Simply Alice

  “Whoa! No plastic bubble for her, Dad!” cried Lester. “Zip, zero, zed!”

  13

  The Instructor Flap

  Elizabeth and Pamela had already given me earrings for my birthday, and Eric sent balloons, but the next day, my official birthday, Dad gave me time off from the Melody Inn to go to the movies with Molly—her present to me. We’d gotten there early and bought a large tub of popcorn to share between us. I told her about Tony ’n’ Tina’s Wedding, and how I’d had to rescue Lester.

  “I wish I’d been there to see that,” Molly said. “You just reached out and poured your drink down her dress?”

  “It was all I could think of to do.” I giggled. “She wasn’t about to let go, and she looked like she was trying to give Les a wedgie.” We laughed some more. “What’s surprising to me is that I actually enjoyed myself, everyone looking at me. I didn’t think I’d have the nerve.”

  “I know I wouldn’t!” Molly said.

  “Maybe I’ll try out for the senior play when the time comes,” I said. “I probably wouldn’t get a part, but—”

  “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” Molly finished for me.

  We heard a familiar voice several rows back.

  “I thought you said ‘buttered,’” came a girl’s voice.

  Then a guy’s: “I said unbuttered. Salt, no butter.”

  “So?”

  “So go get me salt, no butter.”

  “Oh, Ron—”

  We turned to see Faith getting up, setting the unwanted popcorn on her seat and heading up the aisle again as Ron put his feet on the back of the seat in front of him. Incredibly, he took a big handful of the popcorn he’d said he didn’t want.

  Molly and I stared at each other. “She went back to him?” I said in disbelief.

  “Looks that way.”

  “Why?”

  “A glutton for punishment, I guess,” said Molly.

  After the movie we went to the rest room and Faith was there, waiting in line.

  “Faith, what happened? I thought you broke up with Ron,” I said. Tactful, that’s me.

  She shrugged self-consciously and gave a little laugh. “Who can explain love?” she said, and ducked into a cubicle.

  Molly and I went to a Starbucks afterward and sat at a little table, still musing about Faith.

  “That’s not love, that’s an addiction,” Molly said.

  “That’s why I want to be a psychologist,” I said. “I want to know why. No, I want to stop it before it begins.”

  “Good luck,” said Molly.

  When I got home, a small, flat package was waiting for me from Sylvia. I opened it and found the framed photo of her and me that was taken at White Flint Mall over spring vacation. I had sort of a weird smile on my face in the picture, but it wasn’t bad. It looked like a mother and daughter having lunch together, and I wondered if I really would get used to calling her Mom.

  Of course I had to call Elizabeth and Pamela and tell them about Tony ’n’ Tina’s Wedding, and they laughed at the way the bridesmaid had danced with Lester.

  “The next time we come over, we each should pinch him on the buns,” said Pamela. “I’d do it just to see Lester blush.”

  “Well, it takes a lot to embarrass Lester,” I told her.

  We call May the Mad Month at school because it’s so frantic. There’s statewide testing, for one, and all big assignments are due. The seniors who have applied for colleges know where they’ve been accepted, and while they might feel they can slide through till graduation, the freshmen and sophomores and juniors aren’t so lucky.

  Eric and I went for ice cream after lunch one day, and sauntered back to school, cones in hand.

  “I ggg-guess we’re g-going to b-b-be moving n-next m-month,” Eric said, and I’d never heard him stutter so much in one sentence. But he didn’t seem at all upset by it.

  “Does your dad have a house already?” I asked.

  “Yeah. It’s about the ssss-size of the one we’ve gggg-got nnnn-now.” He was smiling at me.

  I smiled back quizzically. “You aren’t doing that on purpose, are you?”

  “D-Doing w-what? M-Moving?”

  “Stuttering.”

  He laughed. “You guessed.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s an assignment. D-Desensitizing myself, so I won’t freak out when I sss-stutter. I’ll get so used to doing it in public, I won’t fight it.”

  “I don’t know anything about stuttering,” I said, “but that makes sense. The more you try to keep from doing something, the more scared you are it’ll happen.”

  “I’m learning to just let it c-come,” he said.

  “Okay b-by m-me,” I said, and we laughed.

  • • •

  Dad and I were sharing a supper of baked beans and corn bread and tomatoes when he said, “You know, Al, if you want to work full time at the store this summer, we can use you, but I don’t know if this is good for you or not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s the same thing you’ve been doing, working for your dad. You’re not getting out and exploring the world.”

  “I’m not exactly climbing Mount Everest, no,” I said. “But if you’d like to send me to Paris …”

  “I thought what might be an ideal arrangement would be for you to work for me part of the summer, but take a few weeks, at least, to do something else.”

  “Dad who’s going to hire me for only a few weeks?”

  He handed me the Style section of the Washington Post, where he’d checkmarked an article on summer camps for children and, in a side column, a few camps that ran for only a few weeks and needed assistant counselors, fourteen years of age or older.

  I tried to think about what Dad was really saying. It was true I wasn’t getting a lot of experience just working for him all summer. But I wondered if part of it wasn’t his need to be alone more with Sylvia before the wedding—just have her here getting used to our house, making suggestions for redecorating, cooking together, all the little domestic things they’d be doing after they were married—without me around putting in my two cents’ worth.

  “I’ll think about it,” I told him.

  I called Gwen to see if she was interested, and she said maybe. I called Elizabeth. “I’d be willing,” she said. “Let’s do an overnight camp if we can get it. Mom and I need to be apart for a while before we kill each other.”

  I would never in a million years have believed that Elizabeth would say something like that; she was always so close to her mom. But maybe the fact that she could bring out negative feelings like this, even jokingly, was a good sign. Maybe she’d just never felt before that she could.

  I called Pam next, and she said almost the same thing. “Dad got a letter from Mom. She wants to come back,” she said.

  “What?”

  “She walked out on the NordicTrack instructor and moved in with another guy, and he left her, and now she wants to come home. Dad says no way. If she does come back and they start fighting again, I’m going to move out, I swear it. See if you can get a camp that runs all summer, Alice.”

  You know what’s weird? Life. All these years, it seems, I’ve been looking for a mom, and now that I’m about to get one, I’m planning on going away. And Pamela and Elizabeth, who’ve had one all their lives, want nothing more than to get away from theirs. Once Dad and Sylvia marry, though, I think she’ll be the kind of mom I want to be around always. She’s never been a mother, of course, but she’s been a teacher, and it can’t be that much different, can it?

  I called all the camps listed in the Post to find out more about them. The only one that sounded just about right was Camp Overlook, near Cumberland, Maryland: three weeks, from June 18 to July 10. The director said she’d need to interview all four of us, but she was impressed when I told her that Gwen and I had volunteered last summer to work in a hospital, and that Elizabeth and Pamela and I had spent some of spring vacation reading to kids at the
Martin Luther King Library.

  When the forms came, we each filled one out. Had we ever been arrested for driving while intoxicated? Had we ever used illegal drugs? Had we ever been arrested for abusing children? Shoplifting? I wondered if they were going to take our fingerprints, too.

  The last day of school, when classes were officially over, we went to the interview together in Rockville. Pamela’s dad drove us over, and Lester said he’d pick us up.

  Our interview was in the county office building, and Camp Overlook, we found out, was run by the county specifically for underprivileged children in foster homes.

  Miss Martinez looked us in the eye. “You’re going to get a lot of sad-faced youngsters in need of far more than what three weeks at camp could possibly give them. Some will come with a chip on their shoulder, angry at life and angry at you, and all of them come with a certain amount of emotional baggage. The most we can hope for in that short a time is to give them a respite from the kinds of lives they’ve lived and get them to smile. We’re not miracle workers, though we do see miracles now and then.”

  I think all four of us were wondering if we could do this, but Miss Martinez looked thoughtful. “These kids are all going to come back to the very same problems they’ve had before, but perhaps a little better equipped to deal with them. We do try to set aside some time each day for our counselors to unwind and socialize with one another, but basically you will be on call twenty-four hours a day. A kid may need you in the middle of the night. He may be scared or angry or confused or sick or homesick or all of the above. Many of them have never even been in the woods before, or seen a lake. This is your chance to make a difference, even a small one. If you don’t think you can take their constant need for attention, then this job isn’t for you.”

  She smiled at us and waited. “There’s no disgrace in saying you can’t handle it, you know. But we’d rather find out now than after you get there. Your room and meals, of course, are free.”

  Elizabeth and Pamela and Gwen and I sat mutely mulling it over.

  “I think I can do it,” said Gwen.

  “It doesn’t sound easy, but I want to try,” said Elizabeth.

  “Me too,” said Pamela, and I nodded.

  “Okay,” Miss Martinez said. “If you change your minds, please don’t wait till the last minute to tell me. You’ll each be getting more information in the mail about what to bring with you, and it will tell you a lot more about the camp. Any other questions?” We shook hands as though we were mature adult women, and felt very grown up as we sat out on the steps waiting for Lester.

  “What I really wanted to ask was whether any guys had signed up for assistant counselors, but I was afraid I’d jinx my application,” said Pamela.

  “Do you think we can really stand three weeks of constant ‘neediness’?” I asked.

  “It’ll give me a break from being on call at home,” Gwen smiled. “There’s always an aunt or a grandmother wanting something.”

  Elizabeth said, “I asked myself if I could stand a whole cabin full of kids acting like Nathan at his crankiest, but these are older kids, six to ten, so I think I can deal with that. At least they can say what’s wrong, not just fuss.”

  Lester drove up and my three friends piled in back. I sat up front with him. “Home, James!” I said grandly.

  “So? How did it go?” he asked.

  “We’re hired!” Elizabeth said. “You’ll be rid of us for three whole weeks this summer, Lester. What will you do without us?”

  “Celebrate,” he said.

  We all trooped inside for a while, eager to talk about what we’d take to camp. Les said he was going upstairs to study, could we please keep our shouts and groans and giggles to sixty decibels?

  “Sure, Les,” Pamela said and, as he started up the steps, she reached out and pinched his buns.

  After dinner that night, Lester got a phone call from Lauren. He answered on the phone in the downstairs hall but, after talking a few minutes, he said to me as I passed, “Al, I’m going to take this call upstairs. Would you hang up down here?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I held the phone to my ear while Les went upstairs. When I heard him pick up, I lowered the phone, but not before I’d heard him say, “Lauren, there’s got to be a way around this.”

  I put the handset back in the cradle and wondered what he was talking about. Then I sat on the couch waiting for him to come back down. My first thought, of course, was that Lauren was pregnant, except I wasn’t at all sure they’d been sleeping together. Or maybe she belonged to a strict religion and wasn’t supposed to marry outside the faith. Or maybe she was taking a job in Alaska.

  Dad was trying out some new sheet music at the piano, and then he just set it aside and played one of his favorite Beethoven sonatas, one that Sylvia especially liked, and smiled as he played.

  I didn’t want to ruin the piece, but as soon as he finished, I asked, “What’s going on with Les and Lauren?”

  Dad shrugged. “Is something going on?”

  “That was Lauren on the phone. They’ve been talking for twenty-five minutes.”

  “You’ve been known to go for an hour or more,” he said.

  “I know, but he seemed so serious.”

  “Well, if he wants to tell us, he will,” Dad said.

  The phone rang again around nine, Jill wanting to know about an assignment. I realized then that Les and Lauren’s conversation was over, but he hadn’t come back downstairs.

  When he hadn’t come down by eleven, though, I went on up, washed my face, and put on my pajamas. When I came out of the bathroom, I saw that Lester’s door was open and his room was empty. Then I heard him and Dad talking down in the kitchen.

  I knew I shouldn’t eavesdrop. In fact, I felt sure now that Les had been waiting for me to go to bed so he could talk to Dad. But I felt I had to know. If my brother was in trouble, it was my business, too, wasn’t it? I was part of the family, too.

  I made my way downstairs one step at a time until I could hear most of what they said.

  “I hate to say I told you so, Les, but I think you knew this was a possibility,” Dad was saying.

  “I know, I know. I just didn’t think they’d come down on her so hard. She’s certainly allowed to have friends. I think she’s overreacting to a few remarks people may have made. She admits that no one came right out and said she couldn’t go on seeing me… .”

  “What’s at stake here is her impartiality, Les,” said Dad. “She wasn’t just dating a student, she was dating one of her students. You’ve been getting excellent grades in her class—deserved, I’ve no doubt—but it would be hard to prove that she wasn’t favoring you.”

  “But we could still see each other off campus! I don’t have any more courses with her, so how could it hurt? Why do we have to break it off completely?”

  So that was it! For only the second time in his life, maybe, Les had been dumped. There was a quiver in his voice, and it always scares me when Dad or Lester is in pain.

  “Maybe she was just plain scared and wants to rectify a foolish mistake. She’d undoubtedly like to become a professor, and doesn’t want to jeopardize that,” said Dad.

  “But if I could just talk with her face-to-face …! We … we love each other, Dad.”

  There was silence in the kitchen. Finally Dad said, “Are you sure of that now?”

  “Well, I love her, and I thought … You think she’s using this as an excuse to break up with me? Is that it?”

  “I don’t know. All I’m saying is that if she sees a way around it and wants to renew the relationship, I’m sure she’ll let you know. Maybe she needs time to think it over.”

  There was real anguish in Lester’s voice now, and I could hardly bear listening to him: “I can’t just let her go! She owes me a better explanation than this!”

  Dad’s voice rose. “Les, be reasonable. I know this hurts, but she owes you nothing. She was new in town, you were a ready and willing guide—
a friend—and I’m sure she valued your friendship. But is it possible you read more into the relationship than what was there?”

  “Don’t tell me what was in our relationship and what wasn’t! What do you know about it!” Les snapped.

  “I don’t, although—”

  “Well, then, butt out, Dad! You don’t know anything about it; we were a lot closer than you think.”

  “In that case, this relationship can only lead to more trouble for her, Les, and if you care for her, you won’t put her in harm’s way,” Dad shot back.

  I wanted so much to go down and put my arms around Lester, but I went back up the stairs, instead, and into his room. I left a note on his pillow.

  Luv you, Les.

  Me

  It wasn’t the same, I knew, and it wouldn’t help much, but there are times I think people need every little bit of love they can get.

  14

  Changes

  I guess if I had to sum up my freshman year in one word, it would be “changes.” I came out of my shell and got “involved,” as Pamela was always telling me to do, while Pam and Liz sort of took a time-out. I made new friends and almost lost Elizabeth and Pamela because of it, and Les, in a strange turn of events, got dropped by a girl instead of being the dropper. It seemed as though the only person whose life wasn’t on a roller coaster was Dad, and if anybody deserved some happiness, Dad was the one.

  Frankly, I couldn’t understand why Les and Lauren couldn’t at least date over the summer, and hang out where no one could see them. But Lauren would be teaching some summer courses, and Les would be on campus taking a course, so it would still be a faculty-student no-no, and Les was taking it hard.

  The first day of summer vacation, I gave myself the pleasure of eating breakfast in my pajamas. Les was already up, getting ready for his part-time job in a shoe store. He wasn’t eating his usual bagel, though, just staring down into his coffee cup. Dad had already left for the Melody Inn.

  I thought of how often Lester had been there for me when I’d had problems, and wished I could do the same for him.

  “Les, I’m really sorry about you and Lauren,” I said, opening a new box of Wheat Chex and pouring some into a bowl.