I’m looking forward to Christmas (Krismasy here—there are no c’s in their language). It’s really different. The kids gather coconut tree fronds to decorate the church, pray all night, then go out and walk the length of the town the next morning, singing to wake the village. . . .
He hadn’t updated his Facebook page in more than a year. It was like Madagascar had swallowed him up. I wondered if he’d even go back to the University of Chicago—if he’d come back to the States at all. Which got me wondering where I would apply for counseling jobs once I had my master’s degree.
I have to say I was feeling more . . . complete? fulfilled? . . . just by my job as registrar for SCOO—something that took me out of the usual grind, something broader than the little world on campus. I really enjoyed meeting the students who signed up. I’d get their names on a posted sign-up sheet, and when I’d call them to find out what skills or talents they had to offer, we’d sometimes meet for coffee later, just to talk, and I think the committee members were right about some of the homesick freshmen wanting a connection. But we also had upperclassmen thinking about their own roles in the community a year or two later. It was just something I enjoyed that fit the person I was, and finding out who you really are and what you want out of life is one of the major goals of college, they say.
Valerie and I—and, to a certain extent, Abby—were so into it, but not so much Claire, and that was okay. We weren’t out to twist arms, just to offer a chance to be more involved in the community. Claire, in fact, wanted us more involved in her life. What she wanted was for at least two of us to buy an assistantship in Magic Myst and make her rich, ours to come later. She’d already found one buyer but figured she needed three to support her.
“I’m sorry, Claire, I just can’t afford either the money or the time,” I told her honestly.
“Even if it means doubling or tripling your investment? The more you sell, the more you make from what your recruits sell, until finally you don’t have to work at it much at all.”
“And by then I would have failed most of my courses,” I explained, and didn’t add that as much as I relied on makeup, I just couldn’t see trying to turn all my friends into Magic Myst models.
Abby heard us talking in my dorm room and came over.
“What happened to the half of a corned beef sandwich I had in my little fridge?” she asked.
“Oh. Was that yours?” Claire said, turning around.
“Duh . . . Yes? One room . . . two people? So if I didn’t eat it, then . . . ?”
“Sorry. I guess maybe I thought you didn’t want it and hadn’t thrown it away yet,” Claire said, avoiding Abby’s eyes as she picked up her bag to leave.
“Claire, my Fritos are gone, and even the Mars bar I had on the window ledge.”
“I’m sorry!” Claire said sheepishly. “Don’t leave stuff lying around to tempt me.”
I studied her more closely. She had lost some weight, and I didn’t think it was intentional.
“Claire, don’t you have any money left to buy food?” I asked.
“Hey, I’m doing fine,” she said. “Just two more assistantships, and I’m set.”
* * *
The leaf-raking event the last weekend of November was a big success too. Marcus and James rode around campus in the back of a pickup, holding rakes high in the air and shouting through a megaphone, SO COME ON OUT! Signs had been posted in all the buildings.
Students wearing SCOO armbands that we’d had made up descended on neighborhoods within two blocks of the campus—neighborhoods where there had been complaints before about drinking parties that lasted till three in the morning, street signs turned around and other stupid acts of vandalism to celebrate a winning game.
I was obviously enjoying being part of the initiative more than Dave was, but he gamely went along with whatever we assigned him to do. Meanwhile, the list of possible ways students offered to help the community lengthened: play chess, braid hair, wrap presents, wash windows, bathe dogs, tutor math, tutor English, help with income taxes, cook meals, play the trombone. . . .
“You know, we could turn this into a business once we left school,” Valerie mused one night. “Like a matchmaking service for the community.”
“Not you, too!” I said. “After claiming she didn’t want the pressure, Abby says she’s going to start one of those cupcake businesses and give those Georgetown shops some competition. What are you going to do after graduation, Val?”
“If I can’t find work as a museum curator?” She stretched out her long legs the length of her bed until her pink painted toenails touched the frame. “I’d like to spend ten years doing a different job every year and see what I do best.”
I smiled at the thought. “Yeah? And how could you manage that? Where would you get the experience?”
“I’d be one of those impersonators. You know, present myself as Dr. Valerie Robbins, horticultural expert, and the next year I’d be Val Robbins, nightclub singer. And then I’d be a tour guide around the Capitol or a taxi driver in Virginia, and—damn!—I’d be convincing.”
“You would too. Just don’t fly commercial planes, please.”
Valerie sighed and turned over on her side. “What do you think we’ll really do, Alice? I bet you’ll marry Dave.”
I was startled. “What even makes you think he wants us to marry?”
She gave me “the smile.”
“What?”
“I just do. He wants to.”
“He’s just graduating. He doesn’t even have a job yet.”
“He will.”
“You’re crazy, Val. I’ve got two years of school ahead of me, counting my master’s.”
“Well, I’ve got only one, but after I finish my ten years of impersonations, I’d like to find myself at the altar with somebody.”
“You’ll find yourself in prison, that’s what, and the newspapers will quote somebody saying, ‘I never really believed she was a brain surgeon.’ ”
* * *
Dave and I were growing even closer, though. He drove me to Silver Spring once when I was helping out at the Melody Inn for the holiday rush, and afterward he picked me up and we went out to dinner with Dad and Sylvia. Another time we went to Cumberland on a Sunday to celebrate his folks’ thirtieth anniversary.
“How’s the resume going?” I asked him.
“I want to be ready to e-mail it by April, see if I can line up some interviews over the spring,” he told me.
Meanwhile, Abby and Claire weren’t hitting it off, and Claire had dropped one of her classes to devote more time to Magic Myst. We all suspected she was going hungry most days and didn’t want to admit it, and she seemed upset with us too for not joining the select company of executive assistants, of which there were still only two for the whole U of Maryland campus.
Then one night she surprised us all by taking the three of us to dinner at Ledo’s. She’d just recruited her second executive assistant and had received her bonus. We were celebrating.
“It’s great, Claire!” Val told her. “Who’s the girl?”
“A sophomore from Potomac,” Claire said, indicating to the waiter that she was to get the check, and we all gave him our orders.
“I think Madison’s furious that she didn’t find Ashley first,” Claire continued.
“Madison?”
“She’s the senior, the other girl Sandra recruited. We were supposed to be best friends, combing the campus and sharing ideas, and instead we’re competing all the time. It’s like she thinks the upperclassmen are strictly her territory or something.”
Someone’s stomach rumbled and it wasn’t mine. When bread was delivered to the table, Claire took the first piece before passing the basket around and spread olive oil on it before popping it into her mouth.
“Beautiful nails, Claire,” I said, admiring the slim fingers that took another piece of bread and, this time, smeared it first with oil, then added a layer of cheese from the cheese shaker before eating
it. “Any chance those fingers could help wrap presents next week? The U is paying for gift wrap and ribbons, and we’re advertising that people in the immediate neighborhood can bring their gifts to us and we’ll wrap them for free.”
“Wow! I’m impressed! SCOO is really taking off,” said Abby. “Where is this happening?”
“Adele Stamp,” I said, which is the name of our student union building. “I doubt we’ll get many guys, but we could be surprised.”
“I’ll think about it,” Claire said as our entrées arrived, “but I’d love to recruit another executive assistant by then.”
I think we talked about Lester’s honeymoon over dinner, and Valerie’s problems buying jeans for tall figures, and Abby’s boyfriend falling asleep during movies, but finally we were all thanking Claire for a great dinner and persuading her to let us pay the tip, which wasn’t a lot, divided among the three of us.
But strangely, when Val and I got back to our dorm room, I saw her writing some figures beside her desk calendar, and she said, “Alice, do you realize that this little celebration dinner, courtesy of Claire, cost us $37.95 a piece? Cost me that much, anyway.”
“What?” I said, pausing there in the doorway, then closing the door in case Claire was listening. “How?”
“Five bucks each for the tip, and then we checked off the Magic Myst items we agreed to buy from the list Claire passed around just before the spumoni. Items at the top, prices at the bottom. Remember? I checked the moisturizer and the mascara, and my bill will come to $37.95, not counting tax. What was yours?”
I took the copy Val was holding and looked it over. I’d checked the loose powder for $19. Fortunately, the ice cream had arrived, and I’d passed the paper on. We’d been had.
“I hope Claire ate a hearty meal, because it’s the last she’ll be getting from me for a long time,” I said. “But it’s our fault. Always read the fine print.”
* * *
Dave made a big deal out of my twenty-first birthday. Everyone did. Liz, Pam, Gwen, and I all celebrated each other’s, no matter where we were. Liz sent flowers from Vermont, and Pamela sent a male stripper. I’d wondered about the phone call I’d received asking if I would be in my dorm at 4:45 p.m. for a special delivery. I asked Val to be there too, just in case it was a rapist or something, but when I answered the knock, here was this tall, broad-shouldered guy dressed to the nines, who handed me a bottle of wine and began singing a sultry version of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” as he took off his jacket.
Claire and Abby heard him and came out of their room, and then a passing junior from down the hall stopped to listen and sent out a cell phone alert. By the time the singing stripper got down to his belt and lowered his pants, the hall was packed with girls and a few guys all watching the elegant way he stepped out of his trousers and flung them aside, then slowly removed his socks. Val and I sat cross-legged on her bed and giggled like fifth graders. I didn’t know if we were supposed to tuck dollar bills into his red-spangled G-string or not, but that was about the time he ended the song.
And then, telling me he was only following instructions, he came over to the bed, excused Val, to much laughter, and then, taking her place, gave me one of those theatrically passionate kisses that drew laughter and applause from the hallway.
After that, professional that he was, he backed off, wished me a happy birthday, and with lightning speed, the pants were on again, the shirt, the jacket, the socks, and in a final tribute to twenty-one, he tossed me a red-spangled G-string. It could not possibly have been the one he’d been wearing, but the others gasped as though he’d magically removed his own somehow, and then he was gone.
My cell phone was ringing, and when I picked it up, it was Pamela.
“Happy birthday,” she said, and we laughed together. “Just wanted to juice up your day a little. Wish I could have been there.”
“You gave the whole floor a thrill,” I told her. “Thanks for remembering, you big goof!”
That night Dave took me to the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown for a six-course dinner, including wine and cherries jubilee. Afterward we walked along Georgetown’s waterfront, stopping often to kiss. I loved being wrapped in his arms—the warmth of them—and was glad he’d reserved a room for us there, so we wouldn’t have to sleep in a dorm room that night. We lay in bed together, propped up on pillows so we could see the lights on the river below, the occasional boat going by, the lamps on the pier.
“Did you enjoy the evening?” Dave asked me.
“Very much,” I told him. “Thank you, Dave. You know what a girl likes.”
“Hope so,” he said. “What this girl likes, anyway.”
As I lay in that drowsy bliss just before sleep pulls you in, I revisited the events of the day. Twenty-one, the so-called magic number. I remembered that long-ago promise Patrick had made to me the summer before seventh grade—that he would call me, no matter where I was, on my twenty-first birthday, and if I wasn’t engaged, we’d make a date for New Year’s Eve. I wondered idly if Patrick even remembered my cell phone number, much less my birthday. Of course, no telling where he was now, or who he was with, and I drifted off to sleep, trying to figure out if the international dateline made my birthday yesterday or tomorrow in Africa. . . .
* * *
I had dinner at home the next night back in Silver Spring. Stacy was holding exercise classes for a weekend retreat, but Les drove in from West Virginia for the occasion. That made it really special.
“Wow!” I said. “Wish I could turn twenty-one every birthday.”
“It’s always good to have you here, honey,” Dad said, giving me one of his bear hugs. “You’ll never be too old for this.”
Sylvia came out of the kitchen holding a six-layer cake she had made, and Les brought both wine and chocolates, so we were all set.
It was somewhere between the steak and the cake that the phone rang. Dad answered, and it was Aunt Sally. She and I used to talk much more than we did now, but Sylvia had told her I’d be here for dinner.
“We were just about to have our dessert, Sal, but we’re only sitting around the table talking. . . . Of course you may. Here she is,” Dad said.
I took the phone. “Hi, Aunt Sally.”
“Oh, Alice.” What a familiar, comforting voice hers was. But she must have felt the same about mine. “I declare, you sound more like your mother all the time. Marie would have been so pleased.”
“Well, I am too,” I said honestly. “How are you and Uncle Milt?”
“We’re older—and we look it—but that’s no surprise. I only hope that he goes first so he won’t be left alone after I’m gone. None of our friends understand that. They think it sounds awful, but it’s not.”
Having just finished a funky course called Funerals and Fabrications in American Life, about the way commercial funeral establishments try to make us feel in order to buy their most expensive products, and the wide variety of emotions people can experience at the death of a loved one, I was perfectly able to see that this may well be a true expression of love and empathy.
“It doesn’t seem that way to me at all, Aunt Sally,” I said.
“And now you’re twenty-one and a junior in college! Oh my goodness!” she said.
Here come the warnings, I thought—sex, alcohol, drugs, drinking, and how she’s worried about Les and me all these years. I settled back in my chair while the others went about clearing the table, smiling my way.
“How I remember my twenty-first birthday!” she said. “I wasn’t much of a drinker, you know. In fact, I’d hardly had anything more than a sip or two of champagne on New Year’s Eve before that, but I went to a dance with a boy, and all my friends were at our table, and I had half a glass of wine, and we danced . . .”
Get ready, I told myself.
“. . . and, Alice, I don’t think I ever danced so well in my whole life!”
I blinked.
“I mean, it was like my legs were loose at the hips, but they
knew just what to do, as though the floor were polished glass. I glided, I slid, I twisted, I whirled like nobody’s business. When we got back to the table, I finished the glass of wine, and we danced some more. It was the most fabulous night on the dance floor, the night I turned twenty-one!”
Les saw the look on my face and paused with a bowl of green beans in his hands. Aunt Sally and I talked a little more, and after we said good-bye, I turned to Les: “I’m not the only one who’s changing,” I said, and told him about our conversation.
“Darn!” he said. “I miss the old Aunt Sally.”
“Oh, I’m sure she’s still around,” I said. “You just have to press the right buttons.”
Dad and Sylvia were excited about a trip to France in August and showed us brochures of all the places they planned to visit. I’d already promised to help out at the store for the two weeks they’d be gone.
“I love that you’re getting away, Dad,” I told him. “You need a break from the store.”
“Well, I’ve never been to France, and Sylvia’s always wanted to go back, so this seems like a good time to do it,” he said.
After we feasted on Sylvia’s cake, Dad and Sylvia insisted I wasn’t to do dishes on my birthday, so Les and I sat on the back porch talking, our feet sharing the wicker hassock, each of us sinking low in a chintz-covered chair. Fireflies flitted here and there over the backyard, reminding me of the lights on the river the night before, lying there in Dave’s arms.
“Got any big plans for this summer?” Les asked.
I played it cool. “Huge. I’ve got a part-time job in the public relations office at the U, believe it or not. Just collecting names and addresses for a database—people in the community who responded to our student outreach program, small-time donors, community leaders. . . . We’re trying to expand the registry we started last September.”
“They’re paying you for this? Or is this still part of that volunteer project?”