Alice Alone

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  “Al,” Dad said, trying to sound reasonable. “What adults in their right minds would allow a bunch of fourteen-year-old boys and girls to spend the night together? Think!”

  “Churches do it! Libraries do it! It’s no big deal,” I told him, wiping my eyes and trying to sound more grown up. “All you can think about is sex! Everyone simply brings a sleeping bag and we watch TV and eat popcorn and talk and play cards, and then everyone goes to sleep in his own sleeping bag. Do you actually think some guy is going to crawl into a girl’s bag with a dozen other kids lying only two feet away?”

  “At two o’clock in the morning in a dark room? Yep!” put in Lester.

  I turned on him then. “Karen said her church group had one and they all got up the next morning and scrubbed down the pews.”

  “What’d they do the night before? Have a food fight?” Lester asked.

  “No! It was a work project, but they started with a sleepover. Mark said the public library had one when he was in sixth grade, and the librarians slept right there with the kids.”

  Dad sighed. “So what adult is going to sleep on the floor with you?”

  “Karen’s mom, I suppose.”

  “Where’s her father?”

  “They’re divorced.”

  “Al, if you are going to be sleeping on the floor with a bunch of guys around, it’s going to be under our roof, not off in some divorced mother’s apartment where things could get beyond her control.”

  I hardly even stopped for breath. “Then can we have the party here?”

  Dad blinked.

  “We’ve got more room than Karen, we wouldn’t be sleeping so close together, and if you want you can sit on the couch all night with a broom and poke anyone who gets out of line,” I said, knowing full well that Dad can’t stay awake very long.

  Lester looked at Dad. “She’s gotcha there, Pop.”

  Dad looked as though he’d just been hit with a brick. “Al, I am going to count the days until you leave for college,” he said, half under his breath.

  “How do you know I won’t live at home and go to the University of Maryland like Lester?” I chirped.

  He turned helplessly to Lester.

  Les shrugged. “I don’t know. If churches and libraries do it …”

  “Even Elizabeth can do it!” I said, not at all sure.

  At that precise moment, like a message from God, the phone rang, and when I picked it up in the hall, Karen said, “Alice, Mom won’t let me have the party. I can’t believe this! I was sure she’d say yes.”

  “I’ll call you back,” I said quickly, and hung up.

  “Okay, Lester, you’ve got to help me out here,” Dad was saying. “Al can have the party, and I’ll make the popcorn and order the pizza, but after I go to bed, you’re in charge.”

  “What?” yelled Lester.

  “You know I can’t stay awake past eleven. It’s a Saturday night, your classes have only begun at the U, so you can’t have too much to do yet. I need you. Once Sylvia and I get married, we’ll handle things like this.”

  Lester gave a howl of pain.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said.

  I went upstairs and phoned Karen. “The party’s still on. Dad says we can have the sleepover here.”

  “Really?” she cried. “Oh, Alice, your dad is so cool!”

  3

  A Sudden Announcement

  Once the word got out that Lester was in charge, everyone, it seemed, was coming. Even Elizabeth. We got a lot of calls, though—parents wanting to talk to Dad to make sure he was going to be here. This only made Dad more nervous, and Lester berserk.

  “I really appreciate this, Les,” I said. “Maybe I can make it up to you somehow.”

  “You can hire ten vestal virgins to massage my feet and feed me grapes, but you’ll still owe me,” he growled.

  As Elizabeth and I walked to the bus stop the next morning, she said, “Mom said I could come if I put my sleeping bag next to Lester and not off in some dark corner with one of the guys.”

  “Poor Les,” I said. “And to think his birthday’s on Sunday.”

  Elizabeth stopped walking. “His birthday’s Sunday?”

  “So?” I said. “Alice, we’ve got to get him a cake! He’s giving up one whole night of his life just for us.”

  Every day is sacred to Elizabeth Price. She knows exactly what she plans to do every hour of the day, and how much she expects to accomplish by the time she goes to bed. Maybe I’m envious of her, because too often I just let things happen to me. I react to whatever comes along instead of making things happen. She used to think she was going to join a convent, but lately she’s been talking about marriage and motherhood and even a career. By thirty, she says, she wants to be “settled in.” Career or marriage or both, she wants to be settled.

  No matter how much she tells you, though, you always get the feeling that she’s holding back. That you never quite know the real Elizabeth. Maybe everyone’s like that to a certain degree. Maybe we never tell our friends everything there is to know about us.

  There was no stopping her where Lester was concerned, however. As soon as we got on the bus, Elizabeth told Pamela and Pamela told Brian, and soon everyone knew that we were planning a surprise party for Lester on Saturday.

  I didn’t get involved. If they wanted to give Lester a cake, it was okay by me. I’d have my hands full just making sure the bathroom was clean and the house straightened up, and helping Dad with the food. That, and algebra.

  I was really having trouble with that subject. I worried so much about not understanding it when the teacher wrote things on the board that I concentrated more on the worrying than the problem. But every time I walked in the classroom, my stomach churned. Whenever I had to put a problem on the board, I could feel perspiration trickling down my sides.

  In junior high, I would have leaned my head on Patrick’s shoulder going home and told him how scared I was, and he would have put his arm around me and volunteered to come over and help me with my homework. But now, if Patrick wasn’t staying after school for band practice or something, he was doing extra work in the library for his accelerated program. I missed him.

  “I might as well not even have a boyfriend,” I complained to Gwen, the friend who’d helped me with general math back in eighth grade. She had a boyfriend, too, and his nickname was Legs. He goes out for track every spring with Patrick.

  “Yeah? Tell me about it,” she joked.

  “I never see him! He’s always got fifty other things to do!”

  “He calls, doesn’t he?”

  “It’s not the same as talking to him in person.”

  “Well, you can’t carry a guy around in your pocket,” Gwen said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’ve each got to have your own space.”

  “It’s like we’ve each got a ball field of space around us now! What more does he need?” I asked.

  She laughed. “A whole city block. Some boys need a whole block just to themselves.”

  I didn’t think that applied to Patrick. He’d never said anything about needing more space. He was simply too busy with all he had going on in his life. I should be proud of him, I told myself—somebody as smart and motivated as he was. Most of the time I’d let him decide where we should go and what we should do. He always had the best ideas.

  When Gwen and I walked down the hall together, we had the habit of leaning toward each other, our arms touching. I walk that way with Pamela, too, but Elizabeth doesn’t like people leaning on her. Gwen’s chocolate-colored skin against my pinkish-cream made Legs think of candy, he said—the kind his grandma kept in her candy dish.

  “If you need help with algebra, I could come over sometime,” Gwen offered when we reached the stairwell.

  “I don’t just need it sometimes, I need it all the time. Every day,” I told her. “I don’t think I’m going to pass this course.”

  “You said the same thing about general mat
h. Don’t play dumb on me,” Gwen said.

  The fact was, I wasn’t playing. If a textbook says, The widest part of North America is from Labrador to British Columbia, I can see a picture of it in my head. If I read that The clam has gills that hang into the mantle cavity on each side of the foot, I know exactly what the book is telling me. I see pictures in my mind. But if I read that The coefficient is the multiplier of a variable or number, usually written next to the variable, or [5a+6a={5a-a+7a}-a], I might as well be looking at pigeon tracks in the snow. I can almost feel my eyes roll back and my brain go on hold.

  “That’s life, Al. L-I-F-E. Some things are harder than others,” Lester said that evening as we made taco salad for dinner. The Melody Inn stays open late on Thursday nights, but it was Janice Sherman’s turn to stay at the store, and we wanted to have dinner ready for Dad when he got home.

  “Well, life stinks,” I said. “I don’t want to go through four years of high school scared to death I’m going to flunk.”

  “What’s the worst that can happen if you do?”

  “I’d have to take algebra I again next semester, which means I’d have to go to summer school for algebra II.”

  “And … ?”

  “And there are other ways I want to spend my summer!”

  “If that’s the worst thing that can ever happen to you, be grateful,” said my brother, the philosopher, as he sprinkled cheese over the ground beef.

  “But after algebra, there’s geometry, and after geometry, physics!” I cried. “Tell me one single way algebra can help me if I decide to become a psychologist.” I had already narrowed my career options to a counselor or a psychologist rather than psychiatrist, because if I went into psychiatry, I’d have to go to medical school, and if I went to medical school, I’d have to take chemistry and who knows what else.

  “Because somewhere along the way, you’ll have to take a course in statistics, and you can’t enroll in that if you can’t pass algebra and geometry, that’s why,” Lester said.

  “Why would I have to take statistics?” I bellowed.

  Lester handed me the shredder and the lettuce. “Let’s say you read a study that most men who commit suicide have sisters. Statistics can help you figure out if the results could have occurred by chance, whether sisters are the actual cause of their brothers’ demise, or …”

  I didn’t get to hear the rest, because the phone rang just then and I answered in the hall. It was Aunt Sally in Chicago. She took care of us for a while after Mom died, and I keep mixing up early memories of Mom with her. This sort of freaks Dad out. Aunt Sally calls every so often because she feels responsible for us, I guess. She even flew out for a few days to see how we were doing when Dad was in England.

  “So what’s new?” asked Aunt Sally.

  She used to say, “Alice, how are you?” implying that she suspected the worst. But because I often clammed up when she asked that, she’s learned to say, “What’s new?”

  “Well, Dad’s on cloud nine,” I told her. “I don’t know when he and Sylvia are getting married— next July, maybe—but he’s really happy these days, and busy as usual at the store. Lester’s back at the U, and I started high school this week.”

  “Sounds as though you’ve all got your work cut out for you,” said Aunt Sally. “So what are you doing for fun?”

  No matter how she tries to disguise it, whenever Aunt Sally opens her mouth, you know exactly what’s eating her. She’s not concerned about our work and our studies; she’s concerned about what Lester and I are doing for fun, because fun and trouble are never that far apart in Aunt Sally’s mind. It’s hard to believe that Carol is her daughter, because there’s no resemblance between Aunt Sally and my grown cousin.

  “Well, Les isn’t going with anyone at present. We’re celebrating his birthday this Sunday.”

  “Yes, I’ve sent him a card. Twenty-two! Can you believe it, Alice? Lester? Twenty-two years old?”

  “Yep, I believe it. In fact, he’s going to chaper one the coed sleepover I’m having here Saturday night,” I said.

  I don’t know why I do that. There’s something about me that loves to torture Aunt Sally.

  “Alice, ex-cuse me, but I thought you said a coed sleepover!” she gasped.

  “That’s right. There will be about a dozen of us, if everyone shows.”

  There was a long pause. Then: “Is your father absolutely, positively out of his mind? Lester, the ultimate playboy, is going to chaperone a dozen hormone-crazed kids on a …” She paused again long enough to breathe. “Where are you all going to sleep?”

  “On the floor. In sleeping bags. Individual sleeping bags,” I said, laughing.

  “Well, all I can say is that things have certainly changed since I was a girl,” Aunt Sally said. “Marie and I couldn’t even spend the night with a girlfriend unless Mother knew exactly who would be there. And I would never have considered letting Carol go to a coed sleepover. Ever!”

  “So she eloped with a sailor,” I said, and knew immediately I’d been unfair.

  But Aunt Sally just sighed. “Yes, eloped, and divorced two years later.” Another pause. “I suppose Patrick will be at this sleepover?”

  “Of course.”

  “Alice, let me give you one little piece of advice: Familiarity breeds contempt.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s true. The more familiar you let a boy get with you, the more favors you give him, the less respect he will have for you.”

  Familiar? Favors?

  “Then I guess after people marry they absolutely hate each other,” I reasoned.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that! I just mean there’s a lot of truth in the saying that if a girl lets a boy go all the way, he won’t respect her in the morning.”

  “How about halfway?” I teased. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Now, Alice …”

  “A third of the way? Three-eighths?”

  “Alice …”

  “Aunt Sally,” I said. “Picture this: Twelve guys and girls, each in his or her own sleeping bag, sprawled out on the rug in our living room, with Lester right smack in the middle of us, listening for every sound, watching for any move …”

  “What I see is Lester snoring away, surrounded by a dozen fourteen-year-olds, who … well, I’ve said all I’m going to say on the subject, Alice. But have fun!”

  Have fun? I knew at least one person I could count on to stay awake Saturday night: Aunt Sally. I always tell Dad he doesn’t have to lose any sleep over Lester and me. Aunt Sally will do it for him. I went back out in the kitchen.

  “What did Sal have to say?” asked Lester.

  “Familiarity breeds contempt,” I said.

  Lester grinned. “She’s got that right,” he said. “Every time you wash your undies and drape them over my towel in the bathroom, kiddo, I want to toss you out the window along with them.”

  We had dinner ready when Dad got home around six-thirty, and I spent the rest of the evening at the dining room table doing my homework. Lester did the dishes, then went up to his room to read, and Dad sat on the couch, his feet on the coffee table, a clipboard on his lap, writing to Sylvia Summers.

  About nine-thirty, I’d just gone out in the kitchen to get some chocolate grahams when the doorbell rang, and a few moments later I heard Dad’s voice in the hallway. “Janice!”

  Janice’s voice: “I know it’s late, Ben, but could I come in for a few minutes?”

  “Of course! Something happen at the store this evening?”

  I heard the door close and their feet crossing the hallway into the living room.

  “That for me?” Lester yelled from upstairs.

  “No, Les. Janice just dropped by,” said Dad.

  I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t very well take my graham crackers back into the dining room and sit there chewing while they talked. But if I stayed in the kitchen I’d be eavesdropping. What I should have done was go upstairs, but I didn’t.

  Dad: “You loo
k upset.”

  Janice: “I am upset. I didn’t want to bring this up at the store, Ben, so I decided to come by and tell you in person. I’ll be leaving the Melody Inn at the end of September.”

  “Janice! Why on earth?”

  “I’ve asked the main office for a transfer, and they’ll let me know. I can’t go on working for a man I don’t trust.”

  “What? Janice, sit down. Please!”

  More footsteps, then a pause. Then the squeak of the couch springs.

  “I’ve worked for you for six years, Ben. Longer than any of your other employees, and the store has had its ups and downs. But I thought we made a good team.”

  “We did, Janice! We do! What do you mean, you don’t trust me?”

  “I don’t expect you to tell me everything that goes on in your life,” Janice said, and now her voice was trembling. “But when it’s a subject as intimate as marriage, and I have to hear about it from a part-time employee …”

  “Ah.” It was a cross between a sigh and an exclamation, and Dad paused. “Marilyn told you that Sylvia and I are engaged. Right?”

  “Can you understand how that made me feel, Ben? Hearing it from her? She gets the news and I don’t?”

  “Janice, I swear. I know I’m a fool when it comes to social relations sometimes, but it was only because she came right out and asked. I mean, these young women, they just ask these things, so I told her. I didn’t think … I honestly didn’t think you’d be that interested.”

  Out in the kitchen I clutched my head and closed my eyes. Even I didn’t think my dad would say something quite so stupid.

  “Y-you didn’t think I’d be interested? I’m speechless,” said Janice.

  Dad didn’t answer. “All these years of loving you … ,” she said quietly.

  “Janice!”

  “And I knew it wasn’t reciprocated. I can’t blame you for that.”

  “Janice, I’ve always been fond of you. You know that.”

  “‘Fond’ won’t do it, Ben. But I did think you’d have the courtesy—the decency—to let me know first if you became engaged to another woman.”