“I think I made a … ,” I began, and then my eye fell on the sixth set of shakers, sitting on the counter where Charmaine must have placed them as she helped clear the table.
“… a pretty good dinner after all,” I said.
“The best,” Dad told me.
• • •
When Aunt Sally called later to see how the dinner had gone, Dad answered and I let him tell her about it. Somehow, sitting in the other room and listening to his version—the frozen turkey, the power saw and duct tape, the CCFO and the spill on the kitchen floor—made me realize just how wacky the day had been, and what a funny piece it would make for the school newspaper.
When I went to school the following Monday, I talked to Sara, the features editor, about my idea, and she said sure, write it up and they’d see if they could use it. So I did. I didn’t bring in the CCFO, I just said we were having guests, and titled it “The Great Turkey Disaster.” Sara and Nick liked it, and even though it appeared on the last page, at least twenty kids made a point of telling me how much they enjoyed it. Maybe my “Alice Time” was more valuable than I’d realized. I was finding out I was worth a lot more than I’d thought.
14
Elizabeth’s Secret
Seeing Patrick and Penny together at school was easier once I didn’t feel that everyone was looking at me to see how I’d react. It was easier because I’d broken the ice with Patrick, and we always said “Hi” now when we passed in the halls.
Part of it, I suppose, was to preserve my pride. To snub Patrick or Penny would only make me look hurt and bitter, and even though that’s the way I felt a lot of the time, I didn’t exactly want the whole school to know.
But I had the drama club to go to, where we read plays aloud, and staff meetings for the school paper, and the Melody Inn on Saturdays. I felt needed and appreciated, and that took some of the loneliness away.
And then, of course, there was Christmas, a plus and a minus both. I was used to thinking of Patrick at Christmas—of shopping for a gift for him, and knowing that he’d be over sometime during the holidays to bring one to me. Waiting for that extra-special Christmas kiss. And there was also New Year’s Eve. Now, he was probably spending it with Penny.
But there was the house to decorate for Dad and Lester, and a gift to buy for Sylvia (Dad said we’d send them airmail express to make sure she got them in time), and presents for everyone else on my list.
“Al, the decorations look great!” Dad said on Saturday morning as I was draping tinsel, a strand at a time, over a wire strung above the shelves in the Gift Shoppe where we keep the Beethoven mugs and Scarlotti scarves and the Brahms T-shirts and the Liszt notepads (with CHOPIN LISZT printed at the top). I had arranged shiny gold and silver balls among the gift items, and the tinsel reflected the light and cast an icy, metallic shimmer over the merchandise.
“What are you giving Sylvia for Christmas?” Marilyn asked me later. She was looking pretty stunning herself in a red dress with little gold earrings in the form of a tree ornament at each ear.
I showed her the sterling silver pin I’d picked out for Sylvia from the gift wheel—the large revolving case next to the counter. You press a button, and the wheel begins to rotate. If a customer sees a ring or cuff links that interest her, she can press the button to stop the wheel, and then I open the case with a key and get it for her.
“Oh, Alice, it’s just perfect for Sylvia!” Marilyn exclaimed, fingering the silver musical clef sign.
I was pleased that she thought so. “I decided that since it was the Messiah Sing-along that brought her and Dad together, a clef sign would be a reminder of that, of something they have in common,” I said.
“You’re going to make a very thoughtful step-daughter,” Marilyn told me.
I beamed. “And she’ll make the perfect step-mom.”
The feature story that Sam Mayer and I had put together turned out well, though he thought his photographs should have been better. Sam is a little shorter than Patrick, and more stocky, but he’s nice looking in his own way.
“They’re too posed,” he said. “I should have taken a few with their mouths open. Gesturing or something.”
I folded up the issue of the school paper and stuck it in my notebook. “Are you always so hard on yourself?” I asked.
“You have to get used to criticism if you go into photo journalism,” he said.
“That’s what it’s going to be for you?”
“Yeah, I’ve decided.”
“It must be nice to be sure,” I said.
As we left Room 17, where we hold our staff meetings, we almost collided with a girl carrying a huge papier-maché icicle, covered with glitter, on her way to the gym, where they were decorating for the Snow Ball. I had really been trying not to think of the Snow Ball. Didn’t want to remember that Patrick and I had been dating for two years, and when the semiformal finally arrived in eighth grade, the one big dance we would attend, Patrick was sick and couldn’t go. Now he would be dancing with Penny. She’d be wearing a glittering gown, he’d have his arms around her, and … “About ready for Christmas?” I asked quickly, refusing to dwell on it.
“Mom and I usually go to the movies on Christmas,” Sam said.
I’d forgotten he was Jewish. “Oh. Right,” I said.
“But this year I’ll probably go over to Jennifer’s for a while. Christmas is pretty big with her.”
“Yeah. Us, too,” I said.
We said good-bye at the water cooler, and I went off to my locker, deciding to invite Elizabeth and Pamela for a sleepover the night of the Snow Ball. Neither of them was going, either. It seemed that not too many freshmen were going to be there. I guess we still all felt a little green, like we wanted to sit things out for a year and see how they were done.
Jill had been invited by a sophomore, though, and Brian was taking some girl from another school. But Karen was going to help serve at a holiday party her dad was giving, and Sam and Jennifer were going ice skating with Gwen and Legs, so I was glad to have Elizabeth and Pamela for company, and they were happy to have some place to go. Dad and Lester had gone to a movie, and we had the house to ourselves. I have our old twelve-inch TV in my room, so we made some caramel corn in the microwave and took it upstairs.
There are times you really, truly appreciate your friends, and this was one of them. I think Elizabeth and Pamela were feeling it, too. We’d been particularly close since Pamela had come back from Colorado, where she’d tried living with her mother and it hadn’t worked. And whatever had been going on with Elizabeth last summer when she put herself on starvation rations only made us realize how vulnerable she was; how vulnerable we all were. Now it was my breakup with Patrick that bonded us closer still, and as I sprawled out on my bed beside Pamela, I actually felt I would rather be here with my best friends than anywhere else I could think of.
Elizabeth had heard all about our Thanksgiving with the three women from CCFO, but Pamela didn’t know the details, so I filled her in. She was fascinated.
“I’ve never actually seen a prostitute,” she said, reaching for a handful of popcorn and then her soda. “Not one I was sure of, anyway. How did she act, Alice? Did she try to put the make on your dad or Les?”
“She used to be one, Pamela. Ginger was more flirtatious than Shirley, actually.”
Pamela lay back on the bed in her black jeans and red sweater. “Can you even imagine it?” she said. “I mean, to stand on a street corner and get in a car with the first guy who stopped? Why, he could have AIDS! He could be a serial killer!”
We were quiet for a moment, wondering about it.
“Shirley said her mom got her into prostitution to help pay for her mom’s drug habit—her mom’s! And then Shirley started taking drugs just to get through the afternoons she had boys in her room,” I said.
“In her pants, you mean. Imagine hating sex so much you’d have to drug yourself to do it,” said Pamela.
Elizabeth was sitting over in the
corner in my leopard-print chair, her knees drawn up to her chest, hugging them close to her body. “What I can’t understand is how a mother could do that— make her daughter invite guys up to her room,” she said. “Couldn’t she even imagine how Shirley might have felt about it?”
“Ha!” said Pamela. “She probably didn’t care! My mom sure doesn’t care what happens to me! I could be in all kinds of trouble here, but as long as she’s got Mr. Wonderful in Colorado, that’s all that matters.”
“She does care for you, Pamela, she’s just all wrapped up in herself right now,” I told her.
“Thank you, Alice, for your kind words, but she’s all wrapped up in her NordicTrack instructor, that’s what,” Pamela said bitterly.
“I’ll bet most prostitutes’ mothers don’t know what their daughters are doing. No one tells her mother everything, you know. I can’t imagine telling Sylvia every single thing I’m doing or thinking. Not that I’d be doing that!” I said.
“Even when we’re little, we don’t tell them everything,” Pamela agreed. “I remember when I was five or six, I used to go to a playground and there was a girl who threw rocks at me. She said I couldn’t come there unless she said so, and for a whole summer I stayed away and never told my parents why.”
I was looking through the TV Guide and found a movie called Dark Secret, Hidden Life, about a girl who had a baby without anyone knowing. It would be on in ten minutes, so we decided to watch that.
“You keep hearing about girls being pregnant and no one knowing, but how is it possible?” I said. “Couldn’t her mother tell? What about gym class?”
We tried to imagine how a girl could keep it hidden. “Maybe she just wore baggy clothes and never went to gym,” Elizabeth said.
“But how can you keep a secret for nine whole months? Well, five, anyway, because that’s when you’d really start to show if you were pregnant. How could a girl keep a secret like that from her mother for five months?” I asked.
“I can imagine keeping a secret from my mother, but I don’t think I’d try to keep one from you guys,” Pamela said. “When I think of all the times you’ve been here for me …”
I nodded. “We can talk about things we’d never tell anyone else. All the embarrassing stuff! Remember when you were showing us that new bra, Pamela, and Mark sneaked up behind us and grabbed it out of your hands and took it to the top of the jungle gym?”
“And the time you lost your bikini bra in the ocean?” Elizabeth told her.
“How about you learning to use tampons at the pool?” Pamela said to Elizabeth. “And your first pelvic exam.” She turned to me. “And the day at school when you found out Miss Summers was going to England for a year, and we followed you into the restroom …”
“I don’t know what we’d do without each other,” I said to them both. “I hope we can still get together and talk like this when we’re fifty.”
“I don’t think any of us could keep a pregnancy secret. We couldn’t go for five minutes without telling someone, could we, Elizabeth?” said Pamela.
But Elizabeth didn’t answer. The movie was on, and she came over to the bed where we were lying, and we all watched together. It was about a sixteen-year-old girl on trial for throwing her newborn baby in a Dumpster. Most of it was flashbacks, about how she’d lost her father as a little girl and missed him, but her mother had her hands full trying to support them and didn’t give her the love she needed, so she threw herself at the first guy who came along.
It was a grade-B movie, actually, but the last part was really sad, when the judge sentenced her to thirty years, and when she stared at him in the courtroom, all she could see was her father. It had the three of us in tears.
“It didn’t have to happen!” Elizabeth wept, blowing her nose. “If the mother had paid the slightest bit of attention, she would have seen what was going on.”
“The mother had all kinds of problems herself, Liz,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t think the mother really cared,” put in Pamela. “She was only concerned with her own pain.”
“When you’re a parent, it’s your job to see how your kids are feeling,” said Elizabeth, still choked up about the movie.
“What else could the mother have done?” I asked.
Elizabeth jerked angrily around and glared at me. “Look at the way she practically encouraged her daughter to go out with the guy. All she could think about was maybe he’d marry Marcie and take her off her hands. If she’d just once put her arms around her and asked how she really f-felt about the guy, and gave her a chance to … to… .” And suddenly Elizabeth was sobbing. Sobbing.
I picked up the remote and muted the sound. Both Pamela and I scrambled to a sitting position and stared at Elizabeth, who had drawn up her knees and was lying there in the fetal position, crying huge, heaving sobs.
Pamela reached out and put her hand over Elizabeth’s, and Elizabeth’s fingers closed around it and held on as if she were drowning. All we could do was stare and keep repeating, “Liz, what is it? What is it?”
Elizabeth’s cheeks were burning. “I … I … I’ve got to tell you something. I’ve kept a secret for seven years, and never told anyone before, not even the priest!”
This really got our attention.
“Okay,” I said, wondering.
“Can you promise n-never to t-tell anyone? Especially my folks. Because if you can’t”—she gulped—“I can’t tell you.”
Pamela promised right away, but I wasn’t so sure.
“I don’t know, Liz. If you’re thinking of doing something terrible to yourself, I’m not going to keep it secret.”
She rolled over and slowly sat up, her hair tangled, her nose clogged. I gave her a tissue. “It’s something that’s already happened, and nobody but you can ever know about it. Ever!” she said.
So I promised.
But all Elizabeth did was put her hands over her face and cry some more.
“What was it?” Pamela asked, reaching over to rub her back.
That seemed to give her courage. “A … a long time ago,” she said, between sobs, her chin quivering, “a man … a man molested me.”
“What?” Pamela said.
“Who?” I asked. I had this awful thought that maybe it was her father and she didn’t want her mother to know. But it wasn’t.
Elizabeth finally stopped crying and took a minute to blow her nose. “He was a … a family friend. Someone my folks had known in college. A biologist, I think. Sometimes he came to our house on holidays, or when he had a conference in D.C. That’s where we were living then.”
Neither Pamela nor I said a word. It was such a revelation—I mean, who would have expected this from Elizabeth!—that we didn’t know what to say.
She took a deep breath and continued: “I think I was about seven, in second grade, because I can remember the dress I was wearing the first time it happened. A sundress. This man’s wife had either died or they’d just divorced or something, and he’d come to Washington for a meeting—he lived out of state—and came a day early to visit us. We were living near Rock Creek Park, and he always brought a little present for me—a really nice gift— a puppet or a microscope or something. My folks thought he was wonderful. I did, too, at first. He was supposed to have done a lot for ghetto kids— got them scholarships and things …”
Elizabeth’s voice was still shaky but it was getting stronger; “Well, on this one visit, he asked if I wanted to go on a ‘secret nature walk,’ just he and I, and my folks said, why, wouldn’t that be fun. It was hot, and we went down into the park. And he showed me lots of ‘secrets’—like the bugs and worms under a rock, moss growing on a tree, a cicada carcass—the kinds of things that interest a child.”
She stopped and began to blush.
“You don’t have to tell us anything if you don’t want to,” I said.
“Shut up, Alice. I want to hear!” said Pamela.
Elizabeth went on. “We came to this big rock— boulder,
really—and he led me around behind it and told me to look real hard in a crevice in the rock where there were leaves and dirt, and see if I could find anything. He had … he was leaning on me from behind, his arms around me, his face against mine, like he was helping me look. And he brought his hands up under my dress in front and just … just casually rubbed my stomach, and then he … slipped one hand down inside my pants and”—she swallowed—“and stroked me between my legs.”
“What did you do?” Pamela asked.
“That’s the part I can’t remember,” Elizabeth said guiltily. “I think I squirmed away, and he just laughed and let me go. And on the way back to the house he said to remember that this was a secret walk, wasn’t it, that he and I had a lot of secrets, and we wouldn’t tell anyone about them, would we, because nobody else would understand.”
“The creep!” Pamela said.
“And when we got back, my parents were doing the dishes, because I can remember a big white platter in my father’s hands, and it looked like a big white eye staring at me. Mother asked what all we had seen and the man winked at me and said, oh, we couldn’t tell, could we, but we’d seen all sorts of wonderful things. I just nodded yes. I really thought … for a long time I thought this … that my parents knew what he was going to do and had let me go because he was such a good friend.”
“And he did it again?” I asked.
“I think there was just one other time. Maybe two, I’m not sure. But the time I remember, he brought me a little box full of drawers, and each drawer had a tiny carved wooden animal in it. It was a great present; I really loved it. He called it the ‘secrets’ chest. And when he asked if I wanted to go on another secret walk, I said okay, because my parents were smiling at me and I knew they expected me to go.
“He said we’d need a strainer, and Mom gave me one. This time I had on shorts and a T-shirt. And we went down in the park again, and this time we walked right along the rocks in the creek, and we tried to see what I could catch in the strainer— little water bugs and things. And then when we started home, he led me through some bushes and he was talking about how lonely he was, because his wife wasn’t with him anymore, and he wondered if I would do something for him… .”