Outrageously Alice

  I tried desperately to come up with points. Ten points for sticking a dandelion behind my ear in kindergarten. Twenty points for thinking what it would be like on my wedding night if I married Patrick and how he would look in the shower; I guess that would be mentally undressing someone, but it wasn’t a stranger. I’d fudge a little on that one. Ten points for taking my socks off once during a meal (socks count as underwear, don’t they?), and twenty points for giving Dad a back rub once. Well, a shoulder rub, anyway. Sixty points.

  We went around the room. One hundred and twenty, one hundred and five, ninety-five, one-forty, one-ten (that was Crystal), and finally they got to me. I thought of lying, but what if we had to turn in our sheets?

  “Sixty,” I said, and they laughed.

  “It’s okay,” Joan said to me, and then to the others, “You, too, were beginners once.” More laughter.

  “It’s all in fun, Alice,” Crystal said, trying to reassure me, but it just made me feel that much more self-conscious.

  “To Dianne, with one hundred and forty points, a little present,” said Joan, fishing in her briefcase.

  “Hey, she lied!” someone called. “Boo! Hiss!”

  “Hey, Dianne, what didn’t you do?” another woman asked, to more laughter.

  “For the winner,” Joan said, and held up a fur bikini. Dianne shrieked and hid it in her purse.

  “And for Alice,” said Joan, smiling at me. My heart sank. A chastity belt, that’s what the booby prize would be. Instead, Joan handed me a tiny box, and when I opened it, I found a pair of teddy bear earrings, like a little kid would wear.

  “Until she’s old enough to wear a real teddy,” said Joan good-naturedly, and the women clapped. All I wanted to do was crawl out the door and go home.

  After that, Joan showed us all the lingerie she had in her sample case, and Crystal made a list of the ones she liked best. The list went around the room, along with the prices, and we put our names beside the ones we decided to give to Crystal, and a check mark for anything we wanted to order for ourselves. I signed up for a pair of satin tap pants for Crystal, but that was all. I tried to imagine me wearing underwear from this catalog and then having to undress in gym.

  Most of the women took lingerie samples into the bathroom or bedroom to try them on, and once in a while one would come out and ask us how she looked in a black lace teddy or a long slinky gown with a slit up the side. Not me.

  I was embarrassed from the moment I’d walked in the front door in my panty hose and pearls to when Betsy came out of the bathroom in a teddy called “Jungle Fever.” The other women shrieked when they saw her. It was a nylon leopard-skin print, and it had a paw print over each breast and another down by the crotch. It was cut so high at the sides that it looked as though Betsy’s legs reached all the way to her armpits. And the bra part pushed her breasts up so far, I’ll bet she could have rested her chin on them.

  The minute the first woman picked up her shoulder bag to leave, I went to the phone and told Lester I was ready to come home. Then I said good-bye to everyone, hugged Crystal, thanked Betsy, and went out to sit on the curb.

  It was one of the most beautiful October evenings I’d ever seen. The air was warm, and there was a gentle breeze that sent dry leaves scuttling along the sidewalk until it sighed itself out. A ring of gold leaves around the streetlight shone with a misty gleam. I leaned forward, head on my knees, and wished that Patrick were there with his arm around me.

  Part of me wanted things to go on forever just like that—hugs and kisses and holding hands on the sidewalk at night—and the other part wanted to do something wild, like walk out of a bathroom in a “Jungle Fever” teddy. Could I ever imagine myself doing that? Right now, the answer was no.

  Is this what my life would be like, then? Feeling too scared to be outrageous and too ordinary if I didn’t? I could see what was ahead for me: one opportunity after another to do something unusual, and never getting up the nerve to do it. By the time Lester pulled up at the curb, I felt childish and innocent and stupid and embarrassed and thoroughly disgusted at myself for not having a better time at the party.

  As soon as I got in, I slammed the door, kicked off my pumps, wriggled out of my panty hose, and took off my fake pearls, dropping them in my purse.

  “You through, or are you just getting started?” Lester asked, wondering.

  “Just go,” I said sullenly.

  “What kind of a party was this, anyway?”

  “A grown-up party for sophisticated women of which I am definitely not one,” I said.

  He drove for a few blocks without saying anything, then tried again: “So you didn’t have a very good time?”

  “Let’s just say it was educational.”

  “Oh. Crystal was there, of course.…”

  “Of course. She’s getting married, isn’t she? And for the first two weeks of her married life, she will thrill her husband with a new set of lingerie each night.”

  “Sounds interesting,” said Lester.

  I felt like crying because I was so awkward and inexperienced. I wondered if it was possible that most of the women had exaggerated their answers. I certainly had.

  “Lester …,” I said, and was surprised to hear my voice quaver. He glanced over quickly. Lester knows when I’m about to bawl.

  “If I asked you some personal questions, would you answer truthfully?” If he hadn’t done any of that stuff, then I’ll bet those women hadn’t either.

  “Well, I don’t know how personal you’re going to get,” Lester told me.

  “All you have to do is say yes or no. I’m not asking for details, and I won’t tell anyone. Okay?”

  “Okay. Shoot.”

  I skipped the questions about the flower in the hair, and matching bra and panties. I hoped I could still remember the others, because I wanted Les to answer every one.

  “Have you ever had a sensual experience while swimming?”

  “I always have a sensual experience while swimming,” he said. “Just looking at girls in bikinis is a sensual experience for me.”

  “Have you ever mentally undressed a stranger?”

  “All the time.”

  “Have you ever massaged a member of the opposite sex?”

  “Of course. You’ve seen me put suntan lotion on Marilyn, haven’t you?”

  He was probably up to sixty points already, and we had just begun.

  “Have you ever gift wrapped yourself for a woman?”

  “Are you nuts?”

  Aha. One down. “Have you … let’s see—ever removed your underwear during a meal?”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  I was beginning to feel better all the time. They had lied, I’ll bet.

  “Have you ever taken a feather and started at the tip of a woman’s nose and ended at her toes?”

  Lester whistled. “That must have been some party!” he said. “What did they do, anyway?”

  “They answered questions.”

  “These questions? You’re kidding! What’d Crystal say?”

  “Lester, I asked you a question.”

  “Oh. Well, no, I can’t say I’ve used a feather, but … listen, Al. How many more of these?”

  “Just two. Have you ever made love in any room besides the bedroom?”

  “Whoaa … next question.”

  “Have you ever used whipped cream for something besides dessert?”

  Les didn’t answer that one, either. He just looked in my direction as he pulled in our driveway and said, “Listen, Al, promise me something: If you’re ever invited to a party like that again, take me along. Okay?”

  4

  IN THE CLOSET

  THE THING ABOUT HALLOWEEN IS, YOU can be as outrageous as you want. I sure didn’t want to be that ridiculous-looking girl in the rayon dress and panty hose; I wanted to be somebody with personality and pizzazz! When I put in my three hours at the Melody Inn the next morning, I told Marilyn Rawley about the haunted house in the schoo
l gym, and she asked what I’d be wearing. The Melody Inn is one of a chain of music stores, and my dad’s the manager of the one in Silver Spring. Marilyn, who runs the Gift Shoppe there, is Lester’s current girlfriend.

  On this particular morning I was putting price stickers on some fountain pens that looked as though they were made of marble, but if you looked closer, you discovered that the long wavy lines were really the names of composers stretched from one end of the pen to the other.

  “I always dressed up like a Gypsy,” Marilyn told me. “In fact, it was the only thing I ever wanted to be on Halloween.”

  That figured, because Marilyn is sort of the barefoot type, and if she ever marries Lester, it will probably be in a white cotton dress, standing in a field of daisies.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” I told her. “Something that’s about as far away from ‘Alice’ as I can get.”

  “What’s wrong with being Alice?”

  “You don’t have to live with her; I do,” I said.

  Janice Sherman, the assistant manager, came over to ask me to help out in the sheet music department when I was through, and I asked Janice what she used to wear to Halloween parties when she was my age. To tell the truth, I can’t even imagine Janice Sherman my age. I’ll bet she was wearing glasses with a chain attached when she was three years old.

  She surprised me, though.

  “A hobo,” she said. “Mother sewed patches on our clothes, and my sister and I went trick-or-treating as hoboes.” You can’t always tell about a person just by looking.

  By the time I went home at noon, I had decided to go as a showgirl. Elizabeth, with her long dark hair, was going as Morticia from The Addams Family, and Pamela wore the cat costume she’d bought once for a dance recital, only she wore black tights instead of net stockings, and said I could wear the stockings.

  So here’s how I looked on Halloween: black suede platform shoes from Elizabeth’s mother; black net stockings from Pamela; a black nylon sarong-type skirt from my cousin Carol in Chicago, which I found in a box of bathing suits she’d sent last summer; an orange jersey top from Pamela’s mother; and some kind of peacock feather headdress that Mrs. Jones wore once for Mardi Gras. Weird, I guess, was the only way to describe me, but I sure didn’t look like the cupcake I’d been at Crystal’s shower.

  After I’d dressed, I slipped into my chair at the table for a quick bite before I left. Lester looked up, then did a double take.

  “Hello, have we met?” he asked.

  Dad just raised his eyebrows.

  “It’s the new me,” I said.

  “You look like a vamp,” said Dad. He has a vocabulary right out of the Middle Ages.

  “A hooker,” Lester interpreted. “You’re not actually going out like that, are you?”

  “It’s Halloween!” I said. “Besides, I can’t believe this is the same guy who asked Marilyn Rawley to cook his birthday dinner wearing only boots and a bikini.”

  “That’s because I know Marilyn can behave herself. I’m not so sure about you,” he said.

  “Thank you, Lester, for your confidence in me,” I told him, scarfing down another bite of pizza, and then I ran back upstairs to brush my teeth before I went across the street to ride with Elizabeth.

  Mr. Price picked up Pamela and then Patrick on the way—Patrick was dressed like a zombie—and drove us to the school.

  “Wow!” Patrick said when he saw me.

  “You’re pretty cool yourself,” I said.

  The gym looked really creepy. The pumpkin I’d carved a week too early had begun to rot, so it was just perfect to set by the ticket window, with strings of decay oozing out its eyes and nose. Someone said that a couple of smaller kids had taken one look at the pumpkin and decided they’d seen enough, but still the line of children went all the way out the front door and around to the driveway, and more kept coming all the time.

  We’d figured on about two hundred kids, at a buck fifty each, which would mean three hundred dollars for our school library. The whole gym had been partitioned off into a long winding passageway, and we took turns escorting kids through it one by one. They had to stick their hands in a bowl of peeled grapes, of course, for eyeballs, and another bowl of cooked lasagna noodles, which we told them were guts, and all along the way ghosts wailed and zombies moaned and witches cackled.

  Things leaped out at them, lights flashed, doors groaned, cobwebs swished, and when the kids reached the very end—or what they thought was the end—my job was to take each kid, one at a time, to a tiny broom closet, sit him on a stool, and tell him to wait for the others. Then Brian or Mark or whoever was taking his turn at it would start to moan at the back of the closet and snap on a flashlight, holding it just under his mask as the kid turned around. It would look for all the world like a floating head, and after the kid let out a bloodcurdling scream, I’d take him out the back door where his parents were waiting. If he was under eight years old, we’d skip the closet.

  About halfway through the evening, though, a couple of parents called the school to complain. They said that the closet thing was going to give their children nightmares, so when I got the word, I opened the broom closet door and said, “Brian? Mark? Mr. Ormand says we’ve got to cut this out. It’s scaring too many kids, okay?”

  In answer, a hand clamped down on my arm, pulled me inside, and somebody put his arms around me, hugging me close to his body, and kissed me hard on the lips. Not only that, but his tongue was pushing its way into my mouth.

  “Hey!” I said, backing up. “Cut it out!”

  But the arms pulled me back, and the tongue kissed me again.

  “Stop it!” I said, pushing away with all my strength, and I tumbled out into the hall.

  I stayed at my post the rest of the evening, escorting kids through the cobwebs at the back exit and giving each one a licorice lollipop before he left, but all the while I was trying to figure out who that was in the closet. It was probably done as a joke, but still, a tongue going in and out of your mouth isn’t exactly a joke.

  At some point in the evening Brian had been in there, I knew, and possibly Mark. But there were also other eighth-grade boys I hardly knew. It could have been anyone.

  The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. What if I had reached in there and unzipped a guy’s trousers? Would he think it was a joke? At the same time, though, I was thinking that finally something outrageous had happened to me, and I didn’t like it much.

  When we walked over to McDonald’s for cheeseburgers afterward in our costumes, I kept looking at all the guys, wondering if I could figure out who it had been. I hadn’t a clue, and no one seemed to be giving me sideways glances. I wondered what would happen if I told Patrick. If he’d keep asking around till he found out who it was, then pound the guy to a pulp. Somehow I felt it would be a mistake, so I made an even bigger mistake. I told Elizabeth.

  It just came out. The guys were on their second cheeseburgers when Elizabeth and I went to the restroom.

  “You must have been really hungry,” Elizabeth commented, washing her hands at the sink. “Your lipstick’s all over your face.” I looked in the mirror for the first time since we’d left the gym and saw that my lipstick was almost up to my nose.

  “Something really weird happened,” I told her. “I poked my head in the broom closet to say that Mr. Ormand wanted us to cut out the finale, and whoever was in there pulled me inside and French-kissed me.”

  Elizabeth froze with her hands over the sink.

  “You don’t know who it was?”

  “No. Brian was in there part of the time, but there were other guys I hardly knew. I mean, it was dark in there.”

  “Somebody you don’t even know had his tongue in your mouth?” Elizabeth cried.

  “Yes …”

  “Alice, that’s the next thing to being raped!”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  “You were violated!”

  The more she kept at it, the worse I began to feel.
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  Pamela came into the restroom then, and she was the last person I wanted to know, because she’s going with Brian.

  What if it had been Brian who’d kissed me?

  But Elizabeth just barreled on.

  “Alice was violated,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The next thing to being raped,” said Elizabeth.

  “What?” Pamela cried.

  I had to tell her.

  “Alice, that’s exciting!” she said.

  I looked at Elizabeth. Elizabeth looked at Pamela.

  “Pamela!” Elizabeth said sternly. “Somebody she doesn’t even know had his tongue in her mouth!”

  “That’s what I mean!” said Pamela. “A perfect stranger! The Mystery Kisser! Just think, Alice, you’ll go all through eighth grade looking at every boy and wondering, ‘Was it him?’ ‘Was it him?’”

  Pamela should have gone to that bridal shower, not me.

  By the time Mr. Price came to pick us up, I decided I had two lunatics for friends, and when Patrick and I got in the backseat beside Pamela and he put his arm around me, I wondered if he could sense that something was different.

  As soon as I got in the house, Lester said, “Well, she’s back from the dead—Dracula’s daughter.”

  Dad was sitting at his music stand with his flute, trying out some new sheet music. “Have a good time?” he asked, leaning forward to turn a page.

  “I was violated,” I said.

  All the expression went out of Dad’s face, and Lester lowered the sports page. I’ll admit, I enjoyed having something exciting to announce for a change.

  “What happened, Al?” asked Dad.

  I told them about the haunted house and the broom closet and how somebody had given me a French kiss. A couple of them.

  Dad looked relieved when he found out it was only a kiss.

  “Where in the world were the teachers?” he asked.

  “They were all over the place, but they couldn’t be everywhere at once.”

  “I guess you’re right,” he said. “Well, I’m glad it wasn’t anything more than a kiss.”

  That really got me. Didn’t he care?

  “I was still violated!” I insisted, sounding more like eElizabeth by the minute. Something outrageous had happened to me, and nobody was paying attention.