I clapped my hands again. “Then you did, you did!”
“Al!”
“Let’s just say they made sweet music together,” said Lester, and Dad said he’d go along with that.
Everyone is musical in my family except me. Dad said that when Mom was alive (she died when I was five), she used to sing a lot. Dad plays the piano and flute, and he’s manager of the Melody Inn, one of a chain of music stores. Lester sings and plays the guitar, and my English teacher sang alto in the Messiah Sing-Along. That’s where Dad met her. Even Lester’s girlfriends sing.
I can’t carry a tune, so I don’t sing at all except to myself, and only when I’m running the vacuum cleaner. Maybe I have a genetic defect or something. Dad says I have other fine qualities, though, and Patrick, my boyfriend, who plays the drums, says I have a good sense of rhythm, so I’m not a total loss.
After that little conversation with Dad, I was pretty quiet because I was thinking how the next five weeks were going to be absolutely awful. The one thing I would not do is tell Lester about my deep-water fear, because he would probably follow me to the pool and throw me in to make me swim.
“Anything wrong, Al?” Dad asked at dinner. I realized I’d got halfway through my chicken salad without saying a word.
I shook my head. I tried to think of something interesting to tell him and Lester to make them stop looking at me, but my brain went on hold. I could tell right away that Dad thought I was feeling left out because he wouldn’t answer my personal questions about his weekend with Miss Summers, so he proceeded to tell me all the impersonal things they had done.
“It was sort of fun living in a dorm,” he said. “Made me feel like a college man again.”
“What’d you do? Streak across the campus naked?” asked Lester. Lester has a thin mustache above his upper lip, making him look a lot older than he is—old enough to have done any daring thing there is to do at college.
“No, we all went to the cafeteria each morning, then Sylvia and I got in a mile walk before the seminars began,” said Dad. “In the afternoon we practiced with the group of our choice and performed for each other in the evening. It was just plain fun! Sylvia even took a class in flamenco dancing.”
I imagined my English teacher doing a Spanish dance with a rose between her teeth. I imagined us both together, she and I, dressed in Spanish costumes doing the flamenco together, beside a pool or something with everybody clapping. In my mind’s eye, however, I danced a little too close to the edge and fell in, never to be seen again. I sucked in my breath.
Dad stopped talking and looked at me strangely.
“Hiccups,” I said.
“Well, here’s a little item that might interest you, Al,” Dad told me. “Guess what you and I are going to do?”
“The flamenco?” I said warily.
“We’re going to go shopping one of these days. I’ve decided it’s time to get some new furniture.”
“We already got a new couch,” I told him.
“Not just a couch. Now that you’re going into eighth grade, I think it’s time you had a real bedroom set—dresser, chest of drawers, the works. Whatever you want.”
“Dad!” I yelped, and leaned across the table to hug him. I hadn’t the foggiest idea what kind of furniture I wanted. Not canopies and ruffles, like Elizabeth has, or the Coca-Cola logo in Pamela’s room. Something that would reflect the real me.
“We need some new dining room furniture, too,” Dad went on, and he and Lester began discussing whether we needed a table that would seat eight or ten. Something told me that Dad wasn’t just doing this for me or Lester or even himself. He was doing it because he wanted a house Miss Summers would like to live in.
I studied Dad’s face, looking for clues as to whether or not he might have proposed to her while they were in Michigan. No, I decided, he would have told us if he had. But he was sure getting ready for something big. He’d fix our house up first, then ask her.
It’s stuff like this, I guess, that makes me nervous—where it’s not just what you do that makes a difference, but what someone else decides. I could stay away from deep water for the rest of my life and do just fine, but what if someone threw me in? Dad and Lester and I could buy new furniture for every room in our house, but what if Miss Summers still said no?
It helped that Pamela had invited Elizabeth and me for a sleepover that evening. The hardest thing about having a secret fear is keeping it secret, and I was afraid if I stayed around home that night, Dad would worm it out of me somehow. He’d go right to the phone and sign me up for swimming lessons at the Y, and I’d be petrified.
Way back in my brain I have this memory of someone taking me to swimming lessons. There was a tall skinny instructor in a gray bathing suit who threw rubber-coated horseshoes into the water. The deal was that when she said go, we were supposed to see who could jump in the water and pick up a horseshoe first.
I jumped in, but all I remember was the way I coughed and gagged as the other kids splashed around. I never did put my head under. The next time I went for a lesson, I wouldn’t even go in the water, and then I didn’t go back at all. Maybe that was about the time Mom got leukemia, and I suppose after that, the fact that I was afraid of the water was the last thing on anyone’s mind.
Life is never perfect, I thought, as I rolled up my pajamas and stuck them in my overnight bag. Maybe all the gorgeous girls we were so envious of last year had secret worries, too. Maybe all the while they were leaning against their lockers, looking into their boyfriends’ eyes and kissing, they were worrying about things like mating and jumping off the deep end. Maybe mating is like jumping off the deep end. What did we know?
I went across the street to get Elizabeth, and then we walked to Pamela’s. We hadn’t been spending the night much at Elizabeth’s. Her mom’s expecting a baby in October and still throws up in the morning, which is not exactly the kind of thing you want to hear while you’re eating your pancakes.
In fact, this was the first time we’d been together overnight since the three of us went to Chicago to visit Aunt Sally, and Pamela got groped on the train. Elizabeth was shocked that a man made a pass at Pamela, and then she was embarrassed because she was shocked. For Elizabeth, with the beautiful dark hair and long eyelashes, life is going a little faster than she wants it to, and she has to take giant steps now and then to catch up.
“My folks have gone to the movies, so we have the house to ourselves,” Pamela told us at the door.
She has this incredible room that looks as though it were decorated by Coca-Cola—bedspread, drapes, wastebasket … When you lie down on her bed and the springs squeak, you almost think you can hear Coke fizzing somewhere in the background.
We played cards for a while, ate pizza, and then Pamela brought out this bottle of stuff that’s supposed to make your hair shiny, and we practiced putting it on each other’s hair and brushing two hundred times. We’d start to brush, but then someone would begin talking and we’d lose count and have to start all over again.
“Isn’t Glo-Shine what they advertise on TV—the girl with the shiny hair and all the boys around her?” I asked.
“Sort of like lightning bugs,” said Elizabeth. “One starts flashing, and they all gather round.” Elizabeth can be funny when she wants to.
The strangest thing happened, though. As we were all brushing, Pamela must have forgotten what she was doing, because her brush slipped down past her chin, onto her shoulder. She absently brushed her shoulder, the way she used to do when her hair was long. She did have an amputation syndrome!
We were debating whether to watch the late movie or go to sleep, when Elizabeth said, “Listen, you guys. I brought something over … I thought maybe … well, maybe I could read parts of it to you.”
She was sounding pretty mysterious. I’d never seen her quite that way before. Her face was pink, the way you look when you get out of the shower.
“What is it?” asked Pamela.
“Something I found on my parents
’ bookshelf.”
I could feel my eyes opening wide.
“Do they know you have it?” Pamela asked.
“N-no. But it was right there. I mean, anyone could have taken a look. I’ve got to get it back by morning, though. I don’t want them to find it’s missing.”
“What is it?” asked Pamela.
“A story.” Elizabeth opened her bag and pulled out something wrapped in a pillow case. I took a look. Tales from the Arabian Nights, it read on the cover. Unexpurgated edition.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Alice In-Between
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