“When we hear his voice,” Al said, nudging me toward the man, “then we’ll know for sure.”
“I don’t remember how Mr. Richards sounded,” I said. “I remember everything about him except the sound of his voice.”
“Close your eyes,” Al commanded. “OK. Now can’t you hear him hollering, ‘Glide, glide,’ the way he did when we were trying to skate on his kitchen floor?”
I closed my eyes and tried. I really did.
I opened my eyes. “Come on.” Al grabbed me, forcing me to walk with her to where the little man stood.
“I know who you are,” the little man said to me. “And you must be Alexandra.”
I swallowed hard. Al wouldn’t let go of my arm.
“Everybody calls me Al,” she said in a weak voice.
“How did you know our names?” I got out.
“Oh, I have ways.” His eyes, as blue as Mr. Richards’s, twinkled. “I get around.” That definitely was not Mr. Richards’s voice.
“My name’s William, but everybody calls me Billy,” he said.
“No offense,” Al said, “but are you a retired bartender?”
“No such luck,” Billy said. “Insurance salesman. Long term. Why, I could write a policy so fast your eyes’d smart.”
I had to see his arm. Mr. Richards had Home Sweet Home tattooed on his right arm. I had to see.
“Could I please see your right arm?” I said timidly. Sometimes the direct approach is best. I heard Al gasp.
“Well, now.” He pulled up the sleeve of his sweater, unbuttoned his cuff, and thrust a bare arm at us. No tattoo.
“You want to see the other arm?” Al nodded, and he did the same with the other sleeve. Still no tattoo.
“Thank you,” I mumbled.
“Don’t mention it.”
“We had a very good friend who died,” I explained. “You look just like him. We thought it was him for a minute.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s time for us to go,” Mr. Keogh said, car keys dangling from his hand.
Dr. Simon saw us to the door.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. “I know they enjoyed having you. Perhaps you’ll come again?”
“John,” Mr. Keogh’s father tugged at his jacket, “tell your mother I won’t be home for dinner tonight, please. I have business commitments I must attend to.”
Mr. Keogh put his arm around his father. “Yes, Dad, I’ll tell her,” he said.
The plump little woman I’d read the Personals to said, “He’s a penny pincher,” and she jabbed her finger at a man standing beside her. “He squeezes a nickel so hard it shouts.”
“And you, my dear,” said the man, without rancor, “are a gold digger.”
We went back to the station wagon, and Mr. Keogh drove off. He let me and Al off first.
“I think it went very well,” he told us. “Thanks for a good job well done. I knew I could count on you.”
“You want to come in for lunch?” I asked Al as we went up in the elevator.
She shook her head. “No, thanks. I’ve got piles of stuff to do. I was glad we went, though. Weren’t you? I mean, I actually did something for somebody. Without thinking of myself. We were being selfless.” Al congratulated herself. And me.
“Not entirely,” I said. “We didn’t want to go, but we did. OK. Big step forward. But after we got there, it wasn’t all that bad. It was sort of fun. I watched you being Mother Zandi. You loved it. I got a kick out of reading the Personals to that old lady.
“What if somebody said, ‘Today you have to work in a shelter for the homeless? You’ve got to sleep there, listen to the sounds, eat the food. Use the toilets. Smell the smells.’”
“Talk about being a killjoy,” Al said, scowling at me. “You’re an ace.”
“Maybe. But that would be another ball of wax, wouldn’t it?”
“Who’s going to ask somebody our age to do something like that?” And what would we accomplish by doing it?”
“I don’t know. I’m just saying what if? That’s all.”
Al thought about what I’d said. I could almost hear her thinking.
“I don’t think I know how to be totally selfless,” she said at last, sadly. “It’s hard to put yourself in someone else’s place.”
“Yeah. I know.”
Al fumbled for her key. “Adiós,” she said.
“See you,” I answered. Once inside, I stood in my room and looked at it. It was all mine. I didn’t have to share it with anyone.
I don’t know how to be selfless, either, I realized. I can learn, I told myself. I will try to learn. That’s the best I can do, is try.
chapter 23
Sunday Polly called and asked me over for lunch.
“Bring Al,” Polly said.
“It’s Sunday. Her togetherness day with her mother,” I told Polly. I decided to wait until I got there to tell her about yesterday. I decided, too, to make a good story better. I’d work on it going over on the bus.
Holding a hand mirror, I checked out my profile in the bathroom. Maybe I could use a nose job, too, like Thelma. My nose was nothing to write home about, but it doesn’t offend me. It was the rest of me that cried out for plastic surgery. I read about a woman who had a plastic surgeon take a tuck in her fanny. She couldn’t sit down for three months. She even had to eat standing up. What some people will do to have a beautiful behind is beyond me.
The bell rang. I opened the door a crack and said, “I gave at the office.” Then I got a good look and shrieked. Al had on the black satin turban and the piece of material Polly had given her for her birthday. It was draped around her and left one shoulder bare. Her red shoes peeked out from underneath. She looked about eight feet tall. She had also painted her eyebrows and her mouth and her cheeks, so she looked like something out of Punch and Judy.
“Mother Zandi says can you spare a cup of sugar?” Al said.
“What are you doing here on Sunday?” I opened the door so she could get in. Walking was not easy for her, what with her clunky shoes and the garment she wore.
“Guess what? My mother asked me if I minded if we didn’t do something together today. Can you beat it? Naturally I didn’t tell her that was cool, that this Sunday togetherness drill can be a drag on occasion.”
“Come to Polly’s, then. She asked us for lunch. I told her you couldn’t make it. Now you can.”
“My mother has a date.”
“That’s nice.”
“Don’t you want to know who with?”
Oh, oh. Here we go again.
I decided to tough it out. “Who?” I said.
“Stan. They’re going to some bigwig fracas at the Plaza. She said she hoped I wouldn’t mind.” Al made owl eyes at me. “She has a snazzy new dress.”
“So Stan’s back in the picture.” Good. “He’s nice, right?”
“He’s all right. He’s more her age. You know.”
“Sure. He’s got megabucks, too. That makes him pretty cute.”
“Your grandfather’s much cuter,” Al said.
I didn’t say anything. She was bound and determined to talk about my grandfather.
“If your grandfather and my mother had gotten married,” Al began.
I whomped myself on the forehead and said, “Oh, no! I don’t believe you. You are totally weird.”
“Let me finish.” As if I could stop her.
“They have one date and you’ve got them going down the aisle,” I said. “You’re nuts.”
“If your grandfather and my mother had gotten married,” Al started all over, “you and I would have been related to each other.”
I just shook my head. Al’s face got red. “Well, it’s true. We would have.”
“What would we have been? Stepsisters? Like in Cinderella?” I asked, very sarcastically.
“If they had,” Al plowed on, “then my mother would’ve been your mother’s stepmother. So you see,” she finished complacently.
I swallowed twice. Then I said, “You floor me. You put me totally under the rug.”
“It’s true. Figure it out. If my mother and …”
I put up my hand like a traffic cop. “Enough. Go wash your face, clean up your act, and get your buns back here so we can go to Polly’s. My mother and Teddy went to Connecticut, and my father’s somewhere.”
“Every time Teddy goes to Connecticut, he comes back more suave than the time before,” Al observed. “This time he’ll probably return with an Afro and L. L. Bean hunting boots.”
When we finally got going, it was raining. We hopped on the bus. Al took a window seat. She likes to look out.
“Isn’t that Ms. Bolton?” she said, wiping off the window with the sleeve of her sweater, which was looped around her neck. Very preppy.
I leaned across to see out. “I think so. They look like her red tights. Who’s she with?”
“Some hunk.”
I saw them. Ms. Bolton was looking at him and laughing. Her hair was wet and sort of stringy. Her face was happy.
“She looks radiant,” Al said. “I’ve never seen anyone look truly radiant before.” The bus stopped at a red light. We watched them go into a restaurant.
“Do you think being in love makes people look radiant?” I said.
“You’re asking me? Your basic radiant-in-love teenager? You’ve got the wrong guy.”
Al stared out at the rain. “I like the idea that there are two of me,” she said.
“I only see one,” I replied.
“There’s me, just plain Al. Then there’s Mother Zandi. I can say and do things when I’m Mother Zandi that I can’t say and do as just plain Al. So, in effect, I’m two people.”
“A split personality, you mean.”
“Well, sort of. And you know something else?”
I let her have her head, as they say about horses.
“I finally figured it out.” Al shoved her bangs around. “It doesn’t matter what your name is as long as you’ve got it all together. As long as you’re doing the best you can. It’s up to you.”
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” I said. “My birthday’s next week. “I’ll be thirteen, a real teenager. And guess what?”
“What?”
I smiled at Al. “I’m thinking of changing my name. How about that?”
In answer, Al threw her sweater over my head. She wouldn’t take it off. I kicked her in the shins, and we struggled. Then we got laughing so hard we couldn’t stop.
“Last stop!” the bus driver hollered. Al finally let me out from under. The driver glared at us. “End of the line,” he told us sternly.
“Oh, no, sir,” Al said, with great respect. “It’s only the beginning. Only the beginning.”
“Don’t get fresh with me,” he said.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Al series
One
“Blind date! I would never never go on a blind date!” Thelma cried, fluffing up her back hair so her bangle bracelets jangled noisily.
“Blind dates are tacky. My mother says they were tacky in her day and they still are. No really popular girl”—and Thelma smiled complacently down at her chest … “would be caught dead on a blind date.”
It was Sunday. We were having lunch at Polly’s. Sunday is usually togetherness day for Al and her mother, but today Al was off the hook due to the fact her mother was whooping it up at some fancy do at the Plaza.
Some days we discuss world affairs, some days politics. Today we were into blind dates.
“I don’t believe I know any really popular girls, Thel,” Al said, smiling. “And never say never, kid. It’s bad luck.”
“What’s that you’re cooking, Polly?” I asked.
“Hollandaise,” Polly said. “For the eggs benedict. You have to stir it constantly or it’ll lump up on you.”
“Mr. Richards!” Al and I said in unison, on account of that’s what he told us when he was teaching us to make white sauce.
“Eggs Benny,” Thelma said. “Yum. What are you two, clones or something?” She was all bent out of shape, I think, probably because of what Al said about not knowing any really popular girls. Thelma’s had six dates. Well, one doesn’t count because it was with her cousin. She didn’t tell us that; Polly did. Al doubts the other five bozos even exist but so far, nobody’s been able to prove anything.
“Next thing you know,” Thelma said, “you two will be wearing matching dresses or something nauseating like that.” Thelma ruffled her back hair again and her bracelets got noisy. Thelma thinks her arms are sexy, Al says. But then, she also thinks her teeth and her elbows and other parts too numerous to mention are also sexy.
“Oh, we already have matching dresses,” Al said. “We’re very cute together. When we wear them, people think we’re twins.”
“What are they, dotted swiss with matching bloomers and puffed sleeves?” Thelma drawled.
“Actually,” Al drawled back, “they’re leather.”
“Yeah,” I spoke up. “Mine’s red and hers is black.”
“I don’t believe it,” Thelma snapped. “You two in leather dresses. I could die laughing.”
“Try,” Al said.
“Soup’s on!” Polly shouted. “Mange, mange!” and we all filed to the stove carrying our plates.
“Eggs Benny are my very favorite, Polly,” Thelma said. “Yum.”
“Yum yum,” Al said, stony faced.
We sat down and dug in.
“What would we do without you, Pol?” I said.
“Starve, probably,” Polly said.
“I knew a boy named Benny in California,” Al said. “He was an egghead too. He could already read in first grade. Benny was very smart, but on the first day of school he wet his pants and everybody laughed and he went home and didn’t show up for a week. Our teacher told us we should be very careful about laughing at someone because as sure as you’re born, she said, we’d all do something embarrassing someday and then people would laugh at us and we’d know how Benny felt. She said we should be kind because there’s too little kindness in this world. And she said everyone needs kindness. I never forgot that.”
Polly nodded. “Little kids are very cruel sometimes. But so are big kids. I think you have to learn to be kind. I don’t think you’re born kind, I mean. I think you have to be taught kindness.”
“Lots of adults are unkind, too,” Al said. “It’s not just kids. I don’t think you learn it, I think it’s in your genes. You’re either born kind or you’re not.”
“Well, my mother says good manners and kindness sort of go hand in hand,” I said. “That’s why she’s such a bug on good manners.”
“This is turning into a very philosophical conversation,” Thelma said in her bored way.
It was kind of philosophical, I thought, pleasantly surprised.
We all had seconds of the eggs Benny to clear our heads.
“Speaking of blind dates,” Polly said, “Evelyn might get married to a guy she met on a blind date. She fell madly in love with him because he’s got two little kids and if she marries him, that means she’ll be a stepmother and she says she’s always wanted to be a stepmother.”
Evelyn is Polly’s off-the-wall older sister.
“Who’s she marrying?” Al said.
“He’s this really nice guy, kind of old, about thirty-five or so,” Polly said. “His wife left him to find herself.”
“Suppose she finds herself and comes back? What then?” Al said. “Couldn’t that get kind of hairy?”
“Who knows?” Polly said. “My father says Evelyn changes her mind and her plans so often it doesn’t pay to worry.”
“Why does she want to be a stepmother?” Thelma asked.
“Well, she loves little kids and she figures if she’s a stepmother, that means she doesn’t have to have kids of her own, which means she won’t get stretch marks,” Polly told us.
“Stretch marks?” I said.
“They’re what y
ou get when you’re pregnant,” Polly explained. “The baby grows bigger and bigger, so your stomach stretches and it leaves marks on your stomach that don’t go away. And Evelyn figures if she had stretch marks she could never wear a bikini again.”
This was followed by a small silence while we all contemplated Evelyn in a one-piece suit complete with skirt.
“I’ll have to think about that for a while, Polly,” Al said. “Toss it around and see how it comes out. But listen to my blind-date story, which I think is very romantic. I read it last week. There’s this dude called the earl of Wistwick, see. He meets some lovely on a blind date and marries her two weeks later, thereby renouncing his claim to the throne. He was sixteenth in line to the throne, you see, and she swept him off his feet and he’s no longer sixteenth in line; he’s nowhere. How about that for a blind date, huh?”
“Who’s the earl of Wistwick, anyhow?” Thelma asked, voicing the thoughts of us all. “And why’d he have to renounce his claims to the throne just because he got married?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Al said with a big grin. “He had to renounce his claim to the throne because royalty doesn’t recognize divorce and the earl’s bride is the divorced mother of two, that’s why. She just swept him off his little feet. The earl is thirty-nine, you see, and his bride is twenty-five, so it was high time the earl got hitched.”
There wasn’t a whole lot to be said to that, so we finished our eggs Benny and waited for dessert.
Polly put a blue bowl with apples and pears in it in the center of the table.
“Fruit,” Polly said.
“Fruit,” said Al, who had hoped for lemon meringue pie. “Parfait. Fruit is very slimming, I hear.”
“Yeah,” Thelma said. “Take a few apples, Al.”
“Who were the fifteen guys ahead of the earl?” I asked, seeing the storm clouds gather on Al’s face. “That’s a lot of guys lined up for the throne, if you ask me. I’d sure hate to be hanging by my thumbs until those other guys were eliminated. What’s the big deal about renouncing his claim to the throne, anyway?”
“Listen, the earl was really into royalty,” Al said. “He dreamed of the day when he’d hoist his scepter and don his ermine mantle and climb up there, master of all he surveyed. He also liked the perks, the trips on the royal yacht, stuff like that. Those were great eggs Benny, Polly.”
Just Plain Al: The Al Series, Book Five Page 9