Alice, I Think

by Susan Juby

  SUSAN JUBY

  ALICE, I THINK

  Dedication

  For my uncle and godfather,

  Greg McDiarmid,

  who always laughs in the right places

  and who lived to see it

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In the beginning the goal was to make two funny people laugh: my uncle Greg and my friend Abbie Weinberg. They did, and I thank them.

  Eternal gratitude also to:

  Bill Juby for his patience, advice, and encouragement;

  My mother, Wendy Banta, who survived my teen years and is now almost able to laugh about it;

  James Waring, a solid-gold original;

  Rod MacIntyre, Jesse Stothers, and the rest of the people at Thistledown for first taking a chance;

  W. P. Kinsella for his vote of confidence;

  Hilary McMahon for her belief;

  My editor, Ruth Katcher, whose support, enthusiasm, and insightful questions have been invaluable;

  Sandra Thomson; Elizabeth Murphy; Karl and Gail Hourigan; Aaron, Scott, and Carl Banta; Trevor Juby; Jessica McDiarmid; Terry, Ian, and Chris McDiarmid; Ian McDiarmid (the elder) and Glenda (Eagle-Eye) Wilshire; Steve Vorbrodt; and Robert Bringhurst for help of various kinds;

  And a special nod to Frank for waiting patiently in the car and under the desk.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WHEN I WAS SMALL AND ORDINARY, BUT ALSO SPECIAL …

  EDUCATING DEATH LORD

  AS FOR ME AND MY LIFE GOALS

  HOME-BASED LEARNERS: DEFECT!

  HELMET HEAD

  PRINCE GEORGE, POPULATION: 70,000 OR SO; MALLS: SEVERAL; NUMBER OF VIOLENT TEEN OFFENDERS: UNKNOWN

  MINIMUM WAGE AT MOUNTAIN LIGHTHOUSE

  THE PROBLEM WITH AUBREY

  THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL

  JUST FINE, THANKS

  PUTTING ON A BRAVE FACE

  TURN LEFT AT MIDDLE EARTH

  NEW FRONTIERS

  MY VANCOUVER COUSIN

  GOOSEBOY AND THE GOOD HAIR DAY

  P.S. Ideas, interviews & features *

  About the Author

  Author Biography

  About the book

  An Interview with Susan Juby

  Alice, Immature Adult: A Page from Alice’s Diary at Age Twenty-five, by Susan Juby

  Read on

  Recommended Reading

  Web Detective

  About the Author

  Praise

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  WHEN I WAS SMALL AND ORDINARY, BUT ALSO SPECIAL …

  July 14

  I blame it all on The Hobbit. That, and my supportive home life.

  I grew up in one of those loving families that fail to prepare a person for real life. When I was little, my parents, especially my mother, encouraged me to be creative. She taught me to sing and dance, preferably on a table so everyone could get a good look. I could belt out show tunes and feminist anthems like “I Am Woman” by the time I was four. My parents would clap and cheer and make me feel like my talents and I were incredibly lovable.

  “Come here,” they’d say to their friends. “You’ve got to see Alice’s new routine.”

  Then I’d get up on the table in one of my outfits and sing some totally inappropriate song at the top of my lungs.

  I loved the attention. They loved the entertainment. I had no idea that it would spell my destruction.

  They were practically sick with pride when I learned to read early, and they made sure I got a full set of all the classics. My favorite, although I didn’t really understand it and my dad had to read most of it to me, was The Hobbit. We talked a lot about the characters, and somewhere along the line I became convinced I was a hobbit. My parents loved this best of all. How incredibly creative and unusual this offspring of theirs was! Not only did they encourage me in thinking I was a hobbit, my mother actually made me a hobbit outfit. It included a burlap-sack tunic with twine fringe, brown felt slippers with bits of fake fur on the toes, and a pointy green hat. I wore it everywhere. I said hobbity things and practiced my deep, fruity laugh. I asked people to call me Took and carried an oversized pipe that my dad’s friend picked up for me at something called a head shop. I liked to tell people that I was fond of flowers. And then my parents sent me off to school.

  My parents didn’t send me to kindergarten, because they said they didn’t feel ready yet. But then my brother, MacGregor, was born, and they had to spread around their urge to overprotect. So off I went for the first day of first grade, where I quickly discovered that everyone else had bonded and figured out the rules the year before. My next discovery was that kids don’t like other kids who think they are hobbits, especially kids who break into song and dance without any warning. In fact, as it turned out, there is probably no worse thing to be in first grade than a newcomer who thinks she’s a hobbit.

  Parenting Rule No.1: Don’t send your kids to school dressed like a character from a fantasy book unless that kid has a lot of friends who also dress like fantasy characters.

  When the little blond girl came up to me and asked me what I was supposed to be, I told her, even though some part of me dimly sensed it was a bad idea.

  “I’m a hobbit,” I announced proudly.

  “What’s that?” she asked, her little face intent. Maybe she was going to be my first friend at school. My mother told me school was where I was going to meet all kinds of kids who would be my friends and possibly also dancing partners.

  “It’s from this book called The Hobbit. It’s really good.”

  “You read?” asked the girl.

  I was breezy. “Oh yeah. Everyone our age does, practically.”

  Her face took on a look any less sheltered kid would have recognized as dangerous. But I didn’t see it.

  “So you’re a what?” she asked.

  “I’m a hobbit. We are small and ordinary but also special. We can be sort of invisible sometimes. And we laugh like this.” I gave her my deepest and fruitiest laugh.

  “You know what I think?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I think you look like an ugly boy.”

  I took off my pointy hat and put my hand to my hair.

  “And just so you know, ugly-boy girls like you can’t have friends,” continued the little blond girl.

  Behind the girl stood six or seven other girls, all staring at me too. Accusing.

  “I don’t like you. No one likes you, even if you are a bobbit or whatever. And no one will ever like you.”

  And with that the little blond girl turned and left me standing by myself on the playground, hobbit hat in hand, burlap sack filled with extra cakes for new friends over my shoulder.

  Turned out that Linda, the little blond girl, was right. No one in my new classroom liked me. The other lonely kids were too scared by Linda and her gang to talk to me, even after I started wearing civilian clothes. By the end of the second week, picking on me had become the favorite activity. After the kids played dodgeball with me as the target, and bologna sandwiches as the ammo, I was afraid to go onto the playground. The playground monitors didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe they didn’t care. I overheard one refer to me as “that little delusional in the gunnysack.” Good thing she was just in charge of the play yard and not the actual classroom.

  My mom eventually had to come in to meet with the principal after I refused to leave the classroom at recess because Linda told me that she and her friends had “special plans” for me. Linda and I were sent to the office, and I had to sit there, two chairs away from my archnemesis, and listen to my mother yell at the principal.

  “My God, don’t you know what those kids are doing to
my daughter? To her spirit? Don’t you care?” my mother demanded.

  The principal mumbled something.

  “No. No!” My mother’s voice rose. “She does not! She has come home crying every day since she started school. What’s wrong with these kids? They act like animals! What’s wrong with their families?”

  I snuck a glance at Linda and saw that she was staring straight ahead.

  Now I could hear the principal’s voice too.

  “Alice came to school dressed like an elf, Mrs. MacLeod. It wasn’t Halloween. Children notice these things.”

  “A hobbit.” I corrected him from my seat in the hallway. Linda scowled at me.

  “Can’t she express herself?” screamed my mother. “She’s just a little girl, for God’s sakes!”

  Linda’s dad was called too. I can still remember the funny, sour smell he gave off when he brushed past me and, without saying a word, grabbed Linda by the arm and hauled her away. As he pulled her, I caught a glimpse of her face and saw for the first time that Linda didn’t look so old after all. When her eyes met mine, she hardened her face and mouthed, “You’re dead!” at me.

  A week later Linda and her friends followed me home throwing rocks. One of the rocks hit me on the head and made me bleed. And that was the end of regular school for me. My mother and father have taught me at home ever since, which hasn’t exactly set me on the road to being voted most popular but may have saved my life. And it also seems to have bought me a lifetime membership in the crisis counseling club. Which brings me to my current situation.

  EDUCATING DEATH LORD

  I am part of the late Mrs. Freison’s caseload. She isn’t dead. More likely just resting. Mrs. Freison, inconsiderately for the purposes of building my self-esteem, cracked up during one of my sessions. That’s not as significant as it sounds. She was never very stable. She had left her husband and kids and moved to Smithers to be with a guy half her age who lived on top of his parents’ garage, and after he left her for an eighteen-year-old gas station attendant at Petrocan, she was never the same.

  It’s a good thing I am very open-minded and tolerant about mental illness, because if I wasn’t, I would have been offended by Mrs. Freison’s parting remarks. And even though she was shaking and crying when she told me I had an almost “freakish ability to see things the wrong way, coupled with a shocking poverty of age-appropriate reallife experience,” I was still a bit hurt. Then she said, chest heaving with sobs, hands full of hair, that from what she’d seen over our endless four years together, my ten-year-old brother, MacGregor, had far more maturity than I was ever likely to have. She accused me of hiding from life in books and harboring strange obsessions and staying at home all the time to torture my poor parents, who are the only people who can’t legally get away from me.

  Nice, eh?

  “Insight is cheap, Alice. Especially warped insight. And that’s the only kind you have.” Sob, sob, sob.

  Then Mrs. Freison said she was getting away, in a body bag if she had to, but she was getting away. Then the paramedics came.

  I may have opened up a bit too much with Mrs. Freison. In fact, I was just telling her about how the dangers of peer interactions are illustrated in the group behavior of chickens (based on my observations of our neighbors’ hobbyfarm poultry). I described how chickens choose one outcast to peck, and the only way to protect the unlucky one is to cover it with tar or maybe homeschool it. I thought it was a pretty convincing argument, but Mrs. F. sort of screamed and said that chickens didn’t have peers. People had peers and they weren’t that bad. Anyway, I refuse to take responsibility for her meltdown. I don’t see myself as counselor burnout material. Maybe that bald girl with the big boots who hangs around here. Now she looks troubled.

  I get counseled at the Teens in Transition (Not in Trouble) Club. It’s supposed to be a haven for those of us suffering from “adjustment difficulties.” They’ve tried to fool us into thinking that the club’s a regular teen hangout by putting in a Ping-Pong table, but the Single Mother Spot with its Learn to Cook and Clean area and the Feelings Room, painted blue-black in a lame effort to be hip and sympathetic, are dead giveaways. The place is also lousy with helping professionals: social workers, parole officers, and of course the on-staff counselor.

  They’ve hired a new counselor to replace Mrs. Freison. The rumor is that the new one’s just a trainee. I don’t know if a novice is really the right person for this job. After all, the clients are messed up enough to willingly walk into a place that has the words trouble and teen written in two-foot-high letters on its plywood sign out front. I had a fully trained, very experienced professional, and look what happened to her. And I’m pretty much a poster child for mental health compared to some of the kids in this place.

  There were three of us waiting to see the new guy this afternoon, and I’m proud to say I was easily the least messed up. The girl to the right of me cried the whole time. After listening to her for almost fifteen minutes, I finally felt I had to say something.

  “Uh, is anything wrong?”

  “No,” the girl moaned, and swiped at her eyes with her sleeve.

  The girl sitting on the other side of me snorted and said, “So why don’t you shut the hell up, then? You’re driving me crazy.”

  The weeper didn’t stop but shifted to silent crying.

  One of the single mothers/peer counselors must have overheard the exchange, because she was over like a shot.

  “Can’t you see she’s upset? That’s not how we talk to each other in here.”

  Encouraged, the weeper turned up the volume slightly.

  Sour Girl turned to Single Mother Girl. “If you weren’t holding that kid, I’d show you how I talk to people—”

  “Oh yeah?” demanded Single Mother Girl, looking around for somewhere to stash her baby.

  Just then the door to the counselor’s office swung open and the new counselor poked his head out.

  We all turned to look at him.

  “Hi,” he whispered throatily.

  Three mouths dropped open. Mine had the dignity to stay closed. All ceased.

  “Hi,” the other girls answered in hypnotized unity.

  It was like a snake charmer had just started a good song.

  Weepy Girl went in for her appointment, and former enemies Sour and Single went into action with their compacts and hairbrushes, giggling and using the word cute over and over.

  The whole thing was sort of interesting because I’ve been going to the club for a long time now and that’s about the most civilized interaction I’ve seen.

  Oh God, it’s almost my turn to meet the new guy. This should be rewarding. Maybe even a turning point.

  Later

  The bad news is that my new counselor seems at least as troubled as the old one. I mean, he seems basically nice and everything, but he’s obviously riddled with issues. Low self-esteem, unresolved family-of-origin issues, boundary problems—Death Lord Bob has them all.

  His name is actually Bob, or Robert, I guess, but he looks like a Death Lord to me. He has a small goatee, dresses in black from head to toe, wears a turtleneck and waistcoat, and carries a black leather briefcase that looks like a medical bag. The bag is filled with his counselor textbooks and copies of A Course in Miracles and other self-help books. But it looks like it should be filled with equipment of doom and destruction—you know, neutralizers and death scepters and stuff.

  I’m not one to brag, but frankly I think Bob got more out of that session than I did. In this hushed, just-between-you-and-me voice, he told me about how his childhood was quite bad and everything, and how being back in a small town like Smithers for his practicum was “bringing up a lot of issues” related to his own small-town upbringing. Apparently his complaining is some kind of technique to get me to feel comfortable enough to open up and “share where I’m at” with him. So far it’s not working.

  I realize Bob needs to learn and everything, and I don’t mind helping out. But I have to say tha
t I’m glad my psychological well-being isn’t, like, dependent on our appointments. The session only really helped by making me feel relieved that at least I’m not as screwed up as he is.

  July 18

  Today Death Lord Bob informed me that I need to decide what I want out of therapy. He’s very pushy and resultsoriented in some ways, even though he whispers. I wonder if he went to business school before deciding to become a helping professional.

  One interesting thing about Bob is that his voice doesn’t really fit his personality. You would think that some guy whispering about his abandonment issues would sound wimpy. But Death Lord sounds like Clint Eastwood talking tough to the warden or something. He probably has the most masculine whisper I’ve ever heard. That must be what’s got all the new Teens in Transition hanging around. Before Bob came, there were about ten helping professionals for every troubled teen. Now the place seems packed with maladjusted young people. And it’s not just teenagers jostling for position outside Bob’s door either. I’m guessing the off-duty social workers hovering around lately aren’t here to do a little extra helping and nurturing. They sure weren’t anywhere to be found when Mrs. F. was up against the ropes. Emotionally speaking.

  I told Bob that I don’t have any goals for therapy because it was my parents’ idea to help offset any problems related to my lack of peer interaction. They enrolled me in counseling after that Home-Based Learners’ Picnic we went to a few years ago. It was supposed to be an opportunity to “socialize with other home-based learners in a noncoercive atmosphere.”

  My parents looked around and realized that the homeschooled kids weren’t exactly what my dad called “paragons of normalcy.” A disturbing number of them were still breastfeeding at an age when most kids are taking up smoking. One boy wore antlers all afternoon. His sister’s eyes rolled around in her head when she sang the Appalachian folk songs her mother insisted she perform for us in preparation for her big debut on the summer folk-music festival circuit. Those kids were called Fleet and Arrow, so they really never had a chance. Fleet’s parents didn’t tell her that her lotto-machine eye action looked weird because they didn’t want to damage her self-esteem.