Incredibly Alice

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  He was talking about the death of two students last summer, the white supremacy stuff, the prejudice against our Sudanese student, Daniel Bul Dau, and Amy Sheldon’s molestation by a substitute teacher. That was a lot for any of us to handle, but I wasn’t sure what Phil was getting at.

  “You want me to do R and R as in … writing about spring fashions? Healthier food in the cafeteria? The summer plans of graduating seniors? Serious fluff?”

  “Get off it, Alice,” Phil said, giving me that you-know-what-I-mean look. “Write anything at all, something people can sink their teeth into, but different from all the Sturm und Drang of last semester.”

  I did know what he meant, and I did need a break. I’d think of something, I figured. In the meantime, I checked the school calendar for coming events. Last year we did a girls’ choice dance. This year we were going to put on a 1950s-style sock hop, and when I got all the details, I wrote it up:

  February 11—Save the Date!

  Ask Gram for those poodle skirts, those Elvis wigs, those 45s, those glow bracelets, ’cause this school is gonna rock!

  Last year we did Sadie Hawkins, but this year it’s Sock Hop. We’re going to go back sixty years and have a dance marathon. We’re gonna have root beer floats at a drive-in. There will be inflatable instruments, a jukebox, a balloon drop, pizza, pom-poms, pastel pearls, and bouffant hairdos galore.

  Get a photo of you and your friends in a ’57 Chevy. Leave your shoes at the door and buy a pair of bobby socks for charity. Watch The Edge for more details.

  “This fluffy enough for you?” I asked Phil, handing him my copy.

  “Perfect!” He grinned. “Now go find a poodle skirt to show your heart is in it.”

  I did better than that. I assigned one of our senior reporters to write up instructions for making your own circle skirt out of a piece of felt. I asked another to research places where people could buy an Elvis wig, rent a guitar, learn to jitterbug, make their own pom-poms, and we had all our girl reporters do up their hair beehive-style so that Sam could take a picture of it for the paper.

  “You guys are rockin’!” Miss Ames told us. “Good show!”

  Patrick called me that evening.

  “So how was your first week back?” he asked.

  I lay on a heap of pillows, cell phone to my ear. “Interesting,” I told him. “Remember the white supremacist guy I told you about, Curtis Butler? The one who was writing those letters to The Edge last semester? He transferred to another school.”

  “Well, that should make life easier for you,” Patrick said.

  “And worse for the school that got him, probably,” I said. “But … in other news … Jill says she and Justin ‘have big plans’—I’m betting they’ll elope; Gwen wants us to get jobs on a cruise ship this summer; and the school’s having a sock hop.”

  “Whoa,” said Patrick. “What cruise ship? To where?”

  “The Chesapeake Seascape, cruising the Bay. A new line. Gwen thinks it would be fun.”

  I was about to ask if he wanted to apply too when he said, “So you’ll be on the Bay and I’ll be in Barcelona.”

  It took a moment to sink in. “Spain?” I gasped.

  “Yeah. This professor I’m working for—he wants to go get settled before the fall class he’ll be teaching there, and he’s offered to take me with him. He wants to finish his book this summer—that’s mostly what I’m researching for him. And … here’s the really big news … only you won’t like it …”

  “Oh, Patrick!”

  “He’s going to see if he can arrange for me to do my study abroad in my sophomore year instead of my junior, so I can stay on in Spain when the fall quarter begins. I’ll be living with a bunch of students all the while.”

  Why was I not surprised? Why didn’t I know I couldn’t fence Patrick in? And why did I realize that even if I could, I shouldn’t? Patrick had the whole world ahead of him.

  “I … I guess I didn’t know you wanted to do a year abroad.”

  “I have to. Part of my major. But here’s another way to look at it: The sooner I put in that year abroad, the sooner I’ll be back.”

  That was comforting in a strange sort of way. It seemed to mean that Patrick was looking ahead. Way ahead. That the two of us had plans.

  “I want the best for you, Patrick—you know that,” I said. “But I’m not sure I can stand it.”

  He chuckled. “I think you’ll stand it very well on a cruise ship with a lot of hunks around.”

  “You won’t be jealous?”

  “Of course I’ll be jealous. You could fall for the first mate and get married on Smith Island and be raising a little deckhand by the time I get back.”

  “I’m not laughing,” I said.

  “It’s not like I’m leaving tomorrow,” he told me. “There’s still your prom.”

  “You will be here for that?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  That was reassuring, but … Spain? For a whole year? Still, after we’d talked and I put my cell phone back on my nightstand, I wondered why I didn’t feel worse. Maybe I felt safer with Patrick in Spain for a year than on the University of Chicago campus, surrounded by all those free-thinking college girls. Now that there was no home here to come back to, I had wondered how he’d spend his summer. And since I’d be on a cruise ship …

  Okay, I told myself. Make the most of it. Quit worrying. When I made new friends at college and they asked, I’d be able to say, Oh, yeah. I have a boyfriend in Spain.

  2

  THE UNEXPECTED

  I rode in with Dad when we went to the Melody Inn on Saturday.

  “Are you going to hire a part-time clerk after I go to college, or do you want me to drive back to Silver Spring once a week?” I asked.

  I could tell by Dad’s expression that the question took him by surprise.

  “If you go to the University of Maryland, you mean? I don’t know,” he answered. “But I doubt you’d want to get up every Saturday morning and drive all the way over here.”

  “I’ll need to work somewhere if I want some spending money,” I said.

  Dad slowed as we approached the small parking lot behind the Melody Inn. “Won’t be the same without you in the Gift Shoppe.”

  “Should I take that as a ‘yes’—that you’d still want me to drive over?”

  He pulled into the space marked MANAGER. “That’s nine months from now, Al,” he said. “Let’s see how it all plays out.”

  Kay Yen, our new full-time clerk, was hanging up her coat as we walked in. Marilyn Roberts had already opened the store and would be turning the key over to Kay after her baby came. It was due February 17, but Marilyn looked as though she could deliver any day.

  “Kay and I are working up a special display for Valentine’s Day,” she told Dad. “DVDs and CDs of all the great songs, operas, ballets—anything that has to do with love.”

  “I’m all for that,” Dad said. In retail, the minute one holiday is over, you start marketing the next one.

  “I’ve already ordered some valentine stuff for the Gift Shoppe,” I told them. “Heart-shaped music boxes, red coffee mugs—I wanted to include a lacy red thong with sixteenth notes on it, but I figured that was going a little too far.”

  “Correct,” said Dad, and gave me a look.

  “We could even have a drawing for a strolling violinist,” Marilyn said. “Kay and I were talking about it yesterday. Like, from February first to the twelfth, all cash register receipts would go into a box, and on the twelfth, you draw one and the lucky winner gets a dinner for two on Valentine’s Day, with a strolling violinist.”

  “It would be a big hit, Mr. M.,” Kay said.

  “Yes! Do it, Dad!” I chimed in.

  “I would have offered Jack to play and sing his love songs for free,” said Marilyn, “but with my due date so close, we’d better not chance it.”

  “Well, I think the Melody Inn can spring for both a dinner and a violinist,” Dad said. “Great idea!
Keep ’em coming.”

  I set about opening up the Gift Shoppe—a cubbyhole beneath the stairs to the second floor. Up there, instructors give lessons in soundproof cubicles, and on Saturdays kids troop up and down the stairs with their trumpets and saxophone cases. But here, I slide a drawer into the cash register, open up the little cylinders of nickels and dimes, recount and record the bills. Then I wipe off the glass countertop and turn on the light in the revolving case where we keep the music-themed jewelry. On the shelf behind me, I straighten the Beethoven sweatshirts, the keyboard scarves, the Bach notebooks, and the dancing bears, and I keep an eye on the sheet music department so I can help out there if I have no customers.

  This particular Saturday, Kay seemed distracted. I caught her standing with palms resting on a counter across the store, shoulders hunched, staring at nothing. She answered the phone, then flipped through a box of index cards, paused, stared into space some more, and started all over again.

  Around eleven, when Dad brought by a box of heart decorations, Kay saw us together and came over.

  “Mr. M., your family was so nice to invite me to your house at Thanksgiving, I’d love to take you two and Sylvia out to dinner. Or I could even bring food over if that’s more convenient. Would you be free tonight?”

  “Why, Kay, you don’t have to do that,” said Dad. “We were glad to have you. You’re part of the Melody Inn family.”

  “I know, but I’d really like to do it. How about tonight?” she insisted.

  “Actually, Sylvia has me programmed all weekend,” Dad said. “We’re eating with some of the faculty from her school tonight, then joining another couple at a concert tomorrow.”

  Kay looked not only disappointed, but somewhat desperate. “Well, another time, then?”

  “Of course!” said Dad.

  After he moved on, though, she turned to me. “What about you? Are you free tonight? I’d really like to make it tonight.”

  “I don’t have any plans yet,” I said. “Sure.”

  She looked a little embarrassed. “Alice, would it be all right if I got some takeout food and brought it over?” As though I were doing her a favor.

  “Whatever you want. Sounds great!” I said.

  Dad and Sylvia went out around six, and Kay arrived at six thirty with a bag of little cartons of Chinese food from a restaurant I’d never heard of. I put place mats and silverware on the table while she heated water for the tea. The whole thing seemed sort of weird, but I figured this night must be special somehow. Maybe she had an announcement to make or something.

  I was half right.

  We’d just started eating—Peking duck, cashew chicken—when her cell phone rang. I heard the music coming from her bag in the living room.

  At first I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then she suddenly excused herself and leaped from her chair. I saw her check the caller ID before she answered in Chinese. The conversation was short and, as far as I could tell, polite.

  When she returned to the table, she gave a big sigh and leaned back in her chair. “Yi, yi, yi, yi, yi,” she said, and looked across at me. “I’m going a little bit crazy. My parents are back from China… .”

  “They just got in?” I asked.

  “No. They got home yesterday. They apologized all over the place for interrupting our dinner just now. They thought it was for later this evening.”

  I didn’t understand, so I waited.

  “But … you know that man they wanted me to meet? The reason they wanted me to go to China with them last November?”

  “Yeah,” I said, remembering how she had refused, how she’d told them Dad needed her at the store over the holidays.

  “Well, they brought him back with them. They want me to have dinner with him.”

  “Now?” I said.

  “No. They wanted me to have dinner with them tonight, and I … told them I had to eat with my boss. So they invited me to dinner tomorrow night. I made up another excuse. I don’t want an arranged marriage.”

  “Oh, wow,” I said. “Have you … even seen this man?”

  “Only photos. But once we meet, and then I say no … His parents and my parents have been friends for decades, they tell me. Before I was born. They say we’ll learn to love each other once we’re married.”

  “What about your boyfriend here? Can’t he do something about this?” I asked.

  Kay buried her head in her hands. “We broke up after Christmas. He could see that—with all the pressure from my parents—I come with too much baggage. He wasn’t even thinking of marriage, and neither, really, am I. I’ve got grad school coming up next year, and I’m saving for that.”

  I smiled as I helped myself to more rice. “So you’re having dinner with your boss’s family tonight, right?”

  She smiled a little. “Yeah.”

  “An invitation you couldn’t refuse.”

  “I hate to lie to my parents.”

  “Well, this takes care of one evening, anyway. How long is this man going to stay?”

  “A few months. He’s supposedly here on a consulting job. The whole thing is just so phony. I know why he’s here and he knows why he’s here and he probably knows I know why he’s here and—”

  “Do you even know his name?”

  “James. James Huang. My dad thinks he’s perfect for me, but I want to choose my own husband. I want a man who chooses me; I don’t want his parents to do it.”

  It was sort of exciting being in the middle of all this intrigue, but it didn’t ruin my appetite. I took another bite of duck. “What did you tell your parents just now?”

  “I said we were right in the middle of dinner and I’d let them know later. They apologized, by the way, and begged you to forgive them for interrupting our meal. My friends are arranging all sorts of things to keep me busy, but I can’t put this off forever.”

  “You’ve got my sympathy,” I told her.

  Over the weekend Sylvia was in her “nesting mode,” as Dad calls it—making soup and meat loaf and spaghetti sauce for the freezer. Dad says if we got snowed in from now till May, we wouldn’t have to buy groceries once.

  Sunday afternoon she asked if I’d take some over to Lester. When I called to see if he was home, he said that he and his roommate had been advertising for a third person, now that George had married and moved out, and that someone named Andy was coming by to see the place that afternoon. So he’d be home all day.

  I like to play “rescuer” to my brother, even though he doesn’t need it. When he was still in school, he sponged meals off us a lot. But now that he’s got his MA and is working in the admissions office at the university, he takes us to dinner sometimes. Sylvia still can’t resist the impulse to send him home-cooked food, though, and he doesn’t exactly refuse it.

  I parked outside the large old house in Takoma Park, its yellow paint beginning to peel a bit on the porch railing, and took the side staircase up to the apartment on the second floor.

  Les has a good thing going and he knows it. He and the other two roomies got the apartment as grad students, rent-free. Elderly Otto Watts, who owns the place and lives downstairs, has a caregiver during the day. But he lets Les and his buddies have the upstairs on the condition that one of them is always there during the evening and all night, should he have an emergency, and that the men help maintain the house and do minor repair work about the place.

  I knocked and heard Les yell, “It’s open,” so I went inside.

  “Care package for Les McKinley,” I called, taking the bag to the kitchen down the hall.

  “Sylvia send any of her chili?” Les called from the living room.

  “A little of everything, I think,” I told him, and began arranging the stuff in his freezer compartment to fit it all in. “That guy come by yet?”

  “No. He said he’d be here before five.”

  “Hope he’s hot,” I said. “I’ll bring you more stuff if he is.”

  Les was reading the sports section with one leg thrown
over the arm of the lounge chair. Even when he doesn’t shave, he’s handsome. Dark brown hair (with receding hairline), dark eyes, square face, square chin. He was dressed in sweats and a tee and socks so old, they had holes on the bottom.

  “I thought there would be a line halfway down the block,” I said. “Nobody wants a rent-free apartment?”

  “We have to pay for our phone and utilities,” Les said. “The real drawback is taking turns being here in the evenings and caring for Mr. Watts when he needs it. Most grad students don’t want to commit to staying home two or three nights a week, and at least half of them have never picked up a hammer, much less helped an old man in the bathroom.”

  “This guy okay with that?”

  “Says he worked in a nursing home one summer—can handle anything. I said great, if he likes the place, he’s—”

  The doorbell rang just then, and since I was leaving anyway, I answered. There stood a woman in her late twenties, I’d guess, with a purple streak in her long copper-colored hair, red-framed glasses, wearing a fake-fur parka, jeans, and ankle boots.

  “Hi,” she said, and I knew from her voice how Les got the wrong impression. Tenor. Not alto: tenor. Baritone, even. “I’m Andy,” she said. “Came to see the apartment.”

  “Oh, yeah!” I said cheerfully. “I’m just a relative. Come on in.”

  I led her down the hallway, trying hard not to smile too broadly. I’d been thinking of going to the mall, but now I decided to stay and watch the show. “Les,” I called. “Andy’s here.”

  Lester put down the paper as we came in, and his mouth froze in an unspoken exclamation, his leg sliding off the arm of the chair. “You’re … Andy?” he asked.

  “Yes. Andy Boyce.” She had a wide face—somewhere between plain and pretty—and she smiled as she shook his hand. “Nice,” she said, looking around.

  I took off my jacket and plopped down on the couch, wishing I had some popcorn. I locked my face into a friendly smile to keep from laughing out loud.

  “Which room is mine?” Andy asked. I’d only heard one or two women in my life with a voice as low as hers, but Andy’s was more sultry. Maybe she was a nightclub singer or something. There were three piercings in each of her earlobes.