Jill sighed and handed me some loop earrings with little beads on them. “Well, it would be a shame to let the costume go to waste.”
I walked home from Pamela’s later, my breath making clouds of steam in front of my face, and found Lester working out in his sweats in the basement. He has a bench down there that looks like a torture chamber, and he lifts weights until the whole place smells like feet.
In case you don’t know much about bodybuilding, the aim is to make your muscles and veins so big that eventually all your insides show up on the outside. You can even point out the liver, stomach, and spleen without a chart.
I sat down on the stairs and listened to Lester grunt. When he’d finished one set, I said, “Lester, I’ve got to sign up for the talent show by tomorrow, and Jill’s got a Wonder Woman costume for me, but I can’t think of anything to do.”
Lester lay there panting. “You could always walk out onstage with your arms full of Wonder bread and throw slices to the audience.”
“Think, Lester!”
“Okay. How about going three days without food, then walking onstage with your arms full of Wonder bread and eating it all yourself? You’d even have the audience counting slices as you wolfed them down. ‘Fifteen … sixteen … seventeen. …”
I stormed out of the basement and cornered Dad that evening as he was scraping carrots and potatoes at the sink.
“What could I do in the school talent show, wearing a Wonder Woman costume?” I asked.
I can tell by the way Dad’s shoulders stiffen that being a single parent just gets too much for him sometimes.
“Hey, it’s okay,” I told him. “I know it’s my problem, but just brainstorm. Think of anything at all.” He had to come up with something better than Wonder bread.
Dad went on scraping. “Refresh my memory, Al. Wonder Woman wears a stars-and-stripes costume, doesn’t she?”
“Yes …”
“Well, why don’t you walk onstage holding the American flag and lip-synch ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ or something? That’s cool, isn’t it?”
Why is it that when parents think they’re with it, they’re so totally out of it?
“Think of something else,” I said.
“Okay. Find some guys who are willing to wear Superman costumes, and then all of you form a pyramid, with Wonder Woman at the top.”
When I made a face, Dad said, “Well, use your head, Al. There must be something you can do to entertain, instruct, or otherwise amuse your friends.”
I leaned over the sink and pretended to vomit. It occurred to me that that’s all I knew how to do. “I could always go onstage and barf,” I said.
“Fine. It’s settled, then,” said Dad.
That night, I called Carol’s apartment in Chicago, and out of desperation, when she didn’t answer, I dialed Aunt Sally. “Any ideas at all,” I told her.
“Well, let me see,” said Aunt Sally. “I remember being in a talent show once. I don’t know if it was junior high or high school, but I do remember that I recited Joyce Kilmer’s ‘Trees.’ I think a friend was playing the music in the background.”
I closed my eyes. “But a Wonder Woman costume?” She was quiet for a moment. “Why don’t you do a skit, dear?”
“A skit?”
“Yes. Like a little play. You could do an antidrug skit. Have a bunch of kids sitting around pretending to sniff glue out of a paper bag, and then Wonder Woman, with your school’s name on her chest, bursts into the room and grabs the bag.”
“Aunt Sally, is Carol at your house by chance?” I asked.
“No, dear, but Milt’s here, and he has an idea.”
I held my breath as my uncle came on the line. “Alice, honey, do you have a trapdoor on your stage?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, if you do, see, you come on carrying a bag with a false bottom. Set that down over the trapdoor, and get somebody underneath passing things up through it, and there you are, taking out twenty-five rabbits or something, and that’d be a real hit, I tell you.”
“Thanks, but we don’t have either a trapdoor or rabbits,” I told him.
I went upstairs and lay on my stomach. The thing about life is that somehow you manage to ruin all the stuff that’s fun. I could have a wonderful time at the talent show if I was just sitting in the audience.
It wasn’t as though we were the Rockettes, I told myself, all performing together. Why didn’t I just say, “Great! You guys be in the show and I’ll cheer like crazy”? I don’t know. I didn’t want my friends doing anything without me. Whatever the Sisters did, I’d do too, even if we made complete fools of ourselves. So here I was, all dressed up like Wonder Woman, with no ideas whatsoever.
The more I thought about Uncle Milt’s suggestion, though, the more I thought about magic tricks, and I finally decided to come onstage dressed as Wonder Woman and do a wonderful trick. I didn’t know exactly what I’d do yet, but there was an old magic book of Lester’s in the basement, so I leafed through it and found a hat trick. I would take my Wonder Woman hat, sew a false bottom in it, the way it showed in the book, then fold up a ten-foot scarf inside a slit in the fake bottom.
I called Jill and told her about it, and she said she would teach me a simple soft-shoe routine so that I could dance onstage to a tune from Guys and Dolls. Then I’d show the audience the inside of my hat to prove it was empty, whirl around a couple times, put my fingers in the hat, and pull out a ten-foot scarf from the slit at the bottom. Exit with scarf wrapped loosely around me, to wild applause.
Jill came over. The problem was that Wonder Woman’s headpiece wasn’t big enough, so we had to use a black top hat, but it looked okay. Putting the scarf inside the fake bottom was easy. Getting the Wonder Woman costume to look like it belonged on my body was not. My boobs weren’t big enough to hold the top up (Jill’s are enormous for a seventh grader, even though she’s skinny!), so Jill sewed some straps over the shoulders. The hips were a little tight, but the boots were loose at the tops, not skintight the way Wonder Woman was supposed to wear them. They would do, though.
We spent every afternoon for a week rehearsing the dance step in our basement, and I finally decided I could at least get through it without falling on my face. At the dress rehearsal, I was sandwiched between Elizabeth, who was doing a dance from the Nutcracker, and a boy who played the piccolo while his cat wailed along with it. Most of the performers were either seventh graders who didn’t know how bad they were, or ninth graders who were really, really good. Patrick was one of the seventh graders who didn’t embarrass himself; he had a drum solo.
The day of the performance, I felt queasy, so I didn’t eat any breakfast. Then I was afraid I’d be sick because I hadn’t eaten breakfast, so I pigged out at lunch. By the time I went backstage in my Wonder Woman costume, the top held up by straps, the shorts too tight, the boots too loose, all I could think about was getting through the performance without my knees giving way.
Patrick, two acts ahead of me, got an encore, and played a second number. Then it was Elizabeth in her white tutu and her gorgeous dark hair and eyelashes, and finally, my heart beating double time, I heard my cue—the music from Guys and Dolls—and I soft-shoed my way onstage. I felt a little stiff and realized I wasn’t smiling at all, but nobody laughed or booed, so I began to limber up, and I was really pleased that I didn’t have any trouble getting the ten-foot scarf out of the hat. I even heard a little applause when the whole scarf was out. I was whirling it around, letting it fall loosely around me, when I felt a sudden tug at the other end.
I looked down and saw the cat, from the next act, pouncing on the end of my scarf. The kids started laughing. The boy who owned the cat was on his hands and knees backstage, hissing the cat’s name, but the stupid thing paid no attention at all.
Here’s the difference between a seventh and a ninth grader, as I figured it out later. If I had been a ninth grader, I would have laughed along with the audience, picked the cat up in my a
rms, done a few steps more, then bowed, as if it were all a part of the act.
Instead, I froze, then tugged at the scarf, then glared at the boy backstage, and finally walked off, my face burning, dragging the scarf and the cat behind me, to wild laughter from the audience.
I think I knew how Pamela must have felt back in sixth grade when I grabbed her hair onstage. I felt as though all the sins I had ever committed had come back to haunt me in those four or five seconds it took me to make my exit.
It was all I could do to keep from crying.
“Life’s rough, kid,” a ninth-grade boy said as I walked past him, swallowing and swallowing.
“Things like that happen to everybody sometime,” said Patrick. “You did okay, though, Alice. Really.”
Patrick’s always there for me; I almost wished we were going together again, but I couldn’t think of anything else at the moment except how bad I felt. I would never be in another talent show as long as I lived. Why had I done it? Whose life was this, anyway?
A ninth-grade singer got first prize, and Patrick got second. If the prizes had gone on and on, I might have gotten twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth.
“Well, you don’t have to be mad, Alice,” Jill said as I thrust the costume in her hands after the show. “We didn’t force you to be in it.”
“I know. I’m only mad at myself.”
“Oh, forget it. Everybody else has,” Karen told me.
She was right, in a way. I remember something that Mrs. Plotkin, my sixth-grade teacher, told me once: “If you worry a lot about what other people think of you, it might surprise you to know how little they think about you at all.”
And when I told Lester what had happened, he said, “You know what, Al? They loved it. And you know why? Because they were so glad it was happening to you and not to them.”
12
SNOW
IT HELPED TO THINK THAT AS I WAS UP in my room that afternoon agonizing over what had happened at the talent show, Crystal Harkins might be in her room crying her eyes out over Lester. The Suffering Sisters of the Sisterhood or something. I wondered if there were groups of boys somewhere exploring their deepest feelings about love and girls and life in general. Somehow I didn’t think so.
I figure that in the twelve years I’ve been alive, about thirty-two really awful, humiliating, ridiculous things have happened to me—all of them when I was above the age of four, which is the furthest back I can remember. And who can tell how many embarrassing things happened when I was in diapers that I don’t know about at all! But if thirty-two things happened to me in the nine years I can remember, that’s four terrible things per year. Which means that if I live to be eighty, I have 272 really awful, humiliating, ridiculous things yet to happen in my life. I don’t think I can stand this.
I used to wish that anyone who had seen me do something stupid would just sort of disappear. Evaporate. When I’d learn that a relative had died, and it was someone who had watched me do something embarrassing, I couldn’t help but feel a guilty sense of relief that he was gone and had taken the memory with him. But there was no way I could vaporize all three hundred kids who had been sitting in the school auditorium during the talent show. That was something I’d have to live with.
“If I could just think of a way to fend them off,” I said to Lester, when I told him about the 272 horrible things yet to come.
“You can’t, Al,” he said, “but you could always go around with a paper bag over your head so you wouldn’t have to look anyone in the face.”
I couldn’t help noticing that, despite the joking, his voice was surprisingly gentle, as though he really, truly cared. There had been a change in him lately, and even Dad noticed.
“Al,” Dad said that evening as we were doing the laundry in the basement, separating the clothes into white, colored, and hopelessly dirty. Lester was out with Marilyn, so we had to sort his clothes for him. All of Lester’s clothes go in the “hopelessly dirty” pile. “Does Lester seem different to you?”
I nodded. “Ever since Marilyn came back in the picture.”
“That’s what I was thinking. Much as I hate to see Lester seriously involved with anyone at his age, I have to admit that she’s been a good influence on him.”
I was curious. “Why do you hate to see him involved? What are you afraid will happen?”
“Oh, all kinds of things. He could decide to marry before he’s through college, he could marry just because Marilyn wants to. …”
“But once he’s married, Dad, you could stop worrying about him, couldn’t you?”
Dad looked over at me, his arms full of clothes. “Al, you don’t understand one thing about parenthood,” he said.
The next day, Mr. Hensley announced a different sort of assignment. Right in the middle of our study of Asia, he suddenly started talking about all the great names in history—Confucius, Gandhi, George Washington, Lincoln. …
“Every February,” he said, facing the class in his old gray suit and navy blue tie, “I ask my students to take a look at historical figures and see if they can determine some of the characteristics common to all famous men and women. I don’t expect you to spend hours and hours on this, and you can limit your research to encyclopedias if you like. But see what you can come up with. The paper will be due a week from today.”
It was a better assignment than “Identify the impact of foreign influence on the development of the Indian sub-continent” or “Explain the historical basis of conflicts in the Middle East.” It was sort of interesting, in fact, because there wasn’t just one right answer. I always loved tests with essay questions, so you could write around them.
When I got home that afternoon, I took a bag of potato chips, a banana, and five volumes of our encyclopedia, and sprawled on the dining-room floor beside the bookshelves. I just leafed through the pages, and every time I came across a famous name, I wrote it down and read the article.
Lester came home from the university and sat down in the beanbag chair in the living room, with a Sprite.
“Master’s thesis?” he asked, looking at all the books around me.
“I’m supposed to find the common characteristics of great men and women,” I said. “So far they’re not alike at all. I’ve looked up Einstein and Lincoln and Helen Keller and Florence Nightingale, and they’re all different.”
“All you have to do is write down the ways they’re alike?” asked Lester. “Piece of cake! You don’t even need the encyclopedia, Al.”
“How?” I asked.
“Well, you can write that they each had two parents.”
“Lester …”
“They were all born without significant brain damage.”
I stretched out on my stomach with my arms up over my head.
“None of them died in infancy,” Lester continued. “See, Al, you make too much work out of things.”
After he went upstairs, I lay there wondering if Einstein ever lay on his stomach in the dining room, working on an assignment. If Florence Nightingale had an older brother. If Gandhi ever in his life ate a potato chip, and at what point in your life you knew you were destined for greatness. I mean, did these people suspect, when they were twelve going on thirteen, that their names would be in an encyclopedia someday?
I was still there, eating potato chips, when Dad came in, and he stumbled over one of my books.
“Darn it, Al, do you have to take up half the floor?” he barked. “Look at this mess! Books all over the place, a banana peel … You’ve got ten seconds to get it up off the floor, and I mean now.”
I looked at Dad, then around at the books. If anybody had expected Henry Ford or the Wright brothers to be famous when they were grown, don’t you suppose they would have been treated with a little more respect? If people had known that Lincoln would be president, wouldn’t somebody have given him a better job than splitting logs?
“Dad,” I said, “just remember that the kid you kick around may own your bank someday. The daughter you
scold may be your senator somewhere down the line.”
Dad just stood there, his head cocked to one side. “And if it wasn’t for me,” he said, “you wouldn’t be sitting here on the floor at all with one hand in the potato chips. Now move it!”
I’m not sure what it was, but I just felt out of sorts—ready to argue at the drop of a hat. I hadn’t been to Elizabeth’s for several weeks. I was sick of the All-Stars Fan Club. After that letter to Izzy, I’d concentrated on writing letters to authors and waiting for replies, but one of them wrote:
Dear Alice:
I’m glad you liked my book, but your letter has the ring of a school assignment or, at the very least, a put-up job. Why don’t you spend your time writing something you’d really enjoy?
Bingo! I thought. Weekends, of course, were taken up with the earring club. Karen and Jill didn’t sleep over, but we met at Pamela’s on Fridays to decide what we were going to buy on Saturdays, and then we went over to Jill’s or Karen’s on Sundays to try on what we’d bought. B-O-R-I-N-G.
Other people’s lives seemed to be going all right, so I didn’t know what it was about mine. Something was obviously going on between Dad and Miss Summers; Janice Sherman at the Melody Inn, who used to have a crush on Dad, was dating an oboe instructor now, and Dad was very, very happy that she had given up on him; Crystal, after receiving Lester’s rose, had called him up, sobbing, and Lester had gone over to cheer her up; Patrick, as far as I could tell, got along perfectly fine without me. Which left me with Pamela, Jill, Karen, Mark Stedmeister, and the Three Handsome Stooges.
This might not have been so bad if we’d done something interesting. I mean, I really liked being one of the Beautiful People. There isn’t any law against being popular; it was fun having other kids look up to us, thinking we had something special. But the fact is, we didn’t. We just happened to get paired up on that silly “Famous Couples of History” list, and things sort of snowballed from there. All the Stooges did was tease and tickle us, and all the girls did was laugh, and after a while, when everything ticklish had been tickled and you’ve laughed all your different laughs, you think, Is this all there is to seventh grade?