Alice on the Outside

  “Yes, but by spending so much time with her, isn’t there a possibility she thought you were more serious than you are?” asked Dad.

  “Then that’s her problem, Dad. How do you know if a woman is right for you unless you do spend a lot of time together?”

  “But … two and a half years?” asked Dad.

  “I was seeing other women too, you know. Crystal …”

  “And Joy. Don’t forget Joy,” I said, remembering a dingbat Lester brought to a birthday party I gave once for Dad.

  “But did Marilyn know about them?” Dad asked him.

  “Some of them, yes. Listen, Dad, what do you want me to do?” Lester asked. “Marry Marilyn just so I won’t hurt her feelings?”

  “Of course not. You’re doing the right thing, Les. But I also believe that Alice is right when she says that Marilyn’s probably taking it harder than you think.”

  Lester didn’t know the half of it.

  I work for three hours on Saturday mornings at my dad’s music store, the Melody Inn, and this time when I got there, Marilyn, who’s in charge of the Gift Shoppe, was back behind the counter, a tissue tucked tightly in her hand, her eyes as red as strawberries.

  “I heard,” I told her.

  Her eyes flashed, and I sure hoped she wasn’t going to be mad at me. She’s one of the best employees Dad ever hired because she knows about all kinds of music—folk and rock and classical and stuff—and Dad’s always been afraid of what might happen if she and Lester broke up.

  “Did he tell you I’ve invested two and a half years of my life in that guy, and he’s dropped me like a dirty sock?” she asked.

  For Lester’s sake, I tried to set the record straight. “Well, it wasn’t exactly two and a half years,” I told her. “I mean, he was going out with Crystal Harkins and a dingbat from school part of that time too.”

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better?” Marilyn snapped. “It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Crystal was behind all this.”

  I stared at Marilyn as I began cleaning the glass of the gift wheel. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve heard rumors she’s not happy. I’ll bet she’s making a play for Lester again.”

  Was it possible? I wondered. I remembered how Crystal had called Lester recently… .

  Marilyn turned away and covered her face with her hands. I was glad we didn’t have any customers yet, because she looked so sad, it almost made me cry.

  “I … I loved him, Alice! He was so gentle and sweet and funny when we were together,” she wept. “If he goes back to Crystal, he’ll not only break my heart, he’ll break up her marriage for sure.”

  “The dog!” I said indignantly.

  “And then he’ll probably drop her and break her heart all over again.”

  “The swine!” I cried.

  “I don’t know why women are so competitive, Alice. We’re all buddy-buddy until it comes to men, and then it’s every woman for herself. Crystal already has Peter. Why does she have to take my boyfriend too? Whatever happened to the Sisterhood, all of us looking out for each other, that’s what I’d like to know.”

  By the time I finished work at the Melody Inn and got home, Lester was just coming down to breakfast. Every other Saturday he works at an appliance store selling washing machines, and this was his Saturday off. He was wearing his Mickey Mouse shorts and a T-shirt, and his eyes were only half-open. I didn’t care if he was only half-awake! I stood in the doorway with my arms folded across my chest and watched him stumble over a chair trying to find the refrigerator.

  “Lester,” I said, glaring, “I have to know: Are you a home-wrecker or not?”

  Lester came to a stop in the middle of the kitchen, his head weaving around, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from.

  “You looking for a demolition company, or would you be addressing me?” he asked. He took out a carton of milk and retrieved a box of Cheerios from the cupboard.

  “I’m addressing you, Lester, and I think you ought to stop right now before you break any more hearts.”

  Lester slid sideways onto the chair and filled his bowl to overflowing. “You going to tell me what the heck you’re talking about, or do I have to guess?”

  “You know very well what I’m talking about! The minister said ‘whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder,’ and if you’re planning to plunder the castle and run off with the bride …” I felt like crying.

  “What the heck did you have for breakfast, Al? LSD? What castle? What bride?”

  “You’re not going back to Crystal?”

  “Al, I can’t even commit to an unattached female. Why would I get involved with a married woman?” He took a bite and continued staring at me. “You’ve been talking to Marilyn, right?”

  “You told her you loved her, Les!” I said accusingly.

  “I did!”

  “And I’ll bet you told Crystal the same thing before she married.”

  “I did! I loved her too!”

  “See?” I said. “I’ll bet there were even more girls you said you loved.”

  “A couple, maybe,” Lester told me. “Can I help it if I love women? Can you help it if you love chocolate?”

  “Well, the Sisterhood doesn’t like your behavior, and we just want you to know that we will be watching your every move. We’re going to look out for each other, Lester, and whatever you do or say will be passed along from one female to another. I just want you to know that.”

  “For the love of Mike!” said Lester, throwing down his spoon. He got up and left the kitchen, but a moment later stuck his head back through the doorway. “I have to go wee-wee, Alice,” he said. “Pass it along.”

  4

  CRW

  WE WENT TO SCHOOL ON MONDAY WITH our gold or orange or white circles pinned on our shirts, and in a holiday frame of mind. Anything to add a little variety to the week. I think that’s one reason they have us change classrooms in January. We go on taking the same courses we started with in September, but with different classmates and teachers. Just so we won’t get too bored—so we won’t form cliques and stuff.

  “Hey, Patrick, where’s your circle?” Mark Stedmeister called when we got on the bus.

  “Forgot it,” Patrick said.

  “Well, don’t think you can squeeze into group A, ’cause your hair’s way too light,” Mark told him.

  “Yeah? Look at Pamela’s. Now that’s light,” Patrick argued.

  “Re-ject!” someone said to Pamela, and we all laughed.

  “What do I care?” said Pamela. “Maybe I’ll hang out with the Bikers or something.”

  “Pamela, you wouldn’t!” Elizabeth said.

  Everyone who forgot to pin on a circle got another as soon as they walked in the door. Teachers were all over the place handing them out, and they were wearing them too. Patrick tried to argue that he was a dark redhead, but it didn’t stick. He got group B’s orange circle, just the way I did.

  Sam, from Camera Club, had called me over the weekend and said he was supposed to remind members to bring their cameras to school all week. The school newspaper wanted to run a double-page spread of photos—faces and scenes from CRW. They’d take the ten best photos we turned in, so I had my camera in my backpack.

  At first it wasn’t the rules so much that irritated me, it was just trying to remember them all. Where to sit, what staircase to use, what table. Only the A’s could use the newer refrigerated drinking fountains, for example. The rest of us had to use the old ceramic fountains that had been there since Year One. The bowls were stained, and the water was warm. Signs over the drinking fountains reminded us: GROUP A ONLY or GOLDS ONLY. Anyone who was African American or Asian had it made. The really light blondes were out of luck.

  I started to sit at Elizabeth’s table at lunch only to be jeered at by the other dark-haired girls sitting there, and I had to go to a table off to one side. Pamela had to sit way, way back, beside a girl named Leslie, who’s probably the blondest b
londe in the whole school.

  Elizabeth got up and came over. “I feel horrible about getting all the good stuff,” she said. “It’s so stupid.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Elizabeth. Nobody’s going to hold it against you,” I said.

  “So how was the first day of the big experiment?” Dad asked that evening.

  “Pretty dumb,” I told him. “By the end of the day everyone was using whatever staircase and drinking fountain they wanted, and nobody cared. I told you we aren’t prejudiced at my school.”

  The next day, though, there were hall monitors enforcing the rules. They were stationed at every drinking fountain, every staircase, and now the restrooms had been segregated too. GROUP A ONLY signs were all over the place. The only restroom the kids with white circles could use was in the basement. If you were a B and tried to go up an A staircase, a hall monitor would stop you and say, “Sorry. Golds only.” If you were a C and tried to sneak in an A or B restroom, a hall monitor would say, “Use the one in the basement.”

  It wasn’t quite so easy anymore to pretend it was fun, because it wasn’t fun to run clear down to the other end of the building before the bell. It wasn’t fun, after a sweaty game of volleyball in gym, to have to drink warm water from a dingy fountain.

  But it was when the cafeteria women said they had run out of bacon cheeseburgers after the Golds had been served that really got to us. The rest of us had to take turkey roll or tuna. Tempers flared just a little, and I got a camera shot of the B’s and C’s waiting in line, staring enviously at the A’s who were enjoying fat, juicy burgers of which we got only the aroma.

  “You never ran out of bacon burgers before,” one of the bleached-blond Bikers said when he got up to the serving table.

  “It happens,” was all the cook said.

  “Yeah. On purpose,” the boy said, shoving the tuna sandwich back at her and stalking out of the cafeteria.

  By Wednesday, we were ready for the experiment to be over.

  “Okay, they made their point,” Pamela said on the bus going home. “Prejudice stinks and discrimination is unfair and we should all love one another, so enough already! If I can’t hang out with anyone but blondes, they’ll be sorry.”

  On Thursday, though, teachers took over as hall monitors, and Mr. Ormand himself guarded the front stairs. Mr. Sorringer, our assistant principal—the guy who loves Miss Summers too, but not as much as my dad does, I’ll bet—was taking names of anyone who came to school without their colored circle.

  I heard that a fight broke out second period, only I didn’t see it. The rumor was that a couple of C’s jumped a couple of A’s who jeered them when they were turned back at the front staircase, but Ormand broke it up in a hurry. I don’t know if it really happened, but what I did notice was that things were a lot more tense than they’d been on Monday. Worse, the A’s, the ones with the gold circles, had started acting so cliquish. Even Elizabeth. She’d been palling around with Gwen, and when I went to their table once to ask Gwen about an assignment—I didn’t even try to sit down—Gwen gave a short answer, then turned back to her conversation with Elizabeth. Maybe I was overreacting, but I felt shut out.

  A tall brunette in my English class was nice to me, though. I’d noticed her studying me before, and I guess she felt genuinely sorry for the Oranges and Whites. She walked beside me after English Thursday afternoon and said, “I’m Lori Haynes. I’ll be glad when this week’s over, won’t you?”

  “Will you?” I said. “You’ve been getting all the perks.”

  “Yeah, but I know how it feels to be on the other end,” she said, though I couldn’t imagine why. She wasn’t beautiful, but she certainly wasn’t ugly. Maybe it was because she was tall, I decided. Never having been tall, I guess you could feel sort of discriminated against, especially if boys avoided you.

  “The idea of CRW is okay,” I told her, “but I think it’s going on a little too long. A couple of days would have been enough. We get the idea.”

  “Yeah, probably,” Lori said. “Though I like it better than our poetry unit in English.”

  “I’m not big on poems, either,” I said. “I disgraced myself last year in Miss Summers’s class. We were supposed to recite a favorite poem aloud, and not only did I get mixed up and start reciting the wrong one, but I started crying right in the middle. Can you imagine? I think that’s probably one of the most embarrassing things that ever happened to me.”

  She laughed. “How about wetting your pants in public? That’s the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me. I laughed too hard, and then I had to wait until everyone else went home because I didn’t dare stand up.”

  I grinned. “One more day,” I said, as we went to our lockers in gym.

  “Yeah,” she said. “See you.”

  There were still some nice people left in school, I thought, feeling a little disgruntled at both Gwen and Elizabeth. It was as though people began to accept the idea that they were privileged, a cut above the rest. And Pamela, true to her threat, deserted Leslie and the other blondes and began to hang around with the Bikers, who always ate their lunch outside on the steps, even in winter. She wore a short T-shirt that exposed her midriff and laughed as the guys rode their bikes around the school parking lot, doing wheelies, each trying to upstage the others. Pamela cheered them on and acted as though they were the most interesting people she’d ever met.

  “That’s disgusting!” I heard Elizabeth say that noon, as I passed her in the hall. Elizabeth was looking out the window at Pamela, who was on the steps below, her arm draped over some guy’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she got a tattoo! She’s being ridiculous!”

  “Not any more than you are,” I retorted.

  She jerked around and stared with wide eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  “Just the way you hang around with the other Golds. You and Gwen purposely shut me out.”

  “You’re imagining things,” Elizabeth snapped, and, turning her back to me, walked off to the library.

  In the space of only a few days, Elizabeth, Pamela, and I seemed to have drifted apart. Pamela was hanging out with the Bikers, trying to act sexy; Elizabeth was hanging out with Gwen and the other brunettes, acting superior; and I don’t know when I’d ever felt so shut out.

  “Trouble?” Lori said, falling in beside me as I moved off in the opposite direction.

  “Yeah, one of my best friends thinks she’s too good for me. She doesn’t even realize she’s changed.”

  “That can really hurt,” said Lori. “Anyway, I like your sweater. You look good in green. Anybody ever tell you that?”

  I smiled then. “Miss Summers did once. She called me Alice Green Eyes. I guess green is my favorite color. What’s yours?”

  “I don’t know. I wear a lot of black because I inherit my brothers’ shirts, and they’re into black right now. Sometimes I feel like an executioner.”

  We laughed, and I was grateful that somebody could put some humor into the day.

  The other thing that made CRW bearable, though, was that I caught some really good expressions with my camera—at least I hoped I did. It was a way to forget that I was one of the untouchables, and let my camera do the talking for me. The faces of the Whites standing in line at the one ceramic drinking fountain outside the gym; faces of the girls at the Golds’ table, laughing and enjoying their lunch; the face of a guy being turned away from the B staircase… .

  Sam was everywhere with his camera. With his dark hair, he was one of the Golds, but he hardly seemed to notice. I guess when you’re really dedicated to something, the way Sam is to photography, you become very focused. I knew that he’d probably have the best pictures of any of us.

  We had barely got to homeroom on Friday when there was an announcement that first-period classes were being suspended for the morning and that we were to spend first period in homeroom instead. I had Mrs. Willis for homeroom, and as soon as Mr. Ormand stopped talking over the school speaker, she stood up
and came around to sit on the edge of her desk.

  Mrs. Willis is Mexican, I think, married to an Irishman or Scotsman or something, and I saw that she had already removed the gold circle from her dress. She invited us all to remove the circles from our clothes too. I sure was happy to get rid of mine.

  “So how was your week?” she asked.

  That was met with groans and laughter.

  “I’m glad it’s over,” Leslie said.

  “Well, it’s not quite over,” she told us. “But how did you feel? What did you discover about yourselves? Your friends?”

  “I thought it was a joke at first,” said a guy, “but I was really pissed … uh … I mean, ticked off … when some of the guys in the gold group tried to keep it going at the mall. Told me I couldn’t use the escalator—that kind of stuff. I actually took a swing at somebody. Then we saw security moving in and stopped.”

  “Things could have gotten out of hand so easily,” said Lori.

  Mrs. Willis nodded. “That’s true. They could. It’s the first time we’ve tried it at this school, and we were a little uneasy ourselves. There were times when I felt the other teachers really resented me, because I could go anywhere I wanted and be served first in the cafeteria. And then I wondered if I was only imagining it.”

  “You weren’t imagining it,” I told her. “I resented all the Golds. They got so thick with each other, as though they really deserved special treatment. I guess we were supposed to learn that this is the way prejudice begins.”

  “I imagine it begins in a dozen different ways. One of the ways is to be told you’re superior, or inferior, and you almost start to believe it,” said the teacher.

  “What got me was that the whole thing was based on something so ridiculous—a little colored circle—and yet the Golds fell right into it. I mean, there was a certain amount of satisfaction. You can’t tell me they didn’t enjoy it,” a boy said.

  But a girl from group A countered, “Heck, why not? We didn’t make the rules.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t have to go along with them,” Leslie told her.

  “We did so, or we’d get in trouble.”