Alice in April

  “We’re through,” a man called from the front door. “You want to sign this, little lady?”

  I hate it when men call me “little lady.” I took the paper and pen and wrote my name with a flourish. It took up half the page.

  The truck was already down the block when Lester came home.

  “What the heck was that truck with the bag on it?” he asked.

  “Furnace cleaning, Lester. They cleaned out our ducts.”

  “Oh.” He started through the hallway and suddenly whirled around. “They cleaned out what?”

  “Our ducts. Our pipes!” I said.

  “Nooooo!” Lester threw himself out the door, but the truck had already gone around the corner. Lester sank down on the front steps. “My life is over,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Patrick, following us out.

  “My key chain broke this morning, and one of the keys fell down the register in my floor. I was going to fish it out tonight.”

  “The key to what?” I asked.

  “Marilyn’s apartment.”

  “You’d better go home, Patrick,” I said. “I don’t think you want to hear this.”

  “Sure I do,” said Patrick.

  “Mad as she is at me, she never asked for her key back,” Lester went on. “Now if she ever asks for it and I tell her it’s lost, she won’t believe me; she’ll change the lock on her door.”

  Patrick sat down beside him on the steps. “So what difference does it make? If she wants the key back, she doesn’t want you to come in anyway. Right?”

  “But once she changes the lock, see, then I can’t.” Lester let out his breath. “And just because she says she doesn’t want to see me anymore doesn’t mean she doesn’t want me to walk in sometime with flowers and surprise her.”

  Patrick scratched his head.

  “But if I lost the key, she’ll think I don’t care, and if she thinks I don’t care, she’ll really change the lock. Oh man, then even if she wanted me to surprise her sometime, I couldn’t.” Lester went inside and up to his room.

  “Alice,” said Patrick. “If we still like each other when we’re twenty, and you have an apartment, and you give me a key, and you say you don’t want to see me anymore, I’ll just drop it in your mailbox, okay?”

  Denise hadn’t said one word about her mom.

  “What happened when you went home?” I finally asked her on Monday.

  “Nothing,” she said. But I didn’t believe her. Sometimes she waited for me to walk to gym and sometimes she didn’t. This day she didn’t. I wondered what could be worse than getting beat up when you went home, and then I knew: finding out that no one even cared you were gone.

  On Tuesday, as I was gathering up my books after Language Arts, Miss Summers said, “Alice, could I see you for a moment?” All the other kids went on out.

  I went up to her desk.

  “About this Saturday,” she said, and her eyes were smiling. “Tell me how I can help. I’d really like to do something.”

  “Well, Patrick and I are going to cook dinner. And two people have offered to bring bread and the coffee.”

  “A cake?”

  “I want to make Dad’s favorite. It’s pineapple upside-down cake, and I’ve got the recipe, but I don’t want him to know. I’m trying to keep the whole meal secret, in fact, but he’ll probably notice all the food in the refrigerator, anyway, after I shop.”

  “Tell you what,” she said, “why don’t we make the cake at my house on Saturday?”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. I was being invited inside Miss Summers’s house, to walk on the very floor she walked on and sit in her very chairs.

  “I … I work at the Melody Inn on Saturday mornings,” I said.

  “Then why don’t I pick you up at noon? I’ll be waiting for you on the corner, we’ll go do the grocery shopping together—I’d like to help out on the expenses—and then we’ll bring everything back to my house and bake the cake there.”

  “That would be wonderful!” I said.

  I wanted to hug her. I wanted to say something so she’d know how much I liked her. I think I loved her, even if Dad didn’t. Dad did, of course. At least I think so.

  “I’m … well, we …,” I stammered. “I’m really glad he has you.” Then I gulped. I’ll bet I’d gone too far.

  “Well, I like Ben very much, and it’s you who introduced us, so let’s see if we can’t make this a good celebration,” she said.

  After I left the room, I started worrying about what she said, though. She didn’t say she loved Dad, she said she liked him. She didn’t say I’d brought them together, she said I’d “introduced” them. She didn’t say they were announcing their engagement, she called it a celebration. Maybe I was jumping too far ahead.

  “Lester,” I said that night. “If a woman says she likes a man very much, and is glad someone introduced them, and that she wants his birthday to be a grand celebration, does it sound to you like a woman who is thinking of marriage?”

  Lester didn’t even look up from his magazine. “No, it sounds like a twelve-year-old-going-on-thirteen who thinks she can marry her dad off to her Language Arts teacher,” he said, which is just about what I expected.

  14

  LOVING LESTER

  THE CLOSER IT GOT TO SATURDAY, THE more irritable I became. There was just too much to do, and only me, it seemed, to do it.

  Dad didn’t even care that the house had to look nice for the party. Dad didn’t know there was a party, of course; not that we had invited anyone, I mean. As soon as I picked up one thing and put it where it belonged, Dad or Lester put down another. As soon as I wiped the toothpaste off the sink, I’d find soap stains.

  Wednesday I woke up angry and went to bed angry. I’d finally mended all the clothes that were heaped in my room, ironed my best shirt for Saturday, dusted everything that anybody might look at twice, and scrubbed the kitchen floor. But when Lester came home that afternoon, he dropped a box of crackers, and spilled crumbs all over.

  “Lester, you pig!” I shouted. “I just scrubbed!”

  “Relax,” said Lester. “I’ll sweep up.”

  But when I came into the kitchen an hour later, I could still feel a crunch here and there. I stooped down and examined the floor. Lester had swept a path through the crumbs, from the refrigerator to the sink, but there were still crumbs by the counter and under the table. It was later, though, when I found an apple core on the coffee table, that I went bananas.

  “You slob!” I bellowed. “I’m tired of always picking up after you! We just can’t live in the same house, that’s all there is to it!”

  “Oh, shove it, Al! I’m tired of your complaining. Give it a rest, will you?”

  I slammed through the house. Went upstairs and banged my door. Then opened it and banged it closed once again. I was so angry at Lester I cried. Just sat on my bed and bawled. I don’t know why I did so much crying lately. I think it had something to do with the weather.

  It was sometime Wednesday night, about midnight, maybe, that I dreamed Lester died. I woke up sobbing. Guilt, I guess. I was thinking how I’d been living with Lester all these years and his slovenliness had never bothered me before, so why now?

  I remembered a letter in a magazine in which a man wrote that he and his brother hadn’t spoken for thirty years, and then the brother died suddenly, and he no longer had the chance to say he was sorry.

  What if Lester got in an accident on the way to the university? What if he choked on a chicken bone at lunch? What if he didn’t look where he was going between classes and fell down a flight of stairs? The last memory he’d have of me, just before he died, was of my screaming at him and banging my door.

  The problem was, I could apologize all I wanted, but as soon as I tripped over his sneakers again, or found his socks under the table, I’d blow up a second time, or a third. It was too late to write to the magazine and expect a reply by Saturday.

  I got up for a drink of water and pau
sed outside Lester’s room to hear if he was still breathing. I know that if Lester had some fatal disease, I’d be as kind as I could to him until he died. So I decided that from now until after the party on Saturday, I would pretend that Lester had only four days to live.

  It worked. When I woke up the next morning, I was determined to make his last days on earth as pleasant as possible.

  Actually, we collided in the hallway, each trying to get in the bathroom first.

  “Go ’head, Lester,” I said. “I’ll wait.”

  “Grummph,” said Lester, groggily making his way to the sink.

  At breakfast, I watched as Lester took almost all the milk.

  “Oops,” he said, noticing. “Sorry.” He thrust out his bowl toward me. “Here. Take some.”

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “I’ll make toast.”

  Lester glanced over at me for a moment, then opened the paper and read the comics.

  As he left for classes, I said, “Have a good day, Lester. I love you, you know.”

  “What?” He turned around in the hallway.

  “I just said I love you. Can’t a girl tell her brother she loves him?”

  His jaw hung loose. “Well, sure. Love ya too, kid,” he said, and went outside.

  It was working! It was actually working! As I went to the bus stop, I thought how maybe I’d discovered the secret to world peace. If everybody in the whole world went around acting as though the people beside them would die tomorrow, maybe everyone would say only nice things to everyone else.

  Maybe I should write that to the magazine. Maybe I should put it in the time capsule for Mr. Hensley. What if, in fifty years or so, the world was on the brink of thermonuclear war, and then someone would open our time capsule and there was the answer, on a little 3” × 5” sheet of notepaper.

  All morning, I tried to imagine Lester in a coffin. There would be a memorial service, of course, and Dad and I would probably both stand up and say how much we were going to miss him. I swallowed.

  “Anything the matter, Alice?” Elizabeth asked me as we headed to the cafeteria at lunchtime. I was trying to imagine that Lester was right at that very moment choking on a chicken bone. He’d be somewhere they didn’t know the Heimlich maneuver, and after he died, they would find a little poem in his wallet that he’d cut out from an old magazine column maybe—something called “What Is a Sister?” Maybe one of the lines would be: A rose, a rainbow—a smile, a song …

  “Alice, what is it?” Elizabeth insisted. “You’re crying!”

  I was? I reached up and felt my cheeks. They were wet. I felt my mouth tugging down at the corners.

  “It’s … it’s Lester,” I said, not knowing how to explain it.

  By this time, Pamela had stopped walking and turned around. “What’s the matter with Alice?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s Lester. Something’s happened,” Elizabeth said.

  “What?” cried Pamela. Now Karen and Jill had come over. Everyone was gathering around me in the hallway outside the cafeteria. This is exactly the way it would be if I heard that Lester had choked to death or gone through the windshield of his car. Seeing the concerned faces, Elizabeth’s arm around me, Pamela taking my books, suddenly I started to cry harder.

  I couldn’t believe it. All the time I was sobbing, I knew Lester was fine, but it was all so sad, so real! Just like a movie.

  They were herding me down the hall toward the nurse’s office, and other kids had stopped now to look.

  “What happened?”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Her brother …”

  “He died?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Her brother died.”

  “He was in an accident, I think.”

  “Her brother was killed in an accident.…”

  The nurse heard all the commotion and came to the door.

  “It’s her brother. He was killed in an accident,” said Jill.

  “Oh, no!” The nurse pulled me to her and hugged me. She smelled of soap and iodine and White Diamonds perfume. She took me into the sickroom where I sobbed some more, and all my friends waited outside when the nurse closed the door.

  She put a box of tissues beside me and sat down, holding my hand. I wonder if nurses know how hard it is to blow your nose with somebody holding your hand.

  When the crying stopped, she said. “Honey, how did it happen?”

  I swallowed again, breathing through my mouth. “It didn’t.”

  “What didn’t?”

  “The accident.”

  “Your brother wasn’t killed in an accident?”

  “No.”

  “How did he die?”

  “He didn’t.” I felt like crying again, but for a different reason.

  The nurse looked confused. “What did happen to him?”

  “Nothing.”

  She leaned back in exasperation. “Then why are you crying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The nurse stopped holding my hand. “Has this happened before?”

  “What?”

  “Crying about things that haven’t happened?”

  I shook my head, and slowly, I told her the story of how awful I’d been to Lester all week and about the letter I’d read in the magazine, and how I thought if I pretended Lester was dying, I might be nicer to him, and it worked.

  She sighed. “O-kaaay,” she said. She got up and went out into the hall. “Alice just needs a little rest, girls. She’s fine, and so is her brother.”

  “But … she said … we thought …!” I heard Elizabeth saying.

  “She thought so too, but he isn’t,” the nurse said.

  The worst part was that nobody would talk to me about it. They sort of talked around me, as though I were still too weak for conversation, and yet I knew what they were thinking. Even when I tried to explain it to Pamela, she said, “It’s okay, you don’t have to explain.”

  “But I want to,” I told her.

  “It’s okay, Alice.”

  Leave it to Patrick to break the ice. “I heard you flipped out at lunch today,” he said, so everyone would hear. Of course everyone stopped talking and listened.

  “I didn’t flip out. I was imagining how I’d feel if anything happened to Lester because I’d been so awful to him this week, and it almost seemed like something had, it got so real, even though I knew it hadn’t.”

  “Oh,” said Patrick. And that’s all there was to it.

  “You sure caused me a lot of trouble at school today,” I told Lester when he got home.

  “What did I do?”

  “Choked on a chicken bone.”

  “What?”

  “I was trying to imagine how I’d feel if anything happened to you, and you’ll be glad to know I cried.”

  “Really? In front of the whole school, I hope. On stage in the auditorium?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Well, it’s nice to know I’d be missed,” Lester said.

  15

  TRIAL RUN

  PAMELA, ELIZABETH, AND PATRICK CAME over for a few minutes for a trial run.

  Patrick stared at the folding table in our dining room, piled high with Dad’s books and papers. “Where do you eat?” he asked.

  “Kitchen.”

  “Where are you going to put thirteen people?”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “You’ll have to serve buffet style,” said Elizabeth. “That’s all there is to it. Just clear off the folding table and put the food out with a stack of trays at one end.”

  “Trays?” I said.

  “You can borrow ours,” she told me.

  “Silverware?” asked Pamela.

  We went out to the kitchen and counted out enough knives, forks, and spoons to serve everyone.

  “Napkins?” said Elizabeth.

  It was embarrassing. I didn’t know how to tell her that we don’t use any, and if we need one, we just tear off a piece
of paper towel.

  Napkins, I wrote on my shopping list.

  “What about appetizers?” asked Pamela.

  Black olives, I wrote. Lots.

  Patrick told Elizabeth and Pamela that their job was to greet people at the door, take their jackets, introduce them around, point out the ginger ale and olives, and start them through the buffet line when dinner was ready.

  “That’s it?” asked Pamela.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “No band? No dancing? No music? No games?”

  “Maybe Miss Summers will think of something,” I said.

  Aunt Sally called me that night to see how plans were coming. I had to talk on the extension phone upstairs so Dad couldn’t hear.

  “Tell me what you’re serving,” she said.

  I gave her the menu, and told her how Miss Summers was going to pick me up at noon and we’d go shopping, and then we’d make the cake together from Mom’s recipe.

  There was a long pause.

  “It just doesn’t seem right, somehow,” Aunt Sally said at last, so softly I almost didn’t hear.

  “What?”

  “Taking Marie’s recipe into another woman’s kitchen to make a cake for your dad. Oh, I know Ben can’t grieve his whole life over your mother, Alice, but I’m always afraid he’ll forget her.”

  “I don’t see how he can forget her when he’s eating her cake,” I said simply.

  “I suppose not.” Aunt Sally’s voice brightened. “Anyway, who all is coming?”

  I recited the names of everyone who had been invited, but as soon as I mentioned Janice Sherman, she said, “Isn’t that Sherman woman the one who was in love with your father a few months ago?”

  “Oh, she got over that, Aunt Sally,” I said. “She’s dating an oboe instructor now.”

  “Women never get over a love unrequited, Alice.”

  There are times I wonder if Aunt Sally speaks English. I’ll bet my mom never said anything like “love unrequited.”

  “Isn’t that Sherman woman the one I was worried might sue your father for breach of promise?”

  “But she didn’t!” I said.