Lester raised one eyebrow. “Who’s talking sex here? Did I mention sex? I just said we were friends again, Al. That’s all I said!”
“You sure?”
“Yes! And will you please stop saying ‘sexual intercourse’? Just call it sex, for crying out loud.”
“Okay, sex, then. You and Marilyn are now friends without sex?”
“She’s got tickets for a folk concert, and we may go skiing—stuff like that,” Lester told me.
I sighed. “Lester, listen to me. Marilyn is not interested in being just ‘friends’ with you. Marilyn is wearing a huge sign around her neck that says ‘Go for it.’” I wondered if I was being fair to the Sisterhood, but the fact was, I didn’t want to see Marilyn hurt.
Les stared. “Go for what?”
“You, Lester. You!”
“I thought you liked Marilyn.”
“I do! I love Marilyn! But a twenty-year-old woman is interested in more than folk concerts, especially a woman who has experienced sex,” I told him. I never knew I was so profound.
“She tell you that, Al?”
“Hinted at it. You’re going to get closer and closer to Marilyn until you are even better friends than before, and then you’ve got to decide all over again if it’s going to be Marilyn for the rest of your life or if you’re ever going out with girls like Crystal Harkins again.”
There was a low, agonized moan from Lester. He stretched out in the chair until he was almost lying down and pulled his jacket up over his face. I decided I had enlightened him enough for one evening and went back to my chapter on hormones.
I wondered if that article was right. The way the writer made it sound, once you were into sex, it was like someone had put you in drive and there was no way to go into park or reverse or neutral until you reached your nineties or something.
When I looked up again, Lester’s chair was empty, and I could hear him rummaging about in the kitchen. Then I heard a car out front, footsteps on the porch; Dad came inside.
“I was beginning to wonder!” I said, glancing at the clock. And when he didn’t say anything, just hung up his coat, I said, “There was some spaghetti left, but I ate it.”
He smiled. “That’s okay. I already had dinner. How did things go today?”
“Fine,” I told him. “For now, anyway. Marilyn came by to see Les tonight, so anything could happen in that department. But I had a great day.” I waited for him to notice my green shirt and earrings, and when he didn’t say anything, I got up and went to stand in the light where he could see me better.
“Look!” I said, and pointed to one of the green earrings I got from Pamela.
“Hey! Pretty sharp!” Dad said. “I really like them, Al!” He looked me over. “You’re a … a symphony in green!”
I stared at Dad. For ten seconds or so, my mind whirred like a computer. Then I blinked, my lips moved, and I heard my voice saying, “You’re dating, Dad!” And before I could stop myself or even understand why, I ran upstairs and shut my door.
Things were changing, all right, and it wasn’t just our bodies.
7
THE EARRING CLUB
I DIDN’T KNOW IF I WAS ANGRY OR surprised. Shocked, maybe. Not shocked because Dad had been out with my Language Arts teacher, but that neither of them had said anything to me about it. I mean, we were a family, weren’t we? If I had gone somewhere at night with my teacher, wouldn’t I have been expected to tell Dad?
Sitting on my bed, back to the wall, knees drawn up to my chest, I hugged my legs and thought about how all during class that day, Miss Summers had known she was going out with my dad that evening, and hadn’t said a word.
I tried to imagine them sitting across from each other in a cozy restaurant. Snuggling up against each other in the car. In the living room of her house, maybe. I didn’t let my imagination take it any further. Yeah, I was hurt, I guess.
How long had this been going on? I mean, I invited my teacher to go to a concert with us in December, and seven weeks later she’s dating my dad behind my back. Wasn’t there a law or something? Boy, I’ll bet the principal would like to hear about this, I thought. The superintendent, even. The whole board of education!
There was a light tap on the door, and it opened halfway.
“Al?” came Dad’s voice. “May I come in?”
“Yeah,” I said finally, in a voice as flat as cardboard.
Dad sat down on one corner of my dresser. “What’s the matter? You okay?”
“Nothing, and yes,” I said in answer.
“Come on, Al. What is it?”
“I thought we were a family,” I told him.
“We are, unless something happened between the time you stalked out of the living room and now.”
“I thought families told each other things—what they were going to do and everything.”
“Ah.” Dad nodded and was quiet for a minute. “You’re mad because I didn’t tell you that I’d be out this evening with Sylvia. Right?”
Sylvia? They were “Ben and Sylvia” now?
“Right.”
“I’m curious, Al. How did you know?”
“Because that’s what she called me today—a ‘symphony in green.’”
“Oh.”
“And I’m wondering how many other evenings you were out with her and didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t realize I needed your permission.”
I gave him a look and went on studying my knees. “Whenever I go out, you want to know where I’m going, who I’m with, and what I’ll be doing. You didn’t even tell me you’d be out. You could have been mugged or something, and I’d never have known it.”
“You’re not mad because you were worried I’d be mugged, Al. Admit it. What I can’t understand is that you were so eager to get Sylvia and me together last December, and now that you’ve succeeded to a certain extent, you’re upset.”
“What do you mean, ‘to a certain extent’?” I shot back.
“Only that I have been seeing your teacher now and then. It isn’t as though we were spending every spare minute together.”
“Have you had sexual intercourse?” I asked.
“What?”
“Sex, I mean.”
“Al!”
“Well?”
“That, young lady, is none of your business.”
“You have, then!”
“Al, what in the world’s got into you? I’m going to answer you this one time, but it’s not a question you can ask again. No, we have not.”
“Why can’t I ask it again?”
“Because it’s none of your business.”
“You’d ask me!”
“Because I’m the dad and you’re the daughter. Got it?”
I think I felt better then—that there were some limits, I mean. I guess it just caught me off-guard, Dad dating Miss Summers, and there were a lot of things I wanted to know. It helped to be told there were some kinds of things I could ask about and some I couldn’t. Sexual intercourse, I couldn’t.
We were both quiet. When I glanced up at Dad again, he was smiling, so I said, “What can I ask?”
“You can ask where we went.”
“Where did you go?” I tried not to smile, but the corners of my mouth were tugging upward.
“We drove to an Afghan restaurant in Bethesda, browsed through a secondhand bookstore, and went back to her house for coffee.”
“Oh.” I thought about that, having coffee in Miss Summers’s living room. “Have I ever been in that restaurant?”
“No, but I’ll be glad to take you sometime.”
“What else can I ask?”
“If we had a good time.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Can I ask if you’re going to see her again?”
“Yes and yes. We seem to get along together okay.”
“Just okay?”
Dad raised one eyebrow to let me know I was skating on thin ice again, but he said, “We e
njoy each other’s company. That’s all I know for sure.”
“Okay,” I said.
Dad went downstairs after that, and now that we’d had it out, I began to feel a little excited about it. Like, wow! Dad dating my Language Arts teacher! And they’d talked about me, obviously, because how else would Dad have known I was a “symphony in green”?
My first thought was to call Elizabeth or Pamela and tell them, but my second thought was no, better wait, and my third thought was that I was feeling left out—as though things were rushing on ahead of me. Dad and Miss Summers, Les and Marilyn … It’s strange how you keep hoping for something—like a mother or sister-in-law—and then when you think you’re about to get it, you get cold feet.
I was also thinking about sex. I guess you think about that a lot in seventh grade because it keeps jumping out at you—in the words of songs, the unit on Our Changing Bodies, magazines. … You look at yourself in the mirror before you get in the tub, and you notice that you really are changing. It’s scary, weird, and great, all at the same time.
The phone rang about nine thirty. I wondered if it was Elizabeth again, but this time it was Pamela, and she asked if I wanted to join an earring club. The truth was that at that particular moment I wanted to join anything I possibly could. I wanted to be part of everything that would give me something to hold on to while the world around me tipped out of balance. I wanted to be surrounded by Sisters.
“Come over for a few minutes,” Pamela said, so I did.
There were two other girls from school at Pamela’s, Karen and Jill. They were both pretty, both popular, Karen a little on the heavy side, Jill thin as a straw. When I saw them there in Pamela’s bedroom, I knew I could knock their socks off by telling everyone that Miss Summers was going out with my dad, but I didn’t. I wanted so much to be exactly like everyone else that I kept it to myself.
“Here’s what I found out,” Pamela told me after we’d dug into the bag of peanuts she was passing around. “You know the shop, Tiddly Winks, across from the post office? They’ve just started an earring club, and here’s how it works: If you can get as many as four girls to form a chapter, you get four percent off every time you buy earrings, a percent for every girl in the chapter.”
“Alice, you should see their selection!” said Karen. “They’ve got everything!”
“Why don’t we register the whole seventh grade, and then we’d get a hundred percent off?” I asked.
“The limit is five per chapter,” Jill said. “But the earrings are cheap. Only five or six dollars a pair.”
I was getting an allowance of ten dollars a week, plus whatever I earned at the Melody Inn, but I had to buy my own lunch out of it on days I got cafeteria food.
“Come on, Alice,” said Karen. “You don’t have to buy a lot. All you have to do is go with us to register, then buy at least one pair a month to keep your membership active.”
So the next day after school, Pamela and I went with Jill to her locker, then to Karen’s.
“Where are you going?” Elizabeth asked when she saw us heading away from the school bus.
“Earring club,” I called to her. “Want to go?”
“She can’t,” said Pamela. “Tiddly Winks carries only pierced earrings. They don’t have any clips at all.”
“See you!” I said to Elizabeth, and headed down the corridor.
I’ve never liked shopping with other people, to tell the truth, because I like to go home after I find what I want. When we shopped together, Pamela tried on earrings while the rest of us watched. Then Jill tried on earrings. It took forever. If the other girls were going to buy a pair each week, I would too, but I wondered if I could do this for the next two years of junior high school. One pair of earrings a week for one hundred and four weeks meant one hundred and four pairs of earrings. I should have so many ears! Sisterhood, I told myself.
I went home that evening with a pair of pink ceramic elephants. My earlobes were healing up nicely. I always wore my studs on evenings and weekends, but now that I’d joined the earring club, I could wear a different pair to school each day.
The next day we traded. At noon we got together in the cafeteria and decided what earrings each girl was going to wear the next week, and what clothes would go with the earrings. It was all very “in.” Boring, but “in.” The trouble was the more “in” I got, the more “out” Elizabeth seemed to be.
“Why don’t you just pierce your ears and get it over with?” I asked her. “Then you can join.” But she didn’t answer. I mean, sometimes all it takes is one little thing to fit in, but Elizabeth just wouldn’t do it.
In Language Arts, I really studied Miss Summers, and I think she knew, because she didn’t call on me much at all. It was as though she didn’t want to seem to be favoring me. I got out the door as soon as class was over, so I wouldn’t be alone with her. That would have been too awkward. If I knew she was really going to marry Dad, that would be different, but what if they drifted apart and broke up, like Les and Marilyn once before? Then it would be really embarrassing. I just hoped that if she and Dad stopped seeing each other, it would be after I was out of her class in June.
On Saturday, though, Lester was out with Marilyn and I’d been over to Pamela’s all evening trying on earrings. When I got home, I walked in to find Dad playing the piano and Miss Summers singing. Dad stopped playing and smiled at me.
“Hello, Alice,” Miss Summers said.
“Hi.” I went right on out to the kitchen as though I often came home to find one of my teachers leaning her elbows on our piano. I got a 7UP and was looking for the cheese when I realized they had it out there, so I had to go back into the living room again.
“Listen, Al,” said Dad. “You’ll find this interesting, I think. Do you know what piece this is?”
I sat down in the beanbag chair in one corner, taking big swigs of my 7UP. Dad played a few bars of a piece on the piano—five quick notes, one at a time, followed by the last three notes; then another five, and so on.
“Bach,” I said.
“That’s right, Alice,” said Miss Summers, surprised. “How did you know?”
“I can read the title of it from here,” I said.
Dad just went on smiling, but he turned around on the piano bench. “Do you know the story of Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’?”
I shook my head.
“Well, Gounod wrote a piece that he called ‘Meditation,’ and someone came along and decided that it would make a perfect melody to accompany Bach’s first prelude in The Well-Tempered Clavier. Then someone decided that the words to ‘Ave Maria’ would go perfectly with Gounod’s melody. So here we have the bottom part by Bach, the top part by Gounod, and the words to ‘Ave Maria.’ Listen.”
He looked at Miss Summers and smiled, and she smiled at me. “Excuse my voice, Alice,” she said. “I just learned this myself.”
Dad started playing those little five-note measures again from the yellow book, and Miss Summers sang ‘Ave Maria’ along with it. She had a low, soft voice, and she sang easily, not strained or showy. She was leaning her arms on the piano again, and at some point Dad looked up at her and smiled again and she smiled back while she was singing. I liked that—to see Dad smile that way. It was a different smile, and I knew it had been a long time since I’d seen it.
“It’s very nice,” I said when they finished. What I found interesting was that Dad and Miss Summers were so chummy. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be in the room or not, upstairs or down. Whether it was proper to talk to Miss Summers about anything except school when you were out of school, and whether I should call her Miss Summers or Sylvia. I felt weird about the whole works, frankly.
So I took my 7UP to my room and realized too late that I’d brought the cheese along with me. When I went back down, Dad and Miss Summers were sitting side by side at the piano. She was playing the upper notes of a song with her right hand, and Dad was playing the bass with his left. I couldn’t see their other hands.
Maybe they were in their laps. Or maybe Dad had his over hers there on the piano bench.
This time I left the room smiling, feeling like Cupid. Here was love hatching in this very house right under my very nose. Maybe.
8
MAR-I-LYN
I HAD THIS DEEP-DOWN FEELING THAT DAD might just possibly give Miss Summers an engagement ring on Valentine’s Day. The fact that he was crabby made it seem all the more possible: He was probably wrestling with an enormous decision.
If he did propose and she accepted, my whole life would change. I’d go through the rest of junior high as Miss Summers’s daughter. She would be here when I had my friends in for overnights, and could make us little sandwiches with the crusts cut off, hot cocoa with whipped cream and cinnamon sticks, and cookies loaded with chocolate chunks, fresh from the oven.
She would teach me how to curl the ends of my hair under and put on panty hose without the legs twisting around three times. When I did something stupid and embarrassing, she’d know the right thing to say; when I was sick, she’d know what to do; and when I was sad, she’d be sad too, because a mom always feels right along with you.
The girls in our earring club spent the next week talking about what to wear on Valentine’s Day. We went back to Tiddly Winks and purchased a pair of red ceramic, heart-shaped earrings, a pair of tiny pink cupids, silver cupids, and some gold hearts tied with miniature red bows. Each afternoon we traded off, along with clothes, deciding what we were going to wear to school on Friday, the big day.
“I’m going to wear a white sweater and red pleated skirt,” said Karen.
“I’m going to wear my white jeans and a red-and-black shirt,” said Jill.
“My mom’s going to braid red silk roses in my hair,” said Pamela, and they all looked at me. “What are you going to wear, Alice?”
“I’ll think of something,” I told them. What I didn’t say was that I usually stick one hand in my closet each morning and pull out whatever it touches first. Then I try to find something to go with it.