The Agony of Alice

  It was chilly and I wished I’d worn my coat instead of a sweater. The patrol boy had his hood up on his jacket and he blew on his hands while he waited for a car to pass. I tried to imagine all of us standing there on the playground in the cold, waiting for our names to be called, like orphans waiting to be adopted or something.

  When we reached the school, it was there, under the basketball net, that I saw the woman I wanted to be my adopted mother. She was one of the sixth-grade teachers, Elizabeth told me, and her name was Miss Cole. She was tall and slim and simply gorgeous, with sandy hair curled under around the edge. She wore slacks that fit perfectly and a blue sweater, and she was holding a clipboard to her chest, joking with some of the students.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She smiled the way I wanted to smile, laughed the way I wanted to laugh, looked the way I wanted to look, and I just knew that if I could only be in her classroom for one year, I would come out a beautiful new person with my hair curled under and would never do a dumb thing again as long as I lived.

  Everyone was talking about which teacher they wanted to get. The boys wanted Mr. Weber, who looked like a teddy bear with thick glasses. He was nice too, Elizabeth said, and always took his class on an overnight campout the last week of school.

  And then, Elizabeth was saying in a whisper, there was Mrs. Plotkin.

  I turned to where Elizabeth’s eyes were looking and saw a human pear. Mrs. Plotkin was standing alone on the blacktop while the other teachers read off their lists. She was about sixty years old, and while she started out normal around the neck, her body grew wider and wider on the way down, as though all the fat had dropped somehow and gathered around her legs and ankles. Her dress was green and shapeless, and her gray hair hung short and straight on either side of her face.

  I sucked in my breath as students gathered around Mr. Weber when he read off his list. Elizabeth looked relieved when her name was called and walked over to stand beside him. Mr. Weber went inside with his pupils, and Miss Cole began reading her list. My heart began to thump wildly when she reached the L’s, then the M’s:

  “Patrick Long, Josephine Mackey, Ann Martin, Ted Norris … ”

  I closed my eyes and swallowed. Maybe nobody had my name. Perhaps, when Dad registered me the week before, they had forgotten to put me down. When everyone had gone inside, I would go the principal and ask to be in Miss Cole’s classroom.

  I could tell by the sound of her voice that she was calling the last name on her list. And then, flashing a smile to her lucky students, Miss Cole led them inside.

  I stood silently, my eyes on my feet, as Mrs. Plotkin read off her list. Even her name was ugly. I simply could not bear to sit in her classroom for ten months. I could not bear to watch her waddle up to the blackboard, the fat on her arms swinging. I would get sick at my stomach. I would develop asthma. I would tell the principal I was allergic.

  I heard her call my name.

  I could have been in Mr. Weber’s class, going on an overnight with my sleeping bag. I could have been in Miss Cole’s class, learning to put on lip gloss. Instead, I was walking behind a pear-shaped woman whose rear was as wide as a yardstick.

  I realized I was grinding my teeth. It would only be a matter of time, I promised, before Mrs. Plotkin expelled me from her class.

  4

  PLOD-KIN

  FIRST, HOWEVER, I DECIDED TO TRY something else. In the classroom, Mrs. Plotkin began seating us alphabetically in rows, and I knew that if I was ever going to be transferred, it would have to be right then, before there was a desk assigned to me.

  My father knew a woman once who went to the hospital to have her right leg removed in an operation, and when she woke up the left leg was gone. She said later it did seem odd when they X-rayed the left leg the day before, but she figured they knew what they were doing.

  “Let that be a lesson, Al,” my father told me. “If you have something to say, don’t put it off.”

  “Alice McKinley,” Mrs. Plotkin said, pointing to a desk.

  I waved my hand.

  “I think I’m supposed to be in Miss Cole’s room,” I blurted out. Everyone looked at me.

  “I don’t believe so, Alice.” Mrs. Plotkin checked her list. “Your name is right here.”

  “Well, when Dad registered me, they told him I’d have Miss Cole,” I lied. I didn’t even have time to be nervous.

  “Perhaps he misunderstood,” the teacher said. “Would you like to go to the office and check?”

  With my heart pounding, I went out into the empty corridor and discovered I didn’t know the way to the office. I opened the door to a broom closet, and the janitor told me which way to go.

  When I got there, I felt really scared. Once you tell a lie, you have to tell another to keep it going.

  “Mrs. Plotkin thinks there’s been a mistake,” I told the secretary. “I’m supposed to be in Miss Cole’s room.” I gave her my name.

  “Let me see,” she said. “I’ve got the master list right here.”

  I could feel my pulse pounding in my ears as she reached in her drawer and took out some papers.

  “No,” she said. “You’re in the right room.”

  “Well … I… I thought when my father talked to the principal that… he said…”

  “Do you want to see Mr. Edgecomb?”

  I nodded. I couldn’t tell which was shaking more, my teeth or my knees.

  “He’s with a parent. Just sit down on that bench, and he’ll be through in a minute.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was doing. I had never told a major lie in my life. I tried to remember all the people I’d known who had been transferred from one class to another and could only think of one—a boy back in fourth grade who sassed Mrs. Saunders.

  He didn’t exactly sass. He just repeated everything she said. If she said, “Open your geography books, please,” he said, “Open your geography books, please.” Day after day. She scolded, she punished, but he wouldn’t stop, and so she had him transferred because of a “personality clash.”

  I could hear people moving around inside Mr. Edgecomb’s office, preparing to leave. I wished suddenly that I had brought the Saint Agnes card under my mattress, something to hold on to. I prayed to Saint Agnes to please let me get into Miss Cole’s class, and then I made the sign of the cross, except I didn’t know exactly how to do it. I touched my head first and then I did it backward, just to make sure. The secretary was watching, and I was glad when the principal came out and took me into his office.

  Mr. Edgecomb looked like a rooster. He had a narrow face with red wavy hair that sort of came to a peak in the center of his head. Beneath his chin, folds of loose flesh hung down almost to his shirt collar. I couldn’t understand it because he wasn’t fat. I decided finally that he had once weighed five hundred pounds and when he lost it, his skin had been permanently stretched.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked and sat down behind his desk.

  It was to be the third lie I had told that day: “I thought … that after my father registered me… he said… you said… I could be in Miss Cole’s classroom.”

  Mr. Edgecomb looked puzzled. “When was that?”

  “Last week.”

  He got out some papers. “You’re Alice McKinley?”

  I nodded.

  Mr. Edgecomb was speaking softly: “I don’t make promises I can’t keep, Alice. We let the computer decide who goes where, and it works out best that way.”

  “But … my dad wanted me to be in her classroom.” I was desperate.

  “If you’re new to our school,” he said, studying me carefully, “you wouldn’t know very much about any of our teachers, would you? Why would your father want you to have Miss Cole?”

  I could feel my face starting to burn. I realized now what was happening. I was definitely growing backward. All the stupid things I was doing would get even more stupid as time went on. Embarrassing myself with Donald Sheavers was nothing compared to this. What awful thi
ng would I do when I got to high school? To college, for heaven’s sake?

  I sat staring down at the Kleenex I held clutched in my hand. I was picking off little pieces, rolling them between my fingers, and dropping them on Mr. Edgecomb’s carpet.

  “We’ve found,” the principal was saying, “that it’s best not to go playing musical chairs with our classes. We’d have pupils moving back and forth all year. We like to think that all three of our sixth-grade teachers are excellent, Alice, and I think if you just put forth the effort, you’ll find that you and Mrs. Plotkin will get along fine.”

  I swallowed.

  He leaned forward in his chair to let me know that I could leave. I bent down and picked up all the little pieces of Kleenex and then, without even looking at him, left the office and went back down the corridor.

  I passed Miss Cole’s room on the way. She was sitting on top of her desk with her legs crossed, and the sun came in the window behind her, like a halo around her hair. She was talking and smiling at the same time, and she looked like a goddess. Everyone was smiling back at her, worshipping her there in the sunlight.

  Tears welled up in my eyes. I wanted to be in Miss Cole’s classroom more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life. More than I’d wanted to be kissed by Donald Sheavers. I needed to be there—needed for someone to make me over. I moved on down the hall to Room 217, and there stood Mrs. Plotkin beside the American flag, her heavy legs planted firmly on the floor, her green dress sagging.

  I slipped in and took the empty seat. Mrs. Plotkin was reading off some instructions from a photocopied paper, and she moved down the aisle, put a copy on my desk, and moved back up to the flag again without missing a word. I saw some girls glance at me, then at each other and smirk, and suddenly I felt furious at the way things were working out in my life.

  “And now, let’s look at the vocabulary list,” Mrs. Plotkin was saying.

  “And now, let’s look at the vocabulary list,” I mimicked.

  It seemed impossible that the voice was mine. It was loud enough to be heard halfway across the room. Everyone turned and stared at me. Mrs. Plotkin heard also. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the green dress pause, and I knew that she was looking right at me.

  “And now,” she repeated again slowly, each word soft but distinct, “let’s look at the vocabulary list.”

  I leaned back in my chair, eyes on my lap, feeling dull and defeated. I wondered if my prayer to Saint Agnes had backfired because I wasn’t Catholic. How on earth did I think that the special patroness of bodily purity would help me with my lie? Slowly the drone of Mrs. Plotkin’s voice filled up the space around me, and after a while I wasn’t the center of attention anymore. I wasn’t anything; I couldn’t feel anything. My whole body was numb.

  At lunchtime, the fifth and sixth graders ate together in the all-purpose room. I sat down at a table with Elizabeth Price, because none of the girls in my room wanted to eat with me—not after the way I’d mimicked the teacher. Everyone was talking about their teachers and how much they liked them.

  “Miss Cole’s in charge of the safety patrol,” a girl named Charlene Verona was saying. “She’s going to try to get us sweatshirts with ‘Parkhaven School’ on the back in blue letters.”

  “Mr. Weber says we’ll be going to Chesapeake Bay for our campout,” Elizabeth said happily. “We’re going out on a boat.”

  “Have you seen Miss Cole’s red sports car?” Charlene Verona went on. “Sometimes, if you stay after school to help, she’ll drive you home in it.”

  I took a bite of the egg salad sandwich Dad had made for me that morning. It tasted like garbage. I was looking desperately for a way to salvage sixth grade, something to cling to so it wouldn’t be a total waste.

  “How do you get to be a safety patrol?” I asked Charlene.

  “Oh, those were all chosen last year,” she told me.

  We stood out by the wall talking after lunch, watching some boys play soccer. Miss Cole was walking around the jungle gym with a cluster of girls beside her, all laughing and talking and reaching up to touch her earrings. One of them, a fourth grader, I think, was begging to carry her purse, which just showed how much they loved her.

  The afternoon moved in slow motion, and so did Mrs. Plotkin.

  Mrs. Plod-kin, I said to myself and wrote that down on my notebook. Mrs. Plod-kin would never drive a red sports car because she’d never fit behind the wheel. Mrs. Plod-kin would never go to Chesapeake Bay, either, because she’d sink the boat. Everything she did at the front of the room was ugly and awkward. At two thirty, she gathered up all the math papers. She was smiling.

  “In this class,” she said, “we stop whatever we are doing at two thirty and enjoy a book together. I’m going to start off this semester with a book that other classes have enjoyed—William Armstrong’s Sounder.”

  I closed my eyes when she began to read to show her I wasn’t the least bit interested. It was about a boy and his family and a dog. I pretended to be asleep and after a while I began to snore, very lightly. A few kids around me snickered. Mrs. Plotkin stopped reading. The room grew very quiet, and I knew she was looking at me. I opened my eyes and stared down at my desk. The reading started again.

  I began scribbling things on my notebook cover. All the kids have notebooks that are scribbled up with words and drawings and things, and I wanted mine to look old and used—as if I’d been going to Parkhaven Elementary all my life.

  “‘His mother always hummed when she was worried,’” Mrs. Plotkin read. “‘When she held a well child on her lap and rocked back and forth, she sang. But when she held a sick child close in her arms and the rocker moved just enough to squeak a little, she would hum. Sometimes she hummed so softly that the child heard the deep concerned breathing of terror above the sound of the humming …’”

  I don’t know why it came to me then, but it suddenly occurred to me that Mrs. Plotkin was married. I looked up and stared. I couldn’t quite believe it. Somebody loved her. Passionately. Somebody got in bed with her every night and had breakfast with her every morning.

  Life is weird, I wrote on the front of my notebook, and decorated the letters with little flowers and scrolls.

  The bell rang before Mrs. Plotkin had finished the chapter, and she said she would read the rest the next day. I figured that’s what the Mrs. Plod-kins of the world had to do to keep you interested: lure you back with stories.

  She hadn’t assigned any homework, so I crammed my notebook into my desk, pulled out my sweater, and started for the door.

  “Alice,” I heard her saying, “I’d like to talk with you.”

  5

  HIDING OUT AT THE MELODY INN

  I FROZE WITH ONE FOOT IN THE AIR, LIKE I’d been playing Mother, May I? and forgot the “May I?”

  I put my foot down slowly and turned around. Mrs. Plotkin was standing against her desk with her hands on a little plexiglass paperweight, the kind that snows when you shake it. I knew she wasn’t going to say any more until I came over. Edging closer, I stopped two rows away.

  Her face seemed a little different. Pinker. I didn’t know whether she was angry or embarrassed, but she definitely looked uncomfortable. That made two of us.

  “All of our regular safety patrols were chosen last spring,” she told me, “but Miss Cole has asked each sixthgrade teacher to select one student as a substitute. I wonder if you’d be interested?”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My ears burned.

  “Yes,” I mumbled.

  “Good. Substitutes attend all the meetings of the safety patrol, and the first one is tomorrow at noon. You can bring your lunch and eat in Miss Cole’s classroom.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t think of one single thing to say, not even “I’m sorry.”

  Mrs. Plotkin looked down at the paperweight and turned it over and over in her hands. The snow was flying around like crazy—around a little doghouse with Snoopy on top.

  “You know,” she said finally, ??
?there are many times we find ourselves in situations we don’t especially like and we just have to make the best of it. Talking sometimes helps, though. Is there anything you want to tell me, Alice?”

  She must have thought I was crazy. How was I supposed to tell her that I didn’t want to be in her room, that I wanted Miss Cole for my adopted mother? I shook my head, feeling awful.

  Mrs. Plotkin set the paperweight on her desk. The snow began to settle and covered up Snoopy.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll give your name to Miss Cole, and I’m sure she’ll be glad to have you.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I walked quickly outside, my heart pounding with relief and excitement. All I could think about was how maybe I could be one of Miss Cole’s girls after all. I wouldn’t be rude to Mrs. Plotkin again, but I wouldn’t give up trying to get in Miss Cole’s classroom, either.

  Elizabeth Price and the other girls had gone on without me and I was glad, because I wanted to think about this alone. I imagined myself standing on a corner in a PARKHAVEN ELEMENTARY sweatshirt with my patrol sash across my chest. I imagined a little child stepping off the curb in front of a bread truck and me pulling her back and getting a medal. By the time I reached the corner, I was practically Miss Cole’s adopted daughter, taking her soup when she was sick and sitting her cat when she went on vacation. I didn’t even know if she had a cat.

  “Hey! Wait a minute!” I felt a hand grab my sleeve as I stepped off the curb just as a mail truck screeched on its brakes.

  “You’re not supposed to cross until I signal,” the safety patrol said, and I found myself looking right into the face of the red-haired boy with the blue underpants.

  I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. I hadn’t recognized him that morning, but now, without his hooded jacket, there was no mistake. I could tell that he recognized me too. He gave me that dazed sort of stare and then turned away and began swinging his arm without looking back. I didn’t stop running until I reached our street.