Alice in Rapture, Sort Of

  Now it was my turn to stare.

  “She said that girls used to come to school with the whole hem of their skirts lined with paper clips, and when they sat down it sounded like gravel going down a chute.”

  “What about girls who’d never been kissed?” I asked. I was thinking how I’d only been kissed by Patrick twice and how two paper clips on the hem of a skirt would look pretty skimpy.

  “Alice, they all faked it!” Elizabeth said. “Everyone had paper clips.”

  “Then … what was the point?” I asked. I knew I asked stupid questions, but I had to know.

  “To show that you were ready for it, that you wanted to be kissed, that you craved it with all your being!” Pamela told me, and we laughed.

  “Maybe we should have a color for that,” I said, thinking about the rubber bands again. “Maybe a girl who was desperate could wear all the colors at once.”

  Elizabeth thought that was a dumb idea.

  We spent the first hour at Elizabeth’s watching Pamela glue butterflies on her toenails, the second hour watching TV in the family room while Pamela talked to Mark on the phone. No sooner had Pamela put the phone down when Elizabeth’s mom brought in some egg rolls and the phone rang again. Mrs. Price went back to the kitchen and answered there.

  “Alice,” she called. “It’s for you.”

  “Me?” I got up and went out to the kitchen. Mrs. Price took her knitting into the living room.

  “Hello?” I said. It was Patrick. “Patrick! How did you know I was here?” I saw Pamela and Elizabeth smile at each other in the next room.

  “Your brother told me,” Patrick said. “How you doing?”

  “Okay.” I could feel my face getting red. I didn’t know if I was pleased that he’d called me there or not. I wish that when boys called you on the phone they’d have something definite to say. I hate it during the silences.

  “So what’s happening?” Patrick wanted to know.

  “Nothing much,” I said. And then, because I couldn’t think of anything else, I told him about the butterflies on Pamela’s toenails. I heard Pamela giggle in the family room.

  “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” said Patrick.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Silence again. I was leaning against the kitchen wall, sliding down lower and lower until my feet were farther and farther from the wall, and when I was about to sit down, I’d straighten up and start sliding again.

  “I got your note,” said Patrick.

  “What note?” More silence.

  “Don’t you even remember what you wrote?” Patrick asked me.

  I stopped sliding. “I didn’t send you any note.”

  “It’s signed ‘Alice,’” Patrick said. “It was in our mailbox this afternoon. It’s a good thing I was the one who found it, too.”

  Suddenly I stood up as straight as a yardstick.

  “What does it say?” I looked around the corner into the family room. The TV was still going but Pamela and Elizabeth had disappeared.

  “You want me to read it to you?” Patrick asked.

  I closed my eyes. “Yes.”

  “Just a minute,” said Patrick. While he was looking for it, I took the phone and moved around into the other room. I couldn’t see Pamela or Elizabeth anywhere.

  Patrick came back.

  “‘My dearest,’” he read. My knees went weak. “‘I am going on a sleepover, but I wish it was with you.’”

  I sat down on the floor. Hard.

  Patrick read on: “‘I keep thinking of the last time we were together—your lips, your arms. I’m counting the hours when I will see you again. Your beloved Alice.’”

  I felt as though I were choking. I sat there by the refrigerator in my shorts and T-shirt and thought about murder.

  “Alice?” said Patrick. “Are you there?”

  “I didn’t write that note,” I told him.

  “It did seem pretty weird,” he said.

  I heard somebody giggle on the line, and then I knew that Elizabeth and Pamela were listening in.

  “I think somebody’s listening in,” said Patrick.

  “And I know who,” I muttered. The giggling got louder and I heard a phone click. Pamela and Elizabeth were laughing back in the bedroom.

  “Listen, Patrick, I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said. And then, softly, “Good night, beloved Alice.” I couldn’t tell if he was laughing or not.

  My neck was getting hot, my ears, my head. I was supposed to say something nice back, but my lips wouldn’t move. In desperation, I wheeled around and pressed my finger down on the button. The dial tone came on. Slowly I hung up and stood with one hand on the receiver. Now he would think I was mad at him. Now we’d probably break up before I entered seventh grade and I’d have to wear all the rubber bands at once and boys would know I was desperate and I’d never get another date as long as I lived.

  Pamela and Elizabeth stuck their heads around the corner.

  “Al-ice,” they chanted together. “How’s Patrick?”

  “Very funny,” I said. I stormed into the family room and plopped down on the couch.

  “Girls,” Elizabeth’s mother called, “if you’re not going to watch TV, turn it off, would you?”

  “We’re watching,” said Elizabeth.

  We all sat and stared at the set and every so often Pamela and Elizabeth would break out laughing. Pamela laughed so hard, she rolled off the couch. Finally they went on back to the bedroom. After a while I turned off the set and went back, too.

  “Can’t you take a joke?” Pamela said.

  “We’re sorry,” Elizabeth apologized, but as soon as she said it, she started laughing again.

  “Who wrote it?” I asked.

  Elizabeth looked at Pamela.

  “Oh, he knows you didn’t write it,” Pamela said. “We were just having fun.”

  “Listen,” said Elizabeth. “You want to take baths with the Gardenia Deluxe bubble bath I got for my birthday? Pour two capfuls in the tub and you’ll look like a movie star. I’ll take pictures with my camera.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. They’d take a picture before I got in the tub.

  “We won’t come in until you’re ready,” Elizabeth told me. “I promise!”

  “I’ll go first,” said Pamela, and she took her pajamas into the bathroom and shut the door. I hoped her butterflies would fall off and her nail polish would chip and she’d have to wear braces until she was twenty-five.

  “This stuff really works!” Pamela called a few minutes later. “Wow! Ready!”

  Elizabeth took her flash camera, and we opened the bathroom door. Pamela had bubbles up to her shoulders. I had to smile.

  Elizabeth took a couple of pictures—Pamela with one leg poking seductively out of the water, Pamela with one shoulder bare—and then it was Elizabeth’s turn and we took pictures of her. By the time it was my turn, I wasn’t mad anymore. If I was still going with Patrick on Valentine’s Day, maybe I’d give him a picture of me in the Gardenia Deluxe bubble bath.

  I kept the door locked until I was ready. When everything was covered, I opened the door and Elizabeth took a picture. I had piled the bubbles on top of my head, too, like curls, and Pamela thought that was pretty funny. She said it looked like a wig.

  We talked till one in the morning. Elizabeth dropped off to sleep first, then Pamela. At three, however, I was still wide-awake, my eyes on the ceiling. Pamela gave little snorts in her sleep, but Elizabeth was as quiet as her First Communion picture.

  I wondered if I’d ever be able to say that to a boy—“your lips, your arms.” Without laughing, I mean. Or “beloved Patrick,” the way he had said it to me. Look into his eyes and say it. I saw a movie once where a woman stared right into a man’s eyes and said, “I want you! I need you!” and all kinds of things like that. And then they leaned closer and closer until they were breathing on each other and finally they kissed. I went out for popcorn and when I got back
they were still kissing or starting all over again, I didn’t know which.

  I guess this is the kind of thing you talk about with your mother if you have a mother. Mrs. Price told me once that if I ever needed to, I could come to her. I can just imagine me asking Mrs. Price how you ever get to the place where you can say, “I want you! I need you!” to a boy without laughing. She’d tell Elizabeth and Elizabeth would tell Pamela and then it would be all over school. I decided I’d start a list of all the things I needed to know and call my aunt Sally in Chicago sometime.

  3

  YOUR LIPS! YOUR ARMS!

  IT SEEMED AS THOUGH PAMELA, ELIZABETH, and I spent the first two weeks of summer trying to figure out how we could get Tom Perona, the boy Elizabeth liked, to ask her to go with him. Steady, I mean.

  We asked Mark Stedmeister to ask Tom what he thought of Elizabeth, but Mark forgot to do it. We asked Patrick to ask Tom to ask Elizabeth to go steady, but Patrick said, “If he wants to, he will.” Everything is so simple to boys.

  “Think, Alice!” Pamela would say to me at least twice a day, but I had other things to think about, too, that summer. My job, for one. Dad said he’d pay me three dollars an hour if I’d help out at the Melody Inn on Saturday mornings. It sells instruments and sheet music and has glass cubicles on the balcony where instructors give music lessons.

  I always wore my best jeans when I went to Dad’s store, a T-shirt that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BEETHOVEN, and sometimes my charm bracelet with the dangling silver-plated flutes and violins and trombones.

  The weird thing is that I’m the only member of my family who can’t carry a tune. Dad sings and plays the flute and the violin. Lester sings (howls, really) and plays the saxophone and the guitar. Dad made me take violin lessons when I was seven, but I lasted two months and gave up. I asked Les once what Mama was like, and he said she was tall and wore slacks and sang all the time around the house. I think what happened is that everyone else in the family got such a big dose of musical ability that there wasn’t any left when it got to me.

  For the first few years of my life, I didn’t even know I was a musical moron, but later on I’d sing “Happy Birthday” at parties and everyone would stare. I’d sing along at school, and the teacher would ask me to play the triangle instead. One of the great things about junior high school would be that there wouldn’t be any music classes. Not for me, anyway. I couldn’t have felt better if someone had told me I wouldn’t have to go to the dentist again as long as I lived.

  If somebody puts on a record of a song I know, I’ll recognize it. I like music. But if you asked me to hum the melody, it would be like asking me to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Chinese.

  My job at the Melody Inn was to do about anything anyone asked me to do. If Janice Sherman, the assistant manager, got in a big order of sheet music, I’d read off the titles while she checked them in. If there were fingerprints and smudges on the glass walls of the practice cubicles, I’d take Windex and wash them off. I swept the walk out front and dusted all the pianos, vacuumed the carpet, and put fresh paper in the bathrooms. What I liked most, though, was helping Loretta Jenkins in the Gift Shoppe.

  The Gift Shoppe, under the balcony at the back of the store, had all kinds of things you could give as presents to people who liked music and small items you might need for your instrument. There were trumpet cleaners and valve oil and guitar strings and dulcimer picks. There were notepads for musicians to put in their kitchens that said CHOPIN LISZT at the top, plaster busts of Brahms, Bach bracelets, Schumann T-shirts, and Tchaikovsky toothbrushes. There were music boxes that played “Clair de Lune” and ballerinas that turned slowly around on one toe to the theme song from Doctor Zhivago.

  What I absolutely loved most, however, was the revolving wheel, a circular display case that, when you pressed a button, went slowly around and around so that you could see everything on the narrow shelves inside, mostly pins and bracelets and earrings and stuff. If you pressed the button again, the wheel would stop moving and you could look at some particular thing for a long time.

  It was one of my favorite jobs on Saturdays to see that all the spaces in the revolving gift wheel were filled. If I had a hundred dollars, I would spend it all in the Gift Shoppe.

  What I was looking for, actually, was a birthday present for Patrick. He was a couple of months younger than me, and I wanted to get him something special. I knew he played the drums. He had a six-piece Ludwig drum set, which Dad says is one of the very best drum sets made, but I couldn’t buy him another drum unless I wanted to be in debt for the rest of my life.

  “What about another pair of drumsticks?” Loretta asked. “Drummers can always use those because they keep breaking.”

  I’d thought of that, but they seemed so ordinary.

  “A pair of boxer shorts with Mick Jagger’s picture on them?” she asked. Loretta is about Lester’s age, and her hair’s a wild mass of curls. You take one look at Loretta and you know she says whatever comes to mind.

  I blushed and shook my head. “I’ll keep looking,” I told her.

  “Dad,” I said later, dusting the grand piano where Dad was arranging a pair of white gloves and a conductor’s baton, “what does a girl my age buy a boy Patrick’s age for his birthday?”

  “Hmmm,” said Dad. “Here’s where I wish you had a mother’s guidance, Al. Candy, maybe? I just don’t know. Ask Lester. Or better yet, call your aunt Sally.”

  “That’s long distance,” I reminded.

  “It’s okay. She’ll know what to suggest.”

  When I got home at noon, Lester was just getting up. Every other Saturday, when Lester doesn’t work, he has breakfast when we have lunch, lunch when we have dinner, and dinner around eleven o’clock at night. On those Saturdays, in fact, he has pizza for all three meals. Dad says Lester eats so much pizza, he’s going to start speaking Italian.

  “Lester,” I said, sitting down at the table across from him and making myself a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich. “What does a girl my age buy a boy Patrick’s age for his birthday?”

  Lester groaned, as though a question like that could give him a headache. “It’s too early in the morning, Al,” he said, getting up and pouring some juice, his eyes only half open.

  “It’s afternoon.”

  “A straight razor and some shaving lotion,” Lester said, his voice still groggy.

  “Patrick doesn’t shave yet.”

  “I know, but think how flattered he’d be.”

  “Think of something else,” I told him.

  “A six-pack of Coca-Cola.”

  “Something else.”

  “Couple pair of sweat socks and some Odor-Eaters.”

  “Something romantic. Lester, for heaven’s sake!”

  “Well, what do you expect at this hour of the day?” he said.

  I went into the living room and dialed Aunt Sally in Chicago.

  “Alice!” said Uncle Milt. “Sal, Alice is on the phone. Yes, Alice, from Silver Spring, Maryland.”

  “Alice!” said Aunt Sally. “What’s wrong?”

  That’s the way my relatives are, see. The only time you call that they don’t suspect something terrible is Christmas. And at Christmas, if you don’t call, they suspect something terrible.

  “Nothing’s wrong. I was just wondering … uh … what a girl my age should give a boy for his birthday.”

  “Oh,” said Aunt Sally, relieved. Then “Oh!” again. “I assume that this isn’t just any boy, but somebody special?”

  “Yes,” I told her.

  “Well, dear, I’m so glad you called, because there are rules about things like that.”

  “There are?”

  “There are only certain things you can give a boy before you’re engaged, you know.”

  Engaged?

  “You have to be awfully careful or your gift might suggest the wrong thing.”

  I had no idea it was so complicated.

  “The only appropriate things to give a boy wou
ld be a book, a record, a wallet, or handkerchiefs,” said Aunt Sally.

  Every one of those suggestions fell like a brick on my head. Patrick already had a wallet, he didn’t use handkerchiefs, and I couldn’t buy him a book or record because I didn’t know what he already had.

  “Anything else?” I asked hopefully.

  “Well, there are probably a few other things I’ve forgotten, but what you absolutely cannot give a boy, unless you’re engaged, is jewelry of any kind or any article of clothing that touches the skin directly.”

  I stood in stunned silence.

  “A belt, now,” Aunt Sally went on, “is perfectly proper because it’s worn outside the trousers and doesn’t touch his underwear.”

  My head was spinning.

  “Just a minute, Alice,” said Aunt Sally. “Carol just walked in. Maybe she’ll have some ideas.”

  Carol was like an angel from heaven. Aunt Sally is my mother’s older sister, and Carol is her daughter, my cousin.

  “Sounds as though you’re trying to buy a gift for a boy,” Carol said, laughing.

  “I’m so confused,” I told her.

  “Listen,” she said. “Buy something fun. Go to one of those stores where they sell ski jackets and stuff for college men and see what sort of things they have on display near the cash register.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like little cartons of chocolate-covered potato chips or miniature flashlights. You’ll find something. You might even find some crazy boxer shorts with Mickey Mouse on them.”

  “Aunt Sally said …”

  “I know. Nothing that touches the skin, right? Things have changed since she was a girl, Alice. Have fun.”

  Now that I had her on the phone, I wondered if I should ask how you know when you’re ready to say “I want you! I need you!” to a boy. But with Aunt Sally there in the room with Carol, and Lester in the room next to me, I figured I’d better not ask that now. I wasn’t about to say it to Patrick, anyway, birthday or not.

  That afternoon at the mall, I found a little carton of chocolate-covered potato chips at Britches of Georgetown, just as Carol had said I would. I wanted to get at least one more thing for Patrick, though, and at the Melody Inn the next Saturday I found it—a little dollhouse-size three-piece drum set that had just come in. It looked as though it was made of ivory. GENUINE LUCITE, it said on a little gold tag. It was only $4.98 without my 10 percent discount.