Alice in Blunderland

  After the Naked Nomads had gone home and Rosalind and Sara had left too, I lay on my bed, Oatmeal purring on my chest, and stared at a crack in the ceiling. I don’t like friends to ask about my mother. It makes me feel different from everyone else. I think they expect me to cry.

  Sometimes I do cry a little bit when I’m alone. I wish I remembered her better. I don’t remember being a baby at all. I can’t remember her rocking me or nursing me or kissing the top of my head, so I don’t know if I’m crying because I miss her or because I miss having any mother at all.

  Dad came out of his bedroom, and I followed him to the kitchen. He says his ears always ring after the Naked Nomads go home.

  “Are you ever going to marry again?” I asked.

  He pulled out a pan to start supper. “I’d like to someday, but I don’t have any prospects at the moment,” he said. He looked at me sort of funny. “Why? Do you have any suggestions?”

  I pushed my list toward him. Dad read down the yes and no columns.

  “Ah! A checklist!” said Dad. “Well, a woman might have a checklist of her own, you know.”

  “What?”

  “She might not want to marry a man who has children. Or she might want a man with a big house. Or she might not want a husband with any gray in his hair. All kinds of things.”

  I never thought of that. I didn’t think that there was any woman in the world who wouldn’t want to marry my dad.

  He got out some meat and started making stew. “She may want to travel, she may hate to cook, she may want a man who will do all the housework, and she may especially hate mess and confusion and…”

  Lester walked in the kitchen just then, still holding his drumsticks.

  “. . . noise,” Dad said.

  “Say what?” said Lester.

  “Al and I were just talking about what a future wife for me ought to be like, and I was explaining that she may have some ideas of her own,” said Dad.

  Lester took out the orange juice, started to drink it right from the carton, then caught Dad’s look and poured some in a glass instead. “Got anybody in mind?” he asked.

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Not the mouth next door, I hope.”

  “Definitely not Mrs. Sheavers,” said Dad.

  “What about the one from your store?” asked Lester. “The severe-looking dame in sheet music.”

  “No. Janice Sherman is just a good friend.”

  “You oughta get out more, Dad. Go to the right clubs. Hang out at the beach in summer. Go where the babes go,” said Lester.

  “What ‘babes’ would those be, Lester?”

  “Well, I guess I don’t know where you’d find women your age,” Lester said.

  “Not the bars or the beach, that’s for sure,” Dad said, smiling a little. “But while I appreciate your suggestions, guys, it’s really up to me. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay by me,” said Lester. “Just let me know before a decision’s final.”

  “Of course,” said Dad.

  My list got me thinking, though, of the kind of person I want to be when I grow up. I want to be funny and smart and kind. How could you make sure you were going to grow up right unless you had somebody to copy? I thought of all the grown women I knew: Aunt Sally; my cousin Carol, who was almost a grown woman; Mrs. Sheavers; Janice Sherman; some of my old teachers. There wasn’t anyone I wanted to be exactly like.

  At school the next day I told Rosalind how I was having trouble finding a woman who was perfect.

  “That’s why I want to work with animals,” said Rosalind.

  “Animals are perfect?”

  “No. But they don’t make fun of you. They don’t talk about you behind your back and say you can’t eat with them at lunch.”

  That was true. “Is that why you want to work in the elephant house at the zoo?” I asked her.

  “Nobody makes fun of an elephant. Not if they know what’s good for them,” she said.

  I was thinking about what Mr. Dooley told us about elephants. “What do you suppose would happen if it was time for a baby elephant to be born and it didn’t want to come out?” I said.

  We thought about that for a minute.

  “Maybe when a baby is ripe, it just falls out,” said Rosalind. “Maybe if you don’t go to the hospital when it’s time, the baby will slide out when you’re at the store or something. Maybe you would go to eat at McDonald’s, and suddenly… whoops! There’s a baby coming out!” She made a face. “Let’s don’t ever get married,” she said.

  “Let’s just live in a big house together—you and me and Sara—and don’t ever have husbands,” I said. “Let’s just have a big farm and raise orphans and stray dogs and cats.”

  “And elephants,” said Rosalind.

  “Okay. We’ll have elephants, too,” I told her.

  9

  CHRISTMAS FOR THREE

  I DON’T REMEMBER ANY CHRISTMAS when there weren’t a lot of people around, but this was going to be the one.

  “Christmas for three!” Dad said brightly, trying to let Lester and me know that it could still be a nice Christmas without Aunt Sally and Uncle Milt and Carol.

  “Christmas for four!” I said. “We have Oatmeal, remember?” Our gray-and-white kitten hadn’t celebrated a Christmas yet.

  “Just keep her away from crinkle ribbon,” said Dad. “Cats will eat anything.”

  “Even ribbon?” I asked.

  “Ha!” said Lester. “Haven’t you ever seen a cat with one end of a ribbon sticking out its mouth and the other end sticking out its rear?”

  “Lester, that’s gross!” I said.

  “Cats are gross,” said Lester. My brother isn’t exactly fond of cats. What I think he is fond of is the girl named Lisa.

  He says she’s just a friend from history class, but I saw her name, Lisa Shane, scribbled in pencil on the back of our phone book, along with her telephone number. I saw the initials LS written in four different directions on the cover of Lester’s three-ring notebook. One night when he was talking to her on the phone, he was doodling on the telephone pad, and when I looked at it later, I saw that he had drawn pairs of eyes with eyelashes all over the notepad and had written Lisalisalisalisalisa all over the place. If that’s not love, what is it?

  One night Lester and I were doing the dishes, and I said, “Lisa’s your girlfriend, isn’t she?”

  “No,” said Lester. “Just a friend.”

  “Ha!” I said. “You’ve got her name on everything! I don’t see Mickey Larson’s name on everything.”

  “I’m just being nice to a girl who needs a friend,” said Lester.

  I took the dish he handed me and wiped it dry. When Lester and I do the dishes together, we don’t use the dishwasher because then we won’t have to empty it later.

  “Why does she need friends so bad?” I asked.

  “Well,” said Lester, “she’s an orphan, and she was adopted by this really mean couple. They make her work day and night, and only give her scraps of food from the table. They didn’t want a daughter, they just wanted a servant. She cries herself to sleep.”

  I looked at Lester. “Is this really true?”

  “Of course!”

  “Why doesn’t she run away?” I asked.

  “Where would she go?” asked Lester.

  “She could come and live with us.”

  Lester shook his head. “They’d never let her.”

  “So how can you help?” I asked.

  “Oh, I buy her things and talk to her. She’s saving up enough money for a plane ticket. Then she’s going someplace they’ll never find her. China, I think.”

  That was a really sad story, and I was proud of my brother for wanting to help Lisa Shane. “Her parents don’t beat her, do they?”

  “Every night,” said Lester.

  “She should tell somebody!” I said.

  “Her father would beat her all the harder if she did. That’s why she wants to go to Ja
pan.”

  “I thought you said China.”

  “Right. China… Japan. It doesn’t make any difference.”

  “What would she do there, Lester?” I asked.

  “Oh, she wants to help out people who work in rice paddies. She’s got a heart of gold,” he said. “I’m just trying to be her friend and help her save enough money to buy a plane ticket.”

  I wished we could invite her over here, but Lester said her adoptive parents wouldn’t let her. No, he just has to be the best friend he can, but he can’t help worrying about her.

  It was really sad about Lisa Shane, but I decided I wouldn’t let anything ruin Christmas. Just like Dad said, it would be a cozy little Christmas for three. Four, counting Oatmeal.

  The week before Christmas everyone is excited and fidgety at school, even people who don’t celebrate Christmas. Jody and Ollie are Jewish, so they don’t have Christmas at their houses, but they get the same vacation we do.

  “What do you do on Christmas?” I asked Jody.

  “Go to the movies,” she said. “We have a big breakfast at Grandma and Grandpa’s, and then all of our aunts and uncles and cousins go to the movies. And it’s never crowded.”

  Mr. Dooley was excited too. He said that his wife thought maybe she had felt their baby move around inside her that morning, and it’s always a big moment when a baby starts to kick.

  “Does it hurt?” Sara wanted to know.

  “No. It’s more like a little flutter,” said Mr. Dooley. “My wife says it feels like a butterfly batting its wings inside her.”

  Somehow I liked the idea of a baby inside me more than I liked the idea of a butterfly flying around, flapping its wings and trying to get out. I looked at Rosalind. She was looking at me. We were definitely not going to have babies when we grew up. No butterfly babies for us!

  Dad came home with a huge Christmas tree. It smelled as though it had been freshly cut and was one of the biggest trees I’d ever seen. It was so tall, we had to saw off some of the trunk so it wouldn’t scrape the ceiling.

  “Just because there’s only three of us doesn’t mean we can’t have a big tree,” said Dad.

  “Way to go, Pop!” said Lester.

  We had two strings of lights, but they covered only half the tree, so Lester strung them all in front where we could see them. We didn’t have nearly enough ornaments, either.

  “Are we poor, Dad?” I asked, gently lifting out the angel that went at the top of the tree.

  “We’re not exactly rich,” he answered. “Music stores don’t pay their employees a whole lot of money, but it’s work I love to do. Why?”

  “Everything we have is old.”

  “That’s because I figured it would cost more to move our furniture from Chicago to Takoma Park than it would to just sell it and buy some used furniture here. We’re just average, Alice. Not rich, not poor. We’re in-between.”

  I thought about that a minute. “I know!” I said. “Why don’t I have a Christmas party and invite some friends to come over and make ornaments for our tree!”

  “Great idea!” said Dad. “Friday night would be the best for me.”

  “The Naked Nomads are coming over to practice then,” said Lester. “The mall wants amateur groups to come by and play Christmas carols on Saturday. We’re scheduled from ten thirty in the morning to eleven.”

  “Christmas carols? The Naked Nomads?” said Dad in surprise. “Well, Alice, I guess you’ll have live music for your party, then, won’t you?”

  I didn’t invite any boys. I didn’t want to even think about having to marry any of the boys in my class when I was grown up, even though Donald Sheavers was supposed to be my boyfriend.

  So Megan and Dawn and Jody and Rosalind and Sara all came over after dinner on Friday to help decorate our tree.

  “It’s such a big tree, we sort of ran out of stuff,” I said.

  “Popcorn!” said Rosalind, who always thinks of food first. “If you have a big needle and a long piece of thread and some popcorn, we could string that to go on the tree.”

  Dad was in the dining room addressing Christmas cards. “I’ll make the popcorn,” he said. “And let me look for some needles and thread.”

  “We could use foil wrap to make stars,” said Jody.

  “Foil wrap coming up,” said Dad.

  I found some old Barbie doll dresses with spangles on them. We cut them into pieces to wrap around acorns from my collection, and then we tucked those among the branches of the tree.

  The Naked Nomads came over around eight thirty. Pretty soon we heard them tuning up in the basement.

  “That’s ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem,’ ” Dad said, surprised, I guess, that he could actually recognize something.

  While Rosalind and Dawn were stringing popcorn and Jody was making foil stars, Sara and Megan and I went into my room to see if we could find anything else to go on the tree. We found a red Barbie doll shoe, a purple glass necklace, a gold-colored ring, and some seashells.

  “It’s a very unusual-looking tree,” said Dawn. “All it needs now is a paper-clip chain.”

  So we made a paper-clip chain. After that we put all my bracelets on the branches, and then we dangled some old cuff links of Dad’s from the highest branch. Dad even took a picture when we were through.

  But it was sad thinking how much fun we were having and what a hard life Lester’s friend Lisa Shane had. So when we took a break and went to my room, I closed the door behind me and told my five friends that I had a secret. But I couldn’t tell them, I said, unless they promised me on their word of honor they would never, ever tell.

  Rosalind, who was opening and closing my dresser drawers, turned around, and her mouth fell open. “What?” she said.

  “I can’t tell unless you promise you will never give away this secret, because if you do, something horrible will happen,” I said.

  “We promise,” everybody said together.

  But that wasn’t enough. I put my hand on my dresser and made Sara put her hand on top of mine, then Megan’s on top of Sara’s, until all twelve of our hands were piled one on top of the other. Everyone’s eyes were on me. Sara’s nose was stuffed up, and we were so quiet that I could even hear her breathing through her mouth.

  “If you ever tell what I’m going to tell you, a girl will be beaten black and blue,” I said.

  I think Jody and Dawn stopped breathing.

  “We promise promise!” Megan said.

  We all climbed up on my bed and sat in a circle. I told them about Lisa Shane—how she was beaten and half starved by her adoptive parents and how Lester was secretly helping her save enough money to go to China.

  “What’s she going to do in China?” asked Dawn.

  “Work in a rice paddy,” I said.

  “Why doesn’t she go to Paris or someplace?” asked Megan. “If I were going to run away, I wouldn’t go to a rice paddy.”

  “Because she loves other people and knows what it’s like to be poor,” I said.

  “We could help her!” said Sara. “We could each save up a little bit of money and maybe send it to her as a present!”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” I said.

  “Maybe we could put some food in it too,” said Rosalind.

  “Does she have enough clothes?” asked Dawn.

  “I’ll bet she only wears clothes with long sleeves so no one can see the bruises,” said Jody.

  “When should we send her the stuff?” asked Rosalind.

  “Why don’t we wait till we’ve collected twenty dollars, and then we’ll put everything in a box and mail it,” I told them. “But we can’t let any one know. It’s just our secret.”

  “We’ll be the Secret Six!” said Rosalind.

  We all put our hands together again, one on top of the other, and said that if any of us ever told Lisa Shane’s secret, may all the trees in a forest fall on that person’s head.

  We went back out in the living room. The Naked Nomads had been prac
ticing for an hour, and Lester came upstairs to ask Dad how they sounded. I saw all the girls look at Lester sorrowfully.

  “Sounds pretty cool to me,” Dad said. “A little less saxophone on ‘Silent Night,’ and I think you could do a bit more with the drum on ‘We Three Kings.’ Use the wood block, maybe—like horses’ hooves, you know?”

  “Camels,” I said.

  “Whatever,” said Lester.

  Dad got out the ice cream then, a half gallon of chocolate chunk and a half gallon of Rocky Road, and made hot-fudge sauce so we could have sundaes. Everyone, even the Naked Nomads, sat around the living room eating hot-fudge sundaes and taking turns dragging a long string with popcorn on the end for Oatmeal to chase.

  “I wish we could share this ice cream with Lisa Shane,” Megan whispered.

  “Me too,” I told her.

  When everyone had gone home, Lester and I turned out all the lights except the ones on the tree, and then the three of us sat down together to admire it. It was still sort of bare in places, but it was our tree.

  “It looks like bargain day at the five-and-ten,” Lester said.

  “I think it’s beautiful,” I told him. I turned to Dad. “Would Mom have liked this tree?”

  “She would have loved it. She liked to make things out of nothing,” Dad said.

  Lester put his hands behind his head, stretched out his legs, and studied the tree some more. All three of us were quiet for a while.

  “I miss having a mom at Christmas,” I said finally in a small voice.

  “I miss Marie all the time,” said Dad. “But especially at Christmas. She loved to give homemade presents. Les, do you remember when we built a wagon for you out of an old apple box and some wheels? It was about the ugliest thing I ever saw, but Marie gave you some spray paint, and you made a royal mess.”

  “I don’t remember the wagon very well, but I remember the paint,” Lester said. “I painted it blue first, and then I made zigzag lines in yellow, and they all turned green. I couldn’t figure it out.”

  We laughed.

  “What else did we do when Mom was alive?” I asked.

  “Well, let’s see.” Dad had his arm around me, and he patted my shoulder. “Your mother was crazy about snow. Once she got you and Lester up at midnight because there had been a beautiful snowfall. We put you both on a sled and pulled you around the neighborhood in the dark.”