The Agony of Alice

  I liked Aunt Sally, though—some of the things about her, anyway. I liked the way she arranged her kitchen, with everything hanging on its own special hook on the pegboard. I liked the confident way she did things; but I liked Carol too—her easygoing manner, so different from her mother’s. Aunt Sally would never wear anything that said HANG TEN. She would never wear any clothes with words on them, she told me, because she was a woman, not a billboard. It was possible, I discovered, to like two people who were entirely different.

  Nice as they were, though, sometimes at night I felt a little homesick. Once Aunt Sally must have noticed because she asked if I wanted to call home. But I really didn’t feel I needed to talk to my father. I certainly didn’t need to talk to Lester. I just didn’t know what it was.

  On Thursday night I awoke about midnight, my abdomen aching. I turned over and felt something sticky between my legs. Turning on the bed lamp, I peeped inside my pajamas. I let the elastic snap and lay back down, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. Then I sat up and peeked again. I was menstruating.

  I put on my robe and looked for some Kotex in the bathroom. Then I tried the hall closet.

  Aunt Sally’s door opened and she came out.

  “Alice?” she said, shielding her eyes from the light. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I guess I need some Kotex.”

  Aunt Sally dropped her hand and stared at me. “Really? Is this your first time?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Oh, Alice!” Aunt Sally knelt right down on the floor and put her arms around me. “Your very first time! My, such an occasion—the beginning of all the privileges and responsibilities of womanhood!”

  That was really weird, and I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want any privileges of womanhood. I just wanted some sanitary napkins.

  Aunt Sally found them for me.

  “Oh, I’m so happy you were here when it happened!” she went on. “Are you having cramps? Is there anything more I can do?”

  I wanted to tell Aunt Sally to just go back to bed, please, but I thanked her and said I could manage, and finally she left me alone. Maybe that was the way mothers always acted, I thought. I just didn’t know.

  The next morning at breakfast there were flowers on the table. Store-bought flowers. Somebody had gone out and bought them.

  “For you,” said Aunt Sally proudly. “A special bouquet for our little moth who has become a butterfly.”

  I stared. Uncle Milt was beaming shyly, his eyes on his plate. Then he looked at Aunt Sally, and they beamed at each other.

  She’d told him. I never felt so ridiculous in all my life.

  15

  SOMETHING FOR THE ORPHANS

  THE LAST DAY BEFORE I LEFT CHICAGO, Aunt Sally and Uncle Milt showed me everything I hadn’t seen before. We made it through the Museum of Science and Industry and the Art Institute before Uncle Milt said, “Good grief, Aunt Sally, sir, give the girl a rest.”

  We ate at a restaurant on the Near North side while Aunt Sally made a list of all the things we’d save for the next time I came to visit.

  On Saturday, Carol drove me to the station, and I told her all about sleeping in a roomette and how you’re not supposed to flush in the station and she laughed. She laughs a lot. I didn’t even know I was funny till I met my cousin Carol. When we got to the gate, I hugged her hard, even harder than I’d hugged Aunt Sally, and that surprised me. I mean, when I started out for Chicago, I didn’t even know I had a cousin named Carol.

  This time, when I got on the train, I was an old pro. I knew exactly where the toilet was and how to latch the bed. The nice surprise was that Eddie, the cheerful porter, was on the train again, and this time I was assigned to him. He was in a joking mood:

  “Well, look who we got with us again!” he said, hoisting my bag up on the rack above the mirror. “Another little gal for the orphanage.”

  “What?” I said.

  “You didn’t know this was a special train, dumps all little gals through a chute in Ohio? Great big old orphanage right there by the track, and we just send ’em down the chute one at a time, train hardly even has to stop.” He winked at me and started to leave, then stuck his head back in: “I saw what happened to you in Chicago; they never even woke you up. You just tell me what time you want to get up for Washington, and I’ll make sure you’re ready.”

  This time I made it to the dining car without hardly wobbling. I still had fifteen dollars left for food, so I ordered the Rock Cornish hen, and sat in the club car afterward with a very small 7UP.

  Eddie sat down with me for a few minutes and talked about his family and his four children, the oldest just about as old as me. And somehow I began to feel that strange kind of homesickness again. It wasn’t quite so bad this time, because I was on my way home, so I tried to get in touch with my feelings, the way Mrs. Plotkin tells us to do in our journals. And suddenly I knew what the trouble was: I was homesick for Mrs. P.

  Back in my roomette, I leaned against the window and watched the lights speed by outside. I liked Aunt Sally, and I wanted to be confident of myself the way she was. I liked Carol too, and I wanted to be easygoing like her. I liked Lester’s old girlfriend Marilyn, and I wanted to look and dress like Miss Cole when I got older. But while I wanted to look and laugh and dress like lots of different people, I wanted to be like Mrs. Plotkin. I wrote in my journal for a long time, even though the train made my handwriting wobbly.

  The next morning, I knew I wasn’t going to put on that white dress for anything in the world, even though Aunt Sally had said she wanted me to be wearing it to show Dad what a lovely young lady I had become. I knew, in fact, that I would never wear that dress again, and it would just turn yellow in my closet.

  “You still here?” Eddie asked when he brought me some hot chocolate. “I thought for sure you was one of those little gals we sent off down the chute last night in Ohio. Orphanage going to be mighty mad.”

  I put on my jeans that said HANG TEN and my striped shirt with the slits on the sides and my rope sandals. Then I left my white shoes and panty hose in the closet under the dress and stuck a note to Eddie over the dress hanger:

  Dear Eddie: Please give these clothes to one of the girls in the orphanage. Alice M.

  I knew that if there was any kind of orphanage at all, Eddie would take that dress to them, and if there wasn’t, he’d find someone who wanted to look like a cupcake.

  It was Lester, not Dad, who was waiting for me in Washington. He took my suitcase and gave me a hug. “Have a good time?”

  “It was different,” I told him.

  “You get to see Carol? She still a good-looker?”

  “I didn’t even remember her,” I told Lester. “But she’s nice. I liked them all, but in different ways.”

  Lester talked to me like a human being on the way home. He told me that he was dating a new girl named Crystal Harkins, and that she was a real dish. I was glad to hear he hadn’t taken up with Loretta.

  I was beginning to feel good about being home again. I had a new haircut and some new clothes, and Lester even told me I looked smashing.

  Dad hadn’t come home from work yet, and the first thing I did when I got inside was call Mrs. Plotkin. I didn’t even know what I was going to say. I just knew I had to call her, so I dialed before I could think too hard about it.

  “Mrs. Plotkin,” I said eagerly, “I’m home.” And then I realized she hadn’t even known I’d been away.

  But somehow she recognized my voice. “Alice,” she said, “wherever you’ve been, I’m really glad that you’re back.”

  And then, as we were making dinner, the phone rang. Dad lifted the receiver off the wall with one hand and continued to jab at the meatballs with the other.

  “Sally!” he said. “Well, what a surprise!”

  I looked up.

  “She says she had a fine time!” Dad went on. There was a pause, and I saw Dad frown just a little. “Did I like what she was wearing?”


  My heart sank, and Dad and I stared at each other. Then I nodded my head violently, begging Dad with my eyes.

  “Why, yes, Sal, she looked absolutely beautiful!” Dad said, taking his cue, and I sank down on a kitchen chair, one hand on my chest.

  “Just beautiful,” he said again. “I’m sure she’s going to wear those clothes for a long time.”

  I fanned myself with a napkin.

  “Okay,” Dad said, when he hung up. “What’d you do with the white ruffled dress and the white shoes and panty hose?” His voice was gruff, but he was smiling.

  “Gave them to an orphanage,” I said, “and some little gal is going to be mighty glad to get them.”

  When we sat down to dinner, Dad and Lester seemed quieter than usual. Quiet and polite. Lester even said “thank you” when I passed the rice. I knew then that Aunt Sally must have called home during the week and told them something else.

  “Well, Al, I understand that this was quite a growing-up experience for you,” Dad said at last.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I started my period. So what else is new?”

  16

  WHO GOT THE GLOBE

  PATRICK DIDN’T GO ANYWHERE OVER spring vacation. I thought he would have gone to India or something, but all he did was clean out their garage. He came over after supper the night I got back and sat on the porch railing while I told him about sleeping on the Capitol Limited. Would you believe that Patrick had never slept on a train? He’d never heard of Cornish hen, either, and wanted to know if it was anything like squid.

  “Better,” I told him.

  By the first of May, everyone started talking about how there were only a few more weeks left of school. I was pretty sure what Pamela Jones was thinking; she had her mind set on Mrs. Plotkin’s globe, because she started making all A’s on her geography tests, one right after another. She even knew the capitol of Nigeria. When we had to write essays for English, I wrote about sleeping in a roomette on the train and got an A. Pamela wrote about the Amazon River and got an A+.

  I don’t know if I wanted Mrs. Plotkin’s globe because it was probably the nicest thing she was likely to give away or whether I just didn’t want Pamela to have it. I think mostly it was that I wanted Mrs. Plotkin to show me that I was special. Something more than writing notes in the margins of my journal. More than the talks we had after school.

  “You know, Al,” Dad said to me one evening when we were making tacos. “You seem more mellow these days. You actually appear to be going off each morning to school, not to war.” He smiled at me. “What did it? That visit with Aunt Sally?”

  I shrugged. “I just get along better at Parkhaven, I guess.”

  “Good.” He opened a can of refried beans and dumped them in on top of the ground beef, and then I added the green chili peppers. “I guess I’ve worried some about what growing up without a mother might do to you,” he added.

  I could tell he wasn’t quite through worrying yet. Even fathers have to be reassured now and then.

  “I’m not planning to run off with some guy on a motorcycle or anything,” I told him. Then I couldn’t help but add, “As long as you don’t run off with Janice Sherman.”

  The spoon in Dad’s hand paused in midair. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “The way she looked at you at Thanksgiving.”

  He laughed. “Well, I’m certainly in the market for a wife, but you can bet it won’t be her.”

  “There aren’t any perfect women, though, Dad,” I said, and then I couldn’t believe I’d said it. Alice the Wise.

  “Well, I’m not perfect either, so I don’t worry much about that,” he told me.

  On the fourteenth of May, my birthday, something happened that if I had known back in September would happen, I would have looked forward to it all year. It was Miss Cole’s birthday, too. The safety patrol decided to give her a surprise party after school, after all the patrols were off duty, and I waited in Mrs. Plotkin’s room until I heard the regulars coming back. Then I slipped down the hall just in time to burst in with the others, all yelling, “Happy birthday!”

  But there, on the big store-bought cake with yellow roses, it said in frosting, Happy Birthday Miss Cole and Alice.

  “I remembered,” Charlene said, smiling at me across the cake. I never thought she would do anything so nice.

  “Why, Alice, is this your birthday, too?” Miss Cole said, and she came around the cake and hugged me close to her apricot-colored blouse. I could smell the perfume on her skin.

  It’s funny that sometimes what you think you want more than anything in the world is okay when it happens, but not all that great. I could feel myself blush. I loved having Miss Cole’s arm around my shoulder, but I didn’t cry with joy or anything. We sat on top of the desks eating the chocolate cake and laughing, and Patrick took the two yellow roses off his piece and let me have them.

  All the while we were eating, though, I was thinking about Mrs. Plotkin back in her room, making up tomorrow’s lessons, and wondered if anybody had ever given her a birthday cake with yellow roses.

  Miss Cole didn’t seem in any hurry at all to send us home. She told us about the best birthday she’d ever had—when she was twenty-one and her father gave her a car—and the worst birthday—when she was seven and had chicken pox. Everyone was laughing and telling his own tales of best and worst birthdays, and finally I got down off the desk and said I had some work to do.

  “Then take a big piece of that cake with you, Alice.” Miss Cole smiled, and she even cut it for me and wrapped it in a napkin.

  I went down the hall to Mrs. Plotkin’s room. She was standing at the blackboard in her green dress writing tomorrow’s assignments. She moved slowly as she stepped back and forth, her hand pausing every now and then while she thought what to write next.

  I set the cake on her desk.

  “I guess it’s my birthday,” I said at last, which sounded so dumb you wouldn’t believe. She turned around and looked at me.

  “Well, for goodness sake, Alice, is that what all that singing was about?”

  “Only half of it,” I said. “It’s Miss Cole’s birthday, too. But I wanted you to have some of the cake.”

  “It looks simply delicious. I’d like to take it home and share it with Ned,” she said.

  My first thought was that Ned was a dog, and then I remembered she had a husband. Ned. Ned Plotkin. I tried to imagine a man named Ned Plotkin falling in love with this large woman standing between the desk and the blackboard. I found I could imagine it very well.

  The day before Mr. Weber’s class left on the overnight, Elizabeth Price got a fever of a hundred and three and couldn’t go. Life is really strange sometimes. You never know what’s around the corner.

  Mrs. Price was out sweeping the walk the next morning when I went to school.

  “Is Elizabeth any better?” I asked.

  “No,” her mother told me. “The doctor says it’s only the flu, but I’ve never seen her so disappointed.”

  I knew about disappointment, all right. When I got to Parkhaven, the bus was loading up with Mr. Weber’s students, all carrying sleeping bags and lunches and shouting to each other and saving seats. I thought about Elizabeth all day, and when I got home, I pulled the Saint Agnes card out from under my mattress.

  It wasn’t that I felt I didn’t need Saint Agnes anymore. I needed all the help I could get. It was just that Saint Agnes meant something special to Elizabeth, the way Mrs. Plotkin was special to me, and I knew it was wrong for me to keep the card, especially since it was probably Elizabeth’s in the first place.

  I walked across the street.

  “Do you think I could see Elizabeth for a minute?” I asked. “I just want to say hello.”

  “Of course, but don’t get too close in case it’s catching,” her mother said, and I went on upstairs.

  Elizabeth’s room smelled of orange juice and throw-up. Elizabeth was lying on her pillow with her hair all stringy, and she
didn’t look much like the photograph on her living room wall.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She turned her head. “Hi,” she said weakly.

  “I just came over to see how you were feeling.”

  “Yucky,” Elizabeth said in answer.

  I handed her the card. “I found this … ” I began. “I thought maybe you’d lost it or something.”

  Elizabeth stared at the card, then took it.

  “I lost this months ago!” she said.

  “Well, I’ve had it for months,” I apologized. I couldn’t think of any other way to explain it, and Elizabeth was too weak to ask.

  “Thanks,” she said, and put it under her pillow.

  I tried to think of something comforting to say. All I could think of was, Cheer up. Saint Agnes didn’t get to go on an overnight, either, but that didn’t sound right, so I just kept quiet.

  “Did you see the bus leave?” Elizabeth asked.

  I nodded.

  “Just my luck,” she said.

  “Oh, sometimes things aren’t as wonderful as you think they’re going to be,” I told her. “They’ll probably all come back with chiggers and poison ivy.”

  She smiled a little. “Thanks for coming, Alice,” she said.

  We all turned in our journals on June 1. Mrs. Plotkin said she’d give them back later, because she hoped we would want to go on writing in them for a long time. It gets you over the rough places, she said once.

  I thought about that as I walked to school. I knew that a lot of what I’d written were things I would have told Momma if she were alive. I wouldn’t have thought that just writing feelings down on paper could help much, but it did.

  What I really wanted to do was write something to Mrs. Plotkin on the last page. I’d even thought about writing a poem, but then I remembered the verse I wrote the mailman, and knew that next year I’d probably look back on this one as just another agony. Everything I thought of to say sounded ridiculous, like the greeting cards that begin:

  Although your leaving makes me sad,