“Get lost, Al,” said Lester.
I heard him talking to Dad, though. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, cutting my toenails, and Dad was out in the hall, standing in the doorway of Lester’s room.
“If only I was one hundred percent sure about Marilyn,” Lester said. “How do you know absolutely, positively, that this is the girl for you?”
“Les, we’re never one hundred percent sure of anything in this life,” Dad told him. “What you need to help you decide is experience and time. After you’ve gone with a number of women, you can make a better decision. Don’t rush things.”
“I’ve already gone with a number, Dad. Counting Josephine Stevens back in fifth grade, I’ve dated fourteen different girls. How many did you date before you married Mom?”
There was a long silence from the hallway.
“Six,” Dad said finally.
“I rest my case,” said Lester.
What Dad didn’t understand about Lester, though, was that he’s never been too good about time. When Lester wants something, he wants it now. Still, giving up Crystal entirely so he could devote himself to Marilyn gave him the jitters.
I thought I could help Lester if I could find out how you knew for sure you were in love—from someone who had been there, I mean. If there was a formula or something, wouldn’t it help? I obviously couldn’t ask Marilyn, Crystal, or Loretta. And if I called Miss Summers and asked how she knew when she was in love, Dad would kill me. I figured that in a case like this, where Lester might do something desperate, Aunt Sally was better than nothing at all, so I called her long distance.
I told her how Lester and Marilyn were going together again. “He thinks he’s in love, Aunt Sally, and I wondered if you knew of any way a person could tell for sure.”
“Oh, good grief!” said Aunt Sally. “It’s times like this, Alice, that you especially need a mother. I don’t know what to tell you. Milt and I just knew, that’s all. Once … somewhere … I read about a test you could take. …”
I wondered if it was like a drugstore pregnancy test we’d learned about in Our Changing Bodies. Maybe all Lester had to do was kiss a piece of litmus paper, and if it turned blue, it was negative: He wasn’t in love.
“I can almost remember it,” said Aunt Sally. “Here’s the way it goes, I think: If Lester was stranded out in the desert with Marilyn and the greatest scientist the world had ever known, and the horse could only carry two people, whom would he take with him to go for help: Marilyn or the scientist?”
I stared at the telephone in my hand and wondered if I’d dialed a wrong number. “Huh?” I said.
“It’s supposed to help you decide whether you’re marrying the right person,” Aunt Sally told me.
“What does the scientist have to do with it?”
“I’m not sure exactly, but Lester could probably figure it out.”
“If he chooses the scientist, he should marry him?”
“Of course not, but then maybe he shouldn’t marry Marilyn, either. Actually, Alice, I read this in a magazine at the dentist’s, only someone had torn out the answer. And that was a long time ago.”
Maybe nobody was better than Aunt Sally.
Lester came home late that night, so I didn’t get a chance to give him Aunt Sally’s test. I was going to try it out on Patrick the next day, but he wasn’t at school, so I called him that evening to find out how he was.
“Better, I guess. I only puked twice today.”
“I’m really sorry, Patrick,” I said. “I know you must feel awful.”
“I feel worse about what happened on the bus. I bet everyone was disgusted.”
“It could have happened to any of us,” I told him.
“What did they say after I got off?”
“Just that they hoped you’d get better,” I lied. I didn’t tell him about the newspaper on the floor, and the way Pamela kept saying “Yuck” while she wiped her sneakers.
“Listen, Patrick,” I said. “You want to take a quiz? It’s not about school or anything. But if you and I were stranded out in the desert with the greatest scientist the world had ever known, and the horse could only carry two, who would you pick to go with you for help—me or the scientist?”
The thing I like about Patrick is he never acts like you’re nuts.
“What’s the matter with the horse?” he asked. “Why did it get lost in the first place?”
“I don’t know, but that’s not the point,” I said. “You’re stranded.”
“If only two people can ride it, how did they all get out there to begin with?” he wanted to know.
“That’s not the point, Patrick! The point is you have to make a choice between me and the greatest scientist the world has ever known. Which will it be?”
“Wait a minute. I think I’m going to throw up again,” he said, and I heard the receiver clunk down on his dresser, the thud of feet against the floor, then the sound of somebody heaving. The corners of my mouth began to twitch.
“Listen,” I said when he came back, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“No, it’s okay. I’m bored. About this quiz, is someone in it supposed to die?”
“I don’t know. Whoever you leave behind, I suppose.”
“Then maybe I could save you both. Two people ride while one person walks, and then that person rides while someone else walks, and—” “Patrick, just forget the horse, okay? If you had to make a choice between me and the greatest scientist the world had ever known—”
“Wait a minute, Alice, I’ve got the runs now,” he said.
“I’ll call you tomorrow, Patrick,” I told him, and hung up.
At dinner, I could tell that Lester was still thinking of Marilyn, because he sat with one sleeve in the applesauce. Dad was working overtime, so it was just Les and me.
“Lester,” I said, “here’s a little test to help you decide whether or not you’re truly in love.”
“Yeah?”
“If you were stranded in the desert with Marilyn and the greatest scientist the world had ever known, and your horse would only carry two, who would you choose to ride with you when you went for help—Marilyn or the scientist?”
“We used to argue about things like that back in Scouts,” said Lester.
“Well, who would you choose?” I asked.
“That’s supposed to show the difference between selfish love and love for mankind, Al. If I go off and leave Marilyn to die, see, I’m the one who would suffer most. But if I leave the great scientist to die, then all humanity would be the losers. The fact is, if I’m so noble, why wouldn’t I put Marilyn and the scientist both on the horse, and stay behind myself?”
I was beginning to feel hopeless. “I don’t know, but maybe you’re the only one who could find the way back.”
“He’s the greatest scientist the world has ever known, and I’m leading the way?” Lester said.
But I wasn’t through yet, because when Marilyn called Lester that evening, I was the one who answered. And before I called Les to the phone, I said, “Marilyn, I’ve got this little quiz. If you were stranded on the desert with Lester and the greatest scientist the world had ever known, and the horse would only carry two people, who would you choose to go with you for help—Lester or the scientist?”
There was absolute silence from the other end of the line.
“How old is the scientist?” Marilyn asked finally.
“I don’t know.”
“Is he married?”
“That’s not the point!” I said.
“It would depend on what had been happening between Les and me, Alice. If things were going well, I’d take Les, of course, but if he’d even looked at Crystal Harkins lately, then …”
I decided that the next time Aunt Sally had a quiz, I’d be two miles out the door. I don’t think she knows any more about love than I do, and that’s not very much.
You know what I wish? That when it’s my turn to fall in love, Elizabeth and Pamela and I—all
the girls in the seventh grade, in fact—would all fall in love at the same time, like graduation, or something. And that if anyone gives me a Vivaldi CD set when I’m expecting a ring, or balloons when I’m not expecting anything at all, I’ll know exactly what to do.
15
ALL BUT ALICE
SOMETIMES DAD AND LESTER AND I HAVE a quiet night at home, and sometimes it’s very quiet. That night was in the “very” category.
Dad must have finished the income tax, because the papers that had been spread out over the dining-room table for six weeks had been placed in neat piles, with bunches clipped together here and there, and stacks of canceled checks neatly held together with rubber bands.
In the past, when he’s through with a job he doesn’t like, such as cleaning the oven, he usually plays the piano—something strenuous, that takes a lot of arm movement and fingering, something fast and loud and rhythmical. But on this night he got out his flute and played slow, soft melodies—not really happy, not really sad—what I call Question Mark Music, because you can’t tell for sure what the composer was thinking. He only played for a short while. Then he poured himself a glass of wine and sat sipping it slowly, staring somewhere up on the wall between the pictures and the ceiling.
It was quiet upstairs, too. The reason Dad doesn’t play the stereo more downstairs is that Les is usually playing CDs so loud upstairs. But tonight there wasn’t any sound at all from Lester’s room except for the soft chewing of Fritos whenever I passed his door. I noticed that on the calendar above our phone, on the Saturday square, Lester had written, “Dinner with Marilyn,” then erased it, then penciled it in again, crossed it out, then tried to erase the cross mark. So Saturday night was anybody’s guess.
I had only two more days to do the assignment for Hensley, and I wasn’t getting very far with that. I wasn’t getting very far with my friends, either. Being one of the Beautiful People had only got me a face full of snow. I wanted someone to cuddle up to, and the first person who came to mind was my sixth-grade teacher, which was strange, because I’ve never cuddled up to her once, except for the time I’d hugged her when she gave me her ring.
I walked across the bedroom and took it down from the bulletin board. Mrs. Plotkin’s great-grandmother had given it to her. It had a large green stone that made it top-heavy, so that it rolled around on my finger and faced the wrong way. She didn’t have any children of her own and had wanted to pass it on.
If someone likes you enough to give you her ring, I decided, she wouldn’t mind if you called once in a while. So before I could think of all the reasons not to, I looked up her number, took the phone into my bedroom, and dialed.
A man answered, and I had to remind myself that she was married. Somebody else had loved that large pear-shaped woman as much as I did.
“Hello, Plotkin residence,” the man said. It was a nice voice, a radio announcer’s voice.
“Is Mrs. Plotkin home?” I asked, hating the way my voice squeaked.
“She’s out visiting a friend. Is there a message?”
“No,” I told him. “I’ll call some other time.” And I hung up.
So much for the cuddle. And yet I felt better just having dialed her number—as though it had connected me to something important. I couldn’t figure out what it was. Mrs. Plotkin didn’t dress as nicely as the other teachers. Nobody would say she was exciting, exactly. And yet …
Alice, how nice to hear your voice! How are you? I was sure she would have said that. I could almost hear her saying it.
Fine. I could hear me saying that. Fine, meaning lousy.
I had my ears pierced. I’d probably tell her that too.
Did you, dear? What kind of earrings are you wearing? Tell me about it.
And I would tell her about that and about the Three Handsome Stooges, and how I was going to drop out of the earring club because it was boring. I blinked. I was?
That seems wise, Alice, Mrs. Plotkin would say. Thinking about it was almost as good as talking to her directly. And then I heard her telling me that I was the daughter she’d never had, and her most favorite pupil, and that she and her husband wanted to adopt me every summer and introduce me to all her relatives and take me on a trip to Spain, and about that moment the real world kicked back in.
It was the next morning on my way to the bus stop that I got the answer about the common characteristics of great men and women—my answer, anyway: There weren’t any. They were all different, and they didn’t care. Like Mrs. Plotkin, maybe.
Pamela and Elizabeth were already at the corner with some of the other kids, and they both spoke to me so I guessed I wasn’t a total wipeout. We were still friends, like we’d promised we’d be forever that summer between sixth and seventh grades.
And then, wonder of wonders, I saw Brian and one of the other Stooges running down the block toward us, and Brian was smiling and calling my name. He obviously wasn’t mad at me, either. We’d pushed snow in each other’s faces and were still friends. There was life after all the mistakes of seventh grade.
I wondered why the boys had come down to our stop. They usually got on at Patrick’s.
“Alice,” Brian said, “how’d you like to go onstage?”
“Huh?” I said. “You must be joking.”
Another boy came running up, and Brian gathered us all into a huddle, one arm around me, the other around Pamela.
“Listen,” he said. “Patrick’s coming back to school today. He told Mark. We’re going to pull something on him. As soon as he gets on, I want all you girls to scream, like he’s going to upchuck on you again. Mark’s going to sit behind the girls, and after they scream, he’s going to gag and clutch his throat. Here’s where you come in, Alice. You’ll be sitting behind Mark, and we want you to pull that little routine you do in Hensley’s class sometimes—lean over the aisle and pretend to barf. Really pour it on. And then I’ll stand up at the back, take a few steps forward, open my mouth, and release this. …” He disentangled himself from the group, reached in his jacket pocket, and pulled out a little plastic Ziploc bag filled with a half cup of water and some Cheerios.
“Ooh!” the girls said, and giggled.
Brian grinned. “All over the floor, right at Patrick’s feet. It’ll be a scream.”
My mouth was smiling, but I think my tongue was frozen to my tonsils or something. I knew how Patrick felt about what had happened on the bus—how embarrassed anyone would have been. Still, Patrick could take a joke. I mean, Patrick’s been all around the world. He can hold his own in any class discussion. He’d probably laugh himself. Here was my chance to redeem myself from the talent show, get back my membership in the Famous Eight, and do something really hilarious. Funny Girl, just like my mom. Maybe I couldn’t sing or dance, but I could barf like nobody’s business, and it would be a scream.
The bus was coming up the street.
“Okay, you got it, now?” Brian said, looking around. “Patrick gets on, you girls start to scream, Mark gags, Alice does her barf routine, and then I’ll unload the Cheerios.”
Everyone giggled.
I climbed inside the bus and sat where Brian told me. Pamela and Elizabeth were sitting in front with the other girls. All the boys were grinning.
We rode for a couple of blocks, and then we could see Patrick standing on the corner with some other kids—his jacket unzipped, books under his arm, hands in his pockets, hunched against the wind.
“As soon as he gets on,” Brian stage-whispered.
My heart was beating double time like it did backstage at the talent show. As the door of the bus swung open, it was my cue, as though I could hear the music to Guys and Dolls. Patrick was the first one on, and the girls up front all screamed dramatically and pulled away from him. Patrick stared and instantly his face reddened. I remembered the way my face had burned at the talent show.
It was Mark’s turn now, and he clutched his throat and started to gag.
And then: “Hey, Patrick,” a voice said. It was m
ine. “Sit here. I’ve got something to tell you.”
“Aww,” came a disappointed chorus from the other kids. Faces turned and looked at me in disgust. Patrick slid gratefully onto the seat beside me, and behind us came the sound of someone spitting a mouthful of water into a Ziploc bag.
“Spoilsport,” I heard Brian mutter as he leaned over the seats and punched my shoulder. Hard. I didn’t even turn around.
“What is it?” Patrick asked as the bus pulled away again. “What’d you want to tell me?”
My mind searched desperately for ideas. “Do you know the story of Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’?” I asked.
“What?” asked Patrick, staring.
“Well, Gounod wrote this music, see, and someone figured out that it would go well with one of Bach’s preludes, and …”
“What are you talking about?”
I went on explaining the story of how “Ave Maria” got mixed up in the mess.
“This is what you wanted to tell me?”
I nodded.
“You’re weird sometimes, Alice,” Patrick said.
“I know,” I answered. But I didn’t tell him I was saving his life. I didn’t say that if it wasn’t for me, he’d have relived that horrible moment on the bus last Monday. I didn’t get my name in the hall of fame, exactly, and I was struck forever from the Famous Eight, but I was glad I’d rescued Patrick.
“Remember that problem about being stranded on the desert?” Patrick said. “I’ve been thinking about it some more, and I guess I’d choose you, because I figure the greatest scientist who ever lived could find his own way back. I know you couldn’t.”
“Thanks, Patrick,” I said.
I liked sitting beside him on the bus. There was a warm spot where our thighs were touching. We weren’t cuddling, but it was the next best thing, I guess. There was something nice about being Patrick’s “special friend,” as he called it, and I wanted him to know that.
“Patrick,” I said, “remember that valentine you sent me in sixth grade?” I’d hardly finished the sentence when I saw the color creeping up in his face. Maybe he remembered the envelope with the drawings of hearts and airplanes too. But I hadn’t meant to embarrass him. “Well,” I went on, “I’ve still got it. And know what else? The wrapper off that Three Musketeers bar, and the matches from the country club.”