Alice in Charge

  “You want some ice cream while we’re sitting here?” I asked, hoping to prolong things. “I’m buying.”

  “No, thanks. I gotta get going.”

  “I just wanted to tell you that after I read your essay for the paper, I realized it sounded as though you’d memorized some of those hate group sites on the Web.”

  He shrugged again. “They say it better, that’s all.” And then he added, “But … after I read some of those responses in The Edge, I asked Vance—”

  “Vance?”

  “He’s twenty. Sort of in charge of our unit. I asked him if he’d give a talk … anything … at school. I mean, now that we’ve got an opening….”

  “He agreed?”

  Curtis shook his head. “He said we don’t get mixed up in that. We are what we are.”

  I didn’t say anything. Curtis shifted uneasily, then leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees. “Well, that sort of got to me, know what I mean? You let me write that essay, and I put myself on the line. I’ll pick up a lot of crap. And now that we’ve got a chance, Vance says no.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He says they always try to trick you, and when we’re right, we’re right, and you don’t have to explain it.”

  I smiled. “That’s what they told Galileo when he insisted the earth revolved around the sun.”

  Curtis didn’t return the smile. “Well, I’m just saying that I’ve sort of been thinking this over, and I figure if we believe it, we should be able to defend it.”

  “You could always debate it on your own. Get some of your friends to be on the panel too.” I could only imagine how this would go over.

  “I don’t know that I’m ready for that yet,” he said. “I just joined last summer. Anyway, Vance sort of nixed the idea. His solution is that everybody should get a free ticket back to where he came from. Keep it simple. It’ll never happen, but it should.”

  “Then we’d all disappear.”

  He shrugged my comment off as though it weren’t worth arguing about.

  “Curtis, did you ever get to know—really know—someone from another race? Another country? Make a real friend, I mean?”

  “Hey, I don’t need to know the bean eater’s family. I don’t need to know the blacks who got the jobs we could have had. I know what they got, and that’s enough.” Curtis turned away again, his face angry.

  “Did you ever think that the United States is the only home most people here have ever known?”

  “Not our boy from Sudan.”

  “No. Africa’s his country and eventually, he is going back. He’s here to see how the real America works.”

  Curtis didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “Okay, so his village was burned down. I didn’t do it. The U.S. didn’t do it. But here they are in this country, getting all the breaks.”

  “Some people risked their lives to get here,” I said.

  “So? The answer isn’t to give them what’s meant for red-blooded Americans either, that’s for damn sure.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. Some of the things the guys are doing … I don’t see it. ‘For the cause,’ they say.”

  “And the cause is …?”

  “Helping the white race see blacks and Hispanics for what they are.”

  “I don’t see any of it, frankly. I don’t know where all that hate comes from.”

  He went on talking as though he hadn’t heard me. “Vance says my heart isn’t one hundred percent in it. He wants to try our operation in a different school.”

  “Scare tactics? Is that what you’re telling me?” I asked.

  I could sense that Curtis was ending the conversation. “I’m not telling you anything. I’m just saying that’s how some groups operate. To each his own. Vance can do without me? Fine. I’ll find a group I like better. But, anyway … I do my job, you do yours. You’re features editor, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. By the skin of my teeth. I’ve made some mistakes this year.”

  “Like asking me to write that article?”

  I gave him a questioning smile. “Guess we’ll have to see how this one plays out. We’ve got a dialogue going—in print, at least—and that’s good.”

  “Yeah. Well …” He stood up and picked up his bag. “I gotta go. See you around.”

  “See you,” I said.

  It was only two days later that I saw Curtis again.

  In return for Sylvia’s help with altering our dresses for the Snow Ball, I told her I’d fill her gas tank and pay for it this time—wash the windshield and check the tires, too, a job she hates.

  I put a hoodie on over my sweater, pulled on a pair of gloves, and drove to the gas station. Other drivers were there, filling their tanks for their New Year’s Eve destinations before the storm that was to blow in that night. Hard to believe when the air seemed unusually warm for December and the sun was out. But a cold gray mass was coming in over the horizon, and I figured that Fate, which had assigned me a cold over Christmas, was planning to ruin New Year’s Eve for a lot of people too.

  After I filled the tank, I moved the car over to the air hose and began checking each tire. I noticed Curtis and two older men standing next to a pickup truck outside the service bay area of the garage. They were joking around about something, and a mechanic came out to talk with them. Curtis strongly resembled both men—same deep-set eyes, same shape of the jaw, same build—father and uncle, I guessed.

  I was crouched down on one side of the car with the tire gauge, in no hurry to stand up as I watched the tableau unfold. Curtis was evidently the butt of some joke, because one of the men took little not-so-playful jabs at his stomach to punctuate a point.

  “Cut it out, Dad,” Curtis said at last, his face a dull shade of pink.

  His father laughed and said to the mechanic, “Thinks he’s going to join the Marines.”

  “That a fact?” the mechanic said, pulling a rag from a back pocket and wiping the grease from his hands.

  “He doesn’t drive an ATV better’n he drives that Chevy in there, he’s gonna make one sorry-ass Marine,” said the uncle.

  “Make a better Marine than you would,” Curtis said.

  With lightning speed, his father kicked one foot out from under him, and Curtis tottered, almost falling to the ground. He righted himself just in time and now his face was crimson. Both men laughed.

  “Why the hell you do that?” Curtis said hotly.

  His dad was still laughing and drew up his fists. “Wanna fight? Wanna fight?” He threw a fake punch at Curtis’s jaw.

  “Hey, son,” the mechanic said. “Come on in here and let me show you what we did for the Chevy.”

  “Never could take a joke,” the dad said as Curtis sullenly followed the mechanic inside.

  “Toughen up the little shit, make a man out of him before he can be a Marine,” said the uncle.

  I checked the pressure of the fourth tire, slowly hung up the air hose, and drove away.

  Patrick called me from Chicago that evening. The cold rain that had come in during the afternoon was already turning to ice in our area, and people were staying off the roads. You couldn’t even get to a neighbor’s without falling down, so people were advised to stay home. We were texting like mad and calling all over the place. But it was Patrick’s call I’d been waiting for.

  “So how are you spending the evening if you can’t go out?” he asked. “I’m going to a triple feature at Ida Noyes Hall. I’ll probably fizzle out after watching two films back-to-back.”

  “I’m writing the article in memory of Mark that I promised myself I’d do last September,” I said. “It keeps morphing into something else, and I’m not sure of where it’s going, but I’m giving it a try.”

  “I’m glad we visited the Stedmeisters on Christmas. Did you get the feeling Mark’s mom was just waiting for a crowd to come? That somehow she knew we’d show?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I kept thinking, what would she have done with all that food if nobody came?” r />
  I’d already e-mailed Patrick that I’d been accepted at the U of Maryland next year, and we talked about the two other colleges and about how Patrick was liking their new house.

  “Funny, but my dorm room seems more like home to me than the house,” Patrick said. “I don’t know the new neighborhood. Don’t know any of the people, don’t know the yard, the street, the trees…. I was thinking about that last night: how maybe the new house will always be my parents’ house, not mine; that home for me, from now on, will be wherever my stuff is. Weird.”

  “I wonder if I’ll ever feel the same way,” I said. “Is it … have you ever felt homesick when you were away? Missed your folks, I mean? Or have you traveled so much that living out of a suitcase is old hat?”

  “I was homesick a couple of times when I went to camp, but that’s all. I guess I see life more as an adventure. Always wondering where I’ll be a year from now. What I’ll be doing.”

  For me, I thought, I was getting to a place that wherever Patrick was, that’s where I wanted to be.

  I had been delaying the writing of Mark’s memorial tribute because there was both too little and too much to say. When September became October, and that turned to November, I’d put it off once again, thinking I’d write the piece and, after it was published, slip it in a Christmas card to Mr. and Mrs. Stedmeister. Now Christmas was over, and here it was, New Year’s.

  Mark was a good friend—not a close personal friend who confided in me, but a “group friend” I’d watched grow up ever since I met him in sixth grade.

  The summer after, I’d been there when he became Pamela’s first boyfriend. I was with Pamela when he and Brian stuck gum in her hair and she had to cut it. As one of the best-looking guys in seventh grade, he was dubbed one of the “Three Handsome Stooges,” and we commiserated with him in eighth grade when, in a Critical Choices class, the “problem” he was assigned to solve was how—working two jobs and with no college education—he could possibly provide child support for eighteen years to a “baby he had fathered with his girlfriend.”

  By tenth grade the Stedmeisters’ pool was the gathering place for our crowd on Monday nights during the summer. We worried about Mark when he fell too much under Brian’s influence, then watched him become more self-confident as he and Keeno worked on old cars.

  Though Mark was never particularly outstanding in any accomplishment, he was a necessary part of our scene. If he was missing, we were incomplete, but I couldn’t say why.

  I was thinking about the uniqueness of stars. I was thinking about snowflakes. And then my mind drifted back to the discussion we’d had at church about the odds that any of us had been born at all, and I sat down at my computer to write.

  IN MEMORIAM

  Mark Stedmeister would have described himself as a “regular Joe.” I never knew him to volunteer for a special project, because he didn’t think his abilities were special. If you asked for his help, however, he was right there. He was on the quiet side—didn’t often tell jokes or stories—but in our crowd Mark was as essential as air.

  Sure, he was one of the first guys to own a car and he drove us around. When he wasn’t going out with a girl, he was always available to make up a foursome. But it was his presence we needed to make us complete. When one of us told a joke, he was right with us, all the way, his eyes bright with anticipation from the start. We watched those familiar laugh lines deepen on his face as we approached the punch line, and he was the first to throw back his head and let out the series of chuckles that became his trademark. If we had a story to tell, he’d settle back and grin like he’d paid good money for our entertainment and knew it would be good.

  Summers we met weekly, sometimes more, at the Stedmeisters’ pool, horsing around, eating his mom’s food, often leaving our wet towels in their bathroom, treating their place like our own. He never said we were a pain, never asked us to leave, never complained when he carried in all our glasses and plates and scraps of pizza when we forgot our manners and didn’t offer to help. If Mark couldn’t make one of our parties, we felt it. If his laughter was missing, jokes weren’t the same.

  I’d met Mark in sixth grade and figured he’d be part of our lives as long as we went to this school. As long as we lived in this neighborhood. We danced with him, swam with him, argued with him, studied with him, and finally, mourned for him when he was killed in a car accident last August.

  We missed him at homecoming in September. He would have worn some crazy getup at Halloween. Over the Thanksgiving holidays we would have gotten together, and when we stopped by his house this Christmas, only his parents were there.

  He’d say he was nothing special. But Mark was the one—out of the four hundred million sperm racing for the egg just before he was conceived—that got there first. If it had been any other sperm that won the race, it wouldn’t have been the same Mark.

  Like stars, like snowflakes, Mark was unique. Losing him created a hole in our crowd, our family. He’d been part of everything we did, and he will be remembered in everything that happens next.

  —Alice McKinley, a friend

  PLANS

  If I could characterize my last semester of high school, I think I’d say it was full of “might have known,” “should have thought,” and “wouldn’t have guessed in a million years.” Surprises, that was it, and decisions like you wouldn’t believe.

  When I woke on New Year’s Day, I thought it must be ten in the morning, it was so light out. But when I got up, it was only five after six. A fresh blanket of snow had fallen after the ice storm of the evening before, and everything looked untouched, untested. Like it was up to me what to make of it.

  I used the bathroom and jumped back into bed, pulled the comforter up under my chin, glad there was nowhere I had to go, no special ritual connected to this particular holiday. And though I don’t much believe in New Year’s resolutions because I so seldom keep them, I wondered if there was anything I really wanted to do before I graduated. Come June, I didn’t want to look back and wonder why I’d missed the chance for something big.

  Yeah, right. As though I weren’t overscheduled enough as it was. But I went through the exercise anyway. Sports? I’d never been especially good at them, so I didn’t crave to be on the girls’ soccer team or anything. Student government? I’d served on Student Jury last semester, and that was all the student government I needed. Journalism? I was already features editor of The Edge. I had no regrets.

  I opened my eyes again and stared at the light reflected on the ceiling. Maybe I was comparing myself with my friends and what they had done—Gwen on Student Council, Pamela an understudy in Guys and Dolls last year, Liz in a folk dance group. I suddenly realized I had never really competed for anything. Anything. I didn’t try out for girls’ track team—I did my solitary running a few mornings a week before school. Stage crew? You didn’t have to try out to be on the props committee. Student Jury? I was appointed. Features editor? I’d started out as a lowly roving reporter, no experience necessary, and worked my way up.

  It’s weird when you discover a new fact about yourself. Like a birthmark you never knew you had on the back of your thigh. Was it unnatural somehow not to be competitive? My grades were reasonably good, but I was only competing with what I’d done before. Was I afraid to compete, or was I just genuinely not interested?

  Who knows? I concluded finally. It was too late in the year for any kind of team I could think of, and I wasn’t going to join something just to be joining. I decided to hunker down under the covers and wait for the impulse to pass, and after a while it did.

  Sitting in the hallway outside the cafeteria on Monday, our legs sprawled out in front of us, lunches on our laps, Gwen said, “I’ve got an idea for this summer.”

  I lowered the sandwich I was eating and stared at her—at the short brown fingers with magenta polish that were confidently peeling an orange without her even looking. Here was someone ready to sail through the next few months of assignments witho
ut a care in the world, already planning her summer.

  “You’re going to intern for a brilliant scientist in Switzerland?” Pamela guessed.

  “Nope. This time it’s something fun,” said Gwen. “I’m going to apply for a job as a waitress/housekeeper on a new cruise line, the Chesapeake. Why don’t we all do it?”

  Now she really had our attention.

  Liz had the look of a puppy who thinks someone just said the word walk. Her head jerked up, blue-violet eyes fixed on Gwen. “We can sign up just for the summer? We could still make the first day of college?”

  “Depends on the college, I guess, but I’ve got the dates already. I think they rely on college help, because the summer cruises end in mid-August and the fall cruises begin with a new crew.”

  “Where does it go?” I asked.

  “Mostly the Bay. A sister ship will be ready in a few months, but for now, this is the maiden voyage of the Chesapeake Seascape. A hundred and forty passengers.”

  I tried to jump forward to summer. Patrick’s folks had moved to Wisconsin, so there wouldn’t be any house here in Silver Spring for him to come back to. If he was there, and I was here, and there were 750 miles in between … Why not work on a cruise ship?

  “Sounds great!” I said. “Providing it doesn’t interfere with the prom.”

  “It doesn’t. Training starts the day after graduation,” Gwen told us. “I tried to get Yolanda to come too, but she doesn’t want to leave her boyfriend. They’re going at it hot and heavy.”

  “You make it sound like a wrestling match,” said Liz.

  “You might call it that,” said Gwen. “Anyway, we could have a blast, just the four of us.”

  Pamela was leaning forward, elbows resting on her thighs—shapely thighs, I might add, because everything about Pamela is shapely. “Will there be guys?”

  “Of course there will be guys,” Gwen said. “There are deckhands, you know, plus the regular crew. Bare-chested, sun-glazed, bronze-colored, muscle-molded, heat-seeking—”