Reluctantly Alice

  I had no idea, however, what was ahead.

  3

  SLEEPING OVER

  THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, ALL THREE OF us—Pamela, Elizabeth, and I—were a little amazed we’d survived the first two weeks of junior high. After making the mistake the first day of asking a ninth grader where the girls’ gym was and being sent to the faculty lounge, finding out that the signs had been reversed on the boys’ and girls’ restrooms up on second, and even after my falling down the stairs and sitting on a doughnut, we were still alive to talk about it.

  “Let’s have a sleepover,” Elizabeth said on the bus going home. And then, as soon as we nodded our heads, she added, “We had it at my house last time.”

  “We had it at mine the time before,” Pamela reminded us.

  There was only one possible response to that: “We can have it at mine,” I told them.

  “For dinner or after?” Pamela asked.

  “Dinner, of course,” I said.

  The truth is that in the year since Dad and Lester and I had moved to Silver Spring, I’d never had my friends in for an overnight except for that one week at the ocean, but that was someone else’s house. I knew that the girls wanted to sleep in my room, in my house, but our house isn’t exactly the overnight kind.

  When we sleep over at Elizabeth’s, we sleep in her bedroom with the twin beds, which we push together to sleep on crosswise, and her mother brings in platters of cookies and fruit slices with toothpicks in them. When we sleep over at Pamela’s, we sleep on a hide-a-bed and a cot in the family room, and her mother makes us waffles for breakfast. At my house, there’s a single bed in my room, and Dad’s idea of a party is to buy me a bag of potato chips. Breakfast is Special K, Corn Chex, or Cheerios.

  “Dad,” I said as soon as he walked in the door that evening. “In forty-five minutes Pamela and Elizabeth are coming here to sleep over, and we’re supposed to give them dinner.”

  “You’re just now telling me this?”

  “Well, we sort of decided it on the bus coming home—Elizabeth and Pamela did, anyway. I’ve never had them here, Dad, and I’ve been to their houses lots.”

  “True,” Dad said.

  “Where are they going to sleep?”

  “Tell them to bring sleeping bags.”

  “Elizabeth doesn’t have one.”

  “She can use Lester’s, or we can get out the army cot in the basement,” Dad said.

  I swallowed. “What will we serve for dinner? It’s supposed to be something special.”

  Dad opened the cupboard. “Beans and franks, Campbell’s noodle, SpaghettiOs, sardines . . .”

  I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes.

  “Chinese . . .”

  “What?” My eyes popped open.

  Dad was grinning. “We’ll order Chinese.”

  I threw my arms around him.

  By the time Elizabeth and Pamela came over, Lester was on his way to pick up some cashew chicken, sweet and sour shrimp, beef with snow peas, and fried wonton. Well, I thought to myself, maybe we don’t have the right furniture, but at least we’ve got the right food.

  To tell the truth, our house is weird. Dad told me once that when Mama was alive, we had regular furniture like everyone else. But then, when it was just Dad and Lester and me, and the Melody Inn music chain transferred Dad to Maryland, he decided that Mom’s furniture was just too much to handle. So he kept just a few pieces, gave the rest to Aunt Sally, and we moved from Chicago to Takoma Park to Silver Spring like gypsies, buying a few things here and there from secondhand shops and the Door Store.

  From the outside we’re not too weird—just a regular sort of two-story house, with a front porch. We live in an old neighborhood in Silver Spring, just outside of Washington, D.C., and none of the houses are modern, so ours looks like all the rest.

  But when you walk inside you don’t see any rugs. You see this couch that looks like it was built out of packing crates, because it was, with cushions piled on top, and a beanbag chair, a couple of aluminum lawn chairs, and this huge round coffee table we got from Goodwill that takes up half the living room. There are brick-and-board bookcases, Dad’s piano, and wherever there’s a bare place on the walls, there’s a poster of either some wonderful place to visit, like Barcelona or Copenhagen, or a poster about a composer. Except that some of the posters advertising places have people on them, and some of the people posters have the composer’s birthplace instead. I was nine years old before I discovered that Lepzig wasn’t a composer and Liszt wasn’t a town in Austria.

  Our kitchen is big, but the table’s so small that only Dad, Lester, and I can fit around it, and our dining room is really Dad’s office. The only way we can serve dinner in there is to push all his stuff over to one side of the long fold-up table. On this night, though, there wasn’t time to move Dad’s stuff, so when Lester came back from the China Palace with the food, we all sat on pillows on the floor around the giant coffee table and ate with chopsticks.

  I could tell that this was a big deal for Pamela and Elizabeth, especially because we were eating entirely with men. Pamela giggled every time her knee touched Lester’s, and Elizabeth giggled whenever she dropped something with her chopsticks. We sure did a lot of giggling. I never noticed it at school, but here in the living room with Dad and Lester, it sounded really weird.

  Lester, though, was the perfect gentleman. “More chicken, madam?” he asked Elizabeth.

  “Another wonton, ladies?”

  “Anyone for some more hot tea?”

  Dad gave us a little lesson on the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin cooking, and how oyster beef doesn’t have any oysters in it.

  I think it would have been a normal dinner and a normal sleepover if we just hadn’t read our fortune cookies. Dad’s said something about the importance of being thrifty, and Dad says he hates to be preached at by a fortune cookie.

  Mine was about wisdom, and Lester’s was “A singing bird makes a merry heart.” It was Elizabeth’s and Pamela’s fortunes that started the trouble.

  Elizabeth takes things too seriously, anyway, and when she read hers aloud, her face turned as red as tomato soup: “A good friend will become a dear one,” she said in almost a whisper.

  Now if that had been anyone but Elizabeth, she would have named a few kids from school, considered the possibilities, and thrown the fortune away. Instead, she glanced sideways at Lester and blushed some more. As though Lester didn’t have enough woman problems as it was. I tried to rescue him by handing Pamela a cookie next. But when she read her fortune aloud, I wished I hadn’t: “One touch is worth a hundred words,” it said.

  The problem was that her knee happened to be touching Lester’s at that very moment, all of us sitting cross-legged around the coffee table. She and Elizabeth exchanged glances and then they both dissolved into giggles again. Lester didn’t even catch on.

  “See?” he said. “That’s not a fortune, that’s a proverb. I want a fortune that says, ‘You will inherit a million dollars’ or even ‘Horrible things will happen on Wednesday.’”

  Pamela and Elizabeth were still erupting in embarrassed giggles, and Dad and Lester didn’t quite know what to do, so they started carrying dishes out to the kitchen and I herded the girls upstairs.

  Elizabeth took the bed, Pamela got the cot, and I got Lester’s smelly sleeping bag on the floor. We had Lester’s portable TV for the evening, so we watched for a while, then looked through the Seventeen magazine that Elizabeth had brought over, but it wasn’t long before I discovered that there was only one thing Pamela and Elizabeth wanted to talk about: Lester.

  “He’s really cute, Alice,” Pamela said.

  “Lester?” I said, disbelieving.

  “I love his mustache,” said Elizabeth dreamily. “I forget. Is his hair brown or black?”

  I looked from Pamela to Elizabeth. But before I could answer, they heard Lester coming upstairs. Pamela ran to the door to peek out, then shut it in a hurry, raced back to the
cot, and had another giggling fit. When Lester came out of his room again, Elizabeth peeked out and then banged the door hard and collapsed on the bed in embarrassment.

  “He was going into the bathroom!” she said. “Oh, Alice, and he saw me looking.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “He knows you know that he goes to the bathroom.”

  “I could just die,” said Elizabeth.

  I wondered if this is what happens to girls when they’re twelve—they go bonkers over “older men.” It was only a few weeks ago that Elizabeth was going to become a nun and Pamela had broken up with Mark Stedmeister, and here they were, losing their minds over Lester. Lester! I decided that if they didn’t calm down, I was going to dig up his socks from the hamper and give one to each of them, to shock them back to their senses.

  “Does he have a girlfriend?” Pamela asked, as the sound of Lester’s electric razor came from the bathroom.

  “Yes,” I told them. “Two of them. And he’s probably going to marry one.”

  Their faces dropped. “Is he engaged?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Well . . . not yet,” I said, and they were off again, like two horses at the starting gate. They made me turn out the light, and then they opened the door a crack and stood there watching as Lester came out of the bathroom buttoning his shirt and went into his room to put on some aftershave.

  “Ohhh!” Elizabeth said weakly. “He smells wonderful!”

  They wanted to follow his every move, and even after he went downstairs on his way over to Marilyn’s, they stood at the top of the stairs and watched him put on his jacket, then raced to a window to watch him drive away.

  After they went home the next morning, I went to the Melody Inn to put in my three hours. This time Janice Sherman seemed to have undergone a personality change. She must have decided that she wasn’t going to get anywhere being quiet and sad, so she was sparkly and funny instead, sort of like soda water.

  “Well, Alice!” she said brightly. Too brightly. “What are we going to do today? Hula with Haydn? Boogie with Beethoven? A little soft shoe with Shostakovich?”

  I stared. I had never heard Janice Sherman say the word “boogie” in my life. I couldn’t even imagine her dancing. She was wearing a pink-and-gray plaid skirt with a pink sweater instead of her usual suit and blouse.

  “Sometimes,” Janice went on dreamily, “I just feel like closing up shop and flying away on a magic carpet to some far-off exotic land. Do you ever feel that way—that you’d like to do something wild and daring?”

  If Crystal Harkins or Marilyn had said that, I would have gotten right into the spirit of things. I’d have thought of something wild and fun I’d like to do and told them about it. But listening to Janice Sherman say it, I felt a little sad, because I knew she only wanted me to go back and tell Dad what a fun, exciting person she really was. The most daring thing I’d ever seen Janice do in the few years I’d known her was climb a stepladder.

  That evening, when Dad and I were eating the leftover cashew chicken, I was about to tell him how Elizabeth and Pamela were in love with Lester when Dad said, “Al, do you remember Helen Lake?”

  The name seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I shook my head.

  “The woman who owns the beach cottage next to Janice’s?”

  “Oh, her,” I said. “Yeah?”

  “She’s coming to Washington on a visit, and I’ve invited her and Janice Sherman to a concert.”

  “You’ve already asked them?” I said.

  “Yes. I wrote Helen a few days ago and mentioned it to Janice this afternoon.”

  I stared at Dad like he had just turned into a giant toadstool. It was as though Lester had said he was going to marry both Marilyn and Crystal.

  “I’ve been wondering if I should have the women here for dinner first—maybe Chinese, like we had last night—or take them both to a restaurant. What do you think, Al?”

  “I think you have lost your mind,” I said.

  Dad looked up from his plate. “You don’t think I should bring them here? We’d use the dining room, of course.”

  “I don’t think you should take them anywhere, Dad. Not together.”

  Dad paused with his fork in the air. “Why not?”

  I couldn’t believe he was so dense. “Janice Sherman will kill you! Or strangle Helen Lake, one or the other.”

  This time Dad put his fork down. “Why?”

  I stared right into his eyes. “This may come as a surprise to you, Dad, but Janice has been nuts about you ever since you became manager of the Melody Inn.”

  For about ten seconds all you could hear in the kitchen was the hum of the refrigerator.

  “You’re kidding,” said Dad.

  I think that men and boys lack a certain chromosome or something. I mean, things happen right under their noses and they can’t even see it.

  “I’m not kidding. Janice has been making eyes at you for a whole year. Why do you think she let us use her beach house without charging us anything?”

  “Because I’m her boss, Al, that’s all. She’s just trying to stay on good terms with me. That’s all it is.”

  “Dad, Janice has been depressed ever since we got back from the ocean. She let us use her cottage for a whole week, and what did she get out of it?”

  “I brought her that bushel of fresh vegetables we picked up on the way home.”

  “She doesn’t want vegetables. She wants you! Ever since she found out you’d been visiting Helen Lake at her cottage, she’s been really upset. She keeps quizzing me about what you did and who you saw while we were at Ocean City. I’m not telling you to date Janice Sherman. All I’m saying is that if you want to live a long healthy life, don’t take them both out at the same time.”

  Dad stopped eating entirely. Every time he raised his fork to his mouth, his eyes would glaze over and he’s put it back down again. “By Jove,” he said finally. And then, “Al, I wonder if you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right. If you proposed to Janice Sherman tomorrow, you’d be married by Tuesday.”

  “But what did I ever do? What did I ever say that gave her the slightest encouragement?”

  “I don’t know what you’ve said, Dad, but you’ve taken her to concerts now and then.”

  “Only as a friend. Only because we’re both interested in the same music.”

  “I know that, Dad, and you know that, but she doesn’t. I think she hoped it would lead to more.”

  Dad pushed his chair away from the table. “Oh, blast it!”

  But the evening wasn’t over yet. About six thirty Lester came home from work, and as soon as he stepped in the kitchen, he handed me a sheet of notebook paper. “Okay, Al, which one did it?”

  “What?”

  “Pamela or Elizabeth?” he asked.

  I stared at the sheet of paper. LESTER, YOU ARE ONE TERRIFIC HUNK, it read in big block letters. I ADORE YOU.

  My stomach sank. “Where was it?” I asked weakly.

  “Under my bedroom door this morning.”

  Somebody, obviously, had either printed it in the night while I was asleep and slipped it under Lester’s door, or done it before breakfast while the others were getting dressed. I read it again. If it had been written in script, I could have guessed, but this had me stumped.

  “Pamela,” I said finally. “It’s got to be Pamela.”

  “Is she the one with the Lady Godiva hair who tried to crawl in bed with me at the beach cottage?”

  “She just did it as a joke, Lester. She crawled right out again.”

  “Well, I don’t want little notes appearing under my door, okay? I’ve got Marilyn and Crystal to worry about without some skinny-legged twelve-year-old spying on me and leaving notes that somebody else might see. Which one was spying on me from your room last night?”

  “Both of them,” I told him. “You now have four girls who would die for you, Lester. I can’t understand it, but you do.”

  Dad understood it. “You want to
go to Mexico, Les? Just the two of us?”

  Lester didn’t know he was kidding. “Mexico? When?”

  “Now. Tonight. Tomorrow. I don’t care.”

  Lester looked at Dad, then at me.

  “He has two women who would die for him,” I explained.

  “Oh,” said Lester.

  At the bus stop on Monday, I said, “Your ‘hunk’ didn’t think it was funny, Pamela.”

  “What?” said Pamela.

  “That note under Lester’s door. He wants you to stop spying on him and slipping notes under his door. You’ll just make him mad.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Pamela.

  And then I noticed that Elizabeth’s face was tomato-soup red again. I stared.

  “You?” I said. And when she didn’t answer, I said, “Elizabeth, I never heard you use the word ‘hunk’ in your life.”

  “I figured that’s what his girlfriends call him.”

  I still couldn’t believe it. Elizabeth, the nun-to-be, having a crush on Lester the Crude.

  “Elizabeth,” I said earnestly, “he actually drinks ketchup right out of the bottle. He sweats. He belches. He does everything you hate. There isn’t anyone in the world more unlike you than Lester.”

  But even as I said it, I realized that Lester, in Elizabeth’s eyes, would never grab a bra out of her hands and go racing around the playground with it the way Mark Stedmeister had done last summer. He would never give her an ID bracelet one week and then come back a couple weeks later to say he wanted to give it to someone else. To Pamela and Elizabeth, Lester was so far above the boys we’d been going with over the summer that he could do no wrong. I decided that the next time Lester was lifting weights and the whole basement smelled like armpits, I’d invite the girls over to see what they were missing.

  In the meantime, I began to think that the main problem with love was the number three: Lester, Marilyn, and Crystal; Dad, Janice Sherman, and Helen Lake; Lester, Pamela, and Elizabeth. . . .

  I was glad I wasn’t part of a triangle. I was glad I didn’t have a crush on anyone. For nine actual minutes that morning, I was glad to be who I was: Alice McKinley. Until I got to school.