Alice in the Know

  Keep working, ’tis wiser than sitting aside,

  And dreaming and sighing, and waiting the tide;

  In life’s earnest battle those only prevail

  Who daily march onward, and never say fail.

  I tried hard not to laugh. “Did it work?” I asked.

  “No, Grandma had to make the pies herself. But, oh, she was a stickler for learning those songs. Alcohol? She wouldn’t let it near the house. She wouldn’t even keep vanilla in the cupboard for fear we’d drink it.”

  “You’re kidding!” I said.

  “I was only eleven when I had to memorize ‘Touch Not the Cup.’ Do you want to hear it? Marie had to learn it later.”

  I wanted to, if only to connect with my mother.

  Touch not the cup, it is death to the soul;

  Touch not the cup, touch not the cup;

  Many I know who have quaffed from that bowl;

  Touch not the cup, touch it not.

  Little they tho’t that the demon was there,

  Blindly they drank and were caught in its snare;

  Then of that death-dealing bowl, oh, beware;

  Touch not the cup, touch it not.

  “Wow!” I said. “And I can’t even sing!”

  “There were four verses, and we had to learn them all,” said Aunt Sally. “Marie learned them faster than I did, because the sooner she did, the sooner she could go out to play. I believe our grandmother had a song for whatever she wanted to teach us. Even Grandpa got in the act now and then, if only to make her stop.” Aunt Sally laughed. “His favorite was titled ‘Don’t Talk If You’ve Nothing to Say’” That cracked us up. “I miss them, the old folks,” Aunt Sally said. “But someday I suppose you’ll be laughing at me, too.”

  “Aunt Sally, some of my most interesting conversations have been with you,” I said. “How’s Uncle Milt?”

  “Well, we manage to keep busy, Alice. Your uncle’s taking more medications than he used to, but there’s certainly never a day we don’t have enough to do.”

  “And Carol?” I asked.

  “She’s dating a nice man now, so we’ll see what comes of that. Is everyone all right in your family?”

  “Yes,” I told her, omitting the part about Lester.

  “Life goes by in a rush,” said Aunt Sally. “Let us hear from you now and then.”

  “You will,” I said.

  At dinner the following night I asked, “Could we have a surprise party for Lester for his birthday? It’s only ten days away.”

  “I think we could manage that. A party, anyway. I’m not sure about the surprise part,” said Dad. “What were you thinking?”

  “Oh … I thought we could invite his roommates and some of his friends. I’ll take care of the invitations if you’ll furnish the food. But we’d need to make sure he comes over.”

  We thought about that a minute. “He’s good at taking us to the airport when we need him,” said Sylvia. “We could ask him to come by that night and pick us up—tell him that we’re leaving town for a few days.”

  Dad checked his calendar. “His birthday’s on a Sunday this year. Why don’t we have him over for dinner that night to celebrate, but hold the real party on the following Friday. We’ll have to check with his housemates to see if he’s free.”

  “Let’s do it!” said Sylvia. “That will be fun!”

  I went up to my room and started a guest list. Lester’s two housemates—Paul Sorenson and George Palamas. They’d have to come separately and stay for only half the evening each, of course, because one of them always has to be there for old Mr. Watts. I’d invite his old girlfriend Marilyn, just because she worked for Dad, my three best friends, Pamela, Liz, and Gwen …

  But then I got carried away. Why not Rosalind’s brother Billy, who used to play in Lester’s band, the Naked Nomads, back in Takoma Park? Of course, then I’d need to invite Rosalind. What about Lester’s baseball buddies? Friends he knew at the university? His roommates should be able to help me with my list.

  Dad called Les and confirmed that he could drive them to the airport Friday evening, September ninth.

  “Did he sound okay?” I asked.

  “He sounded like Lester, Al. Sometimes he’s up, sometimes he’s down. I don’t expect him to be playing a harmonica and tap-dancing, okay?”

  I got all the phone numbers I could and started calling, leaving messages when no one was home. Parties can get pretty complicated. They sound simple when you first start thinking about them. Then you have to be sure you have enough chairs, and what about plates? Cold food or hot? Soft drinks or coffee? Should we have beer? Should there be music? Dancing? Inside or out? And what about decorations?

  I was tired already and couldn’t expect Dad and Sylvia to take my idea and run with it. Dad was gearing up for the big Labor Day sale at work, and Sylvia was making lesson plans for the first week of school. I asked my friends to help me.

  “I think the best decorations would be photographs of Lester from birth till now. That’s what we do for birthday parties,” said Gwen, and added, “Funerals, too.”

  “Now, that makes me feel real good!” I said.

  “I think we should get some Muscle & Fitness magazines, cut out pictures of bodybuilders, remove their heads, and put Lester’s face there instead,” said Pamela. “We could put them all over the house.”

  We loved that idea, too.

  “I’ll get the magazines,” said Pamela.

  “I’ll buy some poster board,” said Gwen.

  “I’ll look through our old photos and see what I can find,” I promised, and Liz said she’d bring some streamers.

  “Don’t expect this bash to work miracles on Les,” Gwen warned me.

  “Okay. I won’t expect miracles. Instead, I’ll expect the worst,” I said, sinking into a chair. “I’m going to expect that not only will everyone we’ve invited show up, but that they’ll bring their children and parents and boyfriends as well. I’m going to expect that at least one person will get sick at the party, somebody else will get drunk, somebody will get offended at something, and it will probably rain. Then, if some of those things don’t happen, I’ll be happy.”

  “Is that going to be your life’s philosophy?” asked Gwen. “Expect the worst, and it will usually be better than what you thought?”

  I thought about what Sylvia had said. “No,” I said. “I’m going to enjoy the good things that happen and deal with the bad as they come along. How’s that?”

  “You’re getting there,” said Gwen.

  “You’ll never guess who came into the store today,” Dad said when he got home from work. “Loretta Jenkins. Loretta Jenkins James, to be exact.”

  “Oh my God!” I said. “She’s still married?”

  “Very much so,” said Dad, “and her little girl is going on three years old already.”

  If there was ever someone I would have voted most likely not to succeed, it was Loretta Jenkins. She used to run the Gift Shoppe there at the Melody Inn. Loretta was a cheerful, laid-back person with a huge mane of curly hair, which she wore like a sunburst around her head.

  While she was working for Dad, she got pregnant. She was engaged and then married in no time. She had morning sickness like you wouldn’t believe. The last time I’d seen Loretta, in fact, she was bending over the toilet at the Melody Inn. She and her new husband didn’t have enough money to get their own place, so they were moving in with his parents. I thought they’d be lucky if the marriage lasted a year.

  “Not only are they still married,” Dad said, “but she told me they have an apartment now, her husband has a better job, and she’s taking a couple of night school courses. Happy as a clam.”

  Hooray for her! I thought. It just goes to show that sometimes a couple with almost nothing going for them can make it if they really want to. And then I had an idea.

  “Do you have her phone number?” I asked. “I want to call and invite her to Lester’s party. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?”
r />   “It would be a surprise, all right,” Dad said.

  16

  Junior Year

  We tried to squeeze all we could out of the end of summer. Pamela gave her notice at Burger King. The day camp where Liz had been working had ended two weeks ago, and Gwen had finished her internship at the National Institutes of Health. I was feeling sort of unsettled. I’d promised myself that I’d visit Molly at least once a week. I’d thought of it, but I hadn’t called since we got back from the ocean. But she had a big family—four sisters, two of them coming clear across the country to be with her. Did she really need me?

  You can think of all kinds of reasons not to do something that makes you uncomfortable. And visiting Molly was uncomfortable sometimes, because I didn’t always know what to say that would make her feel better. And then I remembered what Pamela said, about friends being family. I went to the phone and called Molly.

  * * *

  Over the last week before school we worked on the decorations for Lester’s party and bought some clothes for the new semester. Then on Saturday we went to each other’s houses to redecorate our bulletin boards. It was like those TV shows where people redecorate each other’s houses. We made each person leave her bedroom, and she couldn’t come back till we’d finished. Gwen’s house was first. She sat on the floor out in the hall while we took over. “Don’t take down that picture of my grandmother,” she called to us. “If she comes in here and discovers she’s not the center of my universe anymore, I’ll hear about it for the next six months.”

  We put her grandma’s picture back on the board, in the very center, inside a big red cutout heart that Liz made. Pamela and I had pictures of Gwen, though, that we’d taken at Camp Overlook last summer when we were all assistant counselors, so we had come armed and ready.

  I carefully cut out a figure of Gwen jumping into the lake, arms wrapped around her knees in a cannonball jump. I tilted her around so she appeared to be lying on her back. Then I glued her onto a picture of one of the counselors at camp, his arms holding out a giant-size pizza. It looked like Gwen, not the pizza, was in his arms.

  “Perfect!” Liz squealed.

  “Okay, you guys, what are you up to in there?” came Gwen’s voice from out in the hall. “Don’t put up anything my mom shouldn’t see.”

  Pamela had a picture of Gwen leaning down to talk to Latisha, our problem camper. We cut out Gwen from the photo and pasted it to a picture of another guy at camp, looking up from his lunch, so it appeared that the two were kissing.

  “Bingo!” said Pamela.

  Then there was the picture of Gwen in New York on the ferry, with the Statue of Liberty in the background. She had one hand on her chest, holding on to the strap of her shoulder bag. We put a torch in that hand and a crown on her head, and presto! Another version of the statue.

  “Oh, Gwen, you’ll be famous!” I said. “People will come from all over the world to see you!”

  “You’re not taking off my clothes, are you?” she warned from around the corner.

  Of course we put back some of her own mementos: a dried-up corsage from a dance; an autograph from her favorite author; her membership card in the National Honor Society; a picture of her church choir; a ticket stub from a rock concert… .

  “Okay!” Pamela said at last. We made Gwen close her eyes, then led her back inside the bedroom and stood her in front of her bulletin board.

  “Open!” I told her.

  Gwen yelped when she saw the picture of herself in her bathing suit pinned at the top of the board. We had glued the rounded halves of pencil erasers on her breasts and padded her hips with part of a bunion pad, giving her an hourglass figure. On the side of the picture, with arrows pointing to the appropriate places, we had written, Gwen Wheeler, Miss America, bust 38, waist 24, hips 38.

  Her folks heard all the laughing and came in to see it too. Gwen’s mom, a lawyer at the Justice Department, wears jeans and a T-shirt at home on weekends. She’s short and shapely like her daughter, with dimples in both cheeks. Mr. Wheeler is as tall as his wife is short, and I think he works with computers.

  “So that’s what went on at that camp last summer,” her dad said, chuckling, pointing to a picture of Gwen in her bunk bed, the covers pulled up to her chin. Only we’d pasted the head of one of the guys on the pillow next to her, and Gwen really screamed when she saw that.

  “Don’t I wish!” she said.

  “Show these to your brothers when they come home,” said her mom. “They’ll get a kick out of them.”

  Then it was on to my house, where they took the photos of me in awkward positions at camp, cut me out of the pictures, and pinned me up on my bulletin board with names of silly exercises on them: The Side-Straddle Hop; The Squat-Grunt-Stretch; The Torso Twist; and The Butt Tightener.

  At Liz’s, while she played with her little brother in the next room, we pinned up close-ups of her face. We had carefully drawn different makeup schemes on each one and changed her hair as well: a Dolly Parton wig in one, a Cher wig in another, her eyebrows pencil-thin in a third, a beauty mark on her cheek. We even glued false eyelashes on it to make it more real.

  We’d saved Pamela’s house till last, not because our decorating was so explosive, but because her dad might be. According to Pamela, no “person of color” had ever crossed their threshold. No Latino, no Asian, not even a person whose last name ended in an i or an a. Had he remembered our mentioning Gwen when we were at the beach?

  “So what’s the worst that can happen?” Gwen asked as we went up the steps.

  “That he won’t let either one of us in the house and I’ll have to spend the night at your place,” Pamela told her.

  “Not to worry,” said Gwen.

  We went in and could hear Mr. Jones puttering around in the kitchen.

  “I’ve got some friends with me, Dad,” Pamela called. “We’re going to fix up my room a little.”

  “Okay,” he said, and came to the kitchen doorway holding a skillet and dishtowel. He stopped and stared stonily at Gwen.

  “Oh, this is Gwen Wheeler, the one I told you about,” Pamela added brightly. “The brain. We were counselors together at camp last summer.”

  Gwen smiled at Pamela’s dad. “Hello,” she said.

  Mr Jones gave an almost imperceptible nod, turned, and went back inside the kitchen.

  Pamela gave us a quick Well, we got that far look and led us upstairs.

  We’d planned Pamela’s bulletin board far in advance and had gathered pictures of people in different professions. We cut out Pamela’s head from photos at camp and our New York trip and pasted them on assorted pictures of people in uniform: a scuba-diving suit; a firefighter’s suit; a nurse’s uniform; an acrobat. There was Pamela as a ballet dancer, an astronaut, a doorman, a maid, a soldier, and, of course, Pamela as a stripper with nothing but pasties on her breasts.

  Up at the top of the bulletin board we tacked cutout letters that read: THE PAMELA POSSIBILITIES. Then we let her in to see it.

  “Oh, I love it!” she cried. “Omigod, look at that one!”

  We outdid ourselves, it’s true.

  Mr. Jones came upstairs to get a pair of shoes, and Pamela dragged him in to see her bulletin board. He came unsmiling, reluctant. But when he saw the pictures, he had to smile a little.

  “You end up any of those, Pamela, except that one,” he said, pointing to the stripper, “and it’ll be okay with me.” We laughed.

  As he started to leave the room, he turned to Gwen and said, “What’d you say your last name was?”

  “Wheeler,” she told him.

  “I think the guy who fixes my car is a Wheeler,” Mr. Jones said. “Your dad a car mechanic?”

  “No. He designs computer software,” Gwen said.

  “Oh … well, there’re a lot of Wheelers around, I guess,” said Pamela’s dad.

  “Yeah,” said Pamela. “Same as Joneses.” After he left, she thrust one fist triumphantly in the air.

  When we go
t outside, we were feeling so proud of ourselves that we didn’t want the day to end.

  “On to Molly’s!” I said. “If she doesn’t have a bulletin board, we’ll make one!”

  And so we did.

  Sunday was Lester’s birthday, and Sylvia had invited him over for dinner as planned. I was afraid he wouldn’t come, but we were making all his favorite dishes. That lured him, I guess: filet mignon, baked potatoes with sour cream, green beans with almonds, Caesar salad. I made his favorite for dessert, too, a German chocolate cake—and it turned out fantastic!

  I saw the look of pleasure on his face when he tasted it. “You made this, Al? It’s great!” he said.

  I beamed. Mostly I was happy that Les had an appetite. At the same time, though, he seemed distracted, depressed. I guess he wouldn’t be normal if he wasn’t.

  “How’s the new semester going at the U?” I asked him.

  “Hasn’t started yet,” he answered.

  “You said you plan to finish up this next year, Les?” Sylvia said. “How’s the thesis coming?”

  “Slowly,” he told her. “I’ve hit a couple of snags, but my adviser thinks we can work it out.”

  I remembered the title he’d told me: “In Defense of Partiality and Friendship: A Critique of Utilitarianism and Kantianism.” I was sure I’d never be able to understand it. I couldn’t even understand the title.

  More silence as coffee cups were raised and lowered.

  “Marilyn said to tell you happy birthday,” Dad told him.

  “Yeah. Well … ,” Les said. Then, “What time did you want me to pick you up on Friday?”

  “No sooner than seven. The flight doesn’t leave till ten o’clock.”

  “And you said you’re going to London?” Les asked.

  “Isn’t it crazy?” said Sylvia. “It’s only for a few days, but a customer is giving us tickets to a concert—the London Philharmonic Orchestra—and a Shakespeare play at the renovated Globe Theatre. He got a package deal for him and his wife, but she’s sick, so they gave it to us. It was so generous of him!”