Achingly Alice

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  It was only four in the afternoon, but I called Domino’s and ordered a pepperoni and onion, a six-pack of Pepsi, and two orders of buffalo wings. A really cute guy from Domino’s delivered it, and Pamela tried to talk him into coming inside and having some with us, but he said it was against the rules. He got her telephone number, though.

  We sat on the floor around our gigantic coffee table and ate, and Pamela said, “Thanks for letting us come over, Alice. I mean, Christmas and all …”

  “Letting you!” I said. “I need you, too, you know.”

  We ate quietly for a minute or two. I think we all realized that the pizza and the delivery boy were just diversions on Pamela’s part to get her mind off her parents’ separation. And finally Elizabeth said, “Here’s what I can’t understand about love. Why would a man want to go with a woman who would leave her husband for him? I mean, if she could leave her husband, why wouldn’t the boyfriend figure she could leave him for somebody else?”

  “Good question,” I said. And then, while we were mulling it over, I added, “Sometimes there’s no forever, though, because one of them dies. I mean, I know it has to happen sometime, but Mom was only thirty-nine.”

  Pamela and Elizabeth immediately put on their pitying faces, and I almost wished I hadn’t said anything, because I don’t want friends to feel sorry for me just because I don’t have a mother.

  “Maybe people just change—they can’t help it,” Elizabeth suggested.

  “Sure. One of them buys a NordicTrack and decides to run away with the instructor …” Pamela began, and then she put her head on her knees and started to cry.

  I put my arm around her from one side and Elizabeth put her arm around her from the other, and we just let her cry awhile. I wished we had a fairy godmother who would swoop into the room just then and make things right. I reached down, took my whistle, and blew.

  Pamela lifted her head and stared at me.

  “What’s that for?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Whenever we’re in trouble, we’re supposed to ‘give a little whistle,’ and somebody shows up,” I said.

  “Who?” said Elizabeth.

  “I don’t know. A fairy godmother or something.”

  We heard the front door open, and Lester came in.

  “Pizza!” he said, sniffing the air, and came over to the coffee table to help himself to a piece. Then he paused, his hand poised at his mouth, and studied us there on the rug.

  “Am I interrupting something, ladies?” he asked.

  “Fairy Godfather!” Elizabeth joked, holding out her arms toward Lester.

  “Just leaving,” he said, and went upstairs to his room.

  4

  MAKING THINGS HAPPEN

  IF CHRISTMAS WAS ALMOST, BUT NOT quite, perfect, New Year’s Eve was the pits.

  I hadn’t paid much attention to New Year’s Eve before. Usually I was too sleepy to stay awake, and—if I did—I’d just stick my head out the window for a minute or two, listen to the horns, and go back to bed.

  But now December thirty-first took on a whole new meaning. New Year’s Eve meant excitement. Danger, even. To Pamela, it meant sex. It meant the end of something old and the start of something new. What would it mean for Miss Summers, I wondered? Breaking off with Dad and taking up again with Jim Sorringer? Or breaking off with Mr. Sorringer and committing herself to Dad? And what about Patrick and me?

  Jill was having a New Year’s Eve party, but she’d told us her folks wouldn’t be home. So when I asked Dad if I could go and he asked if her parents would be there, I told him the truth. Naturally he said I couldn’t go, and I wasn’t too disappointed. Elizabeth and Pamela couldn’t go, either. I’m not ready for those kinds of parties yet, and besides, I figured I should stay home with Dad in case he got depressed. Or in case Miss Summers changed her mind and came over to spend New Year’s Eve with him, instead.

  Patrick’s folks were giving a party and paying him to be waiter for the evening, and Les, of course, was out with Marilyn and their friends. So Dad built a fire in the fireplace for just the two of us, and we popped corn and played cards till midnight. Then we turned on the TV to watch the stupid ball in Times Square.

  If you want my opinion, that is the dumbest thing on TV. I can’t understand why people would want to stand around in freezing weather to watch a big silver ball being lowered from the top of a building. That’s it. That is absolutely all there is to it, and when it gets to the bottom, everyone goes bananas. There are probably two thousand places I would rather be on New Year’s Eve than Times Square.

  But when an orchestra began playing “Auld Lang Syne,” I kissed Dad and we both got some wooden spoons and metal pie pans and went out on the porch to bang them a couple of times. Tradition. I guess that’s about as dumb as the ball in Times Square. Then I went to bed.

  I woke up about two and thought I heard voices. I lay there in a half-sleep, trying to decipher where the voices were coming from or whether I’d heard anything at all. I heard a woman’s voice, though—then a man’s.

  Softly I crept out of bed and slipped halfway down the stairs. The voices were coming from the living room, and my heart leaped at the thought that maybe Miss Summers had ditched Sorringer forever and come back to Dad.

  But when I got down far enough, I saw it was only the TV, and Dad was sitting alone in his chair. But he wasn’t watching—he had a magazine on his lap and a sheet of notepaper on top. Somehow I knew he was writing to Sylvia. I’d noticed that he wrote her notes and letters from time to time, and I remembered Aunt Sally had told me that it was his love letters that won over Mom after he met her, charmed her away from a man named Charlie Snow. But what kind of a letter did you write to a sweetheart who was out on New Year’s Eve with another guy?

  He looked so sad—the slump of his shoulders, his rumpled sweater—that I felt like crying. I figured we were both wondering the same thing: What were Miss Summers and Jim Sorringer doing right now, and would she ever come back?

  As I went back to bed, I made up my mind: No more waiting for life to happen to Dad. If he wasn’t going to make things happen, then I’d do it for him. I couldn’t stand the thought of the woman he loved spending New Year’s Eve in the arms of another man. What I was thinking about doing was going up to Miss Summers’s room at school and telling her something about Mr. Sorringer to make her mistrust him. I’d never done anything like that before, but I’d never seen my dad so lonely, either. The palms of my hands began to sweat. What could I say that would sound convincing?

  I was almost afraid to go to school on January second. I worried that as soon as I set foot off the bus, someone would run up and say that Miss Summers was wearing a diamond ring, and I’d know right away it wasn’t Dad’s.

  In my jeans pockets, I was carrying a tube of lip gloss she’d left at our place, waiting until the period just before lunch, when she had her planning session, to take it to her room. I was relieved that I got through the first two periods without any news of Miss Summers, and I told Pamela and Elizabeth I’d see them at lunch.

  Then I started up the stairs to Miss Summers’s classroom, rehearsing a wild tale about seeing Mr. Sorringer going into a motel with a woman, wondering if I could carry it off. What if she asked the name of the motel? What if she wanted the name of the street? What if she wanted a complete description of the woman?

  I could smell pizza coming from the school cafeteria, and suddenly I had this idea. I had seen Mr. Sorringer with another woman! It wouldn’t be a lie! What about all those times he’d taken the school secretary and some of the teachers to Pizza Hut? Of course, Mrs. Rollins is probably ten years older than he is, and a grandmother, but she’d been in his car, hadn’t she?

  Before I could lose my nerve, I went on up the stairs and down the hall to Miss Summers’s classroom. Just as I’d hoped, she was alone.

  “Alice!” she said when she saw me, but my eyes were on her hands. No ring! I felt elated. Empowered!

  “Hi,” I said. “I
just dropped by to return this lip gloss you left at our place.”

  “I did? I must be getting so forgetful!” she said. “Didn’t we have a lovely Christmas, though?”

  “I loved it!” I said. “I really liked having you there. Did you have a nice New Year’s?”

  I may have imagined it, but it seemed as though her eyes searched mine for a moment. “Yes, I did. And now it’s a brand-new year,” she told me.

  What did that mean? That I should expect things to be different? I thanked her again for the little gold whistle and showed her how great it looked, along with Patrick’s necklace, against my navy blue sweater. And then I swallowed and said, “Miss Summers, I … I just thought you ought to know that I’ve been seeing Mr. Sorringer with another woman.” My voice sounded so high and tight, I wondered if it was mine.

  She looked at me quizzically, but didn’t say anything.

  This was horrible! She had to say something! She couldn’t just sit there, could she?

  “I … I didn’t know whether to t-tell you or not,” I stammered.

  “This seems to be upsetting you a lot,” she said finally.

  Me? What about her?

  “Well, I just thought you should know,” I said again. “It’s not the first time I’ve seen them together, either.”

  Miss Summers looked thoughtful and toyed with a pencil that slipped out of her hands and rolled off the desk to the floor. “Would it be someone I know, perhaps?” she asked hesitantly, and then I knew she was concerned.

  “I’m … I’m not sure,” I said.

  She leaned sideways and picked up the pencil. “Well, you know, Alice, Jim has a lot of friends.” She smiled. “Thank you for bringing my lip gloss.”

  “If I find anything else, I’ll bring it by,” I said, and quickly left the room.

  My heart was beating like a gong, and I had to stop for a drink of water to calm down. Even though everything I’d said was true, I’d told a lie, I knew—a real whopper—but I just didn’t feel it was wrong. When your father’s life is in danger—his love life, anyway—it can’t be wrong to try to help him, can it? Dad deserved her! He loved her! Didn’t somebody say once that all was fair in love and war? At the same time, I was remembering the day I sat in Mr. Sorringer’s office telling him that Jill had made up that story about Mr. Everett making a pass at her. Everything Jill had said was true in a way, but it was still a lie. And now I’d done the same thing.

  No! I told myself. It wasn’t the same! Jill had told that story to get Mr. Everett in trouble because he’d given her an assignment she didn’t like. I’d told my story about Mr. Sorringer to … I swallowed. To get him in trouble because he loved Sylvia Summers. One minute I was proud of myself, and the next I felt like dog doo.

  Well, what was done was done. I needed some kind of closure here! I wanted to quit worrying about Dad and worry about me for a change. I decided not to tell anyone about it—not Elizabeth, Pamela, anyone. The next few months were the test. We’d survived New Year’s, but Valentine’s Day was still ahead, and if ever Jim Sorringer was going to propose, it would probably be February fourteenth. If Miss Summers had any doubts at all about Mr. Sorringer, what I’d said should give her second thoughts about marrying him.

  At home, Dad was more quiet than usual. I think he talked to Miss Summers that night, because he took the upstairs hall phone into the bedroom with him and closed the door. I could hear his voice soft and low on the other side of the door.

  Yes!

  I woke up sometime in the night and thought I was sick. I felt cold and shivery, then discovered I’d thrown off my blankets, so I pulled them on again. I was still cold, but I wasn’t sick; I was just suddenly aware, in the reality of my bedroom, of the fact that Miss Summers might have seen through my whole scheme and told Dad about it. He’d be furious, no question.

  And why did I think she wouldn’t ask Mr. Sorringer himself? What’s this I hear about your seeing another woman? she’d say. In the middle of history the next day, I’d hear this announcement over the school intercom: Would Alice McKinley please report to the assistant principal? And there would be Dad and Miss Summers and Jim Sorringer, all sitting there asking me what I’d said and why I’d done it.

  I bolted up in bed and moaned. How did I know my lie wouldn’t make her insanely jealous and she’d rush right into Sorringer’s arms? The best I could hope for, I decided finally, was that Miss Summers would have seen right through me, chalked it up to stupidity, and forgotten about it. But I was in agony all the next day. I was too old to do something like this. Back in fourth or fifth grade, maybe, but not now!

  When I saw Miss Summers in the corridor, I turned and went another way. I avoided the hall outside her classroom completely. Finally, when a whole week had gone by and nobody said anything or acted in any way peculiar, I almost decided that maybe it hadn’t been such a bad idea after all.

  I guess you could say I was feeling unsettled. All of us were—Elizabeth and Pamela, too. There were just too many changes taking place in our lives, and they seemed to be happening too fast.

  First, there was this guy Sam in Camera Club who liked me, I could tell. Whenever we went outdoors for photo sessions, he managed to walk along with me.

  Next, all of us had changed classes for the second semester of eighth grade, and though I didn’t have a single class with Patrick, I had two with Sam—life science and social studies.

  And finally, Patrick invited me over for a drum lesson and I found out later his folks weren’t home. We’d sat out on my porch once fooling around with a bucket. Music was playing, and I’d been tapping out a rhythm on the pail. When Patrick noticed, he said I had talent! Then he began drumming on it with me, and we had a pretty good thing going. I may not be able to carry a tune, but at least I have rhythm. He’d been telling me he’d give me a drum lesson if I wanted, and I’d kept putting it off, but finally he called and suggested I come over, so I did. It was after I’d gone down in the basement with him where he keeps his drums that he mentioned his mom was at the dentist.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Patrick, exactly. But ever since he’d grabbed me in the broom closet at the school’s haunted house without my even knowing who it was, I’d figured that every so often a guy can go berserk. And if I could walk in Sylvia Summers’s classroom and tell her a lie, then Patrick could be expected to do something equally risky.

  Patrick sat me down on the little padded drummer’s stool, and then he sat on a chair in back of me, his legs on either side, his body up against mine, his hands holding my own from behind, and showed me how to use the drumsticks.

  “Hold your left stick between your middle and ring fingers, Alice, and keep the palm up,” he said.

  It felt awkward, but after a while he had me beating a rhythm on the pedal of the bass drum with my foot and tapping along with my sticks on the snare drum.

  After twenty minutes of this, Patrick put on a CD and played along on the tom-tom, hitting the cymbals with me in all the right places. Sometimes our sticks collided, and we laughed.

  It was fun, and I guess I really do have a pretty good sense of rhythm. Patrick thinks so, anyway. But all the while I was doing it, I knew I still didn’t want to be a drummer. I mean, it could never be more to me than just a hobby, a fun thing to do, not something I would ever want to do enough to take lessons.

  Right then, though, Patrick didn’t exactly have his mind on drumming, either, because I noticed after a bit that he wasn’t playing anymore. He had his hands on my waist, instead, and his lips were against the back of my neck. He was slowly running his hands up and down the sides of my rib cage, and I felt a whoosh! go through my body—like everything was drawing up tight, and my nerve endings were tingling.

  “Ummm, Patrick,” I said, leaning back against his chest, and this time he bent his head and I turned mine so that we were kissing sideways, full on the mouth, and I felt another whoosh!

  I lay back in Patrick’s arms, and he kissed me again. One o
f his hands rested on my chest, and although he wasn’t touching my breasts, I think I wanted him to. Then we heard the front door open and his mom’s footsteps on the floor above.

  I bolted straight up, almost falling off the stool, and Patrick hit his sticks on the drum in a quick roll.

  “I’m home!” Mrs. Long called down the basement stairs.

  “Okay,” Patrick answered. “Alice is here. I’m giving her a drum lesson.”

  It was quiet for a moment. “Alice is down there?”

  “Yes, I just stopped by for a lesson,” I called up, not wanting Patrick to get all the blame.

  “Well, that’s nice,” Mrs. Long said, but I think she was just being polite.

  We kidded around some more, and after a while Patrick sat on a second stool at the full drum set and let me use the snare. He put on another CD, and we drummed together this time, me on the snare, Patrick on the bass and tom-toms. It was fun, but I was still reeling from the sensations I’d had when I was in Patrick’s arms. I felt wet and tingly, and began to realize I was definitely a sexual being, as Lester would call it. So this is what it’s all about, I thought. This is what the little gold whistle was for, maybe.

  “Well,” I said when the number was over. “I think I’d better get home. Thanks for the lesson, Patrick.”

  “Hey,” he said, grabbing my hand as I stood up. He stood up, too, put his arms around me, and kissed me again.

  When I went upstairs, I said hello to Mrs. Long, and she smiled and said it sounded as though we had a good duet going, and I thought, You don’t know the half of it.

  As I walked home, the hood of my parka up and my hands in my pockets, I figured that Mrs. Long knew very well what had been going on down there. She’d been thirteen once; she must know what it felt like. I have to admit I’m glad she came home when she did, though, because I’m not really truly sure where I would have stopped if she hadn’t. I was having feelings I hadn’t felt before—terrific feelings that I wanted to feel again. I guess I was thinking that if this felt good, I wondered how it would feel if Patrick did that and that, and … well, it was all new to me, and I wanted to talk with someone about it, but I wasn’t sure who. Pamela had never put these feelings into words, exactly, and Elizabeth probably wouldn’t even know what we were talking about.