“Too bad you don’t have anything better to look at,” I quipped. “Want me to try to be Crystal Harkins for the evening and talk Bach?”
“I want you to figure out what you’re having to eat and quit yapping,” he told me.
I looked at the menu, but there wasn’t anything I recognized. Half the food was served with lemon grass, whatever that was. I imagined having to get down on my hands and knees to eat it.
“Order for me, huh?” I said. “I can’t even pronounce this stuff.”
So Lester ordered strips of beef on lemon grass, shrimp on skewers, and spring rolls. We ate crab soup and garlic chicken, and the kind of rice that sticks together when you eat it with chopsticks.
I had just asked Lester what he remembered of eighth grade—whether it was better or worse than seventh—when I saw a couple come in the front door of the restaurant and wait to be seated, and my heart almost jumped through my chest. It was Miss Summers and a man, and it wasn’t Dad.
For a moment I didn’t think I could breathe.
“What’s the matter, Al? Something stuck in your throat?” Lester asked, ready to spring to his feet and try the Heimlich maneuver.
“Les,” I said weakly, “it’s Miss Summers with another man.”
Lester stopped chewing. “You sure?”
“Turn around and look.”
“Don’t be dumb. And quit staring.”
I could no more quit staring than I could swallow. What would I do if the waiter seated them in here? What would I say?
The headwaiter motioned them to a table in the other room, however, behind the row of plants that separated us from them. I could just see them from time to time if they leaned forward or something. They were too far away for me to hear anything.
My eyes filled with tears.
“Al, for Pete’s sake …!”
“She’s dating someone else, Lester!”
“Well, that’s her business. She’s not engaged to Dad, you know.”
I swallowed. Then swallowed again. “But I wanted them to marry.…”
“Well, then, quit jumping to conclusions. She’s here with another man, and you’ve got her breaking up with Dad already. Maybe it’s her uncle. Her brother …”
“Not the way he was guiding her to a table with one hand on her waist, Lester,” I told him.
“Even brothers do that now and then,” said Lester, and went on eating.
“Les, please turn around and tell me what you think.”
“No! Do I have to beat you over the head, Al? Don’t embarrass me.”
“What will we tell Dad?”
This time Lester put down his fork and looked me straight in the eye. “Al, listen to me. You’ve got to do something that could be even harder for you than jumping in that pool. You’ve got to promise not to say one word about this to Dad. Understood? I mean nothing! Not even a hint.”
I blew my nose.
“This guy could be an old friend, a relative, could be almost anyone at all. If you start suspicions in Dad’s head, you could get them quarreling and breaking up. If she’s dating someone else, Dad will find out eventually. You can’t go around bursting people’s bubbles, especially when it could all turn out to be a mistake.”
Lester went on talking about the food, but I hardly heard. There was something going on between the man and Miss Summers, all right, because they looked very serious. Hardly smiled at all except at the waiter. When Miss Summers tended to look my way, I moved so that she couldn’t see me behind the plants, and because she was sitting sideways to me, she didn’t look over often.
But she was leaning forward talking to the man. He was a younger man than Dad—by a few years, anyway. Taller, better built. Not especially good-looking, but I suppose some women would think he was handsome. Sort of heavy eyelids, thick brows. Craggy-looking.
He seemed to be listening intently to her, and Miss Summers looked very earnest. Then she would listen and the man would talk and look earnest.
“Let’s go,” I heard Lester saying at last. “You’re not eating a thing, and you’re not listening to me, either. I’ll ask the waiter to wrap it up.”
“I’m sorry.”
The waiter brought the check, and put all the stuff we didn’t eat into little boxes. All the way home in the car, tears rolled down my cheeks for Dad. Lester didn’t say very much, and I knew he was thinking about Dad too.
We parked in the driveway. Dad was already home. I started to get out, but Lester put his arm across my chest to stop me. “Remember,” he said. “Not one word to Dad. I mean it, Al! No matter how much you’re tempted or how right it seems, it’s not.”
We went inside.
“Supper, Dad!” Lester sang out. “How about some Thai food?”
Dad was lying down on the couch, his feet hanging off the side so he wouldn’t get the cushions dirty.
“I’m beat,” he said. “You couldn’t have picked a better night. Heat it in the microwave for me, would you, and I’ll eat it here in the living room.”
He sat up slowly. “If I don’t get some extra help at the store, I’m going to need a stay in the hospital.”
I gave him a hug. “I love you, Dad,” I said. “No matter what happens.”
Dad squeezed my arm. “I love you too, Al, but what’s that supposed to mean?”
I caught Lester frowning at me from the hallway. “Just that I know how hard you’re working, and I’m afraid you might get sick or something.”
“Janice will be back half-time one of these days. I’ll survive,” he said.
I cried my eyes out in bed that night—for Dad, for me, for everything I had hoped would happen in the future but probably wouldn’t now. I was glad I wasn’t going to have Miss Summers for English, because I didn’t know what I would say to her if I did. I just want you to know you have really loused up our lives, and it would have been better if Dad had never met you. That’s what I wanted to say.
Except that I was the one responsible. I was the one who had invited her to the Messiah Sing-Along last December. Lester was right. I should stay out of Dad’s love life and let him marry who he wants. Even Janice Sherman without her uterus, if he wants, except he never even wanted to marry Janice with her uterus.
It was the first time in my life I realized that it’s harder to see someone close to you go through pain than it is to feel it yourself. Lester was right about something else: It was going to take a lot more courage to stand on the sidelines and let things take their course between Dad and Miss Summers than it was to climb that ladder at the swimming pool and jump off the diving board.
If Mom were here, she’d know how to handle it, I thought. Then I realized that if Mom were here, Dad wouldn’t be interested in Miss Summers. Or would he? My head was almost too confused to sleep.
School began the next day. Lester left for an early class at the university, so I had Dad all to myself. He made what he calls a “power breakfast” for us—a stack of thin buckwheat pancakes alternating with ricotta cheese and orange marmalade.
“Question,” I said as I dug in. “I know that married people fall out of love sometimes and get divorced, but does it ever happen that someone who’s happily married is still attracted to somebody else?”
“Of course,” said Dad, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Happens all the time.”
I stared. “Even … with you … when Mom was alive?”
“Sure.”
“Dad …!” I was growing up too fast and learning things I didn’t want to know.
“Well, you asked.”
“You mean you were going out with other women?”
“Of course not.”
“But … you might have been happier with someone else?”
“Sure!”
The warm little bubble I’d carried around with me ever since I can remember seemed to have been popped by a cold wind.
But Dad was giving me a quizzical smile. “Listen, sweetheart, I dated six women before I met your mother, an
d there were probably two billion women in the world at that particular time. Just looking at it mathematically, there were probably a million women I might have been happier with or who suited me better than Marie.”
That didn’t help a bit. “Then why …?”
“Why did I marry her? Because I knew that she was a woman I could love—that I did love. And since I couldn’t possibly date all the other women I’d be meeting in my lifetime, why not settle on her? I was committed to the marriage, Al. That’s what makes the difference.”
And suddenly my warm fuzzy feeling was back again, my armor for the first day of eighth grade, and all the other firsts I’d have in my life. But it wasn’t just what Dad had said. It was the feeling that even if I had found out he’d loved another woman, or if Miss Summers was in love with somebody else, or if any of the other hundred and one awful possibilities that lurked around the corner were to happen, I could take it. It might knock me down temporarily, but it wouldn’t put me out. Because I had guts. I was the one who had climbed up on the diving board in front of all my friends and jumped off into space. Alice the Brave, that was me.
When I got out to the bus stop, there was Elizabeth in her new jeans, the second button of her shirt undone. Alice the Brave and Elizabeth the Conqueror. We would take eighth grade by storm.
12
CONVERSATION
YOU KNOW WHAT’S WEIRD? WHEN YOU’RE used to being one of the youngest, smallest, plainest kids in school, and suddenly you’re an upperclassman; you’re one of the beautiful people. The eighth graders ruled the school now; over the summer, the Board of Education moved the ninth grade into the high school, which had been newly expanded to fit them.
Everywhere I looked there were younger kids running around looking worried, afraid they couldn’t find their classrooms or work their locker combinations, or that there wouldn’t be toilet paper in the johns. A lot of older kids sent them in exactly the opposite direction if they asked where a classroom was, but mostly the younger kids didn’t ask. Self-preservation, I guess.
I went out of my way to avoid Miss Summers’s room. I didn’t want to see her. Be reminded of her. Have her say anything to me, even. The really great thing was that I was in two different classes with Patrick and with almost everybody in health class—Pamela, Elizabeth, Patrick, Brian, and Mark, as well as Karen and Jill. If Tom Perona came to our school instead of St. John’s, it would have been the whole gang. Of course Mark and Pamela were sitting on opposite sides of the room; Pamela was sitting with Brian, and Mark was flirting with every girl in sight to show Pamela he didn’t care.
Everything was disorganized at lunchtime, and Elizabeth, Pamela, and I found ourselves sitting across the table from some eighth-grade boys we didn’t know. They were kidding us about how they had this unusual ability to guess what kind of underwear girls were wearing. I could almost feel Elizabeth blushing before I even looked at her. I was all for ignoring them, when Pamela said, “Put up or shut up.”
One of the boys grinned. “If we guess right, will you tell us?”
“Sure!” said Pamela, without even asking Elizabeth and me.
The boy in the Ohio State shirt looked right at Pamela. “Black bikini,” he said.
“Purple,” she told them.
“Pamela!” I whispered, nudging her. Couldn’t she see this was all a trick to make us tell them what we were wearing?
But now they were looking at me and smiling. “What do you think?” the boy said to his friends.
“I’d guess she’s wearing panties with the word ‘Tuesday’ on the seat,” said one of his friends.
I stared. Actually, I was wearing panties with the word “Tuesday” printed all over them. Now I was blushing.
“Bingo!” they said, and laughed.
Elizabeth was drinking from her milk carton, eyes on the table, face as red as a tomato, when they turned to her.
“Cotton jockies,” said the boy in the sweatshirt, which is exactly the kind of panties Elizabeth wears.
She choked and spattered milk all over the table.
It was going to be an interesting year.
There was an assembly that afternoon to introduce the new teachers, the cheerleaders, and the presidents of the seventh- and eighth-grade classes.
Mr. Ormand, our principal, got up to welcome the new seventh graders to junior high, and the eighth graders back again. He explained about the ninth grade moving to the high school—as if anyone could have missed the news—and about the fire drills and the rules. He introduced the new teachers and the exchange teachers, and then he said he wanted to extend a special welcome to our new vice principal, who had left our school as a math teacher to get a degree in administration, and was now back as our vice principal—Mr. Jim Sorringer. We clapped.
Then Mr. Sorringer got up to say how glad he was to be here again in Silver Spring, and suddenly I was staring at his heavy eyelids and his craggy face and knew at once that’s who Miss Summers had been having dinner with the night before.
I closed my eyes and began to smile. A business dinner, that’s all it was! A conversation about curriculum! Miss Summers and Dad were safe. She would be my stepmother after all, and we would live happily ever after. There was no guarantee, of course, but things certainly looked more promising.
“What are you grinning about?” Pamela whispered, poking me. She and Brian were sitting next to me, holding hands.
“The world is a great place after all,” I said.
At dinner that night, we all talked about “our day.” Dad said he didn’t know what he was going to do about Loretta Jenkins, because she wasn’t sure when the baby was due and hadn’t seen a doctor yet. She wasn’t exactly happy about having a baby, either.
Janice Sherman was recovering nicely but seemed depressed when Dad talked to her on the phone.
“I’ve got it!” I said suddenly. “If Loretta doesn’t want a baby, and Janice is depressed because she can’t ever have one, why doesn’t Loretta give her baby to Janice for adoption?” Some problems have such obvious solutions you wonder why adults don’t think of them more often.
“Is that all you have to contribute?” asked Dad, and then I knew it wasn’t such a hot idea.
Lester told us about how he was thinking of switching from business to philosophy for a major, because he was enjoying his philosophy courses so much.
“Have you thought just how you might support yourself with a degree in philosophy?” Dad asked.
“No sweat,” said Lester. “I’ll simply build a hut at the top of the Himalayas so people can make pilgrimages to the top and ask me the meaning of life.”
Dad rolled his eyes, but then he and Lester both looked at me, waiting to hear about my day. I wanted to tell them about how the man Miss Summers had been out with was only our vice principal, but I knew I couldn’t say a word. So I told them about the eighth-grade boys who could guess what kind of underpants girls were wearing.
Dad leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “You know,” he said, “it does seem that we could make a point of more stimulating conversations at mealtimes. It wouldn’t hurt us a bit to be thinking of topics in advance that we could all discuss. Issues to debate. It could be anything at all—philosophy, music, religion, politics. I don’t want you two going out into the world remembering dinner hour as just a big game of Trivial Pursuit.”
“I like Trivial Pursuit,” I said.
“Pass the ketchup,” said Lester.
For a while forks clinked, jaws chewed, bread was buttered, crackers snapped.
“I have a topic,” I said at last.
“Good!” said Dad. “Let’s hear it.”
“I would like to know the definition of Cairene motitations,” I told them.
“Of what?” Lester stared at me.
“Cairene motitations.”
“Never heard of them,” he said.
“We could look it up,” said Dad. “How do you spell ‘Cairene’?”
“What about Yemeni wrigg
lings?” I knew those phrases by heart. Ever since Elizabeth told me to forget them, they were imprinted forever on my mind.
Dad studied me intently. Even Les looked fascinated.
“No?” I said. “What about Abyssinian sobbings, Nubian lasciviousness, or Upper Egyptian heat?”
Lester’s mouth dropped, but Dad was beginning to smile.
“Has somebody been dipping into Tales from the Arabian Nights, by chance?” he asked. “Ah, yes! I spent many an evening with that book when I was about fourteen.”
Then he and I began to laugh, and Lester joined in. “Elizabeth was reading it to us one night during a sleepover, but she felt so guilty she had to go to confession,” I said. “I’ve never been able to get the stories out of my head.”
“Tell you what, Dad,” Lester said, grinning. “I’ll look into Nubian lasciviousness if you’ll take Upper Egyptian heat.”
Dad smiled at me across the table. “Don’t grow up too fast, Al. I like you just the way you are.”
“I’ll take it a day at a time,” I promised.
Find out what happens next for Alice in
THINKING AHEAD
PATRICK AND I WERE GETTING MARRIED, Pamela was pregnant, and Elizabeth was buying a car.
It all happened in our health class, in a unit called Critical Choices. We had entered eighth grade fresh from a summer in Mark Stedmeister’s swimming pool, and one week later we were saddled with all the cares of adulthood.
“What we’re going to study,” Mr. Everett said, “is how the choices you make now can affect the rest of your life.”
He was new to our school this year. Mr. Everett was probably about thirty and really tall, maybe six foot five, wore Dockers, and rolled his shirtsleeves up above his elbows. When he talked, he leaned against the blackboard, arms folded over his chest, feet crossed at the ankles, a lock of blond hair hanging over one eye. A younger version of Brad Pitt, Pamela described him.
His smile was what got to us. It was warm. Friendly. You couldn’t call it flirtatious. He just gave the impression of really loving his job.
“When you come to class tomorrow,” he told us, “you’ll each receive a hypothetical situation in which you will find yourself for the next five weeks. Your assignment is to get as much information as you can about your particular problem.”