All but Alice

But suddenly it was happening to me. I was turning into a lemming! If all the girls in junior high suddenly raced to the roof and plunged madly over the edge, I would be sailing off into space with them.

  2

  A MAJOR OPERATION

  I WAITED TILL BREAKFAST THE NEXT morning to spring it on Dad. Lester always moves through breakfast in a fog (he eats cold leftovers because he can’t trust himself to aim a carton of milk over some cornflakes), but Dad is at his best in the mornings.

  At the exact moment he had drunk a little coffee but hadn’t started the newspaper, I said, “Do you realize I’m the only seventh-grade girl in the state of Maryland who doesn’t have pierced ears?” I decided I might as well paint the big picture while I was at it.

  Dad just smiled and reached for the butter. “I didn’t know you had so many friends.”

  “Dad … !”

  We were distracted right then by Lester, who had just slung a saucer of leftover chicken and noodles on the table, and was fumbling around, trying to find the chair. I can’t figure out why Les doesn’t shave and wash first and then come to breakfast, but he says if he shaved in his sleep he’d probably cut off his nose.

  “There’s plastic wrap on that chicken, Les,” Dad reminded him. I tried not to look as Lester picked up a blob of congealed noodles. He chewed with his head resting on one hand.

  “Seriously, Dad,” I said, “I can’t think of one other girl—well, maybe one, one or two—in seventh grade who doesn’t have her ears pierced. I mean, you’re just not with it unless you wear earrings.”

  “Your mother wore earrings, and she never had her ears pierced,” Dad said.

  “Those were clip earrings, Dad, and they hurt. All the best ones, the pretty ones, are for pierced ears. Please! I can pay for it myself.”

  Dad spread butter on his toast, took another sip of coffee, unfolded the newspaper, and just when I thought he wasn’t going to answer at all, he said, “When it comes to doing something permanent to your body, Al, I just don’t know. …”

  “It’s not a tattoo on my forehead! It’s not a nose job! All I want is a little microscopic hole in each earlobe. Please!”

  “If that’s all there is to it, why are you asking me?”

  “Because I have to have a parent’s signature,” I confessed.

  “I had a teacher once who had pierced ears,” said Lester, warming to the conversation. “Her earlobes were so stretched that you could see light through the holes.”

  I didn’t even look at him, just kept my eyes on Dad, like a Labrador retriever watching his master.

  “I don’t want you doing something you’ll regret later,” Dad went on. “I don’t know a thing about pierced ears.”

  Lester began to sing some stupid song he’d learned in Cub Scouts:

  “Do your ears hang low?

  Do they wobble to and fro?

  Can you tie them in a knot?

  Can you tie them in a bow?

  Can you sling them over your shoulder

  Like a Continental soldier?

  Do your ears—hang—low?”

  I almost bawled.

  “Tell you what,” said Dad. “Talk it over with someone we trust—a grown-up someone, I mean—and if she gives the go-ahead, then it’s okay with me.”

  I reached across the table and hugged him.

  My first thought was of Lester’s ex-girlfriends, Marilyn and Crystal, but since neither had spoken to him since Christmas, I didn’t think it was wise to bring them back in the picture again. Janice Sherman, the assistant manager at the Melody Inn, didn’t have pierced ears. Loretta Jenkins, who ran the Gift Shoppe, did, but hers were pierced in two places, and I could guarantee that whatever Loretta Jenkins of the Wild Hair said, Dad wouldn’t pay one bit of attention to.

  “Call Aunt Sally,” Dad suggested.

  “Not Aunt Sally!”

  “Call Carol,” said Les, the first intelligent thing he’d said since he came to the table. Carol is Aunt Sally’s daughter, but you’d never know it.

  Dad nodded. “I’d trust Carol. Whatever she says goes.”

  I ran upstairs to brush my teeth, then charged out the door with my book bag to tell Elizabeth and Pamela.

  There was slush on the sidewalks, which is what you get most of in Maryland in January, and it splashed over the tops of my sneakers. Pamela was at the bus stop already, telling Elizabeth about how she was going to start out with wire earrings and end up with all the exotic things you see in the department stores.

  When I walked up, the smile on my face stretching halfway to China, Pamela paused in midsentence: “What’s with you?”

  I couldn’t stop grinning. “I get to have my ears pierced,” I said, and Pamela squealed like a runt pig.

  We both looked at Elizabeth. “Why don’t you have your ears done too?” Pamela asked. “Then the three of us could shop together.”

  Elizabeth hugged her books to her chest. “I don’t think I could stand it.”

  “It’s not bad, Elizabeth, really!” Pamela promised. “You hardly even feel it. Just a quick pinch.”

  “It’s not that. …”

  “What, then?” I asked.

  Elizabeth shifted uncomfortably, “I just … I just can’t stand the thought of holes.”

  “But they’re only tiny pinpricks,” said Pamela.

  “I don’t care.”

  “They heal right up if you take care of them.”

  Elizabeth shook her head.

  “It’s not as though they’re the only holes in your body,” I said. “Your ears are holes. Your nostrils are holes. Your…”

  “Don’t talk about it!” said Elizabeth.

  The bus came and we got on. Pamela slid onto a seat beside some boy just because he said “Hi,” so I sat by Elizabeth. I guess when you have blond hair so long you can sit on it, like Pamela does, you can sit with almost any boy you want.

  “I can see it coming,” Elizabeth said miserably. “If you get your ears pierced, I’ll be the only girl left who doesn’t wear earrings. If I’m ever interviewed for the school newspaper, the reporter will write, ‘Elizabeth Price, the girl with the virgin earlobes.’”

  I’d never even heard Elizabeth say the word “virgin” before. “They’re your ears,” I said. “You can do whatever you want.”

  Elizabeth sighed and slumped down in the seat. “You know what I hate, Alice? Bodies.”

  “That’s too bad,” I told her, seeing as how she was stuck with one for life.

  “I could be perfectly happy if I was just a mind and a soul. Do you ever think about things like that?”

  “No,” I told her. “I think about whether you were dropped on your head as a baby, Elizabeth. Sometimes I really do.” I wasn’t very understanding of Elizabeth that day, but she wanted to talk soul and I wanted to talk earrings.

  * * *

  That evening, as soon as dinner was over, I dialed my cousin Carol in Chicago. Suddenly things were starting to happen in my life. Only a day or so ago, I’d been thinking bulletin boards, and now I was thinking pierced ears. What would I be thinking about the day after tomorrow? Being twelve, almost thirteen, meant all kinds of wonderful surprises coming my way, and I imagined how Carol would welcome me to the fold of pierced ears. Then I heard the phone stop ringing and someone saying, “Yes?” Aunt Sally!

  I tried to disguise my voice and spoke as low as it would go. “May I speak with Carol, please?”

  “Alice McKinley with a cold!” Aunt Sally declared. “You haven’t been outside without a jacket, have you?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I just had a frog in my throat for a moment. What are you doing in Carol’s apartment?”

  “Cleaning,” replied Aunt Sally.

  “Is Carol there?”

  “No, she flew to Florida with a girlfriend,” Aunt Sally told me. “She decided to take a few vacation days to lie on the beach and get herself a melanoma.”

  Talking with Aunt Sally is like playing Russian roulette. You ne
ver know what’s coming at you next. I didn’t know what to do. I certainly didn’t want to wait until Carol got back from Florida, in case Dad changed his mind.

  “Is there anything I can do for you, dear?” Aunt Sally wanted to know.

  “Uh … I don’t think so,” I told her.

  “Try me,” she said.

  “Well … I just … we were talking … I was thinking … does Carol have pierced ears, Aunt Sally?”

  “Against my better judgment, yes, she does.”

  “Well, I want to get mine done, and—”

  “Oh, Alice! Those sweet little ears you were born with?”

  “Well, I haven’t traded them in or anything.”

  “What would your mother say?”

  “Listen, Aunt Sally, almost every girl in seventh grade has her ears pierced, and Dad says its okay with him as long as I get some advice.”

  “Advice” was the wrong word. Saying “advice” to Aunt Sally is like saying “mush” to an Alaskan husky.

  “Well, dear, I’ll tell you everything I know,” Aunt Sally said. “When Carol came home after her ears were pierced, they were fiery red. I mean, these are puncture wounds we’re talking about, and you have to marinate your ears in rubbing alcohol for two months to keep from getting gangrene. Carol hardly slept at all the first night. You can’t take the earrings out, you know. Once you get your ears pierced, you have to leave something in them at all times, and—”

  “Well, thanks a lot, Aunt Sally,” I said, signing off.

  “Just a minute, Alice. I can tell that nothing I say is going to stop you, so remember just one thing: septicemia.”

  “What?”

  “Blood poisoning. If you go to one of those fly-by-night places, and they use unsterilized needles, you could be dead within twenty-four hours and not even know it. All for those little dangly things to wear in your ears.”

  I swallowed.

  “If you are determined to get your ears pierced, call a reputable jewelry store and make an appointment. They hire registered nurses, Carol said, to come in and do the piercing. Don’t go to one of those little booths at a mall.”

  “Okay, Aunt Sally!” I told her.

  “Just do one thing for me, Alice, and let it be the guide for the rest of your life: Ask yourself whether your mother would be more or less proud of you if you did whatever you’re thinking of doing.”

  “I’ll remember. Thanks a lot,” I said, and hung up.

  I let my back slide down the wall, my feet slipping out in front of me, until I was sitting on the floor, the telephone in my lap. How did I know what my mother would think about it? I hardly even remembered my mother. But the more I thought, the more I imagined her saying, “Alice, it doesn’t make one bit of difference to me.” That’s what I hoped she’d say, anyway. So I looked up jewelry stores in the yellow pages, dialed one, and made an appointment for Friday evening. I felt like a grown-up already.

  I called Pamela, and we squealed back and forth over the telephone like mice. Her mother said she could take us downtown Friday evening, and for the rest of the week, the girls at school gave me little bits of advice.

  “For the first five days, you’ll feel like your ears have a fever.”

  “Get little gold balls and you won’t have so much trouble sleeping. Don’t get studs that are pointed or anything.”

  “Use hydrogen peroxide instead of rubbing alcohol and it won’t dry your skin.”

  “Turn them at least once a day.”

  Friday came and I was up an hour early. I washed my ears extra well so they’d be presentable for the nurse at the jewelry store, and was already at the table when Dad and Lester came down to breakfast.

  “Puncture Day, huh?” said Lester, groping for the refrigerator.

  “Jealous?” I asked him.

  “Get real,” he said.

  But Pamela wasn’t at the bus stop that morning, and she didn’t come to school later. As soon as I got home that afternoon, I phoned.

  “Oh, Alice,” said her mother. “We’ve all got the flu. We’ll simply have to make that appointment for some other time. I’m sorry.”

  I stood in the hallway, arms dangling. I had to get my ears pierced that day. It would be weeks, the girls told me, before I could wear any earrings I wanted. I was willing to go the rest of January with nothing but gold studs in my earlobes, but then I wanted little porcelain cats, little silver stars, hoops, dangles, tiny purple flowers. If I didn’t get them pierced today, Aunt Sally would send us a clipping about how pierced ears caused brain cancer.

  I couldn’t call Dad and ask him to take off work, because the Melody Inn is open late on Friday evenings, and they’re really busy. I couldn’t ask Mrs. Price to take me when not even her own daughter had pierced ears. I couldn’t go by myself, because the store insisted you have someone with you if you were under eighteen, even with your parents’ signature. I was wondering whether I should go to bed for three days or eat a whole box of chocolate-covered grahams, when Lester walked in.

  I threw my arms around him. “Mo-ther!” I said.

  “Huh?” said Lester.

  “You’ve got to be mom-for-a-day, Les. Please! Mrs. Jones has the flu and can’t take me to the jewelry store, and I have to be there at five thirty. I’ve got Dad’s permission slip and everything. All you have to do is drive me there and back.”

  I didn’t think he’d do it. Lester doesn’t like you to bug him when he first gets home from classes at the U. He opened a can of Sprite and chugged it down. Then he wiped one hand across his mouth.

  “Straight there and back, no stops, no window shopping, zip, zip, chop, chop?” he asked.

  I hugged him again. “I promise,” I said.

  We went out to the car.

  “You know, don’t you, Al,” he said, backing down the drive, “that it’s probably some primitive urge that has nothing to do with beauty.”

  “What?”

  “Getting your ears pierced. Why don’t you get your nose pierced while you’re at it? Get seventeen brass rings to wear around your neck or something. If women only knew how ridiculous they look …”

  “Marilyn and Crystal both had their ears pierced,” I told him.

  “That doesn’t mean I approved.”

  “Lester, don’t try to talk me out of it. My mind is made up.”

  He turned at the corner. “What if I told you studies show that piercing your ears is a form of self-mutilation that has more to do with self-loathing than self-love and is a last-ditch attempt to conform to a neurotic society?”

  “I’d say it sounds like something you made up, Lester, and I’m going to do it, no matter what,” I told him.

  When we got downtown, Lester followed me into the jewelry store, and after I’d chosen my gold studs, he went to a room at the back with me, where a nurse motioned me up on a stool.

  She showed me how to get the backs off the earrings, and explained how to take care of my ears for the first couple months. Then she held my face in her hands and carefully made little pen marks on each earlobe to make sure she had them even.

  “Ready?” she asked, smiling.

  I grinned and nodded. She put one of my gold studs in the stud gun. Then she rubbed an anesthetic on my earlobe. Pop. I felt a hard prick on one ear.

  Thud. The nurse turned and we stared. Lester was flat on the floor, fainted dead away.

  3

  LOSING LORETTA

  LESTER SAID LATER HE HAD THE FLU, BUT he knew, and I knew, what made him faint. The nurse had asked him to sit down for ten minutes before she’d let him drive me home. I had the good sense not to tell either Pamela or Elizabeth about it, because I knew it would have embarrassed Lester. What I didn’t have enough sense not to do was tell Loretta Jenkins.

  At the time I didn’t think it mattered. I headed for the Melody Inn the next morning to put in my three hours, as usual. I work for Dad on Saturdays doing whatever needs to be done: putting price stickers on sheet music, dusting the pianos, wa
shing the glass on the revolving jewelry case in the Gift Shoppe, sweeping out the soundproof cubicles where kids come to take lessons. …

  I couldn’t wait to get to the store that morning, in fact. I zipped past Janice Sherman in sheet music with only a wave and didn’t stop till I’d reached Loretta. Janice Sherman is like the mother superior of the Melody Inn, but Loretta’s the big sister I never had. She isn’t at all like Marilyn and Crystal, who are sort of elegant and classy. Loretta’s got this curly hair like a sunburst around her head, and she chews gum. But her heart is so big and warm and open you could walk right in it. She has a great smile, a nice laugh, and she’s good with customers, so even though she drives Dad nuts sometimes with her chatter, he keeps her on. I couldn’t help liking her a lot.

  “Look!” I said, and turned my head so she could see one of my gold studs.

  “You did it!” she cried. “Oh, Alice, have I ever got the earrings for you!” She pressed the button that made the revolving wheel go around.

  We both looked into the lighted case. Everything in the Melody Inn Gift Shoppe has to do with music, of course. There were little silver violin pins to wear on a suit; barrettes shaped like treble clefs; gold trumpet earrings; chain bracelets with dangly instruments; a gorgeous necklace of musical notes; and rings.

  I liked the ceramic earrings that looked like banjos.

  Loretta winked. “I’ll put them away for you,” she said, taking them out of the case so I could buy them when I’d saved enough. I grinned.

  I was a half-grown woman now, with nonvirgin earlobes, and I felt as though I’d been admitted to the Secret Society of Sisters or something. Whatever Loretta knew about life, she’d share with me, I was sure. I’d laugh like Loretta laughed, learn to talk free and easy with everyone who came in, just like she did.

  It was as though the holes in my ears had opened a new world for me that could be summed up in one word: homogeneity. (I learned that in life science.) It means having identical functions or values. I wanted to be an identical twin to every girl in seventh grade. If we were all standing in a line that stretched around the entire state of Maryland, I didn’t want anyone to be able to tell me from anyone else.