All the McKinleys call each other on Christmas morning, though—the Tennessee contingent calls us in Silver Spring. (“Silver Sprangs,” Uncle Howard calls it.) Everybody down there says “Merry Christmas” to everyone up here, which is sort of nice because it means they care about us. Dad says lots of people care about me and I don’t even know it; but if you don’t know it, I tell him, what’s the point?
“Don’t you even remember Aunt Sally?” he says. Whenever I try to remember Aunt Sally, though, Dad gets upset.
“Is she the one who used to read me the Little Bear books?” I say.
And Dad says, “Al, that was your mother.” He takes off his glasses and looks at me hard. “That was your mother!” he says again in case I hadn’t heard.
Momma died when I was five, and I can only remember bits and pieces; but I mix her up with Aunt Sally, because we lived in Chicago then. Some of the time, in fact, I even mix her up with Sally’s husband, Uncle Milt, and that really upsets my dad.
The trouble with all this is I never quite know exactly who I’m supposed to be like or how I’m supposed to act. What I need, I guess, is a pattern, a road map; but all I’ve got is a father and Lester, and Lester has been no help to me whatsoever.
I remember once when I was seven hearing some older girls talking about their periods.
“Lester,” I said, “what’s a period?”
“A comma without the tail,” said Lester. He was fifteen at the time, but even I knew that girls wouldn’t spend a whole recess talking about commas.
I was thinking about Momma the day I found the picture of Saint Agnes in our new neighborhood. It was lying out on the sidewalk and had a big shoe print on top of it, but I rubbed it on my jeans and took it up on the porch.
It was sort of like a picture postcard, the kind that Catholics carry around, and I figured it belonged to Elizabeth Price. She lives across the street from us here in Silver Spring and knows all about saints. (We’re Methodists, and the only thing I know that Elizabeth doesn’t is a couple of hymns.)
I rocked back and forth on the glider and studied the card. “The Agony of Saint Agnes,” it said at the top with lilies all around it. There was a drawing of a very beautiful girl with long dark hair like Elizabeth’s. She had a lamb in one arm and a palm branch in the other, and she was looking up to heaven.
Underneath the picture was her story. It said that Agnes was only twelve years old at the time of her glorious death. Her beauty excited the young noblemen of Rome, and one even promised to save her if she would marry him and renounce her faith, but she would not and was cruelly whipped. Even the pagans wept to see her tortured so. At last she was put to death and is looked upon in the Church as a special patroness of bodily purity.
I don’t know what there was about Saint Agnes, but I liked her. I figured I might need her more than Elizabeth Price, so I took the picture upstairs and hid it under my mattress. If Elizabeth was ever in difficulty, though, I’d take it over.
When you walk into Elizabeth’s house, the first thing you see is this big photograph over the sofa of Elizabeth on her First Communion day. She has on this white dress with lace around the collar and these white gloves with lace around the wrists and a white veil. Her long dark hair is all shiny around her shoulders, and she’s looking down at a bunch of flowers. She even looks like a saint. I asked Elizabeth once what you had to do to be a saint, and she said you had to die first, so then I stopped thinking about it so much. But I still kept Saint Agnes under my mattress just in case.
It was Elizabeth Price who watched us move in. She was sitting on a wicker couch on her front porch with her mother, and they were reading a magazine together except that they never turned the pages. That’s how I knew they were watching us. It’s really creepy, you know, when someone watches you move in. I had on my oldest clothes and my socks didn’t match, and even from across the street I could tell that Elizabeth Price had on brand-new sneakers.
It took us all day to get things inside. The movers took the furniture, but Dad and Lester and I took the really important things in our car. Dad had the lampshades and I had my bowl of guppies and Lester had his beer can collection, which reached from the floor to the ceiling all along one wall of his room. He sold it just before he started junior college this year and got two hundred and sixty-eight dollars.
It was a gorgeous day in July, and it could have been the marvelous very first day of the rest of my life, like the posters tell you. I was feeling especially good because Dad had promised to take us to Shakey’s for pizza after the movers left, so I was being as helpful as I possibly could. I helped Lester set up his beer cans and put lampshades on all the lamps and fed the guppies and dusted the closets, thinking all the time about pepperoni or sausage and a king-size mug of 7UP.
But just as the moving van pulled away, someone knocked, and I knew even before I opened the door that it was going to be that girl across the street and her mother.
They were standing there in matching skirts holding a cardboard box, and I didn’t even have to look inside to know that it was supper. My heart fell.
“Welcome to the neighborhood,” said the girl, smiling at me, and she didn’t have braces, either. She had beautiful hair and beautiful long eyelashes and no braces.
“Thanks,” I told her.
“We’re the Prices, and this is Elizabeth,” her mother said. “We know how difficult it is on moving day, so we brought you some dinner.” She held out the box for me to see. There was a meatloaf, which I hate, some baked potatoes, a salad, and a plate of flat-looking brownies, which I bet Elizabeth made herself.
“I made those myself,” said Elizabeth, pointing.
I didn’t know what to say. The dinner was hot and ready to be eaten, and I thought maybe they could give it to someone else.
“Thanks a lot,” I told them, “but we’re going out to dinner.”
“Alice!” my dad said behind me, and came right over. “This was so nice of you,” he told them, taking the box. “Thank you very much. I’m sure we’ll enjoy it. I’m Ben McKinley and this is Alice.”
“If you need anything,” said Elizabeth’s mother, “we’re just across the street.”
We ate off a trunk in the living room. Dad and Lester kept forking the food down like it was the best thing they had eaten in years, but I could hardly swallow.
“This tastes like dead birds,” I said.
Dad frowned at me. “That was a very rude thing you told them, after all their work. … ”
“But you promised!” I protested. “The dinner was still hot, and I figured they could give it to the needy or something. … ”
“They didn’t make it for the needy, they made it for us,” Dad told me. “We can go to Shakey’s some other time.”
“Yeah, Al,” said Lester. “You really blew it.”
I got up and went to brush my teeth, only we hadn’t unpacked the toothbrushes so I had to use my finger. That was when I noticed the dirt smudges on my face and the mustard on my shirt from lunch. I guess I’d forgotten to brush my hair that morning too, and it hung all dirty-yellow and stringy around my shoulders. I could imagine what Elizabeth Price was thinking about me.
Life is like a Dumpster. As soon as you get rid of one embarrassment, you pick up another. I knew that this was going to go on forever unless I found someone to set an example for me, and by the time I got the mustard off my shirt, I’d made up my mind: I’d adopt a mother, and she wouldn’t even know.
3
LIPS TOGETHER, TEETH APART
I DON’T UNDERSTAND ABOUT LESTER. I would think he’d be so grateful to have a road map he’d just follow everything my father did. Instead, Lester does the opposite. It’s like having a road map, I guess, and reversing directions.
My father is manager of a music store on Georgia Avenue. It’s part of a chain, the Melody Inn. Back in Tennessee he was a clerk. In Chicago, he was an instructor. But when they transferred him to Maryland, they made him manager. On weekends a
round the house he wears a white T-shirt that says HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BEETHOVEN in black letters. Lester wears a black T-shirt that reads SURF NAKED.
Dad plays the violin and the flute. Lester plays an electric guitar. Dad drinks white wine in a thin goblet with a long glass stem. Lester drinks Budweiser from a can. Dad reads things like The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857. Lester reads the comics.
I asked Dad once what it was about Lester, and Dad said he was out to lunch.
“What?” I asked.
“He’s out to lunch, but he’ll be home for supper,” Dad said, and I knew he was speaking in riddles again. Lately, however, Lester’s been acting a little less weird, so maybe that’s what Dad meant about coming home.
I had been looking forward to sixth grade all my life. It would be the very first time I was an “upperclassman.” There wouldn’t be any older boys on the playground to trap me on the slide. There wouldn’t be any older girls in the restroom to hide the toilet paper. Sixth graders were always chosen to help out in the office or in the halls, and the only ambition I had in life that summer was to be a safety patrol when school started.
There were a few things that had to be done before September, however. Dad made an appointment for me with a new dentist.
It’s weird about dentists. They always slip into the room so quietly you don’t even know they’re there until you hear them washing their hands at the sink. I’d been looking at a poster taped on the wall just in front of me. It had a big mince pie on it and the words, BEFORE YOU FINISH EATING YOUR DINNER, YOUR DINNER STARTS EATING YOUR TEETH.
The dentist came around from behind and sat down on a stool with his little mirror and his silver pick. I immediately opened my mouth. I always feel like a baby bird in a dentist’s office. As soon as he comes near me, my mouth opens automatically. His fingers smelled like Novocain and all the while he was examining my teeth he was asking me questions. That’s another thing about dentists. They ask you questions when your mouth’s open and then they answer for you.
“Almost ready for school?” he said.
“Gaaauuu,” I answered.
He told me that I didn’t have any cavities, but that I must be grinding my teeth because the enamel was worn. People do that, he said, when they’re tense. Then he recited a little poem that he hoped I would always remember:
“From this rule I won’t depart,
Lips together, teeth apart!”
I figured I’d forget it in a day or two, but it stuck in my head like Elmer’s glue. When we went to church on Sunday, it followed me right into the hymn. The first two lines were:
“Love divine, all loves ex-celling,
Joy of heav’n, to earth come down;”
And long after the hymn was over and the minister had started the sermon, the dentist’s rhyme kept ringing in my ears to the same tune:
“From this rule I won’t de-part,
Lips to-ge-ther, teeth a-part.”
On Monday, though, I turned my attention to clothes. My dad asked what I wanted to wear to sixth grade, and I told him I was tired of wearing no-name jeans. I wanted to go to one of those stores that sells Levi’s and get a real pair with the name on the pocket. Dad said that Lester would take me, so one afternoon we set off for a store that had lightbulbs blinking on and off and rock music coming from a speaker.
My brother is nineteen and has a mustache. I asked him if girls like to kiss a man with a mustache and he asked if I wanted to find out and I said no. Lester and I don’t say very much to each other, but when we do, it’s right to the point.
Of course, there are some things we don’t talk about at all. Like how to buy a bra. Not even Dad can talk about that. At the beginning of June, he noticed that my breasts made points in my T-shirts, so he said, “Al, don’t you think you should be wearing something under that shirt?” I went upstairs and put on a second T-shirt over the first, and all summer long I wore two shirts at a time just to hide my points. All because I didn’t know how to buy a bra.
I looked them up in a catalog once, but there were nine pages about contour uplifts, fiberfill supports, underwire minimizers, DD cups, and something called the “Ahh Bra.” I mean, I couldn’t even speak the language.
When we got to the store, I followed Lester inside and stared helplessly at the bins of folded jeans that reached all the way to the ceiling. Each bin had two numbers on it, like 29–33 and 32–31.
Lester stuck his hands in his pockets and looked me over. “Well,” he said finally, “I’m thirty-three, thirty-four, so I guess you’re … oh, maybe twenty-nine, thirty.”
I didn’t know what the numbers meant, but Lester got down a pair of Levi’s for me. Then he took me to the row of dressing rooms in back and found one that was empty. I went in. There was no lock on the door. I went back out.
“What’s the matter?” asked Lester.
“Hold the door,” I told him.
Lester rolled his eyes and came over to lean on it.
I slipped off my old jeans and pulled on the Levi’s. They didn’t even bend. I tried to imagine going to school in jeans that sounded like windshield wipers when you walked.
I stepped in one leg and then the other and promptly fell over. The jeans were so long my feet couldn’t get out. I pulled them up around my ankles and stood up. There was enough room around the waist for a sofa cushion.
“Hey, Al,” Lester was saying outside the door. “They fit?”
I opened the door a crack, and Lester stuck his head in.
“Stay here,” he said when he saw me. “I’ll get the smallest they’ve got.”
I held onto the Levi’s until Lester brought back a pair that said 25–30. I tried them on. They still came down over my feet and I could stick both fists in the waist.
“I can’t figure it out,” said Lester. “Maybe you’ve got a strange body or something.”
I felt like I had swallowed an ice cube. I was what I always suspected: a freak. Other girls my age wore jeans with Levi’s on the pocket, but I would never be able to wear them because I was obviously deformed. Tears sprang up in my eyes.
Have you ever had a perfectly rotten experience turn out wonderful? At that precise moment a salesgirl was passing the door and she looked in.
“How we doing?” she said, and checked the size. “For heaven’s sake,” she told Lester, “she should be wearing Levi’s from the girls’ department.” And with that she took my arm and guided me out to a huge rack of jeans made just for me.
If I had had a sister, she would have known. If I had had a mother, she would have asked. Instead, Lester told me I was strange and would have taken me back home in tears. I shot him a dirty look as I clutched a pair of jeans to my chest and marched triumphantly back to the dressing room.
Have you ever had a perfectly wonderful experience turn out awful? I opened the wrong door. There stood a redhaired boy in blue underpants. He wore white sport socks with yellow stripes around the tops and he was staring at me with his mouth open. I slammed the door as Lester pushed me into the right room, and I decided I would never come out as long as I lived. They could call the rescue squad, but I would stay in that dressing room forever. Miserably I tried on the size one jeans and they fit perfectly, but I was so embarrassed I couldn’t even enjoy them.
“Al,” Lester said finally. “You still alive?”
“I’m not coming out,” I told him, “not ever.”
“He’s gone, Al.”
“I can hear him breathing.”
“He’s gone. That’s someone else.”
I came out at last and went with Lester up to the cash register. There was the boy with the blue underpants in line just ahead of us. I stood behind Lester with my forehead pressed up against his back and didn’t look up again until we were in the parking lot.
“When are you going to grow up?” Lester asked me.
“It was awful!” I told him. “It was so humiliating.”
“It could have been worse,” said Lester. “It
could have been you standing there in your underpants and he opened the door.”
I had a long, hard think about myself that night. I remembered a fairy tale I’d read once about a princess who worried all the time about getting old. One day her fairy godmother told her that if she really wanted, the godmother could fix it so that the princess grew younger instead of older. “Think about it for three days,” the godmother said, and when she came back, the princess said yes, she really, truly, sincerely wanted to grow younger. So the princess got her wish. For the first couple of years she was happy, but at the end of the story, she was lying in bed shaking a rattle and then she wasn’t anything at all. I got to worrying that instead of growing up, I was growing more babyish all the time.
I got out one of the posters from behind my dresser—Dad saves them for me from the Melody Inn—and I turned it over and drew a line down the center. On the left side I wrote Forward, and on the right side I wrote Backward. In the “Forward” column I scribbled down all the things I’d taught myself to do that showed I was growing up, and in the “Backward” column I listed all the things I’d done that set me back a couple of years:
Forward
Backward
Make Kraft Mac & Cheese
Ate crayons
Empty lint trap on dryer
Wrote poem to mailman
Remove splinters
Donald Sheavers
Eat squash
Rude to Elizabeth Price
Raise guppies
Can’t buy a bra
Opened wrong dressingroom door
So far the “Backward” were winning.
On September fifth, I went to school in my new Levi’s beside Elizabeth Price. She said that on the first day of school, all the students gather on the playground, and the teachers come out and call the names of those who will be in their classes.