Reluctantly Alice

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  When Dad came home, Lester’s forehead felt even hotter.

  “Help me get him on his feet and out to the car, Al,” Dad said. “I’m going to drive him to the emergency room at Holy Cross.”

  We pulled Lester into a sitting position, then Dad knelt down and put one of Lester’s arms around his neck, hoisting him up on his feet. I braced his other side. I felt like a sandbag holding back the Mississippi. We sort of dragged Les out the front door, down the steps, and plopped him in the backseat of the car.

  Lester opened his eyes halfway. “You get my shirts, Al?” he asked.

  “Les, you’re going to the hospital,” Dad said. “Al, call Marilyn and tell her Lester’s sick and can’t possibly take her out. I’ll call you from the emergency room as soon as we know what’s what.”

  I nodded, watched the car drive off, then went back inside and sat down on the couch, in the very spot where Lester had been lying. The cushions were still warm. I wondered what I’d do if anything happened to my brother. I didn’t know how much I needed him until I thought of never having him around again. Why was it I had to wait till something like this happened to think of all the ways I’d been a horrible sister?

  I remembered the time Dad bought a fancy cake for Lester’s birthday. He put it on a platter, and all the while he was making supper, I was nibbling the frosting off the sides. If anyone should have eaten the icing off the sides, it was Les because it was his birthday.

  Just when I decided I hadn’t done anything more awful than that, I remembered how I’d taken one of his sweaters, without asking, to wear on a field trip and lost it. And as long as I’d been making supper, I’d given Lester the worst of everything. If there was mold on the bread when I made sandwiches, I’d pinch it off and give that slice to Lester. I certainly didn’t want to eat it, and I wouldn’t think of giving it to Dad. If there was wilted lettuce, it always went in Lester’s salad bowl, not mine or Dad’s. Once I even dropped a hamburger patty on the floor when I was taking it off the stove. I wiped it with my hand and put it on Lester’s bun. He never knew. It was as though he was a garbage disposal or something.

  It wasn’t until the phone rang that I remembered I was supposed to call Marilyn and tell her what had happened. It was probably Marilyn calling Lester, wondering where he was.

  I stumbled over my feet on the way to the phone. It was Crystal Harkins.

  “Hi, Alice,” she said in her silky low voice. “How are you?”

  “Okay,” I told her.

  “Is Les there?”

  I was so glad I could tell her the truth and didn’t have to say he was with Marilyn that I just warbled it out: “He’s awfully sick, Crystal. Dad’s taken him to the emergency room.”

  “Oh, Alice! What’s wrong with him?”

  “I’m not sure, but he’s got a fever. Dad’s pretty worried.”

  “And you’re there all by yourself?”

  “Dad said he’d call as soon as he found out anything.”

  “I’m coming over,” said Crystal, and the phone clicked.

  I stared at the receiver in my hand and slowly hung up. What had I done? What was I supposed to have said? I looked up Marilyn’s number in the phone book and dialed.

  Marilyn sounded impatient when she answered. “Hello?” Lester was late, all right.

  “Marilyn, this is Alice.”

  Her voice grew a little softer. “Alice, where in the world is your brother? We had a reservation for dinner a half hour ago.”

  “He’s at the hospital,” I told her. “He’s practically delirious, Marilyn. He kept saying he had to get over to your place, but Dad told me to call and tell you what happened.”

  “Good heavens! What’s wrong?”

  “We don’t know. Dad said he’d call as soon as they found out anything.”

  “You’ll let me know, won’t you, Alice? As soon as you hear?”

  “I’ll call you right away,” I promised.

  When I hung up, I let out my breath and realized I hadn’t had any dinner myself, so I went out in the kitchen and opened a can of beans and franks. When I don’t have to cook for anyone else, I eat them cold out of the can. I was sitting on the couch, holding the can on my knees and watching television, when Dad called.

  “Al, the doctor thinks it’s strep. He’s taken a throat culture and given him a shot of penicillin, but we have to wait around for a couple more tests before we come home. Did you get hold of Marilyn?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. You go ahead and eat, and I’ll get my own supper when I get back with Les.”

  No sooner had I put the phone down than the doorbell rang. How was I supposed to call Marilyn and tell her what Dad said with Crystal sitting right here? I opened the front door. It was Marilyn.

  “Alice, I couldn’t wait. I wanted to be here when your dad calls. I’m just so worried about Les.”

  “Dad just called and—” I’d only opened the door halfway, but Marilyn came right in.

  “He did?” She took off her sweater. “What did he say?”

  “The doctor thinks it’s strep, and as soon as they take more tests, Dad’s bringing Lester home.”

  “Then I’m so glad I came,” Marilyn said, sitting down. “I want to be here when Les walks in.”

  I swallowed, but before I had time to say a word, I heard the slam of a car door outside and footsteps on the porch. The doorbell rang. I tried not to look at Marilyn as I opened the door.

  “Well, I’m here!” Crystal said, and walked inside.

  Marilyn and Crystal stared at each other like two strange dogs. I wondered if they had ever met. Probably not.

  “Um . . . Crystal, this is Marilyn,” I said, then wondered if it should have been the other way around. Did you introduce the person who was sitting down to the person who was standing up, or the person who was standing up to the person sitting down, or . . . ?

  “I didn’t know you had company,” said Crystal.

  “I’m waiting for Les,” Marilyn told her.

  “What a coincidence,” said Crystal. “So am I.”

  “Sort of like a welcoming committee!” I chirped brightly. Marilyn and Crystal looked at me, but no one smiled.

  Crystal chose a chair off to one side and sat down. I picked up my can off the coffee table.

  “Beans and franks?” I offered.

  Marilyn and Crystal shook their heads.

  If I had a mother, she would have known what to do. I could have just watched and listened, and wouldn’t have had to say anything. Now I had to do it all. I tried to imagine what Elizabeth’s mother would do if she were here. So I sat down on a chair between the couch where Marilyn was sitting and the chair with Crystal in it and folded my hands in my lap.

  “How are things at your house?” I asked Marilyn.

  She was examining a chipped fingernail. “Very well, thank you,” she said.

  I smiled pleasantly at Crystal. “How are things at the university?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” said Crystal. She and Marilyn exchanged stony glances.

  “I think you should know, Crystal, that Les and I were going out tonight,” Marilyn said at last.

  “Well, I saw him at lunch, and he looked fine to me,” said Crystal. “Strange he could become this sick so quickly.”

  “Are you suggesting—”

  “It was such a beautiful day,” I said quickly. “Dad calls it Indian summer.”

  “Are you suggesting that Les isn’t really sick?” Marilyn said, ignoring me completely. I could have been a doorknob for all the attention they paid to me.

  “I’m just saying that sometimes our bodies tell us what we really want to do,” Crystal told her.

  “I’ve known Les for a long time,” said Marilyn.

  “Then why didn’t you hang on to him?” Crystal snapped. “You let him go, and as soon as he found happiness with someone else, you suddenly decided you wanted him back.”

  “I never stopped loving him,” said Marilyn.

/>   I could see that they could carry on a conversation quite well without me, so I picked up my can of beans and franks again and polished it off. I even forgot myself and burped, then said, “Excuse me.” They looked my way, both of them startled to discover I was still in the room.

  And then I heard Dad’s car coming up the drive. I heard the door open and close, footsteps on the driveway, then on the steps. Crystal stood up, but Marilyn stayed where she was.

  The door opened and Lester staggered in, Dad right behind him, one hand on his arm. When Les saw Crystal he came to a dead stop. Like the trunk of a tree, he stood rooted to the floor, but the top of him swayed slightly. He blinked, trying to keep his eyes open.

  “Lester, you must feel awful!” Crystal said sympathetically.

  Then Marilyn got up and came out in the hallway. Lester took one look at her and fell back against Dad. “I feel awful,” he said.

  I just looked helplessly at Dad, lifted my arms, and dropped them again. He took in the situation at a glance.

  “Ladies,” he said, “I have a very sick young man here who needs to get to bed.”

  “If there’s anything I can do, Mr. McKinley—” Crystal began.

  “If there’s anything to be done for Lester, I’ll do it,” said Marilyn.

  “I appreciate it,” Dad said to both at once. “And I’ll certainly let you know.”

  “It’s really okay about this evening, Les,” Marilyn told him. “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Lester, only he said it to Crystal instead of Marilyn. Then he realized his mistake, turned around, and said, “Okay,” again. To me.

  Both girls left, and I helped Dad get Lester upstairs and in bed.

  “You want me to make you some supper, Dad?” I asked.

  “Tell you what. I’ll get my own if you’ll take a washcloth and basin and rub down Lester’s arms and chest and face. It’ll help lower his temperature.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I don’t know if Lester even realized who was taking care of him. When I put the washcloth on his chest, he said, “It’s awful cold, Marilyn.” But when I got up to add some warm water to the pan, he said, “Would you bring me a drink, Crystal?”

  When I went downstairs to get him some ginger ale, I thought I heard voices outside, so I went to the window to look out in the dark. I couldn’t believe it. Marilyn and Crystal were sitting on the steps, facing each other, talking. Their voices were soft and serious.

  I got the ginger ale and a straw and bent it so that Lester could drink. Then I took it upstairs and sat by his bed. I didn’t tell him who was sitting on the porch.

  Lester looked like he might be feeling just a little better. His face was still pink with fever, but his eyes were brighter. They actually focused on me as I put the straw between his lips.

  “You get my shirts?” he asked.

  “Your shirts are still at the cleaner’s, Lester. You won’t need them for a while.”

  “Did you call Marilyn for me?”

  “Yes. She understands.”

  “Good,” said Lester, and closed his eyes.

  I think he slept while I went on bathing his chest and arms. When he opened his eyes again he said, “I dreamed that Marilyn and Crystal both came to see me.”

  I didn’t think I ought to tell him that not only had they come, but they were both here together, and that if he thought he had problems now, they were nothing compared to what he’d face once he got well.

  I stayed with Lester until almost nine, then took his glass back down. Dad had stretched out on the couch and was sound asleep. The front steps were empty now. Both Marilyn and Crystal had gone, and Lester was upstairs sleeping like a baby.

  If there was a mother in our family, I wondered what she’d do next. I decided she would lock the doors, put a light blanket over Dad, turn out the lights, and go to bed. So I did.

  10

  THE TROUBLE WITH HENSLEY

  I WAS WRONG ABOUT MOST OF THE THINGS that might happen in Mr. Hensley’s class. His breath still smelled, and he still showered the first row with spittle while he talked. But being the first person in the first row wasn’t so bad, because I was first out the door when the bell rang, for one thing. And for another, Mr. Hensley never embarrassed anyone if he could help it.

  “Alice,” he’d say, “there were two revolutions in Russia in 1917. Can you tell me what started the first one?”

  If I couldn’t, or my answer was wrong, he wouldn’t remind me how many questions I’d missed that week or ask why I wasn’t studying harder. He’d just go right on to Barbara, then Chris, then David or Heather, so that finally I wasn’t afraid of being called on first. But I didn’t like World Studies any more than I did at the beginning, because the trouble with Hensley was that he was incredibly, stupendously, crashingly, amazingly boring.

  Mr. H. is about five feet ten, squarely built, with small gray-blue eyes and grayish blond hair, and he always, always, wears gray or brown. Never blue. Never black. Never a single piece of clothing that has any purple, green, or yellow in it. Patrick and I were talking about it once, and he said that if Hensley ever came to class in a red sweater, the students would pass out from shock.

  Not only did Mr. Hensley look boring, he sounded boring. His voice rose just a little at the beginning of each sentence and slid down to a half whisper at the end. Every sentence. He never raised his voice in anger, either. If someone wasn’t paying attention, Hensley just stopped talking until the room was quiet again.

  He didn’t read his lectures, but it sounded as though he’s memorized them, and I figured that Mr. Hensley had probably been giving the same talks on the same days for the last twenty years. I think he was sick of them himself.

  Patrick and I had begun making up little jokes about Hensley after we left class each day.

  “What do you think he eats for breakfast?” I asked once.

  “Cream of Wheat,” Patrick said. “What do you think he does on weekends?”

  “Collect rocks,” I answered. “What do you suppose he reads?”

  “The Economic Policy of Latvia,” said Patrick. Patrick always had better answers than I did because he’d traveled all over the world.

  What we couldn’t figure out was whether Mr. Hensley knew he was boring. He wore a wedding ring, so he must have a wife who should have told him just how boring he was. But then we decided that maybe his wife was as boring as he was. Maybe she wore gray dresses and gray shoes, served boring meals, raised boring children, and they all sat at intersections counting cars for excitement.

  Anyway, Patrick and I made World Studies just a little more fun by sending notes back and forth. Patrick sat in the third row exactly two seats behind mine next to the door. He’d wait until Hensley had paced down to the windows on the other side of the room, and then he’d fold up a cartoon he’d drawn and slide it up the floor to my desk. I’d pick it up when Hensley wasn’t looking, smile at the drawing, add a little something of my own, and slide it back. It sure made the forty minutes go faster.

  Patrick was a good artist. He always drew Hensley at the front of the room. Sometimes Mr. H. looked as though he were sleepwalking, with a long string of Zs coming from his mouth. Sometimes all the students in the cartoon were yawning. Once Patrick drew two pictures side by side. One said “boar” and showed a picture of a wild pig; the other said “bore” and was, of course, Hensley.

  This was about the only thing that was fun in Hensley’s class. You’d think that studying about a revolution could be exciting, but Hensley managed to take out every little bit of excitement he could.

  We didn’t bother anyone else, unless it was Connie, the girl who sat right behind me. Connie believed in paying attention no matter what, and she always gave a disgusted sigh when a note sailed by her desk on the way to mine. But at least she never told on us or tried to pick it up.

  And then something happened. On the fifth of November, Patrick drew a cartoon of Hensley in front of the class
with droplets of spit coming out of his mouth, showering the kids in the first row. I grinned when I saw it, and as Mr. Hensley paced back and forth in front of the blackboard, talking about the Bolsheviks, I took Patrick’s cartoon and drew umbrellas over the heads of all the kids in the first row. Then I slid it back to Patrick.

  I leaned my head in my hand and tried really hard to concentrate on what Mr. Hensley was saying. The trouble was that I didn’t care at all about Bolsheviks or Petrograd or even very much about revolutions, not the way Hensley teaches, anyway. He had just walked over to the window again, talking to the trees outside, it seemed, not to us, when suddenly I heard Connie gasp. I blinked and lifted my head.

  “Oh no!” I heard Patrick whisper.

  I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. And then I saw that the little piece of paper had skidded too far this time, and instead of stopping at my desk, had kept going three feet farther. It was lying directly in Mr. Hensley’s path, and now he was coming right toward it.

  He kept walking until he touched it with the toe of his shoe and then, without pausing once in his lecture, reached down, picked it up, and unfolded it there at the front of the room, all the while talking about Lenin and Alexander Kerensky.

  “See?” Connie whispered over my shoulder.

  I didn’t even move. Mr. Hensley’s voice sort of faded out, and for five seconds or so, he stared at the cartoon in his hands. He didn’t look at us, didn’t say anything, just stuck the paper in his pocket and went on telling about why Leon Trotsky was arrested. But his face went from gray to a faint shade of pink.

  It was Patrick and I who were upset. As soon as the bell rang and we got outside, I grabbed his arm. “What did you draw on it?” I asked. “Do you think he knows it was him in the cartoon?”

  Patrick swallowed. “He knows,” he said, and looked miserable. “I drew wavy lines coming out of his mouth and put a sweatshirt on him that said, ‘Bed Breath Hensley.’”

  I moaned.

  “I feel awful,” said Patrick.

  “So do I.”

  We separated for our next class, but for the rest of the day, I knew that Patrick felt as bad as I did. Patrick and I had never meant for Mr. Hensley to see those cartoons. We never showed them to anybody else. It was just a private joke between us.