Elizabeth swallowed. “I think I liked it better back in sixth grade … before the boys …” She blushed a little, as though she knew she was sounding crazy, but I knew exactly what she meant.
“I feel like that sometimes,” I told her. “As though I’m going to wake up some morning to find myself engaged and married and having babies and …”
“Let’s don’t talk about it,” said Elizabeth as her mother came over.
So I rode home with them, and we talked about sweaters instead. And Reeboks. And what kind of shorts to buy for gym.
I guessed I was somewhere in between Elizabeth and Pamela—not as fast as Pamela but not as uncomfortable as Elizabeth. Maybe, if I just gritted my teeth, I thought, and charged out to meet whatever was coming at me next, I could get through junior high school and dates and French-kissing without worrying about them so much.
I was hoping that by afternoon, when I went to the Bentons’, it would be sunny again and I could fill Jimmy’s wading pool in the backyard. Sometimes he’d stay there for a long time playing with his boats and buckets, and Mrs. Benton said it was okay as long as I didn’t turn my back on him for a moment. Even when the phone rang, I picked him up, wet as he was, and took him in the house with me to answer. I’d learned the hard way just what can happen when you turn your back on a little kid.
But it was still raining in the afternoon, so Jimmy and I stayed inside. I cut out paper dolls all holding hands, and Jimmy drew noses and eyes on them. Then I cut out a train, the cars connected, and Jimmy drew windows on them. We took plastic-garbage-bag ties and hooked all Jimmy’s play cars and trucks together into a long train and built tunnels for them to go through. Jimmy put the Playskool nurse in the seat of the fire truck, which was the engine of our train, and carefully ran the train around and around the living room so the nurse didn’t fall out once. She did bang her head on a tunnel, though, and Jimmy picked her up, kissed her forehead, and put her back in the fire engine.
That night, Patrick called and said he wanted to show his appreciation for the weekend he spent at the beach. He had it all arranged, he said; he was taking me to dinner the next day at his parents’ country club. I was terrified out of my mind.
It didn’t make sense, for starters, because it was actually Lester who had invited Patrick to Ocean City for the night, and Dad who had paid for our food, but I knew that when a boy invites you out to dinner, you don’t ask if you can bring your dad and brother, too. So I said yes and promptly went to the bathroom and threw up. It was the words “show his appreciation” and “all arranged” and “country club” that did it. I had never been to a country club in my life. I couldn’t even play golf.
“We’ll pick you up at seven,” Patrick had said.
We? Were his parents coming, too? Were the four of us going to have dinner together? After I threw up, I went to the phone and called Aunt Sally.
“I think that will be a wonderful growing-up experience for you, Alice,” she said. “And I think that Patrick is a fine young man for inviting you.”
“But what will I do? How will I act?” I bleated.
Aunt Sally explained all about country clubs and how I only had to remember five things, and I would do just fine:
1. Wear a dress and panty hose.
2. Let Patrick pull out my chair for me before sitting down at the table.
3. Don’t order either the most expensive or the cheapest item on the menu, but something in between.
4. Use the fork or spoon farthest away from the plate for the first course, then the next fork or spoon for the second, and so forth.
5. Don’t drink the water in the finger bowl.
As soon as I got off the phone, I wrote them all down so as not to forget. Then I ran back up to my room and opened the box of Carol’s clothes, which I had put in my closet. Everything was wrinkled, and most of the clothes were still too big. I shook out each piece and held it up against me in the mirror until I found a skirt (without a slit), a blouse, and a cotton jacket that, with a little ironing, I could use. Dad usually does any pressing that needs to be done, so that night we worked up an outfit for me to wear to the country club on Wednesday. My knees were knocking already.
I was dressed an hour in advance and sat on the sofa reciting the five things Aunt Sally said to remember. I had even put some pink pearl polish on my fingernails, and I sat with my fingers spread out over my knees so as not to chip the polish.
At five after seven, a big silver car pulled up. Patrick’s parents were in the front seat. Patrick got out and came to the door.
I wondered if I had to go to the bathroom. I was sure I had to go to the bathroom. I opened the door for Patrick and promptly disappeared upstairs. When I came down again, I realized it was the first time I had ever seen Patrick in a suit and tie. Dad was talking with him in the living room.
“Have a good time,” Dad said as we went out the door.
“You look pretty, Alice,” Patrick told me.
“So do you,” I said. “Handsome, I mean.”
You won’t believe this, but Patrick’s father was standing outside the car holding the door open, just like a chauffeur. I gawked.
“Alice, this is my dad,” said Patrick.
“How do you do, Alice?” said his father.
“Hi,” I said, and crawled in the backseat.
The whole car smelled like Mrs. Long’s perfume. She turned around and smiled at me.
“Mom, this is Alice,” said Patrick.
“Alice, Patrick has talked so much about you,” said his mother.
“You, too,” I said, and promptly blushed. Patrick hardly ever talks about his parents.
“Really?” she said, and smiled some more. She was a beautiful woman with a thin nose and gorgeous teeth. When her husband got in the front seat again, she faced forward, and the car started off. I could feel my stomach rumbling out of nervousness, not hunger, and I put my pocketbook over my abdomen and held it close. I had forgotten about the four crackers I should have eaten.
“We’ve been invited to a friend’s house for dinner,” Patrick’s dad was saying, “so we’re going to drop you and Patrick off at the club, Alice, and pick you up later. I think you’ll enjoy it. We always have, anyway.”
“I’m sure I will,” I told him. I was so glad they weren’t going to stay and eat with us that I felt like leaning over the front seat and throwing my arms around Patrick’s father.
“The desserts are fantastic,” said Mrs. Long. “Be sure to save room for something chocolate.” She sort of half turned and smiled again.
About twenty minutes later, the silver car went through the gates of the country club and up the long winding drive with the golf course on either side to the big white mansion at the top of the hill. There were lanterns along the edge of the driveway, and a man in a red coat stepped forward when the car stopped and opened the door for Mrs. Long. She explained that we were the ones who were getting out, so he closed that door and opened ours, and even held my elbow as I stepped onto the pavement.
“See you later,” Patrick said to his parents, and then we were walking up the brick sidewalk to the door where another man in a red jacket was waiting. Any moment I expected a man in a red jacket to whip it off and lay it down on the path in front of me so I could walk right over it to protect my lovely feet in my lovely shoes. In fact, with the five rules I had memorized for country club dining, I thought maybe I was going to enjoy the evening after all. I turned to Patrick and smiled. And then I realized I’d left my purse in the backseat of the car.
“My purse!” I said to Patrick. “The car!”
The Longs’ car had made the turn at the end of the driveway and was starting back down toward the road. Patrick yelled and ran after it. The man in the red jacket blew his whistle. Mr. Long looked around and saw Patrick racing across the grass. He stopped the car. Patrick got my purse and came back.
“Thanks,” I said, so embarrassed I hardly knew what to do. “Thank you,” I said to
the doorman, all the while wanting to die. I didn’t know whether I was supposed to tip him or not. I only had a quarter in my purse, anyway, in case there was a pay toilet or something, so I just stared down at my feet and went on inside.
The nice thing about my night at the country club was that leaving my purse in the car didn’t seem to make any difference. The men in the red jackets acted as though it happened every day. I’ll bet they’d seen worse things than that. Aunt Sally told me once about a woman in a long dress who was invited to dinner at the White House, and while she was dancing, she felt the elastic break on her underpants. When they fell down around her ankles, she just stepped out of them and walked off, leaving them there on the floor, and a butler picked them up and brought them to her all folded up and said, “Your handkerchief, Madam,” and she said, “Thank you,” and put them in her purse and went right on with the evening as though nothing had even happened. I could never do that in a million years.
I had never seen such a beautiful dining room. The ceiling was two stories high, and there were palm trees growing in buckets, and gardenias growing in pots. The waitresses were all tall and gorgeous and dressed in black tuxedos and white gloves, just like men.
The first thing I discovered about eating with Patrick at the country club was that just about everything Aunt Sally had told me was wrong. Not wrong, actually. It just didn’t help. Number one, when we got to our table, a man in a black tuxedo, not Patrick, pulled my chair out for me. Number two, there were about three forks on the left side of the plate and a couple of knives and spoons on the right side of the plate, but there was also a little spoon lying crosswise at the top of the plate, and Aunt Sally hadn’t said a word about that.
It was pretty exciting, though. Our table was set for two with china dishes on mirrored place mats. If you put out your hand to pick up your fork, you saw two hands. I finally figured out that the mirrors were so that after the meal was over you could sort of lean over and look at yourself to make sure there wasn’t any spinach between your teeth or anything. Next to each place mat was a little black matchbook with Patrick’s name in gold on the cover. I stared. “Patrick H. Long,” it said.
“That’s your name,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Patrick.
I stared at the matchbook again. Maybe he owned the country club! Maybe his parents owned it, and he was heir to a large fortune or something! Then Patrick explained that whenever you make a reservation for dinner, they print your name on matchbooks and put one at every place at your table. “Mom made the reservation in my name, so they put my name on the matchbooks,” he said.
“But we don’t smoke,” I said, still staring.
“It’s sort of like a souvenir,” he told me.
“Oh,” I said, and put my matchbook in my purse.
The waitress came back and took our wineglasses away. “Would you care for refreshments before dinner?” she asked.
“Alice?” Patrick said, and looked at me.
What were you supposed to order at a country club? The woman had just removed our wineglasses and even if we’d ordered wine, she wouldn’t bring us any. Coke on the rocks? Iced tea?
“Whatever you’re having,” I told Patrick, and felt very proud of myself.
“Perrier with lime,” said Patrick, as though he drank it every day. Maybe he did drink it every day. Maybe butlers tied his shoes in the morning and maids turned down his covers at night.
I felt like Cinderella at the ball. Everything that happened was a little more astonishing than what had happened just before. I had barely got over the waitresses in black tuxedos and white gloves when I noticed the glass place mats. I had scarcely got over the glass place mats than I noticed the black matchbooks with Patrick’s name in gold. And no sooner had the Perrier water arrived in frosted glasses with sugared rims with a slice of lime on the side than I looked up to see another waitress in a black tuxedo coming toward me carrying a rose on a pillow.
“For you, miss,” she said.
I went blank. Was I supposed to take the pillow? Was I supposed to put it behind my head? Under my feet? What did I do with the rose? I started to take the pillow, but the waitress kept a firm grip on it, so I figured it was only the rose I was supposed to have. I took the rose.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” said the waitress.
Now what? I wondered. How was I supposed to eat and hold a rose at the same time? Was I supposed to lay it across my plate like a knife? I looked at Patrick. He was smiling at me from across the table. I looked at the rose. There weren’t any thorns on it. The country club must hire someone just to sit in the kitchen cutting thorns off roses to be taken on pillows to all the ladies in the dining room. Just when I was about to ask Patrick what he wanted me to do with the flower, a man in a black tuxedo came to the table carrying a little vase and set it before me. I put the rose in the vase.
“Thank you,” I said to the man. And then I saw that there were little bubbles in the water in the vase. There was even Perrier water for the roses! Wait until I told Pamela and Elizabeth.
The very worst moment came when we’d finished our Perrier water at last, which, for anyone who cares to know, tastes just like tap water and costs a million dollars, and a waiter brought the menus. I remembered what Aunt Sally had said about not ordering either the most expensive thing on the menu or the cheapest, but something in between. I looked at the menu. There weren’t any prices. I turned it over, thinking maybe they were on the back. There weren’t any there either. I wondered if I should tell Patrick that I got a misprint—that somehow they had left my prices off. In desperation I decided that I needed my quarter more to call home than I did to go to the bathroom, so I excused myself and went to the restroom to look for a phone. There was one right there in the hallway.
The phone rang four times and nobody answered. I thought I would faint. Perhaps I could just slip out the door and keep walking. And then Dad answered. I could hear music in the background, and I remembered that Dad’s friends were playing chamber music at our house that night. The music sounded friendly and comforting, and I wished that I was home right then, sitting upstairs on my bed in my pajamas.
“Dad?” I gulped.
“Al?” he said. “Anything wrong?”
Somebody walked by me in the hall and I waited till he had passed before I answered.
“Al?” Dad said again, louder. “What’s happened?”
“There aren’t any prices on the menu,” I whispered.
“What? I can’t hear you.”
“There aren’t any prices on the menu,” I said. “I don’t know what to order.”
“Patrick’s menu has the prices,” Dad said. “That’s so his guests will order anything they want without having to worry about how much it costs.”
“What should I do?”
“Order anything you want.”
“Dad!”
“If it bothers you, just ask Patrick what he would recommend.”
“Thanks,” I said. I went to the restroom after that and didn’t need any quarters, either.
When I got back, Patrick said, “What would you like, Alice?”
“What would you recommend?” I asked, as though I said it every day.
“The scallops are good,” he said. “So is the beef burgundy. But I usually get the fried chicken.”
“I’ll have the fried chicken,” I said.
I think that people who work in country club restaurants have to go to special schools to learn it. Every dish was brought to the table separately by somebody wearing white gloves, holding the dish with a napkin. When a waitress poured more water in my glass, she held a napkin between me and the glass so that no water would splash on me accidentally. After we’d finished our salads, a waiter brought little china cups with lemon sherbet so that we could get rid of the taste of salad oil in our mouths before we ate our fried chicken. Elizabeth would positively freak out if she had to do all this eating in front of a boy. r />
It was fun in a way, going to the country club with Patrick, but it was a little bit awkward, too. I felt more comfortable sitting on our porch swing with him than I did there. I think I’d put my panty hose on wrong, for one thing, because one leg felt sort of twisted. And Patrick, in a suit and tie, just didn’t look like the Patrick I knew. Even our conversation was different. At home, on the porch, we talked about things like would there still be an Ocean City if the polar ice caps ever melted, and what was the most slices of pizza either of us had ever eaten at one time? Here in the country club restaurant, among the potted palms, we talked about how wasn’t it amazing that lemons grew on trees and was it raining out or not and who invented Perrier water, anyway?
The desserts were things I had never had before in my life, like chocolate mousse surrounded by chocolate fudge, the menu said, and grapefruit halves with ice cream and then meringue. This is the way the Queen of England eats every day of her life, I thought. Even breakfast!
We both ordered the chocolate mousse with chocolate fudge, and Patrick used the little spoon lying crosswise at the top of the plate, so I figured that’s what it was for. Sometimes you can figure things out just by watching what somebody else does. When we were through and Patrick signed the check, I took the rose out of the vase, as the waitress suggested, and we went out the French doors onto the balcony.
It wasn’t raining. The air was very warm and very breezy, and my hair, which was longer now but still curly, blew back away from my face. The stars were just starting to come out, and we could hear music from the dining room. It was about the most romantic place in the world, I guess, which is why I felt so uncomfortable, and whenever I feel uncomfortable, I get silly. Suddenly I put the rose between my teeth and grinned up at Patrick, like a cow with a piece of clover. I wanted to hear Patrick laugh. I wanted it to be like it was back on my front porch.
Patrick smiled, but he didn’t laugh. Gently he took the rose out of my mouth, leaned over, and kissed me, and then I was glad that he did, because he was so romantic and marvelous that I knew I would remember this moment forever.