Dangerously Alice

  “No. It was almost one, and I’d danced practically every dance. I was tired,” I said.

  “Well,” Dad said, “I’m glad you had a good time. I guess I’m going to have to get used to your going out with boys I hardly know.”

  I smiled. “Guess so, Pops,” I said.

  The store had been decorated for Christmas during the week, and I found the Gift Shoppe—the little section under the stairs—wreathed in evergreen and tiny twinkly lights.

  “If I stand behind this counter, I’m going to feel like I’m onstage,” I said to Marilyn, Dad’s assistant manager. She’s married now and happy as a clam.

  “Just wanted to add a little excitement to your boring Saturday job,” she explained.

  “Well, this is your first Christmas as a married woman,” I said. “Now, that’s exciting. What are you getting Jack?”

  “I’ve been saving up for a new guitar for him—a really good one,” she said. She and Jack are both folksingers. “Ben says they go on sale next week—the Christmas bonus sale—and with my employee discount, I think I can afford it.”

  Dad had ordered a lot of extra stuff for the Gift Shoppe because people who’ve never been in our store will come in looking for Christmas gifts for musician friends. In addition to bikini underwear with BEETHOVEN on the seat of the pants and long silk scarves like the keyboard of a piano, we had coffee mugs with Mozart’s face on the side; music boxes with dancing bears on top; tie clips in the shape of a clef sign; earrings like tiny violins; T-shirts with part of the “Hallelujah Chorus” on the front; and little wind-up drummer boys. Customers came in as soon as we opened, and we were busy all day.

  David, the young man who started working for Dad about a year ago—the one who’s trying to decide if he should become a priest—shared a sandwich with me at the little table and chairs we keep for employees back in the stockroom.

  “Now, why do I think that last night was special for you somehow?” he asked, studying my face.

  It took me by surprise, and I instantly felt my cheeks redden, as though he’d seen through the window of the Buick.

  “I—I don’t know. Why?” I said.

  “Hmmm. Must be your hair,” he told me. And then I remembered there was still some glitter in it, and I relaxed.

  “You’re right, it was,” I said. “The Snow Ball at school.”

  “Nice time?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Great band. So how are things with you?”

  “I’m going home for Christmas,” he said. “New Hampshire. I want to talk over my decision with my folks. See how they feel about it.”

  “Your decision about the priesthood?” I asked.

  He nodded. “To tell the truth, I also want to visit a woman up there that I’ve been serious about for a time. See how I feel about giving her up, if I go that route.”

  “How can you do that, David?” I asked. “What about her feelings?”

  “That’s what I need to discuss,” he said thoughtfully.

  “I don’t mean you shouldn’t become a priest, but … I mean … if you’re serious about someone, how can you just give her up?”

  “Because I might be even more serious about the church. If I’m married to a woman but have a love affair with the church, it’s not fair to the woman. If I join the priesthood and have an affair with a woman, it’s not fair to the church. I’ve got to figure out which I love more.”

  “But a lot of married men are ministers!” I protested, rooting for the woman, whoever she was.

  “I know,” said David. “But until the Vatican decides otherwise, it’s a choice I have to make.”

  I rested my chin in my hands. “Why is life so complicated, David?” I asked.

  “To keep us from being bored,” he said.

  • • •

  Liz wanted to hear all about the dance and invited Pam and me to sleep over on Saturday night.

  Pamela was as happy as I’d seen her in a long time and kept saying, “Tim’s so nice! I didn’t realize a guy that cute could be so nice.”

  “Wow! Talk about stereotypes!” I said. “Cute guys have to be players, and plain guys have to be nice?”

  “No, it’s just that he’s so quiet at school—you don’t notice him much,” Pamela went on. “He doesn’t stand out in a crowd. But get him one-on-one, and he’s funny, he’s smart, he’s thoughtful. … Isn’t it strange how some people get along better with just a few people around, and some people enjoy a crowd?”

  “Just goes to show how labels don’t mean a thing,” I said.

  “But what we really want to know is how did he say good night?” asked Liz, and that broke Pamela and me up.

  “What? … What?” she kept asking, poking at us.

  “What you really want to know is how far he got, Liz, not how he said good night,” I said with a laugh.

  “Well, that, too,” she confessed.

  “From the sounds in the backseat, I’d guess they’d been saying good night for the last half hour before we got them home,” I joked.

  “Hey, he’s a good kisser,” said Pamela.

  “French kisser?” asked Liz, all ears.

  “Yeah,” Pamela said dreamily. “French and Irish and Italian and Russian, all put together.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “That he kisses everything in sight—my lips, my ears, my neck, my shoulders. …”

  “And …?” we urged her on.

  “That’s as far down as he went,” said Pamela.

  “Listen to us!” I said. “We’re worse than guys. We give guys a bad rap if they kiss and tell, and we’re doing the same thing.”

  “Yeah, but we’re not spreading it around school,” said Liz. “This is just among girlfriends. And so …” She grinned at me. “How about you and fast-track Tony?”

  “Well, he got a little farther than my shoulders,” I said, grinning.

  Liz and Pamela crowded closer and glanced at the bedroom door to make sure it was closed. “How much farther?” Pamela wanted to know.

  “We did a Liz-and-Ross in the front seat of his car,” I said. That’s what we’ve called it ever since Camp Overlook the summer before last, when Ross, this boy she met at the camp, kissed Elizabeth’s bare breasts—the furthest either Pam or I had ever gone with a guy at the time.

  “Ah! The halter-top dress!” said Liz.

  “Ummm, nice!” said Pamela, imagining it. “If you had seen them on the dance floor, Liz, they were as close as the pages in a book. Hot, hot, hot.”

  “You really like him?” Liz asked me.

  I cocked my head and paused a moment. “I sure liked what he was doing.”

  “And the slits on the sides of your dress?” asked Pam.

  “He got up as far as the panty line, and then it was time for me to go home,” I said.

  We all sat soaking that in for a while. Finally Liz broke the silence: “Does this mean the three of us are ‘experienced’ now?”

  Pam and I howled again. No one can say things quite like Elizabeth.

  “We’re not ‘used merchandise,’ if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said. “And we’re still virgins.”

  “But for how long?” asked Pamela.

  We put a pillow over her face and turned on the TV. But I was wondering the exact same thing. You really like him? Liz had asked. I sure liked what he was doing, I’d answered. And it didn’t take what I’d learned at that sex education course at church to know that there was a difference.

  It was awkward seeing Tony at school on Monday. There were only two boys in the whole school who had touched parts of my body I’d never allowed anyone to touch before—Sam and Tony. Sam Mayer was always so much a gentleman that I never worried he’d talk about me to other people. But Tony?

  I avoided the hall where his locker was located and ducked in an empty classroom once when I saw him rounding a corner. But at lunchtime he came looking for me in the cafeteria, and I’ll have to admit it was exciting to have a
senior interested in me. When his eyes met mine, I could tell immediately what he was thinking. I tried to pretend it was the last thing on my mind.

  “Hi, Tony,” I said, hoping to sound casual, while my friends watched intently.

  He smiled down at me and put his hand on the back of my neck, his fingers caressing. “Hi, baby,” he said. “How ya doin’?”

  Liz had left the table to use the restroom, and Tony slid into her seat. He put his arm casually around my shoulder, one finger stroking the side of my face, and I felt the familiar tingle in my groin. I liked having his attention. Liked the way Jill and Karen at the next table kept glancing over, then pretended they hadn’t.

  “How’d you like the dance, Tony?” Penny asked from across the table.

  “Grrrrreat!” he said, giving my shoulder a noticeable little tug to show everyone it was me who made it great.

  People went on discussing the dance then, and Tony concentrated on me. He was rubbing my earlobe between his fingers. “So …,” he said, lowering his voice. “We going out next weekend?”

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “Does it matter?” he said.

  I laughed nervously. “Of course it matters. Dad has this thing about ‘purpose’ and ‘destination.’”

  “Okay,” said Tony. “Purpose: to be with Tony. Destination: uh … Tony’s house? If my folks aren’t home?”

  “Yeah, right,” I said.

  The bell rang, and he gave my waist another squeeze. “Okay. See ya,” he said, almost too abruptly, and left. I stared after him, wondering if I’d been too casual, too unresponsive, too inhibited. A senior had just asked me out, and I hadn’t acted very enthusiastic. Then I reminded myself that he hadn’t asked me out so much as he’d asked me over. There was a difference.

  “Alice,” Gwen said, nudging my arm. “That was the bell.”

  I picked up my tray and carried it to the counter, then followed the other girls into the hall.

  We did our postponed Girls’ Night Out that Tuesday. Dad let me use his car after getting out a map and showing me the best route to Georgetown. “If you get off on a side street, you’ll find it’s pretty narrow,” he told me, then rapped me lightly on the head. “Please try not to dent my car.”

  “I’ll drive slow,” I told him, “and we’re going to pay to park in a garage, so I’m not going to try to parallel park in Georgetown.”

  Once everyone was in the car, I was surprised myself that Dad let me go. With one or two friends, maybe, but not four—three in back and one in front. Liz sat with me and read the directions from the map.

  Everyone was chattering and laughing and making a lot of noise, and the first thing I did was go through a stop sign. The girls shrieked and laughed.

  Okay, I told myself. This is serious. “You do the talking, Liz. I have to concentrate,” I told her.

  I know you can cause an accident by going too slow and making cars go around you. But I followed the speed limit, and—forty-five minutes later, with Liz holding the map—I finally merged into one horrific traffic jam on Wisconsin Avenue in the Georgetown section of D.C.

  It was easy to see why the area was so popular. People crammed the sidewalks, meandered through traffic in the streets, and cars moved at a crawl, people leaning out of windows, shouting to each other. Snowflakes fluttered through the air, which added a holiday touch. I think every shop was open, every display window lit up. Pamela and Gwen and Yolanda in the backseat were calling our attention to funky dresses in store windows, lace-up boots, fur-trimmed jackets, beaded T-shirts, but all I wanted was to get Dad’s car to the parking garage without bumping into anybody.

  When the car behind me gave us a little tap with its front bumper, I almost freaked out and wondered if I should get out to inspect it, but Gwen assured me it was a bumper tap, nothing to worry about. When I finally pulled into a parking garage, I could feel a trickle of sweat roll down my back and under the waistband of my pants.

  We walked five abreast along the sidewalk, and I let out a loud “Who-eee!”—glad to be free of the car I’d waited so long to drive.

  “We’re here, girlfriends!” Pamela said. “And we’re babes tonight!”

  Yolanda, with her cinnamon skin, probably looked the best, in five-inch knee-high boots so tight, they fit like stockings. I don’t know how she could even walk in them. Her fake fur jacket had a hood that fanned her face and certainly attracted a lot of attention.

  “Look!” she cried, pointing to a guy with a potbellied pig on a leash. “Omigod, where else would you see that?”

  “People are probably saying the same thing about you!” Gwen teased.

  It was like we were in New York all over again, five suburban girls going ape over the sights of the city.

  At Edgar’s we lined up with the others and obediently accepted the “under twenty-one” bracelets when we were carded at the entrance. We took one of the few available tables and ordered our drinks—all nonalcoholic, of course. Gwen ordered nachos and potato skins for all of us, and we wolfed them down but made our drinks last.

  The band lived up to its reputation. Pamela went for the lead guitarist. “He is so hot!” she purred, one leg crossed seductively over the other, her high-heeled shoe balancing on the end of her toe.

  Seated on a sort of platform at the back of the room like we were, we could see everyone who came in—what they were wearing, who they were with.

  “You know what?” Gwen said between numbers. “We are the most dressed-up girls here.”

  Stunned, we looked around. She was so right. We spotted a few women in dresses and heels, but almost everyone else had come in loafers and jeans and denim jackets.

  “We’ve got ‘suburbs’ written on our foreheads, practically,” Pamela lamented.

  “They definitely know we’re in high school,” said Liz. “I’ll bet most of these people are George Washington or Georgetown U students. Maybe we ought to leave and go buy some loafers.” As if we would.

  The guys from St. John’s never showed up, probably because Pamela had forgotten to tell them we were coming, but the room was almost too crowded for anyone else. The man at the door was shaking his head at the people outside. Six guys managed to squeeze in just before the door was closed and were trying to beg extra chairs from nearby tables so they could sit together in the back.

  Pamela asked if they’d like to share our table.

  “That’s a table?” one guy said, seeing that it was scarcely big enough for our drinks. “Sure! Thanks!”

  We scooted out to make our circle larger so the guys could crowd their chairs in. One guy was still left without a chair, so Liz gave him hers and sat on his lap. They turned out to be nice guys, students from GW, who were showing an out-of-town friend a good time.

  It was pretty clear to me that they had come to hear the band, not to pick up girls, because they were talking music among themselves, and Gwen guessed they were music majors. None of them made a move, none of them did more than a little flirtatious teasing, and when they decided to move on, none of them asked for our phone numbers, and we concentrated on the music again.

  Suddenly Liz gasped, “Look!”

  The five of us turned to see ten guys wearing nothing but sneakers and Santa Claus caps come streaking through the club. They were coming, in fact, right toward our table, and they were singing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” In harmony!

  Everyone started cheering and clapping, and—as we gaped in surprise—the first two men lifted the caps off their heads and plunked one on Gwen’s head, the other on Pamela’s. We shrieked with laughter.

  As the men disappeared out the exit, people were saying, “Who were they? Who were those guys?”

  The emcee said, “Well, folks, we’ve just had a visit from the University Men’s Glee Club, showing their naughty parts and doing their bit for Children’s Hospital.” More laughter and cheering. He looked at us. “I know you’d like to keep them, girls. The caps, I mean. But if the two of you would plea
se go around the club collecting money for the hospital, the men will return tomorrow—fully clothed—to pick them up. Thank you.”

  Pamela and Gwen had a great time going from table to table, holding out the Santa Claus caps. Almost everyone put a dollar or two in them, and the manager came over and explained that it was an annual thing. The guys discovered they could collect three times the normal amount if they streaked through the clubs naked, no matter how beautifully they sang.

  “Did we pick the right night, or didn’t we?” Gwen said when the girls came back, breathless, having turned in the caps with the money.

  “And to think that we saw it on Mulberry Street!” Liz said, quoting an old Dr. Seuss book, and we laughed some more.

  I looked at Liz and realized how far she’d come from the girl she had been back in junior high, complaining that she had never seen a naked man or boy in her entire life. She had seen statues and paintings, of course, but not a live nude male. And, trying to be helpful, I had gone through stacks of National Geographic, paper-clipping photos of naked men in other cultures, but they always seemed to have a spear or shield in front of the very thing Liz most wanted to see.

  She caught me grinning at her. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “Just happy thoughts. You and nude men and all that,” I said, and she gave my ankle a kick.

  We decided at last to leave and visit the shops, and we soon discovered that heels aren’t good for walking, much less shopping. But we bought some great earrings at a ceramics shop and watched Yolanda buy an outrageous thong at a sexy lingerie store.

  Finally we went back to the garage, pooled our money to pay for the parking, and I confidently drove us home, knowing that with each block we traveled away from Georgetown, traffic would be lighter, the distance from home would be shorter, the roads more familiar. And then it was back to our old neighborhood, and I was very, very glad to be home.

  “Both your car and your daughter are back without a scratch,” I announced as I came inside and gave Dad his car keys.

  Dad gave me a small smile. “That’s good to know,” he said, but his face looked tired. Serious. Now what had I done? I wondered. For half a minute I thought that somehow he’d found out about Tony and me in the car. Then he said, “We got some disturbing news tonight, Al. Milt’s had a heart attack and is in the hospital for a coronary bypass tomorrow.”