I decided to stay out of it. I’d heard it before. This was Polly’s first time.
“Well, you’re definitely not a Sandy,” Polly said, frowning. “And I know a very snotty girl named Alex, so that’s out. And as for Zandra—” Polly turned her thumbs down. “That’s for a phony, and I know you, Al, you’re no phony,” Polly said.
“What else is there? I can’t pick something entirely different. I have to stay in the Al range.”
“Al is you in a nutshell,” Polly said. “True blue, down to earth, no fooling around. You look like an Al.”
I could tell from Al’s face that Polly had unwittingly struck again. When Al was agitating about mailing her famous letter to Brian, like when should she mail it, what day would it arrive, etc., Polly got impatient and said, “Just mail the dumb thing,” or something like that. I’ll never forget Al’s face when Polly said that. For a basically tactful person, Polly can be blunt at times.
“I told you!” Al wailed. “Just plain Al. That’s me. When I’m an old lady in my rocking chair, I’ll still be just plain Al. That’s very depressing, you know that? How’d you like to be just plain anything?”
I could see her point. And I could see Polly knew she’d blown it.
“Listen, with three great minds at work,” Polly tried to soothe Al, “I’m sure we’ll come up with something. What’s your middle name, Al?”
“I’m not telling,” Al said.
“She’s just trying to help,” I said.
Al mumbled something. “Speak up,” I said. Finally Al said, “Agnes,” in a loud voice. Then louder. “Agnes!” she shouted. “It’s Agnes! Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”
Both Polly and I knew when to quit. Polly brought out her chocolate brownie pudding for dessert.
“Calorie city,” Al said, smacking her lips. On the way home she said, “I must’ve put on five pounds tonight.”
“It’s only baby fat,” I told her.
“When you hit fourteen, it’s gross, grown-up fat, kid,” Al said. “What do you know? You’re skinny. You don’t know squat about being fat. People who’ve never been fat should keep their mouths shut. If you ask me, that is.”
I opened my mouth to say I hadn’t asked her, then closed it. I was beginning to wish Al would stay thirteen. For a while, anyway. This change of life stuff was getting rough. It looked to me as if the brook and the river were rising to flood stage and Al had better practice her backstroke, as well as her crawl.
chapter 6
My mother brought me home a dress from the thrift shop in a brown paper bag. Like a salami sandwich. It cost five bucks. I didn’t want to like it, but even before I tried it on, I did. Then when I actually put it on and turned in front of my mother’s full-length mirror, I tried not to smile. It was perfect. Oh, my basic stick figure was there, all right, lurking under the folds of striped taffeta, but still, I looked pretty neat. The dress did things for me.
My mother sat back on her heels, surveying the pinnedup hem.
“I must say I outdid myself,” she said smugly.
“It’s still too long,” I said.
“Absolutely perfect. You’re all set.”
“How about shoes? And panty hose?”
“Shoes? Panty hose?” my mother repeated as if I’d spoken in Arabic.
“Well,” I told her, “my dress was practically free, after all, and you don’t expect me to go to the Rainbow Room in sneakers, do you? And I can’t very well go barefoot, either. So what do you suggest?”
“Don’t get snippy,” my mother warned me.
Al rang her special ring. I let her in. “How do you like it?” I whirled for her benefit. “It’s the bargain of the century. My mother is very pleased with herself for finding it. Come on into her room. She’s shortening it.”
If I hadn’t been so entranced with myself, I would’ve noticed Al’s grim expression. She stomped along behind me as I led her to my mother’s boudoir. That’s French for bedroom.
“Hello, Al,” my mother greeted her.
Al said hello back. She didn’t go into her routine about not being called Al any more. She simply plopped into my mother’s boudoir chair, another thrift-shop bargain. The chair’s bottom gave way, and Al’s bottom hit the floor with an enormous thud.
“Oh, my gosh!” she cried, struggling to escape the chair’s clutching arms. “I’m sorry! I’ll pay to get it fixed. I’m so sorry!”
“It’s not your fault, Al,” said my mother, stretching out a hand to help her up. “It’s needed fixing for some time. Don’t worry about it.”
“Boy, that’s a relief. I thought I’d totaled it. I’m such a klutz.”
“No, you’re not,” my mother said. To me she said, “Please take off your dress, and watch the pins. I’ll get to it tonight.”
After my mother made off with my dress over her arm, I stood in my underwear and watched Al pace.
“What’s eating you?” I asked. In a minute she’d have to go to the bathroom.
“How’d you like my dress? My mother got it at the thrift shop. For five bucks. It’s really spiffy, don’t you think? I didn’t want to let on how much I liked it or she’ll never buy me anything in a department store ever again,” I said laughing.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Al said. “Excuse me.”
When she came back I told her I was getting heels and panty hose tomorrow. “What are you going to wear?” I said. “Did your mother bring you home anything yet?”
“What for?” Al went over to the window and stared out.
“For Saturday night is what for,” I reminded her. “For your birthday dinner.”
Al turned and looked at me.
“It’s off,” she said glumly.
“What do you mean? What’s off?” I knew in my heart what she meant, but I had to hear her say it.
“No Rainbow Room. No celebration. Nada. I’ll be lucky to get a burger at Burger King.”
I couldn’t speak. I was stunned.
“Stan, the one who was taking us there,” Al said, “well, he had to go to Europe for a couple of weeks. He told my mother we’ll do it when he gets back. I say forget the whole thing. My mother says she’ll take us, but I told her no. It’s too expensive. It’s not worth it. It’s too much money. And for what?” Al whirled on me and I backed off, arms crossed on my chest, suddenly cold.
“For a single lousy dinner, that’s what. With all the people starving in the world, who needs it?”
“That’s OK,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment, “we’ll think of something to do to celebrate.”
Al trudged to the door as if her red shoes weighed a ton. “Hope you’re not too disappointed.”
“Hey, it’s your birthday, not mine,” I said.
“I’m sorry I made such a big deal out of it.”
“It’s OK,” I said again. “Is your mother mad?”
“Mad at who?”
“Stan.”
“He can’t always call the shots. He’s always hopping on a plane to go somewhere. He’s an international banker.”
“That’s why he makes megabucks,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess. Anyway, I’ll just curl up with a good book. Beats indigestion, huh?” Al’s eyes reminded me of a picture I’d seen of a baby deer caught in a trap: huge, liquid, sad. She did a couple of halfhearted bumps and grinds, but without her usual flair.
“I eat too much, anyway,” she said. “Have a weird day.”
“You, too,” I told her.
After she’d gone, I stayed put, telling myself not to be a baby. It was her birthday, not mine, as I’d said. Good thing my mother bought the dress for a measly five bucks. Good thing she hadn’t sprung for fifty.
I don’t know who felt worse, Al or me.
I’ll probably never know.
chapter 7
“Maybe they’re mad at me,” Al said. We were walking downtown to save bus fare. We planned on giving the money we’d saved to the needy. It was Al’s idea.
“I bet they won’t remember my birthday.” Al was talking about her father and Louise and why she hadn’t heard from them.
“It’s not your birthday yet, don’t forget,” I told her. “How come you’re making a Federal case out of turning fourteen? I think it’d be a neat age to be. You get to do all kinds of things you can’t do when you’re thirteen.”
“What?”
“I can’t think of anything right now. My mother says thirty’s the worst birthday. She said when she hit thirty, she felt ready for the old folks’ home.”
We waited for the red light to change.
“Maybe Brian will send you a birthday card,” I said.
Al let out a mammoth Bronx cheer, scattering some pigeons freeloading on the sidewalk. My grandfather is the only person I know who can do a better Bronx cheer than Al. He says they used to call it a raspberry. It’s something you do with your lips and tongue that makes a loud, rude noise. I’m not very good at it. I practice sometimes when I’m alone but don’t seem to get much better.
“He won’t even know it is my birthday,” Al said. “How will he know? Unless, of course, he runs into Louise at the store and she says, ‘Oh, Brian’—Al imitated Louise’s voice—‘Sunday is Al’s birthday.’ Then Brian says, ‘Al, Al, who’s she? Oh, yeah, the fat one with the glasses.’”
“Who says your self-confidence level is low?” I asked her sarcastically. “Whoever says that is a total nerd.” Al is always taking tests in magazines to determine her level of self-confidence. Usually she ends up with a rating of “low,” or sometimes, if she cheats a little, she gets a “medium.” I crossed my eyes at her and she burst out laughing. Good. I had made her laugh at herself, no small feat.
“Hey, cool!” Al spied two slinky leather dresses with sequins on them, one black, one red, in a shopwindow. We blew on the glass and wrote our initials in the fog. “Too bad we’re not going to the Rainbow Room. That would be perfect.”
“Yeah, you could buy the red and I’d buy the black,” I said.
“Or better yet,” Al said, “we can come back here tonight and break the glass and just reach in and take ’em.”
Two women who were standing beside us making clucking sounds of dispproval at the leather dresses turned to stare at us. When they heard what Al said about breaking in, the women clutched their shoulder bags, looked alarmed, and backed away from us.
Refreshed by this encounter, we sauntered along Fifth Avenue, hoping we’d run into Rudy. He plays the violin on corners along Fifth Avenue. He is a first-rate violin player. Sometimes he migrates over to Broadway. Broadway’s his favorite, he says, but the tips are better on Fifth. Rudy can play just about anything. “Just name me a tune and it’s yours,” he likes to say.
Sure enough. We were crossing Fifty-seventh Street when we heard violin music. We caught sight of Rudy through the crowd. He wore his houndstooth jacket with matching hat, which, he told us, his mother had made for him. And even though it was hot that day, he looked fine. He had a bunch of his political campaign buttons pinned to his jacket. Rudy collects them. He told us he’s apolitical, which means he doesn’t take sides. He just likes the buttons.
Today he had on the one that said I Like Ike, as well as Down with McKinley, and his favorite, the one that says President Thomas E. Dewey.
When he saw us, he started to play “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” He always plays that one for us. Sometimes, if he’s feeling frisky, he sings along with the music, imitating Maurice Chevalier. Rudy speaks seven languages, all in broken English, he says. Rudy is a native of Brooklyn. He was born on a roller coaster at Coney Island, he told us. His mother couldn’t get off in time.
A bunch of camera-carrying Japanese businessmen stopped to listen. Rudy segued into “Japanese Sandman.” He boasts there’s not a person he can’t match the song to. When he’d finished, the men clapped and asked if they could take his picture. Some put money into the open violin case Rudy kept at his feet. Rudy tipped his hat and said, “Sayonara.” When they’d gone, Rudy picked up the money and put it in his pocket.
“First folding money today,” he told us. “Things are slow. At this rate, I’ll be on the dole by week’s end. Maybe I’ll have to go back to my wife.” He winked at us. Rudy lives alone in a hotel off Broadway. He likes it over there, he says, close to the theater district. The air’s more exciting, more pulsating, he says. He eats all his meals in a deli around the corner from his hotel. For breakfast he eats a pastrami sandwich on rye, with pickles and relish.
“A little Mozart for you,” he told us and broke into a Mozart concerto. Mozart’s his favorite. “You’d be surprised the people who stop to listen to the old boy. The Master. They don’t tip the way folks do for the golden oldies, that’s true, but there’s lots of real music lovers out there. Warms my heart if not my palm.”
Rudy is always joking with us. “You girls win the lottery yet?” he asked us. “Thought I saw you on TV the other night, picking up your prize. No? Wasn’t you? Too bad. I was gonna ask could I borrow a couple hundred simoleons from you. A story for you: a lady leaves a mink coat in my friend’s cab. He sees it laying there, returns it to the hotel he left the lady at, thinks he hears noises coming from it. He goes inside, the lady’s having hysterics. ‘My baby, my baby,’ she’s crying. My friend hands over the mink. The lady busses my friend, a big hug, big kiss, no money for his honesty, though. Then she reaches in and hauls out one of them little foreign dogs with a face on it only a mother could love. She goes kissy, kissy to the mutt, and that’s that. No tip, no nothing. Next time my friend says he keeps the coat and leaves the country. How’s that for a story?”
“I never know whether to believe you or not,” Al said.
“You better believe me, sweetheart,” Rudy said. “I was stolen by gypsies from my ancestral castle. The moat wasn’t working that day, which is how the gypsies wormed their way in. So then they try to sell me back to my mother, the queen. She says, ‘Has he got a little birthmark the shape of a star on his knee?’ The gypsies say, ‘Sure, he’s got one just like that.’ So my mother, the queen, screams, ‘He ain’t mine, then. My baby didn’t have a mark on him!’”
Rudy broke into “Way down upon the Swanee River,” accompanied by a soft-shoe routine. Quite a few people stopped to watch, clapping along, smiling. It was Rudy’s kind of crowd. He was once a vaudeville star, he told us. The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd, was what counted, he said.
We waved and walked on.
“The one about the lady with the mink coat might’ve been true,” I said, “but the gypsy story was a phony. That I know.”
Al rolled her eyes at me. We stopped for another look at the leather dresses. They were gone from the window. The mannequins stared out at us, naked as jaybirds. We blew circles on the glass and wrote Down with McKinley in them. Then we headed home.
About halfway there, I said, “I didn’t realize it was so far. Maybe we should’ve taken the bus.”
“One dollar times two is two dollars,” Al reminded me sternly. “That mounts up.”
“Wait,” I said and tied my sneaker.
“If he doesn’t send me a birthday card, who cares?” Al said. “It’s just a dumb old fourteenth birthday, anyway. Who cares?”
I didn’t know if she meant her father or Brian. And I didn’t ask.
chapter 7½
When I rang Al’s bell next morning, she came to the door still in her pajamas, with a towel wrapped around her head.
“Are you doing needlepoint?” I said. Usually when she looks harassed that way it means she’s doing needlepoint.
“No,” she said grumpily. “I’m working my buns off. Come on in, but don’t expect me to entertain you.”
Entertain me? Since when. I followed her into her bedroom. It was a mess. It looked as if robbers had trashed it looking for cash stashed under the mattress. Or the world’s biggest diamond.
“What happened?”
Al bent over a pile of
clothes and began tossing them every which way. Bright spots of color flew through the air like confetti: yellow, red, blue, orange.
“I’m getting rid of it. Giving it all away.”
I picked a plaid shirt off my head where it had landed. “What for?” I asked.
Al drew herself up and gave me her holy look. All she does to look holy, she told me, is think of St. Francis of Assisi feeding the starving pigeons. I’ve tried it on my mother when she’s accused me of something I’ve done, or haven’t done. It doesn’t do any good at all. Al is a master of the holy look.
I am divesting myself of my possessions,” she said solemnly. I almost laughed. She did look funny. But in the nick of time I stopped. Laughter at that moment would’ve been the kiss of death.
“What for?” I asked again.
“The time has come for me to face up to the fact that I’m aging. My body is getting older, but my head remains static.” Al frowned. “You know something? I’m a selfish person. I do nothing to justify my place on earth. I think too much of material things. And so do you.”
Leave me out of it, I thought. I don’t like it when Al drags me into her soul-searching. Let her search her own soul.
“Fourteen is a tremendous turning point,” she continued. “Most people think sixteen or eighteen or twenty-one are the biggies. But I’m here to tell you fourteen is the most important birthday of all.”
Al’s been working up to this for a long time, I realized.
“It is?” was all I said.
“Do you realize in the Middle Ages a fourteen-year-old was considered a woman? That when Juliet was fourteen she was hanging out on the balcony wondering wherefore was Romeo? That Joan of Arc was fourteen when she heard the voices that led her into battle to save France?”
“Yeah, and look what happened to her.” I couldn’t resist. I had to put in my two cents.
I don’t think Al heard me.
“That at fourteen,” she went on, “Shirley Temple was already a millionaire?”
One minute we’re talking Juliet and Joan of Arc. The next, we’re onto Shirley Temple. Wild. Weird.
Just Plain Al: The Al Series, Book Five Page 3
