Alice in Blunderland

  “Only the rest of your life, which we’re mapping out for you,” Lester said, and everyone laughed then and pretended we were all friends. When Dad sat down again, though, he gave me a look that meant, Whatever you were talking about, stop it!

  Okay, I decided. I’ll just shut up for the rest of the meal and see how they like that!

  But the pies with whipped cream put everyone in a good mood again, and when we’d finished eating and had cleared the table—which was nothing but a metal fold-up table—Dad got out the game Balderdash and the grownups began to play.

  Donald and I went down the hall to my room. Donald picked up one of my books, The Way Things Work, and was looking up electromagnets while I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and worked on a bead bracelet I was making my cousin Carol for Christmas. I had started it two weeks before, but it still wasn’t right. The trouble with homemade presents is that they always look homemade.

  Donald sat on the edge of my bed to read. I think he’s smart inside his head, but the things that come out of his mouth sound really stupid sometimes. Rosalind told him that Lester called me a blunderbuss, and every day Donald has to remind me of it, just because it’s a weird word. “Blunderpuss” or “Blubber-bus” or “Bloody Pus,” Donald calls me.

  He looked it up and says that a blunderbuss is an old-fashioned gun with a flared muzzle. Great. I’m either a person who keeps goofing up or I look like a gun with a flared muzzle. Maybe something’s the matter with my nose, I keep thinking. Nothing’s wrong with the way Donald looks, though. In fact, he’s probably the best-looking boy I’ve ever seen. If I ever do have a boyfriend, maybe it’ll be Donald Sheavers.

  Now Donald was reading to me what the book said about electromagnets, and then he began on rockets. I reached for another blue bead, threaded it onto the wire, and said, “Donald, what happened to your dad?”

  Donald shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “He just… left or what?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but I don’t remember him,” said Donald. “I was real little, I guess.”

  I threaded another bead. “Do you miss him?”

  “Nope.”

  “How come?”

  “How can you miss what you can’t remember?” he said.

  I thought about that. If I didn’t remember my mother at all, did that mean I wouldn’t miss having a mother? I didn’t think so.

  “But wouldn’t you like to have a father?” I asked.

  “I guess.”

  Now I felt like teasing. “Would you like to have a girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know,” said Donald.

  “Do you want me to be your girlfriend?” I giggled.

  “Okay,” said Donald. Then he read me some more about rockets.

  I was now Donald Sheavers’s girlfriend, and I didn’t feel one bit different.

  Mrs. Sheavers came to the door of my room just then. “So here you are!” she said. “We wondered what you were up to.”

  “I’m making a bracelet and Donald’s reading a book,” I said.

  “So I see,” said Mrs. Sheavers.

  “Alice is my girlfriend now,” Donald told her, and turned another page.

  “Oh?” said his mother. “When did you decide that?”

  “Just now,” I said.

  “Well, why don’t you two come out here and join us?” said Mrs. Sheavers. “You don’t need to stay back here all by yourselves.” Donald and I rolled our eyes at each other.

  So Donald brought the book he was reading and I brought my bead kit to the living room, and we sat together on the couch with our feet on the big coffee table Dad got from Goodwill. The grown-ups went on playing Balderdash in the dining room.

  “The only thing about being your girlfriend is, I don’t want to kiss,” I told Donald.

  “Okay,” said Donald.

  It was easy being a girlfriend! I didn’t have to do anything and neither did Donald. All we had to do was tell the kids at school so that Ollie Harris and the other boys wouldn’t chase me at recess and Rosalind and Sara wouldn’t chase Donald.

  If Dad became Janice Sherman’s boyfriend, I thought, maybe Mrs. Sheavers would leave him alone. I’d have to suggest that after all the company had gone home.

  It was Lester I told that to later.

  “Why doesn’t Dad just make Janice Sherman his girlfriend, and then Mrs. Sheavers will leave him alone?” I said.

  “Are you nuts?” said Lester.

  “But it’s easy! If you have a girlfriend, you don’t have to do anything. You don’t even have to kiss if you don’t want to,” I told him.

  “What planet are you living on, Al?” said Lester.

  When he says that, I know it’s a dumb idea, so I never did give Dad my suggestion.

  7

  EXCUSING MR. DOOLEY

  MR. DOOLEY WAS LATE TO SCHOOL AGAIN when we went back after Thanksgiving. Sara said he probably ate too much turkey and had a tummyache.

  But when he came in around ten, he didn’t look like he had a tummyache to me. He looked tired. Mr. Serio, our principal, taught our class until Mr. Dooley got there, and they stood in the doorway talking for a moment. Maybe Mr. Dooley was getting a scolding, we thought. But it didn’t look like a scolding, either. Mr. Serio smiled and put one hand on Mr. Dooley’s shoulder.

  We did our spelling words and our arithmetic, but before we went to lunch, Mr. Dooley smiled at us and picked up a piece of chalk. He made a dot on the blackboard.

  “Can anyone tell me what this is?” he asked.

  “A dot,” I said.

  “A dot over the letter i,” said Sara.

  “Not exactly,” said Mr. Dooley. He pointed to the dot. “This is the reason I was late to school this morning. Guess again.”

  We all stared at the blackboard.

  “A flea?” said Donald. “Does your house have fleas?”

  Mr. Dooley smiled. “No, not a flea.”

  “A germ?” said Rosalind. “Were you sick?”

  “Not a germ,” said Mr. Dooley. He pointed to the thing he had drawn. “This is the way a baby begins, just a ball of cells no bigger than a dot inside its mother. My wife is going to have a baby, and she doesn’t sleep very well at night, so neither do I.” He smiled again. “And that’s why I was late. I overslept this morning.”

  He looked pretty happy for a man who was missing his sleep. “This is our first child,” Mr. Dooley said, “so we’re very excited.”

  We were excited too, and we were ready to excuse Mr. Dooley anytime he was late from now on.

  “When will it be born?” asked Ollie.

  “In April,” said Mr. Dooley. “April twelfth, the doctor says. It takes nine months for a baby to be ready to be born, class.” He turned to the blackboard again and wrote July over the dot. Next he drew something the size of a pea, and over the pea he wrote August.

  “When its a month old, it’s this big,” he said, pointing to the pea. “It’s backbone has begun to grow and its heart has started to beat.”

  Mr. Dooley drew a lima bean next and wrote September over it. He pointed to the lima bean. “When it’s inside its mother for two months, it’s started to get its fingers and toes and ears and eyes and nose and lips. Even its eyelids.”

  He drew a peach and wrote October. “Here it’s getting its fingernails and toenails, and here”—he drew something the size of a grapefruit—“is the size of our baby right now.”

  He smiled some more. “In our science unit we’ll be studying how things grow—seeds and eggs and birds and babies. And each month I’ll tell you how our baby is doing. Does anyone know what we call a baby when it is very, very small inside its mother?”

  “A seed?” said Dawn.

  “No, not a seed.”

  I knew the answer to that and held up my hand. “An embargo,” I said.

  Mr. Dooley laughed. Several kids turned around and grinned.

  “Not quite,” said Mr. Dooley. “An embryo. For the first nine weeks in
side its mother, it is in the embryonic stage, and after that, until it’s ready to be born, we call it a fetus.”

  Why did I say embargo? I wondered, my cheeks red. But Mr. Dooley went right on talking.

  “Does anyone know which animal spends the longest time inside its mother before it’s born?”

  “A dinosaur?” asked Donald.

  “Well, we’re not too sure about dinosaurs, but you may be right,” said Mr. Dooley.

  “An elephant,” said Rosalind, who wants to work in a zoo.

  “Right! Very good!” Mr. Dooley said. “An elephant baby stays about six hundred and sixty days inside its mother.”

  “Wow!” we said.

  “What’s the shortest time a baby stays inside its mother?” asked Ollie.

  “Good question!” said Mr. Dooley. “But I’m not going to tell you. That will be your science homework tonight. Find out what animal stays inside its mother the shortest length of time and just how short that is.”

  When the bell rang for lunch, I went to the dictionary, but I was not looking up animals. I looked up the word embargo. It said: An order of a government prohibiting the departure of commercial ships from its ports. Rosalind was right. I really was a blunderbuss.

  All the time we were eating in the lunchroom, we talked about Mr. Dooley’s baby.

  “I’ll bet when Mrs. Dooley goes to the hospital, he’ll miss a whole lot of school,” said Jody.

  Sara opened her lunch sack. She had a hard-boiled egg. “Once I cracked open an egg and there was blood in the yolk,” she told us.

  “Euuuw!” said Jody and Dawn together.

  “That means if the hen had kept sitting on it, it would have turned into a chicken,” said Sara.

  We thought about that for a while.

  “That’s all a hen has to do? Lay an egg and sit on it, and it turns into a chicken?” I asked.

  “I guess,” said Sara. She asked if I wanted to trade my cheese sandwich for her hard-boiled egg, and I said no. After that nobody wanted her egg.

  “How does a baby grow inside its mother without eating anything?” asked Megan.

  “It eats,” said Rosalind. “I think it eats its mother.”

  “Rosalind!” I said.

  “Just the lining of her stomach or something,” Rosalind said.

  I knew that couldn’t be right. A baby isn’t in its mother’s stomach anyway.

  “If a baby eats inside its mother, where does it go to the bathroom?” asked Dawn. We looked at each other.

  “Inside its mother!” we all said together.

  “Euuuw!” Dawn and Jody squealed.

  We were glad there weren’t any babies growing inside of us.

  When we came in off the playground after lunch, Mr. Dooley was tipped back in his chair, his head against the blackboard. His eyes were closed. He jumped when he heard us coming and pretended he hadn’t been asleep at all.

  We had our history and geography lessons, but just before we went home, Rosalind raised her hand. “Does a baby eat when it’s inside its mother?” she asked.

  “Yes, but not the same way we eat,” said Mr. Dooley. “It’s attached to its mother by an umbilical cord—I’ll be showing you pictures of that later—and its nourishment comes through that cord. Sort of like a feeding tube, you might say.”

  We looked at each other, wondering who was going to ask the gross question.

  “Well,” said Sara, “if it eats inside its mother, where does it… ?”

  But Mr. Dooley knew what she was going to ask. “Poop and pee?” he said, and we all laughed out loud. “Well, by the fifth month the fetus begins to urinate—to pee—inside its mother’s womb, that special place where the baby grows. But the urine’s sterile, so it doesn’t do any harm. As for poop, that’s called meconium. It stays inside the baby and comes out after it’s born. As our baby gets bigger, I’ll tell you lots more. The whole story of how a baby grows inside its mother is really quite remarkable!”

  “I think it’s remarkably messy!” said Rosalind, and we all laughed again. That’s what I like most about my two best friends. They always make me laugh.

  At dinner that night I said, “Guess what? Mr. Dooley is having a baby!”

  “Well, that should make medical history,” said Lester.

  “His wife, Lester. I mean, he and his wife are expecting a baby. And that’s why he was late to school this morning. His wife isn’t sleeping so well and neither is he.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Dad. “I remember those early months.”

  I was staring down at my lima beans, thinking about the things Mr. Dooley had drawn on the blackboard. About an elephant carrying a baby for 660 days. “Do I have to have a baby when I grow up?” I asked.

  “No,” said Dad. “Not if you don’t want to. And you don’t have to decide it right now, either.”

  “But do I have to have a baby if I get married?”

  “Nope. You and your husband can decide that together.”

  “Maybe I won’t want any kids, or maybe I’ll just adopt a lot of orphans,” I told him.

  “You could do that, too,” said Dad.

  I was still fooling around with my lima beans when Dad and Lester started their dessert.

  “How come women have to have all the babies? Why can’t men have some of them?” I asked.

  “Ouch!” said Lester.

  “Because men’s bodies weren’t made for babies, Alice. You know that. We couldn’t grow a baby if we tried,” said Dad.

  “No fair!” I complained. “I wish I’d been a boy. I wish I could be a man.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Lester.

  “Why not?”

  “You’d have to shave your face every day or grow a beard.”

  “That wouldn’t be so bad,” I said.

  “You’d have to play football…”

  “Now, Lester,” said Dad.

  “And be in the army…”

  “So what?” I said. “I’ll bet having a baby hurts.”

  “It hurts some, but it didn’t stop your mother from wanting another baby after she’d had Lester,” said Dad. “She wanted you very much, Alice. And besides, doctors know how to keep it from hurting too much.”

  “Yep, after Mom had me, she thought I was so wonderful, she wanted another just like me. And what did she get? You!” said Lester. And that you sounded just like yuck.

  I went to our encyclopedias after dinner and looked up animals. I found the section on birth. Just like Mr. Dooley said, elephants keep their babies inside them the longest. And it said that opossums keep their babies in them the shortest time—only twelve days.

  I called Rosalind and told her about the opossums. I asked her how she would like to carry a baby around inside of her for 660 days. Rosalind didn’t even want to carry a baby for nine months.

  “We wouldn’t have to have human babies,” said Rosalind. “You could work at a zoo with me, and we could take care of animal babies.”

  That seemed like a good idea. But, as Dad said, I didn’t have to decide that right away either.

  8

  THE LIST

  THE NEXT TIME THE NAKED NOMADS came over to practice, Rosalind came along with her brother, so I invited Sara for the afternoon too. Lester doesn’t want me around when his friends come by. He tries to pretend he doesn’t have any sister at all. I’ll bet if Lester had his choice between me and a new car, he’d be driving a Mustang this very minute.

  Dad was in his room with the door closed, trying to order Christmas presents from a catalog. It was hard to find any place in the house to get away from the noise in the basement.

  Rosalind and Sara and I were sprawled across my bed, where Oatmeal was asleep on my pillow. We were looking at old-fashioned paper dolls that Sara had brought over. There were four paper dolls of women of the 1800s, all wearing old-fashioned underwear—long bloomers down below their knees and corsets that squeezed their waists so tight, I’ll bet their stomachs rumbled all the time.

  T
here were paper dresses to fasten on them that reached their ankles and big bonnets and lacy shawls.

  “I’m glad we don’t have to wear all this stuff,” I said, fastening a cape over a woman in a ruffled dress. “I would probably trip and break my legs.”

  “I’ll bet your great-grandmother dressed like this,” said Rosalind.

  “Your great-great-great-grandma, maybe,” said Sara. She was putting different hats on the paper dolls and tried out a hat with ostrich feathers that hung down over the doll’s eyes. She looked at me. “Are you ever going to get another mom?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I’ll bet there are a lot of women who would marry my dad if I asked them. I just can’t think of anyone I’d want to be my mother.”

  “What you need is a list,” said Rosalind.

  “Of people?”

  “Of what you want a new mother to be like,” Rosalind explained.

  “You mean, sort of like ordering from a catalog?” I asked.

  “No. If your dad ever tells you he wants to marry again, then you can give him your list,” Rosalind said.

  So we put the paper dolls away, and I got out my yellow notebook from school. On one side of the top sheet I wrote yes, and on the other side I wrote no.

  “What shall I write in the yes column?” I asked.

  “Write down kind,” said Sara.

  I wrote kind.

  “Good cook,” said Rosalind.

  I wrote that, too.

  “Smart,” said Sara.

  “Doesn’t snore,” said Rosalind. We giggled.

  “Funny,” said Sara. “Sexy.” We laughed some more.

  “What shall I write under no?” I asked.

  “Picks her nose,” said Rosalind.

  “Yells a lot,” said Sara.

  “Cooks squash and spinach,” said Rosalind.

  “Won’t help with your homework,” I said, and wrote it down.

  “Bad breath,” said Rosalind.

  “Rotten teeth.”

  “Cruel.”

  “If your dad ever marries again, Alice,” said Rosalind, “you’d better make him sign a paper that says he won’t marry any woman on your no list.”

  “If he does, you’ll be stuck with her forever,” said Sara.