Reluctantly Alice

  That noon in the cafeteria, something really crazy happened—not with Denise and her gang, but with a group of ninth-grade boys who had just finished eating and were leaving. We always watched the ninth-grade boys, because they seemed so much more clever and wonderful than seventh- and eighth-grade boys. They were joking around, and just after they’d passed our table, one of them yelled, “Boxer check!” And while Pamela, Elizabeth, and I stared, along with every other girl in the cafeteria, they unzipped their pants, lowered their jeans, and compared their boxer shorts to see who had the loudest, wildest underwear that day.

  I positively gaped, my mouth hanging open. One boy had Mickey Mouse on his; another had zigzag stripes of pink, yellow, and purple; another had red hearts and cupids; and the fourth had Hawaiian palm trees and surfers. Everybody was standing up trying to see, clapping and cheering, and the guy with the palm trees was declared the winner. We all laughed, even the teacher on duty, the boys pulled their jeans up again, picked up their books, and went outside.

  Pamela and I had our heads on the table in laughter, and when we finally got our breath and looked up, we saw Elizabeth staring straight ahead, unblinking, her face peppermint pink.

  “Hey, Elizabeth,” I said, waving one hand in front of her eyes.

  “I can’t believe it,” she murmured. “I just can’t believe it.”

  Pamela was still giggling. “Alice, can you imagine any seventh-grade boy doing something like that?”

  No, I could not. I remembered when a boys’ gym class joined ours for a day of basketball the week before. While we were all sitting on the floor getting instructions, one of the seventh-grade boys, sitting in the knee-chest position, pulled the bottom of his T-shirt down over his legs and pretended his knees were breasts poking through his shirt. Except for a boy back in third grade who stuck crayons up his nose once and pretended he was an elephant, that was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. “Boxer check” was a whole lot more fun. But not, evidently, for Elizabeth.

  “I never saw a boy in his underpants in my life except on Calvin Klein billboards,” she said, still in shock.

  We didn’t realize what a big deal it was for Elizabeth, though, until a few days had gone by and she was still talking about it. What if somebody called “Boxer check” and one of the boys had a hole in his shorts? she wondered. What if somebody called “Boxer check” and one of the boys wasn’t wearing any shorts at all? Her imagination was working overtime.

  By the end of the week, I found out why. Pamela invited us to her house for a sleepover. Her parents went out to a movie, and that’s when Elizabeth started talking.

  I guess there’s something about three girls in front of a fireplace making s’mores together that makes them feel warm and close and comfortable with one another. We were just sitting there, licking the chocolate and marshmallow off our fingers, watching the flames dance, when Elizabeth said suddenly, “Remember the other day on the playground when we promised we could tell each other secrets and nobody would laugh?”

  Pamela and I nodded.

  “Well . . .” Elizabeth raised her shoulders and took a deep breath, then stared down at her feet. “I’m twelve years old, I’m in junior high, but I’ve—I’ve never seen a boy naked.”

  I was waiting for her to get to the point, then realized that was the point.

  “So?” I said. “Elizabeth, you can still graduate.”

  She gulped. “You don’t understand. I just feel so—so stupid. So backward and babyish and everything.”

  “But how could you see a boy naked? You don’t have any brothers,” I said, trying to make her feel better.

  She looked at me intently. “You’ve seen Lester, then.” I guess that’s what she really wanted to know.

  “Well, of course! Dad, too. . . .” And then I realized I was going to have to explain. It wasn’t like we all took our clothes off and paraded around. If someone took a shower, though, and went to his room to dress, he may or may not have a towel around him. It just wasn’t very important in our house. But Elizabeth’s face was turning peppermint again.

  “Haven’t you ever seen your dad?” I asked her.

  “No!” She looked at me in horror.

  “Haven’t you ever seen pictures of naked men?” Pamela asked curiously.

  “No!” Elizabeth said indignantly. And then she looked miserable again. “Just statues and things. I mean, if those ninth-grade boys ever pulled down their shorts, I’d probably faint.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” said Pamela, and now we were both looking at her, and it was Pamela’s turn to blush. “Listen, I’ve got something to tell you, but you’ve got to promise, promise, that you won’t ever tell the other kids at school.”

  Elizabeth promised and crossed herself. I just crossed my arms over my chest and promised, and hoped that would do.

  “Well,” said Pamela, “I’ve seen a whole lot of boys naked all at once, and it wasn’t that great, believe me.”

  “Where?” Elizabeth and I asked together, as though we were going to get up and race right to wherever it was.

  Pamela hugged herself with her arms and stared into the fire. “My parents . . . ,” she began, then stopped. “My parents . . . ,” she said again, “are nudists.”

  Elizabeth and I couldn’t take our eyes off her. I couldn’t quite believe what I’d heard.

  “You mean they . . . ?”

  Pamela nodded. “They go to a camp sometimes, and everybody takes off their clothes.”

  “In front of everyone?” Elizabeth said, aghast.

  “Of course. Everybody does. They took me once on visiting day, but I decided I didn’t want to join, so I didn’t have to take mine off.”

  “What . . . d-do they do . . . a-after they take off their clothes?” Elizabeth stammered.

  “The same things they do when they have their clothes on. Swim, play tennis, hike, sit around and talk.”

  “Then why . . . ?” I just couldn’t understand.

  “Because they say it feels better to be naked.”

  “And nobody ever . . . ?” I just couldn’t stop. I was worse than Elizabeth.

  “No. It’s supposed to be bad manners to even stare at someone else. At those places, I mean.”

  I couldn’t figure it out. If you only wanted to take off your clothes, you could do it at home. If you wanted to take off your clothes in front of people, you went to a nudist camp. But if you couldn’t look at anybody else after they took their clothes off, then . . .

  But right now that wasn’t my problem. Right now Pamela and Elizabeth were looking at me, because they had each confided something very personal, and it was my turn. So I finally told them about the most embarrassing moment in my life so far: how I had first met Patrick when I opened the door of the wrong dressing room at a store, and there stood this boy with red hair and blue underpants. Pamela and Elizabeth both squealed in embarrassment.

  “But you know,” I said, “I don’t think it bothered Patrick much at all.”

  “He’d make a good nudist,” said Pamela.

  After we went to bed that night in the Joneses’ family room, I was thinking how just a couple months ago, I’d never heard of SGSD. I didn’t know that Lester was going to have to choose between Marilyn and Crystal. I didn’t know that Dad was going to be caught between Janice Sherman and Helen Lake. And I certainly didn’t know that Pamela’s parents took off their clothes outside on weekends. What would I discover a few months from now? What was waiting to shock me once I was in eighth grade? In ninth? In college?

  Saturday morning at breakfast, I couldn’t help staring at Mrs. Jones as she made our waffles. She looked like an ordinary woman in an ordinary robe, but I knew better. When Pamela’s father walked though the kitchen in his sweatpants and shirt to go jogging, I imagined him running through the woods without any pants at all. Maybe when you come right down to it, nobody is an “ordinary person.” Maybe everyone has secrets. Janice, for example. When I put in my three hours at the Melod
y Inn later, I was thinking how nobody else who walked in that store would have guessed that the woman in charge of sheet music was secretly in love with her boss.

  That night at dinner, I told Dad and Lester about the Joneses going to a nudist camp (I hadn’t promised not to tell my family), and when neither one appeared shocked, I grew awfully quiet.

  “Have you ever been to a nudist camp, Dad?” I asked finally.

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  Dad shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe if it was back in the 1890s and we all wore tight collar and long sleeves in the summertime, I might consider it. But the way people can walk around outdoors now with hardly anything on at all—well, I just don’t see the point.”

  If there were any secrets in my family, I wanted to find out about them now, so I turned to Lester. “Have you ever been to a nudist camp?”

  Lester was wolfing down a big plate of ravioli.

  “No,” he said between bites. “Takes all the mystery out of life. I like a little something left to the imagination.”

  After dinner, I took a sack of pretzels to my room and thought about bodies. I decided that if there was one thing seventh-grade girls think about more than anything else—certainly more than boys—it’s bodies. I guess it’s because eighth- and ninth-grade girls have so much more body than we do, we’re always wondering when the rest of ours is going to arrive. They have curves where we have angles. Our knees and elbows still look like ice picks. I couldn’t wait to start feeling more like a butterfly and less like a praying mantis.

  I was thinking, too, about what I could do for Elizabeth. Hadn’t we promised we were friends for life? What would a real friend do? By the time my homework was done, I had a plan.

  I went to the shelves in our dining room where Dad stores all our old magazines and journals, and I picked up an ancient issue of National Geographic. I was determined to find every single photograph I could of a naked man or boy, paper-clip it, and put it aside for Elizabeth.

  There were about four hundred issues to go through, but I kept at it. Actually, there were only a few pictures of men from the front. Too many photographs had been taken from behind, or with the man holding a spear or shield right over the place Elizabeth most wanted to see.

  By Sunday evening the floor of the dining room was half covered with separate piles of National Geographics—the best photos in one, the side views in another, the rear views in another, with paper clips strewn all over the place.

  “Ye gods, Al, what the heck are you working on?” Lester asked, coming through.

  “A project,” I told him. “I’m almost done.”

  He pulled out a chair, sat down, and leaned over to look at a mountain climber on the cover of one. “Well, if your teacher knows how much time you put into this, you’ll get the best grade in the class,” he said.

  I should have just dropped it right then, but I had to go and say, “It’s not for school; it’s for Elizabeth.”

  “You’re doing all this for Elizabeth?” Lester said. “Why doesn’t she look through her own magazines?” And the next thing I knew, Lester was reaching for one of the copies on top of the “best pictures” pile.

  I threw myself bodily on the pile. “No!” I screamed. “Don’t look.”

  Lester stared down at me. Dad came in from the kitchen where he was making chili.

  “What kind of project is this, Al?” Lester said, picking up a magazine from the “side view” pile instead, noticing the paper clip, and turning right to it. I wriggled under the table on my stomach and buried my head in my arms. “New Guinea?” Lester said after a minute. When I didn’t answer, he picked up another magazine and found the paper clip. “Australia?” he asked, then reached for another. “The Amazon?” There was a long, long pause. “I’ll be a son of a gun,” he said at last.

  I didn’t want him making fun of Elizabeth. Not after all we’d shared and confided and promised. I sat up so fast, I bumped my head on the table.

  “She’s never seen a naked man in her life, and I’m just trying to help!” I bellowed.

  “Well, for crying out loud,” said Lester, and went on flipping through the magazines. Then he shook his head. “Elizabeth sure isn’t going to learn very much this way.”

  Suddenly I thought about those magazines that had pictures of naked women in them, the kind on sale in drugstores, and wondered if there were magazines with naked men in them. Lester should know.

  “Lester,” I said. “Would you be willing to do a big, big favor for Elizabeth?”

  Lester leaped up out of the chair. “Are you crazy? No way! You’re nuts!”

  “Oh, not that,” I said. “All I want you to do is buy a magazine with naked men in it so Elizabeth can see what they really look like without spears in the way.”

  “Al,” Dad said. “You don’t need those kinds of magazines, and we can certainly do better than National Geographics.”

  “We can?”

  “Tomorrow after school,” he said. “Meet me at the Melody Inn. We’ve got a date.”

  Every so often, Dad does that. Gets mysterious. I didn’t say anything to Elizabeth and Pamela, but when I got to the Melody Inn after school the next day, Dad already had his suit coat on and came right out when he saw me.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, grabbing his arm as we crossed Georgia Avenue. “Are we walking or driving?”

  “Walking.”

  “Will we be inside or outside?”

  “Inside.”

  “Do we pay or is it free?”

  “Free.”

  “Can we get something to eat while we’re at it?”

  “Afterward, maybe.”

  I couldn’t imagine. The YMCA locker room, perhaps? But when we turned up the walk of the Silver Spring Library, I skidded to a stop. “Oh, no!” I said. “I’m not going in there and asking for pictures of naked men. No way.”

  “Relax,” said Dad. “You’re a big girl now.”

  I followed him in and over to the library catalog computer. “What do I look up?” I murmured. “‘Men, naked’?”

  “How about ‘human body’?” said Dad.

  I tried that, but got human biology instead, and there were a lot of listings under 612.6. I walked around the room until I found the shelves of 612 books, and then, while Dad read the New York Times, I sat down on the floor and looked at books on the human body. Books on sex, I discovered, were in the same section.

  I was absolutely, positively amazed. Dad was right. I didn’t have to buy magazines from the drugstore or look through four hundred copies of National Geographic. There were pictures, all right. I don’t mean diagrams with all the insides showing—the heart in blue and the lungs in red and the liver in green or yellow. These were drawings so real they were like photographs of everything you could possibly want to see, and things you didn’t even know about yet. Skin and hair drawings of what boys look like when they are six, ten, fourteen, and twenty. There were even real photographs of a woman having a baby. Someday I’d show those to Elizabeth, but one thing at a time, I decided.

  A librarian came by to get a book from the shelf, and she couldn’t help but see what I was looking at; she didn’t even blink. Like it was okay to be curious. I felt almost the way I did at the grade school the other day. Safe. Protected.

  When I picked out four books for Elizabeth, the man at the checkout desk didn’t stare at me or anything, either. He checked out my books on bodies as casually as if I were reading up on the Civil War or photosynthesis or how to build a bird feeder. I had to know if this was just an act or if librarians were always glad to have you read stuff. So just before we left the library, I went over to a woman at the reference desk and asked where I would find a list of nudist camps.

  It wasn’t just an act, it was real. “I think those would be listed under sunbathers in our directory of associations,” she said, without batting an eye. She reached for a large book. “Let me check.”

  “Oh, I don’t nee
d to know right now. I just wondered where to look,” I told her. “Thanks a lot.”

  I smiled and she smiled, but what I didn’t realize was that Dad was waiting for me by the door and heard everything I said.

  “Al?” he said curiously as we went outside.

  I grinned. “Relax,” I said. “I’m a big girl now.”

  When I showed the books to Elizabeth later, she said she would be grateful forever. She didn’t know, either, that you could find out anything at all at a library—those kinds of things, I mean.

  Well, almost everything. I knew that libraries had books about friendship and novels about bullies, but there wasn’t any book exactly titled How to Get Along With Denise Whitlock. There were some problems, I discovered in the days to come, that you had to work out for yourself.

  8

  THE FROG STAND

  JUNIOR HIGH SURE HAS A WAY OF MIXING you up, tossing kids around like a giant blender. I didn’t have any classes at all with Pamela. I had World Studies with Patrick, P.E. with Elizabeth, and Language Arts and P.E. with Denise Whitlock.

  Why couldn’t I have had no classes at all with Denise, and Language Arts and P.E. with Pamela? Was it pure luck, or did someone in the school office decide on each pupil individually, moving him or her about from square to square like a game of Monopoly?

  Elizabeth said that everything that happens to us is part of God’s plan for the universe. I said that God must have a terrific sense of humor, but I still didn’t know why I was the girl that Denise Whitlock most liked to kick around. I didn’t think God could hate me that much. Except for Language Arts, where I sat right behind her, I tried to avoid Denise whenever I could. But she did everything possible to embarrass me in P.E.

  Right at that particular moment, I couldn’t see any way that P.E. would be helpful to me. I couldn’t see the importance of school in general, if you want the truth. Not my classes, anyway. I used to think that math was one of the most useless subjects, because I had to figure out things like what was 17 percent of a gross of pencils, and I can guarantee that I will go my whole life never having to know the answer to that.