Alice Bliss (7 page)

The whole tryout thing is one horrible round of humiliation after another for Henry. Alice is about to offer to come with him when Henry says he might not try out for baseball this year after all.

Alice is shocked at this news and possibly also a little bit glad for Henry that he can stop feeling so bad trying to do something he loves so much. But then there’s this other reaction, like why the hell does everything have to change all the time?

She doesn’t say any of this, of course, because what could she say? I’m shocked-sad-mad-disgusted-furious, I want to scream at you, I want to celebrate. She sounds schizophrenic, even inside her own head.

She just keeps walking, keeps her head down. She’s chewing her lip and tastes blood—damn! Now that’s gonna bug her all day. And then they’re passing Mrs. Minty’s house.

Mrs. Minty lives alone, and Mrs. Minty always comes out on her porch and waves to Henry and Alice. Mrs. Minty is old. Really old, like from another century. But that doesn’t stop her from tutoring at the library, where she runs the literacy program. Teaching adults to read and write two afternoons and two evenings a week.

There she is in her tweed skirt and cardigan sweater and those dark brown tie shoes with a little heel. Her hair is in a bun. Her dad used to say, “Mrs. Minty looks like she just stepped out of a bandbox.” Whatever
that
is.

“Good morning, Alice! Good morning, Henry!”

“Good morning, Mrs. Minty!”

Henry gives her a little wave. Henry always gives her a little wave.

“Henry, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind stopping by after school. I need some help moving a few boxes.”

“Sure thing, Mrs. Minty.”

“Alice, you come, too. I’m baking cookies this afternoon.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Mrs. Minty is smiling at her, not some sappy, oh you poor thing smile, but just a regular spring morning smile. Alice stops. Henry is shuffling his feet and giving her all the nonverbal
let’s go
signals he can think of. But Alice ignores him. She stands still right there on the sidewalk and takes a good long look.

The apple tree in Mrs. Minty’s front yard is full of fat buds getting ready to bloom. And it’s full of birds, too, and they’re all singing. Alice didn’t notice the birds before, but now she does. They’re making a racket. How could she not notice this? And then she looks down into the green, green grass and Mrs. Minty’s whole yard is filled with tiny white and blue flowers.

“Those are pretty flowers, Mrs. Minty.”

“Snowbells and scilla. Some of the first to bloom each spring. They’ll even bloom in the snow. My husband and I planted a hundred bulbs thirty years ago. Now there are thousands.”

Henry actually takes Alice by the arm and pulls her away, giving Mrs. Minty a last wave.

Alice is thinking she’d like to just lie down in Mrs. Minty’s front yard and skip school altogether, but Henry has this death grip on her elbow and before she knows it, he is propelling her up the drive to school.

They’re early—as usual—so they head to the auditorium, which has the only decent piano in the school. The janitor has given Henry the key so Henry can come in and play whenever he wants. This is strictly against the rules. The janitor, Mr. Herlihy, and Henry have decided, after much wrangling and discussion back and forth, that they don’t care about that stupid rule.

Mr. Herlihy, it turns out, loves music. He has a huge collection of old jazz records. LPs he calls them. And whenever he can, he slips inside the auditorium and sits in the last row to listen to that kid Henry Grover playing in the dark.

Henry rigs up his book lamp so it creates a little puddle of light, and Alice climbs up onto the lip of the stage, and angles her book into the one spot where there’s almost enough light to read by. Henry plays while Alice finishes her English homework.

Henry likes this arrangement. He gets to improvise and no one makes comments. Alice never tells him to shut up or play something different. Alice lies on the stage and reads, and sometimes she puts her book down and just listens to him. Every once in a while she’ll tell him she likes what he’s playing, or she’ll make him stop and listen while she tells him he’s gonna be a great musician one day. Every once in a while he can see the music take her someplace else and he can see the old Alice, the six-year-old or the ten-year-old or even the twelveyear-old Alice.

Alice abandons
The Catcher in the Rye
and looks up into the darkness. The velvet curtain smells old and musty, and everything around them is shrouded in shadow. She’s trying not to think about her father, about waiting and waiting for the letters that are taking forever to get to them, about the too quick, too hurried call when he first arrived, with every other word breaking up on them, none of them certain that anything they were saying was actually getting through.

She scoots over until she’s lying underneath the piano. Here she can feel the sound reverberating in the floor below her and in the piano above her. She closes her eyes and breathes with Henry’s playing, until the notes are inside her heartbeat and the notes are in her breathing and the notes are flowing through her veins.

After her last class the following day, American history, Mr. Herman hands Alice a blank piece of paper with her name at the top of it, and wants an explanation as to why Alice didn’t even bother to try answering one single question on yesterday’s pop quiz. She looks out the window, looking for an answer maybe, and sees the track team lope out onto the track.

“Do I need to call your parents?”

She drags her attention back to Mr. Herman and the blank piece of paper in her hand.

“What?”

“Your parents. Do we need to get them involved?”

“No. No. Definitely not. You don’t need to call them. I wasn’t feeling well.”

“You should have told me.”

“I didn’t really realize until it was too late.”

“You should have come to me after class, then.”

“Can I make up the test?”

“I’m afraid not.”

She steals a quick look at him. He’s being a hard-ass because he thinks she’s a good student and maybe he can shock her back into line. She thinks, I used to care about this; I used to be able to care about this, when her attention is drawn back to the runners outside on the track.

“I’m gonna miss my bus, Mr. Herman.”

“Don’t let this happen again, Alice.”

“I won’t.”

She is released; she is walking out the door, running down the hall, and slamming through the back doors that lead out to the playing fields and the track. Dumping her backpack and jacket on the ground, she jogs over to the coach.

“Can I run?” She asks.

“Can you?”

“I don’t know. I want to run.”

“What’s your name?”

“Alice Bliss.”

He makes a note on his clipboard.

“Grade?”

“Tenth.”

“You have any shorts? Sneaks?”

“I’ve got these,” indicating her battered Chucks.

“Take it easy, okay? We’re just warming up. It’s our first day outdoors.”

“Okay, okay, but I can run?”

“We’ll see about that.”

Alice sprints to catch up with the runners who are doing laps and falls in beside a tall redheaded girl who looks like she knows what she’s doing. The girl turns her head and gives Alice a half smile. Alice in her jeans feels like a mule next to this gazelle, but it’s fun to try to match her stride, to lift her head, the way this girl does, to begin to sweat. She’s feeling the cool early-spring air and the clouds crossing the sun, and her body, she’s feeling her body, and her legs are starting to ache and feel heavy, but it doesn’t matter; she’s running, she’s breathing, and for a second, for a tantalizing series of seconds, she’s feeling free.

That night B.D., the coach, calls her mother and tells her that maybe they should get her a pair of running shoes. And shorts and a T-shirt and a sweatshirt, too. Angie wants to know what this is all about.

Alice just says, “I guess I joined the track team.”

Alice makes a deal with Henry so he’ll pick up Ellie and take her home with him on the days she has practice, which is turning into every day. Henry doesn’t seem too happy about this, but Ellie loves it. Ellie and Mrs. Grover have started to play Scrabble. Ellie is memorizing all of the acceptable two letter words. Mrs. Grover is scrambling to keep up. Their scores are going through the roof. They’ve even ordered competitive Scrabble playing dictionaries via interlibrary loan. Mrs. Grover has set up an extra table in the dining room dedicated to Scrabble. Don’t even think about doing your homework at that table. And every day at four thirty she serves tea in real china teacups. With little cakes. And sometimes special sandwiches.

Mrs. Grover is good at doing things that really matter but nobody notices. Like being nice to eight-year-olds, or running the community drive to collect children’s books for the nursery at the YMCA, or supplying the local kindergarten with craft supplies after all the budget cuts eliminated just about everything except construction paper and snub-nosed scissors. All the kindergartners love Mrs. Grover’s feathers, which she collects all year long on her walks through the Mendon Woods, or around Pond View Reservoir, or out by the lake.

Today, right before practice starts, Stephie and a clutch of older girls pass Alice and the other runners on their way to the student parking lot. Alice knows that Stephie, whose new friends call her Steph, as though two syllables are just too much trouble, would not be caught dead running. Stephie is paler than usual and she’s wearing one of those push-up bras and a short skirt. When Jeremy Baskin, a senior, catches up to her and runs his hand over her ass, Stephie looks over her shoulder at Alice. But she’s too far away now, and Alice can’t tell if that’s defiance or fear.

Alice turns back to the track. Ginger, the redhead, tosses her a baton on the fly as she sprints past her. They run, one forward, one backward, tossing the baton back and forth. Ginger’s hair is cut almost as short as a boy’s, she has strong legs and big feet, and she never looks down when she runs, she only looks up. She plays with the baton like Ellie would, and, with her energy and her quickness, she lifts Alice into a world where running
is
play.

Alice finds herself fantasizing about being the school’s top tenth-grade 400-meter runner, not that there are a lot of other tenth-grade girls giving up cheerleading or softball to be on the track team. The idea that she might have talent at such a simple thing is amazing. Henry just rolls his eyes when she talks about running sprints while B.D. screams at her: “Breathe, breathe,
breathe!
”

But nobody needs to scream at Alice to run or to breathe. When she’s running she doesn’t want to stop, she just wants to keep going. She feels something she’s never felt before; she feels powerful and strong, she feels like no one can hurt her. Being outdoors, getting into a groove, the freedom and the repetitiveness of her stride; she doesn’t know what it is, exactly, but something settles in her head. Running for time or for distance, on the track, on the roads, through the woods, getting lost, falling, the hard runs, the easy runs, all of it, every minute of it, she’s living and breathing in another world. It is an escape so profound she finds herself longing for school to end and running to begin.

 

Alice arrives home to find Mom and Ellie waiting in the car.

“You’re late,” Ellie says.

“Late for what?”

“I have a surprise for you girls,” Angie says, as she pulls out of the driveway.

“Daddy called!” Ellie crows.

“And I missed it? Are you kidding me?”

“An incredibly quick call,” Angie says.

“Like five minutes. Super fast.”

“He’s moving to a new base. And it’s normal for mail to be slow.”

“Write me, he said to me; and to Mom and to you, Alice. He wants letters. Lots of letters. I’ve already written him two times and drawn four pictures.”

“Where are we going?” Alice asks.

“You’ll see,” Angie says.

“Did he say where he is?”

“F.O.B. Falcon,” Ellie says.

“For the time being,” Angie adds.

“What’s F.O.B?”

“Forward Operating Base.”

“Everything has an acronym in the army,” Ellie says. “Like they’ve got their own special language. F.O.B. and TNT and HQ and IED.”

“What do you know about IEDs?”

“They keep inventing new ones: VBIED: vehicle borne IED; SVBIED: suicide vehicle borne IED; DBIED: dog borne or donkey borne IED.”

“Where do you get these little tips?” Alice asks.

“Bobby DiFiori in the fourth grade likes to watch CNN.”

“And he talks about this stuff?!”

“On the playground. At recess.”

“Oh, my God . . .”

Angie pulls up to the Holschers’ farmhouse and beeps the horn, like it’s a prearranged signal. Edna comes out the front door and Hank walks up from behind the barn. They’re both wearing muck boots and barn jackets and grinning from ear to ear.

Mom makes introductions, and Edna walks right up and takes Ellie by the hand.

“Mrs. Holscher . . .” Ellie begins.

“Call me Edna.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

They all follow Edna and Ellie to the barn, all the way down the central aisle to the last stall on the left.

Hank unhooks the door.

“Go ahead.”

Inside the stall, in knee deep straw is a mama goat and three brand new baby kids, nursing.

Ellie goes right to her knees, beside them.

“They were born yesterday afternoon,” Hank offers. “Triplets. Can you beat that?”

“Can I touch them?” Ellie can barely contain her excitement.

“Sure.”

“The mama won’t mind?”