“Okay, but I don’t want you to leave the house. You and I are going to have a little talk when I get home,” he said.
After he hung up, Rosalind asked, “What did he say?”
“That we’re going to have a little talk when he gets home,” I answered.
Rosalind picked up her backpack and put her hat on her head. “Gotta go,” she said. “Bye.”
I went over and sat down in my beanbag chair, waiting for Dad. If this was the way my fifth-grade year was going to go, I wondered, what was next?
3
TALKING WITH DAD
I STAYED IN MY ROOM TILL SUPPERTIME. I thought that once Lester got home, Dad would forget about me. But he didn’t.
“Where exactly did you and Rosalind go this afternoon when you were looking for Sara?” he asked as he helped himself to the turnips.
I swallowed. “That lot over by the tracks,” I said, looking down at my plate.
“The railroad tracks? Alice, you know you’re not supposed to go there!”
“We didn’t get near them. We just looked at the empty lot,” I said. And then, because Dad and Lester were staring at me, I added, “In case Sara’s family was living in a tent.”
Dad let out his breath. “Where else did you look?”
“The alley behind the furniture store,” I whispered.
Dad dropped his fork. “You went down that alley?”
“No, we just stood at one end and called for Sara,” I said.
“Good grief!” said Dad.
“Be glad she didn’t try to sell our furniture,” said Lester.
“What?” said Dad.
“She asked me what we could sell that would bring in some money,” Lester told him. I gave him a look.
“Alice, what got into you?” Dad said. Now he just sounded tired. Really tired. “Maybe it’s a mistake to let you stay here by yourself.”
“No, Dad!” I cried. I couldn’t stand the thought of having to go to the Sheaverses’ again so that Donald’s mom could look after me. And I knew that Lester would be mad if he had to stick around to make sure I didn’t get into trouble. “I won’t do it again!” I promised. “I just wanted to find her if she was living in a tent or a car.”
“So you went around peeking in cars, too?” Dad asked.
“Just a few,” I told him.
Dad shook his head. “Alice, what am I going to do with you?”
“You could always send her to a convent,” said Lester, stabbing at his meat loaf.
“What’s a convent?” I asked.
“A place where you pray all day long,” said Lester.
That sounded almost worse than the Sheaverses’. And we were having meat loaf and turnips, which made the whole evening awful.
Dad gave a long sigh. “It was nice of you to think of Sara, sweetheart, but let’s go over the rules again. If you don’t think you can follow them, let me know. Number one: When you leave this house, I want you to call and tell me exactly where you’re going. Got it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re not to use the stove or the oven. You can put things in the microwave, but that’s all.”
“Right!” I said.
“You can have a few girls over, but no boys.”
“No problem there,” I told him.
“Never open the door to strangers.”
I nodded.
“And you can make my bed, empty my wastebasket, and wash my socks,” said Lester.
“Go jump,” I said.
I thought “the talk” was over then, but Dad said, “And about Rosalind…”
“It wasn’t her fault!” I cried. “Nothing was her fault! I asked her to go with me to look for Sara, and she did.”
“Well, I wish you had at least one friend who would open her mouth occasionally and say, ‘No, Alice. We’d better not,’” said Dad.
When Rosalind called me later to find out what happened, I said, “Say, ‘No, Alice, we’d better not.’”
“No, Alice, we’d better not,” Rosalind repeated.
“Good. Now I’ll tell Dad you said it,” I told her.
Our teacher is Mrs. Swick, only we call her Mrs. Stick. She’s young and as tall and straight and thin as a pencil. Her body looks stretched, like a Barbie doll’s neck. The thing about Mrs. Swick is, she’s not mean or anything, but she never laughs. On the playground the first week of school Donald Sheavers said that each of us should give a dime to the first person in our class who could make Mrs. Swick laugh out loud.
The second week of September, Jody dropped her carton of orange drink in the all-purpose room and it absolutely exploded. There was orange drink all over Jody. It even dripped from her nose. Everyone laughed, but Mrs. Swick didn’t even smile.
The third week of September, Donald was reading a story from our literature book and he said the wrong word. He was supposed to read, “The artist slipped a little gold dust into his paints,” but Donald said, “. . . into his pants.” Everybody laughed except Mrs. Swick. She smiled, though.
The fourth week of September, on a really warm day, we had the windows open at the top and bottom both. A bird flew in and couldn’t find its way out again. It kept flying around the room, swooping this way and that, and some of us were holding notebooks over our heads so the bird wouldn’t poop on us. That made us laugh, but Mrs. Swick acted as though she couldn’t take one more thing. The custodian came in and shooed the bird out.
When I told Lester about Mrs. Swick, he said that was a shame, because the most attractive thing about a girl is her laugh. If you can make a girl laugh, it means she likes you. I met Mickey once, the girl who likes Lester more than he likes her, and she laughs a lot.
“Can you make Mickey laugh whenever you want?” I asked him.
“The problem with Mickey is, she never stops,” said Lester.
“Make up your mind,” I told him.
But that’s what I’d liked about Sara. She laughed a lot too. Even though her hair was too stinky sometimes and even though some of the other girls were mean to her and even though her family didn’t have a lot of money, she could make us all laugh. Rosalind makes me laugh too, but not as much as Sara.
“Les,” Dad said to him one evening in October, “I want you to be here Friday night. I’m going to a concert at the Kennedy Center.”
“Oh, jeez, Dad! I wanted to go somewhere with Lisa!” said Lester.
“Well, please make it another night, because someone gave me two tickets for the National Symphony, and I’ve invited a friend.”
Lester and I looked at each other.
“Male or female?” asked Lester.
“It happens to be a woman,” said Dad.
I remembered that a customer had given Dad some chocolates on Valentine’s Day. “Is it the same person who gave you the valentine candy?” I asked.
“No, not Elaine,” said Dad, laughing. “She doesn’t believe in candy. That was someone else.”
“Aha!” said Lester.
“What? Aren’t I allowed to have friends?” said Dad.
“Just curious,” said Lester. “So there are two women chasing you!”
“Not exactly,” said Dad.
On Friday night I watched Dad get ready from my room across the hall. Lester has a bed in the basement, but Dad has one of our bedrooms and I have the other one.
Dad put on a shirt with French cuffs. Then he put on gold cuff links. He chose a blue tie with little white dots on it. He polished his shoes and trimmed his fingernails, and when he was done, he squirted on some cologne.
I went to the door of his room and studied him as he ran a cloth over his shoes to make them shine.
“What’s Elaine like?” I asked. I wasn’t too sure about a woman who didn’t believe in candy.
“She’s very nice,” said Dad.
“What does she look like?”
“Well, she’s not too tall, not too short, not too fat, not too thin, not too loud, not too soft, not too—”
“Dad!” I said.
He smiled. “She’s just a woman I like a lot.”
It was the “a lot” that made me perk up my ears. “Are you going to marry her?” I asked.
“Sweetheart, we haven’t got that far,” he said.
Lester and I fixed macaroni and cheese to eat while Dad went to dinner with Elaine what’s-her-name. He wouldn’t tell us her last name because she had children in school, he said, and if we knew who they were, it might make things awkward.
“I think it would be awkward if we told a friend our dad was dating this fox named Elaine, and it turned out that Elaine was this friend’s mother,” said Lester.
“Then I suggest you don’t tell any of your friends that I’m dating a fox named Elaine,” said Dad.
“If she has children, what happened to her husband?” I asked.
“They’re divorced,” said Dad.
Lester stayed in the basement most of the evening listening to CDs and playing his guitar. When the phone rang, he didn’t even hear it. I answered.
“Oh, Alice,” said Mrs. Sheavers from next door. “I just wondered what was going on at the Melody Inn tonight. I saw your father go out, and he was all dressed up.”
I knew that Dad wouldn’t want me to tell Mrs. Sheavers that he was going out with a woman named Elaine, but it wouldn’t hurt for her to know that he had a date. Mrs. Sheavers would like to go out with Dad herself, because she and Mr. Sheavers are divorced too.
“He wasn’t going to work,” I said. “He’s taking a woman to the symphony.”
“Oh, well!” said Mrs. Sheavers. “That woman he works with? Janice somebody?”
“No. Someone else,” I said. And then I added, “He has lots of girlfriends,” which wasn’t entirely true, but then, how would I know? He does know a lot of customers, and he would say that they are friends, and some of them are women, so it wasn’t a lie, was it?
“I just wondered if something special was going on at the Melody Inn that I might like to attend,” said Mrs. Sheavers.
Sure you did, I thought.
When Dad came home, Lester and I were waiting for him in the living room. I was sitting in my beanbag chair. I don’t know what we expected—that Dad would walk in with Elaine on his arm, maybe, and say, Well, kids, this is going to be your new mother, just like Sara’s dad may have said, Let’s move.
Dad came in alone. He closed the door behind him and locked it. When he turned around, there we were, looking at him.
“Hellooooo!” said Dad. “You were expecting Santa Claus, maybe?”
“Just wanted to be sure you got home safe and sound,” said Lester. “Have a good time?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” said Dad. And as he passed under the light in the hallway, I saw lipstick on the side of his face. Well, somebody was having a good year, I thought, even though it wasn’t me.
4
THE PARTY
JODY GAVE A SLEEPOVER HALLOWEEN party at her house. She invited three girls—Dawn, Megan, and me. She didn’t invite Rosalind. We were supposed to come in costume, go out trick-or-treating together, and then come back for hamburgers and to stay all night.
Two of us would get to sleep in the bunk beds in Jody’s room, and the other two would sleep on an inflatable mattress on the floor. Megan and I got the mattress, but that was okay.
Some of the girls, Jody and Dawn in particular, have been sort of mean to Rosalind this year, just like they were to Sara back in third grade. They talk about clothes and earrings a lot. They try to look like the girls in magazines.
Rosalind and I—and sometimes Megan—like to talk about the same things Sara did. Elephants and bugs and volcanoes and ice-cream sundaes and ghosts and almost anything except clothes and earrings. And I don’t look much like the girls in magazines, so I’m not sure how I got invited to Jody’s party.
I never think about costumes, either, until the last minute, and then I never know what to wear. The last couple of Halloweens I’ve just put on an old tuxedo jacket of Dad’s and pretended I was anyone he said I was—a composer, a conductor, whatever.
This year when he got out the jacket again, he said I could be Mozart if I just wore a powdered wig, the way the men did back then. So we got a woman’s gray wig at the dollar store and tied it in back with a black ribbon, and presto! I was Mozart.
Except that none of the other girls could figure out who I was, and they all tried to guess.
“Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother,” said Dawn.
“No,” I said.
“The old woman who lived in a shoe,” said Megan.
I shook my head.
“The old woman who swallowed a fly?” asked Jody.
“No. Mozart,” I said, careful to pronounce it correctly: “Mote-zart,” with a t sound.
“Who’s that?” asked Dawn.
“A guy who wrote music a long time ago,” I said.
“Why would you want to be him?” Jody asked.
“It was Dad’s idea,” I said. I decided right there I would choose my own costumes from then on. That’s what I got for being lazy.
We had a good time trick-or-treating, though. Almost everyone seemed to be giving out candy bars—the good kind—not those little boxes of raisins or those teeny packets of candy corn or gum balls. It was a cold clear night too, and we went four blocks up and down one street, then four blocks up and down another before we headed back.
We passed Donald Sheavers in a Batman costume, and then, under a streetlight, we saw Rosalind, walking all by herself.
“Hey. There’s Rosalind!” I said to Dawn.
“Quick. Over here,” Jody whispered, grabbing my arm and yanking us behind some bushes till Rosalind had gone by.
Somehow I’d thought that maybe Jody would call to her to come and join the party. Then I realized that Rosalind must have known there was a party and that I had been invited, because she hadn’t said anything to me at school about trick-or-treating together.
When Rosalind was gone, we came out, and Jody said, “Boy, if Rosalind eats all her candy, she’ll really be fat! You can already see her you-know-whats under her T-shirt.”
“Breasts,” I said. I hate it when people call parts of their bodies “you-know-what.”
The other girls giggled.
When we got back to Jody’s house, her mother had hamburgers waiting for us. We dumped our four sacks of candy in one big heap in the middle of the kitchen table, and then—one at a time—we took turns choosing something from the pile until the only things left were peppermints and pennies and toothbrushes from a dentist.
Afterward we watched a spooky movie on the TV in Jody’s room, but it got too scary and we turned it off. I wondered what Rosalind was doing right then.
Last year Megan had a sleepover birthday party, and Rosalind had been invited that time. I thought she had been okay. If anyone was awful at that party, it was Megan’s little sister, Marlene. She was bossing everyone around, telling them what to do and where to put the presents, and spying on us down in their family room.
“I wish you’d invited Rosalind,” I said.
“She’s too fat,” said Jody.
“But she’s funny and she’s nice,” I said.
Jody puffed out her cheeks and rolled her eyes, and Dawn laughed.
“When she gets to junior high school, she’ll be sorry she ate so much,” Jody went on. “In junior high you really have to look nice. Even your legs.”
“Your legs?” I said.
“You have to start shaving,” said Jody.
“Shaving?” I said. “Women shave? What’s to shave?” This is what happens when you’re the only girl in the family. When you don’t have a mother, you don’t know about important things like places where women have to shave.
“Haven’t you noticed? There’s hair on your legs, and it will get thick and dark as you get older,” Jody told me.
After we’d put on our pajamas, we looked at our legs. Jody’s hair was the darkest, so we coul
d see fine dark fuzz on her legs. Mine was blond, and Megan’s and Dawn’s was sort of in-between. But none of it looked like hair to me. It looked like peach fuzz.
“So?” said Jody. “Do you want to practice shaving?”
“Uh… I don’t know,” I said.
Now Jody was really smiling. “I’ll show you how,” she said. She went across the hall to the bathroom and came back with four pink plastic razors and a can of shaving cream.
We all rolled our pajama legs up to the knees. Two of us sat on the bottom bunk with our legs propped up beside us, and the other two girls sat on the rug. “Okay, first you spray shaving cream all over your legs like this,” Jody said. She was holding the can the wrong way and got shaving cream on Megan’s hand.
“Oops!” said Jody. She tried again. This time she sprayed the cream up one leg and down the other. She handed the can to Dawn, who did the same. Then she handed the can to me.
I held it just like Jody had done and sprayed a line of shaving cream from my ankle to my knee. Then I sprayed the other leg. It looked like a row of whipped cream on both halves of a banana split. All I needed was a cherry on top.
I handed the can to Megan, and all she got was a hiss of air. We had to scoop a little cream off our legs and give it to her.
“Now,” said Jody, holding up one of the razors and taking off the safety clip, “you hold it like this, and then you run it along your leg.”
We watched in fascination as the razor cleared a path through the shaving cream like a lawn mower cutting through tall grass.
“Feel,” said Jody after she cut another path next to that.
We ran our hands over the path. Her leg felt very smooth.
“Now feel the other leg,” said Jody.
We felt. It was fuzzy.
Jody continued to shave while we watched. I picked up one of the other razors, took off the safety clip, and tried to hold it like Jody was. I started at the ankle and made a long scrape up my leg. It hurt! Then I saw that I had made a thin red line where the blade had cut me.
“Ouch!” I said, drawing back.
“You must have been pressing too hard or holding the razor wrong,” said Jody. “You’re supposed to do it gently.”