Intensely Alice

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  But Justin followed and so did Danny. All five guys ran out into the alley and disappeared around a building.

  “Hey!” we heard Austin shout.

  “Get out your cell phones,” Gwen told the rest of us. “We may need to call 911.” We held our breath, listening for shots, wondering whether to wait.

  Another yell. A string of expletives. Indistinct voices. More swearing. More conversation. Gradually the loud voices grew softer, Austin’s and Keeno’s voices a little louder. Three minutes went by. Five. We heard one of the men mention “Red Sails in the Sunset.”

  “M’God, they’re talking music!” Pamela said. “Did you hear that?”

  “One of Keeno’s songs!” said Liz.

  “Music soothes the savage beast,” said Mavis wryly. We waited for Shelley to say something about God, but she didn’t.

  When the guys came back about ten minutes later, they were smiling. “The case of the missing tarp,” said Keeno.

  “Had one buried at the bottom of his cart, didn’t see it—or want to see it. But everybody’s happy now,” said Austin, sitting down again and reaching for his coffee cup, draining the last of it.

  Someone started talking about a fight he’d seen once at a Nationals game, but Shelley sat transfixed on the wall.

  “You can’t tell me that God didn’t have a hand in what just happened in the alley,” she said.

  “Oh, Shel, knock it off,” said Austin.

  Pamela was getting impatient. “You can’t prove scientifically that there’s a God, Shelley. All you keep saying is you know He’s there. Enough already!”

  Shelley only smiled. “You can’t prove scientifically that you love someone, either. You can’t measure it. But you know it’s there.”

  “Then why can’t you just let people find their own way, their own religion, Shel?” asked Gwen. “Why can’t Buddhists be Buddhists and atheists be atheists and Catholics be Catholics without you trying to put your own particular stamp on how they’re supposed to worship?”

  “Because it wouldn’t save you!” Shelley said earnestly.

  I just had to do a feature story for our school paper in the fall, I decided. Maybe a series of questionnaires called “Sound Off” or something. If University of Chicago students could talk about Christian-based agriculture at a Lamb of God farm, why couldn’t I write a feature on what our students believe about heaven and hell, for example? Stem cell research? The death penalty?

  Keeno finally got into the conversation. “What you’re saying, then, Shelley, is that it’s not enough just to be a good person, you have to believe in God.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And it’s not enough to believe in God, you have to be a Christian.”

  “Right.”

  “And you can’t just be a Catholic Christian, you have to be Protestant,” said Mavis.

  “Well … yes, I guess so.”

  “And not just a Protestant Christian, but a Protestant born-again Christian,” said Gwen.

  Shelley suddenly began to cry, and then I felt terrible. “That’s the way I believe! Jesus told us to preach the gospel, and you’re not being tolerant of me!”

  “We’re really not trying to change you,” Gwen said. “But if you’re going to argue religion, Shelley, then you have to be prepared to listen to what other people think.”

  “And now that we’ve discussed it, and we’ve more or less told you how we feel, can you let it rest?” asked Austin. “Hopefully?”

  Shelley fished in her bag for a tissue and wiped her cheeks. “If you reject what I’ve told you, then I’ve done all I can. All I can say is that I’ll pray for you.”

  “Don’t feel bad, girl,” Gwen said, and put one arm around her. “Tonight I’m going to pray for you.”

  “Whew!” Pamela said when we got in the car. She was staying with her mom for the week, and her mother had let her use the car. “Justin probably wonders what the heck he walked into.”

  “But this is how it all begins,” I said. “Wars. Persecution. Burning people at the stake.”

  “Everyone wants you to believe that his religion has the answers,” said Gwen. “The One True Church; Believers versus infidels; Christ and the Antichrist; God’s Chosen People versus everyone else; The Righteous and the Left-Behinds … It goes on and on.”

  “So … what are you saying? That all religions are a bunch of nonsense?” Liz asked.

  “Maybe they’re all right in some things and wrong in others,” I offered.

  “You’re a religious person, Gwen. Do you believe in God?” Liz persisted.

  “Yes, because I want to believe there’s justice somewhere in the universe. I want to believe I can make a difference. I don’t believe in God because I’m afraid that if I don’t, I’ll go to hell.”

  “You’re waaaaay beyond me,” said Pamela, turning the car west toward Gwen’s neighborhood. “To tell the truth, I don’t worry too much about all this. If there’s a God, I figure at some time in my life he’ll give me a sign and I’ll know for sure we’ve connected.”

  “A sign?” I asked.

  “Yeah. A direct answer to prayer or something. A voice in the storm, a light in the sky, something supernatural.”

  “I don’t know, Pamela. I think God’s more subtle than that,” said Liz.

  “What about your miscarriage?” I asked Pamela.

  “I didn’t pray for a miscarriage. I prayed that I wouldn’t be pregnant in the first place.”

  “Pamela, by then you already were!” Liz said.

  “So? He could have zapped my uterus or something. How would I know what he could have done?”

  “But … in the end … you didn’t stay pregnant.”

  “Yeah, so I figure it’s sort of fifty-fifty whether or not my prayer was answered. The one thing in my life I’ve really prayed hard for was that Mom would give up her lousy boyfriend and come back to the family. Well, she gave up her boyfriend, but Dad wouldn’t take her back, and now he’s engaged to Meredith. Was that an answer to my prayers or not? I don’t think it was part of God’s plan for Mom to run off with her boyfriend in the first place, or God’s got a weird sense of humor.”

  “Sometimes I think the whole idea of God is weird,” I said.

  Liz looked at me worriedly. “You’re beginning to sound like Mavis.”

  “Really?” I shook my head. “Mavis seems so sure of being atheist. I’m not sure about anything, except that I wish I were.”

  We drove with the windows down now that the evening had cooled off. The scent of freshly mowed grass reached our nostrils, the scent of mulch. Pamela had one of her favorite CDs in the player—a song about love and taking chances.

  “How’s your mom doing, Pam?” I asked. “Still working at Nordstrom?”

  “Yeah. She seems to like it. Likes dressing up, anyway. Says she likes to go to work ‘looking like somebody.’”

  “Is she going out with anyone?” asked Liz.

  “I think she’s been out to dinner a couple of times with some manager from another store. I don’t know the details. I don’t ask. But at least she has friends.”

  “And … what about her daughter?” Gwen asked slyly.

  “Me?”

  “Who else?”

  “I’m taking a break from guys this summer, not that anyone’s been calling. I’ve got to start thinking about what I’m going to do after graduation. College? Some kind of theater arts school? Costume design? Questions, questions …”

  “Well, tonight was a nice change of pace for the soup kitchen,” Gwen said as we approached her driveway. “And I think Mark and Keeno really enjoyed playing for those people.”

  “Ha. Keeno wasn’t playing for the soup kitchen, he was playing for Liz,” said Pamela. “His eyes follow her around the room. I could tell that from the get-go.”

  “All the more incentive for him to come back again, then,” said Gwen. “G’night, guys.”

  When I got home later, I went slowly up the steps to our fro
nt porch and sat on the glider awhile before making my way inside.

  Dad was still up reading.

  “Getting home sort of late, aren’t you?” he said, looking up. “You’ve had a pretty long day.”

  “The usual,” I said. “Discussing God and the universe. That took some time.”

  14

  Marking Time

  Keeno and Mark came back the last three nights of our volunteer work at the soup kitchen and played for the diners. But on Sunday we said our good-byes to Mrs. Gladys, who asked us to remember her and People Care anytime we wanted to help out.

  Now I didn’t feel at all energetic. I just wanted to glide through the last week of July with my brain set on “pause.” When Sylvia asked me to help her make peach preserves one evening, it was all I could do to say yes.

  “I picked up this wonderful little basket of ripe peaches at a roadside stand, and we can’t possibly eat them all before they spoil,” she said. “There’s not much work making freezer jam, especially if there are two of us working.”

  “You freeze it instead of cook it?” I asked.

  “You cook the syrup that goes over the peaches, and then you freeze it. The preserves have that fresh-off-the-tree taste that I love,” she explained.

  We sat across from each other at the kitchen table, peeling the peaches, the sweet juice running down our fingers and into a bowl. Every so often we couldn’t resist cutting off a slice and popping it into our mouths. Sylvia, her hair in a short ponytail, already had peach stains on her old striped shirt.

  “If these were the olden days,” she said, “we’d be standing in a steaming kitchen with a pressure cooker bubbling on the stove. We’d have to sterilize the jars, melt the paraffin, pour it over the jam once the jars were filled, put them in the pressure cooker… . What an ordeal!”

  “Why did you have to do it?” I asked.

  “Actually, I didn’t. Mostly I just watched my grandmother do it. She said that her preserves were better than any you’d find at the store, and she was right. But she didn’t have the delight of tasting frozen peach preserves. She never had that big a freezer. She prided herself on the long rows of canned fruits and vegetables in her cellar. Shelf after shelf, and she arranged them all by color. Reds here, greens there … Yellows had a special place, and of course purple plums were right there on top, all of them waiting for winter and the hypothetical blizzard that was supposed to trap us inside for two weeks.”

  “Did your mom make stuff like that?” I asked, picking up the next peach in the basket.

  “No, she didn’t much care for kitchen work. Believe it or not, my mother prided herself on her laundry.”

  “Laundry?”

  Sylvia nodded and paused to eat another slice. “She’d set an entire day aside just to iron. My sister and I would come home from school to find a rack of Dad’s shirts, all starched and pressed; our own shirts and blouses hooked over door handles, waiting for us to take them upstairs. Ours was a freshly pressed house, let me tell you—tablecloths, even sheets. I guess I take pride in my knitting. I like to open my sweater drawer and check out all those I made myself. Strange, isn’t it, how much satisfaction we get out of making something with our own hands?”

  I tried to think what I made with my own hands. Not much, unless I considered the articles I wrote for The Edge at school. And, yes, I did take pride—leafing through my album, page after page encased in plastic protectors—proud of all those bylines: By Alice McKinley, Staff Writer. And this coming year all my bylines would read: By Alice McKinley, Features Editor.

  “I wish I could remember more things about my mother,” I told Sylvia. “Mostly it’s what other people tell me about her. That she was tall, which I’m not. That she liked to sing, which I can’t. I love to make pineapple upside-down cake, like she did, and I have her hair color. But my memories of her get all mixed up with Aunt Sally, since she took care of Les and me for a while after Mom died.”

  “I wish I could help,” Sylvia said. “But I know that Ben loved her very much. Once in a while he even calls me ‘Marie’ by mistake.”

  I glanced up at her. “Don’t you ever get jealous?”

  “Of Marie? Actually, I take it as a compliment—that he must be feeling especially close to me, just as he did with her.”

  The peaches were all peeled now, so we began chopping them up into tiny pieces. I asked my next question without looking at her: “Do you ever feel jealous of anyone else?”

  “Other women?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not really. I know that women seem to like your dad, and I understand that, because I like him too! He treats them warmly, courteously, and he treats me the same way. But once in a great while I’m a little jealous of you.”

  I actually dropped the paring knife and it clattered to the table. “Me?”

  “Yep. I see him trying so hard to understand you sometimes, to figure out what’s bothering you if you seem sad or distant. He wonders if he said or did the right thing, whether he should have done something else. And I have to remind him that you have two parents now, and I can carry some of the load. But he still feels that he’s the one responsible for how you turn out.”

  “Wow! I … had no idea I was such a big deal!” I gasped.

  “You’re a daughter, his only daughter—so it’s natural, completely natural. But you asked if I was ever jealous, so I had to admit that sometimes, yes.” She made a funny face at me. “Never think of me as a rival?”

  I smiled a little. “I suppose maybe I was jealous a little right after you moved in with us. Dad wanted you to love the place—the house—Les and me. It was always ‘Sylvia this and Sylvia that’ with him. As if your opinion was all that mattered.” I couldn’t believe that Sylvia and I were actually having this conversation. “So there!” I said, and made a funny face back.

  “You know, biological mothers and daughters get jealous of each other sometimes too,” Sylvia said. “Mom admitted that to me after I was grown. She said that much as a mother may love her daughter, she’s a little envious when her own body starts to wrinkle and sag a bit while her daughter is looking young and beautiful. She wants her to be young and pretty, of course, but she also wants to stay the same way herself. These relationships can get very complicated.”

  “I guess so,” I said. “If I ever get married and have children, though, will you hate me because that makes you a grandmother?”

  She laughed and I did too.

  “How could I ever hate the girl who introduced me to my husband? I’ll never, ever forget the night you and Ben came to pick me up for the Messiah Sing-Along, and your dad thought he was just picking up a friend of yours.”

  We were actually talking about it! All this time, Sylvia and I had sort of gone on pretending that she hadn’t known how hard I’d tried to set her up with my dad.

  “So … ,” she said. “Are you sorry?”

  I grinned at her across the table. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Only I’d be a little more subtle.”

  Wednesday evening, just as we were starting dinner, the phone rang.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, only because Dad and Sylvia had already sat down at the table. I went into the hall and picked it up.

  “Al!” came Lester’s voice. “How you doing?” And then, before I could answer, he said, “Look. I’ve got to ask a big, big favor. This is huge.”

  “Your car broke down on the Beltway and you want—”

  “No. Listen. Paul and George and I are taking this trip to Utah, remember?”

  “Yes …”

  “We’re leaving Friday, and we’ll be gone ten days, and we had this friend who was going to stay here—keep an eye on the place in case Mr. Watts needed anything.”

  “Yeah … ?”

  “He can’t do it. His dad’s sick and he’s flying to Florida. We can’t go on this trip unless we have someone here at night—that was our rental agreement. Could you and Gwen possibly stay here? I’d feel better if there were
two of you, and Gwen’s the most levelheaded one of your friends.”

  I tried to take it all in. “Gwen and I both work!” I said.

  “I know. Daytime’s no problem. Mr. Watts has an aide from eight until six. But someone has to be here after six.”

  My mind was jumping all over the place. Ten days in a bachelor apartment? Ten days on our own, away from parents? Was this a trick question?

  I tried to control myself. “Yeah, but I think there should be three girls, Les. I can’t guarantee that one of us wouldn’t have to go out for something, and if Mr. Watts fell, it would take two girls to pick him up.”

  “Okay, then, but make it Liz.”

  “All right, Lester, but if Gwen and Liz and I stay there for ten days and exclude Pamela …”

  “I don’t trust Pamela in the apartment, Al. You know she’d be in every drawer, every closet.”

  “She wouldn’t! She’s grown up a lot. We’ll even make her sign an agreement!”

  “Al …”

  “Four girls or we won’t come.”

  “There are only three beds.”

  “Three double beds, Les. Pamela can sleep with one of us.”

  Les gave a long sigh. “All right, providing she sleeps with you. I want you to keep your eye on her while she’s there, Al. No booze, no boys, no smoking for any of you. Okay? Absolute promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “I’ll run it by the Watts family, but I think they’ll say it’s okay. You’re all going to be seniors this year. Tell me I can trust you.”

  “Are we getting paid?”

  “You’re getting the use of our apartment, whatever food’s in the fridge, the phone, the water, the lights. But first you’ve got to find out for me if Gwen’s available. I want to know that she’s on board.”

  “I appreciate your confidence in me.”

  “Please, Al?”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  I was grinning when I put down the phone and thrust one fist in the air. “Yes!” I whispered, not wanting Dad and Sylvia to get wind of it yet. I called Gwen’s number. She talked it over with her dad and said yes. I called Liz. She talked it over with her mom and said yes. I called Pamela. She said yes without talking it over with anyone. I decided to tell Les we’d do it before I brought it up with Dad so it could be a done deal.