Almost Alice

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  “I almost wish she hadn’t gotten a part,” Tim said as we sat together in the auditorium after school, watching another rehearsal. “Almost, but not quite. I’m glad for her, sure, but it’s like she’s turned into this … robot. Press a button and she sings. Press another and she eats. Press another and she—”

  “Never mind,” I said quickly. “It’ll all be over in three more weeks.”

  There had been rehearsals every day, often well into the evening. Since I’d volunteered to help paint some of the sets, most of my work would be done ahead of time. I didn’t have to adjust the lighting or tweak the sound. Molly had enlisted so many volunteers—everyone wanted to help Molly—that the props were well taken care of, so some of the time I was able to go home pretty early while Pamela had another hour or two of practice yet to go.

  If Tim hadn’t been at a restaurant celebrating his mom’s birthday on Saturday, I don’t know when we would have had Pamela to ourselves. The minute Gwen found out she had a free Saturday night, she invited Pamela, Liz, and me to sleep over.

  “I really should be studying for that French test,” Pamela told me as I drove to Gwen’s in Dad’s car, Liz in the backseat.

  “Pam, you’ve got to relax a little! You’re so tight, you’re going to snap a string!” Liz told her. “You’re starting to get lines on your forehead.”

  Pamela reached for her bag and pulled out a mirror, trying to see herself in the dark interior of the car. When we got to the Wheelers’, we told Gwen not to let her in until she smiled, and Pamela finally got the message.

  Gwen’s mom had made paella and a salad, and we heaped our plates with shrimp and sausage and mussels and took over the family room. Mrs. Wheeler stood in the doorway in jeans and a T-shirt. She works at the Justice Department and puts in long hours on weekdays—sometimes Saturdays, too—so I don’t usually see her in anything but a suit.

  “There’s some mint chocolate chip in the freezer, but I can only guarantee it till eleven or so, when the guys get home,” she said. “They went to a movie.”

  “Great paella!” I told her. “Seconds?”

  “As long as it lasts,” she said, laughing. “When those boys get home, everything that’s not nailed down gets devoured. Be careful they don’t fall over you. Bill’s idea of indoor lighting is to turn on the TV.”

  Gwen’s grandmother—“Granny,” Gwen calls her—was watching TV in her own little apartment at the back of the house, and we took some ice cream in to her before we settled down for the evening.

  “You remember my friends?” Gwen asked her. “Elizabeth, Pamela, and Alice?”

  Granny looked up from the TV Guide for a moment, pointed to the screen, and said, “That program should never be on TV. I don’t like it.”

  On the screen a drunken couple had just taken off in a car they had hijacked.

  “Then don’t watch it, Granny. Turn it off,” said Gwen.

  “If I turn it off, someone else will watch it,” said the little woman in the pink sweater and the glasses at the end of her nose. She studied us over the rims. “You girls don’t watch this, do you?”

  “What is it?” asked Liz.

  Granny looked at the TV Guide again. “Prime Crime,” she said. “If you run out of bad things to do, you just turn on this program. I never saw such trash.”

  Gwen picked up the remote and changed the channel, but Granny grabbed for it. “It’s only the ending that’s good,” she said. “The villains always get it in the end, but what they’ve been doing in the meantime is something we don’t need to know a thing about.”

  Gwen leaned down and kissed her on the cheek as she set the ice cream on the little stand beside her. “Well, if you insist on watching it, don’t come crying to me if you have nightmares,” she teased.

  Granny thought that over for a moment or two, then smiled. “Nice to meet you, girls,” she said, wanting to get back to her program. “And, Gwen, say a prayer for your Uncle Albert. He’s got himself a new car, and you know how he drives.”

  We were smiling too as we left Granny’s apartment.

  We hunkered back down in the family room with our ice cream, and the first hour was filled with gossip—who went where and said what—then boyfriend biz, mostly about Tim. I sort of wanted to keep my feelings about Patrick to myself for a while, and though Liz had gone out with a couple guys since the Sadie Hawkins dance, she didn’t have a boyfriend, and Gwen had sworn off guys till summer.

  “The problem,” Gwen said, “is that I want a guy around when it’s convenient for me, and I don’t want him around when I’m studying or doing family stuff. No guy’s going to put up with that.”

  “A guy who’s as serious as you are, maybe,” I told her.

  “Gwen, if you could choose any guy you wanted, what would he be like?” Liz asked.

  “Hmmm.” Gwen leaned back against the couch, palms resting beside her on the rug. “He would absolutely have to have a goal. I wouldn’t want any guy who doesn’t have a picture of where he wants to be ten years from now.”

  “Really?” said Pamela. “I want to be on Broadway, but that doesn’t mean I’ll get there.”

  “I’m not interested in guys who are content to just let life happen,” said Gwen. “I want a guy with plans.”

  “Then you should be dating Patrick,” I said.

  “Don’t think I haven’t considered it,” she said, and laughed.

  I was curious. “Did he ever ask you out?”

  “No, but I was tempted to ask him out a time or two. Back when you were going out with Sam. But Patrick was never around long enough to ask, it seemed. Dad thinks I ought to stick to guys my own race—less hassle—while Mom says go with your heart. But don’t worry.” She nudged me. “Everyone knows that Patrick belongs to you.”

  “What do you mean, everyone knows?” I asked. “He was going with Marcie for a while, remember? And with Penny? What’s this ‘he belongs to me’ business?”

  Gwen took another swallow of her Pepsi to hide a smile. “Oh, it’s just that he has ‘Alice’ engraved on his forehead or something. Anyway …” She got up. “Let’s do something different.” There was a computer at one end of the family room, and she slipped in a software program that invited you to sing along to an accompaniment—words on the screen—then it would rate your performance. If you got a good score, you’d hear applause; the higher the score, the louder the applause. If you bombed, you’d get boos.

  “Let’s each try it,” said Pamela, adding, “Not you, Alice. You’re excused.”

  I was grateful for that, because they know I can’t sing. But it was a blast listening to the three of them. Gwen went first. She chose country music. The guitar accompaniment played “She’s Stolen My Man,” and Gwen was awful. She’s got a good voice—she sings with her church choir—but this time she gave the words a nasal twang and let her voice slide from note to note till we were hooting with laughter. She also purposely sang off-key, Pamela told me. I wouldn’t know. Pamela says that’s even more difficult to do than singing the right way. Gwen got a chorus of boos at the end, and that encouraged Liz to do a love song to violins. She put a lot of drama into it and got a good score, so we clapped and cheered along with the canned applause.

  Finally Pamela got up to sing one of Adelaide’s songs, “Pet Me, Poppa,” and she did it up royally, the original sex kitten. We were all really into it by now, and we were shouting and cheering as she moved suggestively about the floor. Then she got down on her hands and knees, mewing like a cat, wiggling her hind end, and suddenly, out in the hall, we heard a male voice say, “What is it?” And one of Gwen’s brothers walked in.

  Pamela rolled herself into a ball of embarrassment and wouldn’t uncurl even though the song was over and the computer audience was cheering.

  “Hey, Jerry!” Gwen laughed. “I want you to meet Adelaide. Adelaide, this is my brother Jerome.”

  And then Pamela, with the Brooklyn accent that only she can imitate, uncoiled herself, held out one
limp hand, fingers down, as though offering it to be kissed, and said, “Hello, big guiiy. Pleased t’meetcha.”

  Jerry laughed.

  “Where’s Bill?” Gwen asked.

  “Deena came along, so he’s with her,” said Jerry. Both of Gwen’s brothers are in college, though they’re not as old as Lester. “Anything left from dinner?”

  “Paella for one,” Gwen said, and Jerry disappeared.

  Gwen’s folks had gone to bed, so we settled down about midnight and got into our sleeping bags. Pam was the first one asleep. She’s a noisy sleeper and hates it when we tell her she snores. I could tell that Gwen fell asleep next, because I could hear her slow, steady breathing a few feet away from me.

  I lay there feeling a little sad that I couldn’t sing. It must have been fun hamming it up like that. Performing in front of your friends. I’ve missed some good times because of it—Christmas carols, joining in on “Happy Birthday,” high school musicals, chorus.… The thing is, I’m so bad, so tone-deaf, I can’t even tell the difference. I’d get a chorus of boos, but it wouldn’t be funny.

  My mind wandered back to the early embarrassment in grade school when I sang and was terrible but didn’t know it. Kids stared at me at parties when the birthday song came around, and a music teacher once tried to figure out who was ruining “America the Beautiful.”

  I was on the verge of sleep when I heard soft voices coming from the hallway and the almost imperceptible close of a door.

  My eyes popped open, and I remembered I was on the floor of the Wheelers’ family room. Somebody was coming in. Any minute the light would come on, and I braced myself.

  The murmurs continued, but there was no light.

  “They don’t know I’m here, Bill.”

  “So? I’m not going to wake them up to tell them.”

  “What if your dad comes down?”

  “He won’t. He sleeps like the dead.”

  “Your mom?”

  “I’ll turn on the TV. So we’re watching TV… .”

  A girl’s giggle. “At one in the morning? What are we supposed to be watching?”

  “The Weather Channel?”

  More giggles. Murmurs.

  Omigod! I thought. Bill was here with his girlfriend, and any second now I was going to get a foot in the face.

  I coughed.

  “What …?” Bill’s voice.

  “Somebody’s here!” The girl’s frantic whisper.

  “Mom?” Bill said tentatively.

  I lowered my voice. “Go to bed,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Bill! Your mom’s on the sofa! Come on! Let’s go!”

  “Uh … I’m just taking Deena home,” said Bill.

  “Good,” I answered.

  There were hurried footsteps in the hallway. The soft opening and closing of the front door. Then I heard Liz’s giggle from the other side of me.

  “Alice, you were great!” she said. We rolled into each other, suppressing our laughter, and didn’t tell the others till morning.

  When we went in for breakfast around eleven, Mr. Wheeler was in his robe scrambling eggs for us.

  “Your mother upset with me or something?” he asked Gwen as he set a plate of sausages on the table.

  “You’re asking me?” Gwen said. “Not that I know of.”

  “Well, I passed Bill in the hall this morning, and he murmured something about her sleeping on the couch last night. I thought she was in bed with me the whole time.”

  It was all we could do to keep our faces straight.

  “Guess you’ll have to talk that over with Mom,” Gwen said.

  On Monday, long-awaited Monday, after a year and a half of waiting for this Monday, I went to the orthodontist after school, and he removed my braces.

  Eighteen months of Metal Mouth. Five hundred and forty days of catching spinach, corn, chicken—every edible thing—in my braces, of feeling that pull on my teeth, the soreness of my gums, the intrusion of wire when I kissed.

  “Now,” said Dr. Wiley when the last wire was removed, “look at that smile!” He handed me a mirror.

  I grinned like the Cheshire cat, but to tell the truth, I didn’t see that much of a difference. A straighter tooth here, maybe. A little less space between teeth there. But he said I now had a healthier mouth, a perfect alignment, a better bite, and my teeth could grow as God intended. And I wondered why God didn’t make them grow right in the first place. But the orthodontist was happy, so I was happy. And I half regretted some of the remarks I’d made to him when I was most miserable. I especially regretted bleeding on his chair once during my period.

  “Now, here’s the thing,” he told me, and his face was serious. “You must wear your retainer at least twelve hours a day, Alice, or your teeth will grow back like they used to be. Wear it at night, wear it at school, but you can take it out when you eat and for special occasions.”

  That’s really all I wanted to hear—that I didn’t have to wear my retainer to the prom.

  “Gorgeous!” Sylvia told me when I got home. “Now you can do a full frontal smile.”

  I gave my full frontal smile to everyone I met the next day. I laughed at every joke, ran my tongue over my teeth for emphasis, ate an apple, and only one person noticed.

  “What’s so funny?” Patrick asked when he caught me grinning uncontrollably, and I guessed then that it was time to stop.

  12

  911

  On April 11 the GSA had members stationed at all the school entrances to pass out armbands to anyone who wanted to show support for gays and lesbians to be who they are without having to hide it. There were also printed sheets explaining what the Day of Silence was all about in case anyone had missed my article. A few of the kids in the GSA wore tape over their mouths to emphasize their presence.

  It was sort of a relief to go all day without talking, I discovered. Gwen wore an armband, but neither Liz nor Pamela took one, I noticed. I didn’t ask them about it, but Pamela volunteered that it might be confusing to friends who knew she was going out with Tim. Liz simply said that if she couldn’t answer questions in class, it might affect her grades. I guess all of us can think of excuses when we don’t want to do something, but I know that this was an issue they would have to decide on personally; the GSA wasn’t out to change people’s minds with a wrench.

  The teachers noticed which of us were wearing armbands and didn’t ask us questions, and at lunch a bunch of GSA members sat together, so we wouldn’t be tempted to talk to other friends.

  What would it be like, I’d asked in my article, to have a secret so basic about who you really are and to feel you had to hide that part of yourself? What if I felt like a fraud, a phony? That I was pretending to be something I wasn’t? What if I suddenly found myself on a planet where lesbians were the norm, and everyone kept trying to hook me up with a girl? How would I feel?

  Most of the kids got it, I think. A couple of the guys who wore tape over their mouths got grins and a few jeers, but several people gave me the thumbs-up sign in the halls because of my article, and I found a note in my locker saying it was a good piece.

  There was a little “breaking of silence” ceremony at the end of the day in the auditorium. Probably half the kids ditched and went to Ben & Jerry’s, but the other half listened to Mr. Morrison explain how this would be an annual observance at our school, how it was intended to end bullying and harassment of gay students. He thanked us for participating and said that we were part of a national movement to send the message that hate would not be tolerated.

  I looked forward to talking again when I got home, and the first conversation I had was with Aunt Sally, who called to ask if we had moved into our new addition yet. I described the rooms in detail.

  “They sound lovely! I’ll bet you’re almost too busy to enjoy them, though, with all those extra things going on at school,” she said.

  “But guess what?” I told her. “I’m the new features editor for our school paper!” And I explai
ned how Jacki Severn had quit and how Miss Ames wouldn’t take her back. “The features editor plans the more in-depth articles we publish in each issue,” I said.

  “Features editor! Think of it!” said Aunt Sally. “Oh, your mother would have been so proud of you, dear! Those features are the best part of any newspaper! Of course, some features go a little deeper than they have to, but then, that’s what newspapers do, I guess.”

  “Well, if you have any good ideas, let me know,” I said.

  “Why, I’ve got a good idea already,” Aunt Sally said. “I think that every newspaper should have a column called ‘The Answer Woman,’ and that could be you.”

  I didn’t know how to tell her that columns weren’t considered features and that the last thing anyone would call me, least of all myself, was “The Answer Woman.”

  “Um … what do you mean?” I asked.

  “Anybody could write in and ask a question; the Answer Woman would research it, and then she’d answer in the next issue,” Aunt Sally explained. “And these would have to be the kinds of answers you couldn’t always find on the Internet.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like why is it that you can buy canned apricots with seeds only if they’re peeled? If you want them unpeeled, they’re cut in half and missing the seeds, and seeds give them flavor,” Aunt Sally said.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Why do you never see dead rabbits in the street? That’s another question. You see dead squirrels, but when did you ever see a run-over rabbit?”

  “Well, I …”

  “And speaking of squirrels, did you ever see a baby squirrel? You see baby rabbits hopping through the tiger lilies in your yard, but when did you ever see a tiny squirrel skittering down a tree? Never.”

  She was right about that.

  “Why can you say ‘A girl whose clothes …,’ but you can’t say ‘A house whose windows …’? Did an English teacher ever explain why there’s no word like ‘whose’ for an inanimate object? And don’t get me started on sex… .”