Outrageously Alice (8 page)

“So I wanted a new look! I just wanted to try it. It was only for a day.” I turned to Dad. “You really overreacted, you know? If you send Lester to drag me home just because I mousse my hair, what are you going to do if I smoke a cigarette? Cut my hand off? If I have sex with a guy, will you burn me at the stake?” I was shaking, I was so angry. “You have no idea how you embarrassed me in front of my friends by having Lester come for me at school.”

“Then perhaps you have no idea how you embarrassed
me
by going to school looking as you did,” Dad replied.

“
How?
You weren’t even there!”

“Someone I happen to care about is in that school, and it embarrasses me to think she might have seen you, that’s why.”

He had actually said the words “care about.” He cared very much about what Miss Summers thought. I wished I could tell him she
hadn’t
seen me, but he’d find out from her, I knew.

I put down my fork. “Okay, get it over with. Punish me. Ground me. How long is detention? What’s the new curfew?”

“No punishment,” said Dad. He took a bite of cake, then a sip of coffee. But he wasn’t smiling. “I just want you to know that I am very disappointed in you.”

I think that was the first time I could remember that Dad said that to me. It was worse than any curfew. The carrot cake in front of me looked like a chunk of cement that I couldn’t possibly swallow. I stared at it a moment longer, then put down my fork and left the table.

I didn’t know this could hurt so much. It would have been better if he’d slapped me, but what right did he have to be disappointed just because I looked weird for a single day?

Then I thought about those knee-length shorts he wears sometimes in the summer. They’re supposed to be madras, only they’re this disgusting red, yellow, and green plaid. Sometimes when he gets home from work, he doesn’t even bother to change his dress socks and shoes. Just takes off his trousers and puts on those shorts, and he looks
awful
. So maybe I did understand how Dad felt about me going to school with green spikes on my head.

I stayed in my room most of the evening. Both Pamela and Elizabeth called to find out what was happening, and I brought the phone into my room.

“What
happened
, Alice?” Pamela asked. “That was so
dramatic
, Lester’s coming to carry you off.”

Dramatic?

“Nothing’s happening,” I said. “Dad’s just disappointed in me.”

“But it was only an experiment! You want me to come over and apologize to Lester for talking you into it? I’d
love
to apologize to Lester. I’ll do anything he wants.”

Pamela’s had a crush on Lester ever since I can remember.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll have to get out of this myself.”

Elizabeth had a different reaction. After I told her that Dad wouldn’t punish me, that he was just disappointed, and how awful that made me feel, she said, “See, Alice? That’s why it helps to be Catholic. You go to a priest to say your confession and do your penance, and then you feel all free and forgiven.”

I went downstairs where Dad was sewing a button on his shirt cuff.

“I’m thinking about becoming a Catholic,” I said.

“Oh? What started that?”

I sat down across from him. “Since you said you’re disappointed in me. Elizabeth says all I’d have to do for forgiveness is confess to a priest and do penance. With you, there’s no end. It’s purgatory forever.”

I wasn’t sure, but I think Dad was trying not to smile. “Well, I don’t think you have to convert or anything.”

“What, then? Shave my head? Crawl to school and back on my hands and knees?”

“How about just telling me the next time you want to do something drastic. I don’t mean every little thing, but we are talking
weird
here, and I think you know it.”

“Then how about promising me never to send the gestapo after me?”

“You promise not to be weird, the gestapo won’t be necessary.”

“As though
he
never disappointed you! What about the time we went to the ocean and Lester had Marilyn in while we were gone?”

“I was disappointed in him then, of course, but tonight we’re talking about you.”

I sat watching Dad sew on his button and realized that maybe when you love someone, it isn’t always the same. You could be disappointed in him one day and go right back to loving him the next. Maybe you could even be disappointed in him and go on loving him, both at the same time.

“You know what’s weird?” I said. “Love’s weird.”

“One of the weirdest things there is,” said Dad. “No explaining it at all.”

PAMELA BEGAN SPENDING MORE AND
more time at our house, and before the Camera Club met again, I took a lot of photos of her. I told her it was our assignment, that I had to get used to my camera.

At first she wanted to make sure her hair was combed and her makeup perfect, but after a while she didn’t seem to care. She more or less ignored me. I caught her sitting on my bed with her legs drawn up, chin on her knees. I took the way she looked in the morning after a shower, her hair wet and clinging to her head above the collar of her robe, no makeup. I caught her reading a magazine. Stretching. And because I was looking at Pamela with
different eyes, I saw a lot of things I hadn’t seen before.

When I picked up my prints, though, I realized how amateurish they were. Some of them were all washed out—my exposure was wrong. Or Pamela was facing away from the light and her face was in shadow. At least half the pictures looked too posed, too false, or the composition was all wrong—a vase seemed to be growing out of the top of her head, stuff like that.

But out of the thirty-six prints, two of them held my attention—the one of Pamela with her chin on her knees, and one of her looking out the window. The first had the saddest expression I had ever seen on her face. Her eyes looked wet, and her mouth tugged down at the corners. In the other photo she appeared angry.

Somehow I felt that although I didn’t want to make a career of photography, I would be happiest in a job where I studied people. In learning more about Pamela’s feelings, I was learning more about myself.

“Soul!” Mrs. Pinotti said at Camera Club, holding up the print of Pamela looking out the window, and the others agreed.

“Everyone’s so polite,” I said to Sam. He’s dark-haired and sort of chunky. “Nobody asks what was going on with Pamela when I took that shot.”

“That’s because Mrs. Pinotti says she believes the same as primitive people—that when you take someone’s photo, you take a piece of their soul. So we don’t ask any more than the photographer wants to tell us.”

I liked this club, I decided. I liked Mrs. Pinotti; I liked Sam. And I liked what I was learning about the kind of work I might like to do someday.

We all compared prints with each other, and one thing we discovered was how many pictures you have to take to get even one that’s outstanding. As I was making my way toward the door at the end of the meeting, Sam called, “Hey, Alice, thanks for posing for me last time so I could try out my flash. Want the print?”

“Sure,” I said.

I couldn’t believe what I saw—two girls side by side, but one of them, with strawberry-blond hair, had two huge greenish eye sockets. It looked as though a child had taken a bright green crayon and drawn circles around both my eyes. That
couldn’t
be me! I couldn’t look that awful! I stuffed the photo in my pocket, then slipped into the restroom as soon as I was out in the hall.

For a long time I stared at myself in the mirror. And when I got home, I threw out all the green eye shadow and liner. At school the next day, no one seemed to miss them.

“Hey, you look really nice today,” Patrick told me.

“Thanks,” I said.

Justin Collier began hanging around Elizabeth at school. Like I said, he wasn’t as good-looking as Mr. Everett, but he was cool enough. He was tall, and that got him a lot of attention from the girls. He had his eye on Elizabeth, though. Pamela had gone overboard to attract his attention, and it was Elizabeth he fell for.

He was in our biology class, too, and always seemed to be looking in Elizabeth’s direction. He smiled at her every chance he got. When he came to class, he’d detour by the window just so he could stop at Elizabeth’s desk and talk, and when class was over, he’d wait outside the door and walk with her to wherever she was going.

“Gosh, Elizabeth, aren’t you
thrilled
?” Pamela asked her. “I know a dozen girls who’d love to trade places with you, me included.”

Elizabeth would just turn pink and say how he was too tall for her or too forward or too silly or something, and the more casually she treated him, the more he hung around. She was pleased, though. We could tell.

Elizabeth’s the Young Advocate for her church’s missionary fund, whatever that is; I went over to her house
one day after school and helped address envelopes to all the young people in her church, asking them to pledge something each month to the missionary fund. But just when we’d think she only cared about serious stuff, she’d do something different with her hair, or go to the mall with us to meet Justin—by accident, of course. Then she’d walk around with him, looking gorgeous. There are times she’s not as nutty as I think. Times I start to believe that with all her hang-ups, she’s going to be at the starting gate long before Pamela and I show up.

At home, I concentrated on getting back on good terms with my dad. I had the table set each night when he came home, whether it was my night to cook or not; I made sure I kept my stuff picked up and not strewn all over the living room, and when I got back from school on Thursday and realized that every pair of jeans I owned was dirty, I put them all in the washing machine and added the clothes in the hamper, just to save Dad and Lester some work.

Mistake. Lester had a new red sweatshirt in the wash, and when I opened the lid of the machine, everything that was white before was now pink, including Dad’s undershirts, shorts, some pillowcases, and a white linen shirt of Lester’s.

I stared down at the clothes. How could this happen?
How could I continue to do one stupid thing after another? I went straight to the phone and called Aunt Sally in Chicago.

“Oh, my goodness!” she said when I explained the problem. “I can’t believe I let you get to eighth grade without teaching you how to sort the wash.”

No matter what happens, see, Aunt Sally figures it’s her fault. I could lose my life skydiving, and Aunt Sally would say it was her fault for not giving me lessons.

“Listen, dear,” she told me, “here’s a little poem that helps. My grandmother taught it to me, and if you recite it every wash day, you’ll know exactly what to do:

If it’s white, and red it’s not,

Make the water doubly hot.

If the clothes are bright and bold,

Keep the water rather cold.

Never mix your white and blue

If you’d keep your colors true.

If your whites are stained, then reach

For a jug of chlorine bleach.”

The silence over the line was awesome.

“But what do I do now?” I whimpered finally. “I’ve already ruined a whole batch.”

Aunt Sally explained how I should fill the washer again with cold water, a little detergent, and a cup of Clorox, put all the white stuff back in, and soak them for an hour.

“Whatever you do, Alice, don’t put them in the dryer,” she said. “Keep changing the water and soaking them in bleach until all the pink comes out. Once you put a stain in the dryer, it’s set for life.”

I didn’t think I could stand it. There were unpardonable sins all over the place! Everywhere I looked there were mistakes that could not be undone. And this, of course, happened to be the night that Lester wanted to wear his white linen shirt. But after I soaked all the pinks in chlorine bleach, the only one that stayed pink was Lester’s shirt.

“Has anyone seen my white linen shirt?” he asked. “Marilyn and I are going to a concert, and we wanted to stop by a club afterward.”

I took a deep breath. “Lester,” I said, “there was an accident.”

“An accident,” he repeated, staring at me. “Someone broke their arm and you used my shirt for a sling?”

“Well, worse than that. Unless, of course, you want a
pink
shirt. Now if you want a
pink
shirt, then it looks great!”

“Someone was bleeding to death and you used my shirt for a tourniquet?” he croaked.

“A washing machine accident, I mean,” I said miserably. “I was t-trying to be helpful. I
thought
I was doing you a favor.”

Lester followed me down to the basement and stared at the pink linen shirt hanging there on the line. “I’ll take care of my own clothes from now on, okay?” he said angrily. “That was a thirty-eight-dollar shirt, Al!”

“It’s still perfectly good! It’s just pink!”

“If I’d wanted a pink shirt, I would have bought one. Jeez, Al! Use your head! Who would wash a red sweatshirt and a white linen shirt in the same water?”

Worse yet, when I folded the clothes later, so much red had come out of the sweatshirt that even
it
looked more pink than red. Not only that, but because I had put it in the dryer, it was two sizes too small.

Patrick came over on Friday and asked if I wanted to go to a movie. When we got there, though, the show was sold out, so we just hung around the mall. We went into a tie shop and Patrick tried on the loudest, wildest tie they had. They don’t like that in tie stores, especially if you’re thirteen, but then, they never know who might buy something. We ended up at the Orange Bowl for an orange freeze, and Patrick said that Mark Stedmeister was
interested in going with Pamela again, now that she’d broken up with Brian.

“She’s got a lot on her mind these days,” I told him.

“Yeah, Mark told me about her folks.”

“What she probably needs more than anything else is just friends to listen when she wants to talk.”

“Mark can listen,” Patrick said.