Outrageously Alice (7 page)

“What are you going to do, Pamela?” I asked softly.

“I’m staying with Dad. I’m not the one who wants to leave. Mom wants me to go with her, of course, but I’m not. Now they’re fighting over that.”

“Oh, Pamela!” My tissue box was empty, and I had gone to the hall closet for more when I heard the doorbell and went downstairs.

It was Elizabeth.

“I will never forgive Pamela Jones for what she did today,” she said.

I pulled her inside. “Oh yes, you will. Her folks are separating.”

Elizabeth’s mouth fell open, and her eyes grew huge. “
Why?
Because of what I
said
?”

With Elizabeth, original sin begins with her.

“No. Her mom’s taking off. She might be seeing someone else, Pamela thinks. Pamela’s up in my room right now, crying.”

Elizabeth ran upstairs ahead of me, and as soon as she got into the room, she had her arms around Pamela, and Pamela was saying, “I’m sorry,” and Elizabeth was saying,
“I’m sorry,” and I was just standing there on my rug trying to think how I could keep from growing any older than I was right then. If life got any more complicated, I’d need an encyclopedia of instructions.

Lester passed my door, paused long enough to hear all the “sorrys” going on, and disappeared in a flash. I heard his door close, then lock, at the end of the hall.

I pulled out the pillows from under my spread, propped them against the headboard, and we lay in a row, our feet stuck out in front of us.

“I wish I could go back to last summer, before I knew about my folks, and just stay that way forever,” Pamela said softly, her nose clogged.

“I wish I could go back to Mrs. Plotkin’s class,” I told them. “When I was in her room, it was as though she could handle anything that happened to us.”

“I wish I could go back to before Nathan was born,” said Elizabeth. “Life was so simple with just Mom and Dad and me.”

But we couldn’t go back and we knew it. Life was going forward whether we wanted it to or not.

I didn’t know how I felt about Patrick, Pamela didn’t know how she felt about her mom, and Elizabeth didn’t know how she felt about Justin Collier. Every time she’d
seen him in the hall that afternoon, he had called her “hot mama” and she hated it.

There was a soft knock on my door.

“I’m making popcorn downstairs, if anyone’s interested,” called Dad.

And for a little while, the world seemed good again as we traipsed down to the kitchen and filled our bowls from the electric popper.

“DID YOUR LIFE CHANGE AFTER I WAS
born?” I asked Dad the following evening. We were both working at the dining room table. I was doing homework on one side and he was writing checks on the other, and I wondered if he and Lester ever wished
they
could go back to a time when life was simpler.

“
My
life did!” Lester said from the living room. “The mess! The smell! The crying! The burps!”

I ignored him and concentrated on Dad.

“We were so ready for you, all the changes seemed like good ones,” Dad said. “I don’t know if I ever told you, Al, but your mom had three miscarriages before she finally had you.”

“She
did
?”

“Each time she was so disappointed. And finally, you were the one who took.”

I thought that over. “If any of the other eggs had hatched …”

“Not
hatched
, Al. If any of the other fertilized eggs had gone full term …”

“It would have been someone else, not me. Right?”

“Right!” chimed in Lester. “A boy! Twin boys! Anybody but you. Just my luck.”

Pamela came over later. She said her mom was moving out that evening and she didn’t want to be around. Her parents weren’t speaking except to her, and she was tired of being a messenger service.

“‘Tell your mom the stereo stays,’ Dad says. ‘Tell your dad to go to hell,’ Mom answers. No, thank you. If they’ve got anything to say, they can say it to each other.”

“I’m really sorry, Pamela,” I said. “Why don’t you stay all night?”

“I will,” she said, and sheepishly admitted she had already stuffed her pajamas in her school bag.

Up in my room, I told Pamela how, if Mom hadn’t lost her other three babies, I’d probably be someone else, only Pamela said it wouldn’t have been me at all. I just wouldn’t
be
. And then we started thinking about all the eggs that never get fertilized and all the sperm that never make it to the egg, and how, purely by accident, there were hundreds and trillions of people who never got to be born at all. Somehow, that made Pamela feel better, I think. I mean, being born and having your parents separate was still better than not being born at all.

“What I’d like,” said Pamela wistfully, “is to be anyone but Pamela Jones for the next month. The next
week
, even. To just float right out of all that’s going on at home and not be myself again till it’s over.”

“I wish you could,” I told her. Then, “Me? I’d like a new personality. More than green eye shadow. I mean, I’d like to develop a whole
look
, you know? Not so … well … virginal!”

“So let’s dye your hair green,” said Pamela.

“Are you kidding? I’m going to be in a wedding party the end of the month.”

“Just the smear-on kind of dye. You can wash it right out. It’s mousse, actually. We’ll both go to school tomorrow with our hair dyed green and sticking straight up on one side of our heads, slicked down on the other.”

I looked at Pamela. She looked at me. “Let’s do it!” I said.

We walked to the drugstore and bought the stuff. We had to set the alarm for an hour earlier the next morning so we could get out of the bathroom before Dad and Lester wanted in. We dressed, me in a green turtleneck, Pamela in a purple one. Then we took some old towels into my room, closed the door, and took turns applying the thick green gel to each other’s hair. The hair that stuck straight up in spikes made our scalps look like the back of a stegosaurus.

“We’ve got to do the eyebrows, too,” said Pamela, so we did each other’s brows.

By the time I put on my green eye shadow and liner, I looked like a New Age leprechaun. Pamela dressed the same, except she wore blue eye shadow.

“Ready?” I asked, and we went downstairs together.

Les had already left for the U, but Dad was putting things in his briefcase when he looked up and saw us. I watched his lips part in slow motion.

“Al, what’s this?”

“We’re just trying out a new look,” I said. “Relax. It washes out.”

“You’re not going to school that way?”

“Yes! It’s just a look, Dad. I wanted to try something new.”

Pamela moved on ahead of me into the kitchen and grinned helplessly from beyond the doorway.

“I don’t think so,” said Dad. “Go upstairs and wash it out.”

“Dad …!”

“Al, I’m interviewing a clarinet instructor at eight o’clock and I’m late. I don’t have time to be standing here arguing. Do as I say.”

I stood frozen to the floor. He was embarrassing me in front of Pamela.

He put on his raincoat, picked up his briefcase, and stared at me hard. “I mean it,” he said, and went on out to the car.

“Gee, I thought he had a sense of humor!” Pamela said. “What are you going to do?”

“There isn’t anything
to
do,” I insisted. “There isn’t time! I’d miss my bus, and we haven’t had breakfast.” I went out in the kitchen and got some English muffins, split them in half, and dropped them in the toaster. “I’ll tell him it was either missing school or going like I was.”

We ate quickly, then threw on our jackets and went down to the school bus stop. We turned heads, all right.

“Oh, my gosh!” Elizabeth squealed when she saw us.

At first I was afraid she’d be mad we hadn’t included
her, but when I explained about Pamela’s mom moving out and Pamela needing a distraction, she just shrugged.

“Mother wouldn’t have let me, anyway,” she said.

Everyone on the bus was laughing and feeling our spikes, and we each wore a big dangly gold earring on the spike side of our heads.

Patrick, however, didn’t like it. He got on the bus, stared at me for five seconds or so, and then, without a word, moved to the back of the bus and started talking to the guys about football. What was it with boys, anyway? Were they afraid to be a little different? Try something new?

But everywhere we went, kids turned and laughed and pointed at us. The seventh graders positively gawked. One of them even came up and asked where she could buy the green mousse. Sometimes when I walked into a classroom, the kids clapped, like I was famous or something. I guess that must be what it feels like at the Academy Awards, going to the ceremony in your wildest clothes with everyone looking at you and taking your picture. Someone even took our picture for the yearbook. The only thing wrong was that the people I cared most about weren’t all that excited about it. The people I hardly knew thought we were great.

Most of the teachers just gave me a “Well, it’s weird, but it’s your hair” kind of look, and let it go, but most disappointing of all was Miss Summers’s reaction. I passed her coming out of the library and she said, “Oh, Alice!” and gave me a sort of desperate look.

Well, I was getting one thing straight, I decided as I walked to the cafeteria. I was getting across the fact that I wasn’t sweet little Alice McKinley anymore—a generic type of girl with no imagination or style. The kind of girl you gave teddy bear earrings to and expected her to wear them.

Justin Collier hung out at our table at noon and tried to stick pieces of gum wrappers and stuff on our spikes. I noticed that although he was kidding around with Pamela and me, it was Elizabeth he was flirting with.

We did look weird, I’ll admit it. I ducked in the restroom before fourth period and saw that one of my tall green spikes had fallen over, and my mascara was smeared.

Pamela and I were still laughing when we gathered up our books at two thirty and went out to the bus. The wind was blowing hard, and all Pamela’s spikes were leaning to the left. Elizabeth tried to straighten them up, and we laughed some more. Then I heard Pamela say, “Uh-oh.”

I looked around and saw Lester’s car parked there in
the No Parking zone, just ahead of the buses. He got out and walked toward us.

“Over here, babe,” he said, taking me by one arm. The other kids stared.

“
Les
-ter!” I said, trying to pull my arm away, but he had it in a viselike grip.

“Oh, boy! Big brother’s mad!” I heard one of the guys whisper.

“Yeah, he’s cute when he’s mad,” Pamela said, trying to make a joke of it, but Lester wasn’t smiling.

I knew if I really fought Lester, I’d make a scene, so I pretended it was all a joke and rolled my eyes, laughing, as I managed a final wave. He ushered me into the passenger side of his car, closed the door, and came around to the other side. Without a word, he started the engine and drove off, just as a second bus beeped at him.

“Since when did I get a private chauffeur?” I asked.

“Since you proved you couldn’t be trusted,” said Les, and he sounded different. Serious.

I glanced over at him. “Dad called you, right?”

“Right.”

“At the U? He had you paged out of class just for this?”

“I only have morning classes today. He called me at home.”

‘’And told you to wait for me after school and see whether or not I’d washed the stuff out of my hair?”

“Brilliant deduction.”

“So what’s the big
deal
? I didn’t shave my head, did I? I didn’t pierce my nose or do anything permanent!”

“You disobeyed Dad, and that’s enough.”

“And you never did, I suppose?”

“Of course. I just didn’t have a brother to come get me.”

I banged my books down on the coffee table when we got inside and clamped up to my room, slamming my door so hard that the walls rattled. I think I even heard a small chunk of plaster tumble down inside the walls.

How
could
Dad do that to me? In front of all my friends, have Lester cart me off as though I were three years old? And why would Lester agree to do it? I heard once that people who were wildest as kids often turn out to be the strictest parents. Lester must be getting in some practice. I whirled around, clutching my dresser top to vow an oath of revenge, then gawked at the sight in the mirror before me. Four of the five green spikes had fallen over, some to the left, one to the right, so that my head looked like a pineapple. I must have been resting my head in my hands a lot that day, because the green gel had slid down one whole side of my face. The eye shadow had moved on over
to my cheeks, and with the dark smudge of mascara, I looked like a raccoon.

Well, so what! I thought angrily. It was just a joke. Just for fun. I didn’t say I was going to go all week like that, did I?

I went in the bathroom and took a shower, washing my hair and face, and had to use Ponds cold cream to get all the mascara off. By the time Dad came home, I was doing my algebra at the dining room table. I didn’t say anything and neither did he. It was like we were living in a monastery and had taken a vow of silence.

I was hoping that when we sat down to dinner, Dad and Lester would keep the conversation going and I could show how mad I was by not joining in, but even Lester had vowed eternal silence. He reached for the peas and onions, helped himself, then put the dish back down again. Nothing.

At first I decided I could hold out as long as they could. I could go the rest of my life not talking, if that’s the way Dad wanted it. I could graduate, move away and marry, and I still wouldn’t open my mouth. But by the time Dad put some carrot cake on the table, my favorite, I said, “You had no right to send Lester to school to pick me up.”

“Oh?” said Dad. “I thought I was the parent here.”

“Parent, not dictator! Since when can’t I fix my hair the way I want? You never said anything about it before.”

“You never looked like something out of
Night of the Living Dead
before,” Lester put in.