Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) (30 page)

I smiled across the table. “I’ll remember that, especially because you told it to me,” I said. “Thanks, honey.”

My most difficult case was a student named Tarell—a bully—who was teetering on the edge of failing seventh grade, even though his intelligence scores showed him to be above average. He’d be okay for a while, getting passing grades and not causing trouble, and then he would do something especially cruel or humiliating to one of the sixth graders—yank his jeans down in the hallway, perhaps, or heckle him in the cafeteria about the shoes he was wearing. He would often latch on to one particular boy and taunt him for several weeks, then drop him and pick on someone else. He seemed especially determined to show that nobody could beat him up.

He’d had detention and been threatened with expulsion, but he remained silent when spoken to, passively aggressive. In my office he would invariably arrive late, throw himself into a chair reluctantly, and stare out the window, just putting in his time, answering my questions in monosyllables but rarely offering me anything substantial to work with.

One day after he’d been in detention for breaking a boy’s glasses, we sat across from each other while Tarell, as usual, stared sullenly out the window, occasionally glancing at his watch and shifting in his chair.

Finally I broke the silence and asked, “Tarell, who did this to you?”

He still didn’t look at me, but I saw his body tense. “Did
what
to me?”

“Turned you into a hostile, unhappy bully.”

This time he jerked about and faced me. “Nobody does
nothing
to me! I can take care of myself!” he said.

“Who are you trying to get back at here?” I continued. “You can’t possibly be mad at some ninety-pound sixth grader who never did anything to you. Who are you really angry at?”

The breakthrough didn’t come all at once, but once the floodgates were opened, I heard about his sadistic father, a man who never laid a hand on him, in either affection or anger, but who also never had a kind word for his son. Who was as abusive with his put-downs and insults as some parents were with their fists. And as the anger eked out in my office, it wasn’t as necessary for Tarell to take it out on other boys. At the end of the year he still had problems, a lot of them, but he also smiled more and had actually made a few friends.

*  *  *

“So how are you liking your job, Al?” Dad asked me one evening when we had him and Sylvia over for dinner.

“Love it!” I told him. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”

“Same with me,” he said. “I can’t imagine retiring, though I suppose I’ll have to one of these days. It’s just too much fun at the store.”

But I was having problems I didn’t tell him about. Just as Tarell seemed unable to get to our sessions on time, I seemed to continually turn in reports late to Marsha Sims, and I couldn’t understand why. All through high school and college, I managed to get assignments in on time, yet now I invariably discovered
that the day I was to hand in a report on a student, I’d left the papers at home. Or I had done all but the last part. Or I had misplaced test scores that were to accompany it.

“Just get on the ball, Al!” Patrick said to me when I confessed. “Put it on your calendar. Write yourself a note.” I did, and it helped some, but not a lot. It almost seemed as though I were asking to be called into Marsha Sims’s office, and one day it happened.

She sat behind her desk in her navy-blue suit with the navy and turquoise pin on the lapel. With her fingertips together, lightly tapping her chin, she studied me.

“You know, Alice,” she said, “I can’t quite figure you out. You get along well with the staff, the students like you. You never seem to miss appointments, you rarely take sick days. And yet . . .” She pointed to some papers on her desk, and I knew what was coming. “At least a third of your reports are late. I’m supposed to schedule conferences with parents, and I have to nudge you to get a report to me when it should be in my box without any prompting. Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

I began apologizing all over the place, but Marsha waved me off. “That’s not needed here,” she said. “You don’t have to like me, Alice. Not everyone does. But you do have to work for me and respect my rules. And one of my rules is that I have to have reports on time. I’ve got enough problems on my plate without the added annoyance of having to nip at your heels to get something done.”

I nodded.

“If there’s anything I can do to make this easier for you . . . ,” she said.

“I think it’s my problem, and I’m going to have to solve it,” I told her.

“Good,” said Marsha. “I hoped you’d see it that way.”

As soon as I got home that day, instead of sitting down with a cup of tea and a cookie and scanning the newspaper, I went out for a walk. I walked several miles hardly aware of where I was going.

I was behaving just like Tarell, passively aggressive. I’d felt I couldn’t really tell Marsha Sims that she gave orders like a martinet. That she treated me, in particular, like an adolescent. So I’d been displaying my resentment in childish ways, and the one way I could annoy her, without actually realizing what I was doing, was to get my reports in a day or two late. They were well-written reports, meticulously done, and in every other way I did my job well. Yet I was like a fly buzzing around her head.

And strangely, once I knew why I did it, I stopped. The missing test scores were found, the test papers attached, and the reports were in on time. I learned to speak up at faculty meetings and found that if I made a humorous comment without being hostile, she would listen. I was growing up along with my students.

I’d been off birth control for the past six months, and we weren’t “working” at getting pregnant, just ready for a child if it happened. I was now three weeks late, and that had never happened before. Were my breasts more tender than usual? I wasn’t sure. I bought a pregnancy test one day after work and nervously took it home.

It was as though I were carrying something alive in my bag, and I realized I was driving ten miles under the speed limit. I went straight up to our bedroom and sat staring at the kit, reading the instructions again and again, too nervous to absorb them at first. Finally, my heart beating double time, I got a cup, peed in it, and inserted the test strip. Then I sat on the toilet seat, hands folded in my lap, and watched the clock.

One minute . . . two minutes . . . I’d heard that, years ago, a woman had to go to the doctor for a pregnancy test, and then her urine went to a lab where a rabbit was sacrificed or something after it was injected. It sounded almost superstitious. I don’t know if it was good news or bad when the rabbit died, but all the while the woman was wondering whether or not her life would change, and here I was, simply watching the minute hand on the clock.

Three minutes.
Stay calm,
I told myself. I picked up the instructions and read them again.
One line, no baby; two lines, pregnant
. Like Paul Revere and his lanterns or something.

I took a deep breath and lifted out the test strip.
Two lines
.

I screamed with excitement. Then I walked around the bedroom, whispering, “I’m pregnant! I’m pregnant!” When I looked at myself in the mirror, I looked different somehow. My cheeks were flushed. I sat down on the bed, my hands on my abdomen, and couldn’t stop smiling.

I was twenty-six, my third year as a counselor. Liz hadn’t conceived again—she and Moe were planning another trip, this time to South America. Neither Gwen nor Pamela was married, so it appeared that I’d be the first one of us to have a baby.

Everything swirled around in my head at once. We needed to start saving every cent for the baby! What would we name it? Where would we put the crib? What about maternity clothes? Oh, God,
clothes
!

It was late May, and I was probably three weeks pregnant, so the baby was due around February 1. I could probably get
through the summer without showing too much, but by fall and especially winter . . .

I leaped up and grabbed my pillow. Unzipping my black pants, I opened the top as wide as possible and stuffed the pillow in. Then I pulled my jersey top down over the pillow and stood sideways, looking in the full-length mirror. I looked like a woman with a pillow in her pants, and I was stretching my jersey top.

Coats!
What about a winter coat or jacket? These were expensive, and I wondered if my old one would do. I ran to the coat closet, holding my false abdomen, grabbed my down jacket, and ran back again. Standing in front of the mirror, I lifted the hood, with the white fake fur forming a wreath around my face.

Omigod! I’m pregnant! I’m really, really pregnant!
I kept thinking. There were two of us now snuggled all cozy inside my down jacket. But I had to struggle with the zipper and knew I’d never get it up even halfway.

Suddenly I saw movement in the mirror and looked behind me to see Patrick standing in the doorway, staring at me, shirtsleeves rolled up, suit jacket over one arm.

“Snow in the forecast?” he asked quizzically.

I whirled about so fast that the pillow came halfway out and my pants began to slide. With Patrick staring at me bug-eyed, I yanked them up and waddled across the bedroom, then threw my arms around his neck.

“Patrick, I’m pregnant!” I cried. “We’re parents!”

He made some kind of noise, a little gasp or gurgle, and then, holding me out away from him so he could see my face, he cried, “Really?
Really?
”

“Really,” I told him, and he let out a whoop of delight, lifting me off my feet and whooped again.

“When?”

“February, I think. I’m trying on coats,” I said, and we fell on the bed laughing, tossing our pillow baby around and reveling in our May delirium.

It was one of the happiest evenings of my life—second only to getting engaged, I think. Suddenly there’s a whole new subject to talk about, plans to make. There would be another person in this house. We wouldn’t just be a couple, we’d be a family.

We decided not to call anyone, though. Most miscarriages happen in the first three months, we knew, so it was better to keep the secret for twelve weeks or so, as Liz had tried to do until I’d heard her in the restroom on my wedding day. It was hard to keep the secret, but we did. And when the time was up, Patrick called his folks and I called Dad and Sylvia, and I think Dad yelled louder than I had, he was so happy.

When I called Gwen, I said, “Maybe I shouldn’t tell Elizabeth. It will just make her sad.”

“Alice, that’s life,” Gwen said. “She’d feel a lot worse if she knew she was out of the loop, being treated differently than everyone else.”

So I called Liz, and Gwen was right. In characteristic
Elizabeth fashion, she said, “Oh, Alice, I’m so happy for you!” and I’m sure she meant it.

Dad was the one, though, who couldn’t stop smiling. Every time I saw him, there was a smile on his face. There were also lines on either side of his mouth that seemed to be getting deeper, reminding me that he, like everyone else, was getting older. But it didn’t seem to bother Sylvia. They were always holding hands, every chance they got.

“Well, what are we going to name that baby?” he said one night when Les and Stacy were in town and we were all there at the house for dinner.

“How about Myrtle?” said Lester. “Myrtle Louise or Henrietta? Clementine? There are dozens of good names out there.”

“You’re just assuming it will be a girl?” said Patrick, laughing.

“Oh, I’ve got boys’ names too,” said Lester. “What about Alonzo Homer? Horatio? Sylvester? No, wait. I’ve got it! The perfect name if it’s a boy.”

I grinned. “What?”

“Are you all with me now?” said Lester. “Are you listening? This is it: Lester.”

Stacy laughed loudest of all.

*  *  *

What I’d always worried about most when I thought of being pregnant—other than the birth itself—was morning sickness. I hate feeling nauseated and disliked the thought of Patrick hearing me barf in the bathroom. Hated the thought of being afraid to go anywhere for fear I’d throw up. Just thinking about Liz
gagging in her bridesmaid dress made me scared. Miraculously, though, I only felt queasy a couple of times during the whole nine months. Sometimes we worry about all the wrong things.

For the most part, I liked being pregnant. I enjoyed just sitting quietly, one hand on my abdomen, feeling the baby move. I liked taking baths with Patrick, leaning back against him in the tub, his legs on either side of me.

“There! Feel right there!” I would say, placing Patrick’s hand over a particular spot. “What’s that, do you think? A knee? An elbow?”

Patrick would press and poke, and sometimes the bump would move or disappear. “Probably his rump,” he said once. “Going to be one of those pointy hind-end kids with big ears and a snotty nose.” And we laughed.

What I didn’t like as the baby grew bigger was the pressure on my breastbone from inside. And especially the pressure on my bladder.

One day in my eighth month, Valerie was in town and Liz had arranged a “lunch with the girls” at a favorite little restaurant in Chevy Chase. I had started carrying a small pillow with me for my back, and while the others sat at a booth, I was seated on a chair at the end of the table, where I could give my belly plenty of space.

We all laughed about it, and it was no big deal. Val was still employed by the museum in Oklahoma City—was co-director now, in fact—and Claire had photos of her husband in the Coast Guard. We shared appetizers and tried a new dessert,
and finally, when we collected our credit cards as the server returned, I started to scoot away from the table and felt myself pee right there in my clothes.

I froze, not daring to stand up, embarrassed to pieces. I wondered if the others could smell it. How could I explain this? I just plain-out peed!

There was only one thing to do. I leaned forward to put my napkin back on the table and knocked my water glass over, gasping as a deluge of ice water poured over the edge of the table and right into my lap.