“Well, in my family, it is,” said Elizabeth.
Now I was really confused. “Are certain things sins in one family and not another?” I asked.
“It’s in the Bible,” said Elizabeth.
“Where?” Pamela challenged. “Give me the exact verse, Elizabeth, where it says it’s a sin to go topless.”
I was beginning to feel this really was a nightmare. I was sitting here in my bathing suit and sweatshirt listening to an oversized cat talking religion with a girl in a granny gown, and I was supposed to be at my Saturday morning job at the Melody Inn in twenty-five minutes.
“Well, the Bible talks about lust,” Elizabeth told her. “It’s the same thing.”
“But how do you know Lester is lusting after Marilyn? All you know is that she’s going to cook dinner in her underwear,” Pamela said.
Elizabeth was sitting with her hands folded on the table, eyes down, and suddenly she said, “You’re right. I don’t have any business criticizing Lester and Marilyn, and I’m sorry I said anything.”
Pamela and I both stared. This was Elizabeth talking? Saint Elizabeth? The same girl who had gone to confession only a few weeks ago because she’d read some of the racier parts of Tales from the Arabian Nights aloud?
As we stared, I saw the color creeping up her neck until her whole face looked flushed.
“The … truth is …,” she said, still looking down at the table, “I’m in love.”
Now we were staring. Our mouths hung open, in fact. Had she and Tom Perona made up again? She was actually talking love?
“Well … that’s great, Elizabeth!” I said. “Has he asked you to go with him? Steady, I mean?”
“Of course not!” Elizabeth said. “He’s married!”
“What?”
And then we saw tears in her eyes. “It’s Mr. Everett,” she said. “I can’t help it. I’m in love with him.”
I slapped the side of my head to see if I was dreaming. I should have been slapping Elizabeth to knock some sense into her.
“Elizabeth, listen! You’ve got a bad case of puppy love, believe me!” Pamela told her.
“I don’t care what it is. It’s love and it hurts,” Elizabeth went on, and I began to believe her. “I think about him before I go to sleep at night. He’s the first thing on my mind in the morning. I try to imagine what he’s doing every minute. I even …” Now her cheeks were really red, “… imagine how he looks in the … the shower.”
We sat in stunned silence. Only last summer one of us, Pamela, had had her breast touched by a stranger, and now one of us was in love with a married man. Elizabeth, of all people!
Suddenly I wanted to be a seventh grader again. I wanted the protection of being a shapeless, self-conscious girl who didn’t have to worry about what I’d wear if I ever cooked surf and turf for my boyfriend.
“Don’t do anything rash, Elizabeth,” I heard Pamela saying. “I mean, don’t try to take him away from his wife and children.”
“I wouldn’t try anything like that!” said Elizabeth. “What do you think I am? All I want is for him to notice me. Just to smile and talk to me and make me feel special. He doesn’t even have to touch me. I just want to know he understands and cares.”
I was beginning to wonder if they shouldn’t lock up the three of us for the duration of eighth grade, when I heard footsteps in the hallway. Lester walked into the kitchen in his Mickey Mouse shorts, bringing back the tray.
“Yikes!” he said. “You’re still here! The granny, the cat-lady, and the girl in my sweatshirt. Don’t mind the shorts, ladies.”
Pamela laughed and turned away, but Elizabeth frankly stared, and Lester scooted out of the kitchen again as fast as he could.
“Well, there’s another first for you, Elizabeth,” I said. “You’ve seen my brother in his Mickey Mouse shorts and you’re in love with a married man. If this is what eighth grade is like, I can’t wait till we get to ninth.”
3
THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE
“I don’t think we can afford Istanbul.”
Patrick and I sat on the couch in the living room that afternoon with our notebooks scattered around the coffee table. I’d just got back from my job at the Melody Inn, where I work three hours on Saturdays doing whatever Dad says to do, and I was trying to eat a salami sandwich while Patrick went over our finances.
It was hard to find a time we were both free, because Patrick is in band at school, and he’s also on the school newspaper and the debate team. He had wanted to go out for the swim team, but it interfered with track, and Patrick’s really good at track.
Usually I’m not allowed to have boys in when I’m home alone, but we needed a place to work, and besides, I was eating lunch. I figure not much can happen to a girl while she’s eating lunch.
“Why can’t we afford Istanbul?” I asked. “We’ve got five thousand dollars, according to Mr. Everett.”
“Mom says she thinks we should use half of it for the wedding, and the rest for the honeymoon, our first month’s rent, and some furniture,” Patrick told me.
“How much would it cost to go to Istanbul?”
“Couple thousand apiece, probably.”
“Scratch Istanbul,” I said.
“What we need to do is make a list of everything we’d need to get married, figure out the cost, and see what we have left over for a honeymoon, rent, and furniture. What kind of a wedding do you want?” Patrick asked me.
I didn’t even know what kind of a party I wanted when I reached sixteen.
“The usual, I suppose,” I said.
“Let’s start with the engagement announcement in the Washington Post.”
“I checked that already. It’s one hundred twenty-five dollars for ten lines, three hundred twenty-five dollars for ten lines and a photo.”
“So, let’s go with just ten lines,” said Patrick, and wrote it down in his notebook. “What else do you want?”
“Well, invitations, cake, photographer—isn’t that about it?”
“We’re hardly getting started,” Patrick said. “What about the band for the reception? The music at the wedding? The minister? The organist?”
“We have to pay the minister?” I gasped.
“Of course! Then we’ve got flowers, food, renting a hall, wine, tuxedos …”
“My dress …”
“The limo—and that’s just the wedding,” said Patrick. “After that you’ve got the plane tickets to wherever we’re going, the hotel, food, entertainment.”
“What about a ring?” I said in this incredibly small voice.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot. I could easily spend a thousand on that.”
No way, I thought, would I ever wear a ring worth a thousand dollars. What if I lost it? What if it fell down the toilet? Maybe I didn’t need a diamond at all.
“Just a simple gold band would be fine,” I told him.
We settled on a thin gold band for $65. Then we looked up wedding dresses in a J. C. Penney catalog. The cheapest one I could find was $275. I hated it, but then, what could I do? Not only was Istanbul no longer a possibility, but neither was Hawaii. And a reception for two hundred people with live music was out.
Dad had taken the afternoon off from work and driven Miss Summers up to the Catoctin Mountains to pick apples. Miss Summers teaches English at our school, and had started going out with Dad last December. I was sort of hoping he’d have her with him when he came back, because he hadn’t seen her for a while, but when he walked in four hours later, he was alone. They obviously had picked some apples, though, because Dad was eating one.
“Where’s Sylvia?” I asked. When I’m around her, I call her Miss Summers, but I wanted to impress Patrick.
“I dropped her off at home with a half bushel of winesaps. She wants to make applesauce,” Dad said. He ambled on over to the coffee table. “Homework?”
“We’re planning our wedding,” I said and saw Dad blanch for a moment before he remembered.
; “How much is it going to cost me?” he joked. “As father of the bride, do I have anything to say about this?”
“We’ve got to cover everything for five thousand dollars—wedding, honeymoon, rent, and furniture,” I told him.
Dad gave a low whistle. “Well, I suppose I can come up with that much for my favorite daughter.”
He took another bite of apple, then went out on the porch. I could hear the slow creak of the swing. Maybe he was thinking that it wouldn’t be long before his favorite daughter was planning her real wedding.
“Okay,” Patrick said and dug his hand into the sack of chips I’d put on the coffee table. “Two hundred seventy-five dollars for a dress, sixty-five for a ring, one hundred twenty-five for the engagement announcement. About music, now, I want a live band—I don’t want any disc jockey playing records and making dumb remarks. I want a classy wedding.”
“How much for a band?”
“My cousin had a small combo playing at his wedding for twelve hundred. I’ll put down a thousand. That’s close.”
“Patrick, what about the cake? The flowers? The food?”
For the next hour, we haggled. We gave up on an engagement announcement, the tuxedo, the wine, and chose the cheapest invitations we could find. We got the ring down to $50, the photographer down to $600, the flowers down to the bridal bouquet and a couple of bouquets at the altar, and we settled on a store-bought cake from the Giant. There was just enough money left for a cold buffet in the church basement.
“This really stinks,” said Patrick. “El cheapo wedding.”
“Well, that’s not supposed to matter if we really love each other,” I said.
“It’s just a horrible way to start a marriage, that’s all, knowing you had to settle for cut-rate everything.”
I stretched out my legs. “My dad said he spent his honeymoon in a tent. They camped out.”
“Well, my folks went to Paris,” said Patrick.
It was the first time Patrick sounded a bit grand to me. Sort of a snob. All he said was “my folks went to Paris,” and somehow it made me mad.
“Well, I’d rather spend my honeymoon in a tent with the man I love than go to Paris with a snob,” I snapped.
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted it. Actually, Patrick is one of the nicest, kindest guys I know, but there in my living room, talking about the wedding-that-wasn’t, he sounded like a snob.
Patrick didn’t say a word. He just looked at me for a long moment, then quietly gathered up his papers, thrust them in his notebook, stuck his pen in his pocket, and stood up.
“The wedding’s off,” he said, and went home.
• • •
I was crying before he ever got down the front steps. I don’t even know if he said good-bye to Dad on the swing. This was ridiculous, but what was I going to tell Mr. Everett? I ran upstairs, dragging the hall phone into my room with me, and collapsed on the bed.
“Pamela!” I sobbed. “P-Patrick broke our engagement!”
“Alice? I can hardly hear you,” came the voice at the end of the line.
“He b-broke the engagement!” I bleated, with scarcely breath enough to say the word. “The wedding’s off!”
“Whose? Your dad’s and Miss Summers’s?”
“No! They’re not engaged.”
“Lester and Marilyn?”
“P-Patrick!” I almost shouted.
There was a pause. “What are you talking about? He’s not going to do the assignment?”
“He-he’s going to tell Mr. Everett the wedding’s off.”
“Great! So you both flunk! What happened?”
“We argued about everything!”
“But it’s only an assignment!”
“I know, but … he said it was an el cheapo wedding, and I called him a snob and he left.”
“You want to trade?” said Pamela. “I’ll be the jilted bride, and you can be the pregnant teenager.”
I wasn’t exactly eager to do that. What if Pamela did have to go to a doctor and have a pelvic?
“Alice, don’t you see this is what the assignment’s about—learning to face stuff like this before it really happens?” Pamela said.
“But he’s never called me cheap.”
“You never called him a snob, either. Listen, just type in all the figures you’ve collected so far and Mr. Everett will understand.”
“But we haven’t planned the honeymoon yet! We haven’t shopped for furniture.”
“Maybe Mr. Everett will let you go to divorce court instead,” said Pamela. “What can I say?”
Both Dad and I were quiet at the table that night. Lester was getting ready to go over to Marilyn’s for his special birthday dinner, and he came out in the kitchen to ask if we had any window washing fluid to put in his car.
“In the toolshed,” Dad said, gazing off into space.
I sat leaning my head against my hand and played with my spaghetti.
“Well, this is a jolly little affair,” Lester said when he came back in. He looked from Dad to me.
Dad blinked and immediately straightened up. “Guess I do feel pretty washed out,” he said. “I spent the afternoon picking apples with Sylvia, and I’m pooped.”
Lester rolled up the cuffs of his shirt and concentrated on me. “Is it my imagination, or have you been crying your eyes out all day over a lost love?”
“It’s not funny, Lester.”
“You have been crying your eyes out for a lost love?”
“Patrick called the wedding off,” I said.
Both Dad and Lester stared at me.
“He said all we could afford was an el cheapo wedding. He wanted a honeymoon in Paris, and all we could afford was a weekend in a budget motel.”
“Oh, I love this teacher! I love this teacher!” said Dad, suddenly coming to life. “Mr. Everett deserves an immediate raise in salary and promotion to supervisor. He’s a genius.”
Lester pulled out a chair and sat down. “I can’t understand why you’re so uptight over an assignment,” he told me.
“It’s the way we argued,” I said. “We made each other mad.”
“Well, kiddo, if Patrick hasn’t called by the time I get back from Marilyn’s, I’ll be surprised. He’s probably feeling as sorry about it as you are.”
“Hey, that’s right, it’s your birthday, Les, and we haven’t given you your presents yet,” said Dad.
“Well, he’s just about to get one.” I gave Lester a look. I still didn’t like the idea of Marilyn cooking for him in her underwear.
But Dad’s thoughts were somewhere else. “You know, I was thinking this morning that I now have a twenty-one-year-old son, and if Marie were here, this would be a grand celebration.”
“I was thinking of Mom this morning, too, as a matter of fact,” Lester said. “Do you remember the way she always brought a Kleenex to the table when she carried in a birthday cake with candles?”
Dad look puzzled a moment. “Now that you mention it, I guess I do.”
“I always thought it was because she was emotional about our growing up and had a tissue ready in case she cried,” Lester said. “I didn’t find out till much later that the smoke from the candles always set off her allergies, and that’s why she blew her nose.”
We all laughed, even me. I wished I’d been older when Mom died and had known her a little better so that I would have stories to tell, too.
“She’d shop all year for your presents,” Dad said. “January, June, October, it didn’t make any difference. If she saw something she thought either of you would like, she’d buy it and put it away.”
“I remember how she used to let me lick the frosting pan when she made our birthday cake. If it was our birthday, we always got to lick the pan,” I said, glad I had one thing to contribute.
“She did?” said Lester.
“That was Aunt Sally, Al, not your mother,” Dad told me. “Marie liked to bake, but for some reason she always bought a birthday cake a
t the bakery and had it decorated special.”
“Oh,” I said. I always do that. Aunt Sally took care of us for a while after Mom died, and I always mix them up.
“Anyway, happy birthday, Les. I’ve got a few little presents here for you,” Dad said, and went into the other room to get them. He came back with a certificate for some CDs from the Melody Inn and two denim sport shirts that looked like silk.
“Hey! Great taste, Dad! I love that faded look!” Lester said.
Dad gave me a glance, meaning it was my turn.
“I already gave him my present this morning,” I said.
“She did?” Dad asked, turning to Lester.
“Don’t ask,” Les said, and got up. “Well, Marilyn wanted me there by eight.”
“Happy birthday, anyway,” I told him. “Now that you’re twenty-one, you’re officially a man.”
The phone rang at that moment, so I went out in the hall to answer.
It was Patrick.
“Alice, I’m sorry about this afternoon,” he said. “Let’s elope.”
4
A BALCONY, A JACUZZI, AND YOU
Patrick and I agreed that we’d had a dumb argument, and he said he’d be over the next afternoon to finish our assignment. Lester passed me as I hung up the phone, and five minutes after he’d left for Marilyn’s, the phone rang again.
It was Crystal Harkins, another of Lester’s girlfriends.
“Hi, Crystal!” I said. “I haven’t talked to you for a couple of months.” I really like Crystal, almost as much as Marilyn. Lester could marry either one of them and I’d be happy.
“I trust Les still has my number,” she said, her voice flat.
Uh oh, I thought.
“Is he there, Alice? I wanted to wish him happy birthday.”
I hesitated. “Well, not exactly,” I said.
“You mean he’s half there and half not?”
“I mean he was here just a couple of minutes ago, and now he’s out celebrating his birthday with … some of his friends.”
Silence.
Crystal can read me like a book. “Some of his friends, Alice?”