Reluctantly Alice

  “What kind is that?”

  “Who lets people take pictures of her in bathtubs.”

  “But you are! I mean, you did!” I said, and she started bawling again.

  I walked into our house, dumped my book bag on the floor, and bellowed, “I am resigning from the female species forever!”

  “Welcome to the world of men,” Lester said over his bag of pretzels.

  I plopped myself down across from him. “Lester, if somebody gave you pictures of Marilyn and Crystal in the bathtub, what would you do with them?”

  “Tape them on the ceiling over my bed,” he said.

  I gave him a look and went upstairs. But the worst was yet to come. The phone rang, and it was Elizabeth’s mother.

  “Alice,” she said sternly. “Would you come over, please? I’d like to talk with you.”

  I went back downstairs. “If I don’t come home,” I told him, “you can have everything in my room except my bracelet from Niagara Falls.” And I marched across the street.

  Mrs. Price met me at the door. Elizabeth was sitting in a corner of the living room, her eyes red, and she didn’t even look up when I came in. I could tell that, mad as she was at me, she was still embarrassed that her mother had called me over.

  “Please sit down, Alice,” Mrs. Price said, and took a chair across from me. “I am very disappointed in you. Elizabeth gave you those pictures in confidence, and you had no right to make poster prints and give them out at school.”

  I tried to explain how Pamela had been mad at me and how I didn’t want Elizabeth to feel left out.

  Mrs. Price stared at me. “How could you possibly think Elizabeth would be angry if she didn’t have a picture of herself in the bathtub pinned up on the school bulletin board?”

  I knew that didn’t sound right. “I don’t know,” I said miserably. “I guess I take stupid pills.” I mean, what was there to say? Elizabeth was staring down at her lap, but I could tell she was trying not to smile when I said that.

  Mrs. Price was quiet a moment. Then: “We have her reputation to think about, after all.”

  I nodded.

  “So, Alice, if you’ll promise that you’ll never show that picture to anyone else, I won’t object if you and Elizabeth remain friends.”

  I didn’t tell her I’d already torn it up. “I promise not to show it to anyone else if Elizabeth will promise not to take any more pictures of me in the bathtub the next time I come over here for a sleepover.”

  Mrs. Price looked horrified. “But . . . it was just a girlish idea. . . . I mean, it wasn’t for anyone else to see.” She was flustered. “Surely, Alice, the other students don’t think that this is the kind of thing we do when girls come to visit Elizabeth.”

  “Well,” I said, “it never happened at anyone else’s house.”

  Elizabeth had pressed her lips together, trying hard not to laugh, and watching Elizabeth made my own mouth start to stretch, and suddenly we couldn’t hold back any longer.

  Mrs. Price looked from me to Elizabeth and back again. Then she started laughing too. “This is getting sillier by the minute,” she said. “What do you say we forget the whole thing?”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “Agreed,” said Elizabeth. She followed me out on the porch, and we laughed some more.

  After dinner that night, I got a saucer of graham crackers and stood in the doorway of the dining room where Dad was working on some papers at his table.

  “Dad,” I said, “how do you go your whole life without ever having anyone mad at you? I mean, how can you be a person that everybody likes?”

  “You can’t,” said Dad, and went on writing.

  “Well, how can I go for at least a year with everyone liking me?”

  “Impossible.”

  I came over and sat down across from him.

  “Toots,” said Dad. Sometimes he called me “Toots” when he wants to be really serious. “People who try to please everybody all the time turn out like oatmeal. You know that, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “They become so bland, so boring, that no one can get very interested in them.”

  I wondered if that’s what happened to Mr. Hensley.

  “What you have to do first of all is be true to Alice McKinley. And if you’re the best Alice you can be, you’ll just naturally respect the right of other people to be themselves.”

  I ate another cracker and thought it over. “Is that something Mom would have said, or is that from you?”

  “Consider that from both of us.” Dad smiled.

  I sighed. “I’m on good terms with Mr. Hensley again. I’ve made up with Pamela and Elizabeth, but I still don’t know what to do about Denise Whitlock.”

  “I really can’t tell you what to do, Al. I think that this one requires creative thinking.”

  “But I never did anything to her! She has no reason to hate me!”

  “That’s life, Al. Sometimes people hate other people for reasons they don’t even understand themselves. But I trust you to think up something, and I have the feeling that when the time comes, you’ll know what to do.”

  “To get even?”

  “I didn’t say that, did I?”

  I kept wondering what Dad meant. All I could think of was how wonderful it would be to wait until Denise was in the shower in P.E., and then take not only her towel but her clothes as well and stuff them all in one of the toilets. I thought of the way she would look when she opened the shower curtain and discovered her towel was gone. How she’d have to walk naked out to the towel table to get another. How she’d come hulking back to her dressing cubicle, mad as blazes, to find that all her clothes were gone. How she’d beat me to a pulp. That wasn’t the solution to anything, but I didn’t have the foggiest idea what was.

  12

  TAKING CHANCES

  THINGS HAD BEEN GETTING WORSE, NOT better, between Denise Whitlock and me. At first she hadn’t seemed to like me because she didn’t like all that snuffling and sneezing behind her in Language Arts. She disliked me even more when I got interviewed for the school newspaper. Then the three things happened she just couldn’t forgive: Lester rescued me on Seventh-Grade Sing Day just when she had center stage; I laughed when she fell on her stomach in P.E.; and boys started calling me “Bubbles.” Even though my hay fever was gone by December, the message was written all over her face—hers and her crowd’s: Get Alice. It seemed as though they were just after me because I was there, because it had become a habit.

  They purposely bumped into me in the gym; tripped me in the halls; flipped food at me in the cafeteria; laughed at every mistake, every flub; teased me about my hair, my clothes. If I ignored them, it didn’t help. If I tried to laugh it off, it didn’t help. If I was rude in return, it made things worse.

  “I’d paste them one,” said Pamela. “The next time you go by their table, drop an open carton of milk down Denise’s fat neck.”

  “If it was me, I’d go to the principal,” Elizabeth said. “I’d make him call Denise in and sit there while I told all the rotten things she’d done to me.”

  I was tempted, I’ll admit. But I realized I had to make up my mind: Did I want to solve the problem or just get even?

  I guess what I really wanted to do was get even first, then solve the problem, but the thing about getting even is you never do. When I sat down in my seat in Language Arts, though, and found that Denise had smeared Vaseline all over my desktop, I wanted in the worst way to clobber her, but how could I ever prove she’d done it?

  “Al, what in the world did that pork chop ever do to you?” Les said at dinner. “You don’t have to mutilate it.” Dad was working late, and Lester and I had actually made a gourmet meal for just the two of us: pork chops and applesauce. “What’s wrong?”

  “Denise Whitlock.”

  “Denise Mack-Truck Whitlock?”

  “That’s the one.” I told him all the things she’d done lately.

  “It’s time to get tough, Al
. Cream her.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Just haul off and let her have it.”

  “I’d get called to the principal’s office.”

  “Go! Make a splash! Cause an uproar!”

  I thought about it as I finished my meat. Would that be enough? I wondered. Even if I told the principal everything Denise had done to me and he punished her, too, even if her friends didn’t pile up on me after school, she’d still go on hating my guts.

  Lester went out later, so I decided to call Aunt Sally long distance. This was a big enough problem to see if she had any suggestions.

  “Alice, dear, how are you?” she asked as soon as she heard my voice.

  “Not so good,” I answered. “Aunt Sally, what do you do when there’s this girl who hates you?” And I told her a few things about Denise.

  “Well, dear, it’s difficult, I know, but I firmly believe that there’s a soft spot in that girl, and if you can find it, you’ll win her over.”

  I imagined probing Denise in the back during Language Arts, looking for her soft spot. I imagined Denise turning around and pasting me in the mouth.

  “Here’s what you do,” said Aunt Sally. “You give a little Christmas party for some of your friends and invite Denise.”

  My stomach turned. “She wouldn’t come,” I said.

  “Tell her there’s a special present under your tree just for her. No girl can refuse a present.”

  “What if she still wouldn’t come?”

  “Tell her your big brother will be there and wants to meet her. Girls always like to meet their friends’ brothers.”

  I almost choked. “They’ve already met,” I said plaintively, and told her about Seventh-Grade Sing Day.

  “Oh, my, this is serious!” said Aunt Sally. “What you’ve got to do, then, is write her a letter and tell her how much you want to be her friend.”

  “But I don’t!” I bleated. “I just want her to leave me alone.”

  “Write her a letter,” Aunt Sally insisted, “and enclose a friendship ring. Tell her you bought it just for her.”

  I tried to imagine writing a letter like that to Denise. I imagined Denise going to school the next day and telling everyone that I had proposed. I imagined her wearing the ring in her ear. Her nose. Pinning my letter up on the bulletin board outside the cafeteria. I wondered if when my mom and Aunt Sally were girls, Aunt Sally had given Mom the same stupid advice she gave me. I wondered why I kept calling Aunt Sally in the first place.

  I thanked her for her suggestion, said yes, we were all eating vegetables now and then, and no, Dad wasn’t engaged or anything, and then I said good-bye and hung up. I decided that Dad had been right all along. This was a problem no one else could solve but me. I had to figure out how to deal with Denise all by myself.

  When Dad came home later, he looked sort of down-in-the-mouth, sad and discouraged, and it occurred to me that Helen Lake had promised to visit him in November, and here it was December and she hadn’t come. I couldn’t believe I’d been so selfish that I hadn’t even thought about Dad’s problems. Only mine.

  I heated up his dinner for him and then sat across the table while he ate.

  “When’s Helen Lake coming to visit, Dad?” I asked. Tactful, that’s me.

  “She isn’t,” he said. “I had a letter from her a few days ago.”

  I waited. Something was wrong, then. “She’s not coming at all? Ever?”

  Dad smiled just a little. “Well, ‘ever’ is a long time. Let’s just say she’s not coming any time soon.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  And when Dad realized I wasn’t going to get up and walk away, he said, “It’s like this, Al. Helen Lake and Janice Sherman have been friends for a long time—longer than I’ve known either one of them. And Helen realized that if I were to become serious about her, it would hurt their friendship. So she’s opted to stay friends with Janice.”

  “You mean she chickened out,” I said. “You mean she lost her chance to get married to the greatest man she’ll ever meet.”

  “Hey, wait a minute! Who’s talking marriage?” Dad grinned. “But I appreciate the compliment.”

  I wanted to make December really special for Dad after that, and when Monday of the second week came around, I decided to concentrate only on Christmas. Loretta Jenkins had holiday decorations up in the Gift Shoppe at the Melody Inn, we already had a light snow, I was getting along with all my teachers, and we were playing basketball in P.E. It was a time for gifts and music and evergreen and being nice to everybody. Mr. Hensley even wore a tie to class that day with microscopic bits of red in it.

  I especially liked my Language Arts class because Miss Summers, with her blue-green eyes, made me forget about the fact that Denise was in it. Watching my teacher move about the front of the room, listening to her read in her velvety voice, I remembered how desperately I’d wanted to be in beautiful Miss Cole’s room back in sixth grade, and how disappointed I was that I’d gotten Mrs. Plotkin instead. And now I wondered what Mrs. Plotkin was doing this Christmas and decided I’d send her a card. I was feeling kind toward the whole human race. That’s what Christmas does for you, see. One thing leads to another. One minute I was listening to Miss Summers read The Lady and the Tiger, and the next I was thinking about my sixth-grade teacher.

  Everybody, I guess, gets a little mellow around Christmas. Dad and Lester and I aren’t real big on shopping, though. At Christmas we usually think of what we’re going to do together instead of what we’re going to give each other, so I wasn’t surprised when Dad said that evening, “I’ve got three tickets for the Messiah Sing-Along. You two want to go?”

  “Sure, why not?” said Lester.

  “Al?”

  “Yeah, I’ll go,” I said.

  We’ve been going to Messiah Sing-Alongs as far back as I can remember, even in Chicago. If you’re going to be one of the singers instead of the audience, you come early and practice a little. There’s an orchestra and paid singers for the solo parts, but the public is invited to be part of the chorus.

  Because Dad started taking me with him when I was small, I’ve always stood next to him, even though I don’t sing. Dad’s a tenor, and tenors stand next to altos, and he always manages to stand just at the edge of the tenors so I blend in with the women and don’t look weird or anything. I think Dad lets me sit with the singers in hopes that all this music around me will cure my tone deafness, and of course it doesn’t, but I like being in the middle of all that noise. I especially love it when everyone stands to sing the Hallelujah Chorus. I just hum through the other parts, and in the “Hallelujah,” everyone sings so loud that what I do doesn’t matter. I sound just fine to me.

  What I also like about December are the carols. Dad brings home new CDs of Christmas music, so I can hear my favorite carols in a dozen different styles. “The Cherry Tree Carol” is one of my favorites—how Mary’s engaged to Joseph, and she tells him she’s pregnant by someone else. Wow! What a shocker! We’ve got two versions of that. In the first one, Mary asks Joseph to pick some cherries for her, but he gets mad and says the father of her baby can do it. Then the cherry tree bows low so Mary can pick them herself, and Joseph just stands around. In the second version, Joseph apologizes to Mary because he knows she’s going to be the Mother of Jesus.

  The next evening I’d just finished listening to the second version when Lester came home from the library.

  “Lester,” I said, “if you were engaged to Marilyn and she told you she was pregnant by someone else, what would you do?”

  Lester hung up his jacket. “Is this a trick question?”

  “Just checking,” I told him.

  The rest of the week was a week of taking chances, and it all happened in Miss Summers’s classroom. We had already done folktales, fables, and legends, and were finishing up a unit on the short story. Miss Summers mentioned that next semester we’d be reading biographies, autobiographies, and novels, and some of the class groaned.


  She pushed her papers aside and came around to sit on the edge of her desk, the way she does when she has something important to say.

  “I know that some of you think you don’t like to read full-length books, but maybe, just maybe, you’re in for a surprise,” she said in her low voice. Her voice and her skin and her coral-colored sweater all seemed made out of the same soft stuff.

  “I used to feel that way about music,” she told us. “Classical music, I mean—music by Mozart and Brahms and Beethoven.” She made a little face, and the tiny frown lines made pink creases in her forehead. “It just sounded like noise to me—all those violins and horns twanging and blaring at once. But I knew there must be something to it because so many people love it. I made up my mind that every day for a week, when I was preparing my dinner at night, I would play Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony. It wouldn’t be like an assignment. I didn’t have to listen closely or anything. Just play the music. By the third evening I was beginning to hear melodies that were familiar. I realized I was listening for certain passages, and it was then I discovered just how full and rich and wonderful that kind of music can be. Every time I hear it again, there are surprises—things I hadn’t caught before, and I’m always sorry when it’s over.”

  She smiled at the class. “That’s the way it is with books. Good books—full and rich and deep. And that’s what I want you to discover. If you’re in my class next semester, we’re not going to worry so much about grammar. Don’t even think about how you’re going to sound when you read reports to the class. All I want you to do is enjoy. I want you to discover the pleasure of reading.”

  I was so glad I was scheduled for Miss Summers’s class next semester, I wanted to stand up and shout. For once in my life things were going my way.

  And suddenly I wasn’t thinking about books or school or Denise or even Christmas. I was thinking about Miss Summers cooking dinner all by herself, loving Mozart and Brahms and Beethoven, and when the bell rang at the end of class, I found my feet walking up to her desk, my face stretching into a smile, and my lips saying: