Alice on Her Way

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  The class met on Sunday mornings in a downstairs room during the regular church service, Dad had told me. On this particular Sunday, I dressed in the most nondescript clothes I could think of—faded jeans, a beige T-shirt, denim jacket, ankle boots.

  Dad and Sylvia weren’t going to church that morning. They had their income tax forms spread out over the dining-room table and had set aside the day for that, so Dad just drove me over.

  “How many kids are in this class?” I asked sullenly.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But this is the first year they’ve included sophomores, so I wanted to sign you up while I could.”

  “You mean they’re mostly juniors and seniors?” I cried. “This gets worse by the minute!”

  “There are a few other tenth graders, Al. You won’t be the only one.”

  “Dad, I’m doing this just this one time for you,” I said. “Don’t ever sign me up for anything again.”

  “I promise.”

  At the church I got out of the car, closed the door, and shuffled along without saying good-bye.

  When I walked in, there were about fifteen kids sitting around the room talking with each other, laughing. Some sat on the backs of the metal chairs, feet on the seat. Others sat on a table or windowsill. A few looked awkward and out of place, like me, like we’d rather be home cleaning the basement or something, but most of them seemed like they really wanted to be there. Like they were looking forward to it, even.

  “Hi!” said a young woman with a name tag reading GAYLE. She was wearing jeans like mine and a white shirt, tucked in at the waist. “And you are…?”

  “Alice McKinley,” I said, barely opening my mouth.

  “Great! Make a name tag for yourself over there, and we’ll get started in a few minutes,” she said. She and a man named Bert were evidently the instructors.

  I stuck my name tag to my denim jacket and slouched down in a chair, staring at the clock above the door. The second hand didn’t even appear to be moving. The longest day of my life, I thought, and hoped I wouldn’t recognize anyone from school. I didn’t. I heard some of the kids talking as though they’d taken this class before. Could you fail it and have to repeat? I wondered.

  Gayle and Bert didn’t wait around to get things started, in case any of us decided to walk.

  “Hi, everybody,” Gayle said. “Welcome! I’m Gayle Linden and this is Bert Soams. We’re both married, but not to each other, and we’ve been teaching this course for… oh, about seven years now, right?” Bert smiled and nodded. “Some of you are here for the second time, and that’s exciting for us, because we never teach the class exactly the same way twice. There’s so much material to cover, and the topics we choose will partly depend on you.”

  We had “check-in” then—we sat in a big circle and each of us said our name and where we went to school and stuff, and I was one of only three sophomores there. Nobody gave me “the look,” though, so that was encouraging.

  Bert handed out Xeroxed copies of the table of contents of the curriculum and divided us into smaller groups, where we were to decide which topics we wanted to cover: Intimate Communication; Sexual Orientation; Myths and Facts; Gender Issues; Values; Lovemaking…. It was a long list. I found myself in a group with a guy built like a wrestler—a senior, I’ll bet—and a couple who were obviously bf/gf. He had his hand on her knee.

  “Myths versus facts,” the wrestler said. “I was in this class last year, and that’s a good one.”

  “I want the one on communication,” said the red-haired girl. “If you can’t communicate, the rest doesn’t matter.”

  We studied the sheet some more, discussed it a bit longer.

  “What about you, Alice?” the boyfriend asked.

  “They all look interesting to me,” I said, opting for honesty. “But if one of them deals with putting a condom on a banana, I’d zap it.”

  They laughed.

  When we got back in the circle again, Gayle said, “Someone might ask you—and you may have wondered yourself—why we offer this class here at Cedar Lane.” She referred us to the blackboard, where she’d written some of the principles our church stood for and asked which ones we could apply to sexuality. The inherent worth and dignity of every person, read the first one.

  “‘Compassion,’” someone read aloud, studying the blackboard.

  “‘Acceptance,’” said someone else.

  “‘Respect’…”

  “‘Meaning’…”

  Ho hum, I thought. Well, what could you expect from a church, after all? My eyes fastened on to the word Respect. If Dad had shown any for me, I wouldn’t be sitting where I was.

  “I think we get the drift here, that the sexual part of ourselves is deeply connected to our physical lives, social lives, spiritual lives… the whole nine yards,” said Gayle. “There’s a connectedness that we’ll explore during these next couple of months, and Bert and I want you to remember that anytime—anytime—you have a question, ask it! Interrupt if you have to!” She picked up a stack of papers and started them around the circle.

  “There are no stupid questions in this course,” said Bert. “Gayle and I go on the theory that for every person who asks a question, there are six or seven more who want the answer as much as he did.”

  The papers got to me. I took one and passed them on.

  On the left side of the sheet was the figure of a female, all her sexual parts named, with a brief description of each: ovary, cervix, clitoris, and so on. On the other side was the male, with testicles, penis, prostate…. I’d been through all this before. The “Our Changing Bodies” unit back in seventh-grade health class, where we had to name all the parts. That “For Girls Only” class at the Y one summer….

  “And now for the fun part!” said Bert. “Everybody up.”

  I had that sinking feeling. We got to our feet.

  “Gayle is going to go around the room taping a word on your back, one of the words you see here on the sheet,” Bert continued. “Your job is to find out what word it is by asking for clues from each other, but the person you ask should answer in as few words as possible. For example, if I’ve got an ovary on my back”—we all laughed—“I can say to Gayle, ‘Is it male or female?’ and she can say, ‘Female.’ Then I have to move to someone else. ‘I know I have a female on my back,’ I can say”—more laughter—“and that person can say, ‘Internal,’ so I know it’s something you can’t see. Get the drift?”

  Everyone was smiling, everyone but me, as Gayle went around taping sheets of paper on our backs.

  “Ready?” said Bert. “If you guess correctly, you can sit down. Go!”

  What was this? Musical chairs? What were we? Sixth graders?

  I walked over to a girl who looked like she was rooted to the floor. “Can you help me out?” I asked.

  “You mean as in, ‘out the window’?” she joked. “Because that’s just what I’d like to do.”

  “That too!” I said, smiling, and showed her my back.

  “Male,” she said.

  “Thanks.” I turned just as a tall guy with dark eyes was coming toward me. “Take a look,” he said, turning so I could see his word. “I know it’s female.”

  Clitoris, his sign read. Oh… my… God.

  I stared at the paper in front of me to see what one-word clue I could give him. The seat of female sexual pleasure, I read.

  “Um… pleasure?” I gulped.

  “Got it!” he yelped. “Gimme a ‘c’… gimme an ‘l’… gimme an ‘i’… ,” and he continued until he’d spelled out the whole word. “Clitoris!” he yelped as my own face reddened, but everyone laughed. I laughed in spite of myself. He went over to the row of chairs and sat down. I should be so lucky!

  I found another girl and showed her my sign.

  “I know it’s male,” I said.

  She thought for a minute. “Well, it’s not exactly an organ…. It’s sort of confusing.”

  Great! I thought. I’ll be the last one t
o guess what mine is. The wrestler walked over, but before he could show me his back, I showed him mine. “I know it’s male and it’s not an organ,” I said quickly.

  “Hmmm,” he said. “But it comes from an organ.”

  “Semen?” I guessed.

  “You got it!” he told me.

  Gratefully, I took a chair beside the other guy, and we watched while the rest tried to guess their words and, one by one, came to take a seat. Finally we were all rooting for the last person, who simply could not figure out his word.

  “I’ve named every organ, male and female, on this whole paper!” he wailed.

  Gayle laughed. “It’s a joke, really, and it’s not exactly sexual. In fact, it’s not even on the paper, Kevin, so I’ll give you a hint,” she said. “It’s both male and female.”

  “You mean I’m a hermaphrodite?” Kevin said as we burst into laughter.

  “No. But everyone’s got one,” said Bert.

  “Anus?” the guy bleated, and we howled. Gale took pity on him and pulled the sign off his back to show him. Belly button, it read, and we cheered him for being a good sport.

  I’ll have to hand it to the church on Cedar Lane, they sure know what makes a good icebreaker. By the time the first session was over, we were comfortable saying those words out loud in a coed setting. Reading the definitions. Maybe the other kids had been comfortable with them before, I don’t know. But the class didn’t seem so threatening to me after that. I mean, what could we possibly have to do that would be more embarrassing than this? At the end of the session we had “checkout,” and when it got to me, I told them the class was more fun than I’d expected.

  When Dad came to pick me up, though, I put on my grouchy face.

  “So?” he said pleasantly. “Was it better than you thought?”

  “It was a slow two hours,” I answered, which wasn’t exactly true.

  Silence.

  “See anyone you know?” asked Dad.

  “No.”

  More silence.

  Finally I said, “Just what did you think I was about to do that made you enroll me in this class? I sure must lead an exciting life in your imagination. What was Lester doing at my age that’s got you so worried?”

  “Whatever it was, he didn’t tell me,” said Dad. “But he was leading an even more exciting life in my imagination than you are.”

  That afternoon, when Dad had fallen asleep on the couch with the newspaper over his stomach, Sylvia and I were in the kitchen making potato-leek soup for dinner, and I told her about the first session of “Our Whole Lives.”

  “Sounds fascinating,” she said. “I wish I’d had something like that when I was fifteen.”

  I wondered how much I could ask. Should ask. Wondered how much I’d ask if she had been my birth mother.

  “How much did you know when you were fifteen?” I said.

  “Well… let’s see.” She was chopping leeks on the cutting board, moving her fingers slowly along the pale green stalks as the knife came down again and again. “I knew the mechanics, I guess you’d say. But I didn’t know much about the sensations and emotions that go with sex, or how you talk with your partner about them. More like the art of brushing your teeth.”

  The phone rang just then, and I went out in the hall to answer. It was Aunt Sally, calling from Chicago. She doesn’t call as much as she used to because she doesn’t want Sylvia to think she’s interfering. But because she promised Mom she’d look out for us, she feels it’s her duty to call now and then to make sure we’re not malnourished or anything.

  “Alice, sweetheart, how are things? I just got the Christmas decorations down and put away, and I said to myself, ‘I’m going to call the McKinleys and see how they’re doing.’”

  “We’re all doing okay,” I said. “Sylvia and I are making soup, and Dad’s taking a nap.”

  “It’s good weather for soup,” Aunt Sally agreed. “So what’s new in your world?”

  Did I dare? I wondered, beginning to smile. It is so easy to get her going. “Well, Dad signed me up for a course at church, and we had our first session this morning,” I said.

  “That’s wonderful!” said Aunt Sally. “What kind of course is it? The Old or New Testament?”

  “Neither one, actually,” I told her. “It’s called ‘Our Whole Lives’, and it’s about sex.”

  I could almost hear the intake of air. “Your whole life is going to be about sex?” she cried.

  “No, it’s how sex fits into our whole lives, a part of who we are.”

  “Why are they teaching you this in church?”

  “Because they want us to be responsible, caring people,” I said, beginning to sound like my father.

  “Well, I certainly approve of that,” said Aunt Sally. “As long as they don’t go too far. The boys and girls aren’t together, are they?”

  “Yep,” I said. “Coed.”

  “Oh my!” said Aunt Sally. “Well, what did you do in the first session?”

  “I had to walk around for fifteen minutes with ‘semen’ on my back,” I told her.

  Okay, I went too far. I had to start at the beginning and explain the whole thing, and it would serve me right if Aunt Sally never wanted to talk to me again. But I decided that when it came time for me to put a condom on a banana, I’d keep that to myself.

  Liz, of course, had made me promise that I would tell her absolutely everything—everything—that went on in that class. So on the bus to school the next day, squeezed between her and Pamela, I told them as much as I could remember. Pamela was chiefly interested in whether any of the guys were hot.

  “You probably would have gone for the guy with the word ‘clitoris’ on his back,” I said.

  Liz slid down in the seat. “I hate that word!” she said.

  “Clitoris?” I asked.

  She laughingly clapped one hand over my mouth. “It just seems so… masculine or something. Like a tiny penis,” she said in a whisper. “I don’t even want guys to know I have one.”

  Pamela and I looked at each other, then back to Elizabeth. “What do you want guys to think you have down there?” I asked.

  “A Keep Out sign,” Pamela joked.

  “No Loitering,” I said.

  “No Vacancy,” Pamela added, and we started to giggle.

  “No Parking,” said Liz, getting into the spirit of things.

  “Keep Off the Grass,” I finished, and this time we howled.

  “I just wish that sex was more like it was in the movies—the old movies—where women in gorgeous nightgowns kissed men in striped pajamas,” said Elizabeth. “My grandmother said that when she was in high school, movies never showed men and women in bed together at all.”

  “They pretended they didn’t even have double beds back then,” said Pamela.

  “Heck!” I said. “They pretended they didn’t even have bodies!”

  8

  Home-Style

  The night of the dance it was cold but not messy. You could see stars in the sky, even above the lights of Silver Spring. Pamela and Brian were double-dating with Penny and Mark, but Liz and Ross would be having dinner with Sam and me at his condo. When Sam drove over to pick me up, I thought he looked great in his gray pants and blue blazer, a shirt with cuff links, and a red tie.

  Dad was upset because he didn’t have any film for the camera, but Sam said that his mom was going to take pictures of us and that he’d make sure Dad got some.

  “You look wonderful,” Sam told me as he helped me on with the cape I’d borrowed from Sylvia. He leaned a little closer to the back of my neck. “Smell good too.”

  I should have! I was wearing Sylvia’s perfume. She had done both my fingernails and toenails and used a curling iron on the ends of my hair.

  “Fantastic!” she said when she’d finished with me. I think that’s the way Sam felt about me, too.

  “What time is the dance over?” Dad asked.

  “Eleven thirty,” said Sam.

  “You wo
n’t be going any place afterward, will you?”

  “We don’t plan on it,” said Sam, deflecting the question.

  “If there’s any change, I’ll call,” I promised. “But we have to drop off Liz and Ross, remember.”

  Once in the car, I said, “I have to admit I’m a little nervous about dinner at your place.”

  “Why?” Sam asked, backing down the driveway.

  “I don’t even know your mother. She’s going to a lot of trouble for us.”

  “Oh, she’s a riot. She likes doing stuff like this,” said Sam.

  We pulled in across the street to pick up Liz and Ross. He’d come down on the train from Philadelphia that afternoon and taken the Metro to Silver Spring, where Elizabeth’s dad picked him up. Sam got out when Liz and Ross came down the sidewalk, and I got out with him. Elizabeth was positively glowing.

  “Hey, Alice!” Ross said, giving me a hug as he approached the car. “Boy, do you look different than you did at camp!”

  “And look at you!” I said. “Wow! You both look great! Sam, this is Ross, from camp last summer. Ross, Sam Mayer.”

  “How you doing?” said Sam, and opened the trunk for Ross’s overnight bag.

  When we were all back in the car, Ross said to me, “It was nice of your brother to say I could stay at his place tonight. I promise not to trash it.”

  Elizabeth was effervescent and chatty, and she filled Sam in on some of the things we’d done at camp. Ten minutes later Sam drove into the parking lot of his high-rise, and we took the elevator to the fourth floor. We walked down a corridor, made a turn, and there it was. Sam opened the door and we stepped inside. The room was dimly lit, candles everywhere, with soft music coming from a CD. The dining-room table had been set for four, and there was a long-stemmed rose lying across each plate.

  “May I take your coats?”

  We turned around to see a woman in a black turtleneck and white gloves smiling at us. She was sort of short and somewhat stout, but very official looking. I stared as I handed her the cape.