The Agony of Alice

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  ‘’What’s this for?” Lester asked.

  “Thanksgiving,” I told him. “Don’t you know any-thing?”

  Dad invited Janice Sherman from the Melody Inn to come to the restaurant with us for Thanksgiving because she’s single, and then he had to invite Loretta Jenkins, the birdbrain, because she’s single, too. Lester said it was the worst decision Dad ever made. Loretta’s a vegetarian and she kept stealing vegetables off Lester’s plate to fill her up.

  “What’s that?” she said. “A water chestnut? I love water chestnuts.” And she’d poke at it with her fork. “What’s that? A mushroom? I love mushrooms.” She’d wave her fork again at Lester.

  I like Loretta better than Janice, though. Janice is the one in the sheet music department who wears her glasses on a chain. I think she’s been in sheet music too long.

  When we sat down at the table and Janice saw the bouquet of flowers in the middle, she said, “What a symphony of color!”

  When the shrimp cocktails arrived, Janice said, “What a lovely overture to a meal!”

  When the pumpkin pie was served, she clasped her hands and said, “The grand finale!”

  “You know what, Dad?” Lester said when we’d taken them both back home. “You work with a couple of airheads.”

  I wondered about Mrs. Plotkin again and whether she would have come with us if I’d asked. I’ll bet Lester would have liked her better than Janice or Loretta.

  I told Dad it was a great Thanksgiving, though, because he was leaving the next morning for a three-day convention in New York. I went up in his room to help him pack.

  “What was Thanksgiving like when Momma was alive?” I asked, as I polished his shoes with an undershirt and put them in his bag.

  “Well, we always spent it with your Aunt Sally and Uncle Milt. We’d pack your high chair in the car, and your mother would feed you strained beets while the rest of us ate turkey.”

  I remembered watching a baby eat zweiback once in a restaurant, and it was disgusting.

  “I’ll bet I was a mess,” I said.

  “Yes, particularly when you got to the strained spinach,” Dad told me, and laughed.

  The thing about mothers, I was thinking, is that they like you regardless, no matter how repulsive you are. No matter how many stupid things you do. The thing about mothers, in fact, is that they keep you from doing a lot of dumb things in the first place. I couldn’t imagine Elizabeth Price or Charlene Verona doing some of the stupid things I had done. It didn’t seem fair that Charlene, who had a mother, also had Miss Cole for a teacher and got to use her nail polish.

  Dad left money so Lester and I could go to the Hot Shoppe the next night for dinner, but Lester’s girlfriend came over instead to cook for us.

  She was wearing a long skirt and a blouse with puffy sleeves and she looked absolutely beautiful, almost as pretty as Miss Cole. Lester had on jeans and an old sweatshirt and was walking around in his stocking feet.

  Marilyn had brought a wok with her. She showed me how to make stir-fried chicken and vegetables. It seemed as though she was unusually nice to me that night. We talked about all kinds of things, like how long it takes to get used to panty hose and how to take care of your cuticles. I didn’t even know I had cuticles. I set the table and sliced the bread she’d made, and just before dinner, I went upstairs and put on my long blue nightgown and my best blouse over the top, so I’d look like Marilyn. If Lester married her, I realized, she’d be my sister-in-law, and I wouldn’t even need Miss Cole.

  “What the heck have you got on?” Lester said when I sat down.

  “I think she looks lovely,” said Marilyn. “At least she’s wearing shoes.” Lester got up, slipped on his loafers, and came back to the table.

  I did everything Marilyn did. I spread my napkin over my lap, ate little tiny bites like she did, and rested my arms, not my elbows, on the table. When Lester made a joke, I even laughed delicately and tipped my head to one side. Lester looked at me strangely.

  Something was wrong, though, between Lester and Marilyn. Halfway through dinner, I could just tell. When Marilyn talked to me, she smiled, but when she talked to Lester, she looked sort of sad. Lester guessed something was wrong too, and the quieter Marilyn got, the more jokes he made; but it got to the place where I was the only one who was laughing. Finally I realized that Marilyn had come over to cook our dinner because she was going to break up with Lester and she was trying to make it easy on him. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I said I’d do the dishes and went out in the kitchen and closed the door, but now and then I still heard their voices.

  “We’re too different, Lester,” Marilyn said. “It just wouldn’t work.”

  Lester was saying something to her, but I couldn’t make out what. His voice was soft and urgent, the way he talks to Dad when he needs the car. And finally Marilyn’s voice again:

  “I’m sorry, Les, but I just want out.”

  A few minutes later Marilyn stuck her head in the kitchen to say good night to me, and then she left. I heard the sound of her car starting up, and then Lester went up to his room.

  I sat down at the kitchen table with my head in my hands. I wasn’t the only one who missed having a mother. If Momma were here right now, I bet she’d have gone up to Lester and said something nice. I thought of all the awful things I’d said to him in my lifetime and felt even worse. Finally I got up, took a Sprite from the refrigerator and a plate of gingersnaps, and went up to Lester’s room.

  I opened his door just a crack.

  “Can I come in?” I asked. He didn’t answer, so I went in. He was lying on his back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. I softly crossed the room and set the Sprite and cookies beside his bed.

  “I just wanted to make you feel better,” I said. “I’m sorry about Marilyn.” Lester looked at me and then stared at the ceiling some more.

  “Thanks,” he said finally.

  I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall and stayed there for a long time without saying anything. Lester didn’t even seem to know I was there. Now and then he’d sigh, a lonely sigh.

  “I miss her, too,” I said finally.

  Lester jumped when he heard me, and then he sat up. “You still here?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was thinking about Momma. I miss her, too.”

  “Well, I was thinking about Marilyn,” he said, and lay back down.

  “You want me to stay and talk?” I asked, and when he didn’t answer, I said, “There are other fish in the ocean.” I’d read that somewhere; it’s what you say to somebody when they lose a sweetheart. Lester still didn’t answer, so I said, “Someday you’ll look back on this and laugh.” I’d read that, too.

  Lester wasn’t laughing, however. I started to say, It’s always darkest before the light, but I didn’t. I changed the subject. “What was Momma like?” I asked him. “I can’t remember.”

  Lester put his hands behind his head. His voice was flat, but at least he was talking. “Well, she was tall, taller than Dad. She wore slacks a lot, I remember that. Long legs. Reddish-blond hair. Freckles on her arms. She used to sing songs from musicals—from Showboat— that was her favorite. Used to sing when she did the ironing.”

  I tried to imagine this mother, but somehow she didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. She was tall, and I’m only average. I don’t have any freckles at all, and I can’t carry a tune, either.

  I thought again about Marilyn and how nice she would have been as my sister-in-law.

  “I’m sorry about Marilyn, Lester, I really am,” I told him.

  “So am I,” he said, and smiled a little bit. Then he reached for the Sprite, and I realized that we had had an entire conversation without being rude to each other once.

  I got out the poster that night to bring my life up to date. I had been writing in my journal regularly, but I hadn’t wanted to see how long my “Backward” list was getting. Before I could lose my nerve, I picked up the pencil and wrote, “Kicked Miss Co
le,” in the right-hand column. Then, under the “Forward” list, I wrote:

  Cleaned Mrs. Plotkin’s cupboard

  Was polite to Marilyn

  Was kind to Lester

  For the first time, the “Forward” column was ahead.

  On December first, Mrs. Plotkin collected our journals to see how we were doing. All but a few pages of mine were paper-clipped together. I didn’t want her to read about Donald Sheavers. I didn’t want her to know about my seeing Patrick in his underwear, either. I certainly didn’t want her to read about how disappointed I was that I didn’t get Miss Cole for a teacher. The only other things I let her read were about how upset my father got when I confused memories of Momma with Aunt Sally, how I felt about Marilyn breaking up with Lester, and what happened on Halloween.

  We had to read fifteen pages in our social studies books that afternoon, and while we were reading, Mrs. Plotkin checked through our journals. I kept lifting my eyes to see when she got to mine. All the journals looked alike on the outside, but mine was the only one with paper clips holding the pages together.

  Mrs. Plotkin picked it up at last. She skipped over the paper-clipped pages and read the others slowly, taking her time. I squirmed. I was glad when she went on to someone else’s journal.

  At two thirty, Mrs. Plotkin read to us aloud. She had finished Sounder and a book called The Incredible Journey, and just before Thanksgiving had started Watership Down. We were already on chapter five:

  “‘It was getting on toward moonset when they left the fields and entered the wood. Straggling, catching up with one another, keeping more or less together, they had wandered over half a mile down the fields, always following the course of the brook. … ’”

  No matter what happened to me during the day, the half hour at the end, when Mrs. Plotkin read to us, helped make up for it. When she read, her voice made pictures of the words. She read with such expression that we knew instantly what a character was feeling. The first week I was in her class, I had pretended I was doing my homework all the while she was reading. She never said anything, never paused in icy silence the way some teachers would have done. She simply read, and let the words lure me to the story. It seemed to me now impossible that I could have been so rude. It also seemed a shame that someone as kind as Mrs. Plotkin had to be so homely. Life is unfair, I scribbled on my desktop.

  As usual, when the bell rang at three, the whole class groaned in dismay that the story was interrupted. But Mrs. Plotkin smiled as she closed the book. “We’ll hear some more tomorrow,” she promised. Then she handed back our journals.

  I stood at my desk for a moment, thumbing through the pages to see if all the paper clips were still there. And suddenly my eye caught something that Mrs. Plotkin had written in the margin. It was on the page about Marilyn breaking up with Lester, and how we both missed having a mother.

  Alice McKinley, you have a gift for words! Mrs. Plotkin had said. Thank you for sharing that gift with me.

  I stared down at the paper, then up at Mrs. Plotkin. She was smiling. I closed my journal and smiled back, then walked quickly out the door and home, too embarrassed to stay. It was the first time in my life that I had felt embarrassed and happy, both at the same time.

  10

  THE BRAMBLE BUSH, WITH BRANCHES THICK

  I WAS BEGINNING TO FEEL A LITTLE BIT special. When Charlene Verona told me how Miss Cole had let her try on her slingback pumps, and Elizabeth showed me the whistle Mr. Weber had made for her out of a piece of bamboo, it didn’t sound like much to say, “Mrs. Plotkin likes my journal!” so I didn’t. I just kept it to myself while Charlene and Elizabeth tried to outdo each other:

  “Miss Cole wears Cinnamon Coral lipstick,” Charlene would say.

  “Mr. Weber has a sailboat. He said if the weather’s good, he’ll take us out on it on the overnight,” Elizabeth would say right back.

  “Miss Cole’s got a CD player in her sports car, and she let me hear it over the lunch hour.”

  “Mr. Weber’s writing a song about our school, and he’s going to play it for us on his guitar.”

  After they’d gone on for about five minutes or so, they’d look at me to see if I was going to bawl or anything, but I didn’t.

  I guess this was the first time I had ever felt close to a teacher. I know that cleaning Mrs. Plotkin’s blackboard wasn’t much compared to wearing Miss Cole’s slingback pumps or listening to music in her sports car, but it was better than anything I’d had before, and I couldn’t believe how much I looked forward to it.

  Every day after school, as soon as the bell rang, I’d put some water in a bucket and start washing the blackboard. If Mrs. Plotkin was grading tests or making out her attendance report, I’d work quietly without bothering her, and she’d just smile at me when I left. It was the kind of smile you could take home with you and keep overnight. But if she was ordering supplies or checking spelling papers, we’d talk while she was working.

  “How about thumbtacks, Alice?” she’d say. “Do we have enough of those?” and then I’d go look.

  Sometimes we’d talk about all the different places we’d lived. I told her how I used to eat strained beets at my Aunt Sally’s when we lived in Chicago, and she told me how she and her husband had lived in Missouri, Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Maryland. Then we’d find those states on her big globe. It was sort of nice to think that the very years I was living in Illinois, Mrs. Plotkin was right next door in Wisconsin.

  Of all the jobs, I liked dusting the best. I especially liked dusting the globe. It was an old globe, as big as a beach ball, and there were raised places for the mountains and dents for the valleys, and sometimes I’d take a Q-tip and clean out the valleys really good. The globe was so old, though, that it was cracking, and not just along the seam; there was a jagged line all the way from Alaska to the tip of South America. Sometimes, at the end of a school year, teachers give away stuff that’s old and cracked. I was given some old green chalk once, and a history book with the cover missing. I began to hope that Mrs. Plotkin would give me her old globe. I even knew where I would set it on my dresser.

  By early December, I found myself wishing I wouldn’t be called for patrol duty at all so I could help Mrs. Plotkin every day. And then something happened. Pamela Jones moved in on my territory.

  I knew that Pamela didn’t like me much after the way I had walked out on her at the Halloween parade, and I guess she decided that if anyone was going to be special in Mrs. Plotkin’s class it was Pamela Jones. Because the next thing I knew, Pamela was racing to fill the bucket before I got there after school. If I reached the bucket first, Pamela would find some corner of the blackboard I’d missed and scrub it hard. If I watered the plants, she’d come along behind me with a paper towel for any drops I happened to spill. When she started rearranging the supply cupboard that I had worked so hard to clean, however, I wanted the earth to open and swallow her up.

  “There’s plenty of work for both of you,” Mrs. Plotkin would say, and think up extra things to do. But that wasn’t the point at all. I wanted Mrs. Plotkin to myself. I wanted that hour or so each day to be our own special time. I liked our talks, about where we used to live and everything. Pamela was ruining it all.

  One day when she was dusting, Pamela said, “Mrs. Plotkin, did you know there’s a crack in the globe?”

  “Yes, dear,” Mrs. Plotkin said. “That globe was always one of my favorites, but it’s very old and I’m just hoping it will hold up until June.”

  “I love globes.” Pamela sighed. “I always wanted one of my own. I love learning about other countries and people and mountains and things.”

  My throat felt so tight I thought I was going to choke.

  “Well, someday I hope you’ll have a chance to do some traveling and actually visit other places,” Mrs. Plotkin answered.

  She had made no promise about the globe, but Pamela had put in her bid, and I was so angry it made me dizzy. I glared at Pamela, but she just gave me a haughty smi
le and patted the globe as if it were hers already.

  It was getting close to the holidays and the annual school pageant. Mrs. Plotkin said that every year the three sixth grades put on a play for the primary classes and that she was going to direct it. Suddenly I got this wild hope that maybe she would pick me for a leading role.

  A list of characters went up on the bulletin board outside our classroom, and sixth graders were supposed to sign up for the parts they wanted. If several wanted the same part, Mrs. Plotkin said, there would be tryouts. I crowded around the list with all the others. Woodcutter, it said; an old woman;a rock; five soldiers; a bear; three daughters; seven dancing mice. …

  Beside each character it told what the requirements for the part would be. I searched the list for the three daughters:

  Rosebud, Violet, and Marigold: singing required.

  My heart fell. I scanned the list again. I didn’t want to be a bear or an old woman or one of the seven dancing mice. I didn’t want to be part of the stage crew, either. I wanted to be Rosebud, Violet, or Marigold even more than I wanted Mrs. Plotkin’s globe.

  Tryouts were the following day, and I watched glumly as Elizabeth Price, Charlene Verona, and Pamela Jones walked off with the choice parts. I sat staring down at my knees.

  “Alice,” said Mrs. Plotkin, “I don’t see your name here. What would you like to be?”

  I knew I had to be something.

  “A tree,” I said.

  While Pamela, Elizabeth, and Charlene were dancing around singing, I wanted to stand there with no expression whatsoever.

  “A tree?” said Mrs. Plotkin, checking the list. “I don’t see one listed, Alice. There’s a bramble bush. How about that?”

  I nodded.

  Mrs. Plotkin studied me. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” I said dryly. “All my life I’ve wanted to be a bush.”

  My one chance to be a star, and I couldn’t take it because I couldn’t sing. I thought about Momma and the way she used to sing songs from Showboat, the way Lester said. If she were alive, I’ll bet she would have taught me. How could it be that things had suddenly started going all right in Mrs. Plotkin’s room and now they were all falling apart again?