Alice in the Know

  “What I’d like to do,” he said as I took the chair across from him, stretching out my legs and resting my toes on the edge of his seat, “is put on a new porch, twice as big, and screen it in. Would be a nice place to eat dinner and spend a summer evening. Catch a breeze.”

  “Sounds great,” I said. “I could even have a sleepover on it. Or just hang out with my friends.”

  “We could use it for a lot of things,” said Dad. “That’s one thing Marie and I always wanted and never got. A screened porch.”

  I was glad he’d given me an opening.

  “Dad …” I hesitated. “What was it like? Really like, I mean, when Mom got sick?”

  He went on staring out over the backyard. “Awful,” he said.

  I waited. “I was so little,” I said finally. “I just didn’t know what all you and Les were going through. I remember seeing Lester cry, though.”

  “We were worried for you, too, honey.”

  “That I’d get leukemia?”

  “No. About how confusing it must have been for you and how much you missed your mother.”

  “I had Aunt Sally.”

  “Yes, bless her. What would any of us have done without her and your uncle Milt?”

  “Was Mom sick for a long time?” I asked.

  “No. She went pretty fast.”

  “Was hers worse than what Molly’s got, then?”

  “Yes. It was a different kind. There was no talk of a cure when Marie got sick.”

  “How did she know she had it?”

  “We both knew she was tired a lot, but that could have been due to a lot of things. The first symptom she told me about was the bleeding. Her nose … her gums … and finally every opening of her body. She died three and a half months later. That’s how quick she went.”

  “What was she like? I mean, how did she take it?”

  “She was scared. She was just very scared. We both were. Then, after the shock of it, she worried about you and Lester. I knew that my job from then on was to reassure her that I would raise you two okay.”

  “And you have, Dad,” I said quickly.

  He gave my toes a little pinch. “So far,” he said, with a warning smile. Then he added, “I guess she saw her job as being brave. I don’t think either of us was very good at it, but we did the best we could.” He sat very still then, one hand covering my toes like a protective umbrella.

  “Would it have been better or worse if she’d lived longer?” I asked.

  “Sick, you mean? Probably worse. As it was, she didn’t have long periods where she just felt okay. Each day she was weaker; she was always bleeding from somewhere.” I saw Dad’s chin tremble a little. “She died … with me stroking her hair. That’s one good thing I have to hold on to … that I was beside her, stroking her hair.” He pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose.

  I looked away. “I think I remember going to see her once. Did I visit her in the hospital?”

  “Yes. They wheeled her down to the ‘sunroom,’ they called it. I brought you in, and you were frightened at first because of the IV hookup—all the tubes. But then I sat you on her lap—”

  “I remember that! And I remember that she smelled different. I didn’t think it was her at first because her legs were so bony.” I could feel tears welling up in my own eyes. “Then she put her lips against my ear and hummed my favorite song, and I knew it was her. And we snuggled… .” I swallowed. “And I cried when I had to leave.”

  “So did she, Al. And so did I.”

  I decided to invite Les and Tracy for dinner that weekend and to cook the meal myself. Sylvia had taught me how to broil fish—simple as anything—so I planned my menu and set the table for five.

  I peeled the potatoes and boiled them with tiny onions. Steamed some cauliflower, and after rinsing off the trout fillets, I dotted them with bits of butter and spread them out on a big broiler pan. Then I salted them lightly, sprinkled them with lemon juice, and added a dash of dill weed from the spice drawer.

  About four minutes later, when the fillets were just starting to turn golden on top, I took them from the oven and called everyone to the table.

  It’s a wonderful feeling when you cook something that tastes just the way it’s supposed to—the way it would taste if Sylvia had made it herself. The only thing I hadn’t made were the club rolls, and I passed those around in a basket.

  “Pretty good, Al,” said Dad.

  Just pretty good? I thought the meal was terrific.

  “It’s wonderful,” said Sylvia. “The seasoning is just right.”

  “Rainbow trout is one of my favorites,” said Tracy.

  Lester was the only one who didn’t say anything. If you want the truth, go to Lester. “Is there a problem?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” said Les, holding up a piece of cauliflower on his fork. “Is it just me, or is everything on my plate the same color?”

  It suddenly hit me: It was! I don’t think I’d ever thought about color in a meal. I mean, as long as it tasted good …

  “It’s still delicious,” said Sylvia. “Next time you might just add a salad or some green beans.”

  “A few slices of red tomato,” said Tracy.

  “An ear of yellow corn would be nice,” said Dad.

  Of course! How could I not have realized that an appetizing meal can’t be all one color? And then I had an awful thought: Would Tracy think I was making a statement? That I didn’t want any other color at our table?

  I was miserable for the rest of the meal. Anguished at the thought of my homemade coconut cake in the kitchen still waiting to be served. With vanilla ice cream yet! When Tracy helped me carry the plates back to the kitchen, I stammered, “I r-really wasn’t trying to make a statement, Tracy! I just didn’t think!”

  “What?” she said.

  “About the cauliflower and the potatoes.”

  “What?” she said. “I like cauliflower and potatoes.”

  “Everything on the menu was white!” I wailed.

  Tracy burst out laughing. “Les was right about you,” she said.

  “What about me?”

  “He said if you didn’t have enough to worry about, you’d make something up. I don’t make it my occupation to go around looking for ways people are politically incorrect, Alice. Life is too short, too personal, and far too spontaneous for that.”

  “Whew! I’m glad.”

  She grinned at me as she studied the coconut cake on the counter. The cake I’d spent the evening before baking and frosting. “And I’m sure not going to argue with you over that gorgeous thing,” she said. “But I tell you what. Anytime you want to serve a dark meal, make it caviar and chocolate pie, and I’ll think I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

  Keeno was at Mark’s again when we met for our Monday-night swim. He was wearing a new pair of floral trunks that had red and yellow parrots on them. They also looked a size too big, and each time he climbed out of the water, they almost fell off.

  Brian had definitely been smoking weed before we got there—I’ve learned to recognize the odor now after someone pointed it out to me in the school parking lot. Whether Keeno or Mark smoked it too, I wasn’t sure, but I’d be surprised if the Stedmeisters knew about it. Brian carried a little bottle of Visine around in his pocket and joked about his red eyes once—said he’d gotten wasted the night before. But we knew better. One way or the other, of course, he was right.

  Everyone showed up this particular Monday, even Patrick. Without a girl in tow, I might add. Jill and Justin were there, looking like a married couple. Justin carried all of Jill’s stuff, and they had those private little glances and signals and code words that excluded everyone else. We were used to that.

  We all chipped in and ordered pizza, and after it was delivered, we got into this really weird discussion about a girl at Georgetown University who claimed she was date-raped. We were wondering how you would ever prove that it wasn’t consensual.

  “I’ll bet ninety percen
t of the girls claiming date rape brought it on themselves,” Brian muttered. He settled back in the deck chair with his hands over his stomach, eyes half-closed. Reminded me of that old movie, The Godfather.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “You know,” Brian continued. “They get the guys all hotted up, and when he can’t hold back any longer, they cry rape.”

  “Can’t hold back any longer?” Gwen said incredulously. “What are we talking about here? The Hoover Dam?”

  “I used to go with a guy who thought he was an uncontrollable force and I was an immovable object,” said Gwen’s friend Yolanda, who had started hanging out with us. “To listen to him, if he didn’t get what he wanted, he’d erupt or something.”

  Karen is Jill’s best friend, and, like Jill, she usually agrees with the guys. But this time she said, “I don’t care what signals a girl’s giving or a guy thinks she’s giving—if a girl says no, she means it.”

  “Not!” said Mark. “Not always. Sometimes she just likes to tease a little first. Makes for better sex.” Oh, yeah. Mark Stedmeister, Man of Experience. Right.

  “So you’re saying that sometimes it’s okay to force yourself on someone?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t say ‘force,’ exactly,” put in Keeno.

  “If a girl’s been giving a guy the go-ahead all evening and then backs off, I think he has a right to figure she really wants it,” said Mark.

  “Or if a guy spends a bundle on her and she doesn’t put out, he’s entitled to a little something,” said Brian.

  “I don’t believe this!” I said.

  “Okay, what if he’s married to her?” said Mark. “What if they’re married and she says no? Sex is part of marriage, right? So he’s entitled to take a little.” He turned to Patrick, who was finishing a slice of pizza. “Right?”

  Patrick shrugged and took a drink of his Sprite. “Why would he want to?”

  Keeno leered around the group. “Why would he want sex?”

  “No. Wouldn’t he want her to … you know … enjoy it too?” said Patrick.

  It was like I was back in the Our Whole Lives class at church. “Thank you, Patrick,” I said. “At least there’s one sane male around here.” I could have gone over and kissed him, anchovies and all. He sounded so mature, like he was in college already!

  But Brian and Keeno and Mark kept at it. “If she’s resisting, makes it all the better!” Brian said.

  Justin agreed with Patrick, though, and Jill gazed at him adoringly and slid his hand between her knees. I saw Gwen make a gagging gesture, my cue to slide into the pool. Several of us swam to the deep end as the talk disintegrated into which couples from school were “getting any” and which weren’t.

  Mark’s pool has a light at the bottom so that anyone swimming at the top is just a silhouette. If you put your face under, you could make out a coin or a pebble, it’s so bright down there. It’s fun to watch the swimmers if you’re sitting out on the deck. More fun to be one of them.

  I swam around with Gwen and Yolanda, and when we stopped to tread water, Gwen said, “If all the male chauvinists in our school were laid end to end—”

  “—they’d be happy!” Yolanda finished without missing a beat, and we laughed there beneath the diving board and wouldn’t let the guys in on the joke.

  Gwen and Liz and Pamela and I went to see Molly. Faith had called us to say she’d pick us up in her mom’s car. Liz and I squeezed into the backseat beside Pamela, Gwen up front.

  I’d half expected to see Ron, Faith’s scumbag ex-boyfriend, in the car, but Faith was alone. When she saw the relief on my face, she said, “Relax. Ron’s history.” It was the best thing I’d heard in weeks.

  “How’s Molly’s morale?” Liz asked her. Faith had graduated last spring, and Molly was a senior now, so they knew each other better than we knew Molly.

  “What can I say?” Faith said. “How can she do anything but just tough it out?”

  We were quiet for a minute, and I thought of all the work Molly had put into stage crew last spring.

  “Only four months ago, we were working together on Father of the Bride,” I said. “She seemed okay, but she might have been feeling rotten even then.”

  “All those long rehearsals, and she kept the rest of us going,” said Pamela.

  “Well, now it’s our turn,” said Faith. “We’ve got to make sure that at least one of us comes by to see her once a week. Maybe we could work out a schedule.”

  Molly’s mom met us at the door. “How nice of you!” she said when she saw us. “Molly’s in the living room. Go right in.”

  Molly was in a sweat suit at one end of the couch, propped up on pillows and reading People magazine. Her face lit up when she saw us.

  “Well … hey!” she said, dropping the magazine on the floor and scooting up into a sitting position. “Sit down, guys!”

  “Your friendly neighborhood get-well wagon,” Faith said. She leaned down and gave Molly a hug. “How you doing?”

  “Haven’t the faintest. Only the blood tests know. But it’s great to see you,” Molly said.

  What do you say to somebody who may or may not die a lot sooner than she’d expected?

  What do you say to someone who feels like crap—that no matter what’s going on in your life, hers is worse?

  “We’ve all been waiting to come over,” I told her. “We’re glad you’re home.”

  “Yeah. So am I,” said Molly. “I can’t say I feel any better at home, but the amenities are nicer.”

  “When do you start chemo?” Gwen asked her.

  “Next week, I think,” said Molly. “You probably know more about me than I do, Gwen.”

  “Nothing you don’t know already,” Gwen assured her.

  “So how are you spending the summer?” asked Liz.

  Molly motioned to a stack of books on the end table. “AP English,” she said. “I don’t know how much school I’ll miss, so I’m trying to do some of the work now.” She grinned sheepishly down at the magazine on the floor. “Recess,” she said, pointing, and we laughed.

  “What do you have to do for AP English?” I asked. “I may be up for that.” I wasn’t entirely sure I would qualify for advanced placement anything, but it couldn’t hurt to try.

  “An analysis of Dante’s Inferno, a three-thousand-word essay on Interpretations of Myths and Meanings in Beowulf, and a four-page essay on Revisiting The Grapes of Wrath.”

  “Oh, wow!” said Pamela.

  Molly’s mom brought in some iced tea, and after she left, Molly started talking about how weird it was to be thinking about your senior year on stage crew, the debate team, the Latin Club, the prom … and then, after a day at the doctor’s, to suddenly see the whole year from your living room couch.

  I think we decided by the end of that afternoon that she didn’t want us to tell her how we knew she’d get better; she didn’t want to hear that a cousin or neighbor had the same disease and made medical history by drinking gallons of vitamin C. She didn’t want us to cry or give her the name of our doctor or listen to our idea of what made her sick in the first place. She didn’t want us to find her a boyfriend.

  All Molly wanted was for us to listen. And the only helpful response, when she said what a dirty deal it was that she’d be sick her senior year, was, “Yes, it is, Molly. It really sucks.”

  6

  Planning

  “I think Dad may be getting married again,” Pamela told me.

  “Really? Have you met her?” I asked.

  “Yeah. It’s the nurse. They’ve been on-again, off-again, but I went out to dinner with them the other night, and they were definitely on-again. Why else would they take me out to dinner with them unless they wanted me to know they were serious?”

  We’d managed to take a break at the same time that afternoon—me from Hecht’s and Pamela from Burger King.

  “What’s she like?” I asked.

  Pamela shrugged. “Nice, I guess. Sort of plain compared to Mom.
I wouldn’t call her sexy, exactly, but … Hey, what do I know? Maybe Dad’s had enough of ‘sexy.’”

  “Does your mom know about her?”

  “Are you kidding? I’m not going to tell her, that’s for sure. She says she’s over him now, but don’t you believe it.” We crumpled up our sandwich wrappers and took them to the trash. “What department are you working today?” Pamela asked.

  “Infants and toddlers,” I said. “I’m stocking sleepers, overalls, socks, booties… . Did you know you could buy a shirt and top for yourself with what it costs to outfit a toddler?”

  “If I ever have kids, they’ll run around naked,” Pamela joked.

  When I got back to the store, they sent me to the employees’ lounge with a group for training on shoplifting. A Montgomery County police officer was showing a film on how to spot thieves, and Sergeant Camfield—a sturdy brunette with plucked eyebrows—showed us some shoplifters’ accessories, from baggy trousers to large jackets with big inside pockets to shopping bags lined with foil to keep the plastic sensors from tripping the security detectors.

  “Booster bags,” she called them, showing how one thief had covered the foil with duct tape to disguise it and had also fashioned firm handles by cutting out hand holes in the plastic and wrapping the edges with tape. We don’t put security sensors on all our stuff, just the things shoplifters are most likely to want.

  “Don’t ever confront a thief yourself,” Jennifer Martin, from the personnel office, said. “If you see someone with merchandise in hand, you might say, ‘May I ring that up for you?’ or ‘Do you want me to hold this for you at the counter while you look around some more?’ But if you see someone in the act of shoplifting, call the security number.” And she told us what that number was and what the code word was for the week.

  “Learn to look for the unexpected,” Sergeant Camfield said. “If we have to give shoplifters credit for anything, it’s originality. Sometimes it’s the shopper you’d least expect.”

  When I got back to my department, the head clerk asked, “Well, did you learn anything?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Look for toddlers in overcoats and baggy diapers,” and she laughed.