“Well?” asked Pamela.
Elizabeth’s eyes were on the floor. “I don’t ever have to wear a bra, I guess,” she said dolefully. “The only way I could get the pencil to stay up there was with toothpaste.”
They both looked at me. I decided that if I went into the bathroom like Elizabeth to do it, I would turn into Aunt Sally for sure. So I swallowed and pulled off my T-shirt, then unhooked my bra—a sports bra, if you want the truth. I don’t think Elizabeth had ever seen my breasts close up before, and she turned pink and looked away, but Pamela just tucked the pencil up under my left breast.
I was about to say, “Ta-da!” too, but the pencil suddenly fell to the floor.
“Did it or didn’t it?” asked Elizabeth.
“Let’s try again,” said Pamela, and this time tucked it under my right breast and sort of pressed it there. I held my arms out at the sides. “Ta …” The pencil fell.
Elizabeth looked at Pamela, and Pamela sighed. “I guess she’s not bra or braless, just somewhere in-between.”
I was pretty quiet at dinner.
“What happened to the macaroni and cheese?” Lester asked. “There’s no body to it. The macaroni dissolves like oatmeal.”
“I guess I left it on the stove too long,” I told him. “Pamela wanted me to come over for something important.”
“What’s more important than cooking macaroni al dente?” asked Lester.
We chewed some more, and I got up to put a jar of applesauce on the table so the meal wouldn’t be a total waste. I sat there wondering if boys ever put themselves through the trials that girls go through.
“Lester,” I said after a while. “When you were my age, did boys ever measure their … uh … well … um …”
“No,” said Lester.
“Did they ever do the pencil test?”
“Take a pencil test? Like a math quiz, you mean?”
“No. I mean where they …” Now both Dad and Lester were staring at me, so I just came right out with it. “Did they ever tuck pencils up under their testicles to see if they needed to wear a jockstrap?”
“Where did you hear that?” asked Dad.
“I didn’t. I mean, it’s what girls do to see if they need to wear a bra.”
“How do they know?” Lester was still staring.
“If the pencil stays up, they do. If it falls, they don’t.”
The kitchen was so quiet that all you could hear was the hum of the refrigerator.
“Do they teach you that in school?” Dad asked finally.
“No. Pamela read it in a magazine.”
Lester put down his spoon, folded his hands in front of him, and closed his eyes as if in prayer. “Thank you, thank you, thank you that I was not born a girl,” he said.
Dad started to smile. “Can we ask whether you passed or failed the test, Al?”
“No, you can’t ask,” I said.
“She failed,” said Lester.
“No, I didn’t! I didn’t fail and I didn’t pass. I was just sort of … in-between.”
“Well, then!” said Dad, smiling.
I put down my fork. “Did you ever know a Miss America who was in-between?”
“You want to be Miss America now?” asked Lester.
“No, but can you think of any well-known female who was in-between?” I bleated.
“Not off the top of my head, Al, but every grown woman was once in between childhood and adulthood, you know.”
“Well, it’s a crummy place to be,” I told him.
I decided that I would wear a bra to school or anyplace else I had to go, but when I was staying home I didn’t have to. That Saturday, after I’d put in my three hours at the Melody Inn, I changed to old clothes and was outside washing the front windows as I’d promised Dad I would, when Patrick rode up on his bike. I had Lester’s radio on the porch while I worked, and Patrick pulled over and sat on the steps to listen.
“One of my favorite songs,” he said.
I put my sponge down and sat across from him, leaning against a pillar. I sort of liked that song too—something with a strong beat, and every so often there would be a pause instead of a beat, and then you almost had to supply one yourself with your hand or your foot.
I was sitting there slapping my knees with the palms of my hands, keeping the rhythm, when suddenly I saw Patrick staring at me. I wasn’t wearing a bra, and must have been jiggling all over the place.
My face flushed.
“For gosh sakes!” said Patrick.
“What?” I said quickly, looking down.
“Your hands!”
“My hands?”
“Your rhythm! Alice, you’ve got a great sense of rhythm!” he said.
“I do?”
The music stopped and there was a commercial.
“Yes, you do! Most people just do this….” Patrick demonstrated, slapping each knee with the palms of his hands. “But you were doing this….” And he slapped his knees faster this time, even crossing his arms and slapping his left knee with his right hand, tapping his foot up and down.
“Patrick, I wasn’t doing that.”
“You weren’t crossing hands, but you were keeping the rhythm with your hands, and the beat with one foot. Okay … listen.” The announcer was naming the next song. “This one is even better!” Patrick said. “Go for it!”
I didn’t know the song very well, but after a few moments I picked up the rhythm, and pretty soon I was slapping my knees on my side of the porch and tapping my foot, and Patrick was slapping his knees across from me, and tapping his foot. It sounded good. Not just good: great! Like tap dancing with our hands!
This time when the song was over, Patrick said, “You’ve got to come over this summer and let me teach you to play the drums. You’d be good at it, Alice.”
“Okay, I will,” I told him.
And after Patrick rode away I just sat there grinning, thinking that the girl who had failed the pencil test and couldn’t carry a tune could beat out a rhythm like nobody’s business!
5
RESCUE
ALL ELIZABETH AND PAMELA AND I seemed to talk about toward the end of school was going to Chicago in July. I sort of wanted to fly because I’ve never been on a plane that I can remember, but Pamela and Elizabeth had never been overnight on a train, so we decided to go by Amtrak, and Dad made the reservations.
It hardly seemed fair, though, that I was going to get the chance to do something special over summer vacation, and Dad and Lester weren’t. We’re not poor, but we’re not rich, either. I was thinking how Janice Sherman, in sheet music, let us stay at her beach house for a week last summer, and how nice it would be if she’d offer it to us again, so Dad and Lester could get away for a while.
What she didn’t like last year was that Dad had gotten friendly with the woman who owns the beach house next to hers. But that was a whole year ago, and I hoped she had forgotten by now. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if she invited us to go again, and we brought Miss Summers, and she and I shared a bedroom?
When I went to the Melody Inn on Saturday, I was filing sheet music for Janice and told her about the trip to Chicago I’d be taking with my friends.
“How nice for you!” she said.
“I just wish Dad could get away for a little while.” I sighed. “Lester too. Some place quiet and peaceful, like the ocean.”
“I’m sure he could arrange it if he wanted,” Janice said.
She remembered.
“Well, it’s not so easy,” I told her. “Things have to sort of drop in his lap, or he won’t go to the trouble of renting a place.”
“Perhaps Miss Summers has a cottage he could use,” Janice said.
That settled that.
Janice Sherman wasn’t the only one interested in our vacation plans, though. When I went over to dust the shelves in the Gift Shoppe, Loretta Jenkins asked me what the Hunk was doing this summer.
“Lester?” I said. It’s hard to think of your brother as a hunk. “I don’t
know, I haven’t asked him.”
“I was wondering if he’d be interested in going camping,” Loretta said.
Loretta is one of four girls I know whom my brother has dated in the last two years, and probably the least likely girl in the world to interest Lester. Not that she isn’t attractive in her own way, but she’s got this wild mop of unruly hair around her head like a sunburst, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen Loretta without a wad of gum tucked away somewhere in her mouth. I tried to imagine Lester and Loretta in a tent together.
“Camping?” I asked in astonishment. “With you?”
“Well, not my grandmother.”
“I’ll … uh … mention it to him,” I said, knowing that Lester would choose solitary confinement before he’d go camping with Loretta Jenkins.
“No, don’t mention it to him. Promise me you won’t, Alice. I’d rather do it myself. He’s much more likely to say yes if I spring it on him suddenly, instead of letting him brood over it first.”
“Okay, I won’t mention camping,” I promised.
But Lester is my brother, after all, so when he got home that evening from work, I said, “Lester, I’m about to do you a very big favor, but I made a promise, so you’ll have to read between the lines.”
“Al, I didn’t make a single sale today, I’m tired, I’m hungry, my feet hurt, and I have a philosophy paper due Monday. Don’t rattle my cage. What are you talking about?”
“If you don’t pay close attention, Lester, you are going to be in a lot of trouble. Someone, sometime soon, is going to ask you to accompany her in private to a secluded place….”
Lester’s eyes lit up. “She is?”
“Lester, listen! If she takes you by surprise, you’ll say yes and be sorry, so I just want you to be prepared. Okay?”
“Why should I be sorry? Is it Marilyn or Crystal?”
“No.”
“No what?”
“It isn’t either one.”
His face fell. “Not Loretta Jenkins?”
I didn’t answer.
He sat down facing me. “Al, is it Loretta?” And when I just pressed my lips together without answering, he said, “If it’s Loretta Jenkins, raise one finger. If it’s someone else, raise two.”
I raised one finger. Lester let out his breath. “Where’s she inviting me?”
I cast him a hopeless look and pressed my lips tighter.
“You don’t have to tell me, just nod your head if I guess. She’s inviting me to a dance.”
I shook my head.
“A party? A play? For dinner?” He looked puzzled. “Can’t you even give me a hint?”
“I said intimate, Lester.”
“She’s going to ask me to sleep over?”
I looked helpless again.
“Al, I’m going nuts!”
“She’s not going to put it quite that way, Les,” I volunteered.
“Spend the night in her room?”
I shook my head.
“Spend the night in her house?”
I shook my head again. “Spend the night in her yard?”
I motioned to him to continue, as though we were playing charades.
“Spend the night in a tent?”
I nodded but motioned for him to keep going.
“Go camping!”
“Bingo!” I said, and slumped down in my chair, fingers trailing the floor. I had not mentioned the word camping.
“Al, you have saved my life. You have performed a tremendous service to mankind, namely me,” he said.
“Glad to help,” I told him. I had helped save two lives in the past couple of weeks, his and Crystal’s. Not bad for a girl who was only a few weeks into thirteen.
I spent most of Sunday looking through Dad’s books to find a poem that would “speak personally to me,” as Miss Summers had put it. I read poems by Shelley and Keats and Byron and Frost and Sandburg, and thought they were nice, but nothing deep down inside me rose up and cried, “That’s it!”
And then, at the end of a shelf, I found a book titled One Thousand and One Poems, and on the inside cover was Mom’s name. My heart began to pound.
It was just as it had been when I opened her recipe file and found things she had once cooked for us, recipes written in her own handwriting. A sort of window on my mother.
I took the book over to a chair in the corner and began leafing through it. It was divided into sections—nature poems in one, love poems in another, and so on. Here and there a particular poem was checked, or a phrase underlined. The last section was called “Old Favorites,” and as I turned the pages, I saw a handwritten note in the margin of a long poem called Thanatopsis, by William Cullen Bryant. I turned the book sideways to read it and found, “This is one of my favorite poems”:
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
I don’t know how long I sat in that chair, but I somehow knew that this was a poem that had helped my mother before she died. That had meant something to her, and so meant a lot, a whole lot, to me.
Had she read it to Dad too? I wondered. Had they read it aloud together, maybe? Had she decided she was going to die courageously, knowing that she had lived her life well? Whatever, I was going to stand up in Miss Summers’s class, and I would say that this was a poem that meant a lot to me because it had meant a lot to someone close to me before she died. I didn’t care if they put me on suicide watch or not; I owed this much to my mother.
We had to memorize our poems, but Miss Summers said they could be as short or as long as we wanted, provided we had a special feeling about them and could share that feeling with the class. As I shifted, finally, in the chair, my eye fell on a poem on the opposite page, called “Passing By,” author unknown:
There is a lady sweet and kind,
Was never face so pleased my mind;
I did but see her passing by,
And yet I love her till I die.
Her gesture, motion, and her smiles,
Her wit, her voice, my heart beguiles;
Beguiles my heart, I know not why,
And yet I love her till I die….
Cupid is wingèd and doth range,
Her country so my love doth change;
But change she earth, or change she sky,
Yet will I love her till I die.
I was crying. It was just the strangest thing! I didn’t cry all the while I read the poem about death, but suddenly I was crying over this one.
I swallowed, and swallowed, and swallowed. I had found a favorite poem of my mother’s, and beside it, a poem that would be a favorite of my own.
Aunt Sally called to see how my plans were coming for my trip to Chicago in July.
“Dad’s got the tickets already,” I told her. “We’re coming on Amtrak. Elizabeth’s never been on a train before, and Pamela’s never been on one overnight.”
“Oh, I’m so glad you’ll be bringing your two best friends!” said Aunt Sally. “Get a pencil and paper, and I’ll give you tips on packing.”
I did what she said. Actually I’d planned to simply count the number of days we’d be in Chicago, throw that number of underpants and socks into a suitcase along with my jeans and shorts and a couple of shirts. But maybe you packed differently once you were thirteen.
“Ready,” I said.
“You need to get some little plastic jars and bottles for all your creams and lotions,” Aunt Sally told me.
I tried to think. “Suntan lotion?”
“Beauty lotions,” said Aunt Sally.
So that’s wh
at was the matter!
“Panty hose and scarves should be wrapped in tissue paper and put in one of those little quilted bags with sections in them.”
One pair of panty hose, I wrote.
“If you have a travel case, you’ll want to put all your bottles and hair sprays and things in that. Otherwise, borrow one of those little leather toiletry kits that men use,” she said.
One lip gloss …
“As for clothes,” Aunt Sally went on, “cottons are undoubtedly the coolest, especially Liberty cottons, but they’re much more expensive. Cottons wrinkle so terribly, though, so cotton Dacron if you can find it, or even cotton jersey will do, but don’t buy any linens, no matter what the sales clerk tells you.”
Plenty of T-shirts, I wrote.
“I don’t know how much times have changed since I was on a train,” Aunt Sally continued, “but you should bring along any kinds of food you can’t find on Amtrak. Fruit and popcorn are always safe to bring on a trip, but I’d also bring a box of dried prunes for … Well, travel does things to one’s digestion, you know.”
“Aunt Sally, we’ll only be on the train for one night.”
“And finally, Alice, be sure to bring pajamas. I know that modern girls don’t much care for them, but let me ask you this: What would you do if there was a train wreck and you were pinned under the sleeping car and you didn’t have your pajamas on?”
“If there was a train wreck and I was pinned under the sleeping car, I would probably be dead!” I told her.
“Well, if you weren’t, you would die of embarrassment!” Aunt Sally announced firmly.
I closed my eyes. “I’ll bring pajamas,” I said.
“Good,” she answered.
The first Sunday of June, Crystal came over again to sunbathe. Crystal Harkins has the largest breasts I’ve ever seen. The largest beautiful breasts, I mean. Well, actually, I haven’t seen that many breasts in person. I haven’t even seen Crystal’s naked, but they might as well have been, because her bikini top only covered the bottom half of them.
I wondered if I would ever be lying on my stomach on a towel on the grass, and a man would be slathering suntan lotion on my back and along the edges of both of my big beautiful breasts and running one finger just under the top rim of my bikini bottom. I felt all warm and embarrassed just thinking about it. So warm, in fact, that I got a glass of lemonade and took it out on the front steps to drink in the shade.