Alice, I Think

by Susan Juby

  I thought it was sort of my duty to give Fleet some honest feedback, so I told her that when she sang, she looked a bit like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, which I’d seen at my cousin’s house. That led to Fleet’s mother having to tell her about the existence of Catholicism, which made her mother so angry that she told my parents I would not be welcome at their yurt for the May Day Festival.

  But Fleet and Arrow were practically normal compared to the religious homeschooled kids. At that same picnic one of the religious parents told my mother I was a demon spawn after I told her daughter that girls were allowed to wear pants.

  That was the end of my parents’ attempts to get me to socialize with other housebound kids. It was just as well, because my mom was starting to get pressure to declare whether her noncurriculum was unschooling, deschooling, or homeschooling. There’s a lot of friction between the different factions, and Mom didn’t want to end up in the wrong camp.

  The reality is that what I’ve been doing is self-schooling. Sure, my mom and dad take turns pretending to teach me. My mom specializes in giving me alternative family books in which everyone is gay, as well as environmental books like Silent Spring, which haven’t exactly helped to make me into a sunny optimist. Dad takes the afternoon shift and supposedly teaches me science and math, although mostly what we do is drink coffee and read Popular Science and Omni and other books and magazines. Sometimes, when he’s feeling guilty, he makes me do the math sheets he borrowed from another homeschooling parent, but those lessons grind to a halt whenever I have a question.

  But Bob seems unwilling to consider the emotional and intellectual handicaps I have from my homeschooling history. He said he knew that counseling wasn’t my idea, but we might as well make the best of it. At the end of today’s groundbreaking session he whispered moodily that for next time he’s looking forward to talking over my therapeutic goals. For the past four years I have successfully avoided participating in my counseling sessions, so this turn of events is a bit of a blow.

  Later

  I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and I’ve decided that maybe the helping professionals are right. Maybe I haven’t seen enough of life. Maybe I’m not growing enough, or in the right areas. I’m not one to take on a challenge, but it could be that my life could use some direction. But I don’t need goals for therapy. What I need is goals for my life. So that’s what I’m going to get.

  LIFE GOALS LIST

  1. Decide on a unique and innovative career path (to get helping professionals off my back).

  1a. Get part-time job in preparation for said career path? Too much like work? (Should be outside family home.)

  2. Increase contact with people outside of immediate family. (Not friends, necessarily, but at least superficial interaction of the “Hi, how are you?” variety with people who are not home-based learners and who do not attend the Teens in Transition Club.)

  3. Learn to drive a car (but not our car, because I do have my nonexistent reputation to consider).

  4. Some sort of boy-girl interaction? (Possibly best left until after high school. Maybe best left until middle age.)

  5. Publish paper comparing teenagers and chicken peer groups (in lancet or other respected publication?).

  6. Read entire LORD OF THE RINGS series to prove that early, parent-assisted reading of THE HOBBIT was not just an aberration, and I really am advanced for my age. (Do not dress like the characters.)

  There. I’m sure I can achieve those things. I can probably even get through the big ones by the end of the summer. I’ve moved my dad’s Lord of the Rings boxed set into my room in preparation for some mature reading.

  Ten Minutes Later

  I am pleased to report that I am making rapid progress on my Life Goals. Bob is a genius. Career ideas are coming in fast and furious. I was directionless ten minutes ago, but now, thanks to my new Life Goals and an article on the Ukraine I read in National Geographic, I have realized that it is my calling to be an Easter-egg painter. I’ll paint tiny religious scenes on eggs. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner. It was a serious oversight on the part of the Home Learners’ Career Planning pamphlet to forget to include Easter-egg painter in the list of possible vocations. Nurse, doctor, lawyer, secretary, egg iconography painter. Maybe I could paint famous people on the eggs when there is no religious holiday to celebrate. I could do Elvis eggs, rock star eggs, you name it. On second thought, it’s probably better to stick with the religious pictures; they are more traditional and there’s always a market for them.

  Twenty Minutes Later

  Maybe careers aren’t something you can really plan for. They just sort of happen, like brown eyes or flat feet. I took one of those career aptitude tests last year, and it showed that I should be a flight attendant or a seamstress. Not a fashion designer or anything, mind you, but a sweatshop worker. Apparently stewardesses and sweatshop workers and I enjoy a lot of the same interests and activities.

  When I pointed out to my mom that I’m afraid to fly and can’t sew, and besides, the garment district in Smithers consists only of Herringbone and Heather Menswear and Northlight Jeans Fashion Emporium and Bridal Outlet, so there really isn’t anywhere to practice my sweatshop laborer trade, she accused me of being negative and closed-minded. No argument there. Although it seems to me that if ninety percent of the adults I know, including my parents, don’t know what they want to be when they grow up, it’s a bit much to ask of me, at the tender age of fifteen.

  Maybe I should pick some careers out of a hat and just start doing them. I know I can’t just drop in and start doing surgery on someone, but I could be one of those people who hang around the fringes of a profession or industry, hoping to be mistaken for someone who belongs. I could get a white coat and hang out in the pharmacy part of the drugstore reorganizing the vitamin B section like I really know what I am doing. Or I could act really official in the video store and give my opinion to customers with ringing authority.

  It’s too bad that the nearest lighthouse is in Prince Rupert, which is at least a seven-hour drive away from Smithers. For a really good people-free profession I think lighthouse keeper would be outstanding.

  Or, if I’m looking for isolation, I could just hang around the night shift at the mill. I could make myself useful by ratting out the graveyard-shift guys who sit in their trucks on their lunch breaks using those little blowtorches to smoke hash.

  I wonder if my history as a homeschooled child might be a career obstacle, maybe even a Life Goal impediment?

  AS FOR ME AND MY LIFE GOALS

  July 19

  A new day, a new Life Goal.

  Life Goal No. 7: Develop new look. (Like career choice, must reflect uniqueness).

  Today I was mistaken for a salesperson at the Workwear Well. I wasn’t even trying to pass, either. Some woman came up to me and asked where she might find the Stanfield long underwear in red. She seemed a bit dimwitted. She realized her mistake after I shot her my best look of loathing. Then she sort of cackled and said she couldn’t tell one kid from another. What that meant I can’t even begin to guess. It’s disturbing to me that I bear the stamp of Workwear’s so strongly.

  I know I don’t want to be a fashion designer or model or anything, but I also know I don’t want to look like a poster child for the working classes. So far I’ve tried to avoid the fashion thing altogether. My standard uniform is jeans and a plaid shirt. I can see that if I’m going to establish any kind of individual identity, it’s going to have to be reflected in my clothes.

  I think I’ll take my style cues from my cousin Frank (that’s actually her name—her parents were very active in the drug culture of the sixties). She has a lot of style. I remember my dad saying when we were younger that he could have paid off our mortgage with the money from one of Frank’s outfits. I hadn’t seen her for a few years, but when she came to visit us earlier this spring, she looked as good as ever. I could tell right off that she has an alternative value system. Her hair was shor
t and waved back, like hair from the twenties. Her eyebrows were thin and arched. She wore a green-and-blue down-filled vest and red polyester stretch pants with silver platform shoes. The effect was very, well, alternative.

  Frank was supposed to stay for a week while she waited to get in to see a doctor in Vancouver for some special kind of treatment. I was dying to talk to her, but she only came out of her room to go to the bathroom. She must have a small bladder or something, because she seemed to have to go about every ten minutes.

  By noon I’d seen most of Frank’s outfits. She wore eight different ones before lunch. Her fourth ensemble included a curly gray wig and a tiara. At one point she stopped giggling for a minute and came into the kitchen and sang “Ave Maria.” Then she changed into some knee-high boots and did a number called “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” I really liked it, but Dad didn’t seem impressed. Around the sixth outfit, before she went outside to chase the neighbors’ chickens around, I got over my intimidation and told Frank I was interested in looking more like her. She said all I needed was a few more barrettes. She went back into the guest room and came out with a handful. Most were little metal clips, but some were plastic ones like the ones little kids wear. Frank put them all over my head.

  It wasn’t quite the look I was after. She clipped too many on one side, so I was a dead ringer for that pinhead guy in the horror movies. When Mom saw me, she said early-onset dementia wasn’t my look. She can be incredibly tasteless and insensitive at times.

  Before I could get any more advice, Frank disappeared. She used the pellet gun to help round up the neighbors’ chickens, and they (the neighbors, not the chickens) complained to my parents. My mother panicked and called the hospital to ask if Frank’s behavior was “normal for a girl in her condition.” The hospital said they had no idea and suggested that Mom call the police if her niece was menacing domestic livestock with a gun. Personally, I think the incident serves the Stankes right for keeping a so-called hobby farm within the town limits. It makes the whole neighborhood look a bit too agricultural, if you know what I mean. That is something we should really be trying to move away from. Anyway, Mom and Dad had a debate about whether calling the police wasn’t a little extreme; after all, it wasn’t like Frank had been waving the .22 around. Frank must have heard them, because she was gone when they went to check her room. We found out later that she hitchhiked back to Vancouver, where she moved in with a boy named Glue.

  Frank’s little visit upset my mother, but my dad told her it was unrealistic to think that coming to Smithers would help set anyone on the road to sobriety. He said it was more likely to make someone recognize the important role drugs play in making life bearable. Mom didn’t want to tell her brother, Uncle Laird, that we’d lost Frank. Uncle Laird is a rich lawyer, and he has always given Frank the best of everything. According to Dad, Frank’s last treatment center cost $15,000 a month. Frank has this great satin bomber jacket with the words BETTY FORD printed on the back. I hope it was included in the price. In the end Uncle Laird didn’t end up reacting all that badly to the news of Frank’s disappearance. Mom said it was almost like he was expecting it.

  The thing I found fascinating was how Frank, who is apparently a drug addict, could fit so many clothes into a Barbie lunch bucket and Brady Bunch knapsack.

  Anyway, this latest assault on my dignity at the Workwear Well has cemented my commitment to follow Frank’s fashion lead. I think I need a haircut. A trip to the New in View thrift store may also be in order. But I’m a bit worried that, with everyone in this town fixated on the stinky sixties, the New in View people won’t have kept the stuff from the seventies. I read magazines. I know what’s hot and what’s not.

  For lack of anything else to say at my last appointnent, I told Death Lord about Frank’s visit and how I’m working on some Life Goals but I’m not ready to talk about them yet. I think he felt like we were making major progress. He said that it’s important to talk about the dysfunction in our families of origin if we are ever to work out a new dynamic for our interpersonal interfacing. Yeah, thanks, Bob.

  July 20

  I’ve finally hit upon a good career. I think I will be a cultural critic. I bet the criticizing profession will make good use of all my malcontent feelings and total negativity. In fact, these might be prerequisites. I got the idea from this magazine article I was reading. The writer was a very important cultural critic, and he certainly had nothing positive to say. Like me, he seemed to feel that the state of the world is appalling. Living in Smithers and being a homeschooled shut-in may even be an asset for a cultural critic.

  I think I’ll be a radical but well-respected critic, possibly involved with things like performance art involving real blood, but not the sensationalistic kind. My art will be serious commentary. I’ll be quite angry and my writings will be sharp-edged satire—like that Rape of the Lock I read last year. Classic writings.

  I find I have a natural tendency for critical thinking. Like a few years ago, when my parents tried to get me to call them by their first names: Diane and John. They thought it would help us to have a less hierarchical relationship. They seemed to think I would feel like it was a big honor to call them by their first names. I gave the issue some critical thought and decided it was an inappropriate attempt on their part to abdicate parental responsibilities, possibly connected to a pathetic and unhealthy refusal to admit their true age. I mean, they are getting on. So I decided to call them Mom and Dad until I’m in my late forties to help with role reinforcement and age-appropriate behavior. I even tried Mommy and Daddy for a while, but it was too much, even for me. Mother and Father is okay, but used exclusively makes me sound sort of stuck-up. So I call them Mom and Dad as much as possible, especially in public. There’s no mistaking us for some unusually progressive family if I’m calling them Mom and Dad. Now if that doesn’t show critical reasoning on my part, I don’t know what would. I guess I just have a knack.

  Later

  Since deciding to become a cultural critic, I find I have become quite critical. My dad says that is a far cry from becoming discerning, but he doesn’t know anything. God, I mean he’s never even read Spin magazine. He keeps trying to tell me that Rolling Stone was his generation’s Spin. Yeah, right.

  I probably shouldn’t have informed my parents of my new potential career path. After all, they are my parents, and it’s more or less my duty to keep things of a personal nature from them. In my own defense, I didn’t exactly tell them. I told MacGregor and they overheard. MacGregor is my brother, and even though he’s only ten years old, he’s a very good listener and has a lot of integrity. He’s into nature but not in a posing-for-candid-shots, protest-poster, hippie kind of way. Instead, he’s always wandering around looking at bugs and rooting around in swamps and ponds. He subscribes to Owl magazine. MacGregor is the kind of person who could wear an unmatched pair of gum boots all day and never notice. I think MacGregor might be a genius. Anyone so oblivious to the horror of the human world must be.

  My parents tried to homeschool MacGregor, but he was too advanced for them. Plus he seems to have no problem getting along in a regular classroom setting. He’s quite an inspiration to me. I told him about my cultural criticism plans this afternoon while he worked on his tanks. He keeps tropical fish, but only the “sustainable kind” that breed in captivity. He is trying to get his angelfish to have babies and is rearranging the tank furniture to get the mood just right. How he knows what kind of romantic setting fish want is just one of the many amazing things about my younger brother.

  I suggested he move the piece of driftwood a couple of inches to the left for maximum sex action and he just laughed.

  Oh well, it’s nearly time for dinner, and we have company. My mom’s friend Geraldine and her daughter, Jane, stopped in “for a minute” over an hour ago. Geraldine’s not one to leave if a meal’s being served. My mom met her at some home-based educators’ conference on dealing with difficult teens, and they immediately hit it off.
Thank God they’ve given up on trying to make Jane and me friends. For one thing, Jane is about ten years older than me. And for another, she’s pretty angry. She changed her name from Cheyenne Summer to Jane, and even if I don’t like her all that much, I approve of that. Jane still lives at home and her mom says she’s working on her tenth grade certificate. For some reason Jane and her mother go almost everywhere together, but Jane never gets out of the car. She sits inside it smoking and reading and scowling.

  When they come over, my mom makes a point of going outside and asking Jane to come inside, but she always refuses. One time I went out and asked her if she wanted to come in. She looked up from her book, pulled her glasses down her nose with one finger, blew a stream of smoke out her nose, and said, “You’re aware that you’re doomed, eh?”

  Now I let my mom do the inviting.

  It’s understandable that Jane’s temperament is a bit dark. Her mother’s awful. The only cool thing about Geraldine is that she looks like James Woods. What is it with my mother and these sad, messy old hippie chicks? My first target as a cultural critic will be people who never got over the sixties!

  July 21

  I went to see a movie last night with my dad and MacGregor. It was really great. It was quite serious but funny and it was low budget. It was so good, it had musicians acting in it, and it won some prizes in Europe and everything. I’m thinking of doing an in-depth cultural criticism of it. You know, I could talk about its implications for our culture or something. The criticism wouldn’t be very biting or scathing, though, since the movie was really good.

  We went to the movies because Dad wanted to avoid at least part of Geraldine’s visit. As usual, she accepted the invitation to stay for dinner, even though Jane had already been waiting out in the car for over an hour. Dad’s not too crazy about Geraldine. He doesn’t go in for what he calls “all that laziness masquerading as counterculture.” Actually, Dad doesn’t go in for much, but he keeps pretty busy doing it. He complains that Geraldine smells like dope all the time. Mom says it’s just her perfume. I think it might have something to do with Jane’s smoking. Sometimes you can hardly see her in the car, the haze is so thick. Who knows what she’s smoking in there? Considering her parentage, anything is possible.