“Well, how did it go?” Loretta asked, as I took my rag and Windex and started cleaning the glass on the case. “Your ears are still a little red.”
I grinned. “It hurt Lester more than it did me.”
“Lester?”
I told her how he’d keeled over at the sound of the stud gun and had a lump on one side of his head. Loretta laughed.
“Well, he’s got a lot of girlfriends to take care of him,” she said, rearranging the row of coffee mugs on the shelf behind her, each with a picture of a composer on them.
“Wrong,” I said. “Right now he hasn’t got any.”
“What’s the matter? Les losing his touch?”
“He couldn’t decide between Marilyn and Crystal, so he’s going solo awhile.”
“Umm,” said Loretta, and I figured she’d probably been in the same situation herself with boyfriends.
“He still play the guitar?” she asked.
I nodded. “Especially now that he’s not going out so much.”
“Umm,” she said again.
That evening, Dad, Lester, and I were cleaning out the refrigerator, which hadn’t been done since we’d moved in a year and a half ago. Dad had kept setting a date for us to do it, and we kept putting it off, so finally he said that no one was leaving the house until we’d gone through our fridge shelf by shelf.
Dad took things out one at a time, and of course Lester and I claimed we’d never seen them before in our lives. Taking the foil off a saucer you’d been missing for three months was like looking beneath a large rock out by the alley.
“Spinach,” Lester guessed.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s lima beans with something growing on top.”
“Out,” said Dad, and tipped the saucer over the garbage pail.
“Hey, there’s the rest of my birthday cake!” I cried when Dad pulled out a waxed carton from the back of the vegetable bin. “I knew I hid it somewhere!”
Dad studied the package in his hand. “It says ‘corn.’”
“That’s so Lester wouldn’t find it.”
“Al, your birthday was eight months ago!”
“So I forgot.”
We had only done the lower shelf and half the vegetable bin when the doorbell rang.
I went to answer while Les and Dad argued over who had put an opened tin of sardines in the cheese compartment. As I crossed the living room, I glanced out the window overlooking the porch. Loretta Jenkins.
Suddenly everything clicked. The questions, the answers, the long, thoughtful “Umms.” I temporarily forgot the Sisterhood.
“Lester, run for your life!” I cried.
“What?” Lester came to the doorway of the kitchen, holding an unmentionable something.
The doorbell rang again.
“Who is it?” called Dad.
“Loretta Jenkins!”
“So let her in,” he said.
You’d think that after all the problems Dad and Les had been through in their love lives lately, they would have realized there was a new problem standing just outside the door. But Lester had to open it.
“Hi!” said Loretta, and her perfume hit me in the face.
“How you doin’?” Lester said. “Come on in.”
Loretta stepped inside. “I don’t know if you have this by Jimi Hendrix, but I thought you might like to try it, Les,” she said, holding out some sheet music. And then, seeing Dad in the dining room, she called, “I paid for it myself, Mr. M.”
Dad smiled and went back to the kitchen.
“Well … thanks!” Lester said, looking around for a place to set the bowl. Loretta simply took it from him and gave him the guitar music.
“Hey, this looks great!” said Lester, leafing through the pages. “I’ll give it a try. Thanks a lot.”
Loretta walked over and sat down. “I’m glad you like it. As soon as I saw the music, I thought of you.” She studied the bowl in her lap. “What is this?”
“Don’t open it!” I yelped, but it was too late. She’d lifted one corner of the tinfoil.
“Oh, m’gosh!” she gasped. “Science project?”
What it was, I discovered, was the squash-and-onion casserole Dad had made last August and said he was going to serve every meal until it was gone.
“Sorry about that,” I told her and whisked it away. And then, because I knew Les would need help, I went back to the living room.
“… lobster and shrimp,” Loretta was saying as I plopped down in the beanbag chair in one corner. “Mother said that when I was little, I was allergic to everything but water and air.”
I didn’t know how the conversation got from Jimi Hendrix to lobster and shrimp, but you put a nickel in Loretta, you can’t shut her up.
“Lester used to throw up if he ate anything with eggs in it,” I said, trying to bring the conversation to a quick close. I felt responsible for Loretta’s coming over.
But that didn’t work with Loretta.
“I used to throw up if I ate anything before eight in the morning,” she said. “Wake up, eat breakfast, throw up, go to school; wake up, eat breakfast, throw up…”
Lester’s eyes glazed over.
All at once I cried, “Lester, look at the time!”
He stared at me.
“Almost six thirty!” I insisted, looking at him hard.
And suddenly Lester snapped to.
“Ye gods,” he said, leaping up. “I’m outta here! Thanks a lot, Loretta. Hendrix I’m not, but I’ll fool around with that music.”
“I hope I’m not keeping you from anything,” Loretta said, fishing for information.
“If I hurry, I can still make it,” Lester said in answer, and took out his car keys. “Be home late, Dad,” he called.
Loretta followed him out to his car, even hanging over the door until he finally turned the key in the ignition. She waved him around the corner, then got in her own car and drove off.
It was fifteen minutes later, as Dad and I were throwing out something purple, that Lester walked in the back door.
“Thanks a bunch, Al,” he said, taking off his jacket. “Was that just my imagination, or was she coming on to me?”
“It wasn’t your imagination,” I told him. “If you’d been sitting on the couch, she would have been in your lap.”
Les turned to Dad. “Did I encourage her? Have I ever said one thing to Loretta to make her think I was hitting on her?”
“Maybe she thinks you need a woman in your life,” I suggested.
“I don’t need any women,” Lester said. “I haven’t dated anyone since Christmas.”
“That’s three weeks. Should we call the Guinness Book of World Records?” Dad asked.
“I’m serious,” said Les. “I’m going to prove that I can get through my junior year without any chicks messing me up. Just once, I’d like to be able to say I made the dean’s list.”
“Bravo!” said Dad. “That would please me, Lester; it really would.”
Lester looked at me. “So if Loretta comes by again, Al, tell her I’ve gone to Mexico, will you? Tell her anything. Just lose her for me.”
I began to wonder, though, if Lester would ever find the right girl. He always seemed to be out on weekends but never settled on anyone in particular. What if none was ever good enough because the girl he was really looking for was Mom? I read that in a magazine once. The article was “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”
When Dad finally left the kitchen and Les and I were mopping up, I said, “Les, what’s the very first thing you think of when I say ‘Marilyn’?” (If his answer was homemade cookies, I’d know we had a real case on our hands.)
“You don’t want to know, Al,” he said.
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, I’m not going to tell you, snoop! It’s none of your business.”
“Okay, then, what’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say ‘Crystal’?”
Lester whistled through his teeth. “Wow! You really don’t w
ant to know that. Don’t ask!”
So much for the test. Maybe losing a mom was different for boys than it was for girls.
Losing Loretta, though, was even harder than I’d thought. She called the next day and wanted to know if Lester had tried the music yet. Lester said he’d been sort of busy, but he’d let her know. She called the night after that, and as soon as I told Les it was Loretta, he holed up in the bathroom. I told her he was indisposed.
“What are we going to do, Dad?” Lester said after Loretta had called every night for a week. “Can’t you fire her or something?”
“Now, you know I can’t do that, Les. You’re smart enough to handle this. Tell her you’re going through a sort of introspective period right now—doing a lot of heavy thinking: a retreat for the soul or something.”
“Surely you joke,” said Lester.
It sounded pretty good to me, though, because Lester really was doing a lot of reading lately. He was taking a philosophy course at the university and reading books called The Condition of Man and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. So on Saturday, when I put in my three hours again at the Melody Inn, and Loretta asked whether Lester had tried the music yet, I said, “It’s not that he doesn’t want to, he’s just buried in his books right now. He’s going through”—I tried to remember what Dad had called it—“a dark night of the soul.” That didn’t sound right, but I think I’d heard it somewhere.
“Really?” Loretta was dusting a little plaster bust of Beethoven. “In what way, Alice?”
“He’s doing a lot of thinking and reading, and has a lot of decisions to make about his life. That’s why he’s not going out with women right now.”
Loretta put Beethoven down and stared at me. “He’s given up women?”
“Almost.” I nodded.
“Alice, is he… well, studying for the priesthood or something?” She looked at me intently.
I’d not even thought of that but decided we couldn’t actually rule it out. “It’s a possibility,” I told her.
“For heaven’s sake!” Loretta said. “I’d never have thought it of Lester. I can’t believe it!”
“Me either,” I said.
That night, Dad was spreading out his income tax stuff on the folding table in our dining room.
“Does our church have priests?” I asked from the doorway.
“No, Al. Now, you know that.”
I didn’t, really. “Would we have to join another church for Les to become a priest?”
“Of course! Lester would, anyway. But that’s about the most unlikely thing I can think of.”
“But it could happen?”
“Yes, and I could be on the first space shuttle to Mars,” he said.
On Monday I was watching TV, Dad was filling out more income tax forms, and Lester was up in his room doing calculus. The doorbell rang and I looked out to see Loretta.
“Great God in heaven, not again!” said Dad when I told him, and he buried his head in his hands. “Tell Les he’s got to come down here. I simply cannot afford to get involved in that girl’s chatter.”
I opened the door. “I just came to see Les for a moment. I can’t stay long,” Loretta said.
I went upstairs. “Lester, Loretta’s here and says she can’t stay long.”
“I’ve got a test tomorrow, Al! Tell her I’m vomiting. I’m unconscious! Unconsciously contagious! Tell her anything!”
“Dad says you’ve got to handle this. He’s doing the income tax,” I told him. And then I went in and stood by his bed. “Listen to me, Lester. All you have to do is put on a dark turtleneck shirt, carry a book with you, and don’t smile. Whatever you do, Lester, don’t smile.”
“You’re talking nuts.”
“Do you want to get rid of Loretta?” I asked.
“Is the pope Catholic?” Lester said in return, and I was glad he put it that way.
He got up, pulled off his orange sweatshirt with the Budweiser label on the front, and pulled on his black turtleneck.
“Why am I doing this?” he said.
“Don’t ask.” I handed him his copy of The Critique of Pure Reason. “And don’t smile!” I whispered as he started downstairs.
Loretta was still in the hallway, cracking her gum, but as soon as she saw Lester, she stopped chewing.
“Lester,” she said softly, “I didn’t mean to disturb you, but I just wanted to say I understand.”
Lester stood stone still.
“And I brought you something … well, I just thought this might help.” She handed him a CD, and from where I stood on the step behind him, I saw that it was the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Climb Every Mountain.”
“Thank you,” said Lester, looking puzzled.
“I paid for it myself, Mr. M.,” Loretta called to Dad. Then, “Good night, Alice. ’Night, Les.”
The door closed behind her, and Lester stared at the CD in his hands. “What in the world …?” he asked, turning to me.
“For your dark night of the soul,” I told him, and went back to watch TV.
4
ZOMBIE GIRLS
I WAS SORRY THE NEXT DAY THAT I’D LET Loretta down, though. All she was guilty of was liking Lester, and I felt torn between my loyalty to womankind and to Dad and Les. If I was a true Sister, wouldn’t I have paid more attention to her feelings? Tried to see things from Loretta’s point of view? What was the good of Sisterhood if you always sided with a guy just because he happened to be your brother?
To make up for it, I made an announcement at breakfast: “I think you ought to know that I consider myself a member of the Sisterhood—all for one and one for all.”
Lester groggily raised his head over his cup of coffee. “What is this, a declaration of war?”
“All I’m saying is that now I’m a half-grown woman—”
“Which half?” asked Lester.
I ignored him. “I want to do what other women do, feel what other women feel, experience everything there is to experience. …” I knew it was wild.
“That could be rather dangerous, couldn’t it?” said Dad. “What did you have in mind?”
I shrugged. “Nothing yet.”
“You won’t do anything without talking to me first, will you?”
“Like what?” I asked.
Dad smiled a little. “Oh, dye your hair purple or something?”
“I’ll talk to you first,” I promised.
Somehow I’d had the idea that I’d have all new classes and teachers when the new semester began near the end of January. When I was talking to some of the other kids in homeroom, though, they told me that only the electives change. The major courses go right on as they were before—same room, same class, same teacher.
I was glad I’d still have Miss Summers, of course. Everyone who had Miss Summers was glad. She taught eighth and ninth graders too, and I hoped I’d get lucky and have her all through junior high. When I realized I’d have Mr. Hensley some more, though, I groaned. I leaned over the aisle in homeroom and pretended to barf, and it must have been a realistic performance, because it got a big laugh from the other kids: a series of short gags followed by Mount Vesuvius.
Actually, I felt a little sorry for Mr. Hensley and tried my best to pay attention in class. Once in a while, though, when he gave an incredibly dull assignment, I’d pretend to vomit, and it always got a big laugh. Hensley would look around from the blackboard, confused, never knowing what brought it on.
The nice thing that happened, though, was that one of the other world studies classes had too many kids in it; three of them were transferred over to Hensley for the second semester, and one of them was Pamela. Last semester I hadn’t had any classes with her at all. She was especially glad because Mark Stedmeister was in my class—Mark and three other guys who were all good-looking but goofy. (I called them the Three Handsome Stooges; Pamela called them the best-looking guys in seventh grade.)
I was still in the same gym class with Elizabeth, of course. As for e
lectives, when I went from nutrition to gourmet cooking (you have to take nutrition before you get cooking), I found Pamela, Patrick, and two of the Stooges in my class. So things were definitely a little more interesting this semester. Not to mention the fact that I was more interesting—my earlobes, anyway.
I loved waking up in the mornings to find that the little gold studs were still there. Every day I wiggled them around in my earlobes, squeezed a ball of cotton soaked in hydrogen peroxide between each earring and its hole, and made sure that the backs were still on correctly. Then I put on my Levi’s, my Gap shirt, my Old Navy sweater, my Esprit socks, and my Nikes, and went out to wait for the bus like all the other seventh-grade girls in the country. Well, almost like all the other girls. According to Pamela, I wasn’t there yet.
“You don’t belong to anything, Alice!” she said. “How can you be a part of the seventh-grade experience when you haven’t even joined any clubs?”
“Maybe next year,” I said. “It’s too late now, isn’t it?”
“You can always join the All-Stars Fan Club,” said Pamela.
“What do I have to do?”
“Just come to room twenty-one B every Wednesday after school. We write fan letters and trade ideas on how to get photos and autographs from famous people.”
“Who?”
“Movie stars, football players, rock stars … Sometimes we write to authors, because they most always answer, but this week a bunch of us are writing to the Velvet Pistols. You should see Izzy, their drummer! He’s one to die for!”
I tried to imagine throwing myself off a cliff for somebody named Izzy. Still, if I could get an autographed poster or something, it would fill up half my bulletin board.
At five after three that Wednesday, I was sitting on one of the desks in 2IB when the other kids trooped in. One of the typing teachers sponsors the club, and when she’s not there, Pamela told me, Brian Brewster (one of the Handsome Stooges) takes over.
Someone waved an autograph she got from Leonardo DiCaprio, but Pamela showed me a newspaper photo of the Velvet Pistols. “This,” she said, “is Izzy.”
I stared at the picture of five men in tight leather shorts and cowboy hats, their chests bare. They all had long, curly hair, with rings in their ears and on the sides of their noses, and I wondered if I could stand to look at Izzy the Drummer every morning and evening for the rest of junior high school if he did send a poster. He had a tattoo of a pistol on one arm, a skeleton on the other.