Alice In-Between Read online

  “What kind of a train is this, you can’t even be friendly?” Now Bill Donovan was beginning to sound a little drunk. “All I wanna do is have a little talk, have a little fun.”

  “Then I would suggest the lounge, sir, but I have to ask you to leave. You’re disturbing the sleep of the other passengers.”

  “Didn’t I pay for my ticket?” came Bill Donovan’s voice. “I got as much right as the other passengers to socialize with my friend. I got …” But the voice grew farther and farther away, and when there was a tap on the door again, we knew it was only Stan.

  We opened the door.

  “Don’t you worry about him anymore,” Stan said. “I got my eye out for him, and if he comes back, all you’ve got to do is ring that bell, and I’ll take care of the rest.” He looked at Pamela. “Now you come with me back to your own room, because you three girls need your rest.”

  Like a puppy, Pamela followed him out the door. We locked it after her, the aspirin bottle and nail clippers pinging together like chimes. And the next thing I knew it was Stan again, saying it was seven o’clock in the morning.

  We didn’t see any more of Bill Donovan. He wasn’t in the dining car at breakfast, and we didn’t even know if he got off the train, because it was all we could do to get our things together and find the exit. Then Stan was telling us good-bye, and we were following the crowd into the station at Chicago.

  Aunt Sally was standing inside with Uncle Milt, and the minute she saw us, she stretched out her arms.

  “Alice!” she said, and then she hugged Pamela and Elizabeth too, while Uncle Milt grinned from the sidelines.

  “Tell me everything!” Aunt Sally said as we walked through the station and out to their car three blocks away. “How was the train trip? How were the beds and the food? Did you make any friends?”

  I had no intention of telling Aunt Sally about Bill Donovan, because I know Aunt Sally. But Elizabeth doesn’t know her, and if you ask Elizabeth a question, she always tells the truth.

  “Pamela made one,” she said, “only he wasn’t a friend.”

  Aunt Sally stopped walking, and I almost bumped into her from behind. I tried to give Elizabeth a look, but it was too late.

  “Who was it?” asked Aunt Sally.

  “A man,” said Elizabeth. “He got into her room.”

  “What?” cried Aunt Sally. She wheeled around and grabbed Pamela by both arms. “What happened?”

  “He—he—kissed me,” Pamela stammered.

  “Is that all? Are you sure?”

  “Y-yes,” said Pamela, and suddenly she seemed very young to me. Even younger than I am.

  “We rang for the attendant,” I said, “and he kept him away.”

  Aunt Sally let out her breath, but she still had her hands on Pamela’s arms. “Let that be a lesson, girls. Never talk to strange men on trains. Never let them in your room. Ring for the attendant at the slightest provocation.”

  “And don’t,” added Uncle Milt softly as we started off again, “tell your aunt about it afterward.”

  12

  INTIMATE CONVERSATIONS

  THE FIRST DAY IN CHICAGO, WE SLEPT. It was warm and breezy, and we sat out on Aunt Sally’s screened porch, talking about whether we should go see the Museum of Science and Industry, the aquarium, or the planetarium. The next thing I knew I was still on the glider with Pamela, my feet at one end, hers at the other, and Elizabeth was asleep in the hammock.

  “After their ordeal on the train, what do you expect?” I heard Aunt Sally say to Uncle Milt.

  But along about five, my cousin Carol stopped in to see us (she’s a couple of years older than Lester), and then the pace picked up. I could tell right away that Pamela and Elizabeth liked her, the way she joked at the dinner table. Of course, Aunt Sally told her right away about the man who kissed Pamela.

  “There are a lot of jerks out there,” Carol said simply. “But there are a lot of nice guys too.”

  “Like me,” said Uncle Milt.

  “Like you,” said Carol.

  What I forgot was to call Dad, and just as we were eating Aunt Sally’s lemon pie in the dining room, the phone rang in the kitchen.

  “Yes, they arrived here all right, Ben,” I heard Aunt Sally saying. “Physically, anyway, but emotionally they’ve had quite a time of it.”

  “Aunt Sally!” I said, backing my chair away from the table.

  “Pamela was assaulted on the train,” she continued.

  “Mom!” said Carol.

  I lunged into the kitchen. Aunt Sally handed me the phone, and it took five minutes to calm Dad down.

  “Just remember that help is as close as the little white button in our compartments,” I told him. “Amtrak took good care of us, Dad.”

  Carol was in a good mood. “Put on your dancin’ shoes,” she said when the meal was over, “because I’m coming back to pick you up at eight, and we’ll do the town.”

  “Fancy?” I said, thinking of the one denim skirt I’d thrown in my bag under protest.

  “Naw. Just kidding. Something fun to wear, that’s all.”

  I sat up front with Carol, Elizabeth and Pamela in back, and we “did” Chicago—not the official tour, but the fun places that Carol knew about. Back in Silver Spring, the stores close at six o’clock, but Carol knew a neighborhood on the north side of Chicago where there were colored lights and music, and all the shops stayed open. Jewelry, sandals, and blouses spilled out onto little tables on the sidewalk. We all tried on hats—I looked great in a black fedora—and then Carol had a surprise: tickets to a tiny theater where you sat on padded bleachers while actors and actresses imitated famous people like David Letterman, Martha Stewart, Oprah, Barbara Walters, and A-Rod.

  We were still laughing when we stopped at a sidewalk café later for Cokes and fries. Somewhere down the block a drummer was beating out a rhythm, and people were dancing in the street. I wished that Patrick could be there to listen. It could have been midnight or three in the morning, I didn’t even know. I just knew that Pamela and Elizabeth and I were having a wonderful time.

  “Is this where you go when you go out?” I asked Carol on the drive back home.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Do you have … um …?”

  “A boyfriend?” Carol laughed. “A couple of them, but one I like more than the others. We’ll see what happens.” She sounded so happy, so sure of herself. How could she be happy when she didn’t even know what would happen?

  “I wish,” Elizabeth said from the backseat, putting into words exactly what I was thinking, “that I could know what would be happening to me fifteen years from now. I mean, whether I’d be married, or be a nun, or would decide to do something else … It would take a lot of worry off me.”

  “Oh, but that’s half the fun, not knowing!” said Carol.

  I thought about that in bed that night. Aunt Sally gave us the guest bedroom, which had one queen-size bed in it and a daybed over against the wall. Elizabeth took the daybed, and Pamela and I shared the other.

  Maybe it’s easier when you’re twenty-three, not thirteen. Especially if you’ve been married once, like Carol. I think I feel the way Elizabeth does—I’d rather know, and then maybe I could sort of prepare for it. I wondered what Pamela thought, and then I realized that Pamela had been really quiet all day. The more I thought about it, the more worried I was that maybe something else had happened in her roomette and she hadn’t told us.

  “Pamela?” I whispered after a while. I could hear Elizabeth’s noisy breathing over by the wall. For a moment there was no answer. Then Pamela turned over.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “Pamela, tell me the truth, did Bill Donovan do anything else to you besides kiss you?”

  The long seconds of silence told me that he had.

  “Pamela!” I said, and sat up.

  “Shhhh!”

  I lay back down, my head near hers on the pillow.

  “What?”

  “He touched me.�
��

  My heart was thumping hard.

  “W-where?”

  “On the breast.”

  “Did you have your clothes off?”

  “No! Of course not. Through my clothes, I mean.”

  “And you let him?”

  “I pushed him away, and he came right back. That’s when I told him I had to use the toilet, and he said he’d go get another beer, and I ran down the hall to your room.”

  I lay staring up at the ceiling. One of us had had her breast touched!

  “Don’t tell Elizabeth,” Pamela said.

  When we were dressing the next morning, both Pamela and I were extra quiet. I mean, even I could tell that we seemed different. Elizabeth knew it right away.

  “What’s happened?” she asked.

  “Nothing? What do you mean?” I said.

  “Alice McKinley, something happened last night after I went to sleep. What was it?”

  “You’re crazy, Elizabeth.”

  “We promised to share everything! To tell each other everything!” she protested, looking from me to Pamela and back again.

  Pamela sighed. “You’ll freak out, that’s why we didn’t tell you.”

  “I’ll freak out if you don’t.”

  Pamela sighed again. “Bill Donovan touched me on the breast just before I got away.”

  Elizabeth sat down slowly, her shoes in her hand.

  “Both breasts?” she asked.

  “No. Just one.”

  “Just like that—he just reached out and touched your breast?”

  “No, he was kissing me. Trying to kiss me, anyway.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes traveled down Pamela’s face and focused on her breasts. “Which one was it?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Elizabeth, what does it matter?” I said.

  “It matters! Pamela, you ought to go to church with me and have it … blessed or something.”

  “Blessed?” I cried.

  “Made whole again,” she said uncertainly.

  “It is whole!” I protested. “He didn’t take a bite out of it or anything.”

  “Just the same, I’d feel better if you went to church with me and talked to a priest about it.”

  “I’d feel better if I never had to think about Bill Donovan again,” Pamela said.

  Every day we were at Aunt Sally’s, I saw a change in Pamela. She wore less and less makeup, spent less and less time getting dressed in the morning, until the next-to-last day we were there, I swore she looked more like her sixth-grade picture than she did back in sixth grade—without the long hair, of course.

  We were just having a good time being us. No boys, no older girls (except Aunt Sally and Carol), no men (except Uncle Milt). Nothing we had to do except make our beds and help with the dishes. We read some of the books on our summer reading list, but mostly we just talked and walked and ate ice cream.

  Of course, Aunt Sally drove us to the museums and the zoo, but one of our favorite days, the next-to-last, we took the El train downtown all by ourselves, got off at the Loop, and crossed Lake Shore Drive on the pedestrian ramp to the Chicago Harbor.

  All afternoon we walked along the lake, the gray-green water on one side of us, the Chicago skyline on the other. Finally we bought Popsicles from a vendor and sprawled on the grass, thinking how calm and quiet it was in one direction, how noisy in the other. Two sailboats kept an even distance from each other as they tipped this way and that on the water.

  We were all feeling good, Elizabeth especially, because she said, “I decided that Carol’s right; it doesn’t matter that we don’t know what’s going to happen to us fifteen years from now, because God knows.”

  Pamela and I went on licking our Popsicles and thinking that one over. “Did he know that Bill Donovan was going to come into my roomette?” Pamela asked after a bit.

  “Of course.”

  “Then why didn’t he stop him?”

  “Pamela, he wanted to see what you would do! It was probably a test!” Elizabeth told her.

  I decided that if that was God’s idea of a test, I’d hate to get one of his essay questions.

  “I don’t think I believe in God,” Pamela said finally.

  “Pamela!” Elizabeth looked shocked. I was even surprised a little.

  “I mean, I don’t believe he’s an old man with a beard sitting up in the clouds just watching Bill Donovan try to kiss me. I think he’s sort of a spirit. What do you think he’s like?” Pamela asked.

  “I don’t know.” Elizabeth squinted out over the lake. “When I pray, I think of the Virgin Mary. I see her face looking down on me, all sad sort of, and forgiving. I always imagine that when I do something wrong, she cries. What about you, Alice?”

  I closed my eyes and tried to imagine God. “I guess I imagine him as about five-foot-ten, slightly on the chubby side…. Maybe his hair’s a little thin….” And then I realized I had just described my father exactly. I shut up.

  “The thing is,” Pamela went on, “the Bible talks about all the miracles Jesus did. Why didn’t he make Bill Donovan disappear? Why did all the good stuff take place back in the Bible, and now we just have to take their word for it?”

  We were quiet for a while.

  “I think it’s sort of a miracle that we are sitting here talking like this—that we’ve made it through seventh grade,” I said finally. “Can you imagine Brian and Patrick and Mark sitting under a tree talking about God?”

  No, none of us could. And we decided that God, whether he was a spirit or a five-foot, ten-inch man, or even a woman, had made girls a little special.

  13

  A PRESENT FOR PATRICK

  PATRICK’S BIRTHDAY WAS JULY 21, AND I wanted to get him a present while I was still in Chicago, so he’d know I was thinking about him, even though I didn’t think about him very much. Our train didn’t leave until 5:10 in the afternoon, so Carol took us to a little group of shops a few blocks away to see if we couldn’t pick up a present.

  “How about this?” said Pamela, holding up a pair of blue nylon briefs that said KISS on the seat.

  “Get real,” I said.

  Elizabeth thought I ought to get him some chocolates to pay him back for all the candy he’d given me since I first met him, but I wanted something different.

  “What’s he like?” asked Carol. She was standing in the corner of a shop, examining a bird cage. She had on a filmy blue top and a filmy blue skirt, and sandals on her feet, with loads of Indian jewelry all around her neck and arms.

  “Smart,” I said. “He’s traveled around a lot. Sort of on the thin side. He plays the drums….”

  I didn’t find anything in the jewelry shop or the pottery shop, and I didn’t want to buy him clothes. I began to think I wouldn’t find anything at all, until we reached a sort of all-purpose gift shop, and then I saw a terrarium full of hermit crabs.

  “That’s it,” I said, remembering how Lester had given me one once for my birthday. I wasn’t so happy with it then, because I was expecting a cat or a puppy, but since Patrick wasn’t expecting anything, I knew he’d like it.

  “A hermit crab?” asked Carol, staring. Even she thought it was weird, I could tell.

  “I know he’d like it.”

  “All the kids are going to ask what you gave him, and Patrick’s going to say, ‘A hermit crab’?” said Pamela.

  “Nobody’s going to ask him, and if they do, I don’t care,” I answered.

  The clerk assured me that I could get it safely from Chicago to Washington, D.C., and I bought a plastic fish-bowl with a punctured lid that fit over the top, with one hermit crab, one pound of sand, and two empty shells, so the crab could change whenever he liked.

  “Good choice!” Uncle Milt said when he saw it. “I think your young man will be very pleased, Alice.”

  As we drove to the train station, Aunt Sally said, “Now, I want you girls to promise me that the first time a man steps into your compartment, you will ring for the attendant.”

  �
�Unless it’s the conductor,” I told her.

  “And beyond that you just have to be very, very careful that you’re not sending out the wrong kind of signals,” Aunt Sally went on.

  “Moth-er …!” said Carol.

  “Girls can do it without even knowing it,” Aunt Sally said. “Just the way they cross their legs, the way they smile, the clothes they wear …”

  “It’s all the woman’s fault, huh?” said Carol. “That old argument is out of date, Mom.”

  “Just the same, keep your shirts buttoned, your shoes on, your bodies vertical, and don’t smile at anyone unless it’s the conductor.”

  “Good-bye, girls,” said Uncle Milt at the station. “Have a good trip back, and give my regards to Patrick.”

  Both Pamela and Elizabeth thanked my uncle and aunt for the great vacation, and it didn’t get mushy until Aunt Sally hugged me. “Marie’s little girl, almost grown,” she said. “She would have been so pleased.”

  Elizabeth said that nobody would mistake her for an easy mark, so she’d take the roomette this time. She was right. Roomettes have thick zippered curtains outside their sliding metal doors so that you can sort of back out into the hallway when you’re raising or lowering your bed. She kept her curtain zipped all the time, so even when Pamela and I went down to see her, we had to zip ourselves in and zip ourselves out.

  Pamela and I slept like logs in our bedroom. Once I got up to go to the bathroom and peeked out the window. I could see a silver river, with hills in the background, and it was beautiful.

  The only unexpected thing that happened, we found out later (and which we should have expected with Elizabeth), was that she didn’t latch the foot of the bed as the sign told her to do. Sometime in the night, because she sleeps all scrunched up hugging her pillow, she felt her bed beginning to rise and thought she was going to be trapped between the wall and the mattress. She screamed.

  Somebody rang for the attendant, but he couldn’t get in because Elizabeth had her door locked. By the time she got herself out of the bed and the door open, there was a little crowd in the aisle outside. She wouldn’t even come to breakfast, she was so embarrassed, and wore sunglasses when we got off the train so no one would recognize her.