Starting With Alice Read online

  “I was playing musical chairs at a party once, and when the music stopped, I sat on a girl’s lap,” Lester said.

  That didn’t seem as embarrassing either.

  “Okay, here’s one,” said Lester. “When I was in seventh grade, I had just put a problem on the blackboard and found out my pants were unzipped.”

  “That’s pretty embarrassing,” I agreed.

  “Not only that,” said Lester, “but when someone told me about it and I tried to pull the zipper up, it got caught in my undershorts and I had to go to the nurse and have her help me get loose.”

  “Oh, that is embarrassing!” I said.

  “But he’s still here to tell about it,” said Dad. “You don’t die from embarrassment.”

  “Everybody does embarrassing things sometimes, Alice,” Lester told me. “The most powerful person you can ever imagine has done things he doesn’t want anyone to know about. Even the president of the United States.”

  When I went to school the next day, I looked around the classroom and thought about it. That meant that everyone there, including the Terrible Triplets—the teacher, even—had embarrassing things happen to them.

  I decided to test Rosalind on it.

  “What is the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you?” I asked.

  I was surprised to see her face turn pink. “I’m not going to tell,” she said.

  That was all I needed to know.

  One Saturday, Dad asked if I wanted to spend the afternoon at the Melody Inn. I had seen the music store only once, when we first moved here from Chicago. Dad had taken Lester and me in on a Sunday to show us the place, but I’d never visited the store when it was open.

  He said he would come home at noon and pick me up, take me to lunch, and then I could spend the afternoon with him. I put on my blue tights and a blue-and-green dress and brushed my hair. Dad took me to a sub shop, where we shared a Caesar sub with everything on it—meat and cheese and black olives and tomatoes.

  “Is this where you always eat lunch?” I asked Dad.

  “Sometimes. Or sometimes Janice brings me a sandwich.”

  “Is she the one who gave us the kitten?” I asked.

  “Yes. She’s in charge of the sheet music department,” said Dad.

  I felt very grown-up, going to my dad’s store, and everyone smiled at me. I guess when you’re the boss’s daughter, they have to smile and act nice. I smiled back and pretended I knew what they were talking about when they showed me the brass instruments and the woodwind section and the string alcove.

  There are two floors to the Melody Inn. On the first floor, right in the middle, is a grand piano, with smaller pianos around it. There are violins along one wall, horns along another. And trays and bins filled with all sorts of stuff, like guitar picks and strings and instrument oil. The other side of the store has CDs and sheet music.

  The second floor is divided into little soundproof cubicles where instructors give music lessons to students.

  But the place I like best is the Gift Shoppe under the stairs. The sign says, EVERYTHING YOU WANT FOR THE MUSIC-MINDED. There are fun presents. Little plaster busts of Mozart and Bach. Scarves with a piano keyboard printed on them. Pads of paper with CHOPIN-LISZT (shopping list) at the top. Chopin and Liszt are composers, see. Dad had to explain that one to me.

  There are coffee mugs with signatures of singers on them and perfume bottles shaped like violins. But best of all is the gift wheel. It’s a lighted display case with a button to press, which makes the whole case go around so you can see shelf after shelf of jewelry.

  There are pins in the shape of French horns. Earrings that look like clef signs. There are books about Strauss and vases with photos of concert halls on them. Music boxes that play Brahms’s Lullaby and necklaces that dangle little silver C notes from a chain. If you see something you like, you press the button again and the wheel stops turning. Then a clerk can reach in and get it for you.

  I remembered to pronounce Mozart “Mote-Zart,” with a “t,” and to firmly shake Janice Sherman’s hand when Dad introduced me to her. Lester says the worst thing you can do when you meet someone is to give them the “dead-fish” handshake, meaning your hand goes limp and the other person has to do all the work.

  “Janice, this is my daughter, Alice,” Dad said.

  I gave her a nice firm handshake and smiled my brightest smile.

  Janice Sherman is a medium-sized woman with brown hair and brown eyes. She was wearing a gray wool dress and her glasses on a chain around her neck. She looked very orderly to me. I’ll bet if you went to Janice Sherman’s house, all her underwear would be arranged in her drawers in alphabetical order.

  The strange thing about Janice was the way she kept flicking her teeth with her tongue while she talked. I was glad when we left Janice and Dad introduced me to the clerk in the Gift Shoppe and the instructor who taught trombone.

  But Saturday is the busiest day at the Melody Inn, so Dad told me I would have to entertain myself while he waited on customers. Loretta Jenkins, the girl who clerks and runs the Gift Shoppe on Saturdays, let me help her unpack a carton of music boxes with little brass horns glued to the tops. They played “Seventy-Six Trombones” when you wound them up.

  All the iced tea I had drunk for lunch made me need the bathroom, though, and Loretta showed me where to go. When I was washing my hands afterward, I looked in the mirror and then I froze because I seemed to have a tooth missing! I couldn’t believe it! There was a big dark hole beneath my upper gum! I ran my tongue quickly over my teeth to feel the empty place, and a piece of black olive slid off my tooth.

  Then I knew why Janice Sherman had been moving her tongue. I thought of all the people I had smiled at since I’d come in the store. I couldn’t stand it!

  I went back out to Loretta, who wore her frizzy hair in a huge sunburst around her head, and smiled my widest possible smile, but she wasn’t even looking at me. She was dusting the music boxes.

  I felt I had to go around the whole store and smile at everyone I’d smiled at before so they could see I had all my teeth. I went upstairs to the second floor and looked in all the glass cubicles until I came to the trombone instructor. He was giving a lesson with his back to me. I stood there grinning with my lips apart, while the boy he was teaching stared back at me. When the instructor turned around to see what the boy was looking at, I smiled a bigger smile than ever. The instructor reached up and pulled a curtain.

  I went back down and wandered all around the store, grinning at everyone in sight. Then I went back to Janice Sherman, who was writing up a customer’s order, and smiled broadly. She looked at me and then at the customer. “Mrs. Levine, this is Mr. McKinley’s daughter,” she said.

  “How do you do?” I said, and put out my hand. The woman took it, and I made sure it wasn’t a dead-fish handshake.

  That done, I went back to help Loretta unpack the rest of the stuff for the Gift Shoppe. When I sat down on the little stool behind the counter to open the next box, I saw a long piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of my shoe.

  Oh no! First I’d gone around the whole store with a black olive over one tooth, and then I’d walked around trailing toilet paper.

  I put my head in my lap and wished I could keep it there forever.

  “Are you sick?” asked Loretta.

  “I’m sick of myself,” I said, and told her about the black olive and the toilet paper. “Is there ever a time you stop doing dumb things?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “When I’m forty? Fifty?” I asked.

  “When you’re dead,” said Loretta.

  I just wished I could erase the last two months and start all over again. I wished that when Megan, Dawn, and Jody danced along the sidewalk in front of me on the first day of school, I’d said something nice to them instead of pretending to tie my shoe. Then we could have been quadruplets together. I wished I’d smiled at all the other girls I didn’t know in my class instead of
waiting for people to come over and make friends with me. I wished that when Rosalind asked Donald if he wanted to be my boyfriend, I had said, “Well, I don’t want him to be a boyfriend of mine!” instead of crawling under the table, and that when I had lunch with Dad, I’d ordered a grilled cheese sandwich instead of a sub with black olives. How do you ever make friends in a new place if you keep on doing stupid things all the time? If you don’t have a mother to tell you what’s what? If you don’t even have your aunt Sally?

  9

  HELLO AND GOOD-BYE

  I KNEW THAT DAD’S FAVORITE BROTHER was getting married over Thanksgiving, but I didn’t know we were going to Tennessee for Uncle Charlie’s wedding.

  “I’d rather eat toads,” said Lester.

  “You don’t have a choice,” said Dad.

  “Do I have to?” Lester hollered. “I hate weddings! I hate dressing up. Why can’t I stay here?”

  “Because I would have to be brain-dead to leave a sixteen-year-old boy alone in a house over a holiday weekend, that’s why,” said Dad. “You either come with us, or spend Thanksgiving with your aunt Sally in Chicago.”

  I didn’t think that would be so bad at all, but at the very mention of Aunt Sally, Lester changed his mind. “Okay, I’ll go,” he grumbled, “but I won’t enjoy it.”

  “You don’t have to enjoy it,” said Dad. “You just have to show your support for a fifty-seven-year-old man who finally decided to get married.”

  “What took him so long?” I asked.

  “I guess he was just looking for the right woman, and Marge happened to be the one,” said Dad.

  Suddenly I didn’t want to go. “Who will take care of Oatmeal?” I cried. “I can’t go off and leave her.”

  “I’ve already asked Mrs. Sheavers to look after her,” Dad said. “And you know, this will be a good chance to see Grandpa McKinley too, because he’s ninety-three now, and may not be around much longer.”

  We’re sort of short on relatives. My mother’s parents died in a car crash when she was away at college, and Grandma McKinley died of a heart attack before I was born. So that just left Mom’s sister, Sally, in Chicago, and Dad’s three brothers, Charlie and Harold and Howard, down in Tennessee, and a ninety-three-year-old grandfather, whom I hardly remembered. Except that for the last ten years he’s been telling everyone he has only a few more months to live, Dad said.

  “Hey, man, we’re going to party!” Lester said sarcastically.

  I always wished I’d had a nice fat grandmother with a big wide lap I could sit on. It didn’t seem fair that I didn’t have a mother or a grandmother, either. I’d just have to be satisfied with what relatives I had left, I told myself. So I went upstairs and began packing my bag for the wedding.

  Mrs. Sheavers and Donald came over later to see about Oatmeal.

  “Give her a scoop of this every morning and every evening,” I said, showing them where we kept her food. “Here’s her brush and here’s her litter box. And she likes to be tickled under her chin.”

  “We’ll take good care of the precious itty-bitty thing!” said Mrs. Sheavers. And she smiled so wide at Dad that I could see the molars at the back of her mouth.

  “And keep her away from Killer,” I added. Donald only grinned.

  We got up at four on Thanksgiving morning and were on the road a half hour later. There must have been a zillion trucks on the highway but hardly any cars. I just curled up on the backseat with my pillow and went to sleep again. Lester sat up front with Dad, with headphones on his head, his eyes closed, listening to music.

  The problem was, we kept having to stop to go to the bathroom, only none of us seemed to need a rest stop at the same time.

  First we stopped for Lester, then we stopped for me, and when we stopped again for Lester, Dad said, “No more pop! No more orange juice, either, till we get to Tennessee. Alice, get out and go to the restroom too.”

  “I don’t need to go,” I said.

  “I don’t care. Get out and go anyway,” said Dad. “Don’t come back until you do.”

  I went inside the station and got the key to the ladies’ room. I tore off some toilet paper and covered the seat. Then I sat down. Nothing happened. I knew nothing would happen. I sat on the toilet and watched a bug trying to crawl around the waste basket. Then I counted the black-and-white tiles on the floor. I recited all the multiplication tables I’d learned so far, the Pledge of Allegiance, and a poem about clouds. I had just started in on “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” when there was a tap on the door.

  “It’s occupied,” I called out. That’s what Aunt Sally always says when we’re in a public restroom and somebody knocks. It’s occupied.

  “Alice?” came Lester’s voice. “Dad says to hurry up.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “He’ll just have to wait.”

  “You’d better get out here!” he barked. “You’re holding us up.”

  “Too bad,” I said.

  Three minutes went by, and there was another tap on the door.

  “Al, get out here this minute,” said Dad.

  “Nothing’s happened,” I told him. “I told you it wouldn’t.”

  “Then come out anyway. We’ve got to leave,” he said.

  As soon as he said that, I needed to use the toilet, and after that, Dad didn’t complain anymore about bathroom stops, but he wouldn’t let me drink anything either.

  We had our lunch at a truck stop. A big sign said, TURKEY AND ALL THE TRIMMINGS. There were a lot of truckers sitting on stools at the counter, their plates piled high with turkey and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. I was glad I wasn’t a trucker having a Thanksgiving dinner in a diner.

  Besides, the closer we got to Uncle Harold’s, the more I wanted to see these relatives I didn’t visit very often. Uncle Harold and Aunt Vivian didn’t have any children—they said that taking care of Grandpa McKinley was all the children they could handle—and Uncle Howard and Aunt Linda’s children were grown up. Of course, Uncle Charlie, who was just now getting married, didn’t have any either. So Carol, Aunt Sally’s daughter back in Chicago, was the only cousin I really knew.

  “How come we’re so short of relatives?” I asked Dad.

  “Because that’s the way the cookie crumbles,” said Dad.

  We got to Uncle Harold and Aunt Vivian’s house at about six in the evening, and everyone waited to have Thanksgiving dinner with us. I was passed around the room like a sack of sugar, everyone giving me a hug and everybody saying, “Look how she’s grown!” so that I felt like Alice in Wonderland, where she grows so tall that she’s a freak.

  They didn’t hug Lester, though; they just shook his hand and patted him on the shoulder. And I decided right then I was glad I was a girl. I would hate to go through life with dead-fish handshakes instead of nice warm hugs.

  Somebody wheeled in Grandpa McKinley and put him at one end of the long table, with Lester and me at each side. Grandpa had shaggy eyebrows and dark brown eyes that rolled from me to Lester and back again.

  “Who are you?” he demanded, staring hard at me, leaning forward to get a better look.

  “A-Alice,” I said. “Your granddaughter.”

  “Eh?” he said. “Eloise?”

  “Alice,” I repeated more loudly.

  “Don’t shout,” he said, and turned to Lester. “Who’s the noisy one?” he asked, nodding toward me.

  “My sister,” Lester told him. “I’m Lester. We’re Ben’s children.”

  “Oh,” said Grandpa McKinley. He picked up his fork, then looked at Lester again. “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “Because it’s Thanksgiving,” said Lester, looking over at me, and we both tried hard not to laugh.

  “Yes, happy Thanksgiving, Dad,” our father said, coming over to Grandpa McKinley and giving him a kiss on the cheek.

  “They came to see me get married,” put in Uncle Charlie. “Remember what’s happening this weekend?”

  “You’re getting married?” said Gr
andpa. “Now, who in tarnation would marry you?”

  “I would,” said Marge, my aunt-to-be, an apple-cheeked lady with heavy arms and a warm smile.

  “Nobody tells me anything,” Grandpa McKinley complained.

  Somehow that put us all in a good mood, and chuckles traveled around the table and settled on Les and Grandpa and me. Grandpa liked cooked carrots. He ate every single one on his plate, then reached over with his fork and jabbed at mine when he thought I wasn’t looking. When he finished mine, he went after Lester’s, and everyone smiled some more. Everyone but Grandpa, who just chewed away under his scowl.

  Dad’s brothers talked with a southern flavor, which reminded me of the way Dad sounds sometimes when he’s tired. They said “thank” instead of “think,” “y’all” instead of “you all,” and they left the g off the ends of words, so that I was “Alice darlin’.” I decided I liked that just fine. I liked having relatives make a fuss over me and wanted to soak up every little bit of loving I could get.

  On Friday everybody flew into action getting ready for Uncle Charlie’s wedding the next day. No matter where I was sitting or standing, I felt I was in the way. And when Uncle Charlie asked if anybody wanted to ride with him to pick up his tuxedo, I said I’d go. I was afraid if I stuck around, I’d be put in charge of Grandpa, and I wasn’t sure I could handle that.

  We got into Uncle Charlie’s Oldsmobile and headed downtown. He and Dad looked a lot alike, same gray hair over their ears and they both had a twinkle in their eyes.

  “You know,” Uncle Charlie said, “it’s a durn shame your dad and I live so far apart. Those twins are okay, but your dad was always special to me.”

  “What twins?” I asked.

  “Harold and Howard.”

  “Oh,” I said. I hadn’t known they were twins. And then I said, “Dad says you taught him how to drive.”

  Uncle Charlie looked surprised. “Why, I’d forgotten all about that!” he said, and began to smile. “I don’t suppose your dad told you about the time he drove the car to a shopping center and forgot where he’d parked it? Ben came out the wrong entrance, and when he couldn’t find the car, he called home and said it had been stolen. He was really upset. Dad and I, we borrowed a neighbor’s car and drove to the shopping center and picked Ben up. Then we drove him all around the parking lot until we found our car. We sure had a good laugh over that, but Benny didn’t think it was funny.”