A Girl Called Al: The Al Series, Book One (2 page)

We have been friends for quite a while. He is a retired bartender and has a big tattoo on his arm that says “Home Sweet Home.” I had been wanting to have Al meet him. We figured out night before last that Al and I have known each other for exactly three weeks. It feels like forever. Some people you just feel like you have always known. That is the way it is with me and Al and with me and Mr. Richards.

He has the cleanest, shiniest kitchen floor I have ever seen. You can practically see your face in it. Nobody but me knows how he gets it that way. It is one of the things that makes him so special.

I rang Al's bell, but softly. I gave it just a little poke. Her mother has to do a lot of traveling and entertaining, as she is the buyer for Better Dresses, and you never know when she has maybe got in at one o'clock in the morning or something. She wears a sleep shade for her eyes and plugs for her ears. Al showed them to me but sometimes, even all stuffed up with all those things, she can still hear the bell.

Al came to the door and she did not have her hair in pigtails yet. It looked nice.

“I like your hair that way,” I said. “Why not wear it to school like that?”

“It's a mess,” she said. Without her glasses and her hair in pigtails, she looked different.

“I've got to go down and put some clothes in the washing machine,” I whispered, just in case. “Come with me and we'll go see Mr. Richards.”

She said, “In a sec,” and when she came back she looked the way she does every day. It was a disappointment.

“Pleased to meet you,” Mr. Richards said to Al. They shook hands and he asked, “Got time for a little shooter of Coke?”

I had just finished telling Al he talks this way on account of being a retired bartender, so it was nice he proved I wasn't making it up.

His apartment is right behind the furnace room, so it is always warm. “You in the building?” he asked Al, putting out the glasses. “Set 'em up,” he said and slid three glasses down the kitchen counter.

“She's new,” I said. “She's in 14-C.”

“You got enough heat up there in 14-C?” Mr. Richards wanted to know. “We had plenty of problems with that one, I can tell you. Last tenant said it got so cold he didn't need the refrigerator. Just left everything out on the table. Care for another?”

We all had another shooter. I never used to like Coke until I started drinking it this way.

“Don't worry,” Al said. “You don't know my mother. She would not hesitate to let you know the minute anything was not right.”

I think Mr. Richards's eyes are blue. They are so narrow in his face it is hard to tell. I told him once that I thought he looked like the captain of a whaling ship. I could see him squinting out over the horizon. “Not me,” he had said. “Them waves get to my stomach every time.”

“You have a nice place here,” Al said.

Al is a very observant girl. She says if she does not get to be a specialist in internal medicine, she may be a newspaper reporter. I would not put it past her.

“I like your curtains,” she said, “and that's a pretty plant. What kind is it?”

“That's a geranium,” Mr. Richards said, looking pleased. “I been treating it like a baby, better'n most babies, if you want to know. Lots of sun, not too much water. Some day maybe, when my ship comes in, when I find that there pot of gold, when I break the bank at that place they wrote the song about, I'll move where it's warm. All the time. I'll get me a house with nothing but flowers and plants around. No grass, no nothing. Just flowers and plants.”

Mr. Richards was really getting carried away. He tied a couple of rags around his sneakers and started skating around his linoleum.

I was very pleased. I had told Al he skated around his floor when he got excited. Or sometimes just for fun. It relaxes him, he says.

She only said, “I don't believe it.”

One thing about Al, she never comes right out and calls anyone a liar.

Now I just smiled at her. I wanted to say, “I told you so,” but I didn't. Which I thought was kind of nice of me.

Chapter Four

“I like your lady friend,” Mr. Richards said the next day when I took a bunch of towels down to the dryer for my mother. I had stopped at Al's to ask her to come along, but she had said, “My mother has a rule. She says we have to spend Sundays together. She says she doesn't see enough of me during the week.” She made a face. So I went alone.

“She's a humdinger,” Mr. Richards said. “A regular lollapalooza.”

My mother has a thing about me visiting him. It's not just that he's a retired bartender. My mother takes a drink now and then. It's mainly because whenever she sees him around, he's always got a toothpick sticking out of his mouth. He is almost never without a toothpick. She thinks it's common. It makes
me
nervous. Some day he will swallow it. Or get a big hole in his gums.

Anyway, she thinks the combination does not make for a very good companion for me. She doesn't really know Mr. Richards.

“I like that Al,” Mr. Richards said, fixing me a piece of bread and butter and sugar. He didn't even ask if I wanted it. He slapped on the butter and put about ten inches of sugar on top. My mother would have exploded.

“Al is a very interesting person,” I said. “She is a nonconformist.”

“That so?”

One thing about Mr. Richards, he is a very good listener. I mean, he really hears you and he never interrupts.

“You probably won't believe this,” I said, biting into my second piece of bread, “but Al wants to take shop instead of sewing and cooking, and they won't let her.”

“Who won't let her?” Mr. Richards asked.

“The principal, that's who. No girls get to take shop.”

Mr. Richards scratched his head. “Seems like a perfectly normal thing. A young lady wants to take shop, then I say let her take shop. A girl like Al, she doesn't want to waste her time with ladylike pursuits. She wants to get out and live life, change a tire or two, cut down a few trees.”

Mr. Richards was warming up. He started to skate. He tied his rags on and off he went.

“Why, she wants to scale a couple of mountains, dig for buried treasure, sail to the South Seas in a twenty-foot sloop. Stuff like that.”

He glided around nice and easy and after five minutes the floor gleamed and he wasn't even out of breath.

“You think it would do any good if I went down to this here school and talked to the principal?” he asked.

I figured he might do more harm than good, so I said, “No, no, that wouldn't be such a good idea. The only thing is, Al wants to make a bookshelf like the guys in shop are making.”

“Well now,” he said, putting on the pot for soup, “that's all they're doing? That's not so much.”

When Mr. Richards makes soup it is something to watch. He keeps a bag of stuff in his refrigerator. Like celery tops and old bones and carrots and onions. If it's around holidays, he throws in the leftover turkey. Then he scrapes plates and if there's any spinach or mashed potatoes or salad left, he throws it all in.

I nearly got sick the first time I saw him do it. It looked pretty disgusting. Then I ate some once when he hadn't told me he had made it and it was the best soup I ever ate. I don't exactly know how to describe it, but it was delicious.

“I could teach her how to make a bookshelf,” he said, pouring salt into the pot, “if her daddy isn't handy. I'm no slouch with the tools. I got a hammer, some nails lying around somewhere. I might just hunt them up and teach both you young ladies a thing or two.”

“Her daddy isn't around,” I said. “He is divorced from her mother. He travels a lot.”

“Well,” said Mr. Richards, “then we will do it.”

Another thing about him. He doesn't say he's going to do something and then forget it. Like lots of people do. Mostly grownups.

He never says, “Some other time.” He never says that. He does what he says he's going to do.

He is really very refreshing.

Chapter Five

“I think Mr. Richards must have been quite handsome when he was a young man,” Al said when I told her he was going to help us make a bookshelf starting next Saturday morning. “If it doesn't snow, that is. If it snows, Mr. Richards will have to clean the walks.”

Mr. Richards is practically my best friend, outside of Al, but I do not think he was ever what you would call handsome.

“He has great character in his face,” Al said. “And his ears are lovely and close to his head.”

I had never noticed his ears but I made a mental note to check them the next time I saw him.

Al is saving up for contact lenses.

“My mother wears contact lenses,” she said. “She's in Better Dresses, you know, and they like the people in Better Dresses to be chic. And it makes a world of difference when she has to wear a hat or go to a formal affair. In an evening gown.”

I can't see Al in either a hat or an evening gown. But that is beside the point.

“Next time you come over, you can watch her,” Al said.

“Watch her what?” I asked. I have only seen Al's mother a couple of times, outside of the first day they moved in. I do not think she knows my name.

“Watch her slip the lenses in and out,” she said. “It's very interesting. That is, if it doesn't make you nervous.”

Al stopped and tightened one pigtail. She likes them neat and even. Those pigtails are her badge of nonconformity, she says. She may be right.

“Why would it make me nervous?” I asked.

“There's only one thing,” she said. “Can't you guess? Take a good guess. What would be the most logical thing that could go wrong?”

She sat with her hands on her knees and I knew she was trying to see inside my head to see how my brain works. She made a noise like
zzt zzt
, which meant she was X-raying my head.

“Figure it out by logic,” she said.

Al says I have a block about logic, that I reject it. That means I am no good at it. My father says that women are not logical by nature.

Al watched me without blinking, like a little baby. Little babies or real little kids can look at you for a long time without blinking. One time in church there was a little kid sitting in front of me and I tried to stare him down about a hundred times. He won every time.

“I have a cramp in my foot,” I said. I got up and jumped around. When I finished she was still watching me.

“I don't know,” is what I came up with.

Al snorted.

“Just think,” she said, “what would happen if she whipped them in and all of a sudden something went wrong and they kept on going. I mean, where would they end up?”

“On the floor?” I knew this was not the right answer.

Al sighed and closed her eyes. She had lost her patience. She loses her patience often but she is quiet about it. When my mother loses her patience, she tells everybody.

Al sucked in her cheeks. She practices sucking in her cheeks for ten minutes every day. It makes her look very old. It really does the trick. She looks about forty or forty-two.

“I'll tell you where they end up. I'll just tell you!” She started waving her arms around. Then she stopped and said she had to go to the bathroom. I have noticed that she frequently has to go to the bathroom when she is in the middle of a story. I guess the excitement is too much for her.

“Where was I?” she said when she came back.

“Where do the contacts end up when something goes wrong,” I said.

“Oh, yes. Well, I'm going to tell you.”

One thing about Al is you cannot rush her when she is telling a story.

Softly she said, “First, they slide down inside your cheek and wiggle around in your throat. Then,” she said, “then …”

She is like Mr. Keogh when he tugs at his ear because he doesn't know what he's going to say next. Only she squints up at the ceiling, like maybe there is something written there. Finally she looked at me and smiled.

“Then they slip down inside your stomach and into the large intestine.”

I have never been sure of the difference between the large intestine and the small intestine. They are different in size is all I know.

She looked at the ceiling and then at me. “Then you know where they go?”

I racked my brains to remember the diagram of the stomach we have on the wall in biology class. It is a mess. I do not like that kind of thing. I would make a lousy nurse.

“I'll tell you,” Al shouted, hopping around on one foot. “They slide right down your legs and into your feet and there is one contact in your left foot and one in your right. All of a sudden you're walking around on glass. That's all!”

Al was exhausted. She sank back into her chair.

“Don't you think you'd better warn your mother?” I asked her.

Chapter Six

“Can I have my friend Al for supper?” I asked my mother, on account of she was whistling, which she only does when she is in a good mood, and also we were having spaghetti and meat balls, which I know is absolutely Al's favorite food.

“Tonight?” she said. “A school night?”

I explained that Al was going to be alone. Her mother had a dinner engagement. My mother started to say something and then she dropped a meat ball on the floor. She bent over and picked it up and rinsed it off.

“Waste not, want not,” she said and threw it back in the pot. “Remember that, with the price of food what it is today. Your father works too hard to get the money to pay the bills.”

All this is true, if beside the point. All I asked was could I have my friend Al for supper.

“Mom,” I said, “you are a good woman.”

This usually gets to her.

“Get me the sugar, like a good girl, will you?” she said. Then she added a little of it, tasted the sauce, and added, “Yes, I guess Al can come for supper tonight. Put another place on the table.”