Pamela drew up her legs and wrapped her arms around them. “I wonder which state I’ll be? Who do you suppose is Colorado? Wouldn’t you just love to be Colorado?”
“Jill is,” said Elizabeth. “She told me. She’s Colorado and Karen’s Utah.”
I couldn’t believe that two of the girls from our old earring club had got two of the best states in the union. I tried to think what state I’d most like to be, after Colorado. I wasn’t sure. What state would I most like not to be? And then I knew what would be worse than Delaware: Rhode Island. Not the shape, the size.
I don’t pray very often, but suddenly I found myself speaking to God on very personal terms. Dear Jesus Christ, I said. Please let me be anything except Rhode Island.
“What are we going to do?” asked Elizabeth. And then to Pamela, “Can’t you talk to Mark?”
“What can we do?” asked Pamela. “Knowing Mark, it was probably all his idea.”
Elizabeth drew herself up. “Well, I want to name them something. I think seventh-grade girls should get together and name boys after the size of their things.”
Pamela and I exchanged glances. “I don’t believe my ears,” said Pamela.
“Let’s don’t talk about it,” I quipped, Elizabeth’s favorite statement where bodies are concerned.
But this time Elizabeth was so mad we couldn’t hold her back.
“You know,” Elizabeth went on, her face slightly pink. “One boy could be Pikes Peak, and another could be …”
We spent the rest of the evening trying to think of a landmark, geographical or otherwise, so small that it would be an insult. The only thing we could pit again Pikes Peak was the Eiffel Tower, but even that would seem like a compliment to a seventh-grade boy. And the parts of our anatomies that boys were talking about were clearly distinguishable, while the part of a boy that we were talking about was not.
“Lester,” I said later, “if a girl wanted to really embarrass a boy about … um … his groin area, what could she say?”
“His groin area!” Lester turned and looked at me. “Now, Al, what could a boy possibly do that would make you want to embarrass him like that?”
I told him about Elizabeth being Illinois, and how scared I was I might get Rhode Island.
“Tell you what,” said Lester. “If a boy calls you Rhode Island, say, ‘Don’t worry; someday the other one will drop.’”
I thought about that a minute. “I don’t get it,” I said.
“I didn’t think you would, so forget it, okay?”
As soon as somebody tells me to forget something, I know I’m going to remember it the rest of my life. So on the bus the next day, I told Elizabeth that if any boy called her Illinois again to her face, she should just say, “Don’t worry; someday the other one will drop.”
“What?” said Elizabeth.
“I don’t understand it either, but Lester says it’s the most awful thing you can say to a guy,” I told her.
Armed with this new weapon, Elizabeth waited all day for a guy to call her Illinois, and Pamela and I waited to be called any state at all. We saw a lot of smirking and heard a lot of whispering, but none of the boys said anything to us out loud.
That night, I asked Dad what Lester meant by, “Someday the other one will drop.”
“Probably refers to the testicles, Al,” he said. “Sometimes boys are born with a testicle up in the groin instead of down in the scrotum. In most of these cases it descends soon after birth, but in some boys this doesn’t happen until puberty; I’d imagine they’re very self-conscious about it.”
It was amazing. I had no idea that boys ever had to worry about such personal things. I felt very grown-up, very much the Woman of the House, to know that Dad and I could talk about stuff like this without my passing out on the spot.
I also decided that no matter what a guy called me, I could never say that to him; it was just too cruel. Even if he called me Rhode Island.
3
APRIL’S FOOL
EVERY APRIL FOOLS’ DAY, FOR THE PAST five years, Lester has pulled some trick on me, and I always fall for it.
He told me one April that he’d accidently dropped my toothbrush in the toilet the week before and forgotten to tell me. Another time he said that the FDA had just banned chocolate and no one would be able to buy it anymore. And last year, on April 1, he said he thought I had head lice. Each time I gasped and thought my life was over, and then he said, “April Fool!”
So this year I had it all planned. On the first day of April, I went down to breakfast as usual. Dad and I were eating cornflakes when Lester staggered into the kitchen the way he does in the mornings, his eyes half-closed. Most men shave and shower first, then come to breakfast, I’ll bet. Lester does it backward. And on this particular morning, Lester groped his way to the table in the Mickey Mouse shorts I’d given him for Christmas, opened the refrigerator, and waited for something to leap out at him.
“Les,” Dad said, “will you please choose something and sit down?”
Lester found some cold beans and some bread, and sat down at the table with his head resting on one hand. I think you could say that my brother is definitely not a morning person.
I got up, went to the sink with my dishes, then glanced out the window. I dropped my silverware.
“Lester!” I shrieked. “Your car is rolling backward down the driveway!”
Lester, the Living Dead, leaped to his feet, knocking over his chair. He crashed through the hallway, stubbed his toe on the telephone stand, flung open the door, and hopped out onto the porch on one leg, holding his other foot in his hands.
He came to a dead stop. His car was right where it was supposed to be. A woman across the street, who had come out to get her paper, turned to look at Lester in his Mickey Mouse shorts.
“Al?” said Dad, coming up behind me in the doorway.
I collapsed in laughter. “April Fool!” I shrieked.
Lester wheeled about and hobbled back into the house. “I’ll kill her!” he yelled, but I was already halfway up the stairs.
“Al, you’re dead meat!” Lester roared.
“April Fool!” I yelped again, barricading myself in my room.
“Road kill!” Lester bellowed, pounding on my door.
I waited in my room until both Dad and Lester had left the house, and then ran down to the bus stop, smirking from ear to ear, and made everyone laugh with my story.
The thing was, though, nobody paid much attention to April Fools’ Day at school. Not even Denise Whitlock, the eighth-grade girl who’s repeating seventh, did anything awful to me. She’s the girl who bullied me last semester, but she just sat staring out the window in Language Arts, the way she usually does, only half listening.
Back in fifth and sixth, someone was always trying to put something gross in someone else’s sandwich, or a boy would try to stick a sign on someone’s back that said KICK ME HARD. But April 1 in junior high was pretty much like any other day, and by the time I went home, I was thinking how it wasn’t very grown-up of me to go around playing tricks. If I hadn’t played one that morning, in fact, Lester might have forgotten about April Fools’ Day this year. Now he’d have some horrible trick waiting for me when I came in.
His car was in the driveway again. I cautiously went up the steps and opened the door. Everything was quiet.
I looked all around and tiptoed out to the kitchen. Lester was at the table eating cheese crackers and reading a magazine. I didn’t know whether to step inside or not.
“How ya doin’?” he said. He didn’t even look up.
“Okay,” I told him, and waited for him to spring—to stick my head under the faucet or something. Nothing happened.
I came slowly into the kitchen and reached for the crackers. Lester didn’t even seem to know I was there. I poured some orange juice and sat down across from him. Finally there I was, jabbering away about school, and Lester grunted now and then. I realized what had happened.
Lester must hav
e been half-asleep when he ran out on the porch that morning. That was it. They say that if you wake up after a horrible dream but go right back to sleep again, you won’t remember the dream in the morning. Since Lester had never been really awake in the first place, he’d forgotten my trick already. Safe!
I decided to show Dad how grown up I was by making a salad for dinner—have it waiting in the refrigerator when he came home. I got out the lettuce, carrots, celery, and green pepper, and had just stooped over again to see if we had any onions when Lester said, “Is that the latest style?”
“What?” I said.
“That hole in your pants. Is that how they’re wearing them now?”
I bolted straight up. “Where?”
“Right on the seat.”
“You’re joking!” I said, my fingers searching. “I know you, Lester.”
And then my fingers stopped. There was a hole! Right on my bottom! A two-inch rip in the seam. I felt my face turn hot. I remembered how I’d had to go up to the blackboard in math, and dropped the chalk while I was up there. Everybody must have seen when I bent over. And in the cafeteria, when I’d put my books under the table, hadn’t I heard someone laugh when I stooped over?
“My gosh!” I screamed, and ran upstairs.
I took off my brown pants and threw them across the room. Everybody must have noticed and nobody told me. Pamela and Elizabeth were supposed to be my best friends, and they hadn’t said one word. Everybody had let me walk around school with my underwear showing through the hole.
I started to bawl. This was the worst thing that ever happened to me. This was worse than opening the dressing-room door at the store and finding Patrick, who used to be my boyfriend, standing there in his Jockey shorts. This was worse than accidently kicking one of the sixth-grade teachers during a Halloween parade.
This would follow me all through eighth grade, ninth, and senior high school—the girl in the Fruit of the Loom pants. I sobbed.
Lester came to the door of my bedroom. “For Pete’s sake, Al, April Fool!” he said.
I grabbed the bedspread and wrapped it around me. “You’re just saying that! There really was a hole in my pants!”
“Relax! If there was, I didn’t see it,” he said.
I gulped. “You didn’t? Lester, tell me honest and truly: Did you see a hole in my pants or not?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, I think it’s really strange that you just happened to pick that as an April Fool joke when the hole was really there.”
“Coincidence, Al.”
“You’re just trying to make me feel better.”
“Why should I want you to feel better after what you did to me this morning?”
He remembered! “Are you sure you didn’t see the hole in my pants first and then think of the joke?”
“Arrrggghhh!” cried Lester. “Okay! Okay! Let’s say I did see it. Have it your way. If that’s the most embarrassing thing that ever happens to you, you’re one lucky kid.” And he went back downstairs.
I sat woodenly on my bed. Did he mean that far worse things were ahead? Did he mean I’d go to school someday with a hole in the seat of my pants and not have underwear on at all?
I pulled on a pair of jeans and went downstairs.
“Lester,” I said, “if you wake up some morning and I’m not here, you’ll know I’ve hitchhiked to Alaska.”
“Have a nice life,” he said.
4
THE SEWING LESSON
I DECIDED TO MEND THE RIP IN MY PANTS, and after that, I’d check all of Dad’s and Lester’s clothes for rips or holes or buttons that were missing. But first I called Aunt Sally.
“I’m mending,” I told her.
“Good!”
“I don’t know how.”
“Alice McKinley!” she scolded. “Are you telling me you’re almost thirteen and you don’t even know how to stitch?”
“I guess so,” I said.
She told me how to make a knot in my thread and run my needle in and out along the seam where the stitches had come loose.
It sounded simple enough, so I got out the sewing basket, found some dark brown thread, and did what Aunt Sally told me.
It occurred to me that in all the years I’d been coming to this basket to get safety pins, I’d never really stopped to think that this sewing basket had probably belonged to my mother. She used to hold the scissors just as I was holding them. She’d picked out every spool of thread. I swallowed. I figured she would have been pleased to know I was learning to be Woman of the House for Lester and Dad.
I wore my brown pants to school on Monday, and was glad I’d mended that hole, because just after lunch, as I walked by the table of seventh-grade boys at the end of the cafeteria, I heard one of them say, “Florida.”
I didn’t turn around but my pulse beat like crazy. Were they talking about me? Was that who I was going to be? Was Florida better or worse than Delaware? Better or worse than Louisiana? Better or worse than Illinois?
“Patrick,” I said in gourmet cooking, as we stood at the stove together, stirring our lemon custard. “You know how those guys in the cafeteria are naming girls after states?”
“Yeah?”
“Could you do me a big, big favor? Could you find out what state they’re planning to name me?”
Patrick stuck one finger in the custard and licked it. “Which state do you want to be?”
I looked at him in delight and wonder. “You mean I could choose it myself?”
“Why not?”
“I can choose any state I want, and you’ll suggest it to the guys?”
“Sure.”
For the first time in my life, I saw the need to study geography. All those years back in fourth, fifth, and sixth, why couldn’t I have paid more attention? Did I want mountains or did I want hills? Would I rather be desert or wetlands? Which were the timber states and which were coal? Each little feature was enormously important.
I realized that my ignorance of geography could affect my entire life. If I chose a flat state by mistake, I could get a nickname that would follow me through college. If I was Delaware, for example, every inscription in my senior yearbook would be something like, Good luck, Delaware Al! Hang in there, Delaware!
It was more responsibility than I could handle. I wanted someone more knowledgeable than me to pick my state. So after the custard had thickened and we were dividing it into dessert dishes, I said, “Patrick, I want you to pick a state for me and suggest it to the guys. Will you?”
“I guess,” said Patrick. Just like that.
The day seemed to creep along and I could scarcely wait till we got on the bus again so I could find out what state Patrick chose. In Language Arts, Miss Summers, who dates my dad, asked me what poem by Carl Sandburg described a city, and I said, “Illinois” instead of “Chicago.” The boys laughed.
Maybe I should have asked Patrick to call me the name of our own state, Maryland. Maryland had everything, from mountains to ocean, so wouldn’t I be safe with that? Then I wondered if Maryland had something awful I didn’t remember. No, the more I thought about sending Patrick to make a suggestion, the more I decided it was a stroke of genius. Not only would he make a better choice, but I’d know what he really thought of my figure, how he saw my body.
As we got on the bus that afternoon, Pamela and Elizabeth sat together, so I slid onto the seat beside Patrick before any of the guys could sit there.
“Well?” I said.
“What?” asked Patrick. The thing about boys is they take so long to catch on.
“Which state did you choose?”
“Oh, that,” said Patrick. “Maine.”
I stared. Somehow I had been thinking California. West Virginia, maybe. “Why?”
“What do you mean, why? Because Dad and I went float fishing there once, and I liked it.”
“I’m going to be called Maine the rest of my life because you liked float fishing?”
“Seemed like a g
ood reason to me.”
“Patrick, think!” I cried. “Does it have any hills and valleys?”
“I don’t know. We were along the coast.”
I slid down in the seat. Patrick could have called me California. Montana! New Hampshire, even!
“Patrick, the guys name girls after states depending on their figures, not float fishing.”
“But that’s dumb, Alice. I liked Maine,” he said. “What do you care, anyway, what a bunch of guys call you?”
I didn’t answer. I could feel my eyes welling up and was afraid I’d bawl.
“Besides,” Patrick went on, “they already had a Maine, so that’s not you.”
I thought I’d lose my mind. I bolted straight up and grabbed his arm. “What state am I, then?”
“I don’t know,” Patrick said. “It was between Florida and some other state, but I can’t remember which.”
Pamela and I decided that not knowing was the worst. If you were Rhode Island, even, at least you’d know that all the dreams you’d had for junior and senior high school were gone forever, and you could look forward to becoming nothing more than a check-out clerk at the Safeway or something.
After I got home, however, I discovered what was worse even than that. The hole in the seat of my pants was back again. My stitching hadn’t held. I had been going around school all day with my underwear showing, and the kids who hadn’t noticed it the first time would surely have noticed it the second.
I don’t know what it was about seventh grade, but I felt even less confident of myself than I had in sixth. I couldn’t seem to do anything right. Couldn’t even sew up a two-inch rip in my pants.
Dad must have noticed my red eyes when he got home because he asked what was wrong.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing you want to tell me, you mean,” he insisted.
So I told him how I’d followed Aunt Sally’s instructions, but that the stitching hadn’t held.
“Did you secure the thread when you finished—tuck it in good and tight so it wouldn’t work loose?” he asked.
“No, I just cut it.”
“Go bring me the sewing basket,” he said.