Alice the Brave

  I popped and immediately began dog-paddling, hardly able to see through the wet hair over my face, gasping and panting, but I could hear the officers cheering me on.

  After we had the pool to ourselves again, there was no holding me back. I dog-paddled the width of the pool again, then the length, then tried the swimming stroke Lester taught me, but I kept my head above water. It worked.

  “Lester,” I said, “before we go home, I want to jump off the diving board.”

  “What?” Even Lester was surprised.

  “I don’t want to learn to dive right now. I don’t even care if I don’t know any fancy strokes. I just want to be able to jump off the diving board and prove that I’ll come right up again.”

  So Lester stayed down in the deep end near the place I would land, and I climbed the ladder. This was really scary. I didn’t realize just how nervous I would be. Slowly I walked out to the end of the bouncy board. I held my nose, took a deep breath, and jumped.

  It was the longest moment of my life—probably only two seconds, but it felt like thirty. I could hear the gluggle of water in my ears as I went down, down, down, and then … whoosh! I felt myself begin to rise, and I was home free.

  After that Lester taught me how to rise faster from the bottom by putting my hands straight up over my head, then bringing them down to my sides. I could actually control myself under water. If I pushed down on it, I popped to the surface. If I pushed up against it, I stayed under longer. It was up to me. I was the boss.

  There was one more thing to do before we called it a day. I wanted Lester to pick me up and throw me in the deep end like the boys might do to me if I ever went back to Mark’s pool. I wanted to know what it felt like. I wanted to know if I could handle it.

  “You sure about this, Al?” he said. “You might land upside down. You might have to turn yourself around in the water.”

  “I can do that,” I said.

  Lester picked me up and walked over to the side, then threw me in the seven-foot water. I went in upside down, but when I reached the bottom, I put my hands together like he had shown me, cutting the water like a knife, bringing them down to my sides again, and shot right up to the surface. I had already learned to trust Lester, and now I was learning to trust myself! Again he tossed me in, sideways, backward, and I didn’t drown once.

  “Lester,” I said, as we headed home at last. “This was about the best day of my life. I was so afraid before, and suddenly I can wake up in the mornings and not have to worry anymore.” I reached over and grabbed his arm. “You’re really, really great!”

  “I only did it so if you ever fall in a river, I won’t have to ruin my clothes getting you out,” he said.

  10

  LUCK

  I HAD TO CALL AUNT SALLY, OF COURSE, and tell her.

  “Why, Alice, that’s wonderful,” she said. “Marie would be so proud of you. She was an excellent swimmer, you know.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  According to a note on the table, Dad picked up Miss Summers after he’d finished at the Melody Inn and gone to a concert at Wolf Trap. When he got back that night, I told him what a terrific day this had been for me.

  I could tell that Dad was really shocked.

  “Al, I had no idea! Are you sure you couldn’t swim in deep water?” he kept asking.

  “Trust me,” I said, sounding like Lester.

  “If Marie knew I let you get to thirteen, hanging around pools and not even knowing how to swim …”

  “You’ve had a lot on your mind, Dad, these past thirteen years. You’re doing okay,” I told him.

  “What bothers me is what else I might have overlooked. What else do you need to learn to do?” he went on.

  “How long a list do you want?” I replied. “I need to learn to kiss with my lips just touching, for starters.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Al.…”

  “Lester,” I said, turning around, “let me practice on you.”

  “Bug off. Enough is enough.”

  “Just once! I just want to learn how to touch and back off and touch and back off.…”

  “Practice on your hand! Practice on a book! Kiss the door of the refrigerator! When the time comes, you’ll do just fine.”

  The gang was getting together at Mark Stedmeister’s on Labor Day weekend for one last fling.

  When I showed up at Mark’s that Saturday afternoon, I could tell the kids were surprised to see me. The boys all said a polite “Hi,” keeping their distance, but Patrick whooped and waved to me from the water.

  I waved back, and slipped off my shorts, just like nothing had ever happened. I ate a couple potato chips and talked with Jill and Karen. I spread my towel out on the cement between Elizabeth and Pamela, and then, just as though I did it every day, I walked down to the deep end, over to the diving board.

  For a moment no one seemed to notice. Then I heard Elizabeth say, “My gosh! Alice is on the diving board!” And everyone turned.

  I had hoped to jump and be in the water before anyone noticed, because I wanted a practice jump first, but now everyone had stopped talking and was looking in my direction. Patrick, paddling around below, moved out of the way.

  I walked right to the end of the board, my heart pounding like crazy. Everyone looked different from up here—a lot farther down in the water. The diving board seemed higher than the one at the Harkinses’, too. But I remembered that water is water is water, whether it’s four feet deep or fifty, and that I could trust my body to do its thing.

  You swim like a fish, I told myself. And then, You swim just like Mom.

  Walking to the end of the board, I held my nose, then jumped feet first, keeping my legs together the way Lester taught me so I’d slice the water cleanly, my other arm up over my head.

  Whum! Water drubbed in my ears as I went down, down, down. I put my other hand up over my head too, then brought my arms swiftly down to my sides.

  Whop! I shot up to the surface and emerged to the sound of clapping and cheering.

  “Way to go, Alice!” yelled Brian.

  “She did it!” came Pamela’s astonished cry.

  “I thought you couldn’t swim,” said Mark, as I dogpaddled over to Patrick along the side.

  “I learned,” I told him.

  “What happened?” asked Patrick. “How did you do it?”

  “Lester taught me,” I said.

  “That’s what brothers are for.”

  “Well, you looked really nice up there,” Patrick said, and leaned over and kissed me, our faces wet and hair hanging down over our eyes. It wasn’t the way I’d fantasized, but a kiss is a kiss is a kiss, I told myself.

  I guess, seeing how quickly I went from a nonswimmer to jumping off the diving board, I shouldn’t have been surprised that Elizabeth was changing, too; but since she had gone to confession she had changed right before my eyes. All the priest told her, I understood, was that it was okay to be curious, and boy was she curious. About kissing. About flirting. She was curious about lying side by side on a towel with Tom Perona, Tom’s arm over her back.

  “It didn’t take her long to get the hang of eighth grade, and school hasn’t even started yet!” Pamela observed.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it? All three of us are back to dating the same boys we were seeing in sixth grade,” I said, as Pamela and I went into Mark’s house to use the bathroom.

  “Well, not quite,” Pamela said, going into the bathroom first and shutting the door.

  “What do you mean?” I called.

  She didn’t answer at first, but when the toilet flushed and she opened the door, she said, “I think I’m going to break up with Mark.”

  I stared. “What? You’ve been going with Mark ever since I can remember! You’ve been coming to his house to swim all summer.”

  “I know, but I’d sort of like to play the field.”

  “Who else is there?”

  “Well, there’s Brian, for one.”

  I grabbed her b
y the shoulders. “Pamela, he’s the one who put gum in your hair!”

  She grinned sheepishly. “Crazy, isn’t it?”

  I leaned weakly against the door frame. “When are you going to tell Mark?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Oh, lordy,” I said. I sounded like Aunt Sally.

  I went into the bathroom, forgot why I was there, and walked right out again. Here we were at the Stedmeisters’. Mark’s mom had fixed hot dogs and potato salad, and somebody had brought a German chocolate cake. We were all celebrating a glorious summer and the start of eighth grade, and after everyone left, Mark was going to get it right between the eyes.

  “Can’t you at least wait until school starts?” I suggested.

  “Alice, it’s important to start eighth grade as someone’s girlfriend. I mean, I don’t want to be going with Mark one day and Brian the next. I want people to see us as a couple right from the start.”

  “You mean you want the other girls to know that Brian belongs to you.”

  “Something like that,” Pamela told me.

  “What are you going to tell Mark? What reason can you give?”

  “That it’s time to go out with other people, but I still want us to be friends.”

  Fat chance, I thought.

  Life is weird. All summer—all my life, practically—I’ve been worrying about my secret fear of deep water; it was always a lump in the back of my throat. And suddenly it’s the last thing on my mind, and all I can think about on Labor Day weekend is that Mark is having the time of his life, and a couple hours from now he’ll be devastated.

  I tried not to look at him, but my eyes kept drifting over there anyway. Now that I was paying attention, though, I noticed how Pamela was hanging around Brian, laughing when he teased her, egging him on. It was so obvious she was making a play for him that I wondered why I hadn’t noticed before.

  And then Mark did the most incredibly stupid thing I have ever seen in my life. Every so often, boys just go berserk momentarily. Some hormone gets out of whack, and they are temporarily deranged. Because we were all standing around the picnic table in one corner of the Stedmeisters’ deck, eating off paper plates, and suddenly Mark took his plate over to where Pamela was talking with Brian, pulled open the back of her elastic bikini bottom, and dumped his potato salad in her pants.

  Everyone gasped.

  Pamela didn’t even scream. She just turned around with this incredulous look, and threw her cup of Pepsi in Mark’s face. Then she walked, as gracefully as she could under the circumstances, toward the house.

  Mark spluttered and tried to laugh it off. Everyone was standing around in embarrassed silence. I was in awe. All my life I’ve been convinced I’ve done some of the stupidest things known to mankind, but I had just witnessed something worse.

  “Hey, Mark, that was really dumb,” Patrick said finally. “She’s really ticked.”

  “Oh, heck, it was all a joke,” Mark said. Then he yelled, “Hey, Pamela, I’m sorry. Come back.”

  And when there was no answer, he laughed and yelled, “Hey, c’mon, and I’ll help get the potato salad out.”

  A door slammed somewhere inside, rattling the whole house, and Mrs. Stedmeister glanced out the window, her face puzzled, then disappeared again.

  Elizabeth and I went inside to help Pamela. She was in the bathroom, taking clumps of potato salad out of her bathing suit and dropping them down the toilet. I knew why she was taking it so calmly. Fate had just handed her a reason for breaking up with Mark—handed it to her on a paper platter.

  We followed her out to the pool then, where she picked up her towel.

  “Walk me home, Brian?” she said.

  Mark stared speechless. Brian looked confused.

  “Uh … sure,” he said. “So long, everybody. Nice party, Mark. See you in school.” And he walked off into the sunset with Mark’s girl. Ex-girl.

  The party broke up shortly after that. Elizabeth and Jill and Karen and I helped pick up all the dirty plates and cups and throw them in the trash, but Mark stood there dazed, looking out after Pamela.

  Tom walked Elizabeth home, and Patrick came home with me. As soon as we were out of Mark’s yard, I said, “Pamela’s broken up with Mark.”

  “She has? Why?” asked Patrick.

  I stopped and faced him. There are times I think boys take Stupid Pills every morning to make them say the things they do.

  “Patrick, didn’t you see what Mark did to her?”

  “Yeah, but I think she must have been thinking about breaking up with him even before,” Patrick said. “I think that’s the reason Mark dropped the salad in her suit in the first place.”

  Patrick was smarter than I’d thought.

  Later that evening I got a wild thought. I called Pamela.

  “Just out of curiosity, Pamela, did you get a letter a week or so ago about St. Jude?”

  “Yes,” said Pamela. “How did you know?”

  “Because Elizabeth and I each got one. I think Donald Sheavers sent them. What did you do with yours?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose it’s around here someplace. Why?”

  “Just curious,” I told her.

  We had each gotten a letter. I was so afraid to take chances, I’d sent mine on, as it said, and I learned to jump in deep water.

  Pamela had misplaced hers and found a good reason to break up with Mark Stedmeister.

  Elizabeth’s mother had thrown hers in the trash, and Elizabeth learned to kiss. All three of us had done something different with our letters, yet good luck had come to all.

  There was a phone call for me that evening. Lester yelled to me from downstairs, and I took it up in the hall. It was Miss Summers.

  “I just wanted to say hi, Alice, and to thank you for the letter about St. Jude.”

  I swallowed.

  “I’m not sure how I feel about luck coming from a letter, so I didn’t send it on, but I wanted to thank you for thinking of me.”

  “Oh, it’s okay,” I said. “I just didn’t know what else to do with it, but I think Dad was sort of angry that I sent it to you.”

  “He was? Why?”

  “I … well … uh … I guess he doesn’t believe much in luck. He thinks we make our own luck.”

  “I’m sure he’s right. Anyway, I’m going to miss having you in my seventh-grade class this year. But I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other from time to time.”

  “I hope so,” I told her.

  After I hung up, I went to Lester.

  “Does ‘from time to time’ mean a lot or a little?” I asked.

  “What the heck are you talking about, Al?”

  I told him what Miss Summers had said.

  “I think it’s a cagey response from an unattached woman who doesn’t want to presume either too much or too little,” Lester told me.

  Which didn’t tell me a whole lot, one way or another.

  11

  CHANGES

  MOST OF THE STORES WERE HAVING BIG sales on Labor Day, so Dad kept the Melody Inn open, and I put in another three hours to help out.

  September had come to Maryland with all sorts of changes. I was swimming, Elizabeth was kissing, Pamela was going with Brian, Janice Sherman would be coming back to work in a few weeks without her uterus, and Lester would soon be celebrating his twenty-first birthday.

  “I remember too well when I was twenty-one. I wouldn’t be twenty-one again for anything,” said Dad.

  “You’re joking,” said Lester. “I thought everyone wanted to stay twenty-one forever.”

  “Nope. Twenty-eight, maybe, or thirty-five. Forty, even. But not those early twenties. Too much energy going to waste.”

  The other thing that happened was that Loretta Jenkins, who runs the Gift Shoppe at the Melody Inn, came to work engaged to be married within a few days. It was only a couple months ago she’d been chasing Lester.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “Who’s the guy?”

  “A bartender I met at a
club,” she told me. “He’s really cute.”

  The big news, though, was that she was pregnant. I couldn’t believe it. Neither could Lester. We were both probably thinking of the times she had asked him out, but he always made excuses. When Dad told him the news, Lester folded his hands, lifted his eyes to the heavens, and said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you that I did not go camping with Loretta Jenkins.”

  “What is it with young people today?” Dad fumed. “Everyone’s in such a blasted hurry. Do this! Try that! Experience everything as though there’s no tomorrow. Nobody savors anything anymore.”

  Dad was stressed out, and I knew it. With Janice home recuperating and Loretta throwing up in the john, he was carrying a triple load. I was glad I could help him out that Monday, and Lester even came by after he finished at the appliance store to give Dad a hand. We weren’t surprised, though, when Dad told us to go home after the store closed, and he’d do the receipts.

  “Tell you what,” Les said to me. “If we go out to eat, neither of us has to cook, so what about some Thai food? I know a little place in Kensington, and we’ll order extra so Dad can have something to heat up when he gets home.”

  We drove to Kensington, and the waiter must have thought we were dating, because he led us to an adjoining room half filled with plants where, if we had been a dating couple, we could have practiced kissing like Elizabeth and Tom Perona had been doing.

  “Guess what, Lester, the waiter thinks we’re in love,” I told him.

  Lester rolled his eyes and opened the menu.

  “Too bad I’m not Marilyn or Crystal,” I said. “If you had to choose one or the other right this very minute, who would you pick?”

  He shrugged. “They both have different qualities.”

  “You haven’t seen much of Crystal lately,” I told him.

  “So I’m in my Marilyn mood,” Lester answered. “Open the menu, Al, and pick something.”

  The waiter had placed me against the wall, where I could see through the plants into the main room of the restaurant, but Lester was facing me and the wall.