Reluctantly Alice

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

“Miss Summers, my dad and I wondered if you’d like to go with us to the Messiah Sing-Along on December twenty-second.” I couldn’t believe it myself.

  Miss Summers looked at me with her blue-green eyes, sort of puzzled. “You and . . . your father, Alice?”

  “Yes. He’d really like it if you could come. He’s manager of the Melody Inn, and he likes Mozart, too.”

  “Over on Georgia Avenue? Why, that’s where I buy my music!” she said.

  I smiled even broader. “So could you come?”

  “I sing alto and would be absolutely delighted,” she said.

  I grinned. “We’ll let you know later about the time and everything.”

  “Thank you very much, Alice,” she said. “I look forward to it.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  I went out in the hall, leaned against the trophy case, and let out my breath.

  What I had to do quick was get another ticket to the sing-along. As soon as I got home, I found the tickets on Dad’s dresser and called the phone number on the envelope.

  “I’m so sorry,” the woman said, “but we’re sold out. We sold out even earlier than last year.”

  “Even altos?” I asked.

  “Especially altos,” the woman told me.

  I felt my heart slide right down to my toes. Then I had another idea. Since Dad had signed me up as an alto and I don’t sing at all, Miss Summers could use my ticket and I could use Lester’s. One nonsinging alto certainly equaled one nonsinging tenor.

  When Lester came home later I said, “Les do you really want to go to the Messiah Sing-Along?”

  “Yeah,” said Lester. “It sort of grabs me.”

  “Even if you got invited someplace with Marilyn or Crystal?” I thought maybe I could work something out with one of them.

  “Yeah, I’d still go to the sing-along because I know it means a lot to Dad,” Lester said. “He’s sort of lonely right now, you know.”

  I lay down on the rug and pretended I was dead. The only possible way out of the mess was to get sick the day of the sing-along and tell Dad that I’d invited Miss Summers to go in my place. Strep throat. Stomach flu. Appendicitis. I’d think of something.

  What I thought of, actually, was that I hardly knew a thing about Miss Summers except that her eyes were blue-green and I liked her. Maybe she already had a boyfriend. Maybe he was a wrestler.

  But that was only the first impulsive thing I did that week. When I got to Language Arts the next day, Denise not only jabbed me as I went to sharpen my pencil but left a pen mark on my jeans. I think if I had been in anyone’s class but Miss Summers’s, I might have hauled off and let her have it, like Lester said. But I didn’t especially want to be sitting in the principal’s office so close to Christmas, and I certainly didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of my teacher.

  Miss Summers, in a green knit dress, faced the class and said that we had just one more project to do before Christmas vacation.

  “In preparation for the unit on biography next semester,” she told us, “I want you to get some understanding of what’s involved in writing about another person’s life—what’s important, what’s not, and what circumstances and events help shape us. To give you some firsthand experience, I want each of you to do an interview of your own.”

  She walked over to the first person in the first row. “Beginning with you,” she said, “every other person is an A. All the A’s raise your hands, please.”

  We mentally counted off, and every other person raised his or her hand. I was an A.

  “Hands down,” said Miss Summers. “All the rest of you are B’s. All the B’s, hold up your hands.”

  The rest of the students put their hands in the air. Denise, I realized gratefully, was a B.

  “I want you to interview each other,” Miss Summers went on. “And to show I’m not entirely without mercy, I’ll let you choose your own partners. Keep your hands in the air, B’s, so we’ll know who you are, and every A pick a B, starting with you,” she said to the boy in front. “There’s an even number in this class, so no one will be left out.”

  I wished there had been an uneven number in class so that I could volunteer to write about Miss Summers herself, but that just wasn’t in the picture.

  “Ready?” she said.

  The boy in the first row called out a friend’s name across the room, and Miss Summers wrote it down in her notebook. I usually hate things like this because it’s embarrassing to the person who’s chosen last. But this time I knew for a fact that Denise Whitlock would be chosen last—none of her crowd was in our room. She knew it too. I could tell by the way her shoulders slumped, and I was delighted.

  I was sitting in the last seat in the second row, and as the A’s in front of me began choosing B’s as partners, I looked around to see whom I would pick. And suddenly I remembered what Dad had said about how, when the time came, I would know what to do.

  “Sue Cranston,” said the A two seats in front of me.

  The teacher looked at me. “Alice?”

  “Denise Whitlock,” I told her, heart pounding.

  13

  QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

  DENISE SAT LIKE A CHUNK OF CONCRETE. Her hand dropped like a signal flag as soon as I said her name, and now there was nothing moving at all. I wasn’t even sure she was breathing.

  When all the class had been paired up, Miss Summers explained the assignment: “I want the A’s to interview the B’s first, then vice versa, using the charts we made last September as an outline. You may have the last couple of minutes of class today to plan when you can get together with your partner. But for the next twenty minutes or so, let’s talk about the things that influence us and make us the types of people we are, whether we’re the common, ordinary variety or one of the famous you’ll be reading about next semester. Family size, values, religion, scholastic record, hobbies, parents’ occupations . . .” Miss Summers started writing these things on the blackboard while we copied them in our notebooks.

  Denise wasn’t writing anything at all. I didn’t see her shoulders or elbows move once. She hates my guts, I thought.

  Miss Summers glanced at the clock finally. “Oh, dear, I’ve talked too long. You’ve got about thirty seconds, class, to talk to your partners. See what you can work out.”

  Kids started calling across the room to each other, moving about. Denise gathered up her stuff.

  “Denise?” I said. “When do you want to meet?”

  She only half turned. “Drop dead,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Remember, people, these are due the day before Christmas vacation, and they count for fifty percent of your six weeks’ grade,” Miss Summers said.

  Denise stopped and stared at the wall. Elizabeth told me once that she’d heard that if Denise failed any more subjects, she’d be so far behind she probably wouldn’t be able to go on to high school when the time came.

  “After lunch tomorrow in the library,” Denise muttered finally, not even looking at me, and stalked from the room.

  I felt weird the rest of the day—sort of high and nervous, like I’d drunk twelve cups of coffee. My heart was racing.

  As soon as I got on the bus, I told Pamela and Elizabeth what I’d done.

  “You didn’t!” Pamela said.

  “I did.”

  “Alice, of all the people you could have picked . . . !”

  “I know. That’s why I did it.”

  “Boy, Alice, you’ve got nerve!” said Elizabeth. “Can’t you just imagine what she’ll write about you?”

  I shrugged. “She has to turn it in, remember.”

  I told Dad and Lester at dinner. Dad paused, with the bowl of spaghetti in his hand, eyebrows raised high, and beamed at me. “Good thinking, Al!” he said.

  “Not bad,” Les agreed. “Now you’re the one calling the shots.”

  It wasn’t as though I had thought of it myself. If the chance hadn’t dropped in my lap, I’d probably still be on square one. But Dad
says that half the time you’ve got to make your own opportunities and the other half you have to be able to see the ones that are already there.

  I felt so great when I went up to my room later, with Christmas music drifting up from the stereo, that I forgot all about my other problem. Then I happened to look at my calendar and saw the Messiah date circled. I sank down on the bed and stared at it.

  Part of me wanted to go downstairs, while Dad and Lester were in such a good mood, tell them what I’d done, and ask Dad if he’d mind taking Miss Summers to the sing-along instead of me. Then I thought how I would ruin his digestion and his evening as well, and I had no right to do that. I’d had no right to invite Miss Summers in the first place, of course. They were Dad’s tickets, he’d chosen to take Lester and me, and if he’d wanted to take a woman instead, he would have. What he was looking forward to was quality time with his son and daughter. What he was going to get was an afternoon with Lester and a woman he didn’t even know.

  And that was only half of it. When Dad went to pick her up, Miss Summers would find herself in the company of two strange men. The girl who had invited her wouldn’t even be there. Maybe she wouldn’t get in the car. Maybe she’d phone the police.

  I wasn’t about to call Aunt Sally on this one. I’d gotten myself into it, and the only way out that I could see was to wait until the day of the sing-along, then tell Dad I wasn’t feeling too well, go upstairs and call Miss Summers on the extension phone, tell her how my brother was going to use my ticket instead of me, then go down and tell Dad I was too sick to go and had invited my Language Arts teacher in my place.

  The next day in class, Denise didn’t even look at me. I wasn’t there as far as Denise Whitlock was concerned. Her friends were pretty quiet, too. Once or twice they glanced in my direction in P.E. but didn’t say anything. It was okay with me.

  The same thing happened in the cafeteria. They sat in the same place, a few tables away, but Denise sort of turned her back on me. I finished first and went on over to the library to wait.

  Our library is divided into two big rooms—one where you have to be really quiet, and the other half, the open section, where you can do homework together. I found a table along the wall and put my books on it, then got out my pen and notebook and waited.

  I didn’t think she was going to come. It would be just like her, too, to leave me sitting there, waiting. Lunch period is over at 12:45, and she didn’t come until almost 12:30. She yanked out the chair across from me, slammed her books on the table, and sat down with a thud.

  “Hi,” I said. She only sneered. “You want me to ask questions, or you just talk, or what?” I asked.

  “This wasn’t my idea,” she said. “Shoot.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to keep my voice civil. “We’re supposed to exchange those family tree charts we made in September.” I handed her mine. She stuffed it in her notebook.

  “Mine’s lost,” she said.

  I really had to struggle to keep my temper. “Well, I’ll just start with basic questions, then,” I told her. “Where you were born, how many brothers and sisters, where your parents work, stuff like that.”

  She tossed a pencil onto the table. “Detroit, Michigan; four brothers and a sister; Mom works for a dry-cleaning plant, and my dad runs a bowling alley.”

  It was like pulling teeth to get anything more out of Denise. She told me only what I asked, nothing else. We could have gotten twice as much done if she’d only cooperated a little, but she wasn’t about to give an inch.

  “We’ve got lots more to do,” I said when the bell rang. “Meet here Monday?”

  “I guess.” She picked up her stuff and pushed her way through the chairs and tables to the door.

  Bingo! I said to myself.

  On Monday in Language Arts, Miss Summers looked more beautiful than ever, and I wondered if I was only imagining it. She talked about how, from studying the lives of others, we learn about ourselves and our own places in the world. “But no matter how truthful a biographer sets out to be,” she said, “his writing is influenced to some degree by how he feels about his subject.”

  Then she talked about John Gunter’s book Death Be Not Proud, a biography of his son who died of cancer at seventeen, and how the relationship between author and subject could be as close as father/son, or as distant as Carl Sandburg writing about Abraham Lincoln. Not only did her eyes shine as she talked about books she loved, but her voice sounded like music. I wondered if her eyes would shine like that when she talked to Dad about Mozart. If she talked to Dad about Mozart. If the afternoon even came off at all.

  I imagined Lester and Dad and Miss Summers all sitting like fence posts at the concert, none of them speaking, and everyone hating me down to my toenails.

  That noon Denise was at the library five minutes earlier. She didn’t look any friendlier than she had before, but I think she realized that we had only five more days to get our interviews done, so we’d better get on with it.

  This time she looked over at the list I’d copied from the board. “What else do we have to cover?” she asked. “I have to interview you yet, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. “We’ll have to hustle.” I read some more of the list: “Health problems, places you’ve lived, death of a family member, pets . . . She also said we can skip anything we like or add something that isn’t on the list.”

  “Gee, thanks.” Denise snorted.

  I waited. Denise waited. This time, though, she wasn’t talking to the wall the way she had before. Her eyes were on me.

  “How come?” she said.

  I studied her. Her eyes were green, like mine. I could have told you every freckle on the back of her neck or arms, but I couldn’t have told you the color of her eyes.

  “How come what?”

  “You know. How come you chose me?”

  I almost said something smart, like, “Well, I had to choose someone” or “You were in my line of vision.” Instead I just said, “Because I wanted to.”

  She frowned. “Just getting even, huh?”

  I shrugged. “Just getting to know you, that’s all.”

  She gave me a little smile, the first time Denise Whitlock ever smiled at me when it didn’t seem to mean “I’ll get you later,” and then she said, “Denise Whitlock, age fourteen; hobbies: teasing; problems: teasing; parents’ values: I don’t know, I never asked.”

  Every day went a little better than the day before with Denise. By Friday we forgot about the questionnaire and just started talking, telling our own stories in our own words. I’d thought that when it was her turn to do the interviewing, she’d really sock it to me, but Denise was surprisingly gentle.

  “Problems?” I said when she asked. And then I smiled a little: “Denise Whitlock.”

  I was really surprised to see her blush. She didn’t look at me. Her hand paused above the paper, like, what was she supposed to do now?

  So I went right on: “Another of my problems is that I can’t carry a tune. I never could. I just can’t sing. Everyone else in my family can except me.”

  Denise looked at me curiously. “What happens? I mean, if you try?”

  “It never comes out the right note. And the worst part is that I can’t tell the difference. It usually sounds okay to me. Can you sing?”

  “I thought everybody could.”

  “Well, everybody can’t.”

  Denise wrote it down. “I guess we’ve all got something,” she said.

  “Something?”

  She gave a half smile. “The way I look, the way you sing.”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  The interviews were almost over, and she hadn’t asked me any questions I really minded. But there was one, I discovered, that I couldn’t answer.

  “I don’t remember too much about my mother,” I was telling her. “She died when I was five, and I think Aunt Sally took over for a while, helping raise me. Sometimes I confuse memories of Aunt Sally with Mom, and that really freaks
my dad out.”

  “What did she die of?” Denise asked.

  “She was sick, I think. I mean, it wasn’t an accident or anything.” I stared at the pencil in Denise’s hand. “I don’t even know what it was. That’s weird, isn’t it? I don’t think I ever asked.”

  That night Dad and I were scrubbing the bathroom together. We’d been putting it off for about three weeks, and the floor was getting so dirty that when you stepped out of the tub in your bare feet, you had to wipe them again to get all the hair and lint and dirt off them.

  Scrubbing the bathtub hurts Dad’s back, so we have this system: I do the tub and he does everything else. I always scrub the bathtub in my bathing suit. I get in with a rag and a can of Ajax, and while Dad scrubs the sink and toilet, I scrub down the sides of the bathtub with cleanser. Then I turn on the shower and sort of skate around the tub barefoot, rubbing off the bottom and sides with my feet.

  I was in the Ajax stage and Dad was working on the sink when I said, “Dad, was Mom sick a long time before she died?”

  I never seem to give Dad much warning when I ask things like that. He paused, studying his own reflection in the mirror, and then he went on polishing the faucets. “It was about four months, Al.”

  “That must have been pretty rough on you.”

  “It was rough on all of us, honey. Maybe you don’t remember much, but you were pretty confused at the time. Lester took it awfully hard. He cried a lot. We all did.”

  I stood up in my bathing suit, Ajax running down my leg. “What did she die of?”

  Dad glanced over at me. “We never told you that? It was leukemia. Once we discovered what her symptoms meant, she went fast.”

  I don’t know what it was—the sight of Dad’s face in the mirror or the words “she went fast,” but suddenly I felt the tears.

  “Dad . . .” I gulped.

  And then he was standing beside the bathtub with his arms around me, patting my back, and we both cried a little. When it was over, I turned on the shower and let the water rinse the tub and my face at the same time.

  When I was clean and dry, I went to my room to start writing the biography of Denise Whitlock, and then I remembered that the Messiah Sing-Along was Sunday afternoon and I hadn’t said one word to Miss Summers about when we’d pick her up. The tickets had said “Singers, 3:00. Audience, 4:00.” I looked up “Summers” in the phone book, then realized I didn’t even know her first name. I panicked. I hadn’t told Miss Summers what time we’d pick her up; I didn’t know her first name; I didn’t know where she lived; and Dad didn’t know her at all.