Alice In-Between

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  Lester picked us up at the Metro station in Silver Spring after I called.

  “So how’d it go?” he asked. “Anybody get assaulted, mugged, or pillaged on the way back?”

  “You’re not funny, Lester,” I said.

  “Carol still as good-looking as she always was?”

  “She’s beautiful,” I said. “What’s been happening here?”

  “Not a lot. A man called to speak with you, Al. A Mr. Plotkin. I think he’s the husband of a teacher you had back in grade school, and he wanted you to know that his wife is in the hospital.”

  I stared blankly at Lester. “He called?”

  “Yes.”

  That meant she wanted to see me. He wouldn’t have called unless she had!

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked.

  “He didn’t say but he left his number.”

  Pamela and Elizabeth each thanked me again for inviting them and thanked Lester too, for picking us up. And both told Lester, as they got out of the car, how nice he looked with a tan.

  “Always try to please the ladies,” Lester said, and Elizabeth giggled. As soon as I got inside, I called Mr. Plotkin’s number, but no one answered. I let the phone ring eight times.

  “He’s probably at the hospital with his wife,” Lester said. “Try him later.”

  “Did he sound as though it was serious, Lester? An emergency or something?”

  “If it was an emergency, Al, he would have called nine-one-one, not you. Like I said, call him later.”

  I called the Melody Inn next and left a message for Dad that I was home. Then I turned my attention to Patrick. His birthday had been the day before, and I wanted to get the hermit crab to him while it was still alive. I called his number. His mom answered.

  “Patrick’s gone swimming,” she said.

  “Well, I have a present for him,” I told her.

  “How nice! Did you want to bring it over?”

  I swallowed. That had never occurred to me. Somehow I thought that Patrick would ride over on his bike and pick it up, but you can hardly ask someone to come and pick up his own birthday present, and even if you could, I had a hard time seeing Patrick carrying it home on his bike.

  “Okay,” I told her.

  “In fact, why don’t you come for dinner, Alice? It would make a nice surprise for Patrick, and he’d be so pleased.”

  I swallowed again. “Um … when?”

  “Tonight would be fine. Say about six?”

  When I hung up, that big scary feeling filled my chest, just as it had when Patrick took me to his parents’ country club once for dinner. I didn’t have any guidebook for how I was supposed to act! No instruction manual! This wouldn’t be as bad as his parents’ country club, of course; this would be worse! When we ate at the club, his parents dropped us off and picked us up again afterward. Whatever mistakes I made this time would be in front of them.

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” I told Lester.

  “Why?”

  “I have to go to Patrick’s for dinner tonight.”

  “But you like Patrick.”

  “I don’t like eating in front of his parents!”

  “But, Al, they’ll be eating in front of you! Everybody eats the same way. The food goes up to the mouth, in the mouth … chew, chew, chew, swallow.”

  “It’s not just that, it’s everything! It’s what to eat and what to eat it with and how much to eat and what to say and …”

  “Just pretend you’re here with us. The more relaxed you look, the more relaxed you’ll feel.”

  “I don’t think so, Lester.”

  “Whatever happens, it won’t be fatal,” Lester said, and took his books out in the backyard to study.

  I ran upstairs to see what clothes were unwrinkled enough that I could wear them.

  Then I ran back downstairs to feed the hermit crab.

  I ran upstairs to see what shoes would go with what skirts.

  Then I ran downstairs and ate five marshmallows to make my stomach stop rumbling.

  Dad called in the middle of the afternoon. “Thought maybe we could all go out to dinner tonight and hear about your week in Chicago,” he said.

  I wanted in the worst way to go. I wanted to call up Mrs. Long and tell her that Dad had already invited me out to dinner and I’d just forgotten. But everything I thought of sounded wrong, and I had to tell Dad I was eating at the Longs’.

  “That’s wonderful, honey,” he said. “Have a good time.”

  I was all ready by four o’clock, and then I ate a peach and spilled juice on my skirt. I had to wash and dry the skirt, then iron it. At 5:45, I left the house in my new flats, which hurt at the heels, and Dad drove me to the Longs’, eight blocks away. I got out of the car like a girl going to her execution, holding the plastic fishbowl with the hermit crab inside.

  I went up the steps to the porch and rang the bell. Mr. Long answered. He had the newspaper in one hand, and he looked at me over the tops of his glasses.

  “Hello?” he said, and I could tell he didn’t even recognize me. We stared at each other a full five seconds, and finally he said, “Is that for sale?”

  “N-no,” I said, my face turning pink. “I’m Alice. I’m here for dinner.”

  “Oh! Of course!” he said, and I knew his wife hadn’t even told him. “Come in, come in! Patrick, Alice is here.”

  “What?” came a voice from the next room, and Patrick walked around the corner in his stocking feet, staring at me in amazement.

  “Happy birthday,” I said.

  “That was yesterday,” said Patrick.

  “Well, happy birthday, anyway,” I said.

  “Oh, Alice, you’re right on time,” said his mother, hurrying in from the kitchen. “Patrick, we’re having a little surprise supper tonight, and Alice is joining us.”

  And then the hermit crab moved. I guess I was holding the fishbowl lopsided or something, because it suddenly scurried over to the other side of the bowl.

  “A hermit crab!” said Patrick. “Is it for me?”

  “Yes. Happy birthday,” I said for the third time.

  “Hey, Mom, look! A hermit crab!” Patrick said, taking the bowl into the living room, and I realized that Uncle Milt had been right. It was the perfect present to a perfect boy from a … well … almost perfect girl. Sort of.

  If I just could have handed him the crab and gone home, it would have been better.

  Instead, I found myself sitting on one side of a big dining room table, Patrick on the other, Mr. Long at one end, and Mrs. Long at the other.

  She was wearing pink silk slacks and a flowered silk top. Mr. Long was wearing a shirt and tie. Patrick was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. I wasn’t dressed up like his parents; I wasn’t dressed casually, like him. I was dressed in between. It was the summer of in-between.

  What was strange to me was that there was no plate in front of me. I looked around the table to see if someone else had got my plate by mistake, and then I saw that all four plates were sitting in front of Mr. Long.

  But nobody was eating anything yet.

  “Alice, we have a custom in our house of being quiet for a few moments before dinner, and each of us thinking of the nicest thing that happened to us during the day, and being grateful,” Patrick’s mother said.

  I bowed my head, even though nobody else did. I figured it was some sort of religious thing and that bowing my head was the safe thing to do. The nicest thing that would happen to me that day, I thought, would be walking out the door and going home, and since it hadn’t happened, I couldn’t be grateful. Not just yet.

  As though a secret signal had been given, all chairs started to squeak at once, and when I raised my head, I saw Patrick and his mother looking expectantly at Mr. Long and the pile of plates.

  “I hope you like beef brisket and new potatoes,” said Mrs. Long, “because that’s what we’re having. I didn’t change the menu any after I invited you to come.”

  “Oh, it’s fine,” I
said. “I love beef biscuit.” I didn’t even know what it was. Beef over biscuits, maybe. Here at the Longs’ they didn’t even eat old potatoes. She had very specifically said new potatoes. Maybe you were supposed to throw them out after six weeks or something. At our house we keep potatoes around even after they sprout and look like little alien men from Mars.

  Mr. Long reached out to the platter in front of him, and, picking up the carving knife and fork that were lying there, proceeded to cut the meat. He laid two slices on the top plate, then two small red potatoes and three stalks of asparagus, then passed it to me. But where were the biscuits?

  “Beef brisk-et,” said Mr. Long.

  “Thank you,” I mumbled, and put the plate down.

  He picked up the next plate, did the same thing as before, and then passed it to Patrick. Patrick passed the plate on to his mother at the end.

  “Thank you,” she told him.

  I could feel my cheeks turning red. I wasn’t supposed to have kept that plate. I had greedily set it down in front of me when I should have passed it on.

  I looked helplessly around the table. The ketchup was in a little porcelain bowl with a spoon in it. The mustard was in the same kind of bowl at the other end of the table. The butter was on a silver dish, and the cloth napkins under the two forks on the left side of each plate matched the tablecloth.

  Where were the rules for girls like me? Why didn’t someone take me aside when I walked in the door and tell me how you were supposed to eat in fancy houses? Was this the way other people ate?

  I took a deep breath and lifted my fork. The wrong one, I discovered. I put it back down and picked up the other.

  “Bon appétit, Alice,” said Mr. Long, and we started our dinner.

  14

  HOSPITAL VISIT

  THE FIRST TEN MINUTES OF DINNER WITH the Longs were some of the longest ten minutes, and worst, of my entire life.

  I just didn’t feel I belonged. I wasn’t a relative. I wasn’t Patrick’s girlfriend, not really. If I had died right then, they could easily have put on my tombstone, ALICE IN-BETWEEN, and it would have fit.

  It wasn’t that the Longs weren’t kind. They didn’t ask me questions when my mouth was full or anything. It’s just that everything seemed so … so perfect, so fancy. There were even fresh flowers on the table.

  At our house, we sort of dribble down to the table once supper is on. Some of the plates match, and some of them don’t. It wouldn’t occur to us to pour the milk into a pitcher first, or spoon out the mustard into a little bowl. As for napkins, if we remember to put a roll of paper towels in the middle of the table, we’re eating fancy.

  What would dinner at our house be like if Mom were alive? I wondered. Would she have matching tablecloth and napkins? Flowers in a vase? Would she have set all our plates in front of Dad so that he could carve the meat? I didn’t know, but I was miserable.

  The more miserable I felt, the more sure I was that they noticed.

  “What’d you do in Chicago?” Patrick asked.

  “Oh, lots of things,” I said, and couldn’t remember a one.

  “Would you care for a roll, Alice?”

  I realized that Mrs. Long had been holding the basket for at least half a minute before I snapped to. The rolls were wrapped in a white cloth inside a small wicker basket. They were hot. At our house, we usually eat rolls cold. And if we do heat them first, somebody just stands over the table holding the pan with a pot holder and slinging hot rolls onto each plate.

  “Thank you,” I murmured, but I had a piece of potato in my throat, and immediately had a coughing fit.

  “I’ll get some water,” said Patrick’s father, and went out to the kitchen for a glass.

  I wanted to crawl under the table for the rest of the meal.

  When I had drunk some water and the coughing had stopped, Mr. Long said to his wife, “Did you see what Alice gave Patrick for his birthday?”

  “No. What?” she asked.

  Patrick immediately got up and brought the fishbowl to the table with the hermit crab in it. I expected Mrs. Long to throw up her hands and scream. I expected her to say, “Get that horrible thing out of here.”

  She didn’t. “A hermit crab!” she said. “I haven’t seen one of those in years. What a marvelous present, Alice.”

  Did she mean it?

  “And two extra shells, so it can change whenever it wants,” Patrick said delightedly. And then, before my very eyes, he reached into the fishbowl, lifted out the crab, and set it right in the middle of the table.

  I stared. Nobody said, “Get it off!” Nobody said, “Not on the table!”

  Patrick sat down again, and the hermit crab started inching slowly along between the salt and pepper shakers. Everyone laughed.

  It all got easier after that. Nobody was looking at me anymore. They were all watching the crab. Whenever it got to the edge of the table somewhere, the person on that side picked it up and moved it back. Patrick even set his roll on the tablecloth. The hermit crab climbed halfway up, and his mother only laughed.

  You could be rich and still be nice, I discovered. You could be rich and fancy and still be fun! In fact, when dessert time came around and I expected it to arrive at the table in flaming brandy or something, Mrs. Long went to the kitchen and came back with four large pieces of chocolate fudge cake, left over from Patrick’s birthday, with ice cream on top, slathered with chocolate fudge sauce. And she ate every single bite of hers.

  I helped take the dishes out to the kitchen, and Mrs. Long even let me help rinse them and put them in the dishwasher. Then Patrick and I cleaned out an old terrarium they had in the attic and set it up on a card table in his room. We spread sand on the bottom and put the hermit crab in his new home, with a few rocks and sticks from outdoors, and a lid, embedded in the sand, filled with water for a pond.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” Patrick said as he leaned his arms on the edge of the terrarium, watching the crab.

  “You are?” I studied him out of the corner of my eye.

  “Yeah. I wondered what all you were doing in Chicago.”

  “Well, I heard a drummer, for one. We were drinking Cokes at a sidewalk café, and a drummer was playing somewhere down the block. He was pretty good. You would have liked it.”

  Patrick straightened up. “Listen. You want that drum lesson now?”

  “What?”

  “C’mon. I promised.”

  I followed him down to the basement. There was a family room and fireplace at one end, Patrick’s drums at the other. And suddenly I was sitting on a little leather stool surrounded by silver drums with black and green sparkles on the sides, all at different heights and angles. Patrick was showing me how to hold the sticks and explaining the difference between a snare and a tom-tom, and how to work the bass and high-hat pedals with my feet.

  He took a drumstick and hit one of the cymbals sharply on top. “This is my new Zildjian. Dad gave it to me for my birthday.” He struck it again. “Hear that? See how long the ping goes on?” He handed the stick back. “Try it. Just mess around.”

  It was a lot more difficult than it looked—sort of like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. I wasn’t very good at it. I didn’t sound as good as I had that day on the porch with Patrick, when we were both slapping out the rhythm of a song on our legs. But I was beginning to get a feel of how complicated it was, and was grateful when Patrick offered to give me a demonstration.

  He began with a slow rat-a-tat-tat on the snare, gradually increasing the tempo until his hands became a blur. He moved easily from snare to tom-tom, one after another, the tone changing as he went, all to the deep beat of the bass. The high-hat cymbals parted, then clanged together in perfect time. I clapped when he stopped.

  “Patrick, you’re very, very good at this,” I said.

  “I know,” said Patrick. I love it when Patrick says something dumb, because every dumb thing anybody else says or does cancels out one of mine.

>   When it was time to leave, and we went upstairs, Mr. Long said he’d drive me home, but Patrick said it was only eight blocks, why didn’t he walk me home, and I said fine, even though my flats were making blisters on my heels.

  After a block, though, my shoes were really hurting, so I just reached down and pulled them off, glad that I hadn’t worn panty hose.

  It was a beautiful night out, and the crickets were chirping up a storm. The moon was almost full, and there was a breeze that felt like the breeze at Lake Michigan. As we sauntered along, me holding my shoes with one hand, Patrick just reached over and put his arm around me, pulling me closer. It didn’t feel awkward, wasn’t embarrassing—it just felt right. I glanced up at him quickly and he smiled, so I smiled back.

  Once, when we stepped off a curb, we got out of step, and Patrick had to hop so that our bodies were moving rhythmically side by side again.

  We talked about school and the party for Mr. Hensley—how well it went. I told him some more about Chicago, about Pamela’s experience on the train. It seemed a lot funnier talking about it than it had at the time.

  And finally, when we got home, where the porch light was on, waiting for me, Patrick just stopped at the end of the drive, turned me around, and kissed me.

  I had my shoes in my hands, so I didn’t put my arms around him or anything, just rested one hand on his chest. And the nice part was, when he stopped, he didn’t let me go and leave. He smiled down at me, then kissed me again.

  “Good night,” he said, grinning.

  “Good night, Patrick,” I said. “Happy birthday.”

  Then he left, and I stood on the sidewalk a moment, watching him go. I went inside, shut the door, and stood leaning against it, smiling.

  I was still there when Dad came out of the living room and looked at me in the hallway.

  “I thought I heard the door close,” he said.

  “Hello,” I said, grinning crazily.

  He took a step closer. “Al, are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  He waited a moment. “Have a good time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”