He Loves Me Not (11 page)

In our next little break between numbers, Lizzie said, “At least the kid is making Alison smile, Ralph. She’s worth any two klieg lights up here, beaming away at Ted.”

“Yecch,” said Ralph.

I blushed painfully. Was it that obvious that I was so delighted to have Ted up there? I looked over at Ted again. He winked at me and said to Ralph, “Can you do a number without keyboard, Ralph? Alison and I want to dance.”

Ralph almost choked. He actually sputtered into his mouthpiece and had to grab at Lizzie’s bass for support.

“I think he means no,” said Lizzie helpfully.

My ankles began jiggling of their own accord, nervous and excited. Ted had actually asked me to dance! Or at least, he had asked Ralph for permission to let me dance with him. How old-fashioned, I thought. As if Ralph is my father and Ted has to ask for my hand.

During our next number I tried to watch the dance floor as well as watch Ted and pay attention to the notes. I needed to get clues on dancing. Unfortunately every girl seemed to have her own style. I was much too clunky on my feet to develop instant style.

What if we actually dance, I thought, and I trip on Ted’s feet and we fall again? I’ve made him fall once and I’ve given him a bashed head once.

I really would have to quit the combo if that happened. Lizzie and Ralph would tease me unmercifully, and besides, I would be locked up in my bedroom not forgiving myself for being so stupid and uncoordinated.

Since speech was impossible during a rock number, Ted passed me a note, holding it so I could read it. Instead of
May I have the next dance?
Ted had scribbled,
May I have the next band break?

I nodded.

He likes me, I thought. In spite of everything he really likes me. All the girls here and it’s my company he wants.

Of course, all the other girls here had dates. I was actually the only girl his age who was unattached, so if I wanted to be cynical about it, what choice did Ted have except me?

Ted went back to work on my ankles, but he got tired of them quickly and began edging up. Ralph and his sax moseyed over to my side of the piano this time and Ralph stepped on Ted’s hand. Not very gently, either. Ralph and I kept playing. Ted laughed. I said, “Ralph, cut it out.”

“Ted,” said Ralph warningly.

“I know, I know. Leave, or you’ll assign me to detention class.” Ted vanished behind the painted screen.

It was just as well. Ralph was so mad I think he would have broken Ted’s fingers in a minute. “Alison,” he said, “do you have any idea how much these kids had to raise to pay us?”

“I know exactly how much they paid,” I said. “They’re paying part of it to me, remember.”

“
I
remember perfectly,” said Ralph sharply. “Do
you
?”

He was really and truly angry with me. My daydreams about Ted faded. I was here as part of a combo, that was true, and I had no right to play personal games and risk ruining a professional engagement. “I’m sorry, Ralph,” I mumbled. My cheeks hurt with a blush so fierce I felt burned.

“I know you like him,” said Ralph quietly. “But not on my time.”

Ralph had never been so fatherly. I hated it. My own father would not have bawled me out like that. I felt so
public.
Five hundred dancing kids were watching us. Of course, they couldn’t hear, didn’t know what Ralph was saying—probably thought he was announcing the next number to me—but I felt spied on. Exposed.

I struggled through the next piece. It was only three minutes long, I guess, but it felt like an hour. My fingers felt heavy, like metal slugs breaking the ivory. And I was going to cry again, I knew it like the voice of doom. In public, on a stage!

I gritted my teeth and concentrated on the notes and the beat.

“All right, all right,” said Ralph. “You win. Go find your pal Ted and dance the next number. I’ll do the piano.”

“You know how to play piano?” I said, amazed.

“Alison, would I own one if I couldn’t use it?” He sat down literally before I could get up, nudging me right off the bench—into Ted.

If we’d rehearsed that we couldn’t have done it better! Ted caught me, pulling me down off the bottom level of the bandstand and onto the dance floor. He was grinning from ear to ear. “Old Ralph’s bark is worse than his bite, huh?” he said. The floor was very crowded up near the band so Ted locked his fingers around my wrist and hauled me off to a more secluded spot. I cooperated. I certainly didn’t want to dance for the first time in two years right in front of my combo!

“Hey, Ted,” said a boy near our spot, “you’re supposed to lead, not shove.”

He and his girlfriend burst out laughing at us.

I bit my lips, but Ted only laughed back. “You can’t lead in a dance like this. All you can do is demonstrate.” He demonstrated, twitching, wiggling, and thrusting wildly.

“Well,” said the girl, still laughing, “you’re supposed to stop short of bodily mutilation.”

The girl was shorter than I was and had the friendliest smile! I liked her right away. I stopped blushing and started laughing, too. Ted and I were pretty funny, with him dancing so insanely and me afraid to try. “I’m Cindy,” she said to me, “and this is Jon.”

We beamed at each other. “I’m Alison. I’m with the band.”

“I know,” said Cindy. “We noticed you. You’re not wearing the sort of clothes anybody could overlook. Ted,” she asked him, “how you’ve changed. The last I knew, the only girl you cared about was the one who could do your enlargements cheap.”

Next thing
I
knew, the four of us were standing over by the refreshments talking as if we were old friends, and Ted had gotten me a ginger ale and Cindy shared her cup of M & M candies with me. I stared back at the band for a minute. I did not feel as if I knew anybody up there. In their vivid, gaudy costumes, making their wild noisy music, they looked like a race apart. I’m not the music tonight, I thought. My wish came true. I’m the guest, I’m the date.

Jon said, “It’s remarkable, isn’t it, Cindy? Ted Mollison. Actually participating in normal high school life. He’s even dancing. With a real, live, attractive girl.”

Cindy snorted. “I wouldn’t call it dancing,” she said, and we all laughed. I felt like a soda bottle that had been shaken up: Open me and I’d fizz all over the place.

When the number ended it was like Cinderella in reverse. Cinderella had to go back to an ordinary life, but I had to hurry back to the palace.

We played another hour, I guess. It didn’t feel like me playing.
I
was out there with Ted, holding his hand, meeting his friends, laughing at his jokes.

Ted was clearly a person with a lot of extra energy and no hang-ups whatsoever about doing things in public. He actually climbed to the top of the closed-up bleachers way at the rear of the gymnasium and began making semaphorelike signals at me. None of his classmates so much as blinked an eye. It must have been normal behavior. “Good grief,” said Lizzie, as Ted turned his entire body into an alphabet spelling out A-L-I-S-O-N (the N nearly killed him). “Can’t you do better than that, Alison?” she wanted to know.

I looked at Ted, who was vaulting down at last, being applauded by some of his friends, bowing to them.

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think I can do better than that!”

“A
RE YOU PUTTING ME
on?” said Frannie. “You have a date for
breakfast
?”

Like a dope I had told one girl—a reasonably pleasant, seemingly trustworthy person who shared a gym locker with me on Thursdays—that I was going to have breakfast with Ted. She had told everybody she had ever met, heard of or seen in her entire life.

“Alison,” said Jan, shaking her head either in admiration or disgust. “I couldn’t even get my hair brushed by six-thirty. Are you seriously going to be up, dressed, fixed, and able to speak in words of more than one syllable by six-thirty in the morning?”

“With a reporter,” pointed out Frannie, “she’ll even have to be articulate.”

That was in the hall. In my next class Phyllis said, “You should at least have made this date for Saturday morning instead of during the school week. Then you could have your breakfast at a more respectable hour. Six-thirty in the morning! Really, Alison!”

And after that class Mike’s girlfriend, Kimmy, said, “Romance does not occur at breakfast.” I listened to her mostly because I figured Kimmy knew a lot more about romance than I did. All I knew were the lyrics of a thousand songs. Kimmy knew firsthand. “At brunch, you could have romance, yes. At luncheons, dinners, cocktails, and after-theater drinks. But not at breakfast.”

“Why,” said Lisa, “didn’t you make this date for Saturday morning?”

“Because he’s leaving Friday afternoon for a seminar on Creative Journalism in the Small City.”

Everybody was momentarily diverted by having to protest that we did not live in a small city. This led to definitions of what a city might be and everybody had to shut up when Janey, who is from Manhattan, told us what a city was. Not our town, she said firmly.

And then in Latin, Ms. Gardener actually said that she promised not to call on me the day of my breakfast date. “Since you’ll be too busy during breakfast to do your translation,” she explained.

“How did you know I do my translations during breakfast?” I said.

“Just a lucky guess.”

The class howled with laughter.

And the strangest thing was, they were laughing at me—and yet it didn’t bother me at all. I rather enjoyed it. Ted’s whole high school had laughed at his antics during the dance, and Ted just figured the laughs were their way of saying they liked him. Ted, just by asking me out, had given me confidence that performing music never had. I felt ten times stronger than I had a week ago.

We hadn’t meant to date over breakfast, of course.

We’d compared engagement calendars and the only free evening for both of us was actually eleven days off. Ted frowned at my calendar and said firmly that
he
wasn’t going to wait any eleven days!

Technically speaking, Ralph drove me home from that dance in his van, but actually, I floated home. On Ted’s words.

And no amount of teasing in school could puncture my balloon.

“I guess I wasn’t creative enough,” said Mike MacBride. “It just didn’t occur to me to ask you out for scrambled eggs at dawn.” He was smiling at me, with the funny gentle smile he had.

I didn’t know what to make of his remark. He had never asked me anywhere for anything, just hinted vaguely that he might. I wondered if he was just teasing, in his nice easygoing way, or if he really meant that he wished he had asked me out.

All my thoughts about Ted quivered. I was crazy about Ted…and yet, I’d been crazy about Mike my entire life. What if Mike wanted to ask me out?

What would I really do if my dreams came true and
two
wonderful boys wanted my company?

But Mike was going off with Kimmy, so that one was likely to remain a daydream.

Ted and I were going to have this breakfast date at my house, a factor I omitted to tell anybody at school. I don’t drive, and if Ted came to pick me up and we drove somewhere, there wouldn’t be time to eat before we’d both have to go on to our separate schools.

My father was so delighted at the idea his little girl was going to have a date (and under his supervision) that he didn’t even comment on the odd hour. He just said that along with the usual frozen doughnuts we thaw each morning in the microwave, he—my very own good father—would demonstrate his affection by laying in frozen bagels, frozen waffles, bacon strips, and instant maple-sugar-flavored oatmeal.

I asked Daddy if he planned to be present.

He looked very hurt and said if he didn’t have breakfast he would collapse at work, and besides, I made terrible coffee and he had to get up to make it himself.

I said the coffee was instant and nobody could make it any more terrible than when it came out of the jar.

He said, well, he would come down in a new bathrobe, how was that? And I said, that was perfect.

The night before this breakfast date Ralph called up. I could tell by his voice that he was up to no good so I was suspicious of everything he said, which was a good thing, because he tried to con me into a gig. “Did I remember to tell you I promised the Men’s Breakfast Prayer Meeting that you’d play hymns for them tomorrow? They’re not paying anything, of course, but I told them you were free and you’d love to do it.”

“Very funny, Ralph.”

About half an hour later Lizzie called. “I just spoke to Ted,” she said ominously.

She’d do that, too. Lizzie would stop at nothing. “Did he survive?” I said weakly.

“I told him his schedule was altogether too crowded and he would just have to omit something.”

“What did you suggest he should omit?” I asked, although I had a pretty good idea.

“You,” said Lizzie, and she laughed until I had to hang up on her.

“And they pretend to be adults,” said my father. “Those musicians of yours are infantile and immature.”

I agreed with that. I sat trying to do homework so I wouldn’t be worried all through my Ted breakfast about not having done my math. Instead of doing the math, though, I worried about what I would say to Ted. Would having Daddy there make it difficult? What if we couldn’t think of anything to say to each other? What if the whole thing consisted of me saying, “How about some more orange juice, Ted?” and Ted saying, “No, thanks, Alison, prune juice is fine.”

I decided Kimmy was right. You couldn’t bring up romantic subjects at breakfast. Breakfast was not romantic. At breakfast, I thought, Ted will see the real me for the first time. Not me performing and not me rehearsing. Me eating frozen waffles.

The phone rang again and I knew it would be Rob this time, probably coached by Ralph and Lizzie about what to tease old Alison about this time.

But it was Frannie, who wanted to know what I was planning to wear.

“Wear?” I said, as if I usually went around naked.

“On your breakfast date,” she said impatiently. “What sort of costume?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. We’re both going on to school afterward. I’m just wearing school clothes, I guess. Oxford shirt, skirt, Shetland sweater.”