Incredibly Alice

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  Wednesday evening, when Dad and Sylvia were out to dinner with friends, I took over Dad’s big armchair in the family room, wrapped in a robe and a blanket, and carefully reread all of Anne’s lines.

  It was the story of a teenage girl’s relationship with her father. In some ways I was like Anne, and in some ways I wasn’t at all. She was the oldest child in her large family; I was the youngest in my small one. She was from a wealthy background, her father famous in his field. Mine wasn’t rich at all, and except for musicians in the Washington area and our friends at church and in the neighborhood, no one except relatives knew of Dad outside of Silver Spring.

  We were alike, though, in that Anne had to be the trendsetter, the scout, the pathfinder for her siblings. She had to pave the way for wearing lacy underthings and silk stockings and for having a boyfriend. I didn’t have any sisters, but I had to fight my own battles. And while both Anne and I loved our fathers and knew they loved us, they could be so stubbornly old-fashioned at times.

  I remembered how, after Dad saw Patrick kissing me once on the front porch in the dark, he always had the porch light on after that when I was out with Patrick during junior high school. I remember how I had to argue and argue with him to go to a coed sleepover. Strange how life turns out sometimes. We ended up having the coed sleepover here at our house. And that was the night of the fake kiss between Patrick and Penny.

  The more I thought about it, Anne’s disobedience in buying underwear her dad disapproved of wasn’t much compared to my riding on the back of a motorcycle with a guy I didn’t know, and even that was mild. So yes, I knew how desperately Anne felt about the rules in her household, the way her father interfered in what she wanted to do and where she wanted to go, even though her story took place in the 1920s.

  I was breathing through my mouth again, and I felt the strange thumping in my chest. I realized that I wanted to play the part of Anne in this play in my senior year almost more than anything I’d ever wanted.

  Being on the props committee, standing behind the curtain and waiting for a scene to end so I could replace breakfast dishes with a book and reading glasses, didn’t make my heart race. Coming onstage with the rest of the crew for a curtain call, all of us dressed in black, wasn’t something people would remember me for.

  I didn’t want to be the girl behind the curtain helping Pamela change costumes, or the girl in the gym cheering Liz on as she played Stupefyin’ Jones, or the friend in the auditorium clapping for Gwen getting her scholarship award—proud as I was of all of them. For once in my life, I wanted to be center stage, the spotlight on me. I wanted to be the one the audience was applauding.

  But my chances! Charlene Verona could probably get the part of any character she tried out for. I’d seen a couple of cheerleaders waiting in line for a script. Face it, Alice! I told myself. The odds are against you. Understand that! I did. I think. It was just that I was burning bridges behind me. I’d said no to Mrs. Rosen about trying out for class poet. I was about to say no to Mrs. Cary for set design.

  I closed my eyes and took another deep breath. Just do it! I told myself. Get up there and take a chance. If my only big accomplishment in high school was features editor of the paper, that wasn’t so bad. I was doing this for me. I’d made a decision and, right or wrong, it was mine.

  Beside the tryout schedule posted on the door of the dramatic arts classroom, there was a sign-up sheet. Auditions would start the following Monday.

  I wished I could just concentrate on Anne’s lines over the weekend, but Phil had assigned me to cover the dance Friday night. Seniors seemed divided between those who wanted to squeeze in every possible activity they could to remember always and those who were losing interest in high school stuff. Some who had already been accepted for admission had even sent away for college sweatshirts! Gwen was going somewhere with Austin but said they might drop in later. So Pamela and Liz and I went together in the matching poodle skirts Mrs. Price had sewn for us. Poodle skirts and saddle shoes, our hair in the strange pompadour style of the fifties that Sylvia helped us with.

  The junior class had done the decorating this time, and Sam was taking pictures, of course. The school had rented a jukebox with a Plexiglas window so you could watch vinyl records drop onto a turntable for the next song.

  The cheerleaders were there in their own poodle skirts, demonstrating the jitterbug and getting people to try it. There was even an Elvis Presley impersonator sitting at the wheel of a ’57 Chevy, waving to people, then getting out and strolling around the gym, signing autographs as though he were really Elvis.

  Amy Sheldon arrived with two other girls, and though her “Hi, Alice!” could be heard halfway around the gym, I waved and laughed along with her when Elvis gave her a hug as he made another tour of the gym.

  “Do you know what I feel like?” Liz asked as we circled the dance floor for the third time, looking for people we knew. “I feel like somebody’s mother, here to chaperone. I used to be wild for things like this. And it looks like fun, but … What’s the matter with us, Alice? Have we suddenly grown too old for this?”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Pamela.

  “Maybe it’s just overload, everything piling up on us at once. Are you trying out for the play?” I asked Liz.

  She shrugged. “I might. But it’s no big deal if I don’t get a part.”

  I guess that was a major difference between us. For me, it was. I wanted to be tested. I didn’t want to go on dreading things like this forever.

  There were little tables off to the side of the gym where people could sit down, and a couple of girls on roller skates with rubber wheels came out of a shed, taking orders for root beer floats.

  Penny was at a side table with one of the cheerleaders and waved us over to join them, so we ordered floats too.

  “Isn’t this fun?” the cheerleader said. “The decorations committee did a great job. But it was one of the sophomore dads who got the Chevy for us.”

  Penny, as always, looked great. She probably wears size two jeans, and she paired them with a short-sleeved sweater with a Peter Pan collar, fifties-style. I wondered if I would ever get to the place where I could look at Penny without feeling even an ounce of jealousy. Sometimes I felt I was almost there, but not quite.

  The fact that Patrick had once—for a while, anyway—liked her best … liked her, held her, kissed her … would always keep us a little distance apart, like two polarized magnets, I suppose. If it weren’t for that, we might be close friends.

  “Do you ever wish you lived back in the fifties, when they had drive-in root beer places and drive-in movies?” Liz asked.

  “My grandmother says life was a lot simpler,” Penny told us. “Girls were either ‘good girls’ or ‘bad girls,’ and basically they had four career choices—secretary, housewife, nurse, or teacher—though if you were really adventurous or talented, you could become an airline stewardess or an actress.”

  “Yeah, but you got to wear these cute poodle skirts and dance to Frank Sinatra and Bobby Darin,” I joked.

  “Or be one of the girls who marched with the ROTC and carried a flag,” said Liz.

  “Hey, you can still be the lucky girl who gets to be the Ivy Bearer on Ivy Day,” said the cheerleader, rolling her eyes. “Or even the Ivy Day Poet! Whoopee! Mom says they had that ceremony when she went to our school. Somebody left an annuity or something, and we have to do it.”

  I took a deep breath. Close call.

  About an hour into the evening, the jukebox stopped playing and the junior class president made a short announcement. He said that “The Shack” would be selling hot dogs for the next twenty minutes and that the dance committee had worked up a special combo to play during that time.

  “Combo?” said Liz.

  “A band,” the cheerleader explained. “Oh, here they come.”

  We watched some guys cross the floor with their instruments—saxophone, clarinet, the same instruments people played in the fifties—but there,
walking along with them, was Daniel Bul Dau, our Sudanese student who’s been in the United States for only eight months or so.

  “Hey, Daniel!” Liz and I yelled.

  The tall, thin guy with the high cheekbones looked our way, smiling, and when his eyes found us, he grinned.

  He took his place with the others on a glittering makeshift bandstand, and for the first two numbers he didn’t do much, mostly sat with the school drummer, his own drum between his knees, and accompanied a little. But when they started a third number—I didn’t know what kind of dance it was, a Latin beat, I guess—he began drumming out his own rhythm as an accompaniment.

  As the music went on, his fingers began to fly on the drumhead, a complicated beat that none of us could identify. We couldn’t even copy it. The other musicians just grinned and shook their heads. Daniel grinned too and went on playing, his rhythm intricately bound up with the music. At one point the other guys stopped entirely and let him have the spotlight. Students gathered around to watch. It was a rhythm all his own, and Daniel played with his eyes closed now, his head tilted back in concentration, his fingers just a blur over the drum.

  It was as though his hands were playing two different rhythms at the same time. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and his head began to nod in time with the beat. Daniel was off in Sudan somewhere far away, and we could hear, through his drumming, his missing of home.

  9

  READING FOR MR. ELLIS

  I did want to hear how things were going with Lester, though, so on Sunday morning, after I’d done my homework, read over Anne’s lines again, and plucked my eyebrows, I finally called him. Too late, I discovered I’d punched in his apartment phone instead of his cell.

  “Hello,” said a low voice, and it wasn’t Lester’s or Paul’s.

  “This is Alice. Is Les in?” I asked.

  “Hold on,” said Andy.

  I could tell Les was grumpy the moment he said hello.

  “How are things?” I said.

  “Don’t ask,” he told me. “I’ll call you back on my cell,” and he hung up.

  A few minutes later he called.

  “Where are you? Barricaded in your room with your dresser against the door?” I asked.

  “One of the worst mistakes I ever made, not checking Andy out before she got here,” he said. “She’s not only a recluse, but when she does come out, she’s got to be the pushiest female I ever met. She never says, ‘Would you mind turning the TV down?’ She waits till you go get a beer, then turns it down for you. Throws out any food over the sell-by date. Suddenly the corned beef you were saving for those last two pieces of rye bread is gone. And she’ll make a grilled cheese for herself with the bread. You don’t take your clothes out of the washing machine, you’ll find them in a bucket. She wouldn’t think of tossing them in the dryer for you. Whatever Andy wants, it seems, Andy gets, including a rent-free apartment with the jackass who let her in.”

  “That would be me,” I said. “I opened the door.”

  “You know what I mean. The advertisement I wrote without mentioning gender and letting her go meet Mr. Watts. I refer to her as Nurse Ratched because she thinks she knows what’s best for us, but Paul calls her Mother Superior because of the mystical way she eats our corned beef or throws our clothes in a bucket without our ever seeing her do it.”

  “Well, maybe you’ll be moving yourself one of these days,” I said to console him. “Any interviews yet?”

  “Only one, and you wonder why they bothered. I’ve got a major in philosophy, a minor in psychology, and I’m looking for a job working with people, I tell them. So I get there, and what do they want me to do? Digitalize all their records.”

  “Well, it’s a job,” I say.

  “I’ll stick with the university till I get something more my line,” he said.

  “Meanwhile,” I told him, “what you need is some fun in your life.”

  “Yeah, all the babes are in hiding,” he said. “Seems like all the girls I used to know have moved away.”

  “Well, I’m doing something sort of fun,” I told him. “I’m going to audition for a part in the spring play.”

  “No kidding? It’s not a musical, is it?”

  “No, Les. I don’t torture anybody by trying to sing. But there are dozens of other people trying out.”

  “So you give it your best shot, that’s all,” he said.

  Tryouts for the female roles were scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, male roles Wednesday and Thursday, and the cast would be posted on the door of the dramatic arts classroom Friday morning at eight o’clock. Charlene Verona, the perpetual diva, let it be known that she’d be there “with bells on,” as she put it. Petite Penny said she was going to try out for the part of Lillian, the youngest daughter being cast.

  As it grew closer and closer to the last bell on Monday, and other names came floating by of people who were trying out, I could feel an uproar in my insides and panicked when I had an attack of diarrhea in the restroom. Never mind expression and diction and whether or not I could memorize the lines. If I couldn’t even control my bowels, what business did I have getting onstage at all?

  At last I got myself in shape and went out in the hall, where Pamela and Liz were waiting.

  “You okay?” Pamela asked.

  “No, but let’s get it over with,” I said.

  She grabbed one arm, Liz grabbed the other, and we set out for the dramatic arts room.

  “What’s the worst that can happen?” Liz asked me. “We don’t get parts, that’s all. Life goes on. The prom’s coming up. College …”

  Pamela was in her wiseacre mood, though. “No, the worst is that we could all get parts and throw up together onstage.”

  “Pamela!” Liz scolded.

  We passed the water fountain and turned the corner. Just as I suspected, a dozen or more girls were moving through the doorway of the classroom, scripts in hand. From the noise inside, we knew there were even more already there. I heard an audible gasp from Pamela on one side of me, from Liz on the other.

  “Oh, Pamela, I don’t have a chance,” I said, feeling weak in the knees.

  She squeezed my arm. “You have as much of a chance as anyone else. Just be yourself.”

  Why do people always say that? As though anyone’s self is everything good, just naturally funny and clever? What if my self was mousey, silly, plain, ordinary, and boring?

  Only the people actually trying out were permitted inside, so some of the girls had to leave. There were nineteen left. Nineteen girls wanting the same female roles, and there were two days of tryouts. Thirty-eight girls, maybe, wanting parts? The best parts?

  We went up to the blackboard, where sheets of paper were taped in a row—one sheet for each of the seven roles: Mother; Miss Brill, a teacher; Mrs. Fitzgerald, the housekeeper; and four of the daughters—Anne, Ernestine, Martha, and Lillian. We were to sign our names under the character we most wanted to play.

  The longest lists were for Ernestine and Anne.

  I picked up one of the pencils in the chalk tray and signed my name under Anne, my eyes roaming the page for the other names on the list. And then my stomach churned in earnest when I saw Jill’s name near the top.

  I turned, and there she was in the second row, beautiful and demure-looking in a white cashmere sweater.

  How could this be? Maybe she wasn’t pregnant after all. Maybe she’d had a miscarriage. Maybe the whole rumor was just a big joke, and now that I’d gotten my nerve up to do one of the most difficult things I’d ever done, Jill would do it for me, ten times better.

  I wondered if this was how it felt to enter a beauty contest—all the girls smiling at everyone, secretly sizing them up. I wished the auditions could take place in private, just a solitary room where Mr. Ellis could ask me to read a page and then tell me, Sorry, Alice. I don’t think so, and I could leave without a gaggle of smirking girls watching me go.

  We were all sitting in chairs scattered about the room, and there
was a lot of nervous chatter. Liz leaned over to whisper, “Is she serious? Jill, I mean?”

  “Maybe she’ll play the mother,” said Pamela. “If she’s already had a dozen children, what’s one more?”

  Yeah, right, I thought—as though Jill looked like she’d had a dozen children. And if she wasn’t due till September, she’d hardly even be showing by the time of the performances in April.

  The door opened and Mr. Ellis came in with Mrs. Cary. Oh, great! I thought. Mrs. Cary was going to be in on the casting, and I still hadn’t told her I was trying out for a part and wouldn’t do set design if I got it. What were my chances now?

  Mr. Ellis was carrying a clipboard and the script, and he smiled at all of us.

  “Good to see so many of you here,” he said, and walked along pulling the sheets of paper off the board, attaching them to his clipboard. “Here’s how it works, girls. I’ll have two of you reading at a time, maybe even three or four, switching parts around. Don’t try to figure out what I’m up to.” He grinned. “You’ll definitely have a chance to try out for the part you want, but Mrs. Cary and I will be listening and watching for a number of things. The best advice I can give you is to play each part we assign you with as much honesty and feeling as you can.”

  Charlene read first for Ernestine, the role Pamela wanted, and, as usual, Charlene was good. Very good. I could feel my stomach tightening up for Pamela. Charlene had been taking acting lessons since she was nine, she’d told us once. Pamela gave me a helpless look, but I mouthed Go, Pam, go! when it was her turn, and she took the high stool that Charlene had vacated.

  “Take it from the top, Pamela,” Mr. Ellis said. “I’ll read for Frank Jr. Go ahead.”

  Charlene had cupped one hand to her ear on the first line, but Pamela read it straight, with a touch of nostalgia: “Can you hear the music, Frank? I think it’s coming from down the street.”

  “I thought I heard something else,” Mr. Ellis read.

  Pamela smiled faintly. “Songs like that make you remember …”