“Mademoiselle’s eyes are bigger than her stomach,” the waiter said, flashing his eyes and his teeth at me. I don’t think he was French at all. Still, he was cute. He was probably an out-of-work actor. Lots of waiters in New York are out-of-work actors. Someday he might be a star.
Too bad they can’t put ice cream in a doggie bag.
My father paid the check. He left a big tip. He always does. Then he suggested we go to a movie. We said no, thank you. I didn’t want him to spend any more money.
“It was wonderful,” I said. “Thanks, Dad.”
Al shook his hand. “Thank you a thousand times,” she said. “I never had a better time in my whole life.”
My father shook her hand back. “It wouldn’t have been as nice without you, Al,” he said. My father is a good man.
After we went to bed, I heard Al tossing and turning. I thought about tonight. If my father and I went out to dinner all the time, it wouldn’t be nearly as special. Like being alone, going out to dinner was a rare treat. If it happened all the time, the bloom would be off the rose. I decided once in a while was super. I didn’t want to get too used to the good things in life.
Al’s voice said, “Do you realize I never thought about my mother once tonight? The whole entire time we’re living it up in the restaurant, I never thought about her once?” She sounded on the verge of tears. “How do you like that?”
Then she said, “You were pretty neat, letting me come along. I know you would’ve liked it better if it was just you and your father. But you made room for me. That was very nice of you. Thank you.”
I breathed long, regular breaths so Al would think I was asleep. For some reason, I didn’t want her to know I’d heard what she said. I don’t know why, I just didn’t. But I was glad she’d said it.
CHAPTER 13
The next day we walked up First Avenue to the hospital. Through the thick, hot Sunday silence, a heat so dense it seemed to muffle sounds, we walked, not talking much. As we stepped off the curb at Sixty-fifth Street, a huge black limousine turned the corner and bore down on us. As if we weren’t there. That car was so gigantic it resembled a family-size hearse. The guy behind the wheel was probably used to having pedestrians flee from him. When you’re that big, that powerful, that intimidating, you must get accustomed to having obstacles in your path dissolve. We were supposed to dissolve.
Al perked up. That car had the same effect on her that Martha Moseley usually does. Even when she’s in the pits, if Martha crosses her path, she livens up considerably. I could almost see her adrenaline churning through her veins, reviving, restoring, renewing her.
“Not today, bud,” she said, and held her arm out, stiff as a ramrod, like a traffic cop telling traffic to cease and desist while he helps a little old lady across the street.
We kept on going. The limo kept on coming. One of us was going to have to give in. I was all for it. I liked being in one piece. Not Al. She had made up her mind he wasn’t going to steamroll over us. She knew her rights. I knew if I turned and wimped my way back and stood on the sidewalk with my thumb in my mouth or something, waiting for the limo to go on its merry way, she’d never forgive me. I stuck by her, but my teeth were chattering. No mean feat in New York City in July.
The windows of the car were all tightly shut. That meant it was air conditioned. Probably the fat cats inside were discussing multimillion-dollar deals. The windows were the dark, fogged-up kind, the kind we couldn’t see through but the people inside could see out of. Rock musicians have cars with windows like that. So do TV personalities. So people won’t stare in at them, I guess.
“Maybe it’s a corporation president in there,” Al suggested. “Excuse me, sir”—she raised her voice—“but are you a corporation president?”
The driver stared at us. He looked dead. Maybe he was. He wore a chauffeur’s cap, and his face was made of stone. He also wore dark glasses. He took his hand off the wheel and made an obscene gesture. The diamond ring on his pinky caught the light and winked at us. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a submachine gun pointed at me. I had everything I could do to keep from running. It seemed to me I could feel the car’s bumper against my leg.
“Hurry,” I whispered. “Let’s move.”
Al came to a halt, blocking the car’s way. She did a couple of bumps and grinds for good measure, smiling at the driver. I stayed behind her as best I could. This time it was me using her for a shield. Then slowly, like a couple of snails on their way to the dentist, we inched our way to the opposite curb. And stood there, triumphant, as the driver gunned the motor like he was in training for the Daytona 500, making a lot of noise to show us he was the big macho macho guy he’d always been.
“Please, God,” Al said softly, “let him stall. Please. That isn’t too much to ask, is it?” I guess it was. Smoothly, like a gigantic black snake, the big black car slithered its way down the block. I checked the rear windows, hoping to see a face looking out at us. There was no one.
A man standing in front of O’Malley’s Saloon picked his teeth and regarded us with some interest.
“That’s one for the home team, huh?” he said.
“You bet,” Al agreed. I smiled at the man. He lifted his shoulders and returned to the dark depths of O’Malley’s.
We continued on our way. Al was much more cheerful. That kind of encounter, the good guys against the bad guys, always cheered her. But by the time we reached the hospital, she was quiet again. I sat down in one of the phony leather chairs they had in the waiting room and opened my paperback. I watched as Al went up to the desk, and after a bit the woman behind it handed her a card. Then Al went over to the elevators. I pretended to be reading. When I looked up, she was gone.
Someone sat down beside me. It was a man. Out of the corner of my eye I saw his hands. He had a handkerchief balled up in his hand. He worked that poor handkerchief around the head and shoulders: he balled it up, then stretched it out on his knee and smoothed it over and over, then balled it up again. Then he got up and walked away. I think he was waiting for something terrible to happen. I never saw his face, but that’s what I think. I watched him walk out of the main door. I didn’t see him again.
Al came down. We started home. I waited for her to tell me about her mother. She walked very fast.
“Slow down,” I said, huffing and puffing. “Slow down, can’t you?”
She slowed but not much.
“How is she?” I asked at last.
“She’s all right,” Al said. “The doctor came in while I was there, and he said she was coming along fine.”
“That’s good,” I said. I wondered why she seemed so glum. “I think that’s very good news. Don’t you?”
“Sure. It’s terrific.” She stomped along.
“Did he say when she could come home?” I asked.
“He said he’d know better tomorrow. He did some tests and took some X-rays, he said, and he’d get the results tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. Two days after tomorrow Al was supposed to go to the farm. The day after that was the barn dance.
“Oh,” I said. Together we sped home. I had a terrible pain in my side when we pulled up in front of our apartment building. We took the elevator up to our floor.
“My mother should be home soon,” I said. “And Teddy.”
Al fumbled at her front, to get her front door key. “You’re coming to our place, aren’t you?” I said, surprised.
“Oh, not tonight, with your mother and Teddy coming home and all,” she said. “I thought I’d bunk in alone tonight. Maybe tomorrow I’ll come over. I don’t want to wear out my welcome.” She attempted a smile, which didn’t really succeed.
“Don’t be a dope,” I said. “My mother will have a cow if you don’t sleep over at our house. Until your mother comes home.”
“Well,” Al said, “I don’t want to be in the way or anything.”
“You would never be in the way,” I told her. “You’re like a member of our family.”
“I am?” Al said, startled. “Really?”
“Sure. Come on in and stop being silly.” I opened our door. “Besides, I need a helping hand. There’s a lot of picking up to be done before they get here.”
“A lot of picking up or a lot of shoveling out?” Al said in a jaunty way.
“You name it, we’ve got it,” I said.
CHAPTER 14
“I hear them!” I cried, and ran to open the door. My mother was standing there, smiling at me. Until that moment I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed her.
“Mom! Welcome home!” I hugged her, she hugged me. Then she spied Al behind me and gave her a big hug too. My father came out to greet her, and they went into a clinch that lasted for about sixty seconds. We stood and watched. They didn’t even know we were there.
“Wow,” I heard Al say under her breath. Teddy scuttled in, bowed down by the weight of his rucksack that made him look as if he were about to scale Mount Rainier.
“Hey, wimp,” I said, “you look as if you’d shrunk.”
“How’d it go, Ted?” Al asked. “You catch any rattlers or pythons up there in darkest Connecticut?”
Teddy shot us a dark look. “Lots of stuff going on up there I can’t talk about,” he said. “Lots,” and he trudged off to his room, bent almost double.
“What’s he got in that thing—rocks?” Al said.
“I wonder if Teddy’s mixed up with the Mafia or the C.I.A.?” I said. We went into the kitchen to see to dinner so my mother wouldn’t have to lift a finger her first night home. She looked great—rested, tan. “You look cute, Mom,” I told her. She’d had her hair cut while she was away. It was very short and curled around her face. My mother is a very attractive woman, if I do say so.
“That haircut makes you look about fifteen,” my father told her, smiling.
“She doesn’t look any fifteen to me,” Teddy said, chewing with his mouth open. I always think I should miss Teddy more. I try to. I try to imagine what life would be without him. Once I read a story about two brothers, and one of them died, and how bad the other one felt. It brought tears to my eyes. I made a promise then and there to never be mean to Teddy again. To cherish him and love him. But every time I saw him chewing with his mouth open, all my promises were broken. I felt bad about those broken promises but figured they were Teddy’s fault, not mine. If he hadn’t been so repulsive, he would’ve been a lot easier to cherish.
My mother asked Al a little about her mother, how she was, what the doctor had said. “We’re going to the hospital tomorrow to see her,” I told my mother. “I’m going too.”
We cleared the dishes off while my mother and father had coffee. I made Teddy help load the dishwasher. He likes to stand and hurl plates and glasses into it from as far away as possible. He figures if he smashes enough stuff, he won’t be asked to load it again. I told him to clean up his act or I’d break both his legs. He shaped up a little but not much.
“Bath time,” my mother said, yawning. “I’m tired,” she said. So she and my father excused themselves and went into their bedroom to watch TV. I told Teddy to take a bath and that I’d call Dad if he gave me any trouble. Then he was in there for so long, not making a sound, I thought maybe he’d drowned. All he was doing was making surface dives to explore the bottom of the bathtub.
“Look at this place!” I hollered. “I just cleaned it yesterday! Now look at it.” I made him dry himself and scrub out the tub and mop up the floor. By the time he’d finished, he was glassy-eyed with fatigue and didn’t even fight me when I told him to go to bed.
Then Al and I went to bed too and read for a while.
“Maybe tomorrow we can write a joint letter to Polly,” I said. “First you write a paragraph, then me. How about it?”
“O.K.,” Al agreed. She turned on her side and pulled up the sheet.
“You going to sleep already?” I said.
“No, I’m just thinking,” she said.
“What about?” I asked. She didn’t answer so I read another chapter. Then she said in a slow and dreamy way, “If I marry Brian, maybe we could live right down the road from my father and Louise and visit them every Sunday. And they’d ask us to stay for dinner. We’d probably have roast chicken or roast beef with lots of gravy and farm-fresh vegetables. And pie à la mode.”
“Boy, if Mr. Richards could hear you planning to pig out like that,” I said, “he’d hand you a mess of carrot sticks and tell you to go to it.”
“I’d get to know the boys really well,” Al went on in the same slow and dreamy voice, “and we’d be a big family. Closely knit, as they say. And if my father and Louise wanted to go to the movies or anything, we could sit with the boys. Then, when we had a family, our own kids, my father and Louise could sit with them.”
I put down my book. There was no sense in trying to read when Al was on a life plan kick.
“This wouldn’t happen for a long time,” she said, turning around to look at me. “Not until I made sure my mother was taken care of. If she marries Mr. Wright or whoever she marries, then she could come visit us too. But I would never just go off and leave my mother. I’d see she was settled down first. She’d have her husband, I’d have Brian.” Al lay on her back and smiled up at the ceiling, imagining how it would be.
Boy. One minute we’re best friends, my father takes her out to dinner in a fancy restaurant and everything, the next minute she’s practically wiping me off the face of the map.
What about living down the hall from each other? What about all the times she was in the pits and I cheered her up? What about knowing Mr. Richards? Now she was getting her mother married off and planning her life with Brian. Just as if I were some wimpy kid whose last name she didn’t even know who sat behind her in history and copied her notes.
Just as if I were a casual acquaintance.
Boy.
CHAPTER 15
The next morning we hung around waiting for the doctor to call with the results of the tests on Al’s mother.
“Let’s write to Polly now,” I said.
“I’m no good at writing letters,” Al said. She was feeling depressed. I could tell. Al would make a terrible poker player. When she’s down, she’s down. When she’s up, she’s up. And her face tells it all. She’s never in between.
“I stink as a letter writer.” She didn’t have to tell me. When she wrote to Brian, she started out with “Brian, old buddy,” and finished off, after a ton of gnashing of teeth and pacing, with “Your old pal, Al.” Just so he wouldn’t get the wrong idea. She wanted him to know that theirs was to be a platonic friendship. Boy, she certainly had changed her tune.
I started. I wrote:
Dear Pol—
We’re having a blast here. Too bad you’re up in the land of saltwater and codfish. Poor you. The social season here is picking up. My father took Al and me to a classy restaurant for dinner, and we went to Thelma’s for spaghetti. She had two extra boys (twerps), which is why she asked us. And a clone called Daisy. Art and Tommy and Ned talked about making big bucks. Perry couldn’t come, due to chicken pox. All those bozos talk about is making money. I think they were midgets in disguise. I’ll tell you more when I see you.
“Now it’s your turn,” I told Al.
She scratched her head and said, “People like Thelma freak me out. I wonder how come she and a good kid like Polly are friends.”
“Stop talking and start writing,” I said. “That was the deal.”
“Does what I write have to be true or can I fake it?” Al asked.
I thought about that. “Spice it up if you want. I don’t think Polly would care. She needs some excitement, after all. Lolling around on the beach up there, away from civilization.”
So Al wrote:
Dear Polly—
I am going to a nudist camp. It is co-ed. The nudist camp is also a fat farm. I plan on hiding my instamatic camera in my pajamas. We walk around starkers all day and wear pajamas at night on account of the mos
quitoes are ferocious. They’re as big as hummingbirds. I plan on selling my pics to the NATIONAL BLAD. Hope you’re not bored where you are. Please answer this letter.
“That’ll grab Polly,” I said approvingly. “You write very good letters. You really do.”
“I do?” Al looked pleased.
“Sure. If you wrote letters like that to Brian, he’d answer you by return mail. Why don’t you write funny stuff like that to him?”
“It’s different. When it’s a boy, it’s different.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. It just is.” Al twisted a strand of her hair around her finger. Around and around she went. She would have an awful time combing it out.
“Do you realize how lucky you are?” she said suddenly. “You’re so lucky and you don’t even know it.”
“Me? Lucky? How come?” I said, surprised.
“You have a family. You’re all together, eating, sleeping, watching TV.”
“So are you a family. You and your mother,” I said.
“A family,” Al said, “is more than two people. I checked in the dictionary. A family is a group of people living under one roof. No matter how you slice it”—she smiled a sour smile—“my mother and I are not a group.” She started to pace. Then she stopped and wiped off her glasses with her shirttail.
“How about you being lucky?” I said in a too-loud voice. “You’re going off on this jazzy trip, going to a barn dance in a real barn, and everything. All I get to do is sit home and wait for you to write to tell me about all the fun you’re having. I sit here waiting for summer to end so I can go back to school for some excitement.” My voice rose. She was listening to me, though. “I’m not going anywhere. You’re the one who’s having all the fun. Maybe you ought to stop and think about who’s lucky.”
We stared at each other. The silence between us grew and grew like weeds in a garden. It filled every nook and cranny of the room. Outside I could hear a taxi horn bleating, like a lost sheep. The crosstown bus snorted its way around the corner.
Al(exandra) the Great: The Al Series, Book Four Page 6