The Agony of Alice

  Although our paths will part. …

  and you already know that when you get to the fourth line, it’s going to end with “heart.”

  When I got to class, I saw that some of the girls had written poems, though, and one had even drawn blue roses around the border.

  I sat clutching my journal while Mrs. Plotkin checked attendance. What could I possibly write that would show how I felt about her now? Coming back from Chicago, I had written about feeling homesick, but it didn’t seem enough. It didn’t really show her how much I had changed.

  Then suddenly I knew what to do. I could hear all the notebooks slapping together as they were passed forward up the rows. When they got to my desk, there was a five-second wait while I removed all the paper clips from my pages. I wanted Mrs. Plotkin to know that there wasn’t anything I couldn’t share with her now, the angry feelings as well as the good ones. When I finally put my journal on top of the others and passed them on, I saw Mrs. Plotkin smiling at me, the kind of smile you could take home and keep all year. I smiled back.

  I never knew if she read those early pages or not. It’s all right to have secrets, she’d told us once, as long as you don’t have any secrets from yourself. When I got my journal back a few days later, she hadn’t written anything about the first pages. She just wrote something at the end about how glad she was to have me in her classroom and how the “agonies” I wrote about were things that happened to us all.

  I wondered if that was true, if people went on doing stupid things even after they reached twenty. Yep, I decided. They just didn’t worry about them so much, that’s all.

  On the last day of school, I waited until most of the others had left, laughing and yelling, the way they always do. Pamela Jones was there by the globe, turning it around and around on its squeaky pedestal.

  “Anybody interested in a half jar of paste?” Mrs. Plotkin said. “It will only dry up over the summer.” One of the boys took the paste and went off smiling.

  A pair of scissors went next, with one point missing, and in a few minutes, Pamela and I were the only two left in the room with Mrs. Plotkin.

  “Well, my special helpers!” Mrs. Plotkin said. She looked first at me and smiled, and then at Pamela. My heart began to thump.

  “You know, Pamela, that globe is simply not going to last another year, I’m sure; and if you like, you can have it,” Mrs. Plotkin said. Pamela’s face lit up like a neon sign while my stomach did a dive.

  “Really? Oh, Mrs. Plotkin, I’ve always wanted a globe! It’s just the most wonderful thing … !” She went on and on, and Mrs. Plotkin smiled at her as though I wasn’t even there.

  Part of me wanted to leave. Part of me wanted to clobber Pamela. But another part of me told me I loved Mrs. Plotkin for more than her globe. I stayed.

  I filled the bucket with water for the blackboard and began to scrub. Pamela chattered on about where she was going to put the globe, and Mrs. Plotkin sat at her desk cleaning out drawers. Finally, however, there was quiet in the room. Pamela had gone. I went on with the scrubbing, knowing it was the very last time I would clean Mrs. Plotkin’s blackboard. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry.

  “Alice,” Mrs. Plotkin was saying, “I don’t have any children of my own, you know. … ” I turned.

  “I don’t even have any nieces, just nephews,” she said. She was smiling. Then she reached for her purse and opened it. “I don’t know if you want this or not, but … you see, my great-grandmother passed it down to her daughter, who passed it down to my mother, and I was supposed to give it to my daughter, which I never had.…”

  She took out a tiny box of gray velvet and opened it.

  There was a ring—a very old ring—with a large green stone in it about the color of Mrs. Plotkin’s dress. The silver was very worn, and the green stone had a tiny chip on one side, but the next thing I knew Mrs. Plotkin was slipping it on one of my fingers—the finger with the cut on the knuckle and the dirt under the nail. Mrs. Plotkin didn’t seem to notice, though. She held out my hand and looked at the big ring wobbling around on my finger.

  “Well, now”—Mrs. Plotkin smiled—“I think my great-grandmother—she would have been your great-great-grandmother—would have been pleased to see who got this ring, Alice. I really do.”

  I couldn’t even talk. I just threw my arms around Mrs. Plotkin’s neck, and she hugged me back. I swallowed and swallowed, but I didn’t cry.

  Then we talked about what we were going to do over the summer, and Mrs. Plotkin told me how she was going to spend July in Vermont with Ned, and all the while I went on cleaning the blackboard, my eyes on the big green ring there on my finger. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever owned in my life.

  Patrick came over that evening and brought me a miniature pack of Whitman’s chocolate-covered cherries, but he’d left them in the sun all afternoon and we had to eat them with spoons. We sat side by side on the glider, our spoons poised over the melted chocolates. I’d scoop up one, then he’d take one, and when we were through eating, I knew he was going to kiss me.

  There are some things you just sort of know. It got real quiet on the porch for one thing, and I realized that I was the only one pushing the glider. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him looking at me, and I knew that any minute he was going to lean over.

  The old Donald Sheavers panic rose up in my chest, and my palms started to tingle. I was trapped. There wasn’t even a sheet of cardboard to roll off of.

  Alice McKinley, I told myself, you can giggle and squirm and fall off the swing, or you can just get it over with.

  Patrick leaned a little further until I could smell the chocolate on his lips. The next thing I knew the glider was moving again, and Patrick was looking straight ahead. The boy who had lived in Spain and eaten squid had lost his nerve.

  I wanted him to know that it was all right, so I started talking about everything I could think of—how Dad was going to rent a cottage at Bethany Beach over the summer, and how Lester’s new girlfriend, Crystal Harkins, played the clarinet. But when I ran out of things to say, I knew that Patrick would try again. He fidgeted until he had one arm on the back of the glider just behind me, and the next time he leaned forward, he had his eyes closed, so I closed mine, and our lips collided. It was probably the shortest kiss in recorded history, but I knew that later that evening I would go upstairs, take out the poster, and write, “Kissed Patrick” in the “Forward” column. And Patrick seemed so relieved that I wondered if somewhere he wasn’t keeping a list of accomplishments too, and that underneath “Count in Japanese,” he would add, “Kissed Alice.”

  I guess he’d been so nervous about the chocolates and the kissing that he hadn’t noticed the ring before, but suddenly his eye caught sight of it there on my finger, with adhesive tape wrapped around it on the palm side to keep it from falling off.

  “Where’d you get the ring?” he asked, and for a moment I thought maybe he was jealous, that maybe he thought I had another boyfriend. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have two boys crazy over me at the same time. Three, even. Three boys all pining for me on the porch, and Lester having to run them off with the garden hose.

  “It was passed down from a great-great-grandmother,” I told him.

  “Looks good on you,” Patrick said, “but it’s sort of big, isn’t it?”

  I held my hand out in front of me, remembering the way Mrs. Plotkin had held it as she admired the ring. I smiled.

  “I’ll grow into it,” I told him.

  PATRICK AND ME

  I HAD JUST DRUNK MY ORANGE JUICE and was waiting for my toast to pop when Dad said, “Well, the summer of the first boyfriend!”

  It sounded Wonderful and Sad and Magnificent somehow, like “The winter of our discontent” or “The spring of our desire” or “The autumn of our hopes and dreams.” What he was really talking about, of course, was Patrick and me.

  “I don’t know if I can stand it,” said Lester, my nineteen-year-old brother, w
ho had a small piece of scrambled egg stuck in his mustache.

  “You don’t have to stand it,” I told him. “You could always move out.”

  He ignored me, as he usually does. “I mean,” he went on, talking to Dad, “how many times can I come home and find Alice and her boyfriend eating melted chocolate-covered cherries with a spoon?”

  Just for that, I decided not to tell Lester about the scrambled egg. I hoped he would go all day with it there in his mustache and that he would meet the woman he wanted to marry, but all she’d be looking at was that little piece of yellow below his left nostril. Lester, though, was going with a new girl named Crystal Harkins, who played the clarinet, so maybe he’d already found the woman he wanted to marry, and the scrambled egg wouldn’t matter.

  Dad told me once that people only remember the stupid things that happen to themselves—that everyone else forgets almost as soon as they’re over. Lester has a mind like an elephant, though. He’ll remember those chocolate-covered cherries as long as he lives, mainly because Patrick and I had just dropped one on the porch and were deciding whether or not to eat it when Lester came home and saw us.

  It was only last week when that happened. And it was the first time Patrick ever kissed me. So the Summer of the First Boyfriend—the first real boyfriend—stretched out before me like a roller coaster. I didn’t want to get off, but I was terrified of what was over the next hill.

  My toast popped up. I buttered both sides, then drenched them in cinnamon and sugar.

  “Have a little toast with your sugar,” Dad said.

  “I can’t even stand looking at the way she eats!” Lester moaned.

  “Look who’s talking,” I retorted.

  Lester’s on a “carb kick,” as he calls it. He’s into weight lifting and he gorges on carbohydrates. For breakfast he eats a stack of toaster waffles slathered with syrup, then toast, then cereal sprinkled with granola. He waits exactly forty minutes before he goes down to the basement and works out on his bench press. The whole basement smells like Lester’s armpits.

  I wonder what we’d be eating for breakfast if I had a mother. Homemade biscuits, I’ll bet. French toast sprinkled with powdered sugar. Oatmeal, even.

  I told Dad once that my earliest memory was of me sitting at the breakfast table with Mama, eating oatmeal.

  “That was your aunt Sally, Al,” Dad said. He always gets upset when I confuse Aunt Sally with Mama. “Your mother never made oatmeal in her life.”

  Mama died when I was five. I can only remember about one year out of those five, and a lot of what I remember is wrong. Scratch the oatmeal.

  After breakfast, Dad went to work at the Melody Inn. It’s one of a chain of music stores, and Dad’s the manager of this one. Lester waited his forty minutes, then went downstairs to work out. When he finally showered and left the house for his summer job selling washing machines, I curled up on the sofa and thought about summer.

  “Are you sure you trust Patrick and me in the house together?” I’d asked Dad only the day before.

  “Shouldn’t I?” Dad had said.

  Parents love to do that—to answer a question with a question.

  “I don’t know,” I told him.

  “Well, if you feel uncomfortable, Al, you can always tell Patrick that I want the two of you out on the porch,” he said.

  I didn’t know about that, either. If I told Patrick that Dad didn’t want us alone in the house, it would sound as though he suspected Patrick of all sorts of things Patrick had never even thought of yet.

  I guess it was the Summer of the First Boyfriend, not just for me but for Pamela Jones, too. She’s the one with the blond hair so long that she sits on it, and she was going with Mark Stedmeister. You should have seen the way they kissed over by the grade school where we all hung around after dinner. She’s not supposed to kiss until she’s sixteen, though. Pamela’s mom said if she ever caught her kissing, she’d cut off her hair. I asked Dad what hair had to do with kissing, and he said he hadn’t the slightest idea.

  Elizabeth, who lives across the street from me—beautiful Elizabeth with the thick, dark eyelashes—didn’t have a boyfriend yet, but she liked some guy from St. Joseph’s. So we were all sort of on the roller coaster together, Pamela and Elizabeth and I.

  The phone rang and my heart bounced—the way you feel going down in an elevator. I knew it was Patrick. It had to be Patrick. He never calls in the afternoon because he’s usually mowing lawns. In the morning, though, he’s home waiting for the grass to dry.

  The phone rang a second time. Elizabeth says never answer the phone after the first ring because you’ll sound too eager, and Pamela says if you wait for more than three rings, the boy will think you don’t care. Pamela says that two-and-a-half rings are just about right.

  I grabbed it after the second ring. It was Patrick.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Nothing much,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Talking to you,” said Patrick. He always thinks of things like that to say.

  I absolutely could not think of a single word to say next. The seconds ticked on. It was my turn! I had to think of something.

  “Golda died,” I blurted out finally.

  “Who’s Golda?”

  “One of my guppies. The biggest one. I think she was pregnant again. I guess maybe I overfed her.”

  “Did you know that guppies give birth to live young?” Patrick asked me. “About fifty at a time?”

  Patrick knows everything. He’s lived in Spain and Germany and he can count to a hundred in Japanese and his family eats squid.

  “Yes,” I said. “I knew that.” I’d been raising them, after all. I think he was a little surprised.

  “Do you want me to come over?” Patrick asked.

  “Do you want to?” I said.

  “If you want me to,” he answered.

  “I do if you do,” I told him. This was getting ridiculous.

  “Okay, I’ll come over,” said Patrick, and hung up.

  I rushed upstairs and brushed my teeth, changed my T-shirt, combed my hair, and put on a pair of sandals. Then I sat down on the couch again, mussed up my hair a little, pulled on my T-shirt to make it look baggy, and kicked off one sandal so it would look as though I hadn’t even moved since he’d called.

  I stuck both feet out in front of me. They were too big. My legs were too skinny. I looked like a starving prisoner of war, with my bony knees and big feet. I didn’t have any hips to speak of, but I was beginning to get breasts, and I could have felt good about those if my lips weren’t so thin and my hair wasn’t so straight.

  Patrick could have had any girlfriend he wanted out of the whole sixth grade last year, but he chose me. I’m sort of like Mrs. Plotkin, my sixth-grade teacher, I guess, who is ugly on the outside and beautiful on the inside and has this marvelous, adoring husband named Ned. Except I’m not really ugly. Just so terribly … Alice.

  “How come you didn’t choose Pamela or Elizabeth to go with?” I asked Patrick once.

  “Because I like you,” he said.

  Life’s weird.

  I heard Patrick’s bike squeaking to a stop outside. I heard it clunk against the house and then his footsteps on the porch. The doorbell rang.

  “I guess we’d better sit out here,” I said when I answered, and walked on over to the swing.

  “How come?” asked Patrick.

  “’Cause Dad and Lester aren’t home,” I told him.

  “Oh,” said Patrick.

  We sat side by side there on the porch, pushing against the floor with our feet, listening to the creak of the chains on the hooks above. After a while Patrick reached over and put his hand over mine on the swing between us.

  I was thinking about French-kissing, which is kissing with your mouths open. Pamela had never done it but she read about it in a magazine. I was wondering how many times you had to brush your teeth first before you French-kiss. You probably had to start planning it ear
ly in the morning and be careful what you ate all day so your mouth wouldn’t taste like onions or anything. I’ll bet if Pamela’s mother ever caught her French-kissing, she’d cut off her head.

  “What are you thinking?” Patrick asked finally.

  “About that book of your brother’s we were looking at last time,” he said.

  My shoulders slumped with relief. “I’ll get it,” I said, and jumped up.

  It was called Celebrity Yearbook, with high school photos of famous people. You had to guess who they were, and the answers were in the back of the book.

  “Hey, he hosted the Academy Awards—look at that haircut!” Patrick would say, and I’d laugh. Then we’d come to another picture and try to guess.

  “Julia Roberts!” we’d say, and laugh again.

  Inside, on my way to the bookcase, I passed the porch window and saw Patrick take a breath mint out of his pocket and pop it in his mouth.

  I stopped dead still on the rug. He was going to kiss me! The minute I went out there with that book, Patrick would kiss me. I ran upstairs and brushed my teeth all over again. I gargled with Scope. Then I got Celebrity Yearbook and went back out to the swing, my heart pounding like a tom-tom.

  I sat down by Patrick and opened the book on my lap. The roller coaster started to climb. Patrick put one arm around my shoulder and leaned over, as if he was looking at the pictures. I could smell the spearmint on his breath. One minute I was looking at a picture of Bill Cosby when he was eighteen and the next minute I was looking at Patrick’s nose.

  The kiss. The second kiss of the summer. Patrick’s lips were cool, and he pressed them a little harder against mine than he had the first time. He kept them there a little longer, too. I wondered if he was counting.

  Then he sort of squeezed my shoulder with his hand, the kiss was over, the roller coaster was gliding to a stop, and I figured that now we could relax and enjoy the book. There are just certain things you’re supposed to do when you’re going with someone, and I figured that Patrick kissed me first thing so we wouldn’t have to worry about it all morning. I wondered how long you had to go with somebody before you stopped worrying. Before you stopped running inside to brush your teeth. Maybe by the time you were eighteen. The next time Lester brought Crystal Harkins over, I’d ask her.