Elizabeth hadn’t eaten at our table all week, and as we were leaving the cafeteria Thursday, I caught up with her.
“Where’ve you been?” I asked. “You weren’t at our table.”
“You’ve noticed?” she said.
“You’re mad,” I guessed.
“Not mad. Left out,” she told me. “All you and Pamela ever talk about anymore is earrings, earrings, earrings. I’d think you’d get sick of it.”
“Well, sometimes I do,” I admitted. “What did we used to talk about?” I really couldn’t remember.
“Everything. Boys and teachers and life and stuff.”
We walked along in silence for a while.
“It’s not that we don’t like you, Elizabeth. You just don’t fit in without earrings. All you’d have to do is—”
“Yes, all I’d have to do! Everyone else has to change to fit in with your group. You don’t have to do any changing at all.”
She turned at the next corner, just as I was about to ask if I could borrow her red polka-dot shirt to wear the next day.
At home that afternoon, I took everything out of my closet, looking for stuff that was red or pink or white. When Dad got home and came upstairs, my bed was heaped with clothes, and by the time Lester got there, nothing was left in my closet but hangers.
But Lester wasn’t interested in what I wore to school on Valentine’s Day. He leaned against my doorway and stared off into space like a man who had been hit on the head.
“Les?” Dad said.
Lester moved over toward my window and sat down on the sill. “Well, Dad, it happened,” he said.
“You totaled your car?”
“I’m in love.”
“I thought this was your monastic period.”
“I mean, really in love this time.”
“You weren’t before?” asked Dad. “There was Marilyn, then Crystal, then Marilyn again, and …”
“I didn’t even know what love was before. This is the original, unexpurgated edition,” said Lester. “It’s different this time. Everything’s different. Even her name sounds different. Mar-i-lyn.”
“Sounds the same to me,” I told him.
“Lester,” Dad said, “listen to me. I like Marilyn a lot. I think she is a fantastic young woman. I’d be proud to have her as a daughter-in-law. But I’ve heard it said, and I think it’s true, that it doesn’t matter who you marry as much as when you marry.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Lester. “Are you saying it wouldn’t make any difference if I were to marry Loretta Jenkins as long as I married at the right time?”
“Think about it. Under what circumstances would you marry Loretta?”
“If both Marilyn and Crystal ditched me, I flunked out of college, lost all my money, wrecked my car, and had my legs amputated,” said Lester.
“That’s what I mean,” said Dad. “It would be the very worst time to marry anybody.”
“But I’m not talking marriage, Dad. Did I mention marriage? Did I say the word ‘wife’? Did I say ‘daughter-in-law,’ ‘mortgage,’ or ‘crabgrass’?”
“Just checking,” said Dad.
“Tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day, Dad, and I want to do something special for Marilyn,” Les went on. “I want her to know that this time it’s for real—it’s love on a higher plane than it was before.”
There was the slam of a door outside, and I moved over to the window to see what Les was looking at.
On the street below, a man was coming around the side of a panel truck carrying a huge bouquet of balloons. There were about seven or eight of the silver Mylar hearts with words like LOVE and ADORABLE YOU on them, and fifteen or so red, white, and pink latex balloons. All together, it looked as though the man was in danger of rising.
We didn’t say a word. All three of us went downstairs to open the door. All three of us heard the man say, “Delivery for Lester McKinley,” and Dad and I watched as Lester signed. When the door closed, we stood silently by while Lester opened the little card, which he wordlessly passed to us:
“Crystal,” it said.
9
MAYDAY
WHAT HAD HAPPENED, WE FOUND OUT later, was that Crystal Harkins, who plays the clarinet and buys her sheet music at the Melody Inn, heard from Janice Sherman, who heard it from Loretta Jenkins, that Lester McKinley was entering the priesthood.
“Lester is the most unlikely person I can think of to become a priest,” Crystal had said, and decided to send him a trial balloon, of sorts, to test him out. But the day the balloons were delivered, we didn’t know any of that.
“I can’t believe this,” Lester was saying after the door closed on the deliveryman. “This cannot be happening.” He thrust the balloons at Dad. “Here. They’re yours,” he bleated.
Dad backed away. “No, you don’t, Les. You’ve got to deal with this somehow.”
“Al?” Lester said, offering them to me.
“No way,” I told him.
Lester let go of the balloons, and they shot up to the ceiling and bobbed about in one corner of the hallway.
They were still there when I went to school the next morning, dressed in blue jeans, red socks, a white turtleneck, and an old red shirt of Carol’s that came down below my knees. There were tiny gold hearts dangling from each ear.
Some days you just know you look good, and that was one of them. Pamela and I sat together on the bus, and she told me that every time I moved my head, my earrings caught the sunlight and gleamed. She had red silk roses woven in her long blond hair, just as she’d said she would, and was wearing a white angora sweater with a necklace of red hearts, and red heart-shaped earrings.
“Valentine girls,” Patrick commented approvingly as he passed, and we smiled.
Valentine’s Day in seventh grade isn’t like February 14 in sixth. Almost nothing in junior high school is the way it was back in elementary, and we didn’t have to decorate stupid shoe boxes to hold valentines from the drugstore, either.
The way you know it’s Valentine’s Day in junior high is the way the eighth- and ninth-grade couples make out in the halls, pressed up against lockers, and are two to a coat outside at lunchtime. The gym was being decorated for the ninth-grade dance that night, but our health class was still on the Our Changing Bodies unit in a room off the gym, so that was all right.
When we walked into the room that day, though, the chart of a woman’s reproductive organs had been replaced by a chart showing a man’s, and while the other girls giggled, Elizabeth quietly went into shock.
Mrs. Bolino, of course, called off the names of body parts like meats at the supermarket and discussed the anatomy of a testicle the way the instructor in home ec discussed chicken pie. But for Elizabeth, that seemed to make things worse. Elizabeth would have been happier if we had called men’s organs Unmentionable One and Unmentionable Two.
After class, because she was still in shock, I told her about how back in the Middle Ages men had little pouches called codpieces in the fronts of their trousers to keep their privates in—to show them off, I guess. Somewhere I’d read that they even stuffed their pouches sometimes to make them look bigger.
“Don’t talk about it,” Elizabeth whispered.
“I’m not making this up,” I told her. “It’s right there in the dictionary. Anyone can look it up.”
“Not me,” said Elizabeth.
I stopped right there in the hallway. “Elizabeth,” I said, “I hope that the baby your mother is expecting turns out to be a boy and you have to change his diaper every day so that someday you’ll get over being such a loon.”
“Alice!” Elizabeth looked quickly around her. “People heard!”
“It doesn’t matter. They already know you’re a loon.”
“They heard about the baby!”
“So? So your mother’s having a baby! Big deal!”
“Shh! You don’t have to tell everyone! Alice, you’re awful!” she said, and fled down the hall.
Valentin
e’s Day was only a few hours old, and already I’d made an enemy.
In Language Arts, I found myself staring at Miss Summers, and wondered if tonight was the night she would become my mother-to-be. Dad had already told us he’d be home late, possibly very late, so he didn’t have to tell me that he was taking Miss Summers somewhere, and might come home an engaged man.
I tried to figure out if her smile was any different—if she’d guessed that Dad was going to propose. She didn’t have on valentine colors, but she did have on a gold knit dress with bronze jewelry that made her look like an Egyptian princess or something, and her eyes seemed unusually bright, as though she knew this was a special day. Then I realized I’d been staring at her extra hard, because she suddenly glanced in my direction and gave me a quizzical look. I buried my nose in the book again and went on reading the biography of Lincoln Steffens.
“You look like somebody’s valentine,” Denise Whitlock told me after class.
Even though she’d bullied me last semester, I figured this was a compliment, so I said, “Thanks.” Then I tried to think of something nice to say to her in return. She looked like somebody’s Mack truck, but I couldn’t tell her that.
“I like your shoelaces,” I said finally. She had on Day-Glo lime green laces with orange ladybugs on them.
“They’re my brother’s,” she said. “Mine broke.”
Oh, well.
World Studies was more like a fashion show, and Mr. Hensley just couldn’t seem to cope. Jill and Karen are in that class along with Pamela and me, and if Miss Summers had seen us four girls in our red, white, and pink clothes and matching earrings, she would have called us a “symphony in rose” or something. Not only that, but Mark Stedmeister and the Three Handsome Stooges walked in wearing black—black turtlenecks, pants, layered shirts—and our assorted pinks and reds against their blacks made us look like a dance company.
I couldn’t believe I was one of the Beautiful People. I mean, here I was, Alice McKinley, looking gorgeous, laughing my tinkling laugh, with my gorgeous white teeth showing through my ruby red lips, and these tiny red ribbons on my earrings highlighting the pink in my cheeks. I sat sideways in my chair, legs crossed, feet in the aisle, and Brian, the handsomest Stooge of all, was rubbing the edge of his foot against one of mine. I didn’t even move my foot—just went on smiling my wonderful smile, like a rose all covered with dew, preening herself in her very own bud vase.
It was the first day of school I can ever remember that went too fast. A photographer from the school paper was roaming the hall when we got out of Hensley’s class, and he caught a picture of Pamela and Karen and Jill and me coming through the doorway with some of the boys behind us. I think I was looking over my beautiful shoulder at Brian and smiling my bedazzling smile when the picture was taken.
There were pink-frosted cupcakes in the school cafeteria, and fruit cocktail with slices of pink grapefruit. In Our Changing Bodies class, though it had nothing to do with Valentine’s Day, the teacher had a medical diagram on the board showing how a male deposits sperm inside a female’s body, and Elizabeth would look at the board for one second, then at her desk for five seconds, then the board, then her desk …
Frankly, I felt very grown up on the bus going home. I had actually been in a class where the teacher said words like “ejaculation.” I had looked at my reflection in every mirror I’d passed, in every restroom that day, and every single time I’d looked gorgeous. I was on the threshold of being a mature adult woman, and it felt good.
Nobody was home when I got there, not even the balloons. I figured Lester had taken them out in the backyard and simply let them go. They’d probably be over the Potomac by now—possibly halfway into Virginia.
There were a couple Sara Lee brownies left in the refrigerator, and I wanted to get to them before Lester got there, so I sat down with a glass of milk and savored the taste of chocolate on my tongue. I had just started upstairs to brush my teeth when someone knocked, so I clattered back down and opened the door. There stood Patrick with a two-pound box of Whitman’s chocolates, tied with a red bow.
I have never in my life been given candy by a boy except for a few candy bars and four chocolate-covered cherries the day we left sixth grade. And here I was, Alice McKinley, standing at the front door facing a boy with a two-pound box, all for me.
“Patrick!” It’s all I could manage.
“Hi,” he said. That’s all he could say too, I guess.
“You … want to come in?” I asked.
Patrick came in and thrust out the box. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said.
“But I … I mean, we …” We’d stopped being boyfriend and girlfriend last September.
“We decided to be special friends, didn’t we?” he said. “So I don’t see why I can’t give you candy.”
“But I haven’t got anything for you!” I protested.
“That’s okay,” said Patrick.
We went into the living room and I set the box on our coffee table, which takes up most of the floor.
“I hope you like Whitman’s,” said Patrick, sitting down on the edge of the couch.
“Oh, I do.”
Patrick looked around, then interlocked his fingers and wiggled them back and forth a few times. “These are the chocolates with a diagram on the lid to show what’s inside each one,” he said.
“I know.” I couldn’t possibly eat one then, not after those brownies.
Patrick leaned back and placed the sole of one shoe on the side of the other. “You looked real nice at school,” he said. “I mean, you still do.”
“Thanks. I like your sweater,” I said, noticing it for the first time. The fact was, I couldn’t even remember whether Patrick had been in World Studies or not, that’s how much attention I’d paid to him.
“You want a Coke or anything?” I asked.
“Umm … not a Coke,” said Patrick.
“We’ve only got Coke or Sprite,” I told him.
“Nothing to drink,” said Patrick.
I was sitting in the chair beside the couch, my feet sticking out in front of me. I realized that my left foot was within inches of Patrick’s, and remembered how Brian had rubbed one of his shoes against mine in World Studies.
“What are you thinking about?” asked Patrick.
I jerked to attention. “Nothing.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Feet,” I told him.
“Feet?”
“Yeah. You know. Crazy thoughts come into your head sometimes.”
“Yeah,” said Patrick. Finally he stood up. “Well, I’ve got to go deliver papers. Enjoy the chocolates, Alice.”
“I will,” I told him. “Thanks a lot.”
I walked him to the door and watched him ride away on his bike. Then I went back to the living room, picked up the big yellow box with the red ribbon around it, and took it upstairs. I sat down on my bed and held the box in my lap. My very first box of chocolates! I couldn’t help smiling.
I’d put the ribbon on my bulletin board, put the chocolates in the bottom drawer of my dresser, and choose a different one every day. Or maybe I’d lie on my bed on a bunch of pillows and eat them while I read magazines, the way they do in the movies. Or maybe I’d get a glass candy dish with a lid and keep some of them there, and whenever I had a visitor, I’d say, “Have a chocolate.” Just like my own apartment or something.
The door slammed downstairs, and a few moments later Lester walked by my doorway. When he saw the box of chocolates, he stuck his head inside. “Hey, looks like somebody got a valentine!”
“Patrick gave it to me,” I said. “He just left.”
“No kidding? Patrick again, huh?” Lester leaned against the door frame. “You going to keep the bow on it?”
“I haven’t opened them yet,” I said.
Lester stared down at me. “Patrick brought them over and you didn’t open the box?”
“No …”
“You didn’t even offer him
any, Al?”
My chest got that cold feeling you get when you’ve swallowed an ice cube. “I … I’d just had some brownies, and I wasn’t hungry, and …”
“But he was. Listen, Al, the first lesson of dating is this: When a boy gives a girl candy, it’s because he wants some.”
“But I … oh, Lester! I just didn’t think!” It all made perfect sense. Of course Patrick didn’t want a Coke or Sprite. He wanted a huge milk chocolate creme with a nougat center, that’s what.
“Lord, Al, that was really dumb,” Lester went on. “If I could give you a gadget that would light up or beep when you were about to do something stupid, I would, but sometimes you just don’t use your head.”
I was on the verge of tears. “What am I going to do?”
“Wait until tomorrow. Then call him up, tell him the box was so beautiful you couldn’t bear to open it, but now you want to try some of the candy, and you want him to be here when you do so he can choose the first piece.”
A reprieve! At last I’d done something stupid that had an escape hatch. I fell backward on my bed, spread-eagled, glad for a second chance. I had to start thinking about other people more—how somebody else might feel. If I’d been thinking about Patrick instead of myself, I would have figured that out.
I decided to focus on Lester and his problems. “What are you going to do about Crystal?” I asked.
Lester had gone into the bathroom and I could hear the clink of his cup as he turned on the water. “I don’t know what I’m going to do about her, but I can tell you what I did with her balloons. I took them over to Marilyn’s and tied them to her door handle, with a note from me. She’ll have them by the time we go out tonight.”
I bolted straight up, and the chocolates slid off onto the bed. “Lester, no! You didn’t!” I jumped to my feet and went out into the hallway.
Lester came to the door of the bathroom, holding the plastic cup. “Of course I did. What’s the matter with it?”
“Lester! Those balloons! Didn’t you see? One of them read ‘You gorgeous hunk.’” The water dropped from Lester’s hands and spilled all over the rug.
“You’re kidding.”