I mentioned the capsule to Patricia and Tyler, who were both home for the weekend. Tyler and his longtime girlfriend had announced their engagement, and Patricia’s little boy was having his third birthday. Little Lyle had been born up in New Hampshire with only Zack and a midwife in attendance. (Patricia, at thirty-four, still wanted to do everything herself. “But I remembered what you said about counting to eighty-five by fives, Mom, each time a labor pain began, and that really helped!” she confessed later. “Just knowing the pain would subside by the time I got to a hundred and ten got me through it.”)
“Go, you guys!” said Tyler, when he heard about the time capsule. Now a thirty-one-year-old social worker, he put the emphasis on social where his parents were concerned. “It should be fun!”
“Of course we’ll go,” Patrick said. “Wouldn’t miss it!”
I called Pamela, who was now Mrs. William Harris, having been married on a cruise ship to a husky, kind man with shaggy gray eyebrows who treated her like a queen—when she deserved it—and whom Pamela adored.
“Pamela, do you remember burying a time capsule back in seventh grade?” I asked.
“What?” she said.
“The time capsule we buried in Mr. Hensley’s class. We all put something in it and wrote letters to our sixty-year-old selves. Don’t you remember?”
“Vaguely.”
“And the guys had just named you Wyoming, while I got North Carolina.”
“What?” she said again.
“The seventh-grade boys gave each seventh-grade girl the name of a state, based on the size and shape of her breasts. And you were so proud of getting Wyoming that you said you were going to put your measurements in the time capsule. Did you?”
“Alice, how do you remember all this stuff? I scarcely even remember seventh grade!” she said.
I guess I do have a good memory for the past. Sometimes I wish I didn’t. I think I remember every embarrassing, agonizing, humiliating thing that ever happened to me. “Hensley was the history teacher nobody liked much—until he retired, that is, and then we gave him a party,” I told her.
“I guess I do remember the party,” Pamela said.
“Why don’t you come down for the opening, just to see who shows up. It might be fun,” I said. “I guess the idea is that those of us who are still local will contact the ones who left. That’s why I called you.”
“I’ll see,” she said.
* * *
The thirteen or so men and women who got out of their cars and crossed the playground came tentatively, as though we were kids again and it was our first day at a new school. I imagine each of us thought we hadn’t changed much since seventh grade and were shocked at how old some people looked and surprised that others hadn’t changed much at all.
I was wearing a white tee, khaki skirt, and thong sandals, my blondish-gray hair swept back away from my face, little gold hoop earrings in my ears, and the gold heart on a chain that Patrick had given me around my neck. Patrick and I hardly knew a few of the people, but we recognized the others—Pamela and Elizabeth, of course. Pamela was as svelte as ever, even though her shoulders were somewhat stooped. She kept her hair a lovely shade of blond, while Elizabeth’s hair was totally white—beautiful and wavy—and she was heavier now, thicker about the waist. But her skin was as gorgeous as ever, and Liz still looked about the same to me somehow because we got together so often. Her children were grown and married, and she seemed at peace with the world. Gwen came because she wanted to see all her friends.
“Brian?” I said, looking at a pudgy man who was bald on top. None of us had seen Brian for decades.
“Alice! Oh, wow! You’ve still got some red in your hair!” Brian Brewster said, giving me a bear hug. He was living in Nevada now, he told us, and a relative had seen the piece in the paper about the time capsule and sent the clipping to him.
“Jill!” I cried, recognizing the still-attractive woman—trim and tanned—despite her unusual number of wrinkles. “How are you?”
“Doing good,” she said. “And you look great, Alice. Isn’t this a hoot? My mom read about it in the Gazette.”
It was Karen I hardly recognized because she had gained so much weight. There we were on this warm May Saturday—Jill and Karen, Pamela and Elizabeth, Brian and Patrick and me, and five other members of our class. We stood at the center of the small crowd that had gathered to watch—friends, relatives, young women with strollers, and a few businessmen who seemed to have stopped on their way to lunch.
Two photographers were there with reporters from both the Gazette and the Post, and someone from the board of education was waiting for us with a ceremonial shovel.
Patrick couldn’t believe we got press coverage. “News must be slow today,” he joked to a reporter.
“We’re always interested in a good human interest story,” she said. “People like to read about time capsules.”
Our old school had been converted to a county recreation and day care center. A cluster of boys stood to one side with their basketball to watch, while small children peered at us from a fenced-in playground beyond, then continued chasing each other about, disinterested.
“What do you remember of seventh grade?” one of the reporters went around asking. What do you remember of Mr. Hensley, the school, the city, the world—as though we were the last members of a lost civilization.
“Ask Alice,” people kept saying. “She remembers everything.”
When we’d all given our names, we took turns digging in the spot Hensley had marked on a map of the school property, measuring exactly from the corner of the lot. He’d had the foresight to file the map with the board of education and leave the spot unmarked so vandals wouldn’t dig it up and destroy our project. He’d even left a copy of the map, we found out, in his will. Now, that’s planning ahead!
With each thrust of the shovel, we seemed to remember more and more and couldn’t stop talking. Seventh-Grade Sing Day, which had frightened us so; Denise “Mack Truck” Whitlock, an eighth grader who ended her life by standing in the path of an Amtrak train; the talent show; the “Our Changing Bodies” seminar at the Y (“Omigod! That!” one of the women cried); gourmet cooking; Patrick’s drum solos; gym. . . .
Patrick was using the shovel when it struck the canister, and he hauled it out. It was a large metal milk can, actually, so rusty that we had to borrow a hammer and screwdriver from the building custodian to pry off the lid. But as we gathered around and the cameras clicked, we greeted each of our treasures with cries of, “Oh, look!” and “Who put that in there?” and “Brian, that must have been your idea.”
It was a strange assortment there on the picnic table, where we spread everything out. A copy of the Washington Post, dark and yellowed, with headlines about the old Soviet Union; a Michael Jordan poster; a SAY NO TO DRUGS bumper sticker . . .
We gingerly examined our treasures, passing them around. One was a bracelet made in Hawaii.
“What in the world is that?” asked Pamela. “Whose was it?”
No one seemed to know, but everyone was looking at me for the answer. It did seem familiar somehow. And then I remembered. Denise Whitlock’s bracelet—one of the personal items she had given me before she committed suicide. I had put it in the capsule so that we would remember a girl we hardly knew.
“A bracelet from a friend,” I said, slipping it on my wrist. “Denise Whitlock’s.”
“The girl who . . . the train?” asked someone. I nodded.
“She left it for you?” asked Jill.
“Among the things she gave me that last day, before I knew. Before anyone knew what she was thinking about.”
The keepsakes continued to come—a wrapper off a McDonald’s Big Mac, a photo of our seventh-grade class, a girl’s halter top, a report card . . . and finally a clutch of lined notebook pages.
At Hensley’s insistence, each of us had written a letter to our sixty-year-old self, and as they were distributed among us, we moved over to t
he swings and merry-go-round, where we could sit and read them. The rubber-strap seats of the swings weren’t nearly as comfortable as those old wooden seats I remembered—the kind a guy could stand on, with a girl in the middle, pumping it high into the air.
It was a strange feeling holding a piece of notebook paper I had held as a twelve-year-old girl writing a letter to the woman she would become:
Dear Alice:
I can’t believe that when you read this, you’ll be sixty years old. Right now that seems ancient to me—older than Dad, even. I wonder if you feel ancient inside or if you still feel like you always did.
I smiled and continued reading.
Dad will be gone, of course, by the time you get this letter. Maybe Lester too, and it’s hard for me to even write about that. But maybe you’ll be married and have children and grandchildren, and when you do, I guess that makes up for the people you lose. Does it? A little, even?
Among the soft chuckles here and there, I detected more than one sniffle. As several women dug in their bags for a tissue, the boys who had grown restless and were passing their basketball back and forth stood still again and watched respectfully from a distance.
What I want to know is how your life has been so far, and what you decided to be. Did you ever get breasts as big as tennis balls, and was it still important to you when you did? Do you still have any red in your hair, or is it all gray? Are you fat? Do you wear orthopedic shoes? Can you still wear shorts in the summertime?
I had to laugh out loud. Patrick looked up from his own letter, and we just exchanged smiles. I didn’t want to share my letter right then, so I kept reading:
Is your favorite food still fried onion rings? Is your favorite color still green? Does the name “North Carolina” ring any bells? Do you ever hear from Elizabeth or Pamela? Whatever happened to Patrick?
Maybe what I really want to know is, did you ever reach an age where you could forget all the stupid, ridiculous things you’ve done and said, or do you still wake up in the middle of the night and remember each one exactly, embarrassing you all over again?
Maybe you’re a famous chef by now. Or maybe you stay home and feed your cats. But whatever you are, I hope you never forget me, the girl I am now.
Love,
Alice
I wasn’t the only one who was crying. I guess I thought we’d laugh and hoot and pass our letters around, but except for a passage read here and there, most of us folded them up and tucked them away in a purse or pocket to read again and again.
Suddenly I felt the swing I was sitting on lurch, and my arms tightened around the chains as I found myself being pulled backward, higher and higher. I gave a little shriek as Patrick let go and I went sailing forward, my legs straight out in front of me to keep them from dragging the ground. When the swing came back again, Patrick gave another push.
“Hey! Nice legs!” Brian called as my skirt billowed out over my thighs, and I laughed.
Then the swing to my left was moving with Liz in it, and Jill was on the other side of me as Brian gave it a push.
“Way to go!” laughed a reporter, as one by one, each swing in the row got in motion. The squeak and creak of the moving swings had a rhythm all their own, and no one cared that the photographer snapped a picture. The spring breeze fanned our faces, the sunshine warmed our legs, the guys doing the pushing were obviously in competition with each other, and it seemed perfectly natural that one of the men watching from the sidelines should bound forward and climb deftly to the top of the jungle gym while we cheered him on.
Standing on the next-to-the-top rung, the familiar-looking man suddenly beat his chest and let loose with the most magnificent Tarzan yell.
“Donald Sheavers!” Liz and Pamela and I all shouted together, and as we screamed his name, the former boyfriend of all three of us did a couple of flips, then dropped to the ground and came over to say hello.
“Just read a piece in the paper about the time capsule and thought I’d stop by to see who showed up,” he said, grinning.
He was still in the area, he told us, and worked for a Ford dealership in Wheaton. And because he knew all the new establishments in Silver Spring, he suggested a good place where our little crowd could have lunch.
Seated around three tables pushed together there in the restaurant, it was like old times. We talked nonstop, just as we used to in class. We overlooked the gray hair and the trifocals, the pants with elastic at the waists, because those weren’t important anymore. We were. We had survived illnesses, divorces, disappointments, and worse. All of us had lost people we loved, and some had lost jobs. But we were here, we had good things to share as well, and best of all, we were still making memories, not just reliving them.
Just for fun, we each took out photos of our children and mixed them up there on the table to see if the others could guess whose they were. I added a photo of Patricia’s little boy just to confuse things, and we all laughed when Pamela, who was raising border collies with her husband on a farm in Connecticut, slipped in a picture of their dogs.
A few of us were retired, but all of us had plans.
“I’m going to do some part-time consulting for IBM,” Patrick told the others. “They need someone to go to Japan a couple times a year, and Alice will be going with me.”
“I’m enrolled in a language course, and Patrick and I are allowed to speak only Japanese at the dinner table,” I explained, and everyone laughed.
Elizabeth and Moe had started a foundation to help finance foreign adoptions for childless couples; Pamela and Bill were going to Scotland to look at a special breed of collie; Jill, divorced from Justin, was a talent scout in L.A.; Brian owned a sports franchise; and Karen worked in a bank. Gwen was invited to join in, of course, and told us that she and Charlie have been hosting some foreign medical students in their home.
Each of us talked about the milestone of reaching our sixtieth birthday and how we planned to celebrate it. When they got to me, I started to say that we hadn’t really done anything special, but Patrick rested his arm on the back of my chair and smiled.
“Alice doesn’t know it yet,” he said, “but I’m taking her back to the Caribbean for snorkeling, something she’s been wanting to do again.”
“Patrick! Really?” I cried, and hugged him as the others cheered.
We stayed another hour, reluctant to leave, exchanging cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses, vowing to keep in touch. But as I rode home contentedly beside Patrick, I knew I hadn’t shared quite everything with my friends. I hadn’t even told Patrick yet about the project that excited me most: I wanted to write some books about what it had been like growing up with three best friends and marrying my childhood sweetheart. About what it was like to grow up without a mother and about all the things Dad and Lester had to teach me. I wanted my children and grandchildren to know that no matter when you are born or where you live, happiness and disappointments have the same flavors the world over. I think that Mom, and the girl I was back in seventh grade, would have been pleased.
And so, when we reached home and Patrick had gone into his study to check his e-mail, I took my laptop out on our screened porch and sat down on the glider. I looked out over the backyard, at the forsythia Dad had helped us plant at the edge of the garden, and thought of all the things I would put in my first book—all the embarrassing, weird, wacky, wonderful things that happen as a girl goes from child to woman.
I smiled as I wrote down the title of the first book: Starting with Alice.
******
AFTERWORD
To my readers:
I started writing my first Alice book thirty years ago, and The Agony of Alice was published in 1985. I didn’t know at the time that the book would become a series—I’d only planned to write about a motherless girl looking for a role model, and who finds her not in the most beautiful sixth-grade teacher, but the homeliest. Then the fan letters started coming; reviewers said things like, “Alice’s many fans await her further advent
ures,” and I said, “What?”
My wonderful editor at the time, Jean Karl, and I talked it over, and I agreed to do a series, provided I would not have to write more than one book a year and that Alice could grow a little older in each one; I didn’t want to find myself stuck in a sitcom year after year.
As the series progressed, it seemed most natural that each book cover about four months of Alice’s life—fall semester, spring semester, and summer. For a time, Jon Lanman edited the books, then they were passed along to Caitlyn Dlouhy, who was raising two daughters in real life, and continued as editor to the end of the series.
When we discovered that very young girls were reading their older sisters’ collections, I wrote three prequels, beginning with Starting with Alice. And, somewhere along the way, I recklessly promised my readers twenty-eight books. I would end the series with Alice and the members of her seventh-grade world studies class meeting again to open the time capsule they’d once buried. Since my mother, her sisters, and my grandmother all lived to a grand old age, I figured I would too. What’s to worry?
Still, at some point, even though I had six or seven books yet to go, I wrote a quick draft of the final book and stuck it in a fireproof box in my office. I didn’t want to leave readers hanging, never knowing how things turn out for this little community of people I had created, should anything happen to me. Of course, when all the books had been written and it was time to submit the final manuscript, it took many more drafts and ended up twice the length it had been originally.
Several of my readers suggested the title of the book, Always Alice, and we started out with that—then decided we needed a title with a bit more oomph. And because I’d been promising to tell readers everything they wanted to know in the final book, Now I’ll Tell You Everything seemed perfect. Zillions of you asked—no, demanded—that Alice and Patrick get married, and on that, I was way ahead of you. I even knew about their engagement before they did.
Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) Page 39