Alice in Lace

  Mr. Everett began scribbling notes on Brian’s paper. “I want to know exactly how much wine it takes to put you over the legal limit, how much beer, how much whiskey, the works. Now down here, you say you went to court. What day did you go?”

  “Huh?” said Brian. “What does it matter?”

  “It matters. You think it’s going to be a nice convenient Saturday, maybe? I want to know what day, I want to know how you got there… .”

  “How I got there?”

  “You weren’t foolish enough to drive with a suspended license, were you? And when they didn’t get to your case the day you were supposed to go in, I want to know how many more times you had to take off school or take off work and have your dad take off work to drive you there.”

  “They call you in and don’t get to your case?”

  “Check it out,” said Mr. Everett, handing his paper back. “You’ve got a lot more work to do here.”

  Mr. Everett was no pushover, and we knew it.

  Patrick had been busy after school all week getting ready for a track meet that weekend, and if he wasn’t at the track, he was at band practice. I was just as glad, because I found myself avoiding him since the night I’d kissed him by the mailbox. I had just been so incredibly silly about it, like a six-year-old instead of a thirteen-year-old.

  But after class on this particular day, Patrick caught up with me in the hall and slipped his arm around my waist.

  “Hey, you aren’t avoiding me, are you? I thought we were engaged,” he said.

  I laughed then, but I still felt embarrassed. “Well, when do you want to work some more on our assignment?” I asked.

  “What do we have to do next?”

  “Go furniture shopping.”

  “Next week is going to be murder. The week after? We’ll still make the deadline.”

  “Okay.”

  We took a few steps more.

  “That was some kiss,” he went on.

  I turned away. I could feel my face blushing.

  “Next time, try to get the upper lip. You were sort of heavy on the nose.”

  “Patrick!”

  “See you,” he said, and turned the corner.

  It was Lester’s night to cook, and he was making my favorite, black bean burritos with purple onions and cheese. I could smell the beans heating as soon as I got in the house.

  “For a minute, there, I thought you were Crystal,” Les said.

  I was wearing her sweater again, her earrings, her watch, her perfume. I put my books down on the table. “Is it really over between you, Lester?”

  He shrugged. “Until she asks for her presents back, I guess it is.”

  “What?”

  “Relax, Al. They’re yours. Besides, she’s been out the last couple times I’ve called. Either that or she’s avoiding me.”

  I got down a box of crackers and stood by the table eating a handful. Whenever Lester looked my way, I chewed with my mouth open just to annoy him. He says it was my most disgusting habit as a young kid, so I have to do it occasionally to test his reaction time. He passed. He immediately made a gagging reflex.

  “Lester,” I said, “do you think you’ll ever marry?”

  “When I’m sixty, maybe.”

  “Do you plan your life? I mean, do you know what you’ll be doing after graduation?”

  “I don’t even know what I’ll be doing Saturday night,” he told me.

  “In Mr. Everett’s class we’re learning to plan.”

  “Bully for you. If you can plan when you fall in love, you’ve got it made. Make sure it’s about three years after you graduate from college, so you can have a good job and some savings. Plan when you’re going to take a vacation so it won’t be the same week it’s going to rain. Plan not to get sick when you’ve got a big event coming up, and of course you don’t want to die till you’ve accomplished everything you’ve got on your list, so you’ll want to set a date for checkout.”

  “You don’t believe in planning, Lester?”

  “In the words of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley’”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “It means that no matter how well you plan something, it often doesn’t work out due to circumstances beyond your control.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said. And then, “Do you think that if Dad and Miss Summers don’t marry, he’ll end up with Janice Sherman?”

  “Why should you care?”

  “Les, can you imagine Janice Sherman in our house? She’d have all the spices alphabetically arranged. She’d have everything in the freezer labeled. She’d even put name tags on our underwear.”

  “If he marries Janice, I’m outa here,” said Lester.

  “You can’t,” I told him. “As my older brother, it’s your responsibility to stick around till I’ve finished college or married or both. That’s what I heard.”

  “Well, kiddo, you heard wrong. If you decide not to marry or go to college, I’m stuck here forever?”

  I sighed. “I wish I knew the future.”

  “No, you don’t. That would take all the fun out of life. Believe me, Al.”

  Dad came home about six-thirty, and as he washed his hands at the sink, he said, “I’ve got news.”

  I sat up perfectly straight. “You and Miss Summers are engaged?”

  He gave me a strained look, and I was immediately sorry I’d said it. “No, Al. Actually, I guess it’s not news so much as a question.” He sat down across from us. “Janice has two applicants lined up for Loretta’s job. Both are good, but one is stupendous. Really knows her music. Which one do I hire?”

  “Is this a trick question?” asked Lester, taking a big bite of burrito and pushing it over to one side of his mouth as he chewed. “What’s to decide?”

  “The stupendous one is Marilyn Rawley.”

  Lester choked. “What?”

  “I was as surprised as you are. Janice wasn’t even aware that we knew her.”

  “But … but she goes to school! She’s in one of my classes!”

  “Part-time,” Dad said. “It’s a drawback, but we could work around it. She has several evening classes this semester, evidently, so it would be only one morning and two afternoons a week we’d have to fill in without her. I think we could swing it. The big plus is that when she is there, she could help out in other departments. She is much more knowledgeable than Loretta was.”

  “Then what’s the problem?” I asked.

  Dad chewed thoughtfully. “I’m just not sure it’s wise to have her working for me. What happens if you two break up, Lester? What happens if you break her heart? What happens if she breaks yours?”

  “My heart is made of surgical steel,” said Lester.

  “That’s what you think,” Dad told him.

  I imagined going to the Melody Inn on Saturdays and working beside Marilyn in the Gift Shoppe. I imagined having woman-to-woman talks and telling her all my secrets and listening to hers.

  “Hire her, Dad! Please!” I said. “I love Marilyn. I’d love to work with her. She knows all about music. She plays the guitar and sings. She sang in the Messiah, and all the customers would love her.”

  Dad looked at Lester.

  “Hire her,” said Les.

  “Okay,” said Dad. “I just wanted your input first.”

  I couldn’t stop grinning. If I wasn’t getting a mother, maybe I was getting a sister-in-law. And if I wasn’t getting a sister-in-law, maybe I was getting a sister.

  7

  ON PAMELA AND PREGNANCY

  According to Pamela’s assignment, she could be as pregnant as she wanted, but had to report on what choices she would need to make, based on how many months she was along. She also had to report on the possible consequences of whatever she decided to do about her unborn child.

  We had figured out by this time that Mr. Everett was going to grade us on just how many factors we considered. If he saw we were choosing the easy way out and taki
ng the first solution that came into our heads, he’d add twenty more things to research.

  Pamela called some clinics who told her that if she was thinking about an abortion, they’d only perform it in the first three months, and, depending on what state she lived in, she’d have to have her parents’ permission.

  If she made up her mind to have the baby, she had to decide whether to keep it or give it up for adoption. And while there were a lot of infertile couples who would lovingly adopt a healthy newborn, the strikes were against it if it had a handicap.

  “Okay, I’ll be six months pregnant,” Pamela informed me on the school bus one morning. “I decided to choose the month I’d really be showing.”

  “You just wanted to skip all the morning sickness,” said Elizabeth, who knows whereof she speaks, because her mom’s expecting at the end of October.

  Pamela had to figure out where she would live, where she would work, and whether or not to finish high school, and make as many other decisions as she could cram into her report.

  “What I found out,” she said to me, while Elizabeth hung over the back of the seat, “is if I name the father, they can force him to provide child support. If he’s working, that is. But I might not want to. I might be afraid that if they go after him for child support, he’ll never marry me.”

  “Every baby needs a father,” said Elizabeth. “Why wouldn’t they make you tell?”

  “How?” I asked. “Stick hot pins in her thumbs till she confesses?”

  “I could just say I didn’t know,” Pamela told us.

  “How could you not know?” Elizabeth demanded.

  “Maybe I was drunk at a party and there were too many guys to count.”

  “That’s disgusting!” cried Elizabeth.

  “I know, but it happens,” Pamela told her.

  “Then who should we say is the father?” I asked. “Brian? Mark?”

  Pamela grinned. “I’m going to name Donald Sheavers.”

  “Oh, Pamela, no!” I giggled. Donald was my old boyfriend back in Takoma Park. We met him in the mall last summer, and he’s been calling Elizabeth and Pamela ever since. “If it’s Donald Sheavers’s baby, it will be handsome as anything, but dumb as a doorknob.”

  “I don’t think we should even be talking like this,” said Elizabeth.

  “It’s all in fun!” I said. “Lighten up.”

  Elizabeth sighed, her arms resting on the back of our seat. “You know when I wish I had lived? Back in troubadour times.”

  “In what?” I asked.

  “When the troubadours lived. The men who sang to ladies who lived in castles. They made up love songs, and the women looked down on them lovingly and dropped their handkerchiefs so the troubadours would have a token of their love, and the troubadours went on wandering, and forever after, women would have this memory of unconsummated love.”

  “What’s the point?” asked Pamela.

  “The point is that you can cherish and love someone deeply, Pamela—deeply—without ever having to take your clothes off. It’s love on a higher plane.”

  “Spare me!” said Pamela.

  “Only very few people will ever experience this kind of love in their lifetime, because they let their bodies get in the way,” Elizabeth went on.

  There’s just no reasoning with her sometimes.

  • • •

  After school, Pamela asked us to go with her to McDonald’s to apply for a job. She had a list of other places that usually hire teenagers. She’d tell them she was six months’ pregnant and see how many rejections she got. We figured how many places we could hit on or near Georgia Avenue that had been hiring now that their summer help was back in school.

  “But if they say no, how can you prove it’s because you’re pregnant?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Because one of you will go in first and fill out an application, and after you come out, I’ll go in and ask if they’re hiring. If they take your application but not mine, then we’ll know.”

  “You don’t look very pregnant,” I told her. “You need a pillow.”

  “Come on over to my house, Pamela,” Elizabeth said. “My mother will make you look very pregnant.”

  Mrs. Price herself looked very, very pregnant.

  “Six months’ pregnant, huh?” she asked Pamela. “Let’s try a small flat decorator pillow, and see how that looks under a maternity top.”

  She bound it to Pamela’s body with a long cotton scarf, then slipped a maternity top over Pamela’s head.

  We stared at the transformation.

  “It … it looks so real!” gasped Elizabeth.

  “It feels weird!” Pamela told us, patting her artificial abdomen.

  It was weird. In Mr. Everett’s course it was as though someone had put our lives on fast-forward.

  Before we left the house for McDonald’s, Mrs. Price said, “What you have to remember now, Pamela, is to sit and stand a little slower than usual, and rest one hand lightly on your tummy, as if to quiet the baby down. It does a lot of kicking, you know. Feels like giant hiccups in your abdomen. Pretend that every time you change position you’re going to get a kick in the gut unless you do it slowly.”

  Pamela practiced a couple times.

  “It doesn’t hurt to huff and puff a little,” said Elizabeth’s mother.

  We set out, but couldn’t stop giggling. People looked at us, especially at Pamela. Especially her abdomen.

  “This is so weird,” Pamela kept saying, but I knew she was having fun.

  “Just don’t go into labor or try anything dumb,” Elizabeth warned, not at all sure about it.

  When we got to McDonald’s, I went in first and asked if I could fill out an application. They handed one right over. I gave a phony name and age, of course, because I really don’t want to work there.

  Then we went to the diner, and Elizabeth asked for an application. After she filled hers out, we went back to McDonald’s again, and stayed out of sight while Pamela went in. She was out within a minute.

  “They said I could fill out an application, but I would find the work difficult because I’d be on my feet all day,” she told us.

  “At least they were honest,” I said.

  We went back to the diner. They told Pamela they were no longer hiring. We goofed around down the block for a while, and then I went in the diner and asked about work. They gave me an application.

  When I came out, Karen and Jill had come along. All the girls were laughing down at the corner.

  “This is so neat!” Karen kept saying. “Everybody’s looking at you, Pamela. It’s so real!”

  “Everyone got a fun assignment except me,” Jill complained.

  “Let’s head over to the library and see the reaction,” said Karen, and when we walked up the steps, we saw Brian and some other guys coming out.

  “Whooaaa!” said Brian, staring.

  “Hey, Brian, you’ve been busy!” said one of his friends, and whooped.

  “It’s not yours, Brian, don’t worry,” Pamela kidded.

  “Whose is it, then?” asked Brian.

  Pamela shook her head. “My lips are sealed.”

  The boys followed us back inside and tried to make Pamela tell, but she wouldn’t. Everyone looked at us. We tried not to laugh, but couldn’t help it. Pamela moved slowly, one hand on her stomach, and when she sat down, she leaned back, her abdomen sticking out in front of her. By this time, though, the pillow had slipped to one side, and that made us hysterical.

  A librarian came over. “Please?” she said.

  We put our hands over our mouths as Pamela reached up under the maternity top and pulled the bulge forward again. The librarian stared. We couldn’t help ourselves this time and got up and left before they kicked us out, laughing all the way.

  Pamela told the class the next day about applying for jobs as a pregnant teenager.

  “This is the kind of thing I’m looking for,” Mr. Everett told the rest of us. “Approach your assigned situation as thou
gh it were really your personal problem, and try to think of all the people your decision is going to affect. I don’t want any dumb speculation. I want you to experience what some of these situations would really mean for you. And I don’t care if you have a little fun while you’re at it.” He grinned at Patrick and me. “You two excepted,” he said.

  When the bell rang that day and the others were leaving, I went to the back of the room to look up something in the legal encyclopedia that Mr. Everett keeps for reference. The one thing Patrick and I hadn’t checked was how long it takes to get a marriage license in Maryland, and the cost. Jill was up at Mr. Everett’s desk—Jill, who got the name “Colorado” in seventh grade when boys were naming girls after states based on the size of their breasts.

  “It’s not fair, Mr. Everett!” I heard her saying. “Pamela and everyone else got a fun assignment, and you gave me a dead grandmother. Almost anything would be better than that.”

  Mr. Everett was gathering up his papers. “Listen, Jill, you can’t always choose what happens to you in life. It’s important to see how you deal with this.”

  “Please, Mr. Everett!” She was using her whining voice. “It just isn’t any fun at all.”

  “Fun is not the object here.” He was smiling at her, but standing his ground.

  “Mr. Ever-ett!” Jill wailed. She motioned vaguely at her breasts. “Look at me! I mean, I look a lot older than my age. You’ve got to admit that I’m going to be faced with a lot more serious problems than burying a grandmother.”

  I couldn’t believe she’d said that, but Mr. Everett didn’t give an inch: “Well, if you’ve got the body of a woman, then you have to be thinking about what kind of decisions women have to make. And somewhere along the way you’ll have to bury someone. It’s as important an assignment as any of the others.”

  He tucked his papers under one arm and gave her a quick hug with the other as he headed for the door.

  “Come on now, Jill. You can do it,” he said, and he was gone.

  She glared after him, then stalked on out into the hall.