Elizabeth was meeting a boy in secret? Obviously, Donald Sheavers was going to have lunch with Pamela and dessert with Elizabeth. I decided to stay as far away from the mall that day as I could get, and since neither Pamela nor Elizabeth was going to Mark’s, I could stay home.
“Have fun,” I told Elizabeth.
The really nice thing was that I got a postcard from Banff. It was from Patrick. The picture on it looked like Switzerland:
Hi, Alice,
Bet we’re cooler up here than you are—unless you’re in Mark’s pool right now. We hiked in the woods today, and tomorrow we’re going to walk around on a glacier. Only you have to be careful not to fall in a crevasse. See you in a few weeks. Patrick
I wished he’d said a little more. I suppose he didn’t want to put anything too personal on a card, but even if he didn’t sign it “love,” couldn’t he at least have called me “dear”?
When Dad came home from the music store that night, I said grumpily, “Why don’t we ever go hiking on a glacier?”
Dad gave a loud sigh and hung up his sport coat. “Al, an order of sheet music didn’t arrive today, and two of my instructors didn’t show. It’s been a rough afternoon. Don’t bug me.” And he sat down to look over the mail.
I waited awhile and then said, “I got a postcard from Patrick. They went hiking on a glacier.”
“Good for them,” said Dad.
It was my turn to cook, so I went out in the kitchen and opened a jar of tomato and mushroom sauce, then boiled some spaghetti. By the time I’d melted butter for the garlic bread and made a salad, the kitchen was beginning to smell pretty good. I looked up to see Dad standing in the doorway.
“How would you like to go camping before vacation’s over?” he asked.
I knew he was trying to make up for the glacier, but still, camping with Dad sounded okay.
“You can invite Elizabeth and Pamela too, if you like,” he said.
“All right!”
“It’s a date, then. We’ll pick a weekend sometime soon,” he told me.
I went straight to the phone to call Elizabeth, but it rang just as I got there. It was Pamela. Before I could even tell her about camping, she said, “Alice, that old boyfriend of yours is a creep.”
“What did he do?” I asked weakly.
“We met at Wendy’s, and things were going great, but then we walked around the mall and he kept looking at his watch. At five minutes to three he said he was meeting a girl at the Orange Bowl.”
I gulped.
“Can you imagine?”
I imagined, all right.
“And do you know what else he told me? That I’d look great with long hair.” And suddenly Pamela burst into tears. The last time I’d seen her crying over her hair was the day in the beauty parlor when they were cutting it off, so I figured she needed another good cry.
“He’s not worth it, Pamela,” I said. “I’ve seen you with long and short hair both, and I like it better short.”
Then I told her how she and Elizabeth were going camping with Dad and me, and after that we had something else to talk about, so things were okay.
I called Elizabeth.
“Donald Sheavers is a dip,” she said.
“I know,” I told her.
“We had a shake at the Orange Bowl, and you know what he said? He said I’d look better in short hair.”
Maybe Donald was going into the beauty business.
“He’s a jerk,” I agreed. “Listen, Elizabeth, do you want to go camping?” And I told her all about it.
The next person who called, of course, was Donald Sheavers. “You’ve got some really weird girlfriends, Alice,” he said.
“That’s okay, Donald, they loved you, too,” I told him. And he actually thought it was a compliment.
But something was really bothering me, and it wasn’t Donald Sheavers. Pamela and Elizabeth both were taking chances. Pamela didn’t surprise me. Nothing Pamela ever does surprises me. But Elizabeth had done two things now that were really hard for her, I knew. Somehow she’d just gritted her teeth and got up the courage and done them.
Yet no matter how much I wanted the kids to like me, to be a part of the gang, I couldn’t even imagine myself going in water over my head. The very thought made me break out in a cold sweat, my heart pound. I’d just have to be creative, that’s all, and think up new excuses, I told myself. I’d have to make sure I was always near Mark’s house, so if the guys started horsing around, I could run inside. I mean, if I was diabetic, I’d always have to be careful of what I ate, wouldn’t I? So why couldn’t I look at this as sort of a health problem too, and make sure I never got near the deep end?
I didn’t have to make up an excuse not to go over to the Stedmeisters’ pool on Saturday, because I work at Dad’s music store for three hours on Saturdays. Actually, my boss is Janice Sherman, the assistant manager, who’s in charge of sheet music, and I also do whatever Loretta Jenkins needs doing. Loretta runs the Gift Shoppe.
I helped record a music shipment. Janice, in a brown linen dress, with her glasses hanging on a chain around her neck, was efficiently answering the phone and filing a pile of letters in her lap at the same time. Janice, who once had a crush on my father and probably still does, looked as though she was never afraid of anything in her whole life, and suddenly I found myself saying, “Janice, how do you get over being afraid of something?”
She’d just hung up the phone and put her glasses back on. Now she studied me over the top of the frames.
“It depends. Anything in particular?”
“Oh, things that you shouldn’t be afraid of, mostly, but you are.”
For a long time it seemed that Janice Sherman honestly couldn’t think of a thing. Maybe she’d gone her whole life without being afraid once.
Finally she told me, “The one thing I was afraid of when I was young was public speaking, but then someone told me it’s the audience that’s frightened. They’re afraid you’re going to speak too long, or be boring, or that they won’t understand you. It’s your job to make them feel at ease. When I looked at it that way—that I was standing up before a roomful of people who were afraid of me—I just wasn’t scared anymore. It was the strangest thing.”
I thought about that as I checked in the rest of the music. It just didn’t seem to apply, somehow. Nothing could convince me that the water in Mark Stedmeister’s swimming pool was as afraid of me as I was of it. Maybe it was a good thing Janice never married and had a daughter, because I doubted she would be any help to one at all.
The weird thing was, when I asked Loretta Jenkins the same question, she said the only way to overcome your fear of something was practice, practice, practice—that when she was in junior high she had this fear of kissing, so she simply told herself to practice, practice, practice and never dreamed how much fun it would be once she caught on.
“How can you do a lot of something you can’t even get up your nerve to do for the very first time?” I asked.
“Just close your eyes and let it happen,” she said.
Loretta wasn’t much help either.
Aunt Sally called that evening.
“How are things, Alice? Summer’s almost over, you know. I can’t believe you’ll soon be starting eighth grade.”
“Me either,” I told her.
“How’s Lester?”
“Still dating Marilyn Rawley and seeing Crystal Harkins on the side,” I said.
“He likes to live dangerously. And your dad?”
“Fine. He said he had a good time in Michigan.”
“Michigan? He went to Michigan without stopping to see us?”
“Well, Chicago’s not exactly on the way, Aunt Sally,” I told her. “He and Miss Summers had a direct flight.”
I knew immediately, by the silence at the other end, that I had not only failed to tell her that Dad was going to the music conference at all, but I had not mentioned that he was traveling “in the company of a woman,” as Aunt Sally
would have put it.
“Your English teacher?” she asked. “What does she know about music?”
“She sings. She even took a class in flamenco dancing.”
Now I knew I’d really done it. Aunt Sally, who has never met Miss Summers, would forever after imagine her as a flamenco dancer with a rose between her teeth.
“So your father has a traveling companion,” she said finally.
“They had separate rooms,” I told her.
“I didn’t ask about sleeping arrangements,” said Aunt Sally. More silence. Then, “On the same floor?”
“No, they were in a dormitory. Men on one floor, women on another.”
Aunt Sally sighed. “Tell me about your teacher, Alice. What’s she like?”
Why did I feel that no matter what I told her about Miss Summers, my teacher would never be good enough for my dad in Aunt Sally’s eyes? Never be the kind of woman my mom was? I knew for a fact that whatever I said would be wasted on Aunt Sally, so I just said the first thing that came into my head.
“She wears a black lace slip with a slit up the side.”
“Other than that,” said Aunt Sally.
“When she comes over, she leans against the piano and sings while Dad plays,” I added.
“Anything else?” Aunt Sally asked plaintively.
It was amazing the things that stuck in my mind. “She doesn’t make her bed,” I said, remembering the time Miss Summers had invited me to her home to make Dad’s birthday cake. “I’ve been in her house, and I know.”
A sigh came over the line.
“And she leaves her clothes lying around.” That was true, but it was just a pair of slippers here, a sweater there.
“Friends of mine have seen her and Dad holding hands at a restaurant,” I went on, desperate for anything. “That’s about all I can think of, except that she’s a really great teacher.”
“It sounds pretty serious to me, Alice,” Aunt Sally said at last. “What do you think?”
“I hope so! She’s really nice.”
“Well,” said Aunt Sally. “If she’s a great teacher, I guess it’s all right if she doesn’t make her bed, isn’t it?”
4
ARMPITS
I KNEW I COULDN’T HOLD OFF FOREVER, and when Pamela called on Sunday and said the gang was gathering at Mark’s pool that afternoon, I put on my bathing suit like a girl facing her execution and went across the street to walk with Elizabeth.
Mrs. Price was sitting out on the front porch fanning herself. She was beginning to look really huge, and I wondered what it would feel like to carry a baby around in your abdomen so that every time you leaned forward you knew you were squishing it just a little.
I guess one of the things that scares me most when I think of having a baby is morning sickness. Throwing up is my least favorite thing to do. The thought of saying “Good morning” to my husband, then brrraaaghack! and spilling my cookies is really scary.
“How are you feeling?” I asked Mrs. Price.
She covered her mouth with one hand and waved me on with the other. “Don’t ask,” she mumbled.
Elizabeth and Pamela and I always put on shorts and T-shirts over our bathing suits and take them off when we get to Mark’s. This is the part that Elizabeth hates.
“It’s like a striptease!” she said as we walked over.
“Practice, practice, practice,” I said, quoting Loretta Jenkins. “You’ll have to do it someday in front of your husband, Elizabeth, so just look at this as practice.”
Elizabeth stared straight ahead.
“Alice, would you still be my friend … twenty years from now, I mean … if I never got married?”
“Of course! What does getting married have to do with it?”
“But then you and Pamela would have stuff to talk about, and I’d feel left out, and …”
“Why are you trying to figure out your whole life right now?” I asked. “Maybe in twenty years you’ll be married and I won’t.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “I just don’t think I can go through with it. The sex part.”
“We’re all a little scared of that, Elizabeth.”
“It wasn’t … wasn’t so bad when I thought it was just … intercourse!”
She actually said that word. I knew how hard it was for her.
“But … after the other night … when I found out about foreplay and everything … Oh, Alice, I just can’t do that.”
“Nobody’s asking you to do that, Elizabeth! That’s a long time off with a man you really love that you haven’t even met yet.” Elizabeth is brave and Elizabeth is honest, but she is also a little nuts.
“Do you think it could be in the marriage contract—there won’t be any foreplay?”
“I suppose you can put in anything you want. You can even make him promise never to open the door while you’re in the bathroom,” I joked.
Elizabeth brightened up. “Really?” She actually seemed to be walking a little livelier, as though maybe she could live through eighth grade after all. There are times I know Elizabeth was dropped on her head as a baby.
Pamela was already at the pool this time, sitting at the end of the diving board, legs dangling over the edge.
Why is it that what seems so easy for one person is so hard for another? It didn’t bother me at all to unzip my shorts and step out in my bathing suit, yet it was desperately difficult for Elizabeth. But I couldn’t climb up on the diving board and sit dangling my legs over the deep end any more than I could sing in public; Pamela did it without a second thought.
Most of the kids I hung around with were there—Mark, of course, who’s been going with Pamela since sixth grade; Brian, the one who put gum in Pamela’s hair; Karen and Jill, who had started an earring club once; and a few other kids from school.
“Hey, Alice, when will Patrick be back?” Brian yelled just before he did a cannonball.
“End of the month,” I said, down by the three-foot marker, splashing water up over my freckled legs. Nobody would ever mistake mine for alabaster.
I tried not to look at Pamela while she was getting ready to do a back flip. But my eyes kept watching as she got her balance on the edge of the board, then propelled herself backward, turning a somersault in the air, and stretching out just in time to dive into the water, bob back up again, and swim around the deep end.
What was I afraid would happen to me if I tried a simple jump? I wondered. I tried to imagine myself going up the ladder to the diving board. Imagined myself walking out to the end and then jumping off. Holding my nose and just jumping right off, hitting the water feet first, going down, down, down, the way Pamela did, and then … never to be seen again.
Getting a lungful of water. Passing out. Being hauled out by Mark Stedmeister’s father and taken to the morgue.
No matter how many times I watched Pamela dive to the bottom and come up again, I knew beyond a doubt that I would be the person who sank like a rock. I knew that as soon as I realized the water was over my head, I would panic, tense, stiffen, and sink.
Every time I go over to Mark Stedmeister’s, I have an excuse ready, and this time he provided it for me, because we’d only been at the pool an hour when Mark set up the badminton set between the trees, and for the rest of the afternoon I was in safe territory. But how long before my luck ran out?
When we took a break and sprawled out on the grass, Jill said, “You know what we are? The Swim Kids.”
“What?” asked Mark.
“Swim Kids … Pool Group … Water Wonders. Something like that,” Jill went on. “You know all those cliques there were in eighth grade last year. The Takoma Five. The Music Bunch. The Baseball Nuts. The Photography Freaks. We’ve been getting together at Mark’s pool for a long time now, and we could be known as the Pool Group or something.”
I could feel my muscles tense.
The boys thought it was sort of corny, but I could tell that the girls liked the idea right off.
“I mean, wh
en the other kids want to talk about us, they wouldn’t have to recite all our names; they’ll just say the ‘Pool Group,’ and everyone will know who they mean,” Jill went on.
“Why would they want to talk about us?” asked Brian.
“They might want to mention the gorgeous girls and the handsome studs,” said Mark.
Everyone laughed, including me. It’s amazing how you can set your face on automatic. Your lips stretch and your eyes crinkle and you make little chuckling noises in your throat, and all the while you’re feeling sicker and sicker inside. I didn’t belong there any more than I belonged on stage at the Metropolitan Opera. I was as phony as a three-dollar bill. At least Elizabeth had the courage to talk about the things that bothered her. I was too afraid to even say I was scared.
Marilyn Rawley was there when I got home. She was sitting on the couch with her guitar, and Lester was sitting on the piano bench with his. They were playing and singing some old Simon and Garfunkel songs. I got a Pepsi and listened from the doorway of the living room, dripping water from my swimsuit onto the floor.
Marilyn’s a small girl with long straight brown hair. She usually wears either jeans or long cotton dresses, the kind of girl you see on the front of a J. Crew catalog. If Lester married Marilyn, I’ll bet they’d live in a cabin out in the woods, and all their kids would go barefoot.
She smiled at me when the song was over.
“You look cool,” she said.
“I’ve been over at a friend’s pool,” I told her.
“Best place to be,” said Marilyn.
Lester went up to the bathroom, and I was just getting up my nerve to ask Marilyn if she’d ever been afraid of deep water when she said, “Sometime I’d like to go scuba diving. It’s one thing I’ve always wanted to do that I never got the chance to.”
I decided that Marilyn wasn’t the one to talk to either.
When we were having dinner that night, I got an idea. I was thinking about the girl who brought a note to school last year because she had a heart condition and couldn’t take gym. What if I carried a card with me at all times, signed by Dad, saying that I’m allergic to chlorine and can’t ever get water up my nose?