Too bad I don’t have braces. Then I could blame all my s-s-stuttering on that.
I answered:
Does it still bother you much? Stuttering?
And Eric replied:
No, especially since I met a girl named Emily. I guess I should tell you that she’s really special.
Oh, man, I was even losing Eric! I thought awhile before I answered. Did I care? I guess I did, in a way. Not that I wanted Eric to pine away for me down in Texas when we might not ever see each other again. I guess I just missed being special to someone. Missed being the only female in the family. Missed having Lester around all the time to pay attention to me. Was already missing the me who wasn’t afraid to smile.
That’s wonderful, Eric. Eric and Emily! Sounds good together!
I lied.
It helped a little now that Sylvia was teaching again. We were on more of a schedule. I knew when she’d be getting up in the mornings and what time she left for school. She was usually out of the bathroom before I’d finished breakfast, and I learned to blow-dry my hair in my own room, freeing the bathroom for Dad.
Hard as it was to get used to Sylvia in our house, I wondered how it was for her. Here we were, a settled household, and somehow she had to find a way to fit in. If it were me moving into her house and her routine back on Saul Road, would it have been easy for me? I don’t think so.
We each had our night to cook. Dad did the cooking on Sundays, I was responsible for Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Sylvia did the rest. At least having scheduled duties made us feel more like a family, I think. But it was still easier to talk to Sylvia about my friends than to talk about myself. It was a start, though, and now I looked for a chance to find her alone without Dad around. When he came home after work, it seemed he could hardly wait to put his arms around her. They liked to tell each other every little detail of what had gone on in their lives that day. I’d sit in the next room doing my homework and think how fascinated they were with each other. When you’re in love, you want to share every single thing, I guess.
Dad works late on Thursday evenings, and on this particular Thursday, a week before Thanksgiving, Sylvia and I had dinner together—a chicken and pasta dish with artichokes and black olives. It was a recipe I’d copied from a woman who used to cook for us when I was in fourth grade, Mrs. Nolinstock.
“What do you do,” I asked Sylvia, “when there’s a girl who really needs a friend and you just don’t want to be that chummy with her? I mean, I feel sorry for Amy and I try not to be mean or anything, but I don’t especially want to do things with her either.”
Sylvia pierced a black olive with her fork and put it in her mouth. “You know,” she said, “there are some problems that just don’t have a good solution.”
“I feel so guilty,” I went on. “She’s obviously lonely, and some of the other kids … okay, we … laugh at her sometimes. She comes out with the stupidest remarks—meaningless stuff—and she doesn’t even seem to notice.” I smushed an arti choke and swirled it around on my plate. “But she looks so pathetic, and then I feel horrible.”
Sylvia nodded. “Oh, I know. I can remember girls like that back in high school.”
“She wants to be part of our group so bad, and nobody wants her, including me.”
“It’s rough, because you can’t make yourself like someone, can you?” said Sylvia.
We ate quietly for a minute or two.
“What I’d like to do sometimes is just shake her and point out how stupid she sounds when she says the first thing that comes into her head,” I said.
“Is there some way you could let her know privately when she says something like that? Better she hears it from someone who’s kind,” said Sylvia.
“I suppose.”
“I’m not saying this will happen with Amy,” Sylvia went on, “but sometimes, after a while, we find something about a person we really like. That helps us overlook the other stuff.”
It was possible, I guess. I don’t think I’d especially liked Elizabeth or Pamela when I first met them, either, and now they’re like sisters to me. At least Penny and I were on speaking terms again. I knew it would be a long time, maybe never, before I felt close to her, but at least we talked and joked around a little.
• • •
Dad and Sylvia and I were going out to dinner on Thanksgiving because Lester was spending the day with friends.
I got my braces the day before, and I sat in the orthodontist’s chair plotting murder for every person who had told me it “wasn’t too bad.” Okay, it wasn’t like catching your hand in the car door or having a dentist drill without Novocain, but just when I’d think the orthodontist couldn’t make the wires any tighter, he’d tighten them some more. If it hadn’t been for the lip spreader, I would have bitten off his fingers.
When he was through and asked me how I was doing, I just grunted at him. I had to come back in a week so he could torture me all over again? He gave me a list of foods I should avoid—nothing hard, sticky, chewy, nothing with a peel or kernels—and I took the bus home, huddled against a window, looking out at all the normal people who could still chew. The last thing in the world you want to do when you get your braces is eat, and the next-to-last thing you want to do is smile. The spacers the orthodontist put in my mouth to make room for the band installation felt like meat permanently stuck in my mouth. I felt as though I had rocks on my teeth. All I wanted to do when I got home was drink a milk shake and go to bed, but my mouth was so sore that I couldn’t sleep.
It didn’t feel much better the next morning, so I finally took a pain reliever. Amazing what a little relief will do. I realized I was ravenously hungry.
“Think you can manage to go out for dinner?” Dad asked me. “We’re skipping the turkey this year. We figured we’d go for Italian. Soft ravioli might go down pretty well.”
It did. We went, I ate, and I even smiled a time or two. Nobody even missed the Thanksgiving turkey. Another tradition, like the throwing of the bridal bouquet, that we didn’t have to follow, and the world didn’t end.
On Saturday, Pamela and I spent the night at Elizabeth’s and played “bear and bunny” with her little brother, Nathan, his favorite game. He covers a card table with a blanket to make his “cave,” and every time he comes out, the three of us crawl around on our hands and knees, growling like bears, and try to catch him. He goes absolutely bananas.
Nathan found my braces fascinating. He kept wanting to touch them and would try to pry my lips open, making us all laugh, when I held him on my lap.
“You know, Alice,” Pamela said, “you can smile with your lips apart occasionally. We all know you have braces. It’s not as though you have a mouthful of rotting teeth.”
I flashed the widest smile I could manage, and she pretended to be blinded by the glare. I realized that as long as I didn’t bore people by continually talking about them, braces weren’t going to make that big a difference, and I wasn’t going to be left behind.
Later, when Nathan had gone for his bath and the three of us were sprawled on Elizabeth’s twin beds in exhaustion, Liz asked, “What about taking dinner to Lester and his roommates next week?”
“Yes! Let’s do it!” said Pamela. “Which night?”
“Friday,” I suggested, remembering that Les had often hung around our house on Fridays, tired from work or school, and had saved his Saturdays for dating. “If any of them do go out, it’ll probably be late in the evening, because they’re tired when they first come home. I’ll bet we’d find them all in if we went over around seven or seven thirty. After nine, I don’t know.”
“All right! What will we make?” asked Elizabeth.
I thought a moment. “Lasagna? Why don’t you and I make the lasagna, Liz, and Pamela can bring the salad. I’ll make a pineapple upside-down cake for dessert.”
It was something to look forward to.
“How are we going to get over there?” asked Elizabeth. We frowned for a moment, considering.
&
nbsp; Then Pamela said, “I suppose I could ask Mom to drive us. She’s been after me to let her back into my life. This way we can include her without my having to talk to her for very long.”
Strange, I thought, how simple conversation could be so difficult for human beings. Penny and me, Sylvia and me, Pamela and her mother, Amy and almost everybody… . If we were dogs, we’d just sniff each other and that would be that. It’s hard, sometimes, to be human.
“And dress sexy!” Pamela was saying. “We’re hoping, of course, that they’ll invite us to stay for dinner.”
“Of course,” I said. “But what if Lester’s right and his roommates are covered with warts?”
Pamela grinned. “Then we’ll just have to concentrate on Lester, won’t we?”
I hated going to school on Monday. I’d told my friends by e-mail that I was getting braces so they wouldn’t be shocked when they saw me, but of course they were all waiting to see how I looked.
“Hmm,” said Patrick when he saw me. “I see you’ve added something.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Lucky me.”
“It’s not forever,” he said. I knew they weren’t forever. What I wanted him to say was something like, You’re just as pretty as you were before. But if he had, I’d only think he was lying.
“Hey!” said Brian. “Does she bite?”
I certainly felt like it. It was Amy who said the kindest thing: “Your smile’s so nice, Alice, people notice that first off.”
“Thanks, Amy,” I said. “Just what I needed to hear.”
“Liz and Pam and I are getting together tonight,” I told Sylvia when she came home from school on Friday. “Liz is coming over to help me cook, and then we’re going to spend the night at her house.”
“Oh, really? Then I think Ben and I will go out for dinner and see a movie,” she said.
I’m not sure why I didn’t tell her what I was planning. Probably because she’d tell me that it wasn’t a good idea, and I didn’t want to hear it.
I made the pineapple upside-down cake while the pasta was boiling, and Elizabeth and I managed to have both the cake and the lasagna done by the time Pamela and her mom drove up at seven thirty. Mrs. Jones was acting sort of like a teenager herself, trying too hard to fit in.
“This is fun!” she said. “And the boys don’t even know you’re coming?”
I hadn’t heard Lester referred to as a “boy” for a long time. Maybe she had forgotten just how old my brother was.
“Yeah. We thought we’d surprise them,” I said.
“Well, you just give me a call on my cell phone, and I’ll be back later to pick you up,” Mrs. Jones said.
She wears jeans so tight that they pull around her thighs. Her jacket was made of soft black leather that looked and felt like butter. Of course, we looked pretty hot ourselves. Pamela had on tight jeans too, and a top that laced across the front. Fortunately, she had a camisole underneath. Liz and I were in our best jeans and shirts and jackets.
Pamela, the salad bowl in her lap, sat up front with her mom. Elizabeth and I sat in back. I had wrapped the hot lasagna dish in a towel and held it on my thighs, while Liz carried the cake.
“Well, Alice, you finally got a mom!” Mrs. Jones said. “How does it feel to have another female around the house?”
Weird, I wanted to say, but it came out, “Wonderful.”
“It’s nice to have someone to share all your little secrets, isn’t it?” Mrs. Jones was talking, of course, about the kind of relationship she wanted with Pamela. Elizabeth looked at me and rolled her eyes.
“Oh, she’s got us,” Pamela told her mother. “Any secrets Alice has, she tells them to us.”
It wasn’t the answer Mrs. Jones wanted to hear. She drove a few minutes more in silence, but as we got closer to Takoma Park, she giggled and said, “Do you think I ought to come in and play chaperone? I hope I don’t get in trouble now, delivering you girls to the bachelor apartment of three young men.”
“Hey, Mom,” Pamela said, “Lester’s not into incest, you know.”
We turned onto Lester’s street, and I directed Mrs. Jones to the big yellow house with the wraparound porch. There seemed to be only one light on in a window on the first floor, but several lights were on above.
“I hope they’re all home,” I said eagerly. “Thanks, Mrs. Jones.”
She pulled up in front. “Well, here we are, then!” she said. “Have fun, but call me if the party gets rough.”
“Mom!” said Pamela.
I really think Pam’s mother wanted to be invited in too, but we weren’t about to do that. We got out, trying not to slam the car door too loudly. Mrs. Jones drove off, and we walked up the path to the side entrance and started up the steps.
I got to the top first and peeked through the small window in the door. I could hear voices and music from inside.
“As soon as someone opens the door, we all yell ‘Surprise!’” Elizabeth reminded us.
I was just about to knock on the door with my knee when I saw a young woman cross the center hall and disappear into the back room where the kitchen was.
“Pamela!” I said. And then another woman crossed the hall in the other direction, holding a wineglass in her hand. “Elizabeth!” I gasped. The three of us, holding our offerings, stared through the window.
“They’re having a party!” Pamela said in disappointment.
Now a man appeared, then a third woman in a thin dress.
“They’re having an orgy!” Elizabeth cried.
“They are not!” I said.
“That woman’s in her slip,” said Elizabeth.
“It’s not a slip, it’s a cocktail dress,” said Pamela.
“How do you know it’s not a slip? I don’t want to walk in on something we’re not supposed to see,” said Elizabeth.
“I don’t want to walk in at all,” I said, suddenly embarrassed at my stupidity in thinking this would work. “We’ll look like dorks!”
“Maybe we could just set the food out here, knock, and run,” Elizabeth said.
“They’ve got food. Lester’s cooking Chinese. I can smell it all the way out here,” I said.
“I still think we ought to go ahead with our plan and give it to them,” Pamela insisted. “They’d at least be grateful. You can always use more food at a party.”
“We’d look like lunatics,” I said.
“Yeah, I suppose. Worse yet, they’d ask us to stay for dinner, and we’d sit around looking like virgins,” said Pamela.
“We are virgins,” said Elizabeth. In the light from the window she looked hard at Pamela and me. “Aren’t we?”
“We’re virgins,” I said.
“Let’s leave before someone else comes and finds us out here,” Elizabeth said.
“I’ll call Mom on my cell phone,” Pamela muttered.
Hugely disappointed, we went back down the steps, hoping that maybe Mrs. Jones had just cruised the block and was coming back to see if we needed her. We got to the fourth step from the bottom, and standing right next to us on the wraparound porch was an elderly man, his hands in his pockets, looking at us fiercely.
13
Dinner with the CIA
It could only be Mr. Watts, who owned the house. We didn’t know whether to run back up or rush on down. We were three girls, all dressed up with no place to go, holding a salad, a lasagna, and a pineapple upside-down cake.
“Hello,” I said, feeling the need to say something.
At first I didn’t think he was going to answer at all. Maybe, like Grandpa McKinley, his mind was sort of slipping and he was confused a lot of the time. He studied us for a moment and then said, “I see you’ve brought me some dinner. Come on in.”
Now it was our turn to stare. Pamela and Elizabeth looked at me.
“Smells like lasagna,” he said, and motioned us around to the front door.
Otto Watts rents the upstairs apartment free, except for utilities, to Lester and his two friends as long as one of
them is always there in the evenings in case Mr. Watts needs help. They also do odd jobs for him. That was the agreement—a great deal for graduate students, a pretty good arrangement for Mr. Watts, who already has someone look in on him during the day.
“He’s safe,” I whispered, nudging Pamela to go on down. We followed the path around to the porch steps. Mr. Watts held the door open for us and followed us inside.
His high-ceilinged living room with the velvet drapes looked like something out of a Masterpiece Theatre production. Maybe it was because the Victorian living room was so large that Mr. Watts looked so small, but he was a short, wiry man with a mustache and goatee. If he had been wearing a silk weskit and smoking jacket, he would have been Masterpiece Theatre for sure. But he had on a worn pair of corduroy pants and a rumpled button-down shirt, open at the collar and topped with a V-necked sweater. There were old canvas deck shoes on his feet.
He shuffled on out to his kitchen and turned on the light as we tagged along behind.
“Kicked you out, did they?” he asked.
I stared at him, then at Pamela and Elizabeth. “We didn’t even knock,” I said.
“Eh?” he said, one hand to his ear. I noticed the hearing aid and repeated my answer.
The kitchen was almost as large as the living room, with cupboards all the way to the ceiling. Mr. Watts began handing plates and glasses to Pamela, and she dutifully set them on the table.
Somehow I’d thought that maybe Mr. Watts would phone upstairs and tell Lester we were there, tell him about the dinner we had brought, and that Lester would come get us. Then it wouldn’t look so much as though we’d crashed his party. But now it was clear that Mr. Watts was going to do no such thing. Elizabeth and Pamela watched in astonishment.
“Well, I figured as much,” the old man went on, rummaging now through the silverware drawer and handing a serving spoon to Elizabeth. “Didn’t know you were coming, did they?”
“How did you know that?” I asked, speaking more loudly.
He smiled, and his watery blue eyes sparkled. “The first contingent brought wine and cheesecake at six thirty, and I could smell Lester’s shrimp in oyster sauce around seven. I figured they had about all they needed to eat right there. Then you girls showed up, and it was just the way you got out of the car and crept up those steps that told me you weren’t exactly on the guest list. Which one of you is Alice?”