It wasn’t till later that evening that I remembered to call Patrick. Does that mean you’re over a
breakup, I wondered, when you even forget to answer an ex-boyfriend’s e-mail?
I dialed his number. “Hi,” I said. “I’m back.”
“O-
kay
!” he said. “How was it?”
“Hard. Fun. Interesting. Exhausting.”
“Sounds so academic.”
“We went skinny-dipping,” I said.
There was a pause. “I stand corrected,” he said. “Just the girls?”
“Guys and girls together.”
“Not very academic at all,” said Patrick.
“So what’s up?” I asked him.
“I wondered if I could get some help on an assignment,” he said. “I could come over.”
“You’re
asking for
my
help?” I said. “Patrick, I didn’t know there was any subject in the world you couldn’t handle.”
“Surprise!” he said. “In psych we have to do an interview, and I wondered if I could interview you.”
“Why?”
“We’re doing some kind of statistical thing. Data gathering and statistical correlation.”
Patrick’s advanced-placement courses always sound so impossible to me. “What do you want to know?” I asked.
“Well, I thought it would be easier if I just came over. That okay?”
“Sure.”
“About nine? It would help if you had a baby book or something—a record of childhood illnesses and stuff.”
“Yeah, I’ll look for it,” I said.
“See you,” he said.
“Patrick’s coming over,” I told Dad. “He wants to see my baby book.”
“Oh?” said Dad.
“Your
baby
book?” Lester said. “Call him back and tell him there’s still time to cancel. Does he know you were born bald?”
I gave Lester a look. “Where is it? My book?” I asked Dad.
“The bottom drawer of my desk,” he answered.
It was a white book with pink letters on the silk cover:
BABY DEAR.
And there, on the very first page—I remembered it now—was the photo of me just a few hours after I was born, my eyes closed, mouth puckered, fists clenched. Lester was right. No hair whatsoever.
I carefully leafed through the book, because some of the photos were pasted in, some were loose.
First Outing,
it said at the top of one page, and there was a picture of Mom in a pretty spring dress, holding me up to the camera, a cotton sunbonnet on my bald head.
Baby’s Friends, Baby’s Favorite Toys, Health Record, First Birthday…
Stitched to the page describing my third birthday was a lock of fine silky hair, blond with a faint orange tint to it.
We’ve got another strawberry blonde in the family,
Mom had written below.
A photo of me at Christmas on Dad’s lap, a photo of Lester, gingerly handing me a small car…
Mom’s notes:
Alice Kathleen—a bright happy little soul!… Around the age of two, when Alice would discover a parent missing temporarily, she would say, “Where’s a mama?” or “Where’s a daddy go?”… Upon waking from a nap and seeing Lester’s shoes on the floor, she asked, “Where did feet go?”…
And further on:
Age three: Was inspecting the beloved but raggedy bear she took to bed every night, which had long since lost its face, and said, “Daddy, we’ve got to buy this kid a mouth.”… Alice calls Lester her “bruzzer.”
Then three small pictures of my mother—holding me on a merry-go-round, blowing soap bubbles with me, kissing my forehead.… Suddenly that sinking, smothering, sad feeling. It comes on so suddenly that I don’t even feel it till it knocks me over, like a wave in the ocean. I gulp, I blink, I catch my breath, and then it’s gone. Sometimes it comes again within a week, and sometimes months go by without my feeling it. I told Dad about it once and he said, “It’s called longing, Al. It’s missing somebody.”
Patrick always seems taller when I haven’t seen him for a while. He stood at the door in his tennis shorts and T-shirt, his fair skin freckled, his red hair hanging down one side of his forehead.
I think my heart will always skip a beat for Patrick. They say that’s true of your first boyfriend. The big question, of course, was whether his heart still skipped a beat for me. I doubted it. Still, I couldn’t help wondering just how far he would have to bend down to kiss me now.
“So, hi,” he said. “Welcome back.”
“Come on in,” I told him. I noticed he had a notebook under his arm.
Dad was stretched out on the couch listening to music, and Lester was in the kitchen. We took over the dining room table, and Dad waved to Patrick, then closed his eyes again. When he’s
missing Sylvia, he always listens to the music they’ve enjoyed together.
“You look great,” Patrick said to me.
“So do you. What have you been doing, besides school?”
“Teaching tennis.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. At day camp. Five afternoons a week. My courses are both in the mornings.” He saw my baby book open to the photo of me just after I was born. “Let me see that,” he said, and I slid the book toward him. He studied it and grinned. “Didn’t have a lot of hair, did you?”
“Bald as a grapefruit,” I said.
He went back to his assignment sheet. There was a series of questions about “firsts,” and I found the right page in the baby book and read them off to him. First laugh?
Twelve weeks.
First crawl?
Eight months.
First word?
Thirteen months, “ba” for “ball.”
First step?…
“Why do you need to know all this stuff, Patrick?” I asked.
“It’s just an exercise in gathering data. It’s not very scientific, and that’s probably what we’re supposed to learn from this assignment.”
“Why not just go through
your
baby book?”
“That would be too subjective.”
“Okay. What else do you need to know?”
“Social development,” said Patrick. “Did you have any of the following?” He slid a paper toward me. “Just put an ‘X’ in the appropriate box.”
I looked the paper over. “I haven’t the foggiest idea!” I turned toward Dad. “Dad,” I called, “when I was little, did I suck my thumb, throw temper tantrums, exhibit separation anxiety, or wet the bed?”
Lester stuck his head in from the kitchen. “What’s this? Did she wet the bed? Why, she was a first-class, grade-A, government-certified soaker!”
“Lester!” I said, and looked at Dad again.
“Gosh, Al, that’s something Marie would have remembered,” he said. “If it’s not in your baby book, I don’t know. You sucked your thumb till you were three, I remember that, and you cried if we left you with a sitter, but as for the rest…”
“It’s okay,” said Patrick. “I’ll put down two ‘no’s’ and two ‘yes’s.’” He looked over the assignment again. “All right, on a scale of one to ten, one being the lowest and ten the highest, how would you rate your abilities in science and math?”
“Two,” I said.
“I don’t believe it,” said Patrick.
“Okay. One,” I said.
He smiled, shook his head, and wrote down
2
.
“Your abilities in social studies—history, sociology, stuff like that?”
I shrugged. “Seven, maybe?”
“Art?”
“Seven.”
“Language arts?”
“Nine and a half,” I told him. Patrick wrote down
9
.
“I can’t understand what you’re going to do with all this stuff,” I told him after we’d gone through another fifteen minutes of questions.
“We’re trying to see if there’s any correlation between things that happened to us when we were small and our abilities in high school,” said Patrick. “But I talked to a guy who took this course last semester, and he says what it’s really going to show is all the things that could make for a false correlation. We learn how to do a study right by doing it wrong.”
“Whatever,” I said.
Patrick’s always so far ahead of me that I’m not sure I know what he’s talking about. Maybe he really
is
the kind of guy who should get through four years of high school in three.
“Take it from me,” Lester called from the kitchen, “She really
was
a soaker.”
“Lester, will you shut up?” I said. “Go out for the evening or something.”
“I will. I’m just waiting for a babe to call. If the phone rings, guys, I’ll get it,” he said, and it
sounded like his mouth was full of potato chips.
“Okay, we’re almost done,” said Patrick. He glanced over at me. “Can I get you anything? Water? Tranquilizers?”
“This is my house, remember?” I said.
“Oh, right!” said Patrick. “This is the last set. On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your popularity?”
I thought I’d probably check in at about a six or seven, but I wasn’t going to tell Patrick that.
“Eight,” I said. He wrote it down.
“On a scale of one to ten, how comfortable are you with members of the opposite sex?”
“Ten,” I lied.
“How many boys have you kissed in your lifetime, excluding family members?”
“Patrick!” I said.
He didn’t even look up. “How many guys did you kiss at Camp Overlook, and on a scale of one to ten, how would you rate them?”
I laughed. “This interview is over. The whole thing was bogus, wasn’t it?”
He laughed too and closed his notebook. “No. Cross my heart. Except for the last set, which I sort of sneaked in there. Hey, it’s a nice night out. Want to sit on the porch for a little bit?”
“Sure,” I said, and we got up and went to the door.
It was a beautiful clear night out, and it reminded me, with a pang, of the night Patrick and I had that fight and broke up. I almost didn’t want to sit in the swing with him for fear it would take me back to that place where my world… well, my social life, anyway… seemed to revolve around Patrick. Before I got involved with the backstage crew of the Drama Club at school. Before I felt as comfortable with myself as I do now.
But then, there was Patrick holding the screen door open for me, so I followed him out and we sat down a few inches apart.
“Been a while since we did this,” he said, and smiled at me.
“Yeah, it has,” I said, and smiled back. We pushed against the floor with our feet.
“So… are you going out with anyone?” he asked.
“Not at the moment.”
“Me either. I’m girl-less.”
“So I heard.”
He shrugged. “I guess school and band and track and tennis are about all I can take on this year.”
“So… no time for romance, huh?”
“You could say that. Anyway, it was a dumb idea to think you’d like it if I went out with you both. Penny thought so too.”
“Chalk one up for Penny,” I said dryly, then decided to go for it. “So why
did
you two break up?”
“She was just.… Well, Penny’s a nice girl, but she was way too demanding of my time, and I can’t blame her.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Besides,” Patrick said with a grin in my direction, “she wasn’t you.”
“Well, of course she’s not me,” I said.
He leaned sideways and kissed me lightly on the forehead before he stood up. “Viva la difference,” he said. “See you later. Thanks for your help, Alice.”
Viva la difference?
Now what did he mean by that, exactly? I’ve heard Lester say it before when he’s talking about the differences between men and women. Talking about a woman’s curves, for example.
Did Patrick mean that he was glad Penny and I were different from each other because he liked variety? Was he saying he was glad that I’m me because he found something missing in Penny? He said she was demanding. Good. At least I’d found
something
about her to hate.
The fact was, I wasn’t really hurt that Patrick hadn’t stayed longer—that he hadn’t given me a real kiss. That he hadn’t asked me to go with him
again. Relieved mostly, I guess. Maybe both of us wanted to see what else—
who
else—was out there. Besides, did I really want a boyfriend who was more interested in getting through high school in three years than he was in me? I don’t think so.
“Bye, Patrick,” I said to the breeze, and went back inside the house.
Aunt Sally called about ten. Sometimes I think she makes a note on the calendar when it’s time to check up on us. I know she promised Mother to look after Lester and me, and since we moved to Maryland, she feels the least she can do is call. How she and Uncle Milt raised Carol, their only daughter, to be the free spirit she is, I don’t know, but Dad says that talking to Aunt Sally sets him back forty years.
It was Lester who answered the phone. Les always says as little as possible to Aunt Sally because he hates the way she tries to pry personal information out of him.
“Hi, Sal!” I heard him say. “Things are fine here. How are you?” And then, “Oh, I think she enjoyed camp a lot. She’s right here; I’ll let you talk to her.”
“Thanks,” I muttered as I took the phone. Then, “Hi, Aunt Sally.”
“Oh, dear, I just wanted to know how things
went at camp. What a wonderful experience for you! The children must have been so grateful!” came her voice.
“Well, I can’t say that, exactly, but I did have a good time,” I said.
She laughed self-consciously. “But not
too
much fun, I hope.”
I didn’t answer for a moment. I could have told her about skinny-dipping, I suppose. I do things like that sometimes just to hear her flip out. But Aunt Sally’s probably doing the best she can, so I said, “No, it was just right.”
“That’s good,” she said. “I know you’re growing up, Alice, and I try to prepare myself for the day you’ll be a young woman, but I never know quite what to ask. I try to think what Marie would have wanted me to tell you, but I’m just not very good at this. I’m afraid Carol had to raise herself in the sex department.”
I envisioned a store with a sex department between housewares and shoes.
“You’re doing fine,” I told her. We talked then about Sylvia and the wedding being postponed, about how Uncle Milt and Carol were doing, how Carol had just mailed off a box of clothes she thought I might like, and how I was going to spend the rest of my summer. I think this was the closest to a real conversation Aunt Sally and I had
ever had. I decided that from now on, now that I was “growing up,” I would try to be a little more understanding of Aunt Sally.