“That might not be too bad,” I said. Al’s mother getting married had been the furthest thing from my mind. “Then you’d have a father.”

  I put my foot in it then, I knew. Al sort of raised her shoulders and I could almost see the ice forming on her ears. “I already have a perfectly good father,” she said. “Why should I want another one?”

  “He wouldn’t be your father, he’d be your half father, or your stepfather,” I said, trying to repair the damage. “They say stepfathers are really nice, sometimes nicer than real fathers.”

  Al didn’t answer me. When we got to the gym door, Martha Moseley was standing there with her two cronies, Linda Benton and Sally Sykes. Linda Benton and Sally Sykes are as close to being nothing as any two girls I’ve ever known. I don’t think they go to the bathroom without asking Martha if it’s O.K. with her. I don’t know why somebody like Martha has the power over people she seems to have. Last year two other girls practically laid down their coats when they came to a puddle so Martha wouldn’t get her feet wet. Martha Moseley is probably the biggest phony God ever put on this earth.

  Martha looked over her shoulder at us.

  “I’ve got a note from my mother,” she said, like she was the lead in the school play and wanted to be sure her voice carried to the last row. “To excuse me from playing basketball. I’ve got my period again.”

  Linda and Sally looked at each other and then at us as if they were thinking of calling an ambulance.

  “Poor M,” Linda said. They called her M when they were being super super slobs. “When she gets her period she’s absolutely knocked out.”

  “Hey, wow,” Al said in a loud voice. “Too bad she doesn’t get it more often. Then she’d be unconscious all the time instead of just some of the time.”

  Al and I marched past them into the hall. It was lucky Martha didn’t have a loaded weapon on her or she would’ve unloaded it in our direction. Linda and Sally both dropped their mouths open so they resembled Teddy, which is a terrible thing to say about anyone.

  “I’ll say this,” Al said when we got to our lockers and started unloading our stuff, “I started out the day feeling lousy. But now I feel pretty good.”

  There was a peculiar smell in my locker. I think I must’ve shoved either my dirty gym socks or part of a sandwich in the back and forgotten about it.

  “What’s that terrible smell?” Al asked.

  “Maybe I’ll check on it this afternoon. It’s almost time now for the bell.”

  Al looked down at her brown vest. “I should’ve worn my blue sweater.”

  “Wear it tomorrow,” I said.

  “Suppose he asks me for her hand,” Al said.

  “What?”

  “Her hand. Suppose he asks me for my mother’s hand in marriage. Seeing as I’m her daughter, maybe he’ll ask me for my permission to marry my mother.” Al slammed her locker door. “I saw a movie on TV last week where the father of the girl asks the suitor what his prospects are—how much money he makes and how much he expects to make. Can he provide for his daughter, stuff like that.”

  “Isn’t that kind of old-fashioned?” I said.

  “Maybe.” Al looked doubtful. “Why don’t you check with your mother and father, find out if he asked for your mother’s hand. I mean, I’m the only person this guy could ask, when you come right down to it.”

  “It sounds kind of nervy to me,” I said. “A kid your age asking a grown man how much money he makes. I don’t think he’d like that at all. It’s really none of your business.”

  Al stuck out her lower lip and blew up at her bangs to get them out of her eyes.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said as the bell rang, “they better not ask me to go on their honeymoon with them.”

  “Why would they do that?” I asked her.

  Al picked up her books. “They might feel sorry for me,” she said. “They might feel sorry for me because I was going to be alone. It won’t bother me to stay alone. I’m used to it.”

  “Sure,” I said, opening the door to our homeroom. “Anyway, you always have me.”

  5

  “Listen, mom,” I said that night when I was peeling potatoes, “did Dad ask Grandfather for your hand when you decided to get married? Did he want to know how much money Dad made?”

  My mother was on her hands and knees with her head stuck under the sink looking for some soap. “Your father was making seventy-five dollars a week and I was making ninety,” she said. “It was sort of embarrassing. I told him he could lie and say he was making ninety, too, but he wouldn’t do it. Why do you ask?”

  “I just wanted to know,” I said, gouging at a black spot with the point of the potato peeler. “It’s an old-fashioned custom, right?” I said. “Nobody does it anymore.”

  “From what I understand,” my mother said, sitting back on her heels, “there is nothing that nobody doesn’t do. Young people only get married nowadays after they’ve been living together to try it for size. I think it’s sad, never mind the morality of it. Morality is an outmoded word, I’m afraid.”

  “Al’s mother isn’t young,” I said. “Does living together and sleeping together mean the same thing?”

  “One usually leads to the other,” she answered. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, Al’s mother has this new boyfriend, and Al thinks maybe they’re going to get married.” I left out the part about them kissing because maybe Al wouldn’t want me to tell that. “And Al thinks he might ask her for her mother’s hand in marriage and she might have to ask him what his prospects are, how much money he makes, and I told her I thought that would be sort of fresh.”

  My mother whistled softly.

  “Right on,” she said. She gets hold of expressions like that from reading the papers and watching TV, and when she gets attached to a certain expression she won’t let go.

  “And Al thinks they’re going to ask her to go on their honeymoon with them because they’ll feel sorry about leaving her alone. Can we ask her to stay with us?”

  “Why don’t you wait and see what happens?” my mother said. “Maybe they’re only platonic friends, Al’s mother and this man.”

  “That’s all you know,” I said. Sometimes you have to protect your parents from the hard facts.

  The bell rang and it was Al standing in the hall.

  “Did you ask yet?” she whispered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “She said my father was making seventy-five bucks a week and she was making ninety, so it was sort of embarrassing, but he wouldn’t lie about how much he was making. She said follow the wait-and-see policy.”

  “He’s there now,” Al said darkly. “They’re having a cocktail. He gave me the business about what grade was I in, what was my favorite subject, etcetera. I was watching a special about Bermuda on the telly and he asked me if I’d ever been there. I said no and he said he had and it was beautiful. Then you know what he said?” Al peered out from behind her bangs at me. They seemed to have grown since that afternoon.

  “No. What?” I am basically a straight-man type.

  She looked over her shoulder to make sure no one was around. “He said too bad, I’d have to go there someday.”

  I thought that one over.

  “So?” I said. “So what?”

  She poked me in the chest.

  “Bermuda. What’s Bermuda famous for? You don’t know?” She didn’t even give me a chance to answer. “Honeymoons, wimp. That’s what Bermuda’s famous for. Honeymoons.”

  “Listen, if he didn’t offer you a free airplane ticket on the spot, forget it.” I was trying to make her feel better but things did not look good.

  “It’s O.K. for you to say,” she said. “I’ve been thinking. I might join the Army. I just finished watching a TV commercial about all the advantages the Army has to offer women.”

  “There’s only one thing wrong with that,” I said.

  “What?” she said.

  For the second time I had the answer to Al’s question.

  “You ain’t no woman, baby,” I said.

  We got a good laugh out of that and Al zapped down the hall to her apartment to keep an eye on things.

  6

  When I rang her bell Saturday morning Al came to the door still in her pajamas. She had an old towel wrapped around her head, pulled straight across her forehead and tucked behind her ears. She looked sort of like an Egyptian pharaoh with glasses.

  “I’ve got to do a load of wash,” I said. “Come with me?”

  “I can’t,” she said, breathing heavily, “I’m doing needlepoint.”

  “I didn’t know you knew how to do needlepoint.”

  “I don’t. My mother brought this eyeglass case home for me to start on, which is driving me up the walls. But I’m going to finish it if it kills me.”

  “Five’ll get you ten it will,” I said. I don’t understand odds but I like the way they sound. Al doesn’t understand them either, which is good.

  She waved her hands around. “I’m doing it as a lesson in self-discipline,” she said. “It’s good for you to do things you hate doing.”

  “It is?” I had started to knit a sweater when I was about ten. It made me so nervous I felt like jumping out the window. My mother finished it for me. One sleeve was longer than the other, and when I tried to pull the thing over my head, I almost choked to death. My mother put it in a hot-water wash and it came out looking just about right for a six-month-old baby. We were both relieved.

  “Then after I do my needlepoint, I have to clean up my room,” Al said. “My mother wants me to go down to the store and meet her and you-know-who. He’s taking us to lunch.”

  “Has he got a name?” I asked her.

  Al wrinkled her nose. “His name is Mr. Lynch. Mr. Henry Lynch. He’s pretty old, about forty-five or so. He wears after-shave lotion. Very powerful after-shave lotion. And he wears a gold ring on his pinkie. Does that tell you anything?” Al stared at me.

  “As long as he doesn’t wear an earring in one ear, so what’s to worry?” I said. We know this boy who wears an earring in one ear. He’s a real wimp but he thinks he’s a hot dog. A wimp who thinks he’s a hot dog is one of the most pathetic people going.

  “Why have you got that on your head?” I asked, pointing to the towel.

  “When I started the needlepoint my bangs kept getting in my eyes, so I put this on to keep ’em out,” Al said.

  “Any news? About last night, I mean. Anything new on Bermuda?” I asked.

  I should’ve known. Al likes to tell things in her own good time. Lucky for me the phone rang just then, because she started to get that expression on her face that made me think I made Bermuda up.

  “Go answer it,” I said. “It’s probably somebody calling to tell you you’re a missing heir.”

  Meanwhile I looked at the fashion magazines Al’s mother gets, due to her job working in Better Dresses. They are far out. The girls look as if they have stilts for legs.

  Al’s voice sounded high and not like her at all. I heard her say, “I guess that’ll be all right. Do you want me to come down there?… O.K. I’ll have to clue my mother in. See you.”

  She came to the door of the living room. She looked white and funny.

  “Who was that?” I asked. Maybe somebody really had told her she’d inherited some money.

  “It was my father,” Al said, in a trance. She sat down on the sofa very carefully. “He’s here. He’s staying in a hotel. He wants me to have dinner with him. Tonight.” We looked at each other.

  When Al and I first became friends, she used to think every airplane flying overhead might be bringing her father to see her. But she was older now and hadn’t mentioned him in quite a while.

  “No kidding!” I said. “That’s great. Terrific.”

  Al started thumping her fist on the table so hard the ashtrays bounced.

  “Who does he think he is?” she shouted. “Who does he think he is that he can forget about me for almost six years and then all of a sudden decide to give me a big treat and take me out for dinner? I don’t think I’ll go. When he shows up, I’ll have my mother tell him I have a fungus or the mange or something.”

  “What will your mother say when she hears he’s coming?” I asked.

  “She thinks people who get divorced should be civilized about it,” Al said as if she was reciting a lesson. “She says divorce is a fact of life. But you know something?”

  I shook my head.

  She looked at the wall over the sofa and she wasn’t paying any attention to me. “If I ever got a divorce from my husband after we have a kid and all that junk, and I had loved him, I wouldn’t be civilized about it. Boy, if he walked out on me and my kid, I’d be sore. Good and sore.”

  She started to stomp around the room, stiff-legged, the way she does when she’s burned up about something.

  “I don’t think I’ll go out to dinner with him,” she said.

  “I know you, Al,” I told her. I tried to get her to smile. “You’ll go—anything for a free meal. Now get back to your needlepoint and blow your brains out. See if I care.”

  I’m happy to say that got her laughing. She came out in the hall in her pajamas and her Egyptian pharaoh’s headdress. While we were waiting for the elevator, she did a little belly dance. We both want to take lessons in belly dancing but so far haven’t asked our mothers.

  When the elevator stopped at our floor, a man and lady got out. They looked at Al in a very disapproving way. She scuttled back inside.

  “Stay loose,” I told her.

  “Have a weird day,” she said.

  Then I went down to do the wash.

  7

  I was going to take the crosstown bus to see my friend Polly Peterson, but it started to rain cats and dogs and my mother said I’d better call Polly and tell her I’d come some other time. Polly moved away about the same time Al moved into our building. Polly and I were good friends but not as good friends as Al and I are. Polly is my second best friend. We both cried when she had to move and vowed we’d be best friends forever. But that lasted about two weeks and now she has a best friend named Thelma.

  Polly is very skinny and scrawny and she got her period when she was ten. Her mother is the kind who believes in giving kids the facts of life practically before they’re able to walk, so Polly was the one who told me how babies were born. I told her she was a liar and started to hit her, and she told me I was a baby. We didn’t speak to each other for a day and a half. Anyway, Polly knew everything there was to know. So when she got her period and it was over, she said to her mother, “Boy, I’m glad that’s over,” and her mother had to explain that it was just the beginning. Polly had thought, so you get your period, you have it once, and that was that. Polly is a riot.

  There’s nothing worse than a rainy Saturday, especially when you live in an apartment and your best friend is having lunch in a restaurant with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. Not to mention she’s also going out to dinner with her long-lost father. Teddy was down in 12-C visiting a wimpy little friend of his and my mother and father were at a building committee meeting. There’ve been a lot of complaints lately about litter outside the building, and people are up in arms. One old lady stepped in a dog turd and almost got a concussion when she skidded on it, so they’re having a meeting to decide what to do. My father said, “Dogs will be dogs,” but my mother made him go anyway.

  I went through my mother’s bureau drawers to see if there were any additions or anything I’d missed the last time. There weren’t. Then I went through her jewelry box and put on a pair of dangly earrings and a touch of blue eyeshadow.

  I half closed my eyes and made a sexy face.

  “I vant to be alone,” I said. Nobody argued with me.

  The rain was coming down so hard I couldn’t even see across the courtyard. I decided to dust the bookshelf Mr. Richards had helped me make. I keep it in my bedroom. I polished it really well and I even took out all the books first. Then I sat down on my bed, closed my eyes and sent a couple of very strong thought waves up to Mr. Richards. I told him Al and I thought about him a lot. I also told him the new super was a slob and lazy to boot. I wonder if Mr. Richards is whipping around heaven, rags tied to his sneakers, showing St. Peter how to shine the linoleum.

  “Glide, glide!” I can hear him shouting. Even if he was talking to St. Peter, he’d still yell. Mr. Richards is not the kind of person who would be impressed by who someone was.

  After I got over my first really sad feeling about Mr. Richards’ dying, I thought about how nice it was to have known him, about all the good times he and Al and I had. He taught us how to make soup and cream sauce and crepes suzette, and I never have a Coke without hearing him say, “How about a shooter of Coke?” Mr. Richards had been a bartender before he was assistant super. He was what my grandmother would call “a rare soul,” and I’m glad I knew him even for a little while. Al feels the same way.

  I looked at the clock for about the fourteenth time. It was only one thirty. I turned on the television and got semi-engrossed in an old Tarzan movie. My mother and father came in from the meeting with my father muttering about how he’d never go to another one. My mother told him sternly he had to have some sense of responsibility. Sometimes she talks to him just the way she talks to Teddy and me.

  “We’re going over to the Babcocks’ tonight,” my mother said. “Maybe you’d like to have Al over.”

  “I would but she can’t come. She’s having dinner with her father,” I said.

  My mother raised her eyebrows. “Her father? How exciting! She must be thrilled. When did he show up?”

  “He called this morning,” I told her. “Mostly, Al’s sore. She says who does he think he is to show up after all these years and expect her to be all suited up ready to go out for a hamburger.”

  “Something’s gone bad in the refrigerator,” my father said, helping himself to a beer. He was always giving my mother a hard time about stuff that got shoved to the back and started to smell.

 

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