Alice on Board

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  “And ‘man overboard,’ what’s that all about?”

  I told them about the incident with Pamela’s mom.

  “Wow.” Les leaned back in his chair. “She’s done things like this before?”

  “Not in front of an audience.”

  “Hardly got the reaction she expected,” Paul guessed.

  “No. Pamela thinks she thought her dad would be frantically looking for her, joining the rescue—”

  “And hugging her to him when he discovered she’d been hiding somewhere, watching the whole thing?” Les asked incredulously.

  “That he’d be so glad she was alive that his true feelings would come out and he’d drop Meredith and remarry her—I don’t know,” I said.

  “Where is she now?” Paul asked. “Pamela doesn’t live with her, does she?”

  “No, fortunately. Mrs. Jones has an apartment in Glenmont, and Pamela will be going to school in New York this fall.” I ate the last fry on the platter. “Would it be okay with you guys if I had the girls over here one night this week? It’d be great to have one last get-together before we all scatter.”

  “Sure,” said Les, and for the first time, he didn’t make some remark like, Just let me know so I can be out for the evening, as he usually did when I mentioned Pamela. But he added, “They could even help with the boat, if they wanted.”

  “They might,” I told him.

  Les made some coffee, and we sat around talking about what needed to be done to the sailboat. I couldn’t help studying Paul. I’d always been attracted to him in a weird sort of way. Slim, bespectacled, introverted, and shy, he was a geology major; and for a long time that’s the way I thought of him, as an intellectual type whose most intimate relationships were with rocks—billion-year-old rocks. And then I found out he was a ballroom dance instructor and a bluegrass musician in his spare time. I mean, go figure.

  You can play with a band, though, and you’re still the only one playing your particular instrument. You can be a dance instructor and still hold your partner out away from your body. I wondered if he was using his hobbies as a front, to make him appear far more social than he was.

  But suddenly, with the purchase of the boat, he was like a little kid. How fast it would probably sail, how he’d signed up for lessons this fall …

  “What are you going to name her?” I asked.

  He had an embarrassed smile on his face as he lowered his coffee cup. “Fancy Pants,” he said.

  Les and I broke into laughter.

  “Fancy Pants?” I cried.

  “You’re serious?” said Les.

  “That’s her name,” said Paul.

  “Uh … somebody you know?” I asked.

  “My grandmother.”

  “Your grandmother?”

  “Get’s better by the minute,” said Les.

  I wondered what Mitch would say about this. But Paul explained: “Whenever she got really dressed up to go somewhere, my grandfather called her ‘Fancy Pants.’ But it was Grandma who loved the water, the sea. When I bought this boat, I kept thinking how much she would have loved sailing in it, so why not name it after her? Somehow ‘Fancy Pants’ sounds better than ‘Ursula Birgit.’”

  Couldn’t argue with that.

  “And you can tell each of your respective girlfriends you named it after her,” I said.

  “Now, that’s an idea,” said Paul.

  Les and Paul cleaned up the kitchen while I got the TV all to myself. As he passed the living room, Les asked, “Any calls for me today, Alice?”

  “No. Were you expecting one?”

  “Probably not. But I sent out a new batch of resumes last week, and I listed our landline as well as my cell. I’m applying for some really nice spots, so … Well, if someone calls, be professional.”

  “Why me? I’m not applying for a job.”

  “You know what I mean. It might be a woman. Don’t give her the third degree.”

  “You think I’d do that?”

  “I’m just saying. If you know I’m waiting for an important call, you’ll be ready.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Good. I’m especially interested in a job at the Basswood Conference Center in West Virginia.”

  “Are you expecting any calls, Paul?” I asked when he came in to watch a program.

  “No, I think I’ll stay working where I am for a while,” he said. “Now that I’ve got a boat, I’d like to be fairly close to the bay.”

  “Can’t leave old Fancy Pants,” said Les.

  I was on Lester’s computer most of the next day. I’d already told my friends that my room was being painted and I was staying at Lester’s for a week until it was ready. Now I was desperately trying to catch up with Facebook and e-mail messages from potential roommates, and I found that many had given up on me. I hadn’t responded fast enough or told them enough, or they had opted for the “experience” of letting the university pick a roommate for them.

  A girl named Rainey said she hoped I wouldn’t be offended, but she was really looking for someone more into the arts. Briana said she was Irish and wanted to know my “heritage.” I didn’t even answer. Kayla said her mom wanted her to room with a Christian.

  For God’s sake, I thought, we’re not getting married! If I couldn’t have Gwen for a roommate, I just wanted someone compatible. I finally agreed to room with a girl from Ohio named Amber because we looked at each other’s pictures on Facebook, and she said she loved my freckles and I said I loved her tattoos.

  On Wednesday morning I was about to call Pamela with the news when she called me.

  “How you doing?” I said, not daring to ask if she’d visited her mom yet. She and her mom hadn’t communicated since that awful man-overboard night. And when Pamela didn’t answer right away, I asked, “Have you heard from your mom?”

  “She just called,” Pamela said. “She’s been in the hospital. Wants me to come take her home.”

  20

  BEING PROFESSIONAL

  “What can I possibly do?” I asked.

  Pamela had pulled up in Meredith’s Honda, and I slid in beside her.

  “Just help me get her back to her apartment. Moral support, if nothing else. I don’t especially want to be in a car alone with her, and I’m not sure what to say.”

  “That makes two of us. Things got pretty weird the night she reported herself missing.”

  I was surprised at Pamela’s response. “She didn’t report herself missing! I wish people would quit using that term.”

  I glanced over at her, wondering, then faced forward again. I didn’t know what to say to Pamela!

  She exhaled, and her hands went slack for a moment on the steering wheel. “All we really know is that she thinks she saw someone fall overboard and got emotional about it, then holed up somewhere for a while. She may have been confused, it may have been deliberate, it may not have been her at all who reported that someone fell—or whatever … People shouldn’t jump to conclusions!”

  What was happening here? I wondered.

  “Okay,” I said. “Point taken. What’s the latest? Why has she been in the hospital?”

  The sharpness went out of Pamela’s voice. “She just called and said she’d been in an accident with her car—nothing serious, I guess—and was kept in the hospital overnight for observation. They wouldn’t release her today unless she had someone to drive her home—said she couldn’t take a taxi.”

  “All right.”

  I settled back in the seat, my eyes fixed on the white crocheted cross that dangled from Meredith’s rearview mirror—a symbol of her faith and her nursing profession, I guessed. There was a tiny tissue holder attached to the dashboard and a collection of odds and ends in a console tray—lipstick, change, parking ticket, comb… .

  “I’m totally freaked out,” Pamela said finally. “Everything’s happened so fast.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, the cruise, Dad and Meredith being there, Mom showing up, the generator
breaking down, getting ready for New York, and now this.”

  “Everything coming at you at once,” I said.

  “How am I supposed to deal with it all?”

  “Just like you’re doing, Pamela. One thing at a time.”

  “Thanks for coming with me,” she said, glancing over.

  At Holy Cross we had to go through a parking gate, and Pamela finally found a place in the visitors’ lot. I went inside with her. Pamela’s mom was sitting in the lobby in a wheelchair, an attendant on the bench next to her.

  Mrs. Jones, or Sherry Conners, or whatever she was calling herself now, gave us an impatient smile. “I’ve been sitting here for thirty-five minutes,” she immediately complained to Pamela. “It’s a simple ride home, and I could have taken a taxi if they’d let me.”

  “Hospital rules,” the attendant said.

  “I just came along for the ride,” I said, hoping to make it easier on Pamela.

  Mrs. Jones ignored me completely. “You should have pulled up here in front, Pamela. Now I have to wait even longer while you get the car,” she said.

  Pamela turned on her heels. “I’ll be right back,” she said flatly, and headed for the entrance.

  I stood awkwardly off to the side, wondering what I was supposed to do. Pamela certainly didn’t need help getting the car she had just parked, but staying here with her mom …

  I had no choice. The attendant looked at me impassively, took out her cell phone, checked caller ID, and slipped it back into the pocket of her smock.

  What should I say to Mrs. Jones? Had I ever felt this awkward in my life? I wondered. Yes, plenty of times. But not in the same way. Not with an adult who, by all rights, should be the one feeling awkward.

  “She had to park at the very end of the lot,” I said finally. “But it shouldn’t be long.”

  Silence. Another attendant appeared, pushing a young woman in a wheelchair. The patient, her brown hair pulled back away from her face and fastened with a rubber band, was holding a baby wrapped in a pink checkered blanket. All we could see of it was a pink knit cap peeking out and one tiny fist. The mother was smiling proudly.

  It made me smile too, and Mrs. Jones’s attendant looked over and cooed.

  “The happiest place in the hospital—the maternity ward,” she said. And to the young mother, “Let’s see that fine baby.”

  The second attendant wheeled her over, and the young mother held her baby up. A little red, scrunched-up face. The mother beamed at her, then at us.

  “What’s her name?” I asked, grateful for this brief interlude.

  “Rebecca Ann, named after my great-aunt,” the young woman said, then looked expectantly toward the door where a car was pulling up. Her husband leaped out, grinning at everyone as he came through the door, and assisted his wife outside.

  “I remember when Pamela was born, and I carried her out like that,” Mrs. Jones said pensively.

  “Did she have any hair?” I asked, glad I thought of something to say.

  “A little—like corn silk,” Mrs. Jones said, and fell silent again.

  The Honda pulled up at last.

  “That yours?” the attendant asked me, and I nodded.

  She wheeled Mrs. Jones outside, and I held the passenger door open. Pamela’s mom got inside. The attendant helped fasten her seat belt, shut the door, and took the wheelchair back inside. I got in the backseat.

  Wordlessly, Pamela drove to the gate, paid the parking fee, and exited the lot, heading once more for the beltway.

  Mrs. Jones reached up and fingered the crocheted cross. “Whose car is this?”

  “Meredith’s,” Pamela said.

  “Bill wouldn’t let you use his car?”

  “He’s at work, Mom.”

  When we reached the ramp for 495, Pamela studied her driver’s side mirror and, when she saw an opening, merged onto the beltway and into the middle lane.

  “I’m sorry to cause you all this trouble,” Mrs. Jones said at last. “I must have nodded off before I drifted into a ditch last night and got this big bump on my head—you can’t see it under my hair. The hospital kept me overnight for observation.”

  Nodded off, my ass. I was sure Pamela and I were thinking the same thing. Neither of us said a word.

  Mrs. Jones continued: “I called my friend Dorothy first, but she’s in Towson today. She’ll go with me tomorrow to get my car, though. It’s impounded on some lot.”

  “Well, I’m glad I could help,” Pamela said.

  More silence.

  “I’m such a bother to everyone,” Mrs. Jones said finally, her voice shaky. “When you live alone, with no one to see or care that you get home okay, it’s scary.”

  “I’m sure it is, Mom,” Pamela said.

  We reached the Georgia Avenue exit and went north toward Glenmont. When we reached her apartment complex, Mrs. Jones got out.

  Pamela said, “Are you going to be all right now, Mom? Do you want us to come in and fix you breakfast or something?”

  “I didn’t get a blessed wink of sleep the whole night,” her mom said. “I’ll just make myself some tea and go to bed.”

  “We could come in if you want,” Pamela repeated.

  Mrs. Jones glanced toward me in the backseat. “Another time.” She closed the door, turned, and started up the walk to the entrance.

  When she was safely inside, I got out and climbed in front beside Pamela, uninvited. Was this part of the reason Pamela wanted me along? I wondered. So she wouldn’t be invited in?

  The car moved forward, Pamela reached over and turned on the radio, and she drove me back to Lester’s without saying much at all.

  * * *

  Some of the sultriness of summer returned, and I could feel my helpfulness around the apartment eke away. Dad said the only thing left to paint in my room was the trim, and the paint smell should dissipate in a few days. If Les could come over on Sunday, he said, and help move my furniture back in, I’d have some time to enjoy my room before I left for college.

  On Thursday, I made the beds, put a load in the washing machine, and made some deviled eggs, but by eleven, the humidity overcame me. Mr. Watts’s old house had air-conditioning units in the windows of most of the rooms, but they weren’t strong enough on the second story to keep us sufficiently cool. I stretched out on the sofa in my shorts and a cutoff T-shirt and fanned myself with an old Sports Illustrated.

  There was the sound of the refrigerator’s hum in the kitchen, the rhythmic churning of the washer going off and on, a couple of crows cawing back and forth somewhere in the distance.

  I was in and out of sleep … that state of stupor where your arms and legs feel deliciously numb and weightless. I seemed to be talking with Mitch, and we were getting ready to go somewhere—to see Patrick, I think! Maybe I was going to call him first, but then he must have called me because the phone was ringing. As the Sports Illustrated slid to the floor, I realized that the phone really was ringing, and I was in Lester’s apartment and I was supposed to be professional and … “Hello,” I said, “Lester McKinley’s …”

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. Then a woman’s voice said, “This is the Basswood Conference Center. Is Mr. McKinley in?”

  Awk! Wake up! Wake up! I told myself, and knew my voice sounded husky. “I’m sorry. Mr. McKinley is out right now,” I told her, sounding as though I had just wakened, because I had. Maybe she thought I was a girlfriend and we were lazily sleeping away the day together.

  “And you are?” the woman asked.

  “Uh … Mr. McKinley’s secretary,” I said. “May I take a message?”

  “Please,” she said. “Would you ask him to call Rita in Mr. Burns’s office?”

  “Just a moment,” I said, and dived for a pencil and the back of an envelope, my mind racing, my mouth dry.

  She gave me the number and said that Mr. Burns had some questions about Lester’s resume. I assured her that Mr. McKinley would get back to her as soon as possible.

>   “Actually, I’m leaving the office now for the afternoon, so tomorrow will be fine,” she said.

  When I hung up, my hand left a sweaty imprint on the phone.

  What had I done? What had I said? Was I even awake enough to hold a coherent conversation? Why did Rita what’s-her-name have to call here, anyway? Why hadn’t she called Les on his cell? What would I tell him? That he’d received perhaps the most important call of his life, affecting his very future, and I’d answered it half asleep and said I was his secretary?

  By the time the guys came home that evening, I had made chicken salad out of the rotisserie chicken that Paul had brought home the night before. I’d walked over to a farmer’s market on Wayne Avenue for fresh tomatoes and sweet corn and had also baked a batch of brownies.

  “Heeey!” said Les, and gave me a really appreciative smile—the kind that indicates honest-to-God gratitude and affection.

  Paul, burnished bronze now by the sun, put it more bluntly: “I swear, Alice, if you were ten years older and could pass my genetics test, I’d propose,” he said.

  With a guy like Paul, you can never tell when he’s joking, because he’s usually so serious.

  “And if you were a few years younger and didn’t walk around with a genetics test in your pocket, I’d accept,” I said, and that got a laugh. “What’s it for, anyway? You’re not a white supremacist, are you?”

  “Oh, God no!” he said. “It just makes sense to be sure we’re not carriers of the same diseases. I’m a big believer in the power of recessive genes.”

  “Oh, boy, I’ll bet pillow talk with you is really exciting,” I said, and he blushed a little. I guess he’s not sure when I’m joking either.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t bring it up right away,” Paul said, taking a seat at the dinner table. “But there are certain hereditary diseases more common to Scandinavians or Middle Eastern women, for example, than to other nationalities. It’s fascinating, but I’d never use it to fall in love.”

  “I should hope not,” I said. And then, because I had everyone in a good mood, I said casually, “You got a call from the Basswood Conference Center, Les.” I handed the envelope to him with my scribbles on it.