Patiently Alice (3 page)

The gowns were all very simple in design. One was straight across the front with spaghetti straps and a long narrow skirt; one had a scoop neckline and short sleeves, and the third had a V neck with straps that crossed in back.

“I can choose any one of them?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Sylvia. “Nancy’s already chosen the one she likes best, but I’m not going to tell you which it is. You should have the gown you like best. I’m not one of those people who believes bridesmaids should look like identical twins.”

“I like the one with the spaghetti straps,” I said.

“That’s exactly the one Nancy chose,” she said, and hugged me. “Excellent taste, Alice. As soon as we have dinner, I’ll take your measurements.”

“Oh, her measurements are simple,” Les said from the doorway. “Thirty… thirty… thirty.”

“
Lester!”
I said.

Sylvia just laughed. “Don’t you believe it, Alice. You’ve got a great figure.”

Sylvia Summers is the only one who could ever lie and get away with it. I’m more like thirty-two, twenty-five, thirty-four, but what I was really wondering right then was if my bra and underpants had holes in them and whether I’d have to take off everything to be measured.

At the table Lester asked Sylvia, “Do you actually enjoy this? The photographer, the cake, the flowers, the rings, the candles, the music, the…”

“I love it,” said Sylvia.

“Actually,” said Dad, “we’ve sort of divided up the work. She’s taking care of the wedding details, and I’m arranging the honeymoon.”

“Sounds fair,” said Les.

I was able to slip away before dinner was over and change my bra, which had old elastic in back, and by the time Sylvia came upstairs with the measuring tape, I was in my robe.

She’s very efficient and acted as though this were what she did every day of her life: measured girls in their underwear. I knew I shouldn’t have minded—she was almost my stepmother—but I was glad when I could put on my robe again.

“Well, someday, Alice, it will probably be you and me in a room together taking measurements for your
wedding
dress,” she said, smiling.

I smiled back and said flippantly, “And having
that intimate conversation for the bride-to-be.”

She laughed and I laughed, and then, because my joke had gone over so well, I took it a step further: “But now
you’re
the bride, so if there’s anything you need to know, Sylvia, just ask me.”

“Well,” she said, “nothing I can think of at the moment. Is there anything
you
would like to ask
me
?”

I could feel myself blushing. Had I been that obvious? Had she seen right through me? What I really wanted to know, of course, was whether she and Dad had already made love, but it was none of my business and I wouldn’t ask it in a zillion years.

“No,” I said, “but if I think of something, I will.”

“Good,” said Sylvia. “I want to keep things open and honest between us. I know we won’t get along perfectly all the time—no one does, not even Ben and me. But I’d like it if we could promise each other that when something upsets us, we’ll talk it out. There’s nothing worse than people going around holding grudges and never talking about them and nobody quite knowing who’s mad about what. Agree?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty awful,” I said, thinking of the time Elizabeth and Pamela had turned against me for a while and nobody would come right out and say what was wrong.

“Is that the way you and Dad solve problems? Talk them out?”

“We’re working on it,” she said.

I got one more call before I went to bed that night. It was Gwen.

“You all packed, girl?” she asked.

“All except the small stuff,” I said. “You know what I wish? I wish we were going to a camp where we wouldn’t need a hair dryer, conditioner, nail file, lip gloss.…”

“It’s called Girl Scout Camp,” she told me. “We’ve been there, done that. Those kinds of camps, I mean.”

“So it’s all about guys, isn’t it? Who we might meet?” I said.

“You could say that,” said Gwen. I thought of her perfect eyebrows, her short but shapely legs, her skin the color of cocoa. I’ll bet she’s had a different boyfriend for every year of her life, though she and Leo—Legs is his nickname—have been going together for eighteen months.

“So what’s up?” I asked her.

“Legs and I had a fight,” she said.

“You broke up?”

“Not exactly. He said he was going to drive out and visit sometime during the three weeks we’re at camp, and I said I didn’t want him to. I think
he’s been seeing another girl when I’m out of the picture, and I guess I just want to be free to fool around myself if I meet somebody.”

“Fool around… meaning…?” I asked.

She laughed. “Hang out with… kiss…”

I couldn’t help myself: “Elizabeth’s bringing condoms,” I said.

I heard the expected gasp at the other end of the line.
“Elizabeth?”

“For Pamela. Just in case. She says anything could happen.”

She laughed. “She goes around thinking like that, anything
might.
Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that if Legs calls asking for directions to that camp, don’t give them to him. Okay?”

“Got’cha,” I told her.

I had just gone to bed when the last call came. Dad tapped lightly on my door. “Al? Hate to disturb you, but it’s your Aunt Sally. Shall I tell her you’ve gone to bed, or do you want to talk with her? It’s only ten o’clock Chicago time.”

“I’ll take it,” I said groggily, and padded out to the upstairs phone in the hallway. If I didn’t talk to her now, I knew she’d call again the next morning when I was trying to get out the door.

“Oh, Alice, dear, I just want to wish you a very happy time at Camp Overlook,” Aunt Sally said.
She’s Mom’s older sister and looked after our family for a while after Mom died. She and Uncle Milt have a daughter named Carol, a few years older than Les.

“Thanks, Aunt Sally,” I said. “I’m an assistant counselor, you know. I’m not going as a camper.”

“I know that, dear. Counselors have a lot of responsibility, and little children look up to them.”

I wondered why Aunt Sally didn’t give her sermons from a pulpit every Sunday.

“Meaning…?” I said, knowing very well that Aunt Sally didn’t call just to wish me happy camping.

“Why, nothing, dear! I think it’s wonderful that you are going to be a role model for all those little children. They’ll want to imitate everything you do.”

“Thank you,” I said.

There was a brief silence, and then Aunt Sally said, “Your father tells me it’s a coed camp.”

Here it comes,
I thought. “Yes,” I told her.

“So there will be male counselors as well as female?”

“That’s what ‘coed’ means, all right,” I said.

“Well, as I said to your Uncle Milt, you’re Marie’s daughter, and I know you would want her to be proud of you. Of course, this is the first time
you’ve been away from home for any length of time, and there are all those woods and hills and valleys and—”

“Aunt Sally,” I interrupted, trying not to laugh, “are you afraid I’ll get lost?”

“Oh, no,” she said.

“Are you afraid I’ll drown?”

“Not really.”

“Are you afraid I’ll go off in the woods in a fit of passion?”

“Why, whatever made you say that?” Aunt Sally choked.

“Because I can read you like a book,” I said gently. “Actually, I doubt there’s anything you could worry about that Elizabeth Price hasn’t thought of first. But I appreciate your call, and I will really try to have a most magnificent summer, role model and all.”

Gwen’s mother was to pick us all up the following morning. I gave Dad and Lester a hug and went over to Elizabeth’s to wait.

Liz was not only looking more normal these days—she wasn’t putting purple in her hair any longer—but she seemed more relaxed, if you can ever call Elizabeth relaxed. She saved her hugs and kisses for her little year-and-a-half-old brother, though—just a quick “Bye-bye” to her parents, and that must have hurt. Both Elizabeth and Pamela were having parent problems, and I was glad it was Gwen’s mom driving us to the recreation center, where we would board the buses.

Pamela was with the Wheelers when they drove up, and all four of us—Gwen and Liz and Pamela and me—were in shorts and tank tops. Elizabeth’s legs actually looked good again; you wouldn’t
mistake her for a prisoner of war, with sticklike thighs and knobby knees.

Mrs. Wheeler was on the short side, like Gwen, and wore her hair in a well-shaped Afro. “Off you go, into the wilds,” she said, smiling. “Please don’t break any bones, Gwen.”

Gwen’s mom is a lawyer who works at the Justice Department. Even though it was Saturday, she looked smart in her linen shirt and pants, while we looked like we were going to dig potatoes or something. “Your father wants you to call home every weekend,” she said. I saw Gwen roll her eyes. “Humor him, please.”

“And I suppose I should call Granny,” Gwen said.

“That would be nice.”

I think we all envied Gwen’s extended family. She seemed to have aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents all over the place. The closest relatives I’ve got are Dad’s brothers, Uncle Howard and Uncle Harold—twins—down in Tennessee, though I don’t see them as often as I see Aunt Sally in Chicago.

So one minute we were taking our bags out of the trunk of Mrs. Wheeler’s car, and the next we were walking up the sidewalk toward the recreation center, where about eighty kids were milling about, yelling and chasing each other, swinging their duffel bags at friends, teasing, laughing, jumping, and
spinning, all except a dozen or so who had grown tearful and were clinging to a relative or caretaker.

The full counselors were already at work comforting the weepers, and after pointing out the buses we’d be riding on, they gave us clipboards with names of campers on them. We were each responsible for locating the kids on our list and showing them where to line up.

I had just started toward a group of girls sitting on the steps of the building when I heard Pamela say, “Whoa!” Coming out the door of the center were two guys,
very
good-looking guys, also holding clipboards. They noticed us about the same time and came over.

“Name, please?” one of them said to Pamela jokingly, looking over his list. “Age? Marital status?”

We smiled.

“Craig Kimball,” he said to all of us. “Nice to meet you.”

“Andy Simms,” said his friend, a tall African American wearing an Orioles T-shirt.

“I’m Pamela. This is Elizabeth and Alice and Gwen,” Pamela told them.

“You have your cabin assignments yet?” asked Craig. “It’s there on top of your clipboards.”

We checked. Gwen and I discovered we were in the same cabin, number six. Elizabeth was in eight, and Pamela was in twelve.

“Darn!” said Craig. “They did it again, Andy. Girls on one side of the camp, guys on the other.”

We laughed, but there were kids to be rounded up, so off we went.

Gwen and I were to be in charge of six girls, ages seven to ten. One was a little Korean girl, Kim, who sat tearfully on the steps clinging to a grown woman.

It was Gwen who knew how to handle that. She reached in her duffel bag and pulled out a little black box, the hinged kind that jewelry comes in. She simply sat down on the steps next to the little girl and, without a word, opened the box. Inside was a butterfly, perfectly preserved under a plastic bubble. Its wings were a shimmering pattern of brown and yellow with orange spots.

Gwen held it out for Kim to see.

“It’s beautiful,” said the woman, and introduced herself as Kim’s aunt.

“Can I touch it?” asked Kim.

“No, because it would crumble,” Gwen said. “I collect them. But not till after they die.”

Then she let Kim try on her watch and rings, and by the time we were to get on the bus, Kim had attached herself to Gwen, and I herded the other five girls on board.

The youngest was a chubby African-American
girl of seven named Ruby, but the smallest child, who was eight, was Josephine. I swear I could have carried her about in one arm. She and her older sister, Mary, were the only white kids in the bunch. Then there was Estelle, who was Latina, and Latisha, the oldest of the six girls, also black. We decided it was no accident that each cabin was a miniature melting pot.

When we finally had our girls settled and their belongings accounted for, and Craig and Andy had done the same with their campers, our bus pulled away. Gwen looked at me and said, “Well,
our
lives are about to change!”

For the worse, it seemed, because a boy at the back of the bus started singing “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” only his friend changed the lyrics to “Ninety-nine bottles of snot on the wall.” As the song progressed, the word became “pee,” then “poop,” and each new word brought yelps of laughter from the boys and at least half the girls. The other girls covered their ears and pretended to look offended.

I glanced across the aisle at Pamela and Elizabeth and shouted, “Do you think you can stand this for three weeks?”

But Elizabeth was looking toward the front of the bus and smiling, and when I followed her gaze, I saw Craig and Andy looking back at us.

“Oh, yes!” Elizabeth said in answer. “I think I can stand this very well.”

We decided that Camp Overlook must have been built for munchkins, because there were two facing rows of small cabins, twelve in all, odd numbers on one side of camp, even on the other. Each was crammed with four bunk beds but no facilities—just two small dressers with drawers, some shelves, and eight coat hooks. We’d read that it was owned by a church, which donated the camp to the county’s social services for three weeks each summer to provide summer camp for poor kids. It was run on a shoestring, and none of us expected more than the basics. The basics were all we got.

Each cabin had either one counselor and seven campers or two assistant counselors and six campers. Each cabin was to choose a name for itself. Our girls chose the Coyotes, which should have told us something right there.