Alice on Her Way

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  The floor creaked above us.

  “Al?” Dad called down the stairs.

  “Yes?” I answered.

  “You work tomorrow, remember.”

  “All right.”

  Sam grinned at me and stood up. “That’s my cue, I guess,” he said. He drew me toward him, and we kissed again. “We won’t be in such a hurry to come inside next time.”

  10

  Pamela’s Story

  Sylvia tapped on my bedroom door before I was awake the next morning, waited a few seconds, then opened it a crack. “Alice?”

  I was down in a deep dark well, so full of sleep and oblivious to place and time that my head felt like one of those toy slot machines: You pull a lever and wait while pictures whir and spin in the windows. Eventually, they began to line themselves up, and I was conscious of Sylvia standing beside my bed.

  “Alice,” she was saying, “I really hate to wake you, but Elizabeth called.”

  I struggled to open my eyes. The lids were just too heavy. I could feel the movement of the mattress as Sylvia sat down beside me, but I was drifting off again, lulled by the softness of my pillow that somehow became Sam’s shoulder in my dream.

  Now Sylvia was gently massaging my back. “Liz has invited you to brunch at her house around eleven.”

  Sam’s shoulder disappeared and became my pillow again. “What?” I murmured.

  “Ross is coming over before he goes back to Philly, and Mrs. Price thought it would be fun to invite the three other girls who were at camp with him last summer.”

  My lips moved. “What time is it?”

  “Ten twenty. I’ve let you sleep as long as I dared. Ben said you don’t need to come into work until one today.”

  Now my eyes were open. It was Saturday, the busiest day at the store. “Really?” I said. “It’s okay with him?” I rolled over so I could see Sylvia’s face. Her hair was wrapped in a towel, and I could smell the conditioner she uses. “I could sleep for days,” I said, drawing my knees up into a fetal position.

  She smiled. “Have a good time last night?”

  “Yeah, the dance was great.” My eyes closed, opened again, closed…. “Is anyone in the bathroom?”

  “No. It’s all yours.”

  I got up then and staggered into the shower, then shocked myself awake by turning on first the hot water, then the cold… hot… cold….

  Pamela and I got to Elizabeth’s at the same time. Gwen was already there, and Ross was sitting at the table holding a glass of orange juice when we came in.

  “Only eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning and we’re awake!” Pamela cried.

  “Awice!” Liz’s little brother called when he saw me. I swooped him up in my arms and flubbered the side of his neck before his mom whisked him away so we could have the kitchen to ourselves.

  There were scrambled eggs and bacon and coffee cake on the counter. We helped ourselves, then sat around the table. Liz was on Ross’s lap at one end, arms around his neck.

  “Did Les drive you over?” I asked Ross.

  “No. Liz’s dad came and got me. Thanks again for asking Les if I could sleep over there,” Ross said. “They gave me a blanket and pillow and, man, I was out!”

  “Have you heard about next year?” Pamela said, lifting a pecan off a piece of coffee cake and popping it into her mouth. “The school’s replacing the Jack of Hearts dance in February with a Sadie Hawkins Day dance in March—girls’ choice.”

  I remembered we had talked about that at a newspaper staff meeting.

  “Why?” asked Elizabeth.

  “There’ll be an article in The Edge next week,” I told her. “A lot of kids feel there are too many formal dances. It’s too expensive. So next year there’ll be two informal dances—Homecoming and Sadie Hawkins—and two formals, the Snow Ball and the prom.”

  “I can live with that,” said Gwen. She was wearing a white fleece sweat suit, but there were still glittery silver beads woven among the dark circular cornrows on her head. She looked like a goddess.

  “Did you have a good time last night?” I asked her.

  Gwen gave me a rueful smile. “Mostly I danced with Yolanda. One of our dates kept going outside to smoke, and the other one kept hanging around the punch table, looking for something to eat.” We laughed.

  “You weren’t the only girls dancing together, I noticed,” said Ross.

  “Yeah. Lori and Leslie looked great. And as far as I can tell, nobody hassled them,” I said.

  “Yeah, but did you see what happened to that girl—what’s her name?” said Gwen. “That really thin girl who dresses all in black and wears the bright red lipstick?”

  “Faith?” I said. “Why? What happened?”

  “I’m not sure, but she was down in the locker room with a torn sleeve and a big welt on her arm. She’d obviously been crying. She told the teacher there that she’d fallen on the ice.”

  “What ice?” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I wondered,” said Gwen.

  “It’s that boyfriend of hers,” I said angrily. “He treats her like dirt, and she keeps going back for more.”

  “There are other guys who would ask her out if she gave them half a chance, I’ll bet,” said Liz. She was caressing Ross’s ear with one finger.

  “And quit dressing like a witch,” said Pamela.

  “The thing is,” I mused, “even if she dressed differently and three other guys asked her out, she still might choose Ron. Weird, isn’t it? Like she needs to be knocked around.”

  “Love,” said Pamela disgustedly.

  “Love!” Liz responded, bending down and kissing Ross on the lips. We all gave a loud dramatic sigh and broke into laughter.

  “Speaking of which,” Ross said, turning to me, “I met your brother’s girlfriend.”

  I lowered my fork, and the scrambled eggs fell back onto my plate. “Girlfriend?” I said.

  “Yeah. At his place. They were having coffee when I got up this morning.”

  Pamela and Liz and Gwen all turned their eyes on me, but I was still staring at Ross.

  Lester has had plenty of girlfriends, but as far as we could tell, he hadn’t had a current girlfriend for some time now.

  “She… was there this morning?” I asked.

  Ross looked around uneasily. “Yes…”

  “So… she was there all night?” I asked.

  “Uh-oh,” said Ross. “Erase! Erase!”

  “What was she wearing?” Elizabeth demanded, and we knew that if she was in her robe, Lester was toast.

  “I refuse to answer on grounds that I may incriminate somebody,” said Ross.

  I could believe Les would have a girlfriend staying overnight, though he’d never said that he had, but I could hardly believe he’d do it with Ross there.

  “What’s she like?” I asked.

  Ross shrugged. “I don’t know. Nice…”

  Nice? Is that all he could tell us?

  “Well, what does she look like?” asked Gwen.

  Ross shrugged helplessly. “Attractive. I don’t know…”

  What is it about guys, I wondered, that they never notice the details? “Well, what did you notice?” I asked him.

  Ross thought about that a minute and tried to hide a smile. “I think she was drinking her coffee black. No, maybe she put sugar in it, I’m not sure.” I think even Elizabeth could have strangled him at that point.

  “Well!” Pamela said to me. “Looks like you need to have a little chat with your brother, Alice. I mean, we want information here! This is a biggie!”

  “Hey, leave me out of this,” said Ross. “It was nice of him to let me sleep on their couch. Besides, he is an adult, you know.”

  I knew that, but somehow it’s hard for me to accept that Lester is grown up. Maybe you never look at your own brother as grown up, I don’t know, even after his hair turns gray, which Lester’s has not.

  We hung around Elizabeth’s talking about all the fun we’d had at Camp Overlook,
about when we were getting our driver’s licenses, and what we planned to do the coming summer. I didn’t feel so bad not knowing what I was going to do because nobody else seemed to know either.

  Sylvia drove me to the music store a little before one. I was tempted to tell her that Lester had a new girlfriend who had spent the night with him. But then I decided that if Lester was ever going to confide in me and treat me like an adult, I had to be someone he could trust. So unless he brought it up himself with Dad and Sylvia, my lips were sealed. Just wait till I got him alone, though!

  At the Melody Inn, Marilyn wanted to hear all about the dance. I told her about my dress and about Sam and the dinner his mom made for us. About Lori and Leslie and how Gwen had seen Faith crying in the girls’ locker room.

  “It’s possible she could have fallen,” Marilyn said. “You don’t want to jump to conclusions.”

  “Then she falls an awful lot,” I said.

  “Well, if her boyfriend is abusing her, the one thing she can count on is that it will get worse,” said Marilyn. “I’ve had a couple of girlfriends in that situation. Control freaks keep upping the ante. The more she gives in to that, the tighter the screws. She should break it off while she can.”

  “Yeah, try to convince Faith of that,” I said.

  That evening, this being Valentine’s Day weekend, I decided to hole up in my room with my CD player so Dad and Sylvia could have some privacy. I called Gwen and Liz and Pamela in turn, just to talk. We had to go over every detail of the dance, things we couldn’t quite say in front of Ross.

  “Don’t ever date guys from your own church,” Gwen said. “They’re more like brothers than boyfriends.”

  Oh, I don’t know about that, I thought. I didn’t think I’d ever feel like a sister to the guys in the “Our Whole Lives” class.

  Elizabeth was still dreamy over Ross. “You know,” she said, “some high school romances do last. My aunt married her high school sweetheart.”

  This was the second time that marriage had come up in a conversation recently—first Sam, now Liz. “You aren’t thinking about marriage already, are you?” I asked her.

  “No, but we have to think about it sometime,” she said.

  Pamela had the most to tell because Brian had his driver’s license, and he had done the driving.

  “Where did you go after?” I asked.

  “You mean before or after we took Penny home and dropped off Mark?”

  I thought about that a moment. “Well… both.”

  “We went to a Mexican restaurant in Bethesda, and then we took Penny home. Then Mark,” she said.

  “And then?”

  “We parked.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And did… whatever.” Her eyes turned impish.

  “I didn’t know you liked Brian that much,” I said.

  “Oh, he’s okay. You don’t have to be wild about someone to do whatever.” She laughed. “And he had a good time, anyway.”

  “Pamela!”

  More laughter. “Okay. So I gave him a hand job.”

  “I don’t think I want to hear this.”

  “Of course you do. You asked. It’s a good idea to practice on somebody you don’t care a lot about so that you’ll know how to do it on somebody you do care for.”

  “What? I don’t believe this!” I said. But I did. “How did it…? I mean, did he… ask you to do it or what?” I was still trying to picture it in my head.

  “He just unzipped his pants and put my hand there. It didn’t take long, but it’s kind of sticky, if you want the truth.”

  “You know, you make it sound like you put your hand on a doorknob, for all the emotion you put into it,” I told her.

  “Don’t lecture,” Pamela said warningly.

  “I’m not. I’m just surprised, I guess, that it… well, didn’t mean any more to you than that.”

  “But it’s sort of exciting to see how easily you can turn a guy on,” Pamela said. “You get a guy begging for it, he’ll do almost anything. It’s kind of amazing!”

  “So what did he do for you?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Not that he didn’t try. But… jeez, it’s Brian! I’ve known him forever. I’d probably end up laughing. If I’d wanted sex, though, I’ll bet he’d have done it. I know he would.”

  “A hand job is sex, Pamela.”

  “You know what I mean. So how did things go with Sam? Tell me about that dinner. What was it like?”

  “Well… his mom was dressed like a waitress. She took our orders and everything. She really went all out. There were even long-stemmed roses on our plates.”

  “Is she for real?”

  “I guess so. And the song she was playing on the CD was ‘My Heart Will Go On.’”

  “Alice, that is definitely creepy,” Pamela said.

  “Oh, it was for Valentine’s Day, after all. Liz and Ross seemed to have a good time. Sam says his mom enjoys that kind of thing. She’s a photographer, and her photos are all over their living room. It’s just, well… if it had been somebody else’s mother, I probably would have been more comfortable.”

  “You know what I think?” said Pamela. “It’s her way of checking out the girls Sam likes.”

  “You think?”

  “Why else?”

  “Maybe she really is just being nice.”

  “Yeah, and maybe I was just being nice to Brian.” Pamela laughed. “Anyway, Liz looked great, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, and I love seeing her so happy with Ross,” I said.

  “Me too. If I didn’t like her so much, I’d be jealous,” said Pamela.

  I lay in bed that night thinking about what Pamela had told me about Brian. About practicing on guys you didn’t like so you’d know what to do with guys you did like. The inherent worth and dignity of every person. It was impossible not to remember that. It was impossible too not to think of Faith and Ron.

  11

  Questions

  At the “Our Whole Lives” class the next morning Gayle had written another word on the blackboard: Intimacy. Bert was explaining how being intimate is not a single act, but everything from just watching a sunset with someone to talking about personal things to having intercourse. Then he asked us to name every possible act we could think of that expressed intimacy or sexual feeling between two people. As we called out words Gayle wrote them on the blackboard.

  “Kissing,” said a girl.

  “Talking,” said another girl. “I mean, really saying how you feel without hurting the other person’s feelings.”

  “Hugging,” said someone else.

  Back rubs, holding hands, foot massages, oral sex, mutual masturbation…

  The thing about the class at Cedar Lane is that things I’d hardly thought of doing before were okay to talk about there. Words I wouldn’t say aloud to most people. But Gayle and Bert didn’t even blink.

  Gayle brought up the fact that our bodies are ready for sex long before our particular society is ready for us to have it. In some cultures, she said, girls are married off as soon as they start menstruating, and early sex and childbirth are the norm. But in our country, where parenthood is delayed until long after the body is physically ready for sex, our problem is what to do about sexual feelings before we’re ready for marriage.

  The third time in the span of one weekend that somebody had mentioned marriage!

  One of the guys told about a party his friend had gone to where everyone was doing something sexual, short of intercourse, to someone else. All in the same room.

  A few kids moaned.

  “Okay,” Gayle said. “What’s wrong with that picture? Anything?”

  “It’s… like they’re onstage. Performing,” said one girl. “I mean, how can you feel anything for anybody if it doesn’t matter who it’s with and you’ve got an audience?”

  “Well, it’s safer than having intercourse,” said a guy.

  “Can’t argue with that,” said Bert.

  We thought about it some
more.

  “I’d think there would be about an eighty percent chance for humiliation,” said the tall guy I’d talked to the week before.

  “Yeah, but if you just look at the whole thing as a practice session… ,” said someone else.

  “I don’t think I want to be somebody’s guinea pig,” I offered, thinking of Pamela and Brian.

  Gayle nodded encouragement, but that was all I wanted to say. That was another thing I liked about the class: You could decide for yourself just how deep you wanted to get into a topic. I wasn’t ready to tell Dad, though, that—surprise! surprise!—I liked the class.

  Lester’s car was waiting at the curb when it was over. I slid into the passenger seat.

  “So have you found out everything you wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask?” he said.

  “Never mind me, Lester, let’s talk about you!” I said, glad to have this chance with him alone.

  “Yeah?” He swung the car around, and we headed back toward the street. “What about me?”

  “Well, I know you’re an adult, but—,” I began.

  “Who are you? Rip van Winkle, just waking up from a long, deep sleep?” he asked.

  “I mean, it’s not any of my business, but I was sort of surprised that you’d have a girlfriend there right next to Ross,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Next door to Ross, I mean. In the next room.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Al, but somebody here is hallucinating.”

  “The woman, Lester! You were having breakfast with a woman the morning after our dance.”

  “Having breakfast is not a sexual activity,” he said.

  “Now, look. I can put two and two together,” I told him. “If she was there at breakfast, she was probably there all night.”

  “So?”

  “So? Why didn’t you tell me you had a new girlfriend?”