Alice In-Between

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  “Does Crystal know?”

  “What do you mean, does Crystal know? Do I ask what she does on the weekends she’s not with me?”

  I sighed. Life was just too complicated right then to worry about many more people besides myself, and I decided to devote my energy to Dad and Miss Summers, not Lester and his girl-of-the-month.

  Even Mr. Hensley, in World Studies, had plans. He announced that he was retiring at the end of the week. The world’s most boring teacher, and yet I was sorry to see him go. I’ll always remember that we buried a time capsule when we were in his class, and now I realized he wouldn’t be around to open it with us when we were sixty years old.

  “What do you say we chip in for a cake for Hensley?” Patrick asked as he cornered some of the others in the hall when class was over. “Give him a little going-away party.”

  Everybody chipped in fifty cents, and Patrick said he’d do the honors on the last day of class. Maybe even buy a little party hat for Hensley to wear above his gray suit and gray tie and gray shoes and socks.

  Miss Summers had set aside the whole week for us to recite our poems to the class and talk about them afterward. It wasn’t the reciting that bothered me, because I could do the last verse of Thanatopsis now without looking once at the poem. I could almost say it while I was reading the one across the page from it, about the lady sweet and kind, whose voice my heart beguiles.

  Someone, once, had sung that poem to me, I was sure of it. How could somebody sing a poem? And who could it have been? I recited it to Dad one evening and asked if Aunt Sally had ever sung it to me.

  “That was your mother, Al,” he said. “I think I even remember her singing it. It goes something like this….” And he hummed the melody first, then put the words to it, becoming more sure of himself and confidently singing the last line:

  “But change she earth, or change she sky,

  Yet will I love herrrrr, till I die.”

  “Did she just make up the music or what?” I wanted to know.

  “I think we had a book of old English ballads. It was probably in that,” he told me.

  Miss Summers started at the beginning of the alphabet and called on us one at a time. The boy ahead of me recited a poem about soldiers marching off to die even when they knew they had been given the wrong order: “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

  We talked a lot about that afterward. I said I didn’t think I’d ever do that. Was it courage or stupidity? someone else asked, and the debate went on so long, I figured Miss Summers wouldn’t get to me that period.

  I had settled back to relax when suddenly she looked at the clock and said, “We have about ten minutes left, so I’ll leave it to you, Alice. Would you like to do yours now or wait till tomorrow? If it’s a short poem, we might finish it today.”

  I wanted to get it over with. “I’ll do it now,” I said, and walked up to the front of the room.

  Why do friends always look different when you face them in front of a classroom? Everybody looked so serious somehow. You’re used to seeing your friends laughing and talking in the halls, not sitting there sober-faced, staring at you. They seemed like different people entirely, and I felt rattled.

  “I’ve chosen the last verse of Thanatopsis, by William Cullen Bryant,” I told them. “It was the favorite poem of someone close to me before she died, so I’d like to share it with you.” And then I began:

  “There is a lady sweet and kind,

  Was never face so pleased my mind;

  I did but see her passing by,

  And yet I love her till I die.”

  Suddenly I realized I was reciting the wrong poem! The wrong poem! For a moment I thought my heart would stop beating. I could see Miss Summers out of the corner of my eye, leaning forward at her desk, but I could tell from the faces of the people in front of me that nobody else seemed to know I’d made a mistake. I wondered whether I should stop and start over, or just keep going. I kept going:

  “Her gesture, motion, and her smiles, …”

  What came next? Did I really know this poem?

  “… uh … Her wit, her voice, my heart beguiles;

  Beguiles my heart, I know not why,

  And yet I love her till I die.”

  I realized I wasn’t reciting a poem that was a favorite of my mother’s at all; I was reciting a poem that was my mother. When I started the last verse I felt really strange, and my voice sounded thick and husky:

  “Cupid is wingèd and doth range,

  Her c-country so my love doth change;

  But change she earth, or ch-change she sky …”

  Tears were running down my face. It was awful!

  “Yet will I love h-her till I die.”

  I rushed to my chair, not even waiting for the discussion afterward, and sat with my hands over my face. It was burning. The room was so still you couldn’t hear a thing. I knew people were looking at me. I wished the bell would ring so I could run away. Why had I done that? Why hadn’t I stopped and done the other poem?

  And then Miss Summers was talking. She was sitting with her chin resting on her hands, and sort of looking out the window, talking in a clear, low voice:

  “Sometimes,” she said, “a poem moves us in ways we didn’t expect, and I suspect that’s what happened here. I asked you all to recite a poem that had special meaning to you. Alice did that, and did it beautifully, but the poem was not Thanatopsis, as she’d planned, but an old ballad, I believe, called ‘Passing By.’”

  She smiled at me then, and I managed a smile back. I was glad she was going to talk about it. I couldn’t stand everybody leaving class wondering if I was out to lunch or something. She said that my mother died when I was five, and that this was an example of how lines of poetry can sustain us when we are troubled or frightened or angry or sad. I guess I was her star exhibit in class that day.

  When the bell rang and we surged out into the hall, I was amazed that two other kids had tears in their eyes, that other eyes were red.

  “Nice going,” a guy said to me, only it wasn’t sarcastic or anything. He meant I’d done okay.

  I had to talk about it at dinner that night, though. Feelings, in our house, tend to come out at the table.

  “I … cried today in Miss Summers’s class,” I said.

  Both Dad and Lester stopped eating and looked at me.

  “You did, Al?” said Dad. “What about?”

  “I recited my poem.”

  They were still staring.

  “What happened?” asked Lester, and then I told them how I had substituted one poem for another, and decided to keep going.

  “I’m sure the other students understood,” said Dad.

  I nodded. “They did.” It was the first time I could remember that I’d embarrassed myself horribly, yet it all came out all right in the end.

  I thought Lester would laugh at me, make some smart remark, but he looked pretty serious himself.

  “Something like that happened to me once,” he said.

  Now it was my turn to stare. “You recited a poem?”

  “No. Mom had written me a letter from the hospital, and I kept it in my pocket wherever I went. And one day, about two weeks after she died, I reached into my pocket and it wasn’t there. I thought I’d lost it.” Lester swallowed. “I started crying in school, and just couldn’t stop. Everyone knew about Mom’s death, of course, so they sent me to the school nurse. I found the letter later in my room, but I never did tell anyone about it. Or about my crying.”

  “You didn’t even tell me,” Dad said gently.

  “I guess I figured boys didn’t talk about things like that,” Lester said.

  I imagined an eleven-year-old Lester going bravely to school after Mom died. He had known her so much better than I had. It must have been awful.

  Dad reached over and put a hand on Lester’s shoulder, then stretched out his other hand to me. I put out both hands, one for Lester and one for Dad, and for a moment we just sat there, all holdin
g hands. Then Dad gave us a quick squeeze, and we went back to eating supper.

  9

  TRAIN TO CHICAGO

  WE GAVE MR. HENSLEY THE PARTY OF his life. Not only did he put on the paper hat that Patrick had brought to school with the cake, but he even blew the little horn that came with it and seemed genuinely touched that we remembered his retirement in this way.

  Sometimes it doesn’t take very much to make someone happy. All a person really wants to know is that he’s appreciated and is going to be missed. There was a moment or two, watching Patrick there in front of the room, when I wished we were going together again. At the end of sixth grade, we’d decided to be special friends, not boyfriend and girlfriend. I just didn’t feel ready for steady dating then, but I don’t think I was any more ready for it now. I wasn’t a little kid anymore, but I wasn’t a young woman, either. The more I thought about it, the more I decided I had those “in-between blues.”

  “I’ve got the in-between blues,” I said to Lester that afternoon as I sat on the porch with a book.

  “They’ll pass,” said Lester.

  He was right. A few days later I was worrying about packing for my trip to Chicago. Every day the phone must have rung a dozen times—Pamela calling me, me calling Elizabeth, Elizabeth calling me, me calling Pamela.

  When the day to leave actually came, we’d decided to take the Metro down to Union Station, so Dad dropped us off around noon.

  “Have a good time, gals,” he called, blowing me a kiss. “Call me when you get to Aunt Sally’s.”

  I wonder why parents want you to call when you go on a trip. It’s as though Aunt Sally wouldn’t let Dad know if I didn’t get there all right.

  We sat on the subway with our suitcases tucked behind our legs and giggled at everything. The car lurched so that Pamela almost slid off the seat, and we giggled; a boy got on who looked like a TV star, and we giggled. A woman looked over at us to see why we were giggling, and we giggled some more, and then we giggled because we were giggling.

  We were all wearing jeans, but Pamela was wearing tight jeans. I mean, so tight that there were little zippers on the bottoms to zip them down her calves. She had on a silky tomato-red shirt with the second button left undone, and copper-colored earrings, and copper bracelets all up one arm. I would have guessed, if I hadn’t known her, that she was eighteen at the very least.

  Elizabeth, on the other hand, had a luggage tag on her suitcase that was shaped like a panda bear. She was wearing her long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and had on a checked blouse with little ruffles around the collar and sleeves. If I hadn’t known Elizabeth, I would have guessed she was ten going on eleven.

  What would people guess if they looked at me? I wondered. I wasn’t chubby and cute, but I wasn’t slender and shapely, either. I wasn’t short for my age, but I wasn’t tall. I wasn’t ugly, but I wasn’t beautiful, either. My hair wasn’t red, but it wasn’t all blond. I decided that I was a category the stores had overlooked. I was too old for the girls’ department in clothing stores, but I wasn’t quite junior miss. There should be a big section with neon lights blinking off and on above the entrance saying IN-BETWEENS. That was me.

  Union Station, you wouldn’t believe. It’s huge, with nine theaters and an eatery on the lower level. It has high, curving ceilings trimmed in gold, with statues and balconies and shops and trees growing on the inside. Because we were going to have sleeping compartments, we were considered “first-class passengers,” which entitled us to wait until train time in a special lounge, with marble floors and soft couches, and a bar with free soft drinks and peanuts and stuff. It even had conference rooms and fax machines. Elizabeth and I looked a little out of place, but Pamela didn’t.

  We left our bags with the man at the desk and went out to explore the eatery. I chose Mexican, Pamela chose Chinese, and Elizabeth got a foot-long hot dog. Then we sat there listening to trains being announced and watching people go up and down the escalators. I decided that going to Chicago with Pamela and Elizabeth was about the most exciting thing I had ever done.

  Maybe I would like being grown-up. Maybe I would love being on my own, with no one to tell me what to do. I crossed my legs like Pamela was doing, only my legs didn’t look like hers, because I was wearing sneakers and socks, and she was wearing sandals that had thin ankle straps at the tops and her toenails were painted bright red.

  “If anybody asks us where we’re going, let’s say we’re running away,” said Elizabeth.

  Pamela and I turned and stared. Elizabeth said that?

  She giggled. “Just for fun.”

  “All right,” I told her.

  We hadn’t been at our table five minutes when four guys came along, with baseball caps on backward and T-shirts down to their knees. One of them reached around between Pamela and Elizabeth and took the pickle off Elizabeth’s plate. We tried to grab it back, and started giggling all over again.

  “You come down here to spend the day?” one of the guys asked.

  We tried not to smile.

  “No,” Elizabeth said. “We’re running away.”

  The boys just grinned. “Yeah? Where you going?”

  “Chicago,” I told them.

  “I’ll bet.”

  “We are,” Elizabeth insisted. Pamela was getting up to throw her stuff in the trash, so Elizabeth and I got up too. We headed for the escalator, knowing the guys would follow.

  “Well, come and run away with us,” another boy said. “We’ll have more fun.”

  We shook our heads.

  “So where are you going now?”

  “To the train,” I said.

  “Sure.”

  They kept trying to find out our names. I told them I was Roxanne Peters. Pamela said she was Jennifer Leigh, and Elizabeth said she was Marlene Malloy.

  The boys got off the escalator right behind us and followed us over to the double doors of the first-class lounge. We pressed the button. The boys stared. The doors opened and we went inside, the boys right behind us, their eyes wide.

  “May I see your tickets?” the man at the counter asked them.

  The guys looked at the man and then at us.

  “This is a lounge for sleeping-car passengers only,” the man said. “Sorry.”

  The boys went back out, looking at us over their shoulders. We had another laughing fit and had to go to the restroom and put cold water on our faces.

  About 4:15 we followed a redcap to the gate, then down the escalator to the train platform, until we came to sleeping car #2900. I think Pamela and Elizabeth had thought the three of us would be sleeping in the same room and were a little dismayed to discover that we had one bedroom, sleeping two, and a roomette, sleeping one.

  “The only fair thing to do is draw straws to see who has to sleep alone,” Elizabeth decided, so she tore a piece of paper into three strips and put an X on one, and Pamela got the roomette.

  I felt rather grown-up showing them how everything worked, the sinks folding into walls, the beds folding out of walls, and little closets only eight inches wide. Maybe I’d like to work for Amtrak someday, I thought. Be a train attendant, like a stewardess or something.

  Pamela came back to our room with us, and we all crowded together at the window, tapping lightly on the glass whenever a good-looking man walked by, then ducking down where he couldn’t see us and laughing.

  “I’ll take the guy with the little mustache,” said Elizabeth, pointing to a man with a large suitcase.

  “Oh, look at the one over there! Look at those buns! Oh, yeah!” Pamela cried, pressing her lips dramatically against the glass as a startled young man in tight jeans looked up.

  We squealed with laughter.

  “Uh-oh, look what’s coming!” I said.

  There were the four guys we’d met in the train station, walking along the platform and looking for us. Somehow they’d gotten down to the tracks. We dived again.

  They must have seen us, though, because when we popped back up, t
wo of them were riding on the shoulders of the others, their faces right outside our window. We shrieked.

  “Excuse me.” We wheeled around. The conductor was standing in the doorway. “May I see your tickets, please?”

  I could feel my face burn as I scrambled up off the floor and groped around in my bag for the tickets. The boys were tapping on the glass now, and Pamela and Elizabeth were huddled together on the floor with their hands over their faces. The conductor punched the tickets and handed them back as though he ferried lunatics daily between Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

  The next person to come by was our sleeping-car attendant, who asked us if we knew how to use all the controls in the room, and we all said yes. He said his name was Stan, and to let him know if there was anything he could do to make our trip more comfortable.

  “Friends?” he smiled, nodding toward the guys, who were really cutting up now outside the window.

  “Sort of,” we told him.

  The train started to move then, and the guys were running alongside. Suddenly one of them turned around, bent over, and lowered his pants.

  Pamela and I shrieked hysterically, but Elizabeth went catatonic. She kept gasping long after the boys were out of sight. It’s a good thing the chief of onboard services came by next to take our dinner reservations, because I wasn’t sure Elizabeth’s heart would hold out. She’d told me once she felt awkward and immature because she’d never seen what a man looked like naked, but now she’d at least seen a backside.

  We made a reservation for seven o’clock in the dining car, then Pamela went to her roomette. When Elizabeth went down later to ask Pamela if she’d brought any Kleenex, she said, Pamela was sitting there with her ankle-strap shoes propped on the hassock, reading her magazine, and all she needed to pass for twenty-five was a cigarette in one hand.

  “I’m never going to smoke, ever,” I told Elizabeth. “When you smoke, your breath smells like dead fish.”