Alice in Rapture, Sort Of

  Alice in Rapture,

  Sort Of

  To Maureen Hayes, my special friend

  Contents

  One: Patrick and Me

  Two: Sleepover

  Three: Your Lips! Your Arms!

  Four: The Girl with the Corkscrew Curls

  Five: Bad Mommies

  Six: The Up-Lift Spandex Ahh-Bra

  Seven: The Music Lesson

  Eight: Couples

  Nine: What Happened at Jimmy’s

  Ten: The Surf and Spray Hideaway

  Eleven: Lester’s Surprise

  Twelve: Breakup

  Thirteen: Love Letters

  Fourteen: Black Matches, White Gloves

  Fifteen: An Emergency Mom

  Sixteen: Patrick and Me

  1

  PATRICK AND ME

  I HAD JUST DRUNK MY ORANGE JUICE and was waiting for my toast to pop when Dad said, “Well, the summer of the first boyfriend!”

  It sounded Wonderful and Sad and Magnificent somehow, like “The winter of our discontent” or “The spring of our desire” or “The autumn of our hopes and dreams.” What he was really talking about, of course, was Patrick and me.

  “I don’t know if I can stand it,” said Lester, my nineteen-year-old brother, who had a small piece of scrambled egg stuck in his mustache.

  “You don’t have to stand it,” I told him. “You could always move out.”

  He ignored me, as he usually does. “I mean,” he went on, talking to Dad, “how many times can I come home and find Alice and her boyfriend eating melted chocolate-covered cherries with a spoon?”

  Just for that, I decided not to tell Lester about the scrambled egg. I hoped he would go all day with it there in his mustache and that he would meet the woman he wanted to marry, but all she’d be looking at was that little piece of yellow below his left nostril. Lester, though, was going with a new girl named Crystal Harkins, who played the clarinet, so maybe he’d already found the woman he wanted to marry, and the scrambled egg wouldn’t matter.

  Dad told me once that people only remember the stupid things that happen to themselves—that everyone else forgets almost as soon as they’re over. Lester has a mind like an elephant, though. He’ll remember those chocolate-covered cherries as long as he lives, mainly because Patrick and I had just dropped one on the porch and were deciding whether or not to eat it when Lester came home and saw us.

  It was only last week when that happened. And it was the first time Patrick ever kissed me. So the Summer of the First Boyfriend—the first real boyfriend—stretched out before me like a roller coaster. I didn’t want to get off, but I was terrified of what was over the next hill.

  My toast popped up. I buttered both sides, then drenched them in cinnamon and sugar.

  “Have a little toast with your sugar,” Dad said.

  “I can’t even stand looking at the way she eats!” Lester moaned.

  “Look who’s talking,” I retorted.

  Lester’s on a “carb kick,” as he calls it. He’s into weight lifting and he gorges on carbohydrates. For breakfast he eats a stack of toaster waffles slathered with syrup, then toast, then cereal sprinkled with granola. He waits exactly forty minutes before he goes down to the basement and works out on his bench press. The whole basement smells like Lester’s armpits.

  I wonder what we’d be eating for breakfast if I had a mother. Homemade biscuits, I’ll bet. French toast sprinkled with powdered sugar. Oatmeal, even.

  I told Dad once that my earliest memory was of me sitting at the breakfast table with Mama, eating oatmeal.

  “That was your aunt Sally, Al,” Dad said. He always gets upset when I confuse Aunt Sally with Mama. “Your mother never made oatmeal in her life.”

  Mama died when I was five. I can only remember about one year out of those five, and a lot of what I remember is wrong. Scratch the oatmeal.

  After breakfast, Dad went to work at the Melody Inn. It’s one of a chain of music stores, and Dad’s the manager of this one. Lester waited his forty minutes, then went downstairs to work out. When he finally showered and left the house for his summer job selling washing machines, I curled up on the sofa and thought about summer.

  “Are you sure you trust Patrick and me in the house together?” I’d asked Dad only the day before.

  “Shouldn’t I?” Dad had said.

  Parents love to do that—to answer a question with a question.

  “I don’t know,” I told him.

  “Well, if you feel uncomfortable, Al, you can always tell Patrick that I want the two of you out on the porch,” he said.

  I didn’t know about that, either. If I told Patrick that Dad didn’t want us alone in the house, it would sound as though he suspected Patrick of all sorts of things Patrick had never even thought of yet.

  I guess it was the Summer of the First Boyfriend, not just for me but for Pamela Jones, too. She’s the one with the blond hair so long that she sits on it, and she was going with Mark Stedmeister. You should have seen the way they kissed over by the grade school where we all hung around after dinner. She’s not supposed to kiss until she’s sixteen, though. Pamela’s mom said if she ever caught her kissing, she’d cut off her hair. I asked Dad what hair had to do with kissing, and he said he hadn’t the slightest idea.

  Elizabeth, who lives across the street from me—beautiful Elizabeth with the thick, dark eyelashes—didn’t have a boyfriend yet, but she liked some guy from St. Joseph’s. So we were all sort of on the roller coaster together, Pamela and Elizabeth and I.

  The phone rang and my heart bounced—the way you feel going down in an elevator. I knew it was Patrick. It had to be Patrick. He never calls in the afternoon because he’s usually mowing lawns. In the morning, though, he’s home waiting for the grass to dry.

  The phone rang a second time.

  Elizabeth says never answer the phone after the first ring because you’ll sound too eager, and Pamela says if you wait for more than three rings, the boy will think you don’t care. Pamela says that two-and-a-half rings are just about right.

  I grabbed it after the second ring. It was Patrick.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Nothing much,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Talking to you,” said Patrick. He always thinks of things like that to say.

  I absolutely could not think of a single word to say next. The seconds ticked on. It was my turn! I had to think of something.

  “Golda died,” I blurted out finally.

  “Who’s Golda?”

  “One of my guppies. The biggest one. I think she was pregnant again. I guess maybe I overfed her.”

  “Did you know that guppies give birth to live young?” Patrick asked me. “About fifty at a time?”

  Patrick knows everything. He’s lived in Spain and Germany and he can count to a hundred in Japanese and his family eats squid.

  “Yes,” I said. “I knew that.” I’d been raising them, after all. I think he was a little surprised.

  “Do you want me to come over?” Patrick asked.

  “Do you want to?” I said.

  “If you want me to,” he answered.

  “I do if you do,” I told him. This was getting ridiculous.

  “Okay, I’ll come over,” said Patrick, and hung up.

  I rushed upstairs and brushed my teeth, changed my T-shirt, combed my hair, and put on a pair of sandals. Then I sat down on the couch again, mussed up my hair a little, pulled on my T-shirt to make it look baggy, and kicked off one sandal so it would look as though I hadn’t even moved since he’d called.

  I stuck both feet out in front of me. They were too big. My legs were too skinny. I looked like a st
arving prisoner of war, with my bony knees and big feet. I didn’t have any hips to speak of, but I was beginning to get breasts, and I could have felt good about those if my lips weren’t so thin and my hair wasn’t so straight.

  Patrick could have had any girlfriend he wanted out of the whole sixth grade last year, but he chose me. I’m sort of like Mrs. Plotkin, my sixth-grade teacher, I guess, who is ugly on the outside and beautiful on the inside and has this marvelous, adoring husband named Ned. Except I’m not really ugly. Just so terribly … Alice.

  “How come you didn’t choose Pamela or Elizabeth to go with?” I asked Patrick once.

  “Because I like you,” he said.

  Life’s weird.

  I heard Patrick’s bike squeaking to a stop outside. I heard it clunk against the house and then his footsteps on the porch. The doorbell rang.

  “I guess we’d better sit out here,” I said when I answered, and walked on over to the swing.

  “How come?” asked Patrick.

  “’Cause Dad and Lester aren’t home,” I told him.

  “Oh,” said Patrick.

  We sat side by side there on the porch, pushing against the floor with our feet, listening to the creak of the chains on the hooks above. After a while Patrick reached over and put his hand over mine on the swing between us.

  I was thinking about French-kissing, which is kissing with your mouths open. Pamela had never done it, but she read about it in a magazine. I was wondering how many times you had to brush your teeth first before you French-kiss. You probably had to start planning it early in the morning and be careful what you ate all day so your mouth wouldn’t taste like onions or anything. I’ll bet if Pamela’s mother ever caught her French-kissing, she’d cut off her head.

  “What are you thinking?” Patrick asked finally.

  I felt I was on the roller coaster again, starting up the long hill to the top.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked him.

  “About that book of your brother’s we were looking at last time,” he said.

  My shoulders slumped with relief. “I’ll get it,” I said, and jumped up.

  It was called Celebrity Yearbook, with high school photos of famous people. You had to guess who they were, and the answers were in the back of the book.

  “Hey, he just hosted the Academy Awards—look at that haircut!” Patrick would say, and I’d laugh. Then we’d come to another picture and try to guess.

  “Julia Roberts!” we’d say, and laugh again.

  Inside, on my way to the bookcase, I passed the porch window and saw Patrick take a breath mint out of his pocket and pop it in his mouth.

  I stopped dead still on the rug. He was going to kiss me! The minute I went out there with that book, Patrick would kiss me. I ran upstairs and brushed my teeth all over again. I gargled with Scope. Then I got Celebrity Yearbook and went back out to the swing, my heart pounding like a tom-tom.

  I sat down by Patrick and opened the book on my lap. The roller coaster started to climb. Patrick put one arm around my shoulder and leaned over, as if he was looking at the pictures. I could smell the spearmint on his breath. One minute I was looking at a picture of Bill Cosby when he was eighteen and the next minute I was looking at Patrick’s nose.

  The kiss. The second kiss of the summer. Patrick’s lips were cool, and he pressed them a little harder against mine than he had the first time. He kept them there a little longer, too. I wondered if he was counting.

  Then he sort of squeezed my shoulder with his hand, the kiss was over, the roller coaster was gliding to a stop, and I figured that now we could relax and enjoy the book. There are just certain things you’re supposed to do when you’re going with someone, and I figured that Patrick kissed me first thing so we wouldn’t have to worry about it all morning. I wondered how long you had to go with somebody before you stopped worrying. Before you stopped running inside to brush your teeth. Maybe by the time you were eighteen. The next time Lester brought Crystal Harkins over, I’d ask her.

  2

  SLEEPOVER

  THERE ARE SOME QUESTIONS YOU CAN ASK older girls, though, and some you can’t. I couldn’t just go up to Crystal Harkins and ask if she and Lester French-kissed or whether or not she brushed her teeth first. So Pamela and Elizabeth and I tried to figure things out for ourselves.

  We did most of our talking on sleepovers at Pamela’s or Elizabeth’s house. I hadn’t invited them to mine yet. I mean, usually there’s a mother somewhere in the background making cocoa or lemonade, and I just didn’t know about Dad or Lester trying to act like a mom. Lester, especially.

  Elizabeth had a sleepover on Friday night. Elizabeth’s the one whose First Communion picture is on her living room wall above the sofa. I suppose someday her wedding portrait will go up there beside it, and then the photos of all her kids. It must be really something to have a whole wall of a house reserved for you.

  When we sleep at Elizabeth’s house, we sleep in her bedroom, where there are twin beds with white ruffles at the bottom, and Mrs. Price puts up a cot along one wall. When we sleep at Pamela’s, we sleep in the family room on a Hollywood bed, a trundle bed, and a cot. If the girls ever came to my house, we’d probably just have sleeping bags on the floor.

  I was sitting on one ruffled bed with Elizabeth, watching Pamela paint her toenails. She was painting them cherry red and gluing little metallic butterflies in the center of each one. It made her toes look as though they were alive or something.

  “You know what I heard?” Pamela said as she leaned way over and blew on her toes. “I heard that the very worst thing that can happen to you—next to having all your teeth knocked out in an accident or something—is to start seventh grade without a boyfriend. I’m so glad I’ve got Mark!”

  Pamela always had the latest information about everything. Listening to Pamela was like having a map of a city without any roads on it. You knew where you were supposed to go, but you didn’t know how to get there.

  “Why?” I asked. Elizabeth never asks why. “I mean, why would it be so terrible if you didn’t?”

  “Because if you start junior high without a boyfriend, the guys will think you’re a dog, and then you’ll have to work twice as hard to be popular.”

  “A dog?” I said, wondering.

  “A creep. A nerd,” Pamela said impatiently.

  “Just because you don’t have a boyfriend!”

  “My cousin in New Jersey said.”

  That was the third time in a week that Pamela had given us the latest word from New Jersey. New Jersey was right next to New York, she reminded us, and her cousin knew absolutely the latest about everything. The first thing she told Pamela, and Pamela told us, was that a girl wasn’t even born yet if she didn’t have her ears pierced. The second thing she told Pamela was that a girl was absolutely nothing if she didn’t own a leather skirt. And now, according to this New Jersey hotline, we all had to have steady boyfriends by the first week of September. I didn’t own leather anything and didn’t have holes in my ears, either, but I figured one out of three wasn’t bad.

  Actually, I was thinking about what it would be like to have my teeth knocked out in an accident, wondering if there wasn’t something even worse than that, when I heard Elizabeth saying, “You don’t have to worry about it, Alice. I’m the one who’s not going steady. Just don’t break up with Patrick till after school starts.”

  Somehow that made it seem pretty scary. “Why is it so important?” I asked.

  Both of them looked at me as though I were still a baby on stewed prunes.

  “For heaven’s sake, Alice, there’s got to be a boy in the background, that’s all. What do you think when you see a guy letting a girl eat off his tray in the cafeteria and giving her his jacket when she’s cold?” Pamela said.

  “That she hasn’t got any money?” I guessed.

  Pamela rolled her eyes. “That he’s her slave! That she’s so ravishing he’d do anything for her. The other boys will simply go wild when
they see how much Patrick cares about you and Mark cares about me, and from then on, all through high school, we’ll never have to worry.”

  I had no idea it was so critical. It was like my whole life depended on what happened between Patrick and me the rest of the summer.

  “It’s just not fair,” said Elizabeth. She plopped back on the bed and her thick black hair spread out in gorgeous curls on the pillow. “If I start going with a boy from St. Joseph’s, no one at the junior high will know! It’s not fair if you have a boyfriend and nobody knows.”

  “Maybe the girls could wear rubber bands around their wrists,” I suggested helpfully.

  Pamela paused with the nail polish in one hand and stared at me.

  “In different colors,” I said quickly.

  Now both Elizabeth and Pamela were staring.

  “I mean, girls who are already going with someone could wear blue bands and girls who are going with someone from another school could wear red bands. Then everyone would know.”

  “Girls who just broke up with somebody could wear yellow bands,” said Pamela, getting interested.

  “And girls who are going with someone but are just about to break up could wear purple,” said Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth’s mother came into the room just then, carrying a big platter of fruit. The apples had been cut into rings and the orange slices had toothpicks in them and there were grapes and cherries around the edge, with the stems all pointing in the same direction. In the middle of all the fruit was a big heap of chocolate-chunk cookies from a bakery.

  “A little something to eat,” said Elizabeth’s mother, and after she put the tray down, she came back with glasses of milk.

  I wondered what kind of snack Dad would fix for my friends if I ever invited Elizabeth and Pamela for a sleepover. A box of Ritz crackers and some cheese, I guessed. Lester would probably just walk by the room and toss in a sack of pretzels. I decided to wait a while before inviting Elizabeth and Pamela to my house for a sleepover.

  After Mrs. Price had gone back to the kitchen, Elizabeth said, “My aunt Betsy told me that when she was in junior high school, the girls used to put paper clips on the necklines of their blouses and the hems of their skirts, one paper clip for each time they’d been kissed.”