“I’m not!”
“I thought they said ‘Love.’ I’m sure they said ‘Love.’”
“The Mylar hearts had ‘Love’ on one side but messages on the other, and one of them said ‘You gorgeous hunk.’”
Lester leaned his forehead against the wall and his shoulders slumped.
“Lester,” I said quietly, “If I could give you a gadget that would light up or beep when you were about to do something stupid, I would, but sometimes you just don’t use your head.”
What happened next was that Lester and I rode over to Marilyn’s. He was going to park around the corner, and if the balloons were still there, I was to sneak up on the porch and untie the whole bunch, sending them off into oblivion. Too late. The balloons were gone. We went back home, and Lester prepared for his date with Marilyn like he was going off to war.
But what was even worse, Dad came home around ten looking as if he’d just been through one. He didn’t say a word—just went out to the kitchen, plugged in the leftover coffee, and slumped down in a chair, waiting for it to heat.
I finally came in and sat beside him. “Tired?” I said.
“Very.”
“Disappointed?”
“Should I be?” he asked.
“Dad, what happened? You can tell me,” I said. “Did she say no?”
“Did who say what?”
“M-Miss Summers. Did she … ?”
“What does Sylvia have to do with anything? I’ve been doing inventory at the store, Alice, and I’m bone-weary. Even my brains hurt.”
“Oh,” I said. I went upstairs and sat looking at the box of chocolates on my bed—the chocolates I never offered to Patrick. I thought of Lester out with Marilyn somewhere, and wondered if they were even speaking. And of Miss Summers, home alone on Valentine’s Day when Dad should have been over there proposing.
I felt as though we were all going down in a boat at sea. I wanted to run to the window, fling it open, and shout, “Mayday! Mayday!” That’s what they should have called February 14 in the first place.
10
MODERN LOVE
I GUESS IF I LEARNED ONE THING OVER the weekend, it was that only death is final, because three things happened to prove that Valentine’s Day wasn’t a total disaster.
Number one: Lester told Marilyn on their date Friday night exactly how he had got the balloons and what he had done with them. Then he and Marilyn went out in her backyard and released the balloons together. Lester said it would have been perfect if Marilyn hadn’t said, as the balloons sailed away, “There goes Crystal Harkins forever.” Forever, Lester told me later, is an awfully long time.
Number two: Dad took Miss Summers to the theater on Saturday night. I know it was a valentine celebration of sorts, because Dad was wearing a bright red tie, which he usually saves for Christmas. Just after he put on his coat, he reached up on the closet shelf for a little box wrapped in red and silver and then went out the door. My heart beat double time. Adults, I guess, can celebrate Valentine’s Day whenever they like.
Number three: While Lester was at the appliance store where he sells washing machines on weekends, and after I’d put in my three hours at the Melody Inn, I came home and called Patrick.
“Patrick,” I said, “that box of chocolates you gave me was so pretty I just couldn’t open it. But now I’m ready to take the bow off, and I wondered if you’d like to come over and choose the first piece.”
“Be right there,” said Patrick, and in two minutes he was at the front door. It was weird doing the same thing all over again, only this time doing it right.
“Hi,” he said.
“Come on in,” I told him, and we walked into the living room, sat down on the couch, untied the ribbon on the chocolates, and opened the box.
It got easier after that. We read the diagram, found the right shapes, peeked under the cardboard to see what the second layer looked like, exchanged some of the first layer for part of the second, and had three chocolates apiece.
“If I’d known you weren’t going to open them till today, I would have waited and bought the box this morning,” Patrick said.
“Why?”
“Because valentine candy is half-price now. I could have bought two boxes for what this one cost.”
It felt good to hear Patrick say something dumb for a change. To know that the boy who had traveled all over the world with his parents and could count in Japanese could still say the wrong thing.
“That’s okay,” I told him. “If I had two boxes, I’d get fat.”
“I didn’t say I’d give them both to you,” Patrick said.
Bingo. Two stupid remarks in one day.
The nice thing was that Patrick didn’t try to kiss me. We talked about which chocolates we liked best, and Patrick said when he was little, he used to lick all the chocolate off each piece and leave the center. When it was time for him to go, I asked if he wanted to take some with him, and he took a whole handful! Then he felt embarrassed, I guess, because he put two back, but they already had dents in them.
“See you Monday,” I said as he went outside. “Thanks again.” Patrick the Perfect wasn’t so perfect after all.
Wouldn’t you know, though, that after he left and I was home by myself, Crystal Harkins called.
“Hi, Alice,” she said. “How are you?”
“Uh … fine, Crystal!” I said. I started to say I hadn’t seen her since the Messiah concert, but decided that that was the problem exactly.
“Did you have a nice Christmas?” she asked.
“The usual. We went to a Mexican restaurant,” I answered.
“That’s good,” said Crystal.
There was a three- or four-second silence, and then she asked, “Is Les around?”
“He’s working today,” I told her.
“Oh,” said Crystal. Another silence. Then, “Does he have any plans for tonight, would you know?”
“I really don’t.”
“Did he …?” She laughed a little, as though it were unimportant. “Did he get my balloons?”
“Yeah. That was nice of you, Crystal.”
“What did he do with them?”
“I—I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure?”
“N-Not exactly.”
“Well, are they there? In his room or something?”
“I don’t think so, but they could be.” It was February but there was sweat running down my back. Here was a problem about Sisterhood I hadn’t expected. How could I look out for Marilyn and Crystal both?
“Alice,” said Crystal, and her voice was soft. “You really don’t have to lie to me.” And then she got louder: “What happened to those balloons?”
I swallowed. “He and Marilyn let them go.”
“He and Marilyn?”
I gulped again. “Over in her backyard.”
As soon as I’d said, “Marilyn,” I knew I shouldn’t have, but if I’d said that Lester did it alone, it would have sounded as though he’d been really angry about the balloons, while if I mentioned Marilyn, it might seem as though she’d talked him into it, yet …
“Alice,” Crystal said, “would you get a piece of paper and take a message to Lester? I want you to write it down, because I want him to get every word.”
“Sure,” I said. I went to the dining room, tore a sheet of paper out of my notebook, and came back. “Okay,” I told her.
“This is going to take a while, because I’m composing as I go, but write his name down on your paper vertically—you know, L at the top, then on the next line, e, and so on.”
I wrote it like she said.
“Beside the L,” said Crystal, “write lousy.” She waited. “Beside the e, write egotistical.”
I began to get the drift.
“Beside the s write stupid.” By the time we got to the last letter, she had added thankless, extraneous, and repugnant. I didn’t know what extraneous meant, but I knew it wasn’t a compliment. Surprisingly, however, h
er voice was soft again when she finished.
“After you give that to Lester,” she directed, “you can tell him, for me, that I didn’t really believe it when I heard he might enter the priesthood, but I think he should reconsider, because I can’t think of a better place for him. It might keep him from hurting anyone else.”
“Crystal,” I said, and my voice was soft too. More like a squeak, actually. “How has Lester hurt you?” This was a secret of womanhood I just had to know.
She sighed—a long, painful sigh. “By making me believe, when I was with him, that I was the only woman in the world—that he worshiped me. When Lester talks, he looks you right in the eyes, hangs on to every word you say. And the way he kisses … Oh, Alice, if he’s not locked up, he should be.”
After we’d finished talking, I stared down at the notepaper on my lap. If Lester worshiped you and hung on to your every word and was a great kisser, how could he be lousy, egotistical, stupid, thankless, extraneous, and repugnant all at the same time?
Nevertheless, when Lester came home, I offered him some chocolates first to fortify him, then gave him Crystal’s message.
“Lester, I’m sorry!” I said. “Really! I didn’t know what to say! She kept quizzing me, and I just blurted out Marilyn’s name. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.” What was I doing? I was supposed to be sticking up for Sisterhood and I was apologizing to my brother!
You know what he did? Lester went right to the phone, called the florist, and asked him to deliver a rose to Crystal. One single long-stemmed rose, with only his name attached. And then I knew why girls fell for my brother.
I sat on the stairs and listened and watched, and realized I was witnessing modern love in the making. I didn’t have to buy any of those romance magazines. I imagined how Crystal would feel, after all that, when she got a single red rose. How could he be repugnant and do that? But how could he love Marilyn with a love that was the true, unexpurgated edition if he was sending a rose to Crystal?
On Sunday, I didn’t get one glimmer out of Dad as to how his date with Miss Summers went. I hung around the breakfast table all the while he ate his Wheat Chex, put the milk away for him when he was through, put the dishes in the sink. …
“Have a good time last night, Dad?” I asked finally.
“Mmm,” he said, not even looking up from his paper.
“She look nice?” I quizzed.
“Mmm,” he said again.
I knew I wasn’t going to get one bit of information out of him, so I went upstairs.
In Language Arts the next day, the first thing I looked for when I entered the classroom was Miss Summers’s left hand, to see if she was wearing a diamond. I tried to think what I should do if she was—rush over and hug her? Say, “Mother!”? Or would she hug me after class and tell me the news herself?
I gave her a big smile as I walked past her desk, and she smiled back. She was wearing beige this time, with a sweater of blue, green, and rust. But she had the attendance book open, and her left hand was beneath it, so I couldn’t really see anything.
When she’d taken attendance, she started talking about some of the great biographers of the world, and how they went about their work. Now she had her hands folded in front of her. I could see her left hand, but not her ring finger. I cocked my head a little to the right to see around one thumb.
“What do you think, class? Is it possible to write a completely objective biography of someone, or are your own prejudices going to sneak in undetected? Let’s have some examples here.”
Hands shot up—all hands except Miss Summers’s. She had unhooked her fingers now, but her left hand was lying loosely on the desk top, turned on its side, and I still couldn’t see her ring finger. I leaned farther out into the aisle, trying to get a glimpse of something shiny.
And suddenly I was conscious of a silence in the room, then a giggle, and realized that Miss Summers was looking right at me. “You look terribly uncomfortable, Alice,” she said.
I bolted upright. “I’m fine,” I said, but I wasn’t, because when Miss Summers moved her hand at last, I saw that the ring finger was absolutely naked, and a dull rush of disappointment came over me. Dad was dragging his feet, Miss Summers would get away, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, I could do about it.
In World Studies, though, things were different. Jill and Karen had got together over the weekend and made up a list of couples. There just happened to be eleven boys in Mr. Hensley’s class, and eleven girls, so Jill and Karen had divided the list of students into couples, just for fun. They taped it up on the blackboard in one corner and titled it “Famous Couples in History.” Mr. Hensley looked at it as though it were some undecipherable message from outer space and let it be. But most of the kids were grinning.
Pamela was matched up with Mark Stedmeister, of course, and Jill, Karen, and I were matched up with the Three Handsome Stooges. There was my name beside Brian’s.
Alice and Brian, it said! I couldn’t believe I had only been in junior high for five months, and already my name was being mentioned in the same breath with the most handsome guy in seventh grade—a jerk, but handsome. I couldn’t help smiling a little bit. I mean, the eight of us had become sort of a clique now. We didn’t eat lunch together or go walking around the neighborhood the way Pamela and Elizabeth and I used to do with Mark, Tom Perona, and Patrick. But we horsed around a lot before and after class, and teased each other in the halls. I wondered if the eight of us would hang around together in eighth too, and if we’d all go to the ninth-grade dance together.
Brian sat right behind me, and he thrust his feet under my chair, rubbing the back of my shoes with the toes of his Adidas sneakers. He took a ruler and ran it up and down my spine, making me shiver, then laugh. When Hensley wasn’t looking, he took the ruler and tapped each of my ceramic banjo-shaped earrings, making a sort of ping.
I was so excited about being one of the Famous Eight that it wasn’t until halfway through the period that I realized Patrick must have been matched with someone too, and finally, when we were taking a true-and-false quiz, I went to the pencil sharpener just so I could see whose name was there beside Patrick’s.
It was a girl named Sara, and after I went back to my seat, I turned slightly and stared at the girl down at the end of the row behind me. She had dark hair like Elizabeth’s. She wasn’t gorgeous, wasn’t ugly, wasn’t fat or thin or tall or short. Just sort of average and quiet, but somehow—without knowing why—I felt jealous.
Why had they put Sara’s name with Patrick’s? Had he taken her chocolates too? Did he like her? Did she like him? What did I know about Sara? Nothing, and that made her all the more mysterious.
“Time!” called Mr. Hensley. “Turn your papers in, please!”
I stared. I’d only answered two questions. Papers were being passed shoulder over shoulder to the front of the room, and when the bell rang that day, I went out in the hall with Brian tickling me from behind, and Pamela and Mark Stedmeister holding hands. Jill and Karen were flirting with the other two Stooges. My own lips were smiling and my mouth was laughing, and Brian was trying to find all the places where I was ticklish. I could tell by the looks on some of the other faces that we were envied. The Beautiful People. Now that I had “arrived,” however, it was like opening a gorgeous box and finding nothing inside.
I was still thinking about boxes when I got home, and at dinner I asked Dad, “What was in that little box you gave Miss Summers?”
Dad slowly ladled out the meat and potatoes into a big bowl. “I wasn’t aware I was being watched.”
“I just happened to notice,” I told him.
“It truly is none of your business, Al,” he said, “but the fact of the matter is, I gave her a Vivaldi CD set.”
I stared. “Valentine’s Day, and you gave her a CD set?”
“Yes, and she loved it. Do you have a problem with that?”
I had a problem with that. I had a problem with everything. I had a problem wi
th Brian and Patrick and Pamela and Jill and Karen and Elizabeth and Crystal and Marilyn, but most of all I was having a problem with myself.
11
WONDER WOMAN
LIFE, I’VE DECIDED, IS HOLDING YOUR breath to see what happens next. And what happened next was that there was a sign-up sheet outside the cafeteria for students who wanted to be in the junior high talent show.
Going up onstage in front of three hundred kids and putting your life on the line is not something that would have occurred to me for one moment. I mean, if somebody had said, “Al, take your choice: Swim across this crocodile-infested river or do something for the talent show,” I’d probably have taken the river. But every kid in the All-Stars Fan Club was involved in the show, every girl in our earring club was talking about what kind of an act she was going to do, and they just assumed that I, naturally, was going to be in it. I, naturally, assumed that I was going to sit in the audience and clap.
“What are you going to do, Alice?” Karen asked as we sat on Pamela’s bed, each trying on the others’ earrings and passing them on.
“Do?”
“In the talent show! Tomorrow’s the last day to sign up. The list has been there for a month.”
“I—I don’t know,” I stammered.
“Dress rehearsal’s only a week away,” Pamela reminded me.
“Just put your name on the sign-up sheet, and you can decide later,” said Jill. “But I’ve got just the costume for you. I wore it last year for a dance recital, and it’ll be perfect on you: Wonder Woman.”
I stared. “But what would I do?”
Jill shrugged. “I don’t know. But it’s a wonderful costume, and you could think of something. Can you dance?”
I shook my head.
“Sing?”
“Are you kidding?”
Pamela nodded. “Trust me: She can’t.”
My lack of singing ability was notorious. I can play simple songs on the piano, but I’ve never been able to carry a tune. I can’t even tell if the notes go up or down.
“How about juggling?” asked Karen.
“Forget it.”