Outrageously Alice

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  Most of the teachers just gave me a “Well, it’s weird, but it’s your hair” kind of look, and let it go, but most disappointing of all was Miss Summers’s reaction. I passed her coming out of the library and she said, “Oh, Alice!” and gave me a sort of desperate look.

  Well, I was getting one thing straight, I decided as I walked to the cafeteria. I was getting across the fact that I wasn’t sweet little Alice McKinley anymore—a generic type of girl with no imagination or style. The kind of girl you gave teddy bear earrings to and expected her to wear them.

  Justin Collier hung out at our table at noon and tried to stick pieces of gum wrappers and stuff on our spikes. I noticed that although he was kidding around with Pamela and me, it was Elizabeth he was flirting with.

  We did look weird, I’ll admit it. I ducked in the restroom before fourth period and saw that one of my tall green spikes had fallen over, and my mascara was smeared.

  Pamela and I were still laughing when we gathered up our books at two thirty and went out to the bus. The wind was blowing hard, and all Pamela’s spikes were leaning to the left. Elizabeth tried to straighten them up, and we laughed some more. Then I heard Pamela say, “Uh-oh.”

  I looked around and saw Lester’s car parked there in the No Parking zone, just ahead of the buses. He got out and walked toward us.

  “Over here, babe,” he said, taking me by one arm. The other kids stared.

  “Les-ter!” I said, trying to pull my arm away, but he had it in a viselike grip.

  “Oh, boy! Big brother’s mad!” I heard one of the guys whisper.

  “Yeah, he’s cute when he’s mad,” Pamela said, trying to make a joke of it, but Lester wasn’t smiling.

  I knew if I really fought Lester, I’d make a scene, so I pretended it was all a joke and rolled my eyes, laughing, as I managed a final wave. He ushered me into the passenger side of his car, closed the door, and came around to the other side. Without a word, he started the engine and drove off, just as a second bus beeped at him.

  “Since when did I get a private chauffeur?” I asked.

  “Since you proved you couldn’t be trusted,” said Les, and he sounded different. Serious.

  I glanced over at him. “Dad called you, right?”

  “Right.”

  “At the U? He had you paged out of class just for this?”

  “I only have morning classes today. He called me at home.”

  ‘’And told you to wait for me after school and see whether or not I’d washed the stuff out of my hair?”

  “Brilliant deduction.”

  “So what’s the big deal? I didn’t shave my head, did I? I didn’t pierce my nose or do anything permanent!”

  “You disobeyed Dad, and that’s enough.”

  “And you never did, I suppose?”

  “Of course. I just didn’t have a brother to come get me.”

  I banged my books down on the coffee table when we got inside and clamped up to my room, slamming my door so hard that the walls rattled. I think I even heard a small chunk of plaster tumble down inside the walls.

  How could Dad do that to me? In front of all my friends, have Lester cart me off as though I were three years old? And why would Lester agree to do it? I heard once that people who were wildest as kids often turn out to be the strictest parents. Lester must be getting in some practice. I whirled around, clutching my dresser top to vow an oath of revenge, then gawked at the sight in the mirror before me. Four of the five green spikes had fallen over, some to the left, one to the right, so that my head looked like a pineapple. I must have been resting my head in my hands a lot that day, because the green gel had slid down one whole side of my face. The eye shadow had moved on over to my cheeks, and with the dark smudge of mascara, I looked like a raccoon.

  Well, so what! I thought angrily. It was just a joke. Just for fun. I didn’t say I was going to go all week like that, did I?

  I went in the bathroom and took a shower, washing my hair and face, and had to use Ponds cold cream to get all the mascara off. By the time Dad came home, I was doing my algebra at the dining room table. I didn’t say anything and neither did he. It was like we were living in a monastery and had taken a vow of silence.

  I was hoping that when we sat down to dinner, Dad and Lester would keep the conversation going and I could show how mad I was by not joining in, but even Lester had vowed eternal silence. He reached for the peas and onions, helped himself, then put the dish back down again. Nothing.

  At first I decided I could hold out as long as they could. I could go the rest of my life not talking, if that’s the way Dad wanted it. I could graduate, move away and marry, and I still wouldn’t open my mouth. But by the time Dad put some carrot cake on the table, my favorite, I said, “You had no right to send Lester to school to pick me up.”

  “Oh?” said Dad. “I thought I was the parent here.”

  “Parent, not dictator! Since when can’t I fix my hair the way I want? You never said anything about it before.”

  “You never looked like something out of Night of the Living Dead before,” Lester put in.

  “So I wanted a new look! I just wanted to try it. It was only for a day.” I turned to Dad. “You really overreacted, you know? If you send Lester to drag me home just because I mousse my hair, what are you going to do if I smoke a cigarette? Cut my hand off? If I have sex with a guy, will you burn me at the stake?” I was shaking, I was so angry. “You have no idea how you embarrassed me in front of my friends by having Lester come for me at school.”

  “Then perhaps you have no idea how you embarrassed me by going to school looking as you did,” Dad replied.

  “How? You weren’t even there!”

  “Someone I happen to care about is in that school, and it embarrasses me to think she might have seen you, that’s why.”

  He had actually said the words “care about.” He cared very much about what Miss Summers thought. I wished I could tell him she hadn’t seen me, but he’d find out from her, I knew.

  I put down my fork. “Okay, get it over with. Punish me. Ground me. How long is detention? What’s the new curfew?”

  “No punishment,” said Dad. He took a bite of cake, then a sip of coffee. But he wasn’t smiling. “I just want you to know that I am very disappointed in you.”

  I think that was the first time I could remember that Dad said that to me. It was worse than any curfew. The carrot cake in front of me looked like a chunk of cement that I couldn’t possibly swallow. I stared at it a moment longer, then put down my fork and left the table.

  I didn’t know this could hurt so much. It would have been better if he’d slapped me, but what right did he have to be disappointed just because I looked weird for a single day?

  Then I thought about those knee-length shorts he wears sometimes in the summer. They’re supposed to be madras, only they’re this disgusting red, yellow, and green plaid. Sometimes when he gets home from work, he doesn’t even bother to change his dress socks and shoes. Just takes off his trousers and puts on those shorts, and he looks awful. So maybe I did understand how Dad felt about me going to school with green spikes on my head.

  I stayed in my room most of the evening. Both Pamela and Elizabeth called to find out what was happening, and I brought the phone into my room.

  “What happened, Alice?” Pamela asked. “That was so dramatic, Lester’s coming to carry you off.”

  Dramatic?

  “Nothing’s happening,” I said. “Dad’s just disappointed in me.”

  “But it was only an experiment! You want me to come over and apologize to Lester for talking you into it? I’d love to apologize to Lester. I’ll do anything he wants.”

  Pamela’s had a crush on Lester ever since I can remember.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll have to get out of this myself.”

  Elizabeth had a different reaction. After I told her that Dad wouldn’t punish me, that he was just disappointed, and how awful that made me feel, she said
, “See, Alice? That’s why it helps to be Catholic. You go to a priest to say your confession and do your penance, and then you feel all free and forgiven.”

  I went downstairs where Dad was sewing a button on his shirt cuff.

  “I’m thinking about becoming a Catholic,” I said.

  “Oh? What started that?”

  I sat down across from him. “Since you said you’re disappointed in me. Elizabeth says all I’d have to do for forgiveness is confess to a priest and do penance. With you, there’s no end. It’s purgatory forever.”

  I wasn’t sure, but I think Dad was trying not to smile. “Well, I don’t think you have to convert or anything.”

  “What, then? Shave my head? Crawl to school and back on my hands and knees?”

  “How about just telling me the next time you want to do something drastic. I don’t mean every little thing, but we are talking weird here, and I think you know it.”

  “Then how about promising me never to send the gestapo after me?”

  “You promise not to be weird, the gestapo won’t be necessary.”

  “As though he never disappointed you! What about the time we went to the ocean and Lester had Marilyn in while we were gone?”

  “I was disappointed in him then, of course, but tonight we’re talking about you.”

  I sat watching Dad sew on his button and realized that maybe when you love someone, it isn’t always the same. You could be disappointed in him one day and go right back to loving him the next. Maybe you could even be disappointed in him and go on loving him, both at the same time.

  “You know what’s weird?” I said. “Love’s weird.”

  “One of the weirdest things there is,” said Dad. “No explaining it at all.”

  8

  STUDIES IN FORGIVENESS

  PAMELA BEGAN SPENDING MORE AND more time at our house, and before the Camera Club met again, I took a lot of photos of her. I told her it was our assignment, that I had to get used to my camera.

  At first she wanted to make sure her hair was combed and her makeup perfect, but after a while she didn’t seem to care. She more or less ignored me. I caught her sitting on my bed with her legs drawn up, chin on her knees. I took the way she looked in the morning after a shower, her hair wet and clinging to her head above the collar of her robe, no makeup. I caught her reading a magazine. Stretching. And because I was looking at Pamela with different eyes, I saw a lot of things I hadn’t seen before.

  When I picked up my prints, though, I realized how amateurish they were. Some of them were all washed out—my exposure was wrong. Or Pamela was facing away from the light and her face was in shadow. At least half the pictures looked too posed, too false, or the composition was all wrong—a vase seemed to be growing out of the top of her head, stuff like that.

  But out of the thirty-six prints, two of them held my attention—the one of Pamela with her chin on her knees, and one of her looking out the window. The first had the saddest expression I had ever seen on her face. Her eyes looked wet, and her mouth tugged down at the corners. In the other photo she appeared angry.

  Somehow I felt that although I didn’t want to make a career of photography, I would be happiest in a job where I studied people. In learning more about Pamela’s feelings, I was learning more about myself.

  “Soul!” Mrs. Pinotti said at Camera Club, holding up the print of Pamela looking out the window, and the others agreed.

  “Everyone’s so polite,” I said to Sam. He’s dark-haired and sort of chunky. “Nobody asks what was going on with Pamela when I took that shot.”

  “That’s because Mrs. Pinotti says she believes the same as primitive people—that when you take someone’s photo, you take a piece of their soul. So we don’t ask any more than the photographer wants to tell us.”

  I liked this club, I decided. I liked Mrs. Pinotti; I liked Sam. And I liked what I was learning about the kind of work I might like to do someday.

  We all compared prints with each other, and one thing we discovered was how many pictures you have to take to get even one that’s outstanding. As I was making my way toward the door at the end of the meeting, Sam called, “Hey, Alice, thanks for posing for me last time so I could try out my flash. Want the print?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I couldn’t believe what I saw—two girls side by side, but one of them, with strawberry-blond hair, had two huge greenish eye sockets. It looked as though a child had taken a bright green crayon and drawn circles around both my eyes. That couldn’t be me! I couldn’t look that awful! I stuffed the photo in my pocket, then slipped into the restroom as soon as I was out in the hall.

  For a long time I stared at myself in the mirror. And when I got home, I threw out all the green eye shadow and liner. At school the next day, no one seemed to miss them.

  “Hey, you look really nice today,” Patrick told me.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Justin Collier began hanging around Elizabeth at school. Like I said, he wasn’t as good-looking as Mr. Everett, but he was cool enough. He was tall, and that got him a lot of attention from the girls. He had his eye on Elizabeth, though. Pamela had gone overboard to attract his attention, and it was Elizabeth he fell for.

  He was in our biology class, too, and always seemed to be looking in Elizabeth’s direction. He smiled at her every chance he got. When he came to class, he’d detour by the window just so he could stop at Elizabeth’s desk and talk, and when class was over, he’d wait outside the door and walk with her to wherever she was going.

  “Gosh, Elizabeth, aren’t you thrilled?” Pamela asked her. “I know a dozen girls who’d love to trade places with you, me included.”

  Elizabeth would just turn pink and say how he was too tall for her or too forward or too silly or something, and the more casually she treated him, the more he hung around. She was pleased, though. We could tell.

  Elizabeth’s the Young Advocate for her church’s missionary fund, whatever that is; I went over to her house one day after school and helped address envelopes to all the young people in her church, asking them to pledge something each month to the missionary fund. But just when we’d think she only cared about serious stuff, she’d do something different with her hair, or go to the mall with us to meet Justin—by accident, of course. Then she’d walk around with him, looking gorgeous. There are times she’s not as nutty as I think. Times I start to believe that with all her hang-ups, she’s going to be at the starting gate long before Pamela and I show up.

  At home, I concentrated on getting back on good terms with my dad. I had the table set each night when he came home, whether it was my night to cook or not; I made sure I kept my stuff picked up and not strewn all over the living room, and when I got back from school on Thursday and realized that every pair of jeans I owned was dirty, I put them all in the washing machine and added the clothes in the hamper, just to save Dad and Lester some work.

  Mistake. Lester had a new red sweatshirt in the wash, and when I opened the lid of the machine, everything that was white before was now pink, including Dad’s undershirts, shorts, some pillowcases, and a white linen shirt of Lester’s.

  I stared down at the clothes. How could this happen? How could I continue to do one stupid thing after another? I went straight to the phone and called Aunt Sally in Chicago.

  “Oh, my goodness!” she said when I explained the problem. “I can’t believe I let you get to eighth grade without teaching you how to sort the wash.”

  No matter what happens, see, Aunt Sally figures it’s her fault. I could lose my life skydiving, and Aunt Sally would say it was her fault for not giving me lessons.

  “Listen, dear,” she told me, “here’s a little poem that helps. My grandmother taught it to me, and if you recite it every wash day, you’ll know exactly what to do:

  If it’s white, and red it’s not,

  Make the water doubly hot.

  If the clothes are bright and bold,

  Keep the water rather cold
.

  Never mix your white and blue

  If you’d keep your colors true.

  If your whites are stained, then reach

  For a jug of chlorine bleach.”

  The silence over the line was awesome.

  “But what do I do now?” I whimpered finally. “I’ve already ruined a whole batch.”

  Aunt Sally explained how I should fill the washer again with cold water, a little detergent, and a cup of Clorox, put all the white stuff back in, and soak them for an hour.

  “Whatever you do, Alice, don’t put them in the dryer,” she said. “Keep changing the water and soaking them in bleach until all the pink comes out. Once you put a stain in the dryer, it’s set for life.”

  I didn’t think I could stand it. There were unpardonable sins all over the place! Everywhere I looked there were mistakes that could not be undone. And this, of course, happened to be the night that Lester wanted to wear his white linen shirt. But after I soaked all the pinks in chlorine bleach, the only one that stayed pink was Lester’s shirt.

  “Has anyone seen my white linen shirt?” he asked. “Marilyn and I are going to a concert, and we wanted to stop by a club afterward.”

  I took a deep breath. “Lester,” I said, “there was an accident.”

  “An accident,” he repeated, staring at me. “Someone broke their arm and you used my shirt for a sling?”

  “Well, worse than that. Unless, of course, you want a pink shirt. Now if you want a pink shirt, then it looks great!”

  “Someone was bleeding to death and you used my shirt for a tourniquet?” he croaked.