The Agony of Alice

  I wrote in my journal every day, just putting the words down as they came to me. Mrs. Plotkin said that all great writers wrote about subjects that really mattered to them, and that’s why she wanted us to get used to writing about feelings, not just things. But one day something happened I would never put in my journal.

  I was passing the school office during the lunch hour, and the secretary asked if I would take a note to Miss Cole. The garage had called, she said, and left an estimate for repairing Miss Cole’s sports car. I knew that Mrs. Plotkin was on playground duty, so I figured the rest of the teachers were in the lounge.

  I went down the hall and opened the door. Some of the teachers were eating lunch at the table. Miss Cole was taking her paper cup over to the trash.

  “I wonder if I’ve got time to run to the bank,” Mr. Weber was saying. “Who’s on playground duty?”

  In answer, Miss Cole turned toward him and let her shoulders droop, her arms dangle. She took a few steps forward, leaning heavily on one foot, then the other.

  My hands felt chilly. I wished I hadn’t seen that.

  “Miss Cole,” I said, “here’s a note from the office.”

  She turned around. “Oh! I didn’t see you, Alice. Thank you.” She watched me leave.

  I went quickly back out into the hall and closed the door behind me. I shut my eyes against what Miss Cole had done, but I couldn’t get rid of the picture. I wanted to protect Mrs. Plotkin from it, however. I would never write it down in my journal.

  At dinner that night there was squid. It was tough and yucky and I wondered why on earth Patrick would ever admit to eating anything so awful. Still, I knew I had to eat every bite.

  But that wasn’t all. When I had washed the last piece down, Dad said, “I’ve got a little surprise for you, Al.”

  I didn’t want any more surprises.

  “How would you like to go to Chicago over spring vacation and visit your Aunt Sally?”

  I didn’t want to visit Aunt Sally. Chicago was not Hawaii or Spain or Japan. Before I could say no, however, Dad went on: “I’ve made a reservation for you on the Capitol Limited.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s a train, and you’re going to have a roomette, your own little bedroom. It will be quite an experience! Aunt Sally will take you shopping for some new summer clothes, take you to the theater, to museums. … ”

  There was no way in the world I could say no. Three weeks later Dad drove me down to Union Station and saw me to the gate. He wanted to put me on the train himself and tell the conductor to look after me, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Then everybody would know it was my first trip.

  “You’re going to have a great time, Al,” he promised. “Something to talk about when you get back.”

  The crowd moved through the gate, and then I was walking along a silver and blue train, car after car after car, my suitcase banging against my leg.

  13

  FLUSHING ON THE CAPITOL LIMITED

  I HAD HOPED I’D BE ASSIGNED TO THE cheerful porter who helped me on, but I got a grumpy-looking man instead with a face like mashed potatoes. For the first five minutes in my tiny roomette, I tried to find the toilet, but I certainly wasn’t going to ask my porter. I found the closet and the cupboard and the ice water dispenser, but no toilet. Then I lifted the lid of the hassock and there it was, right in front of the window!

  Everything is collapsible on a train—the bed, the sink, the chair. People are collapsible. On my way to the dining car, the train lurched and I fell right across the lap of a woman who was reading to her little boy.

  “Get off!” the kid said, and pounded me on the ear.

  At the table, while I was waiting for my cheeseburger, the train lurched again and the water in my glass spilled over onto the trousers of the businessman next to me who was enjoying his Rock Cornish hen with wild rice.

  It took twice as long to get ready for bed as it did at home because everything kept moving. The soap slid round on the edge of the sink, and every time the train went around a bend, I’d go careening against the mirror. DO NOT PLACE VALUABLES ON SINK, said a little sign between the faucets, but I forgot and closed the sink up with the wash cloth still on it. When I opened it again, the cloth was gone, lying somewhere on the tracks between Pittsburgh and Canton, Ohio.

  I had just used the toilet when the train stopped. There was another sign under the lid of the hassock: DO NOT FLUSH WHEN TRAIN IS IN STATION. I wondered what would happen if somebody flushed. I imagined people standing on the platform saying good-bye and suddenly a trap door opening under the train. Then I imagined the train going down the track at sixty miles an hour and everybody flushing. That didn’t seem right either. I wondered when you could flush in an airplane. Maybe you had to wait till you were over the ocean or something.

  While I was waiting for the train to start up again so I could flush, I studied the control panel just inside the door. I pushed a button, and a fan came on. I pushed another for the ceiling light. I kept going, right down the row, and then I realized I had called the porter.

  I froze. Somewhere a light had lit or a buzzer had buzzed, and the man with the mashed-potato face would be on his way to number six. I pulled on my pajamas and curled up in the seat, with my arms over my head.

  “Porter!” I heard the man call as he went up and down the aisle outside. “Porter!”

  What would happen if I didn’t answer? I wondered. Would they stop the train? Would they call the paramedics and blowtorch my door? But after a while he went away, the train started moving, I flushed, and knew I was going to have to get the bed down by myself, because I couldn’t possibly call the porter again.

  There was a big handle on the wall over the seat so I turned it. The seat folded up and the wall started to come down on top of me. The bed was taking up the whole space! I would be crushed! SILVER SPRING GIRL CRUSHED BY BED ON CAPITOL LIMITED, the headlines would say.

  When I was down on the floor, I realized that the bed had stopped falling and was resting on the hassock. I could just reach my hand up and open the door, crawl out inside the zippered curtain, climb up on top of the bed, and close the door again.

  I settled down under the covers, my heart still pounding. It was dark now outside the window. I turned on my bed lamp and took my journal out of my suitcase. Mrs. Plotkin had asked us to keep it going during spring vacation, so I wrote about falling in that woman’s lap back in the passenger car and how, if all the people who had ever seen me do something ridiculous were to die or disappear or something, hundreds would vanish off the face of the earth. Then I turned out the light and closed my eyes.

  Suddenly I realized that the bed was rising. Just when I felt myself drifting off to sleep, my feet seemed to be higher than my head. The bed was closing! I was going to be buried alive! SILVER SPRING GIRL SUFFOCATES ON CAPITOL LIMITED! I yanked my suitcase off the rack and put it on the bottom of the bed to hold it down. Then I had to go to the bathroom again. The 7UP I’d drunk at supper was going through me like a rocket.

  I put my suitcase on the rack, opened the door, stepped down behind the zippered curtain, lifted the bed till it hung suspended halfway up, and used the toilet. This time, when I lowered the bed, I saw a little sign on the wall that said, LOCK BED SECURELY. There was a latch on the wall and a latch on the bed. The latch clicked. The bed was secure. I finally went to sleep.

  The next thing I knew, the conductor was calling, “Chi-cago! Chicago, Illinois!” I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t up! I wasn’t dressed! I wasn’t even awake!

  Peeping out the window, I could see that we were entering a large city. I yanked down my suitcase and dressed on top of the bed. I slid open the door, leaped down behind the curtain, pushed up the bed, and splashed water on my face. There was barely time to flush the toilet before the train stopped. Grabbing my toothbrush from the sink and my jacket from the closet, I crammed my pajamas into my suitcase and went out in the hall, dragging my suitcase after me.

  I hadn’t
seen my aunt for six years, but I knew that the tall gray-haired woman in the red raincoat was Aunt Sally.

  “They didn’t wake me!” I explained, but she just swooped down with her long arms and hugged me to her, lifting my heels right up off the concrete.

  “Alice McKinley, I can’t wait to get you home and feed you!” she declared, and if I looked like the dog’s breakfast, she didn’t say so. She just picked up my suitcase with one hand and linked her other arm in mine and marched me right down the platform, through the Chicago terminal, and down the block toward a parking lot.

  I liked Aunt Sally right away. She had that determined look in her eyes, like a woman in charge of her life; and at that point I wanted somebody to take charge of me. Maybe fate had sent me to Chicago; maybe now that boys were getting interested in me—Patrick, anyway—Aunt Sally was just what I needed. She was easy to talk to, and while she headed out to the suburbs, she told me about all the things we were going to do during my vacation.

  “Your Uncle Milt is at work, but we’ll have us a big dinner tonight,” she was saying, “and of course Carol’s coming by.”

  “Who’s Carol?” The name seemed vaguely familiar.

  Aunt Sally looked over at me. “Why, Alice, Carol’s our daughter, your very own cousin. Don’t you remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. Right,” I said, trying hard to think what she looked like.

  “She married last year—husband’s in the navy … ”

  Aunt Sally rattled on and on, and my eyes began to get heavy. I was about to fall asleep there in the front seat of her Pontiac when all of a sudden I straightened up and stared.

  “Aunt Sally, you’ve got to stop!”

  The brakes began to catch, and Aunt Sally swerved over toward the curb. “What’s the matter?”

  I was looking at a church just beyond a Catholic school and playground. CHURCH OF ST. AGNES, it said.

  “I’ve just got to go in there,” I told her, pointing.

  The Pontiac stopped.

  “Alice, have you turned Catholic?”

  “No, but it’s just something I have to do,” I explained.

  I could see that Aunt Sally didn’t understand at all. “You’re not dressed for church, Alice.”

  “She won’t care,” I insisted, knowing that a girl who had been put to death by the Romans could scarcely mind whether hundreds of years later another about-to-be-twelve girl had the proper clothes or not.

  “You’ve nothing on your head!” Aunt Sally protested. She turned off the ignition and dug around in her purse until she found a plastic rain bonnet.

  “Here,” she said. “You’ve got to be decent.”

  I couldn’t for the life of me understand how a plastic rain bonnet over uncombed hair was going to make me decent, but Aunt Sally meant business, so I put it on.

  “I’ll wait here,” she said.

  It was almost ten o’clock on a Saturday morning, and the church was empty. In the vestibule was a rack of free pamphlets about the Catholic Church, and one of them said, Saint Agnes, Martyr. I took it with me and walked slowly down the aisle toward the little statue off on one side.

  There was no light in the church except what was coming through the stained glass windows and from the candles in front. But the statue of Saint Agnes looked just like the picture I had back home under my mattress.

  I sat down on the pew next to the statue. Just like her picture, she was holding a lamb and a palm branch, and her bare feet pointed daintily out beneath her blue robes.

  The pamphlet told how at the age of twelve, Agnes had consecrated herself to a heavenly husband. She had a lot of suitors who wanted to marry her, but she wouldn’t give in, and so they accused her of being a Christian and she was sent to be judged. Still she wouldn’t give in. “At last,” the pamphlet said, “terrible fires were made, and iron hooks, racks and other instruments of torture displayed before her, with threats of immediate execution. The heroic child surveyed them undismayed, and made good cheer. … ”

  I swallowed and looked up at the statue again. Maybe Agnes had sent me here to Chicago, I was thinking. Maybe the girl with a dozen boyfriends, the girl who could laugh in the face of her persecutors, could be the model that Alice McKinley was looking for. Maybe, though I didn’t see quite how, if I carried around her card when I got home, I wouldn’t feel so awful when I did something stupid.

  I stuffed the pamphlet in the pocket of my jacket and went back out. Aunt Sally started the car.

  “Tonight,” she said, not even looking at me, “I’m going to have Carol cut your hair.”

  14

  AUNT SALLY, SIR

  EVERYTHING AT AUNT SALLY’S IS ORGANIZED.

  “A place for everything, and everything in its place,” she said. She said it when she took me up to Carol’s old room, and she said it when I came down to lunch, and she said it that evening to Uncle Milt when he left his umbrella on a chair instead of the stand.

  Uncle Milt didn’t seem to mind. “My Sally runs a tight ship,” he said, when Aunt Sally was in the kitchen making supper. And when she called out to remind him to change the lightbulb on the porch, he smiled, saluted, and said, “Yes, sir, Aunt Sally, sir.”

  Carol, their married daughter, came for dinner, and she looked exactly like Aunt Sally, only younger. She dressed in old sloppy clothes, but on Carol they looked great. Aunt Sally didn’t seem to think so, but they did. Carol was tall and freckled the way I imagined my mother looked, and her eyes were always smiling even when her mouth wasn’t.

  “Wow,” Carol said, when she walked in. “The last time I saw you, Alice, you were five years old and blowing soap bubbles on our back porch.”

  “And not long before that … ” said Uncle Milt, smiling, “she was sitting at a high chair at this very table, and we were feeding her strained beets.”

  “And you were an absolute mess!” said Aunt Sally, but she was smiling too.

  “She sneezed,” said Carol, laughing. “Don’t you remember? She had a mouthful of strained beets, and she sneezed.”

  “All over the table,” said Aunt Sally. “The walls, the floor, the refrigerator. … ” She was studying me again. “What can you do about her hair, Carol? Can’t you cut it or something?”

  I began to feel like an exhibit.

  Carol looked at me. “You want me to give it a try? Taper the edges a little?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  After dinner, while Aunt Sally did the dishes, I sat on the table while Carol cut my hair. Afterward she showed me how to comb it back and fluff it up with the blow dryer.

  “I’ve got next Tuesday off,” she told me. “I’ll show you around Chicago, all the places Mother’s missed.”

  After Carol went home, I was feeling pretty tired and was glad when Uncle Milt suggested we all go to bed early. Aunt Sally followed me upstairs, though. She reached in the closet and pulled out a box.

  “For you,” she said. “For Easter. Your dad gave me your sizes.”

  “My gosh!” I said, pleased, but then I looked inside. There was a white dress, with white shoes and panty hose. It was the kind of dress that Southern girls wear for their coming-out parties, except that it only came down to my knees. There were ruffles on the shoulders and a flounce along the hem, and little white bows from the neck to the waist. I was speechless.

  “Oh, try it on!” said Aunt Sally excitedly. “I just can’t wait.”

  I tried not to look in the mirror when she slipped it over my head.

  “For goodness sake, open your eyes!” Aunt Sally said. “Now if that isn’t adorable!”

  I did not look adorable. I looked like a vanilla cup-cake with frosting running down over the sides. The only way I got to church on Easter Sunday was by reminding myself that I didn’t know anyone and would never see any of them again.

  We were all taking pictures of each other in the backyard later—Aunt Sally and me, Uncle Milt and me, me alone—when Carol came over.

  “Oh, no!” she brea
thed, when Aunt Sally wasn’t listening. “The Easter dress! I didn’t know they made them like that anymore. Mother, poor dear, means well, Alice, she really does, but go upstairs and put on something comfortable.”

  It was strange being around Carol and Aunt Sally because they were so different. When Aunt Sally took me out for the day, she had a list all prepared of what we were going to do and see—where we were going to eat lunch, even. We started out at the aquarium. Then we did the Field Museum and the planetarium and by the time we got back to the car I was positively crawling with weariness, while Aunt Sally hadn’t even begun to get tired yet.

  When Carol took me out on Tuesday, she didn’t have anything planned. We just got on the El and rode and rode until we felt like getting off. We wandered around Buckingham Fountain and later went shopping at Macy’s. Carol bought me a pair of jeans that said HANG TEN on the bottoms, a striped shirt with slits at the sides, some rope sandals, an Indian print skirt, and my first bra. She even showed me how you bend over and sort of let yourself fall into it before you hook it in back. After that we ate stuffed grape leaves in a little Greek restaurant. Then we walked along Lake Michigan, swinging our packages, before we caught the El and came back home.

  Aunt Sally believes that anything is possible. We were talking one morning about how it was being the only girl in a house with my dad and Lester, and Aunt Sally said that if girls have survived with only one lung or one leg, then I could survive with only one parent. All I had to do, she said, was figure out what I wanted most in the whole world and then make a plan for getting it. I told her what I wanted most in the whole world was a mother, so we were back to square one.