“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told her.
“If Tom didn’t like me, maybe no one will,” she went on.
“You’re talking crazy, Elizabeth!” I said. “Besides, who said Tom doesn’t like you? He just likes somebody else better.” That wasn’t the right thing to say.
“You know why he likes her better?” Elizabeth said after a bit.
“Why?”
“Because she lets him kiss her, and I didn’t.”
Now I really stared at Elizabeth. “You didn’t? Not even once?”
She was bawling again.
“For heaven’s sake, Elizabeth, what have you been doing all this time?”
“There’s more to life than kissing,” said Elizabeth.
“Well, sure, but … I mean, it’s not a sin!” I said to her.
“I don’t know,” she said miserably. “I guess I thought that since I was going with a boy, and Mom didn’t know about it, it would make it okay somehow as long as he didn’t kiss me.”
You know what I think? I think that people talk about being “madly in love” because they go slightly crazy. Here was Elizabeth going with a boy but not kissing, and Pamela kissing but holding her breath. Were we nutty or what?
Elizabeth slowly got to her feet, and I followed her down the sidewalk.
“Everything’s going to be okay, Elizabeth. You’ll have another boyfriend by Halloween, I’ll bet.”
I could tell by her face that Halloween seemed five years off. She shook her head. “I’m not going to have another boyfriend ever!”
“Elizabeth!”
“I’m thinking of becoming a sister.”
“A sister?”
“A nun.”
“Elizabeth!” I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I just kept saying her name.
“A nun is even better than being married,” she said. “Then I won’t have to worry about boyfriends again ever.”
Somehow that didn’t sound like a very good reason for choosing nunhood.
I wanted to say something comforting to her when we got back to her house, but her mother was standing at the screen wondering what was going on, so we just said good night and Elizabeth went on inside.
What happened was that I walked away from one problem and right into another. Dad had come home while I was gone, and he and Lester were facing each other across the living room. Lester had muted the sound on the TV, but his eyes were still on the screen. I walked on past them and went out in the kitchen to see if the refrigerator had miraculously filled up since the last time I’d looked, but I stood just inside the kitchen door so that I could hear.
“It doesn’t matter how I know,” Dad was saying. “When I come home from a trip and find out that you’ve been entertaining women in my bedroom, Lester, I get mad as heck.”
I stopped chewing. Somehow “entertaining women” didn’t seem like quite the right words. Dad has a way of saying things rather quaintly. I knew that Lester certainly had not been playing his saxophone or tap dancing.
“What exactly is it that teed you off about it?” Lester asked.
“I don’t like your sneaking around behind my back, waiting until I’m out of the house, and then having women in my bedroom.”
“It wasn’t women, Dad, it was only Crystal. And if I’d asked in advance, would you have let me?”
“No,” said Dad.
“So I didn’t ask,” said Lester.
“You deliberately did something that you knew I would disapprove of. I don’t like to feel you can’t be trusted, Les.”
“Look, Dad, I figured you knew already.”
“Suspected, but didn’t know.”
“Crystal and I are pretty serious about each other.”
“Not in my bedroom, you’re not.”
I suddenly didn’t want to hear anymore. I figured that however Lester had been entertaining Crystal Harkins, he didn’t deserve any more cheese crackers, so I took the whole box up to my room, sat down on the floor by my window, and ate them all.
Across the street Elizabeth was sobbing her heart out, I knew. Somewhere down the block, Tom Perona was putting his ID bracelet on another girl. Lester and Dad were discussing the details of Lester’s private life. I looked at the clock. It was a few minutes after eleven. That meant it was only a little after ten in Chicago. I went to the telephone in the upstairs hallway and called Aunt Sally.
Aunt Sally said she was just getting ready for bed and had put cold cream all over her face, but it didn’t make a bit of difference, I could call her anytime, and what on earth was the matter?
I told her about how we’d gone to the ocean and how Pamela had tried to crawl in bed with Patrick but got Lester instead, and I wanted to know if this was a sin, the way Elizabeth had said.
“I’m so glad you asked me that,” Aunt Sally said. She always says that. I could call her at four in the morning to ask about breathing in when you kissed, and she’d still say she was glad I’d asked.
“Actually,” said Aunt Sally, “a girl could get under the covers with a boy and spend the whole night and it could be an act of mercy, pure and simple.”
“It could?” I said, getting interested.
“Let’s say there was a blizzard,” said Aunt Sally, “and there were this boy and girl somehow stranded in this farmhouse, and there was no wood for the fire and only one bed and one blanket. Huddling against each other there in bed would be a simple act of mercy.”
“What about if there wasn’t a blizzard?” I asked.
“It depends entirely on what’s going on in your mind,” said Aunt Sally.
Things were really getting complicated now.
“If a boy and a girl aren’t married and a girl gets in bed with a boy with the intention of arousing him, that would be a sin,” said Aunt Sally.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, what if she just does it for fun, like Pamela?”
“Was she dressed?”
“All but her shoes,” I said.
“Was Patrick dressed?”
“I don’t know. She got Lester.”
“Well, I’m just glad your father had the sense to have Lester there as a chaperone,” Aunt Sally told me.
I didn’t tell Aunt Sally what was going on in our living room at that very moment.
“Alice,” said Aunt Sally before I hung up, “you do know how babies are made, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “We learned that in health and hygiene back in fifth grade.”
“Good,” said Aunt Sally, and I could tell she was relieved. “But if there’s anything else you need to know, dear, anything at all, I want you to call me.”
I promised.
I went back in my room and sat down by the window again. There were love problems all around me, and it seemed only a matter of time before something happened between me and Patrick.
13
LOVE LETTERS
WE STILL HAD THE FIRST WEEK OF SEPTEMBER to go before school started because Labor Day came late, but on Monday it rained the whole day. I was so glad it hadn’t rained at the ocean while we were there, though, that I didn’t care. Elizabeth was over at her house practicing to be a nun and wouldn’t come outside anyway.
To tell the truth, I was pretty scared about starting junior high. Back in sixth grade, when Patrick was throwing candy bars to me while he was on the patrol duty, the closest we got to touching was a Milky Way flying through the air.
Now we were into French-kissing, and Tom breaking up with Elizabeth, and Lester entertaining women in Dad’s room. Somehow life seemed to be rushing ahead faster than I was ready for. I’d barely get comfortable with one thing, and then—bam!—something new was happening.
I thought of the way it used to be when Patrick would just sit beside me at lunch in the all-purpose room or come over and sit on the porch railing. Or even the way the six of us used to walk around the neighborhood at night after Patrick and I started kissing. Why can’t good things last forever? Because, Dad told me once, noth
ing stays the same, but some things actually change for the better.
I wasn’t so sure about that. I’ll admit, I looked pretty nice at the beach in my new bathing suit. In some ways my body was changing for the better, but my feet were still huge and my knees were too bony and Lester said I had elbows like ice picks. To make it worse, Pamela said that her New Jersey cousin told her that knees and shoulders were “in,” and if you didn’t have at least one leather skirt with a slit in it and at least one beautiful knee to show through the slit, you might as well wear a gunnysack to school. Boy, I’d hate to live in New Jersey.
If I felt shaky, though, it was going to be an even worse week for Janice Sherman, because this was her week at her beach house, and not only was it raining, but she’d probably found out by now that Dad had been visiting with her neighbor while we were there. If Loretta Jenkins, who runs the Gift Shoppe, and Janice Sherman, in charge of sheet music, had their way, they both would be Mrs. McKinleys. Janice would be Mrs. Ben McKinley (he’s my dad), and Loretta would be married to Lester. Then we’d be one big musical family. Dad would play the violin, Janice would play the flute, Lester would play the guitar, Loretta would sing country music, and I’d play the triangle. Not all at the same time, though. Can you imagine what Christmas would be like at our place?
Patrick couldn’t mow lawns in the rain, so he came over for a while, and I let him come in the house this time. He taught me to play the top part of “Chopsticks” on the piano while he played the bottom part. I never knew I could do it. I could actually make music that sounded good. Patrick said he had a book of easy duets at home, and he’d teach me to play some more. All I had to do was press the right keys in the right order and count how many beats to hold them down, and I did that part all right. Surprise! Music!
After he went home, though, the rain kept coming, so I went up in the attic to look for some clothes of Carol’s that Aunt Sally had sent a couple of years ago. She told Dad that some of them might fit me now. He didn’t remember where he’d put them, but thought they might be in the attic. I was sort of hoping I’d find an old skirt of Carol’s with a slit in it.
I don’t know why I hadn’t spent more time in our attic. Maybe I was a little afraid of what I might find. I’d already seen pictures of myself and Mama, of course: Mama bringing me home from the hospital, Mama nursing me at her breast, Mama holding a cake in front of me on my first birthday, Mama pulling me in a wagon… . But looking at pictures was sort of like looking at a movie of somebody else’s life. And I realized when I opened a trunk that I was probably going to find things of Mama’s—things that she had touched—and I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about that.
The first thing I found, actually, was a little dress that I had worn when I was two. It was in a large brown envelope that said, “Alice’s dress at two years of age.” It was pink, with white ruffles at the bottom and around the sleeves. And then, in another envelope, older and more wrinkled, another dress of yellow silk, and on this envelope Mama had written, “Marie’s dress when she was two.”
I laid them both out side by side. Mama’s dress was a little larger and a little longer than mine. I thought it would be nice if someday I had a daughter and we’d keep the dress she wore when she was two. I folded up both dresses carefully and put them back in the envelopes.
I knew somehow that I was going to bawl when I looked in this trunk, but I didn’t until I found a little brown monkey I remembered from when I was very small. And then I remembered very well how Mama used to fill a doll’s baby bottle with water and I’d put the nipple in the monkey’s mouth and after a while the water could come out his bottom. And I remembered how Mama used to make diapers out of dish towels for my monkey and help me change its diapers. That’s when I started crying. I cried, too, when I found pictures I’d drawn for Mama back in nursery school, pictures she had saved. And a paper with an outline of Mama’s hand traced on it and then on the inside of that, an outline of my own hand, right there with Mama’s. That really brought the tears.
Halfway through the trunk, I realized that the clothes Aunt Sally sent wouldn’t be in there at all—these were all keepsakes—but I kept going, bawling the whole time. I even went downstairs, brought up a box of Kleenex, and went on crying. It just seemed important to me somehow that I go through the trunk this summer, that before I started seventh grade with a boyfriend and everything, I really get to know all I could about my mother.
And then, down in one corner of the trunk, I found a little blue box, tied with a blue string, and it said in Mama’s handwriting, “Our letters.”
My heart thumped madly. It almost hurt, pounding against my chest. First I examined the string. It was tied in a bow, not a knot, so it could be opened easily. I figured that if Mama hadn’t wanted anyone to read those letters, she would have at least tied a knot. In fact, she would have taped the box shut or written “Personal” on top, but she hadn’t.
Then I thought about Dad. These were his letters too. I could always go to the phone, call the Melody Inn, and ask him if I could read them. But then I thought how if he didn’t want me reading them, he could have written “Personal” on the box, and how, if he was ever run over by a truck or something, I’d be reading the letters anyway, so it didn’t seem to matter whether or not I read them now.
I lifted the lid. Those in white envelopes were postmarked Tennessee, and the ones in the blue and yellow and pink envelopes were postmarked Illinois. The letters were arranged in order; I could tell by the dates on the postmarks. One of Mama’s letters came first:
Dear Ben,
You didn’t think I would write, did you? I always do what I say. Just wanted you to know that it was a wonderful weekend and yes, a girl from Illinois can get to like a boy from Tennessee very much. I wonder if the boy from Tennessee feels the same?
Yours,
Marie
It was really weird reading that letter, thinking about my dad as “a boy from Tennessee,” thinking about the feelings between the lines that weren’t there on paper at all. Mama sounded pretty bold to me. I wondered what they had done together that weekend that was so wonderful, and if that had been their first date.
Dad’s letter was next. His was even shorter:
You want to know how a boy from Tennessee feels about a certain girl from Illinois? Can I come up again two weeks from Sunday and show you?
I blushed. I was actually holding in my hands a letter that had been written by my father and held in my mother’s hands. I wondered if she had blushed, too, when she read it. I wondered if I should read any more, and how long it would be before I got to the “Your lips! Your arms!” part.
It didn’t take very long. Six letters later, Mom was saying:
Ben, my dearest, I sat by the window after you left, hugging myself with my arms, but it wasn’t the same as your arms. I wish our ‘every two weeks’ was every week. But then I would wish that every week was every day and that every day was every night… .
Now I really worried about reading the rest. Maybe I should go call Dad and get permission right now, I thought. I remembered what he’d said to Lester about doing things behind his back. But I thought of how these letters would be Lester’s and mine someday, so I opened the next one in the pile. It was from Dad:
Marie. My Marie. I’ve been hearing music all week! Strauss waltzes! Mozart sonatas! Haydn quartets! My taste in music, since I met you, my dearest, has turned from somber to lively! Happy music to express the joy I feel! …
“Ben,” Mama wrote back, “all I want, all I will ever need to be happy, is to be in your arms forever.”
I want you. I need you. There it was, plain and simple, and after that, there were no more letters.
I sat on the chintz chair by the trunk, my heart pounding. It was just as Pamela had said. First, “Your lips! Your arms!” and then, “I want you! I need you!” Not in those same, exact words, maybe, but it was there.
I carefully put all the letters back into the box in the order in w
hich they were written and tied it again with the blue string. At the very bottom of the trunk, beneath the pictures that Lester had drawn, was a large box marked “Marie’s wedding dress,” but I didn’t open it. I put everything back in the trunk the way it had been, the box of love letters in the exact same spot where they were before. I wondered if Lester had ever read them.
Dad once told me that he had married Mom when he was twenty-five and she was twenty-three. That meant that when Mom wrote the letters, a few months before they married, she was eleven years older than I was right then. Sometime in the next eleven years, I would probably reach the place where I would say, “Your lips! Your arms!” to someone, and later, “I want you! I need you!” It still seemed a long way off. I mean, when you spread that out over the next eleven years, there was a lot of time between “Your lips!” and “I need you!” It was comforting in a way to know that I didn’t have to squeeze it all into a single summer or all into seventh grade or even do it all in high school. I could take my time.
I finally found the clothes that Aunt Sally had sent. They were in a box marked “Alice” in black Magic Marker and it was sitting in one corner of the attic. I think I knew it was there all the time, but I was just ready to get to know my mother a little better. Someday I’d tell Dad I’d read those letters and we could talk some more about him and Mama. But for right now I just wanted to think about her myself, beginning with the yellow dress she wore when she was two.
14
BLACK MATCHES, WHITE GLOVES
TUESDAY MORNING IT WAS STILL RAINING. Poor Janice Sherman, I thought. I took a bus to the mall and saw Elizabeth and her mother buying clothes for seventh grade. While her mom paid the cashier, I said, “Elizabeth, how are things? You feeling any better?”
She shook her head hard. I was afraid she might start crying again right there, but then she said, “Did you go to High’s last night?”
“No,” I told her. “It’s no fun without you.” I wanted to show her just how loyal we were. I didn’t mention the rain.
Alice in Rapture, Sort Of Page 9
