Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) (50 page)

“A bracelet from a friend,” I said, slipping it on my wrist. “Denise Whitlock’s.”

“The girl who . . . the train?” asked someone. I nodded.

“She left it for you?” asked Jill.

“Among the things she gave me that last day, before I knew. Before anyone knew what she was thinking about.”

The keepsakes continued to come—a wrapper off a McDonald’s Big Mac, a photo of our seventh-grade class, a girl’s halter top, a report card . . . and finally a clutch of lined notebook pages.

At Hensley’s insistence, each of us had written a letter to our sixty-year-old self, and as they were distributed among us, we moved over to the swings and merry-go-round, where we could sit and read them. The rubber-strap seats of the swings weren’t nearly as comfortable as those old wooden seats I remembered—the kind a guy could stand on, with a girl in the middle, pumping it high into the air.

It was a strange feeling holding a piece of notebook paper I had held as a twelve-year-old girl writing a letter to the woman she would become:

Dear Alice:

I can’t believe that when you read this, you’ll be sixty years old. Right now that seems ancient to me—older than Dad, even. I wonder if you feel ancient inside or if you still feel like you always did.

I smiled and continued reading.

Dad will be gone, of course, by the time you get this letter. Maybe Lester too, and it’s hard for me to even write
about that. But maybe you’ll be married and have children and grandchildren, and when you do, I guess that makes up for the people you lose. Does it? A little, even?

Among the soft chuckles here and there, I detected more than one sniffle. As several women dug in their bags for a tissue, the boys who had grown restless and were passing their basketball back and forth stood still again and watched respectfully from a distance.

What I want to know is how your life has been so far, and what you decided to be. Did you ever get breasts as big as tennis balls, and was it still important to you when you did? Do you still have any red in your hair, or is it all gray? Are you fat? Do you wear orthopedic shoes? Can you still wear shorts in the summertime?

I had to laugh out loud. Patrick looked up from his own letter, and we just exchanged smiles. I didn’t want to share my letter right then, so I kept reading:

Is your favorite food still fried onion rings? Is your favorite color still green? Does the name “North Carolina” ring any bells? Do you ever hear from Elizabeth or Pamela? Whatever happened to Patrick?

Maybe what I really want to know is, did you ever reach an age where you could forget all the stupid, ridiculous things
you’ve done and said, or do you still wake up in the middle of the night and remember each one exactly, embarrassing you all over again?

Maybe you’re a famous chef by now. Or maybe you stay home and feed your cats. But whatever you are, I hope you never forget me, the girl I am now.

Love,

Alice

I wasn’t the only one who was crying. I guess I thought we’d laugh and hoot and pass our letters around, but except for a passage read here and there, most of us folded them up and tucked them away in a purse or pocket to read again and again.

Suddenly I felt the swing I was sitting on lurch, and my arms tightened around the chains as I found myself being pulled backward, higher and higher. I gave a little shriek as Patrick let go and I went sailing forward, my legs straight out in front of me to keep them from dragging the ground. When the swing came back again, Patrick gave another push.

“Hey! Nice legs!” Brian called as my skirt billowed out over my thighs, and I laughed.

Then the swing to my left was moving with Liz in it, and Jill was on the other side of me as Brian gave it a push.

“Way to go!” laughed a reporter, as one by one, each swing in the row got in motion. The squeak and creak of the moving
swings had a rhythm all their own, and no one cared that the photographer snapped a picture. The spring breeze fanned our faces, the sunshine warmed our legs, the guys doing the pushing were obviously in competition with each other, and it seemed perfectly natural that one of the men watching from the sidelines should bound forward and climb deftly to the top of the jungle gym while we cheered him on.

Standing on the next-to-the-top rung, the familiar-looking man suddenly beat his chest and let loose with the most magnificent Tarzan yell.

“Donald Sheavers!” Liz and Pamela and I all shouted together, and as we screamed his name, the former boyfriend of all three of us did a couple of flips, then dropped to the ground and came over to say hello.

“Just read a piece in the paper about the time capsule and thought I’d stop by to see who showed up,” he said, grinning.

He was still in the area, he told us, and worked for a Ford dealership in Wheaton. And because he knew all the new establishments in Silver Spring, he suggested a good place where our little crowd could have lunch.

Seated around three tables pushed together there in the restaurant, it was like old times. We talked nonstop, just as we used to in class. We overlooked the gray hair and the trifocals, the pants with elastic at the waists, because those weren’t important anymore.
We
were. We had survived illnesses, divorces, disappointments, and worse. All of us had lost people we loved, and some had lost jobs. But we were here, we had good things
to share as well, and best of all, we were still
making
memories, not just reliving them.

Just for fun, we each took out photos of our children and mixed them up there on the table to see if the others could guess whose they were. I added a photo of Patricia’s little boy just to confuse things, and we all laughed when Pamela, who was raising border collies with her husband on a farm in Connecticut, slipped in a picture of their dogs.

A few of us were retired, but all of us had plans.

“I’m going to do some part-time consulting for IBM,” Patrick told the others. “They need someone to go to Japan a couple times a year, and Alice will be going with me.”

“I’m enrolled in a language course, and Patrick and I are allowed to speak only Japanese at the dinner table,” I explained, and everyone laughed.

Elizabeth and Moe had started a foundation to help finance foreign adoptions for childless couples; Pamela and Bill were going to Scotland to look at a special breed of collie; Jill, divorced from Justin, was a talent scout in L.A.; Brian owned a sports franchise; and Karen worked in a bank. Gwen was invited to join in, of course, and told us that she and Charlie have been hosting some foreign medical students in their home.

Each of us talked about the milestone of reaching our sixtieth birthday and how we planned to celebrate it. When they got to me, I started to say that we hadn’t really done anything special, but Patrick rested his arm on the back of my chair and smiled.

“Alice doesn’t know it yet,” he said, “but I’m taking her back
to the Caribbean for snorkeling, something she’s been wanting to do again.”

“Patrick! Really?” I cried, and hugged him as the others cheered.

We stayed another hour, reluctant to leave, exchanging cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses, vowing to keep in touch. But as I rode home contentedly beside Patrick, I knew I hadn’t shared quite everything with my friends. I hadn’t even told Patrick yet about the project that excited me most: I wanted to write some books about what it had been like growing up with three best friends and marrying my childhood sweetheart. About what it was like to grow up without a mother and about all the things Dad and Lester had to teach me. I wanted my children and grandchildren to know that no matter when you are born or where you live, happiness and disappointments have the same flavors the world over. I think that Mom, and the girl I was back in seventh grade, would have been pleased.

And so, when we reached home and Patrick had gone into his study to check his e-mail, I took my laptop out on our screened porch and sat down on the glider. I looked out over the backyard, at the forsythia Dad had helped us plant at the edge of the garden, and thought of all the things I would put in my first book—all the embarrassing, weird, wacky, wonderful things that happen as a girl goes from child to woman.

I smiled as I wrote down the title of the first book:
Starting with Alice.

******

To my readers:

I started writing my first Alice book thirty years ago, and
The Agony of Alice
was published in 1985. I didn’t know at the time that the book would become a series—I’d only planned to write about a motherless girl looking for a role model, and who finds her not in the most beautiful sixth-grade teacher, but the homeliest. Then the fan letters started coming; reviewers said things like, “Alice’s many fans await her further adventures,” and I said,
“What?”

My wonderful editor at the time, Jean Karl, and I talked it over, and I agreed to do a series, provided I would not have to write more than one book a year and that Alice could grow a little older in each one; I didn’t want to find myself stuck in a sitcom year after year.

As the series progressed, it seemed most natural that each book cover about four months of Alice’s life—fall semester, spring semester, and summer. For a time, Jon Lanman edited the books, then they were passed along to Caitlyn Dlouhy, who was raising two daughters in real life, and continued as editor to the end of the series.

When we discovered that very young girls were reading their older sisters’ collections, I wrote three prequels, beginning with
Starting with Alice
. And, somewhere along the way, I recklessly promised my readers twenty-eight books. I would end the series with Alice and the members of her seventh-grade world studies class meeting again to open the time capsule they’d once buried. Since my mother, her sisters, and my grandmother all lived to a grand old age, I figured I would too. What’s to worry?

Still, at some point, even though I had six or seven books yet to go, I wrote a quick draft of the final book and stuck it in a fireproof box in my office. I didn’t want to leave readers hanging, never knowing how things turn out for this little community of people I had created, should anything happen to me. Of course, when all the books had been written and it was time to submit the final manuscript, it took many more drafts and ended up twice the length it had been originally.

Several of my readers suggested the title of the book,
Always Alice
, and we started out with that—then decided we needed a title with a bit more
oomph
. And because I’d been promising to tell readers everything they wanted to know in the final book,
Now I’ll Tell You Everything
seemed perfect. Zillions of
you asked—no,
demanded
—that Alice and Patrick get married, and on that, I was way ahead of you. I even knew about their engagement before they did.

What made me write the Alice books in the first place and why did a series appeal to me? It’s probably true that Alice represents the daughter I never had, though I didn’t start out thinking that way, for I’ve written lots of books about girls. It’s immeasurably easier to raise a child on paper than it is in real life, but it was Alice who determined what would happen next. Once she became a full-fledged person in my head, she directed the way she wanted to go. She never played on a sports team, and I never had either, nor did she sing in a school choir or a madrigal group—and this was something I had loved. Alice never even sang in the shower. Yet this seemed true to the person I had created, and I was determined to let her lead her own life. More than that, I wanted to share the journey with her.

I received many suggestions over the years from my readers. Give her a dog, a sister, a car, diabetes . . . Make her play soccer, smoke pot, go to Paris, sleep with Patrick . . . Making Alice do something that didn’t fit was like trying to cram on a shoe that was the wrong size. It just didn’t work. But your letters and e-mails describing your own problems and your own lives helped more than you’ll ever know.

If you see yourselves in Alice and her friends, rest easy. The things that happen in these books are partly me, partly you, partly things friends have told me or newspaper stories and articles, all mixed up with imaginings.

Some of you were intrigued almost as much by the book jackets as by the stories, and were often confused by the different covers for each new edition. A few of you asked for the names and addresses of some of the models (sorry!) and a lot of you pleaded to see Patrick or Lester on a book jacket. Quite a number of you asked if there was a movie about Alice (Yes!
Alice Upside Down
) and offered to play the role of Alice or one of her friends in future films.

When my husband was alive, he read each Alice manuscript before I turned it in. Both he and my agent, Bill Reiss, were especially fond of Lester, and chuckled over the conversations between him and Alice. But keeping track of what went on in each book when it came time to write the next one was my biggest headache, not only for me but for the editor and copy editor. In the early books, I believe, Alice’s birthday falls on three different dates; Elizabeth has her ears pierced in one book but not in the next.

Finally the copy editor, Cindy Nixon, took on the tedious job of creating an Alice “bible,” rereading each of the Alice books and recording every friend’s temperament, hair color, likes and dislikes; every holiday, every gift, every vacation, every kiss . . . Each of the twenty-eight books is summarized, and the copy editor even included all the discrepancies from book to book. These hundred or so pages were collected and revised every few years, and now, as a special gift to my readers, the publisher has made this collection of facts available for free, online. Just go to the Alice website,
www.alicemckinley.com
,
and click on “Just the Facts” in the heading at the top of the screen. You can find every possible thing you ever wanted to know about Alice from each of the twenty-eight books.