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A Girl Called Al
The Al Series, Book One
Constance C. Greene
To Sheppard, Philippa,
Stephanie, Matthew, and Lucia
Chapter One
There’s a new girl moved down the hall from us. She said “Call me Al” and it wasn’t until I saw her report card that I found out her name was Alexandra. She hates it.
She has lived in a lot of different places. She has lived on the Coast, among other places. In L.A.
“I have never heard of Ellay,” I said. “Where is that?”
Al explained to me that L.A. is short for Los Angeles. In California. They have a lot of smog there.
She has been on an airplane a lot of times. She said the next time she goes on one she will bring me one of the little plastic dishes of jelly and stuff they give you.
I have never been on an airplane.
She has been to Hollywood where she saw them making a movie. “It’s not so much,” she said
She has Doris Day’s autograph.
“And that dopey guy who always plays with her. He’s such a dope he makes me sick. What does she see in a dope like that?” Al said.
She has been to Disneyland about a thousand times.
“It’s not so much,” she said.
Al is a little on the fat side, which is why I didn’t like her right at first. That’s not fair, I know. She might not like me because I’m on the skinny side. To each his own, my father says. But it wasn’t just because of that. She walks stiff, like a German soldier, and she has pigtails. She is the only girl in the whole entire school, practically, with pigtails. They would make her stand out even if nothing else did. Most of the kids have long, straight hair like mine. My father says I remind him of a sheep dog but I don’t care. Al’s pigtails look like they are starched. She does not smile a lot and she wears glasses. Her teeth are very nice, though, and she does not wear braces. Most kids I know have to wear braces. They are very expensive and also a pain in the neck. I am fortunate, my father says, because I have inherited my teeth from his side of the family. It saves him a pile of dough, he says. My brother inherited his teeth from my mother’s side, I guess. He has a retainer and all that stuff.
Al is a very interesting person. She is a year older than me but we’re both in the seventh grade, on account of she dropped back when she moved here. She has gone to a lot of different schools. She has a very high I.Q., she says, but she doesn’t work to capacity. She says things like this all the time but I don’t like to let on I don’t always know what she is talking about.
“I am a nonconformist,” she said, like she was saying she was a television star or Elizabeth Taylor or something.
“What’s that mean?” Here I go again.
“It means I don’t follow the herd. It’s the best way to be. You,” she said, looking over the top of her glasses at me, “have the makings of a nonconformist. There’s a lot of work to be done, but I think maybe we can manage.”
Most of the things Al and I talk about I don’t tell my mother. She probably wouldn’t get them. The first night Al moved into the building, her mother came to our door. She had a mess of green stuff on her eyelids, and her fingernails looked about two inches long.
She said, “I wonder if you’d be good enough to let me use your telephone. Mine has not as yet been installed. I will reimburse you, of course.”
She’s not my mother’s cup of tea, whatever that means. My mother says she likes most people, but I’ve noticed that when you come right down to it there are a lot of people she doesn’t like.
She’s very critical, my mother.
Al’s mother works. She’s got a very important job in a department store downtown. When she comes home at night her feet hurt and she takes a tub. That’s what she says. She doesn’t take a bath, she takes a tub. When I was there the first time, she came in, and after Al introduced us she said she had to run and take a tub. I guess I looked funny because Al said, “She means a bath.”
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
“A tub has all kinds of gunk in it,” Al said. “Like bath salts and bath oil and things like that.”
My mother takes mostly baths.
Al says she doesn’t love her mother that much. I never heard anyone say they didn’t love their mother before. She likes her because she’s her mother, she says. She respects her, but she doesn’t love her that much. She loves her father. He sends her salt-water taffy from Atlantic City when he is at a convention, or a couple of jumping beans from Mexico when he is at another convention.
Al’s mother and father are divorced. She says she doesn’t mind too much that they are divorced. She gets more presents that way. She has a picture of her father over her bureau. She says he is very handsome and smart.
My father is not very tall and he is going bald. Every year at my birthday he pretends he can’t remember how old I am. He always takes off a year or two. Practically the only time he gets mad at me is when I bring home D’s on my report card.
“You can do better,” he says.
I wonder what my I.Q. is and if I am working up to my capacity.
Chapter Two
Our home-room teacher, Mr. Keogh, is the only teacher in the whole school who calls Al “Al.” All the others call her Alexandra and she turns about eight colors of the rainbow. I said it to myself under my breath and it sounded pretty. But you know how kids are about their own names. Even if they really like them, they pretend they don’t.
Al doesn’t want to take cooking and sewing. She wants to take shop. But in our school only boys get to take shop, and when Al told Mr. Keogh about this he said he would talk to the principal but not to hold out too much hope.
Al and Mr. Keogh are friends. She talks to him before class. She found out Mr. Keogh’s wife was having an operation.
“It’s so sad,” she said. “I feel so sorry for Mr. Keogh. His wife is having an operation.”
I wondered about Mr. Keogh’s wife. I feel sorry for her. She’s the one who’s having the operation.
“What’s the matter with her?”
“She has ball stones,” Al said.
“What?” I said. “I have never heard of ball stones.”
“She has ball stones,” Al said like she was an authority on the subject. “You know. In her gladder.”
It must be so if Al says so. I am not up on operations.
Except for taking out tonsils. It is supposed to be a breeze. Everyone is very jolly, saying ho ho, what fun it will be. Just think. You will get ice cream and ginger ale whenever you want. Won’t that be fun? What a blast.
Mr. Keogh came back after lunch and said he had talked to the principal and the principal said that Al cannot take shop. It is against the rules, he said. She will have to take cooking the first half of the year and sewing the second half, like all the other girls.
“Why don’t they make up a new set of rules?” Al wanted to know. “I bet they never had a girl before who wanted to take shop. I want to make a bookshelf like those guys are making. I don’t want to learn how to sew a dumb old skirt or make a mess of muffins.”
Al was mad as anything and she marched out of the room and her pigtails were swinging like someone was hanging on to the ends of them.
“Why can’t she take shop if she wants to?” I asked. “What’s the harm?”
Mr. Keogh had on his blue polka-dot tie today. That meant it was Tuesday. He wears a red one for Mond
ay and a green one for Wednesday and switches around for the rest of the week.
“You can’t fight city hall,” he said.
It’s another one of those things people say, like, “I’m from Missouri,” which is what my father says when my mother says she’s going to budget her food money so we can eat out once a month on what she saves.
I happen to know my father is from Chicago, Illi-nois.
So there you are.
Anyway, I could see that Mr. Keogh felt pretty bad about Al not being able to take shop and make a bookshelf.
“Maybe her father can help her at home,” he said to me. “All it takes is a saw and a couple of pieces of wood.”
“Al’s father is usually in Atlantic City or Mexico at a convention,” I explained. “He is divorced.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Keogh. “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry. That is too bad. Well.”
Al came back into the room and she was walking just as straight and mad as before. “Suppose I say I won’t take dumb old cooking and sewing. What then?”
Mr. Keogh sat on the edge of his desk and tugged at his ear, which Al has pointed out to me usually means he doesn’t know what he is going to say next.
“They’d probably make you take an extra math course,” he said. “To fill in the time.”
Math is Al’s worst subject.
“Mr. Keogh,” I said, “I’m sorry to hear about your wife’s ball stones.”
Mr. Keogh looked like he’d had a hard day.
“What?” he said.
“Your wife. I’m sorry she has ball stones.”
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Keogh said, and he put on his hat and went home.
Chapter Three
“Will you take a load of stuff and put it in the washing machine for me?” my mother asked.
It was Saturday morning. Our machine is on the blink and she doesn’t want to buy a new one this month.
“It never rains but it pours,” she says. Our car has to have a new differential, whatever that is, and my brother Teddy went to the orthodontist last week and he has to wear his braces another year.
“Sure,” I said. I was glad. I would get a chance to visit Mr. Richards. He is sort of the assistant superintendent of our building. He makes change for people for the washers and dryers, and fixes leaky faucets, and once in a while, he shovels snow.
We have been friends for quite a while. He is a retired bartender and has a big tattoo on his arm that says “Home Sweet Home.” I had been wanting to have Al meet him. We figured out night before last that Al and I have known each other for exactly three weeks. It feels like forever. Some people you just feel like you have always known. That is the way it is with me and Al and with me and Mr. Richards.
He has the cleanest, shiniest kitchen floor I have ever seen. You can practically see your face in it. Nobody but me knows how he gets it that way. It is one of the things that makes him so special.
I rang Al’s bell, but softly. I gave it just a little poke. Her mother has to do a lot of traveling and entertaining, as she is the buyer for Better Dresses, and you never know when she has maybe got in at one o’clock in the morning or something. She wears a sleep shade for her eyes and plugs for her ears. Al showed them to me but sometimes, even all stuffed up with all those things, she can still hear the bell.
Al came to the door and she did not have her hair in pigtails yet. It looked nice.
“I like your hair that way,” I said. “Why not wear it to school like that?”
“It’s a mess,” she said. Without her glasses and her hair in pigtails, she looked different.
“I’ve got to go down and put some clothes in the washing machine,” I whispered, just in case. “Come with me and we’ll go see Mr. Richards.”
She said, “In a sec,” and when she came back she looked the way she does every day. It was a disappointment.
“Pleased to meet you,” Mr. Richards said to Al. They shook hands and he asked, “Got time for a little shooter of Coke?”
I had just finished telling Al he talks this way on account of being a retired bartender, so it was nice he proved I wasn’t making it up.
His apartment is right behind the furnace room, so it is always warm. “You in the building?” he asked Al, putting out the glasses. “Set ’em up,” he said and slid three glasses down the kitchen counter.
“She’s new,” I said. “She’s in 14-C.”
“You got enough heat up there in 14-C?” Mr. Richards wanted to know. “We had plenty of problems with that one, I can tell you. Last tenant said it got so cold he didn’t need the refrigerator. Just left everything out on the table. Care for another?”
We all had another shooter. I never used to like Coke until I started drinking it this way.
“Don’t worry,” Al said. “You don’t know my mother. She would not hesitate to let you know the minute anything was not right.”
I think Mr. Richards’s eyes are blue. They are so narrow in his face it is hard to tell. I told him once that I thought he looked like the captain of a whaling ship. I could see him squinting out over the horizon. “Not me,” he had said. “Them waves get to my stomach every time.”
“You have a nice place here,” Al said.
Al is a very observant girl. She says if she does not get to be a specialist in internal medicine, she may be a newspaper reporter. I would not put it past her.
“I like your curtains,” she said, “and that’s a pretty plant. What kind is it?”
“That’s a geranium,” Mr. Richards said, looking pleased. “I been treating it like a baby, better’n most babies, if you want to know. Lots of sun, not too much water. Some day maybe, when my ship comes in, when I find that there pot of gold, when I break the bank at that place they wrote the song about, I’ll move where it’s warm. All the time. I’ll get me a house with nothing but flowers and plants around. No grass, no nothing. Just flowers and plants.”
Mr. Richards was really getting carried away. He tied a couple of rags around his sneakers and started skating around his linoleum.
I was very pleased. I had told Al he skated around his floor when he got excited. Or sometimes just for fun. It relaxes him, he says.
She only said, “I don’t believe it.”
One thing about Al, she never comes right out and calls anyone a liar.
Now I just smiled at her. I wanted to say, “I told you so,” but I didn’t. Which I thought was kind of nice of me.
Chapter Four
“I like your lady friend,” Mr. Richards said the next day when I took a bunch of towels down to the dryer for my mother. I had stopped at Al’s to ask her to come along, but she had said, “My mother has a rule. She says we have to spend Sundays together. She says she doesn’t see enough of me during the week.” She made a face. So I went alone.
“She’s a humdinger,” Mr. Richards said. “A regular lollapalooza.”
My mother has a thing about me visiting him. It’s not just that he’s a retired bartender. My mother takes a drink now and then. It’s mainly because whenever she sees him around, he’s always got a toothpick sticking out of his mouth. He is almost never without a toothpick. She thinks it’s common. It makes me nervous. Some day he will swallow it. Or get a big hole in his gums.
Anyway, she thinks the combination does not make for a very good companion for me. She doesn’t really know Mr. Richards.
“I like that Al,” Mr. Richards said, fixing me a piece of bread and butter and sugar. He didn’t even ask if I wanted it. He slapped on the butter and put about ten inches of sugar on top. My mother would have exploded.
“Al is a very interesting person,” I said. “She is a nonconformist.”
“That so?”
One thing about Mr. Richards, he is a very good listener. I mean, he really hears you and he never interrupts.
“You probably won’t believe this,” I said, biting into my second piece of bread, “but Al wants to take shop instead of sewing and cooking, and they won’t let her.�
�
“Who won’t let her?” Mr. Richards asked.
“The principal, that’s who. No girls get to take shop.”
Mr. Richards scratched his head. “Seems like a perfectly normal thing. A young lady wants to take shop, then I say let her take shop. A girl like Al, she doesn’t want to waste her time with ladylike pursuits. She wants to get out and live life, change a tire or two, cut down a few trees.”
Mr. Richards was warming up. He started to skate. He tied his rags on and off he went.
“Why, she wants to scale a couple of mountains, dig for buried treasure, sail to the South Seas in a twenty-foot sloop. Stuff like that.”
He glided around nice and easy and after five minutes the floor gleamed and he wasn’t even out of breath.
“You think it would do any good if I went down to this here school and talked to the principal?” he asked.
I figured he might do more harm than good, so I said, “No, no, that wouldn’t be such a good idea. The only thing is, Al wants to make a bookshelf like the guys in shop are making.”
“Well now,” he said, putting on the pot for soup, “that’s all they’re doing? That’s not so much.”
When Mr. Richards makes soup it is something to watch. He keeps a bag of stuff in his refrigerator. Like celery tops and old bones and carrots and onions. If it’s around holidays, he throws in the leftover turkey. Then he scrapes plates and if there’s any spinach or mashed potatoes or salad left, he throws it all in.
I nearly got sick the first time I saw him do it. It looked pretty disgusting. Then I ate some once when he hadn’t told me he had made it and it was the best soup I ever ate. I don’t exactly know how to describe it, but it was delicious.
“I could teach her how to make a bookshelf,” he said, pouring salt into the pot, “if her daddy isn’t handy. I’m no slouch with the tools. I got a hammer, some nails lying around somewhere. I might just hunt them up and teach both you young ladies a thing or two.”
“Her daddy isn’t around,” I said. “He is divorced from her mother. He travels a lot.”
A Girl Called Al: The Al Series, Book One Page 1