Alice in Blunderland

  I rolled over on my tummy. It went right on gurgling. My own stomach was a traitor!

  “It’s Alice!” said Jody. “She’s got the growling stomach.”

  “Girls!” Mrs. Beachy came halfway down the stairs in her robe. “Quiet down now.”

  “We can’t,” Megan said, laughing. “We can’t sleep because Alice’s stomach is growling.”

  Mrs. Beachy shone her flashlight on me. “Do you need something more to eat, Alice?” she asked.

  “No, I’m okay,” I said.

  “She needs some Pepto-Bismol,” said Rosalind.

  Everyone laughed again.

  “Good night, now,” said Mrs. Beachy. She went back upstairs.

  Gurgle, gurgle, went my stomach. Somebody giggled.

  “Al-ice! We can’t sleep!” said Dawn.

  I crawled into my sleeping bag and zipped it up, even though I was too warm. You couldn’t hear my stomach so easily from in there.

  “Good night, everyone,” said Megan.

  “Sweet dreams,” said Sara.

  “Kiss a frog,” said Rosalind.

  “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” said Megan.

  Gurgle, gurgle, said my stomach from inside the sleeping bag.

  While the other girls went to sleep, I lay there hot and sweaty and wondered how many embarrassing things had happened to me already in my life. Hundreds, I’ll bet. Then I wondered how many were still waiting to happen.

  Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, went my stomach. I put my chin down inside my sleeping bag. “Shut up,” I said.

  My stomach wasn’t listening.

  5

  REMARKABLY AWFUL

  I DIDN’T KNOW HOW MUCH I HATED music class till I got to fourth grade.

  Maybe I knew something was wrong back in Chicago. In second grade we had been practicing “The Merry Little Horses” for a PTA meeting, and the teacher stopped the music and had us sing it row by row. When she got to ours, she had us sing it two by two. When it got down to me and a girl named Margaret Keiler, the teacher asked me if, instead of singing, I might like to play the triangle. At the PTA that night, I held the triangle in one hand, the stick in the other, and at the end of each verse I went ping.

  A week later Dad came to school for my second-grade parent-teacher conference. There hadn’t been anyone to stay with me at home that day, so the teacher had asked me to copy some words on the blackboard at the back of the room while she talked with Dad.

  At some point I’d heard her say, “. . . remarkably tone-deaf…” I remember feeling good inside, because anytime a teacher says remarkably, it must mean you’re doing well.

  But as we’d walked out to the car later, I could just tell by the quiet way Dad had his hand on my shoulder that remarkably and deaf didn’t go very well together and that Dad was feeling sorry for me.

  “Am I sick?” I’d asked him.

  “What?” said Dad.

  “Is being tone-deaf like being sick?” I asked.

  He’d laughed. “No,” he had said. “You’re a wonderfully healthy seven-year-old.” And then he added, “I don’t think you’re exactly tone-deaf. You just can’t carry a tune in a bucket, that’s all.”

  But when I went to the doctor that fall for my checkup and he looked in my ears, I asked if my ears were okay.

  “They look fine to me,” he’d said, smiling. “Best ears I’ve seen all morning. Why? Do they hurt?”

  “No,” I told him. “But I’m remarkably tone-deaf.”

  He’d laughed. “My gosh, I can’t sing either,” he said. “The only place I’d sing is in the shower, so don’t worry about it.”

  I figured if a doctor could laugh about you, you couldn’t be very sick. But now that I was in fourth grade, I started worrying again. Maybe at Megan’s birthday party I was worrying but didn’t know it, though I realized the girls were looking at me sideways when we sang “Happy Birthday.”

  It wasn’t until music class one day that I discovered for myself just how remarkably off-key I really am. We were going to put on a school assembly for Veterans Day, and each class was going to do something special. It was sort of a Columbus Day–Veterans Day–Thanksgiving Day program, actually. The sixth grade was going to put on a play about Columbus in the New World. The fifth grade was making a special pumpkin treat for everyone, and the fourth grade was going to sing “America the Beautiful,” all four verses.

  After we learned the words, the teacher concentrated on the notes. “Listen now, class,” she said. She was a young teacher, and I’ll bet this was her first year. We were sitting on the floor in the music room, and she was standing at the piano. She leaned over and played the notes to just the first few words: “O beautiful for spacious skies… .”

  “Now, let’s sing them really well,” she said.

  We all sang.

  “I don’t think some of you are lis tening,” she said. She played the notes again. “Every body. Sing the first note. A nice big ‘O.’ ”

  “Ohhhhh,” we sang.

  The teacher frowned. “Let’s try it again. Just the people on this side,” she said. She played the notes a third time.

  “Ohhhh,” they sang. My heart began to thump.

  “Good!” said the teacher. “Now the people in the center.” She made them try it. “Good,” she said again. “Now the people over here.” She played the first note on the piano.

  The kids in our group sang, and I wanted to do my best. I sang out loud and clear. It sounded fine to me.

  “Listen!” the teacher said, frowning even more. She played the note again. “Now try it,” she said. We sang, but I didn’t open my mouth quite so wide.

  The teacher looked really unhappy. “Someone is singing much too low,” she said. “Let me hear the four girls over here.”

  I was one of the girls. I sang, but not so loud. The other girls turned and looked at me. The teacher looked at me too. She played the note louder still. I must be deaf, I thought, and yet I could hear that note as well as anyone.

  “Alice,” the teacher said, “could you make your voice go a little higher?”

  I didn’t know what she meant by higher. I sang louder.

  “No, not lower, dear. A little higher up the scale,” said the teacher.

  How do you make your voice go up? I wondered. I stretched my neck and raised my chin. When I sang the note again, some of the kids laughed. I could feel my cheeks begin to burn.

  The teacher suddenly smiled at me and rapped her knuckles on the top of the piano. “Okay, class. Every one now, the whole first verse,” she said, and it was then I realized I was hopeless. Nothing could be done for me.

  When I walked home from school that day with Donald, he said, “How come your dad is manager of a music store and you can’t sing?”

  “How come you can’t mind your own business?” I told him.

  “I’m just asking.”

  “I can so sing,” I said in a tiny voice.

  “Just not on the right notes,” said Donald.

  “Well, you don’t always play the trumpet on the right notes either,” I said. “I can hear you clear over at our house.”

  He just shrugged. “So what? I never wanted to play the trumpet.”

  “Then why are you taking lessons?” I asked.

  “Because Mom makes me,” he said.

  I began to feel really awful. Donald had to take trumpet lessons because his mom was taking care of me on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was all so stupid. He didn’t want to take lessons, I didn’t want to go to his house, and I’ll bet Mrs. Sheavers didn’t even want me there.

  “Well, I don’t know why I can’t get the notes right,” I said finally. “They sound okay to me.”

  “When the notes go up, you go down,” Donald said.

  “Thanks for telling me,” I said, and turned up the walk to my house. I was glad it was a Wednesday and I didn’t have to go to the Sheaverses’.

  Lester was on the couch with a bowl of pretzels on his lap. He had the peanut butter
jar between his knees and was dipping each pretzel in the peanut butter before he put it in his mouth.

  “I think I need an operation,” I told him.

  “What for? Somebody going to give you a new brain?”

  I sank miserably down in my beanbag chair. “I think I need a new voice box or something.”

  Lester looked over at me. “Yeah?”

  “I’m remarkably tone-deaf, Lester, remember? In music today it was horrible! The teacher made me sing a note all by myself, and Donald said I went down instead of up.”

  For once Lester said something really nice to me. “You know what?” he said. “Some of the people who can sing shouldn’t, and if you don’t sing, it doesn’t matter.”

  I burst into tears. “It was so embarrassing!” I said. “She made me do it in front of everyone.”

  “Well, she shouldn’t have. She should know that a lot of people can’t carry a tune.”

  I wiped one arm across my eyes. “Will I get better, Lester?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s not a disease or anything. Don’t worry about it. Think of all the stuff you can do.”

  “Like what?” I sniffled as Oatmeal wandered into the room and climbed up in my lap. I stroked her as she pawed at my legs to find a soft spot.

  “Well, for one thing, you take good care of your cat,” Lester said.

  “Any one can do that!”

  “And you make good popcorn.”

  “What else?” I said.

  “Well…” Lester thought awhile. “You can blow your own nose.”

  “Lester!”

  “You’re a good reader. You have nice handwriting. You get good grades in spelling.”

  “But what am I going to do at the Veterans Day performance of ‘America the Beautiful’?”

  “Go to the teacher before the program and ask how much it’s worth to her if you just lip-synch the words.”

  “What?”

  “You know. Pretend. Just move your lips and pretend you’re singing.”

  “Les-ter!”

  “Well, just do it anyway. Just whisper the words. Who cares? It’s America that’s important here, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  The school sent home invitations to our parents in case they wanted to attend the program.

  “Is this something special, Alice?” Dad asked. “Do you want me to come?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I don’t know of any other parents who are coming. It’s really just for the school.”

  “Well then, I think I’ll stay at the store,” said Dad. “We’re having a big Veterans Day sale.”

  I felt better then. I didn’t want Dad to come all the way to school just so he could watch me open and close my mouth like a goldfish, without one single sound coming out.

  The program went off fine. I held my head high and opened my mouth wide, moving my lips as though I were really singing. And, since I was in the first row, I even put my hand over my heart and closed my eyes on the chorus, to show how patriotic I was.

  Everyone clapped, and I figured if I could pretend I was singing the words, I could pretend that the applause was for me, and I even took a little bow.

  6

  A HOUSEFUL

  DAD SAID WE WERE GOING TO HAVE COMpany for Thanksgiving. Janice Sherman, one of his sales-clerks at the Melody Inn, didn’t have any relatives in Maryland. And Loretta Jenkins, who worked at the Melody Inn’s Gift Shoppe on Saturdays, didn’t want to go out of town with her parents for the holiday; so she’d be alone too. So he invited them both to have Thanksgiving dinner with us.

  “Loretta’s the birdbrain with the sunburst hair?” asked Lester. He didn’t want company for Thanksgiving. He wanted to be company.

  “She’s a very capable worker, Les,” said Dad.

  What Lester really wanted was to go to an all-you-can-eat Thanksgiving buffet at a restaurant so we wouldn’t have to do any dishes afterward. But I was excited about having people at our house.

  “I get to set the table for five!” I said.

  “Make it seven,” said Dad. “I invited the Sheavers, too.”

  “Dad!” yelled Lester.

  “Actually, Mrs. Sheavers invited us,” Dad explained. “And I thought it would just make things easier all around if I had them over here along with Janice and Loretta. Safety in numbers, you know.”

  “You could have asked me what I thought!” Lester complained.

  “Mrs. Sheavers volunteered to bring the turkey,” said Dad.

  “Oh,” said Lester.

  It would be our second Thanksgiving away from Chicago. Last year we drove to Tennessee for Thanksgiving to see Uncle Charlie get married, and a few days later we drove back again for his funeral. He had a heart attack on his honeymoon, so I’m not sure how I feel about weddings.

  “Everyone’s going to bring something,” I told Rosalind at school the next day. “There are going to be seven whole people at our house!”

  “No halves?” said Rosalind. “No thirds?” We laughed. Rosalind always says crazy things.

  “There are thirteen people coming to our house!” said Megan.

  “I’m going to my grandmother’s, and we’re going to have twenty-two people there!” said Dawn.

  I guess seven didn’t seem like so many people after all.

  On Thanksgiving morning Dad and I got up early and made the pies. We’re good pie makers. We make pumpkin, pecan, and mincemeat. Dad buys the crusts already made, and we pour in the filling. Lester had brought home cider the day before. Here’s what everyone was bringing:

  Janice Sherman: mashed potatoes, cranberries, and green beans.

  Loretta Jenkins: salad and rolls.

  Mrs. Sheavers: the turkey, the gravy, and Donald.

  Loretta looks sort of like a salad herself. Her hair, I mean. She was the last one to arrive, and her hair was all tossed and curly and wild around her face, like the fur on an Eskimo’s parka. She’s a little younger than Lester, and he pretends he doesn’t like her, but Lester likes all kinds of girls except me. I noticed he sat right across from Loretta at the table and as far away from me as he could get.

  “Isn’t this fun!” said Mrs. Sheavers when we were all seated. She was wearing jangly earrings that reached all the way down to her shoulders. With her red hair and her green blouse, she looked more like Christmas than Thanksgiving. “I know we’re each thinking of things to be grateful for this Thanksgiving, and Ben’s friendship is certainly high on my list.” I looked at Dad, who was looking at his plate.

  I’ll bet Dad was grateful that he was at the opposite end of the table and Lester was grateful that Mrs. Sheavers wasn’t our mom. Donald, though, was right across the table from me, and every time he swung his feet, he kicked me, so I wasn’t very grateful about anything yet. Oatmeal kept walking from one chair to another, looking for someone’s lap to jump up on, but we wouldn’t let her.

  “Now, tell me,” Mrs. Sheavers said to Janice as she started passing the turkey around. “Just how did you come to know Ben?”

  “I work with him at his store,” Janice said, and it sounded as though little slivers of ice were coming out of her mouth when she talked. “I’ve known Ben ever since he moved here from Chicago.”

  “That’s exactly how long Ben and I have been friends!” said Mrs. Sheavers. “We’re neighbors, you know, and I take care of little Alice after school.”

  “Only on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” I said. Little Alice made me feel like I’d shrunk.

  If both Mrs. Sheavers and Janice Sherman were interested in Dad, though, he was too busy to notice, because he kept getting up to take things out of the oven or to put dishes back in to keep them warm.

  “So, Lester,” said Loretta from her side of the table, “what do you do with yourself when you’re not in school?”

  “Oh, try to stay out of trouble,” said Lester, reaching for another roll.

  “He plays in a band called the Naked Nomads,” I said helpfully, because
Dad told me to be part of the conversation.

  Loretta smiled. “Naked Nomads? Hmm. Now that sounds interesting!” she said.

  Lester gave me a look, but I noticed he smiled back at Loretta. It’s hard to know whether I’m helping my brother or not.

  “I can hear those boys practice clear over at my house!” said Mrs. Sheavers. “What a musical bunch we are! Donald here plays the trumpet, and I myself play the ukulele.”

  Janice Sherman lifted one eyebrow. “Really!” she said, only it wasn’t the kind of really that sounded as though she wanted to know more. It was the kind of really that meant, Not the ukulele!

  “What about you?” Lester said to Loretta. “What do you do when you’re not at school or working at the Melody Inn?”

  “I’m either at the beach or in the mountains,” said Loretta. “I guess I’m a gypsy at heart. In summer I head for Ocean City, and in winter I go off to ski whenever I can.”

  “Sounds like a nice life,” said Lester.

  I noticed that Loretta was eating everything except the turkey. She didn’t even take one slice. We found out later she was a vegetarian. I would have molded her a little turkey out of mashed potatoes if she’d just told us.

  Dad had gone out to the kitchen for more rolls, but he’d left them in the oven too long, and they were burned on top. He went back for more butter.

  Mrs. Sheavers laughed. “Poor Ben. He needs a wife, that’s all there is to it.”

  She sounded as though she was joking, but Janice Sherman said, “Well, it would have to be an exceptional woman, because Ben’s whole life, practically, is classical music.”

  Even a girl in fourth grade knows that what Janice Sherman meant by that was that Dad wouldn’t be interested in a woman who plays the ukulele.

  “Oh, but he’s such a wonderful father!” Mrs. Sheavers shot back. “I’d think he’d be looking for a woman with maternal instincts. Alice is so in need of a mother.”

  How did I get into this? I wondered. “My dad isn’t marrying anyone!” I said just as Dad came back into the dining room with a stick of butter. “He says that being my dad is a full-time job.”

  Dad paused there in the doorway, looking confused. “Have I missed something?” he asked.