Alice in Rapture, Sort Of Read online

  A lot of the time we just sat on the porch swing and talked (and kissed), but at least once a week we went to Mark Stedmeister’s pool with Pamela. Once in a while Tom Perona would go up and down the street on his dirt bike, and then Elizabeth would come over and she and Patrick and I would sit on the steps watching Tom do wheelies and things on his bike. If it wasn’t too hot, all six of us—Mark and Pamela, Elizabeth and Tom (even though they weren’t officially going together), and Patrick and I—would take a basketball over to the grade school and play a few games, or if it was hot, we’d take a bus to Wheaton Plaza and spend a few hours there. Dad always liked to know the details: when I left, who I was with, when I got back, and what we did. Fathers get nervous unless they have all the details.

  So, when Elizabeth, Pamela, and I started babysitting for the neighbors, Dad was happy to have me occupied. It’s weird, though. Nobody ever asked us to babysit when we were in sixth grade. But now that we were going into seventh, it was as if people suddenly decided we could be trusted. And the third week of July, when Mrs. Benton, from the next block, decided to go back to work two afternoons a week and hired me to babysit Jimmy on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Dad was really pleased. Now he knew exactly where I was and what I was doing—two afternoons out of five, anyway.

  I liked having a steady job, but I wasn’t too sure about Jimmy. For one thing, most of the kids I had taken care of were babies, and they slept a lot. Cry, eat, wet, and sleep. But Jimmy Benton was three years old, and his mother had never left him with a sitter for very long.

  The first Tuesday I was to start work, I told Dad I was a little scared. “What if he won’t take a nap?” I wondered.

  “You’re clever enough to think of something,” Dad told me.

  “Try singing to him, Al,” Lester said over his waffles. “Tell him you won’t stop singing unless he takes a nap. That’ll shut him up quick.”

  I still had some of the books I used to like when I was small—Little Bear’s Visit and Goodnight, Moon—so I took those with me when I left the house. When I reached the Bentons’, I gave Jimmy a big smile, but he just put his hands over his eyes and wouldn’t look at me.

  “I’m afraid you might have some problems with him at first,” Mrs. Benton told me. “I’ve tried to explain to him that I have a job now just like his daddy, but it’s hard to know how much a three-year-old understands.”

  “We’ll get along fine,” I promised, but I wasn’t sure. When Mrs. Benton bent down to kiss Jimmy good-bye, he hit her on the cheek.

  “Bad Mommy,” he said, and went into the other room to watch television.

  Mrs. Benton looked as though she were going to cry.

  “He’ll be fine,” I said. “If there’s any real problem, I’ll call you.”

  But I was sure it was not going to be fine when, after Mrs. Benton left, I sat down by Jimmy and he kicked my leg. Hard.

  I tried to show him where the little hand on the clock would be when his mother came home. Jimmy hit the clock. I built a tower for him with his blocks. He knocked it down. I told him I’d read to him if he’d sit beside me. He wouldn’t come. When I picked up Little Bear’s Visit and began reading aloud, he rushed me from across the room and butted his head against the book.

  I really wanted to make the job work because it was the first steady job I had had, outside of helping Dad at the Melody Inn. More than that, there was something about Jimmy Benton that made me want to like him, even though I couldn’t think of any real reason why I should.

  An hour into the job, though, I was worn out. I was bruised. Nothing I tried seemed to work. I saw a TV show once where a therapist did everything the child did to show that she accepted him just as he was. So I tried doing whatever Jimmy did. When he kicked his blocks across the floor, I kicked blocks. When he scrunched up his eyes and screeched, I scrunched up my eyes and screeched. He stared at me. When he sat down on the couch and banged his head against the back, so did I. Finally, he curled up at the end of the sofa with his thumb in his mouth, looking very, very sad and small and lonely, and I decided right then that I liked Jimmy Benton, no matter what.

  He kept on sucking his thumb and twisting a lock of hair around and around his finger. After a while he fell asleep, and even though Mrs. Benton had told me to put him in his room for a nap at two, I wasn’t about to touch him for anything. While he was asleep, I straightened up the house a little, picked up all his toys, put out two graham crackers for his snack when he woke up, then sat down to read a magazine.

  There were seven different shampoo ads in the magazine, and in every one of them the woman had curls just like mine. In every single picture, the woman had her head tipped back, and curls were falling down around her shoulders. In every picture there was a man in the background who looked as though he just couldn’t wait to run his fingers through the woman’s hair. And all the women were smiling, ignoring the man, as though women who used that kind of shampoo just had to get used to men moaning over them back in the trees.

  I went over to the mirror by the front door and slowly tipped my head to see how far down my back my hair would come. I looked at the way the women in the magazines were smiling, and I practiced the same kind of smile in the mirror. The next time Patrick came over, I decided, I’d be standing on the porch waiting for him, leaning against a post, my head tipped just a little, showing my long luxurious throat, and I would smile as he came up the steps and put his arms around me.

  I stopped smiling suddenly. Back on the sofa, Jimmy was awake and watching.

  “Snack time!” I sang out, and went to pour Jimmy a glass of grape juice. I had hoped that when he woke up, he would feel better. Wrong. Jimmy felt worse.

  “Alice poo-poo,” he called me.

  He picked up his grape juice, drank half of it, and poured the rest over his graham crackers.

  That’s it, I thought. Just stick it out till five o’clock and then you can quit this job.

  I cleaned up the mess without a word, washed Jimmy’s hands and face, and then sat down on the floor and took all the toys out of the toy box, one at a time, talking to myself: “This is a fire engine. Wow! Look at that ladder!”

  Jimmy grabbed the fire engine out of my hands.

  “Here’s a hospital!” I said, picking up a little Playskool building, with a Playskool doctor, nurse, and three little Playskool patients.

  Jimmy grabbed the Playskool nurse. He put her in the fire engine and ran it pell-mell along the rug. The Playskool nurse fell out and the fire engine backed up and ran right over her.

  “Oh no!” I said.

  Jimmy chuckled out loud without even looking at me. “She’s all runned over,” he said. Back and forth went the fire engine over the Playskool nurse, who was lying on her side with her head turned around 180 degrees.

  “Now she’s going for a walk!” the monster-child said, grabbing the Playskool nurse again. “Walk, walk, walk,” he said as he bumped her along one side of the couch and up onto the back. “Walk, walk, walk,” he said, starting to smile, and he turned and looked at me. Halfway across the back of the sofa, he let go, and the Playskool nurse fell down behind the couch.

  “Oh no!” I said again.

  “She fell off!” Jimmy cried delightedly. “The mommy’s dead.” He crawled back behind the couch, picked up the Playskool doll, and dropped her all over again. “Bad, bad mommy!” he yelled.

  Somehow Jimmy Benton’s little game seemed familiar to me, and all of a sudden I knew.

  I don’t remember much at all about Mama dying. I think I remember the funeral. At least I remember a room full of flowers and Aunt Sally picking me up and crying. But Dad says that for a long time after Mama died, I talked about my bad, bad mama. I don’t remember that part at all.

  “Why did I say that?” I asked when he told me.

  “Because you were angry that she left you.”

  “But she died!”

  “I know,” Dad said.

  “She couldn’t help it!” I told him.
r />   “But you didn’t know that,” Dad said. “You probably thought that if she’d really wanted to stay alive and take care of you, she would have.”

  I remember thinking about that for a long time. “How did I get over it?” I asked finally.

  And Dad had said, “We just let you get your anger out, Al, that’s all.”

  I knew then what I could do to help Jimmy Benton.

  “Boy, Jimmy is really mad!” I said.

  He just laughed. Up went the Playskool nurse over the back of the couch again. Clunk. Down she fell on the other side.

  “There she goes again!” I said.

  For the next hour, the Playskool nurse was run over by the fire engine again, stuck feetfirst in a cement mixer, dropped from an airplane, dumped out of a car, and finally deposited upside down in a jar of paste.

  “That fixes her good!” I said.

  Jimmy screeched with laughter.

  All that violence must have tired him out, because he settled down at last for a story. He wanted more grape juice, too, and this time he drank it all.

  At five o’clock, we played a game to see which one of us would see his mother’s car first. When I saw the Bentons’ station wagon turn the corner, I pretended to look the other way.

  “She’s here!” Jimmy yelled, and was waiting at the door when Mrs. Benton came in. He didn’t hug back when she hugged him, but at least he didn’t hit her.

  “How was he?” she asked.

  “We had a fine time,” I said. I didn’t tell her that during the course of the afternoon she had been chopped, dropped, and run over.

  I thought a lot about Jimmy as I walked back down the block. Dad says it took me a long time to get over Mama’s death. Sometimes I think I’m not over it yet. Over the anger part, maybe, but not over the wanting and missing.

  6

  THE UP-LIFT SPANDEX AHH-BRA

  THE NEXT DAY, SOMETHING REALLY WEIRD happened to Pamela. She’d never had any more bosom than I did, and even though she wore those T-shirts with the deep V in front, there was hardly anything down there to see. But that day, when we all met at the playground after supper as usual, Pamela was definitely larger. Not just lumps under the T-shirt, but the skin showing in the V-neck looked puffed out. I couldn’t stop staring.

  Patrick, Mark, and Tom were there, so even though both Elizabeth and I noticed the way Pamela’s chest was swelling, we couldn’t ask her about it until the boys went out into the field to throw Mark’s football around. Then we both asked it together:

  “Pamela, what happened?”

  She pretended she didn’t know what we were talking about, of course, as though anybody could get a sudden swelling of the breasts overnight.

  “What?” she said, pushing her feet hard on the ground and leaning back as the swing came forward.

  “Your breasts!” I said.

  “Oh, those,” said Pamela. “It’s a new kind of bra.”

  I didn’t know how any bra could puff your skin up. But there was Pamela, big as life.

  “What kind of bra?” asked Elizabeth. We both wanted to rush right out and buy one.

  “The Up-Lift Spandex Ahh-Bra,” Pamela said, as though she had invented it herself.

  “How does it do that?” I asked.

  “Come over tomorrow afternoon and I’ll show it to you,” she said.

  “I’ve got to babysit Jimmy Benton,” I said.

  “I’ve got a ballet lesson,” said Elizabeth.

  “Then I’ll bring one over here tomorrow night and you can see it,” Pamela promised.

  I spent all the next day waiting for the evening, and when the evening was over, I wished it had never happened.

  There’s something about boys I can’t explain. I don’t think girls would ever do what Mark Stedmeister did that night. Even Patrick got crazy. Most of the time he was polite. I mean, he opened doors for me and always walked on the outside of the sidewalk, which I never saw any other boy do in my life. I asked him once why he did it, and he said his dad taught him.

  “But why?” I asked.

  “So if a car splashes water at us, I’ll get it instead of you,” he told me. It’s sort of nice, I guess, when you think about it.

  Anyway, Patrick was polite most of the time, but he wasn’t on this particular evening, and neither was Tom Perona. The boys were fooling around on the monkey bars, chinning themselves to impress us and trying to see who could get up highest and stay there longest. Pamela, Elizabeth, and I were sitting on a bench near the swings.

  “I brought one,” Pamela whispered. “I haven’t even worn it yet. Mom bought me two.”

  She pulled a little sack out of her shoulder bag—Pamela is the only one of us who carries a purse wherever she goes because she always carries a brush and makeup—and we leaned over to see.

  “The Up-Lift Spandex Ahh-Bra,” read the tag attached to one strap.

  “Here’s the secret,” Pamela explained. “There’s a little nylon pad in the bottom of each bra cup, and that pushes your breast up so that it puffs out over the top.”

  It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.

  “A gentle assist to the undersized,” it read on the back of the tag. “Lifts, supports, and promotes cleavage.”

  “What’s cleavage?” Elizabeth asked, taking the sack from Pamela and examining the nylon pads.

  “Where the breasts come together,” I said knowingly. “When you have a lot of cleavage, you can wear a gold locket and it almost gets buried between your breasts.” I dreamed of having enough cleavage some day to be able to bury a locket in it.

  I was just about to ask Pamela where her mother bought the bra when all of a sudden we realized that the boys were awfully quiet, and just as we looked up to see that they weren’t on the monkey bars anymore, Mark Stedmeister reached around from behind us, grabbed the bra out of Elizabeth’s hands, and went running as fast as he could go across the playground, holding the bra up in the air like a flag and shrieking like a savage.

  Pamela screamed, and Elizabeth and I stared in horror as he circled the basketball court three times and then climbed to the top of the monkey bars and sat down. Pamela put her hands over her face.

  “Mark!” I yelled. “Give that back!”

  Patrick and Tom were laughing. The thing was, when Mark Stedmeister grabbed the bra out of Elizabeth’s hands, he thought it was hers.

  “Presenting … ,” he said, and made a noise like a trumpet, “the”—and he found the tag and read it aloud—“the Up-Lift Spandex Ahh-Bra! Ta-da!”

  Pamela was crying. I could tell by the way her shoulders shook. Now Patrick and Tom were crawling up the bars to see the bra.

  “Mark, you are absolutely awful!” Elizabeth called up at him.

  Mark went on reading the tag: “A gentle assist to the undersized. Lifts, supports, and promotes cleavage!”

  Pamela slid off the bench and sat there on the grass with her head on her knees. Mark didn’t even notice. He slipped his arms through the straps of the bra and pretended he was wearing it. Patrick and Tom doubled over with laughter.

  “I dreamed I was climbing the jungle gym in my Maidenform bra,” yelled Mark, and this time Patrick almost fell off the monkey bars, he was laughing so hard. He was positively disgusting. “Hey, Elizabeth, if you want your bra back, come and get it!” Mark yelled, and acted as though he were going to tie it to the top of the jungle gym.

  Elizabeth glowered at him. “That’s not mine,” she said icily.

  Mark looked at me.

  “It’s not mine either,” I said.

  Mark Stedmeister suddenly stopped grinning and stared down at Pamela, who was just a little heap now on the grass.

  “Well, heck!” he said. “I thought it was Elizabeth’s.” As though that excused him. “Hey, Elizabeth,” he said. “Catch.” And he threw the bra at her, as though it had suddenly turned into a hot potato.

  Elizabeth caught it and stuffed it back in the sack. We crouched down beside Pamela on the ground.


  “I got it back, Pamela,” Elizabeth told her.

  “I want to die,” said Pamela.

  I couldn’t help but be a little bit glad that she was finding out how I felt when she sent that love note to Patrick and signed my name, but even I knew that this was worse. A lot worse.

  Slowly Pamela got to her feet. Mark Stedmeister stayed at the top of the jungle gym, and I knew he wasn’t about to come down for anything.

  “I never want to see Mark Stedmeister again as long as I live,” said Pamela.

  What was she saying? She couldn’t break up with him now. Seventh grade was only a little more than a month off, and then where would she be?

  We started walking Pamela home, Elizabeth on one side of her, me on the other. Was this the first breakup we were going to have in our group? None of us had been through it before, and we didn’t quite know how to act. So we just walked off the playground without saying goodbye to anyone, not even Tom and Patrick.

  “Now everyone knows,” Pamela wept when we got out to the sidewalk.

  “Knows what?” I asked.

  “That I’m undersized!” Pamela wailed.

  “Everybody knew that before,” Elizabeth said, trying to be helpful. It was not helpful. Pamela cried all the harder.

  “I don’t think Mark really minds about your breast size,” I said.

  “I don’t care what Mark thinks! Mark is a creep!” Pamela said, and the tears came even faster. I think we thought that all boys were creeps that night.

  When we sat on Pamela’s front steps and listened to her talk about getting even, though, I wondered how you could really like a boy one day and talk about making him miserable the next.

  “If you ever see Mark Stedmeister with spinach between his teeth, don’t tell him,” she said. We promised.

  “If you ever see him with his zipper open, don’t say a word.”