Al drew herself up so she looked as if she were a couple of inches taller.
“When did you have your lobotomy?” she asked Martha sweetly. “It’s improved your personality one hundredfold.”
One thing about Al. She reads the newspaper every day and also medical journals when she goes to the library. This gives her a decided advantage.
“I haven’t had my lobotomy yet,” Martha whistled through her teeth. She was furious. “But I’ve had my period and that’s more than some people can say.”
Al broke up over that. Mr. Keogh had to get really angry and tell her to calm down. He had an announcement to make.
12
“As if I didn’t have enough on my mind,” Al groaned on our way to the cafeteria. “I’ve got to cope with exams too. How am I going to get organized for my father’s wedding and study for exams too?”
“You can do it,” I said. “I have faith in you.”
We got our trays and sat down next to the teachers’ table. Mr. Keogh was talking to Miss Percival and Mrs. Bagg, the oldest teachers in the school. Mrs. Bagg has big dark circles under her eyes and smokes a pack of cigarettes between soup and dessert. Miss Percival has greenish white skin and gray hair. One night I had a very realistic dream. I was walking down the school corridor. It was very dark. Suddenly, my blood ran cold. There was an icy presence, although I could see no one. A wind sprang up. In the faint light from the window I could see Miss Percival floating up around the ceiling, her gray hair flowing and a pale light coming out of her skin.
Then I woke up. But since then I have always wondered about Miss Percival and what she does when she’s not teaching.
“Al,” Mr. Keogh called out, “I thought you might be interested to know that, starting in the fall, girls will be able to take shop.” When Al first came to our school she wanted to take shop, but the principal said it was off limits for girls. Which is why Al and I and Mr. Richards made our bookshelves on our own time.
“Hey,” said Al, “that’s great. We’ve come a long way, baby.” Mrs. Bagg looked a little taken aback, and Miss Percival smiled and nodded. “Don’t forget to let the boys take cooking if they want.” She got up and went over to the teachers’ table.
“Mr. Keogh,” she said, “I’m going to my father’s wedding the weekend before exams. He called me up and invited me. So my mind may not be all geared up. You know? I thought I better explain in case I bomb out and fail everything.”
“Don’t start making excuses this far ahead, Al,” Mr. Keogh said. “That’s nice that you’re invited to the wedding.”
“You know what?” Al leaned over and looked into Mr. Keogh’s face. “That’s not the best part. The best part is that I inherit three brothers. And a stepmother. I don’t care so much about the stepmother part. I’ve got a perfectly good mother of my own. But I never had any siblings, and I think I’m going to like it.”
Mr. Keogh got up and shook Al’s hand. “Congratulations,” he said. “I think you’re going to like it too. And, what’s more, they’re going to like you. Don’t sell yourself short.”
Al blinked. “That’s a thought,” she said. “You may be right, Mr. Keogh.” She zapped back to our table.
“That Mr. Keogh is all right,” she said.
Al had a date after school to go downtown to her mother’s store. Her mother had arranged to have some time off so they could go shopping for a dress and shoes.
“I hate going shopping with her,” Al told me. “She always wants me to wear things I wouldn’t be caught dead in.”
“Maybe she’ll buy you something from Better Dresses,” I said, joking. The idea of Al in a Better Dress was almost too much.
Al tossed her bangs out of her face.
“Actually,” she said, “maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea. I think I’m going to be one of those women who looks older than she is. I’ve led a full life, and the other night I noticed a few lines around my eyes.”
I poked her in the stomach. “You probably forgot to wash your face,” I said, laughing.
Al turned on me, her eyes blazing, her cheeks red.
“It’s all right for you to fool around,” she said at the top of her voice. “You don’t understand. You’re just a little wimp with a ready-made family. You don’t realize how important it is, getting one for the first time. Just don’t joke about something that’s totally foreign to you, all right?”
I started to say I was sorry. Then I got mad.
“Don’t take yourself so seriously,” I said. “You’re not the first person who ever went to her father’s wedding. I know plenty of people whose fathers and mothers are divorced and get married again and everything. Don’t think it makes you so special, because it doesn’t.”
We didn’t talk to each other for the rest of the afternoon. When the bell rang, Al shot out the door. She must’ve got a bus right away, because when I got out onto the street she was nowhere in sight.
13
Talk about kid gloves. I guess I didn’t do a very good job of handling Al with them. We’d only fought once before, when I made a dopey remark about how fathers thought daughters were something special. All Al ever got from her father were postcards and, once in a while, a ten dollar check.
Maybe I’d go to her apartment after supper and pretend nothing had happened. Maybe I would. I’d have to think about it.
The doorbell rang—two, then one, then two. That was Al’s special ring.
“What do you think?” she asked, looking down at me.
“Holy Toledo!” I said. “Where’d you get those?”
“Aren’t they super?” Her shoes were red and they had soles about four inches thick and big clunky heels. She staggered into the living room. “They take a bit of getting used to,” she explained. “My mother and I made a deal. She said if she bought me these shoes, which make her hair stand on end, then she could choose the dress. I said O.K.”
She knelt down and wiped her new shoes with a scruffy piece of Kleenex. “I love them,” she said. “I really love them. I never thought I could love a pair of shoes. Can I look at them in the full-length mirror?”
“Sure,” I said.
Al clumped down the hall into my mother’s room. She turned this way and that, admiring her shoes from every angle.
“I’m sorry I called you a wimp,” she said. “You’re not one. I was just sore.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “You want a shooter of Coke?”
“I’m on a diet,” Al said firmly. “Think thin. Now all I have to do is get a present for my father and Louise. My mother suggested place mats. Place mats, for creep’s sake. I was thinking more along the lines of a silver bowl. Or a silver ashtray. My mother says she can’t afford silver. I think she plain doesn’t want to afford silver.” She looked at her watch. “I better get going. Ole Henry’s coming for dinner.”
She took off one of her shoes and scratched her foot. “You know something? I’m sorry you asked about how my mother feels about my father getting married again.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because you put the idea in my head. Maybe you’re right. She was talking today about a friend of hers who got divorced from her husband, then she turned around a year later and married him again. Oh, well,” Al shrugged. “Too late now. The fat’s in the fire.”
I watched Al clump down the hall in her new shoes. They made her walk sort of like Frankenstein. They also made her behind wiggle. Just a little. Maybe I better tell her. But on second thought, no.
A man got out of the elevator.
“Hello, Mr. Lynch,” Al said.
“What’s this?” Ole Henry did a double take. He blinked up at her. Those shoes made Al almost as tall as a basketball player.
“You’re turning into a fine young lady,” he said. He reached out to pat Al on the head. His arm was too short. He patted her on the shoulder instead.
“My, my, you certainly have grown,” he said.
14
That ni
ght Al slept with her shoes tucked under her pillow.
“I didn’t sleep very well,” she told me next morning. “They were awfully lumpy. But every time I woke up I reached under to make sure they were there. I’ll probably grow up having a shoe fetish.”
What I should do is carry a small notebook around, and every time Al uses a word I don’t understand, I should write it down to look up when I get home. I should, but I know I never will.
“Do you think I should kiss them?” Al said. I didn’t think she meant her shoes. “Not when I get there. That’s too soon. But when I leave. Of course I’ll kiss my father and maybe Louise. Women kiss each other more. But the boys. I don’t know.”
“Play it by ear,” I said.
After school Al went home and had a couple of trial runs on her shoes.
“They’re coming,” she said later. “Slow but sure.”
“Maybe you should turn on a record and practice walking around in time to the music,” I said. “Hold your arms out like those showgirls we saw in that old movie last week.”
Al’s eyes lighted up. “Yeah, I could practice walking down the service stairs balancing a book on my head. Maybe Mr. Ogilvy would hold the door open into the lobby and I could walk right through and out onto the street.”
“That’d really shake some people up,” I said.
“Listen, you want to come shopping with me today?” Al asked. “My mother gave me her charge plate. She said I could send a dress home, only she reserves the right to return it if she doesn’t like it.” Al made a face. “I think what she has in mind is something that will make me look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”
“My mother’s big on smocking,” I said. “She says I used to look adorable in my little smocked dresses with matching panties. ‘It’s too bad girls don’t dress like that any more. All they wear is jeans.’”
“My mother thinks it’s a pity that jeans have taken over the earth,” Al agreed.
Going shopping with Al was an experience. We must’ve covered every junior miss, teen, and young sophisticate department in town. Each dress Al tried on was worse than the last. Every time she got one zipped up and looked at herself in the mirror, she’d become more depressed.
“I look as if I’m six months’ pregnant in this one,” she said, puffing out her cheeks and crossing her eyes at herself.
The saleslady, who wasn’t sure whether we would rip off a few garments if she turned her back, made little cooing noises.
“You look perfectly sweet,” she said firmly.
Al peered out from a ruff of white organdy.
“You know who you look like?” I said. “Mary Queen of Scots.”
“That does it,” Al said. “What I need is to look like Mary Queen of Scots. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm isn’t enough.”
The saleslady had given up the idea of making a sale. She gathered up all of the rejected finery.
“When I was your age,” she said, “girls wanted to look feminine and pretty, not like hooligans.”
“What’s a hooligan?” Al asked her, taking off her Mary Queen of Scots outfit.
The lady pretended she hadn’t heard. She glided off in the pursuit of fresher prospects.
We started down on the escalator. On the third floor, Al spied a sort of one-shouldered, blue beach dress on a model.
“How much is that?” she asked the salesman.
“I beg your pardon?” the man said.
“How much is that dress?” Al pointed to it.
“I don’t work here,” the man said apologetically. “I’m waiting for my wife.”
“I can’t stand the kind of man who waits while his wife tries on clothes,” Al said as we zapped back on the escalator. “I’m not going to marry the kind of man who’ll do that. If I feel like buying a tangerine-colored G-string, I’ll go ahead and buy it and not have my husband approve.”
“You’d be a smash in one of those,” I said. We stopped at the hat bar to try on a few hats. I found a green one with a feather that wasn’t bad. A Robin Hood hat. Al tried on a black job with a big floppy brim. She pulled it down on either side of her face and sucked in her cheeks.
“Alms for the poor,” she said in a sing-song.
“Get lost,” a voice said.
The girl behind the counter was a vision. Her eye liner was coordinated with her eye shadow, which was coordinated with her nail polish.
We took off the hats.
“Who said that?” Al asked, looking around. “It couldn’t have been her,” she said, pointing to the girl, “because I don’t think she’s real. She’s made of plastic. They do wonderful things with plastic these days.”
We both stared.
“I said get lost, you two,” the girl said out of one corner of her mouth.
“I’m going to bring George—that’s my husband, George—back to try on that black hat for him,” Al said to me. “I do hope when I bring him they have somebody to wait on us. It’s terrible, the lack of salespeople today.”
Al and I sailed off and went through the revolving door twice on our way out.
15
Al’s father sent the airplane ticket. First class.
“I usually go tourist,” she said, smiling. She has been on an airplane lots of times. I never have.
Her ticket looked as if the moths had been at it. She took it to school every day in her wallet, in case somebody broke into her apartment in search of valuables. She read the fine print at night to make sure there weren’t any catches. She said she didn’t trust first class.
“Ta-dah!” Three nights in a row Al said this when I answered the door. Each time she wore a dress her mother had sent home.
“Maybe I should’ve settled for looking like Mary Queen of Scots, six months’ pregnant,” she said.
“That one’s not bad,” I said.
“It makes me look waistless,” she said. She was right.
“Your bangs are practically gone,” I said to cheer her up. It was true. They’d grown enough so she could hold them back with a barette. “You have a nice forehead.”
“Listen, I think I’ll put that on my tombstone,” she said. “Here lies Al. She had a nice forehead.”
“You’re awfully sour. How come you’re so sour these days?” I asked her. For almost the first time since I’d known her she wasn’t fun to be with. I couldn’t joke and kid around with her without her taking things the wrong way and getting her back up. I’d be glad when Al’s father and Louise were safely married.
Al sat down on my bed and put her head in her hands.
“I know,” she said in a muffled voice. “The way I’m carrying on about what I wear is ridiculous. How shallow can you get? I remind myself of Martha Moseley and others of her ilk. I could kill myself when I get like that. It’s just that if I come off the plane looking like a sack of potatoes, that’s the way they’ll always think of me … a sack of potatoes.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Al looked at me.
“You know what?” she said. “Last night I heard my mother crying. She thought I was asleep. I’m a very light sleeper. I heard her get up and get a glass of water. Then she turned off the light and I heard her. She cried for a long time.”
Al started pacing around the edges of my rug. She only does this when things are bad.
“One thing about my mother. She’s not the crying type. I saw her cry only once before. And that was when my grandmother, her mother, died.”
And I had to go and open my big mouth. Maybe Al’s mother was still in love with Al’s father and she’d been planning on marrying him again, like her friend remarried her husband. But now he was going to marry somebody else.
“Maybe I shouldn’t go,” Al said. “Maybe I should send the airplane ticket back and tell them I broke my leg or had my appendix out unexpectedly.”
For once I took charge.
“You’d spoil it for everybody if you did that,” I said. “You’d spoil it for your father and Louise and the b
oys. They’re expecting you. You want to really louse things up? Pull yourself together,” I said firmly.
Even to myself, I sounded like my mother. It’s a terrible thing when you’re twelve and a half and you already sound like your own mother. It makes you stop and think.
16
“One thing I positively draw the line at,” Al said, “and that’s gloves. My mother’s putting the moves on me to wear a pair of stupid white gloves. ‘At least until you get off the plane, dear’,” Al said, mimicking her mother. “I think she thinks maybe Louise won’t think I’m a first-class citizen if I don’t wear white gloves.” She snorted in disgust. “Sometimes I think my mother thinks it’s the nineteenth century. She has some nineteenth century ideas.”
Her mother finally brought home a dress they both liked, a red-and-white check, to go with the shoes.
“Isn’t it super?” Al tried her whole outfit on for me. “I feel put together. It’s the first time I ever felt that way.” She put a new Band-Aid on each heel. Due to the fact that she’d increased her practice time, her new shoes had given her gigantic blisters.
“I feel like a baby learning to walk all over again,” she said.
“Try it on your hands and knees,” I suggested.
“Listen, if these blisters get any bigger, maybe I will.” She studied her profile. “I may save up for plastic surgery,” she said.
“Don’t forget to send me a postcard,” I told her.
“If I have time. I’ll get there Thursday afternoon, the wedding’s Saturday, and I come back Sunday morning.” Al was being excused from school all of Thursday and Friday. Her mother had talked to the principal, explaining the situation so Al could get off.
“I’m going to study on the plane,” she said.
I gave her the fishy eyeball. “Al,” I said, “you are talking to somebody who knows you. I am not one to be taken in by lies and hallucinations.”
I Know You, Al: The Al Series, Book Two Page 5