Alice Alone

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  “Three-thirty, if we’re lucky,” I told him.

  “Three-thirty? What time are the people coming?”

  “Two,” I said.

  “What am I supposed to do with them until then?”

  “Talk to them, Lester! Be sociable! I’m cooking the dinner. Do I have to tell you how to entertain, too?”

  “Do you know what country they’re from?”

  “From here.”

  “Refugees from here? From what?”

  “I don’t know, Lester! I don’t know where they were born. I’m doing the best I can, and if you—”

  “Okay, okay,” Les said. “Pipe down.”

  When he left the kitchen, Elizabeth said, “Don’t you know anything at all about these women, Alice?”

  My heart began to thump. She was looking at me suspiciously. “Liz,” I said. We’d started calling each other nicknames since we began high school. “They’re not … not exactly refugees in the ordinary sense. They’re sort of … more like … well, troubled women looking for a refuge in an uncertain world.”

  “What?” said Elizabeth.

  “The Salvation Army referred me to an organization called CCFO, which turned out to be Community Connections for Female Offenders, and after I found that out I couldn’t very well hang up, could I? They’ve all been in prison.”

  Elizabeth let her spoon fall into the sweet potatoes. “What?”

  “Shhhh. It’s okay. They haven’t done anything violent.”

  “Alice, are you out of your mind?” she gasped.

  “Probably,” I told her.

  13

  Refugees

  We had this plan: As soon as the turkey was out of the oven, I’d put the pies in to bake while we were eating the rest of the meal. I’d heat the peas and carrots on the stove, the sweet potatoes in the microwave, stick the rolls in the oven for a couple of minutes, open a can of cranberry sauce, and voilà! Dinner.

  Elizabeth and I found my mom’s best tablecloth in a drawer in one of Dad’s closets. There were marks all along the creases, and the matching napkins had yellowed, but it looked better than a bare table. We also found a box of sterling silver candlesticks and ten little individual salt and pepper shakers to match the candle holders. Dad said they had been a wedding gift from Aunt Sally and Uncle Milt. While I checked on spoons and serving dishes, Elizabeth polished the silver, and I’d never seen our dining room look so elegant.

  Elizabeth said she’d stay till the women arrived, and followed me upstairs so I could comb my hair and change my shirt. I chose a long, moss-green shirt to wear with black leggings, and had just put some mauve blush on both cheeks and was fastening tiny gold hoop earrings when I heard Elizabeth say, “Oh … my … gosh!”

  “What?” I turned around.

  She was standing at the window, her hands on the sill, looking down at the street. I picked up the other earring and walked over in time to see the last of the three women coming up onto our porch. This one was dressed in a fake zebra-skin coat, five-inch heels, and was wearing enough jewelry to open a store.

  “Wait till Lester gets a load of this!” Elizabeth said wide-eyed. Then she turned to me. “Alice, do you think they were prostitutes?”

  I didn’t know what their convictions were for. All I knew was that Dad was probably expecting Albanian refugees with kerchiefs on their heads, but at that moment the doorbell rang.

  “Al?” Dad called from the kitchen. “You going to get that?”

  “I’ve got it!” came Lester’s voice. I could hear him walking rapidly across the living room toward the front door. The sound of the door opening.

  There was a three-second silence so profound, it was as though Lester had lost the power of speech. And then the miracle happened. I heard my brother say, in his most gentlemanly voice, “Welcome to our home. I’m Lester. Please come in.”

  Elizabeth and I went downstairs together. The three women—two white, one African-American— were taking off their coats. They were probably in their late twenties or early thirties, and each smiled as she handed her wrap to Lester.

  Elizabeth stuck around just long enough to hear the African-American say, “I’m Charmaine,” the one in the leather jacket say, “I’m Shirley,” and the one taking off her zebra-skin coat say, “I’m Ginger.”

  “And I’m Alice,” I said. “This is my friend Elizabeth, who helped me make dinner. Only she’s leaving now.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice she could help you!” said Charmaine.

  “Good-bye! Have a nice dinner!” Elizabeth said, slipping noiselessly past me, and whispered, “Good luck!” as she closed the door behind her.

  Dad came out of the kitchen, and Lester introduced the women to him.

  “You were so kind to invite us to dinner,” Shirley said, pushing up the cuffs of her satin blouse, which she wore with designer jeans, and followed the others into the living room. “The CCFO has been wonderful to us.”

  “Excuse me?” said Dad.

  But I chimed in with, “We’re always glad to have company for dinner. Won’t you sit down? Lester will see to the appetizers while I check the turkey.” Then I made a beeline for the kitchen and opened the oven door. The thermometer still had a way to go before it reached the poultry mark, and I stared at it, trying to will the mercury to move. I grabbed a dish of black olives and a plate of cheese and crackers to take to the living room when Lester came around the corner.

  “You’re dead,” he told me. “Al, who are those women?”

  “Charmaine, Shirley, and Ginger,” I gulped.

  “I know that! Where did you find them?”

  “I told you. I called the Salvation Army, and—”

  “These are no Salvation Army bluebonnets, I’ll tell you that.”

  “… and they referred me to the CCFO,” I added as Dad entered the kitchen.

  “What is the CCFO?” Dad asked me.

  “Community Connections for Female Offenders,” I bleated.

  “Holy Mother … !” Lester said prayerfully, and we’re not even Catholic.

  “Al,” breathed Dad, “get out there and be friendly. Les, put the wine back and serve those women ginger ale if you have to drive ten miles to find some.”

  I took the cheese and olives to the living room and sat down across from Charmaine in her blue jersey dress. She seemed the most motherly of the lot. If you had met either Charmaine or Shirley on a bus, they wouldn’t look different from anyone else, but Ginger … I figured if anyone had been a prostitute, it was she.

  “So who all is in this family, Alice?” Shirley asked. “Just you and your dad and Lester?”

  “Yes. Mom’s dead,” I told her, and instantly all three women stopped smiling and looked at me pityingly. “So we just wanted to … to have a feminine presence at the table this Thanksgiving, we miss her so,” I fumbled, not knowing how to stop.

  “Bless your little heart,” Charmaine cooed.

  Dad came back in the room then, and Ginger said they were sorry to hear about his wife. Dad looked quizzically at me, then at Ginger, and said simply, “Thank you.”

  Lester found some ginger ale and brought it in with a bucket of ice.

  “All three of us are looking for jobs right now,” said Charmaine. “The CCFO got us work in a warehouse, but we’d like something better, if we can get it.”

  “What kind of work are you looking for?” Dad inquired.

  “Something that’ll pay the rent. Something in sales, maybe. You put yourself out of circulation awhile, you’re amazed at how much the rents have gone up,” said Ginger.

  “Shoot. Just blink your eyes and it’s another thirty dollars a month,” said Charmaine.

  “Sales have their ups and downs,” Lester told her. “I take some classes at the U and work part time selling shoes.”

  “Do you, now?” said Charmaine.

  “A college boy!” said Ginger.

  I went out in the kitchen again and turned the oven to 450 degrees. I decided I would get
that turkey done if I had to blast it out of the oven. I fussed around, making sure everything else was ready to go, sat out in the living room for another fifteen minutes making small talk, and when I checked again, the needle had almost reached the poultry mark. I turned the oven down a little for the pies, and tried to figure out how to lift a twenty-pound turkey out of a roasting pan so I could set it on the carving board.

  I thought of calling to Dad or Les for help, but Dad had just made a joke and the women were all laughing, and then Lester said something funny and they laughed some more. I figured I needed Dad and Lester to keep the conversation going more than I needed them in the kitchen.

  I slid out the oven rack as far as I dared. Then I picked up two heavy meat forks, jabbed one in each side of the turkey like handles, and tried to lift it straight up out of the roasting pan. The skin was stuck to the pan, however, so I tried jerking upward to free it.

  The skin gave, the turkey jerked free, and then, before I knew what happened, one fork slipped out of the side, and half the huge turkey fell to the floor with a greasy whump and splat, followed a second later by the other.

  I don’t know which was louder—the clatter of the pan as it clanked back on the rack or my scream.

  Lester was the first one to reach me, Dad at his heels, and a moment later Ginger, Shirley, and Charmaine were all peering over Dad’s shoulder at the spectacle there on the floor.

  The turkey looked as though it had been cut in half with a power saw because it had, its legs and skewers akimbo, dressing strewn about the floor in clumps, the puddle of grease, like an oil slick, spreading slowly out beneath it.

  I was on the verge of tears when Charmaine started to giggle. I saw Shirley elbow her, and suddenly she gave a snort disguised as a sneeze, and then Ginger burst out in a fit of laughter. A moment later Dad joined in, then Lester, and suddenly we were all standing there in the kitchen, howling like hyenas.

  Charmaine leaned against the door frame, clutching her ribs as though she, too, might split in half.

  “Well,” said Dad at last. “The only sides we can’t eat are the sides that’re on the floor. Ladies, would you care to take a seat at the table while we tend to things here?”

  “Not until we help clean up,” said Charmaine. “Just hand me a dishrag, Ben.”

  The next thing I knew, Dad had speared one half of the turkey, Les had speared the other, and they were lifting the twin carcasses onto the carving board. The three women, with towels and rags, were mopping up the floor, stopping every so often to laugh some more.

  We were in fine spirits when we finally got the meal on the table. There was enough stuffing left in the turkey to salvage for dinner, and the sweet potatoes turned out well. So did the rolls and the peas and carrots, and I remembered to stick the three pies in the oven. Already we could detect the scent of mincemeat.

  “Alice, you can cook me a turkey any day,” said Shirley. When she smiled, she arched her eyebrows, which had been plucked into two thin half circles. “This sure beats jail food.”

  “Indeed it sure beats that,” said Charmaine.

  And then they began to talk. It was almost as though, once I had made such a horrible mess of the turkey, it was easier for them to talk about their own mistakes. And since the women knew how we’d got their names, there was no need to hold back.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t Ginger in the dozen or so gold bangles who had been a prostitute, it was Shirley, but she’d been in prison on a drug charge. Both Ginger and Charmaine had done shoplifting big time.

  Once, when Shirley referred to her former profession, she glanced at me and hesitated, but Dad said, “You can say anything you want around here, because that’s the way we learn in this house.”

  “It’s the way we all ought to have learned!” said Charmaine, wiping her fingers with the rose-colored nail polish on her napkin. “My mother didn’t tell me nothing! Not a single thing I needed to know about myself. Everything I learned I learned from the neighbor boys in all the wrong ways. I ever ask my mother a question about sex, why, she’d crack me across the mouth, like how I shouldn’t even be thinking about things like that.”

  Ginger nodded. “I’d ask my mother questions about sex, she’d just laugh. Big joke. You’ll find out soon enough, my aunt would say, and she and mom would laugh some more.”

  Shirley, though, was more quiet than the rest. Then she said, “My mother told me everything I wanted to know about sex and more besides. Said she expected twenty dollars a week from me—a boarding fee—for our two-bedroom apartment. Now how in the world is a high-school girl supposed to get twenty dollars a week to pay for her own room? So I was taking boys up to my bedroom after school, making a whole lot more than twenty dollars, and that’s when my mother said I didn’t need to finish high school to make that, and didn’t care if I never went back, so I didn’t.”

  This was news to Charmaine and Ginger.

  “Your very own mama?” Charmaine gasped.

  “If you can call her that,” Shirley continued. “She used the money for her drug habit. Then I got into drugs as a way of getting through the afternoons with the boys. Nobody is ever again going to mess with my body and my mind if I can help it.”

  “Good for you,” said Dad.

  All the women were looking at me now.

  “You got a good home here, mother or no mother,” said Charmaine.

  “The kind of mothers we had, you can do without,” said Shirley.

  But Ginger disagreed. “Every girl needs a mother,” she said.

  Dad smiled around the group. “Well, Alice is about to get one, because I’m engaged to be married next summer.”

  All the women began to exclaim at once, and I had to tell them the story of how I’d invited Miss Summers to the Messiah Sing-along and Dad didn’t know about it, and Dad told about his trip to England, while Lester poured more ginger ale.

  When I went out in the kitchen to rescue the pies, the edges were browning nicely. We sat around talking while the pies cooled, and then I set them out with a can of Reddi-Wip and some plates and forks, and we all helped ourselves.

  Dad said he’d do the dishes. The women wanted to help, but he said absolutely not, so the rest of us moved into the living room and sat around our big coffee table, playing crazy eights and poker, and some other kind of card game we’d never heard of that the women had learned in prison.

  “That’s one thing they give you plenty of in prison: time,” said Shirley.

  “Isn’t that the truth?” said Charmaine. “You ever think the months are flying by too fast, you just spend a year in jail and you’ll swear that clock don’t move at all.”

  Ginger, who was closest to Lester’s age, kept directing coy little remarks to him, I noticed, and fluttering impossibly thick black eyelashes, but he didn’t fall for it. He was gallant and funny and helpful and attentive, and I could tell that none of the women wanted to leave as afternoon turned to evening, but they realized they should go.

  Dad and Lester helped them on with their coats, and I remembered what Aunt Sally had suggested, and wrapped up a packet of turkey and some rolls for each of them.

  “Thank you so much,” Shirley said, shaking hands all around. “It was a wonderful afternoon.”

  Ginger lingered over Lester’s handshake. “Don’t you study too hard now, College Boy,” she said. “You’ve got to have a little fun.”

  “I’ll remember that,” said Lester.

  But it was Charmaine who hugged me as she went out the door. “Little girl,” she said, “you don’t know how lucky you are to have a home and a family like this.”

  I hugged her back. “Maybe I do,” I said.

  We watched them go down the sidewalk, Ginger in her five-inch heels that, according to Lester, would be considered instruments of torture back in the Dark Ages. And then, with a little toot of the horn, the old Buick turned around and headed back down the street.

  I wondered if Dad and Lester were going to jump all over me
once the women were gone, but Lester simply hit me on the head with the newspaper he was rolling up to restart the fire.

  “Knucklehead,” he told me, trying not to smile. “Salvation Army; Community Connections for Female Offenders. Who are you inviting next year, Al? The Mafia Wives Club?”

  “Why didn’t you tell us about those women, Al?” asked Dad.

  “I thought maybe if you didn’t know they were ex-cons, it would be easier to treat them like ordinary people,” I said.

  “Well, fortunately, they seemed to feel comfortable enough here to talk about their past, and let’s hope it really is past,” said Dad. “Actually, I think you did a fine thing, Al. Your mother used to do things like that—invite a neighbor in who had lost her husband. Take dinner to a friend going through chemotherapy—that sort of thing. I just wish you’d let me in on these schemes before they happen.”

  “You guys were really wonderful,” I said. “You made them feel right at home. You were great.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t go pressing your luck,” Lester growled.

  I went back to the dining room to help put things away. The women had been careful not to spill anything on Mom’s linen tablecloth, but I decided to wash it, anyway, to see if I could get rid of the yellow lines. I carefully picked up the candlesticks that Elizabeth and I had polished, and then the little sets of silver salt and pepper shakers. And suddenly I froze and stared at the table. Five sets of shakers. One was missing.

  I stood there, my throat too tight even to swallow, blood rushing to my head. I tried to picture where each woman had been sitting, and realized that the set of shakers by Charmaine’s place were gone.

  How could she? How could she accept our invitation to eat at our table and share our hospitality and then walk off with one of the few things I had left that had belonged to my mother? How could she hug me there at the door with those shakers stuffed in a pocket?

  My eyes filled with tears. Angry tears. How could people come into our house and just take things? First my boyfriend. Now my mother’s shakers. I didn’t want to admit to Dad that I never should have invited those people here—that it had been another of my stupid ideas. But he had to know. I went back out in the kitchen.