Achingly Alice

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  “Miss McKinley?” he said.

  I hate it when teachers call you by your last name.

  “Coming,” I said.

  Pamela went back to her class, and I felt as though I were flying. For once in my life I had done something impulsive that had actually paid off. Every time my conscience reminded me that I had lied, I told myself I’d done it for Dad. He deserved her more than Mr. Sorringer did. If Jim Sorringer had really loved Miss Summers, I reasoned, he wouldn’t have gone off to California for his Ph.D. without marrying her first and taking her with him. It was while he was gone that I’d introduced her to Dad. If she married Dad, I’d devote the rest of my life to keeping her happy to make up for the lie.

  The hardest part was not telling anyone what I’d done. As soon as Lester got home from his class at the U, I grabbed him and swung him halfway around.

  “I saved this dance for you?” he quipped. “I thought you wanted me to stop the world and let you get off.”

  “Not anymore!” I said. “Something wonderful happened! Well, actually, something awful didn’t happen, and that’s the wonderful part.”

  “You had a test and could have flunked, but didn’t,” he guessed.

  “Mr. Sorringer bought a diamond for Miss Summers and she turned him down. He returned it to Karen’s father’s jewelry store. I can’t wait to tell Dad!”

  “You will not tell Dad!” Lester said sternly. “You’ve got to keep out of their love life, Al! How many times have I told you that?”

  “But what harm will it do? He’d love to know.”

  “Because one would assume that if it’s all over your school, Dad already knows about it, and if he’d wanted to share it with us, he would have told us. If he doesn’t know about it yet, he would be devastated to think that Sylvia didn’t tell him herself—that he had to find it out from you.”

  That made sense. Elizabeth called and we talked about it some more, and I said, “That just goes to show that couples can dance cheek to cheek and it doesn’t mean they’re trading bed partners.”

  There was silence from the other end. Uh-oh, I thought.

  “What?” said Elizabeth.

  “Trading bed partners,” I said meekly.

  “You mean … adultery?” she said.

  “I guess so. Exchanging wives for the night. Lester told me about it.”

  “Alice, I am never getting married! Never, never, never, never, never, never, never!” she wailed.

  “Me either,” I said, and we hung up.

  Five minutes later, when she recovered, she called back and remembered what she’d called me about in the first place. “When are we going to work on that commercial?” she asked.

  We were studying persuasive techniques in social studies, specifically commercials. How some were informative and useful, and others were heavy on fear mongering and misrepresentation of facts. The teacher had divided the class into six sections of five students each, and each section had to write and perform a commercial. Our group was composed of Elizabeth and me, Sam, Brian, and Jill.

  “I don’t know,” I told Elizabeth. “You want us all to come over there?”

  “Brian called and suggested we meet at your place. It’s hard to do stuff here with Nathan crying.”

  “Okay, tell him to come at eight and call Sam. I’ll call Jill,” I said.

  Lester had gone to a basketball game at the U with some of his buddies, and Dad said of course we could practice here. He seemed in a pretty good mood. A very good mood, in fact, and I couldn’t help but think that he knew all about Miss Summers and Mr. Sorringer. I gave him every opportunity to tell me when I said, “Well, you look like you got some good news today!” but all he said was, “That new clarinet instructor at the store is working out fine.”

  I was brushing my teeth around seven thirty when the doorbell rang. I hate it when people come early and you’re not ready. What if I’d been in the shower?

  “I’ll get it!” I called to Dad, and clattered downstairs, wiping my mouth on my sleeve. I opened the door, and there stood Patrick.

  “Patrick!” I said. “You’re back! How was Vermont?”

  “It was okay,” he said, but I’d never seen him look so serious. “Well, are you going to invite me in or not?”

  “Sure! Actually, a bunch of kids from social studies are coming in a half hour to practice a commercial. You can stay if you want.”

  He stepped into the hall and looked at his watch. “I’ll be gone,” he said. “I just wanted to know if you’d had a good time at the dance.”

  He’d seen!

  “Yeah, I did. The music was great. Everyone liked the combo,” I said.

  “How about Sam? Did he like it?”

  I didn’t answer, and Patrick said, “I asked someone who you were dancing with, and he said Sam Mayer. I’d never noticed him before, but I guess you had.”

  “He’s sort of quiet. He’s in Camera Club,” I told Patrick.

  “The guy who took your photo?”

  “Yes. Listen, Patrick, he asked me to dance, and what else could I do? You were onstage playing.”

  “That’s my fault?”

  “Patrick, what are we arguing about here? It’s nobody’s fault for anything. It was just a dance! I wasn’t exchanging bed partners or anything.”

  “What?” said Patrick.

  I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes, wondering if Dad was hearing all this from out in the kitchen. How did life get to be so complicated? If Elizabeth didn’t run off and join a nunnery, maybe I would!

  “You like him?” Patrick asked, and his voice was a bit softer.

  “Of course I like him. I like a lot of kids. I also like you, in case you didn’t know.”

  Patrick reached out, clasping my shoulders, and kissed me—a light, hesitant sort of kiss—and then he just studied my face. “Um … Crest,” he said, licking his lips. I wiped my mouth again, and we laughed. “All right,” he said. “See you around.”

  I watched him leave. I liked the long, lean look of him. I liked the way he usually knew what to do in public, his self-confidence. But I also liked Sam’s quietness. His smile.

  Is this what Miss Summers was going through? I wondered, except about one hundred times worse? I guess when you settle on one person, there are always things you have to give up. I had to admit I liked having two boys interested in me, yet it didn’t stop the sinking feeling that I was supposed to choose.

  When the other kids arrived, Brian and Sam had already written a draft of the script. Brian sort of took over as director. We had to demonstrate the different ways a commercial could be misleading, and would be graded according to how many of these we worked into the script: faulty correlations, incomplete data, fear engendering, appeal to vanity, and creating unreasonable expectations.

  Dad said hello to everyone and retreated back to the kitchen where he was baking bread.

  “So what have you got so far?” I asked Brian as he handed each of us a copy.

  “Boy meets girl, conflict, boy gets girl,” he said. “That’s it.”

  “What’s the product?” Jill wanted to know. I was afraid for a moment, knowing Brian, that it would have something to do with Jill’s large breasts, because they’re very obvious, and she’s obviously proud of them. In fact, I had nightmares that the commercial would start out with Elizabeth saying, “I wore a 32A cup bra until I tried Ex-pand,” and Jill would take her place and say, “And now I look like this.”

  “The product,” said Sam, pulling a tube of toothpaste from his pocket, over which he had taped, in black letters, THE WHITE STUFF, “is ‘The White Stuff’—the right stuff. Teeth whitener.”

  We laughed.

  “All you have to do is use this whitener on your teeth and you’ll have girls galore,” said Sam.

  “We need an announcer, a voice-over, a male, and two females,” Brian told us.

  We studied the parts and finally decided on Elizabeth and Jill for the female roles, Sam for the announc
er, Brian for the male role, and me for voice-over.

  I set up two card tables to look like news desks. I sat on one side of the hall doorway, Sam sat on the other.

  After we’d practiced a couple of times, we called Dad in for a sneak preview.

  “Lights! Camera! Action!” said Sam, and Brian came to the doorway and stood forlornly with his hands in his pockets.

  Sam: “Do you ever feel that life is passing you by because of your smile?”

  Brian gave a halfhearted smile, his lips clamped tightly together. He sure looked like a loser.

  Sam: “More specifically, do you feel that life passes you by because of your teeth? Dingy, where they should shine? Yellow, where they should gleam?”

  Brian nodded ruefully, one hand over his mouth, looking sheepish.

  Sam: “Do friends avoid you?”

  Elizabeth and Jill walked in from the hallway, took one look at Brian, and turned their backs on him, arms folded across their chests.

  Sam: “Bosses ignore you?”

  Brian held up a sign saying DEMOTION.

  Sam: “Strangers give you the cold shoulder?”

  Elizabeth and Jill left.

  Sam: “Don’t just stand there, brush with The White Stuff!”

  Me: “Brought to you by a subsidiary of the same company that makes your teeth brown in the first place, Smutty Smokes.”

  Sam: “Nine out of ten doctors …”

  Me: “Veterinarians, perhaps …”

  Sam: “… agree that The White Stuff is more effective …”

  Me: “Than what?”

  Sam: “… in making your teeth whiter, brighter in just ten days.”

  Brian smiled a full, idiotic smile, showing his teeth.

  Sam: “Leading doctors …”

  Me: “Make that, doctors leading their dogs, perhaps …”

  I heard Dad laugh.

  Sam: “… agree that if you use The White Stuff daily, you will notice a remarkable difference in only ten days.”

  Me: “A difference in what? Your teeth? Your weight? Your pocketbook?”

  Sam: “The boss will notice.”

  Brian held up another sign saying PROMOTION.

  Sam: “Friends will notice.”

  Jill and Elizabeth came back in and hung on to Brian’s arms, looking at him adoringly.

  Sam: “And you will increase your self-confidence and self-esteem.”

  Me: “That’s all it takes, folks, and your life will be perfect. Yeah, right!”

  Brian: (holding up the toothpaste tube) “The White Stuff. The right stuff! Never be without it.”

  Dad laughed and clapped. “Absolutely revolting,” he said. “Great job.”

  We read off all the categories—incomplete data, appeal to vanity, etc.—and Dad said we had covered all the bases.

  We fooled around after that. Jill and I did some variations of “Chopsticks” on the piano, and Sam had brought his camera, so he took close-ups of everybody. I guess if you’re a true photographer, you take a camera everywhere. I was already getting the idea that Sam was one of the best photographers in the Camera Club. I also noticed that he hung around my place for a while after the other kids left.

  “Who plays the piano here?” he asked. “You?”

  I laughed. “No, my dad. He’s manager of The Melody Inn. Everybody’s musical in my family except me. Of course, if I used The White Stuff …”

  Sam laughed, too. “The right stuff …”

  “… I’d be playing Chopin,” I told him.

  “How many in your family?” he wanted to know.

  “Three. Dad and Lester and me. Lester goes to the University of Maryland. He’s twenty-one. Senior year.” And then, because I didn’t want him to think Dad was divorced, I added, “Mom died when I was five.”

  “Oh,” said Sam.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Just Mom and me. She’s divorced,” said Sam.

  I had a terrible thought that Sam might try to get his mom and my dad together, so I said, “Dad’s been dating Miss Summers from school.”

  “Yeah?” Sam looked puzzled. “No kidding? I thought she and Sorringer were an item.”

  “Not anymore,” I said, but didn’t say anything else for fear Dad might hear us from the kitchen.

  When Sam had gone, Dad ambled in eating an apple. The smell of baking bread filled the house.

  “Another boyfriend?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Looks to me as though he likes you, Al.”

  “I guess he does. I like him, too. I mean, he’s okay. But I’ve got Patrick.”

  Dad didn’t say any more. Just sat down at the piano and thumbed through the pages of some new sheet music. Then he put his apple down and began practicing the Mozart sonata he’d been working on for a week. I curled up in one corner of the couch with my English assignment, but watched Dad’s fingers at the keyboard.

  I’ve got Patrick sounded so sure. So final. Maybe Dad didn’t say anything because he was trying to tell me that nothing is sure. Maybe I’d been looking at life like The White Stuff commercial, as though everything wonderful would follow if only I had a mother. Suppose it wasn’t like that at all? Sometimes, in fact, as Pamela would say, a mother can cause more problems than she solves. Of course, maybe Dad was looking at life that way, too, as though he had to have Sylvia Summers or nobody. Why wasn’t he dating other women?

  Well, maybe he was. I guess there was a time he and Janice Sherman went out for a while. And the summer we went to the beach, he’d been attracted to the woman in the beach house next door, I knew, but somehow that never worked out.

  “Dad,” I said.

  “Hmmm?” He went on playing, but slightly softer so he could hear me.

  “When you and Mom were married … did you ever swap wives with anyone?”

  Dad’s hands dropped from the keyboard and he turned slowly around on the piano bench. “What?”

  “Did you ever take Mom to a dance, maybe, and swap partners and dance cheek to cheek with somebody else’s wife, and then take somebody else’s wife home with you?”

  “Al, what on earth have you been watching on TV?” he asked.

  “That’s not real life?” I asked hopefully.

  “Not in this house it isn’t,” he told me.

  I took a deep breath and smiled. “That’s all I wanted to know,” I said.

  8

  DECISION

  AS FEBRUARY TURNED TO MARCH, I WAS too busy to worry much about Dad and Miss Summers. I had let all the other priorities on my list go neglected in my obsession with Miss Summers, and now that she’d turned down Sorringer’s ring, it was time to concentrate on other things.

  “I don’t know whether I want to be a psychologist or a psychiatrist; I’m getting to know Sam better, but I’m more confused than ever; I think I’m developing a potbelly; I haven’t done much for Lester lately; and my life’s a mess,” I said to Pamela when she called that night.

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” she said wryly. Our favorite saying. We were definitely into spring slump.

  The commercial had gone over well in social studies, though; Dad finished the income tax; I discovered in Camera Club that I took much better pictures of people than I did of scenes and objects, which helped confirm my feeling that I’d be happiest in a job working with people; Patrick and I had gone to the movies a couple of times; and I had long talks on Saturday mornings with Marilyn at The Melody Inn.

  I can talk with Marilyn about anything. Well, almost anything. I asked her once how long she was willing to wait for Lester, and she said, “Who’s waiting?” which sort of unnerved me.

  “What do you and Lester talk about when you’re out on a date?” I asked that first Saturday in March.

  “Excuse me?” she said, her eyes laughing.

  “I don’t mean the details,” I said hurriedly. “I mean, do you talk about the future or about things you’ve already done, or is it mostly about classes or what?”
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  “It’s about everything,” Marilyn told me, and I noticed how brown her eyes are. Brown eyes and long brown hair. She’s short and thin, but not skinny—just lean, like a girl who grew up in the mountains.

  “But … but how do you talk about the future without including each other in it? And if you include each other in it, aren’t you sort of committing?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, Alice,” she said. “We sort of dance around it without ever resolving anything.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Later, when I was stamping sheet music for Janice Sherman, I was thinking about how impossible it was to do anything with Sam without making Patrick jealous. I realized, of course, that if Patrick started getting interested in other girls, I’d probably be jealous, too.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” Janice said to me. “Do you realize you just stamped that last sheet upside down?”

  I quickly turned it right side up and did it over. “I was thinking about life,” I told her.

  Janice smiled. “That’s a big topic. Can you narrow it down a little?”

  “Love,” I told her. “I was thinking about how much easier things would be if nobody got jealous. If you could just wake up in the morning and pop an antijealousy pill.”

  “Well, maybe things would be easier, but then, what’s the point of love? Love is supposed to make you feel special, and how can you feel special if your beloved is treating other women the way he treats you?”

  She had a point. But was I really talking about love? I wondered. Did I really “love” Patrick? Or just like him a lot?

  “If two people just like each other, though, they should be able to date as many others as they want, shouldn’t they?” I asked.

  “Liking won’t do it for me, Alice,” Janice said, and she wasn’t smiling anymore. “If a man loves me, I expect him to forsake all others, just like the marriage vows say.”

  Oh, boy! I thought. I was talking about Patrick and me, and she was talking about her and Dad. Do you know what love is? It’s a food chain! A feeding frenzy! Janice has had a crush on Dad forever, he has a crush on Miss Summers, Miss Summers has a crush on somebody, we’re not sure who …

  On the bus Monday, I told Elizabeth and Pamela how unsettled I felt, and they said they were feeling the same way.