Simply Alice

  I ran the sweeper over the carpet and wiped out the bathroom sink. I also made a pitcher of iced tea and a quick-mix coffee cake. About four o’clock the following Sunday, Les pulled up in front of the house, came around to the passenger side, and opened the door for a brown-haired woman in a blue short-sleeved sweater and slacks, wearing tiny pearl earrings and a floating pearl necklace. She was about the same height as Lester, with a small waist and broad hips—nice looking—more handsome, I’d say, than beautiful.

  Lester gallantly held one hand under her elbow as he guided her up the steps.

  “Lauren, this is Alice, and my dad, Ben,” he said, and we politely shook hands all around before we moved into the living room and I set about slicing the cake.

  She had an interesting-looking face, but I think she was a little uneasy with us. There was a sort of forced self-confidence about her that made her begin each sentence louder than it ended up, as though she was trying to convince herself that she was still the instructor here, oblivious of the lovesick puppy look on Lester’s face.

  “How are you liking the University of Maryland?” Dad asked her, handing her a glass of iced tea.

  “Well, I got my degree from Ohio State,” she said, “and Maryland seems a bit more personal, more manageable. This is my first teaching job, and I was very lucky to get it, even though it’s just adjunct instructor.”

  “She got the job because she’s smart, period,” Les said proudly.

  Lauren gave him a fond, admonishing look. “And Les is one of my best students. He’s the only graduate student taking my course, actually, but he needs it for his degree.”

  The coffee cake was pretty awful. I thought maybe I had taken it out of the oven too soon, because the center was gummy, and we all sort of ate around it, mauling our slices just enough to show we’d tried.

  “Is the pay comparable with other universities?” Dad asked.

  “I suppose so,” said Lauren. “It’s not a lot, but”—she stopped and smiled at Lester—“Les has been so good at showing me around—the least expensive restaurants, all the things there are to do on campus. He’s been a great guide.”

  Obviously. Les never seemed to be home anymore. He was on campus every night. There, I’d guess, or Lauren’s apartment, and I suspected the apartment.

  She was originally from Tennessee, Lauren said, and Dad told her he was from Tennessee, too. They talked about Nashville and Memphis, while I poured more iced tea for everyone and had to keep running to the bathroom. I threw out the rest of the cake.

  Nothing Lauren said indicated that Lester was more than a friend to her. But once, when I came back in the living room and Dad was out in the kitchen getting more ice, I noticed that Les was rubbing his thumb over her hand.

  Eric invited me to a coffeehouse one evening. It was held in a church basement, where small tables had been set up with red-and-white-checked tablecloths, and a candle in the middle of each. Eric said there would be music and poetry and stuff.

  “Are you going to read something?” I asked.

  “No. Just listen over a c-cappuccino,” he said.

  Probably most of the people there were high-school seniors or college age, but we seemed to fit right in. I guess the coffeehouse was run by a singles group at the church, who served as waiters, and I ordered a mocha, which arrived under a heap of whipped cream and a cinnamon stick.

  “So is this where you hang out?” I asked him.

  “N-Not exactly,” he said.

  “But do you come here a lot?”

  “Not exactly,” Eric said, smiling.

  I gave him a quizzical look. “Have you ever been here before?” I asked curiously.

  “Nope,” he said, and we both laughed. “I just w-wanted sssss-something different.”

  The first person to read was a man with a beard who read several far-out poems in a sort of dry, distant voice, and twice Eric rolled his eyes at me, asking if I wanted to leave, I guess. But after that a girl stood up and read a funny monologue about some of her fantasies when she rides the Metro. Then a guy played the guitar and sang, and by the end of the evening, though I could hear liquid sloshing around in my stomach whenever I changed position, we decided it had been fun.

  Eric walked me home—all fourteen blocks—because it was a gorgeous spring night. We held hands, and I was thinking I could really get to like this guy, if only he were sticking around.

  “Your moving to Dallas is definite then?” I asked.

  “’Fraid so.”

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters? How do they feel about it?”

  “A mm-married sister in Missouri, so it d-doesn’t affect her.”

  “What does your mom think?”

  “She’s all fff-for it, because that’s where she’s from. We’ve g-got relatives all over T-Texas.”

  “Oh. So it’s not like you’re moving to a distant land or anything.”

  “N-No. In fact, I’ve g-got a ccccc-cousin who says she’s going to ggg-give me a pppp-party when I get there. She sss-says I’ll have girls swarming all over me.”

  I laughed. “Lucky you,” I said.

  “Lucky me,” said Eric. Then he said, “I’d g-give it all to be with you.”

  “Ah!” I said. “What a great line, Eric! It sounds like the last line of a poem.”

  “Hmmm,” said Eric, starting to smile as we walked along. Then he began, “‘I wandered lonely as a cloud …’”

  “‘When all at once I saw a crowd …’” I put in, teasing, realizing that his class must be studying Wordsworth, too.

  “No, no, that’s the third line,” Eric said. “It’s ‘That floats on high o’er vales and hills …’” He nodded at me to join in then, and we both said together, “‘When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils.’”

  Eric was grinning now. “Though Dallas beauties do await …”

  I made up the next line: “Um … beneath a sky of azure blue …” We were really into it now, and I discovered that he didn’t stutter when he was reciting something.

  “And rosy lips shall be my fate …,” said Eric.

  Together we ended with, “I’d give it all to be with you.”

  We gave each other a high five.

  “Hey, we’re really good!” I crowed. “Do you think we should read it at the coffeehouse sometime?” We both laughed. “I didn’t know you liked poetry,” I told him.

  “I d-don’t, exactly. Well, that’s not true. Mom always read t-to us, so I like it, but I go mmm-more for the adventurous poems—‘The Cremation of Sam Magee’ and stuff.”

  I let my head rest on his shoulder. “Tonight was a lot of fun, Eric,” I said. “I’m going to miss you.”

  He looked down at me. “There’s E-mail, rrrr-remember?”

  “Yes,” I said. “How could I forget?”

  We stopped and kissed then, a long, long kiss that would have been embarrassing it was so long if I’d thought he didn’t mean it. It wasn’t like Patrick’s kisses. Eric’s were a little more intense, maybe—sort of a signature kiss, all his own.

  If I felt bad that Eric was leaving, the one thing I felt good about was that I didn’t see Faith and Ron together anymore. They ate at separate tables in the cafeteria, and though I couldn’t say that Faith looked happy, at least she wasn’t being ordered around by “The Corporal,” as we called Ron.

  Pamela and Elizabeth had gone to the auditorium over lunch one day to watch a fashion show put on by the home arts department, but I slipped outdoors to enjoy ten minutes of spring sunshine, and found Faith sitting on the school steps, hugging her knees, her eyes closed, face tilted toward the sun.

  I sat down beside her. “You, too?” I said.

  She opened her eyes. “Yeah. It feels so good. I’m always cold.”

  “Maybe you should take up basketball—get the blood circulating,” I said. She didn’t answer, so I added, “How are things?”

  “Between Ron and me?” she asked.

  “Well, that, too.
”

  “I hear he’s not dating anyone,” she said.

  “Surprise, surprise!” I said. “After the way he treated you, who would have him?”

  “You only saw one side of him, Alice. I saw his tender side. Some guys hide part of themselves when they’re around other people, you know? But when it was just the two of us, he was so incredibly loving.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Finally I asked, “Did you ever wonder, though, why he felt the need to treat you like that in public?”

  “Yes.” She laughed a little. “It was just his defense. He’s really an old softie inside.”

  “But … doesn’t it bother you that he had to be so controlling, Faith? I mean, it was as though he didn’t want you to have any friends except him.”

  “It’s just that he needed me so much, Alice.” She shrugged. “And sometimes it’s nice to be needed.”

  “Oh, Faith, you’ve got so much going for you! You’ve got a whole lifetime ahead of you and …” I sounded like Aunt Sally.

  “I know, I know. I’m just reliving old memories. Just a slight case of sunstroke, that’s all,” she said.

  “I would hope so,” I told her, and laughed.

  The most difficult part of my freshman year was not the course work (except for algebra) or finding my way around, it was juggling all the different parts of my life. And I didn’t even have a boyfriend. Not officially, anyway. Eric may have been seeing other girls, for all I knew, and he never asked if I was seeing anyone else. We didn’t go out every weekend or anything like that, and he never called. We were just friends. Erotically charged friends, I suppose Les would say.

  It helped that Fiddler on the Roof was over, but there was still my work on the newspaper, my assignments, my Saturday job at the Melody Inn, my friends and family, the housework. I was very careful to do something each week with Elizabeth and Pamela, but Dad seemed to be asking me to do more and more around the house to get it ready for Sylvia, and there just weren’t enough hours in the day to do everything.

  I was complaining about it to Marilyn at work one Saturday. “I’m only one person!” I cried. “I have only two arms and two legs.”

  Marilyn was sorting though mail orders to see which had been filled and which were still waiting for supplies to come in. “Doesn’t Les help out?” she asked.

  “He’s so crazy over this new girlfriend that he—” I stopped.

  “It’s okay, Alice,” she said.

  But I knew it wasn’t okay. It would never be okay as far as Marilyn was concerned, because I didn’t think she’d ever gotten over him.

  “So tell me about her. What’s she like? I promise not to cry,” she said.

  “She’s a new philosophy instructor at the U, and I don’t think Dad’s too happy about it.”

  “If she’s faculty, then she should know better than to date a student,” Marilyn said.

  “I guess there’s no reasoning with a woman in love,” I said. I paused, realizing suddenly that Marilyn did not look especially sad, did not have tears in her eyes. In fact, she was taking it very well. “So what’s new with you?” I asked.

  “I’m dating again,” she said.

  “The trombone teacher?” I said, thinking of all the men who gave music lessons in the practice cubicles upstairs.

  “No. He’s a guitarist who plays with a group in Baltimore. A friend introduced us.”

  “That’s great!” I said. “How long have you been seeing him?”

  “About a month now.”

  “No wonder you look so sparkly!” I told her, and she laughed.

  Dad had gotten up early Sunday morning to make waffles, and left the batter for Les and me. I was making a second waffle when he stumbled into the kitchen in his T-shirt and boxer shorts. It was one of the pairs we’d given him for his birthday, with a lipstick pattern all over it, red ruby lips half parted for a sensuous kiss.

  “You want this waffle?” I asked. “If you want it, it’s yours.”

  “Never look a gift horse in the mouth,” said Les. “Sure.”

  “What does a horse have to do with anything?” I asked.

  “Never mind,” said Les. He poured himself some coffee and sat down at the table.

  I slid the waffle toward him, then the butter and syrup, and sat down across the table. I knew he and Lauren had gone to a concert the evening before. “Have a good time last night?” I asked.

  “The best.”

  “Good concert?”

  “Passable. But the company was excellent.” Lauren, he meant.

  There was something about the satisfied look on his face that made me study him a little more intently, and then I saw a large hickey mark on the side of his neck. That really made me worry. Just how intimate were they? I wondered. What if he got Lauren pregnant? What if she lost her job? What if Lester suddenly found himself a husband and father and he wasn’t even through grad school yet? What if he grew to resent her and reject the baby, and Dad and Sylvia and I would have to take the baby in, and I’d be the aunt who raised this little child who …?

  “Lester, you are using birth control, aren’t you?” I gasped.

  The fork fell out of his hand. “What?”

  “You’re so in love with her, and—”

  “Al, can it! I’m more than seven years older than you, and I don’t ask if you use birth control, do I?”

  “I don’t.”

  “What?” he said again. “Meaning …?”

  Dad came back in the kitchen to refill his coffee cup. “What are we talking about?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” said Lester.

  “Birth control,” I said.

  “What?” cried Dad.

  “What” was the favorite word at breakfast that morning, it seemed.

  “If Les and Lauren aren’t using any kind of birth control, Dad, I think we ought to decide right now if we can accept the responsibility of a little baby in our house while Lester finishes school so he won’t abandon his wife and child,” I said.

  “What?” yelled Lester. “I thought we were talking about you, Al.”

  Dad’s head swiveled from one of us to the other. He decided to focus on me. Almost in a panic, he said, “If you’re thinking of having sex at the age of fourteen, Al, forget it. But if you decide to have sex, anyway, I hope you will go to Dr. Beverly and discuss it confidentially.”

  “None of the above,” I said. “It’s Les I’m worried about.”

  “Well, then, I wish you’d stop,” said Lester. “Lauren and I are both adults, and I can handle myself just fine.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Dad said, and had to sit down right then to get his bearings.

  Elizabeth was having another fight with her folks. She called and asked if she could spend the night, and I told her to come over in about an hour. Gwen was there helping me with algebra, and I couldn’t take on Elizabeth’s problems until I’d solved my own.

  Gwen had told me once she wanted to be a singer. “You should be a teacher,” I said. “I can’t make sense of algebra in class, but when you explain it, I can catch on enough to squeak by.”

  “Lack of self-confidence, girl. That’s your problem,” she said.

  “Huh-uh. Lack of intelligence.”

  “What’s with Elizabeth?”

  “She’s coming over to spend the night. Problems with her folks again.”

  “Looks like you’re running some kind of shelter here,” Gwen said, smiling.

  “For wayward girls,” I told her. “You want to stay?”

  “Can’t. Told my grandfather I’d be home in time to play him a game of cards,” she said, and grinned.

  What I couldn’t figure was that Elizabeth got mad at her parents over every little thing these days. She’d been in therapy now for about four or five months, and though I think she was feeling better about herself, her parents were feeling worse. I could see that she might be mad at them for not having suspected that their friend had been molesting her when she was young
er, but it seemed as though she was going to hold it against them forever. I even began to wonder if she hadn’t already worked this through and was just using it as an excuse to rebel against any other thing she didn’t like about them. Elizabeth had been such a dutiful daughter for so long that, now that she’d had a taste of what it felt like to rebel, she couldn’t get enough of it, it seemed. Pamela and Gwen and I just wondered how far she’d go.

  “Elizabeth’s coming over to spend the night,” I told Dad. “And she’s upset.”

  “Man the lifeboats,” said Lester.

  “Do her parents know she’ll be here?” Dad asked, not wanting a replay of what had happened last summer when Pamela once spent the night.

  “They know,” I said. “At this point they’re probably glad to get rid of her.”

  I was at least half right, because Elizabeth walked in dressed in purple from head to toe. She had tinted her hair purple, was wearing purple eye shadow, mascara, lipstick, and nail polish, and had on a long, granny-style purple dress with a purple stole.

  Now what? I wondered.

  Once in my room, she whirled around and faced me. “I like it, okay?” she snapped.

  “Did I say anything?” I asked. “You can paint your behind purple for all I care, Liz. Don’t jump on me!”

  “Sorry.” She dropped her bag on the floor and stood with her arms folded, staring out the window. “No matter what I do, they’re against it!” she complained. “Every little thing.”

  I smiled a little and studied her some more. “Sure you’re not just trying to get a rise out of them?”

  “I like purple!”

  “So, fine! You look good in it! Just come up for air occasionally, will you?”

  “You know what, Alice? I don’t know who I am,” she said ruefully.

  “You’re Elizabeth,” I told her. “Take a seat and stay awhile.”

  “Hey, Al!” said Lester. “You’ve got a birthday coming up. The big ol’ one five!”

  “Yeah?” I said. “What’s the proper gift for a fifteenth birthday, Lester? Rubies? Emeralds? Sapphires?”

  “Plastic,” said Les.

  “Les-ter!”

  “No, seriously. I thought of something else. I told Lauren I wanted to do something special for your birthday, and she suggested taking you to a show in Baltimore—a play, actually—a spoof on Italian weddings called Tony ’n’ Tina’s Wedding.”