Patiently Alice by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
I danced silently around the hall upstairs. I waltzed into Lester’s room, twirled around on his rug, and said, “Get ready to be best man in October, Lester!” And then, with Les still staring after me, I rushed downstairs, unable to control myself, threw my arms around Dad’s middle, and gave him a bear hug. He just laughed and patted my head and went right on talking to Sylvia.
On Labor Day weekend Lester wanted to take some of his stuff over to the new apartment. “Okay,” he said to me. “Call the Harpies and tell them they can help if they want.”
I looked “Harpies” up in the dictionary. It said a Harpie was a creature in Greek mythology that is half woman, half bird. “Why do you call us Harpies?” I asked.
“Because you chatter like birds,” said Lester.
“Then why don’t you call us chicks or something?”
“Harpies are more you,” he said.
I called Pamela first.
“You mean, all weekend? We can sleep over there and everything?” she asked excitedly.
I covered the phone with my hand and looked at Lester, who was drinking his coffee. “All weekend? she wants to know. Can we sleep over there too?”
Lester shot out a mouthful of coffee and coughed. He wiped his lips with one hand. “No, you’re not staying all night. You can take your choice, tomorrow or Monday.”
“Tomorrow,” said Pamela when I told her.
“Tomorrow,” Elizabeth agreed when I called.
“Okay,” Lester said. “Tell them to be over here at ten o’clock, ready to work. We’ll take some boxes over to the apartment and sort them there.”
Pamela believes in dressing for success—we just have different definitions of “success”—and at ten on Sunday morning she arrived in short shorts. I mean, she didn’t even have to bend over to show us her cheeks. She sported a halter top and thong sandals. Elizabeth, on the other hand, came over wearing the same jersey top she’d worn to mass that morning and had just pulled on a pair of cutoffs to go with it. I was in my usual jeans and T-shirt.
Elizabeth studied Pamela, who was stretching and giving an enormous yawn while we waited for Lester. “Why don’t you just wear a sign saying FEEL ME?” she asked her.
Pamela glanced down at herself. “Why? What’s the matter?”
“Those shorts!”
“If you got it, flaunt it,” Pamela sang.
Lester came clattering downstairs carrying two boxes, one on top of the other.
“Well, this is a start,” he said. “Good morning, ladies. Open the door for me, will you, Al?”
“Good mor-ning, Les-ter!” Pamela trilled.
He raised one eyebrow as he paused beside me at the screen. “Take my keys, would you, and open the trunk? I’ve got a couple more boxes upstairs.”
We were soon rolling south on Georgia Avenue toward Takoma Park, and because it was a Sunday and a holiday weekend, the streets were deserted. Seven minutes later we were cruising down a tree-lined street of old Victorian houses, and thirty seconds after that Lester swung his car into the driveway of a large yellow house with brown trim and a wraparound porch.
“Oh, Lester!” I gasped. “You get to live here?”
“Isn’t it great?” he said. “I still can’t believe it.” He turned off the motor. “Okay, everybody out, and carry something in with you. We take the stairs at the side of the house.”
We headed for the separate entrance but bumped into each other because we kept stopping to exclaim over things: a huge sycamore with peeling bark, the two dormer windows at the front of the house, a little stone statue among the shrubbery, some old wicker furniture on the porch—a swing and a rocker.
“Come on up,” Lester called, holding the door open with one elbow as he balanced a footlocker on his knee.
The apartment smelled of fresh paint, and the entryway was only half finished, but there was a stained-glass inset above a window on the opposite wall that let in the morning sun.
We put our boxes down and went exploring, excitedly commenting on every new detail we found. Lester tagged along, smiling broadly, pleased, I could tell, that we were so enthusiastic.
There were two large rooms with closets on one side of the hallway, two smaller rooms with closets on the other side. In between the smaller bedrooms was a sitting room with French doors that led out onto a screened porch.
“That’s what was known as a sleeping porch at the turn of the century,” Lester said. “Without air-conditioning, the kids—sometimes the whole family—would sleep on cots out on the porch in the summer. But see, if we open the French doors, it extends the living room so we can get more people in.”
“Party, party, party!” Pamela cried. If I’d worried about Pamela being too subdued over the summer, it didn’t seem I’d have to worry about that now.
Back inside, Lester pointed out the door that had been cut between the sitting room and one of the small bedrooms. The closet in that room had been removed and a kitchenette installed—a sink, a counter, a refrigerator, and a stove and oven.
“Not the best kitchen I’ve ever seen, but it’ll do,” Lester said.
“So who gets the two larger bedrooms, and who has to take the small one?” I asked.
“Paul and I get the big ones, and George gets the small one, because he’s not sure he’ll be here next summer. We might have to look for someone else.”
“Boy, Lester, you are so lucky!” I said. I imagined Elizabeth and Pamela and I sharing an apartment like this when we went to college. Sleeping out on a porch.
“Okay. Work time!” Lester said suddenly. “Here’s what I want you to do. These are boxes of stuff I’ve had since grade school. Some of them, anyway. I want you to go through everything and sort them into three piles: stuff that looks like I should definitely keep, stuff you’re not sure about, and stuff I could possibly throw away. I’ll go through them after you decide, but this will make it easier. Got it?”
“Got it,” said Elizabeth.
Lester went into his bedroom with some hardware and began adding more shelves to his closet.
We sat down on the floor, each of us with a box between her legs, and began. It was obvious Lester wasn’t going to let us go through anything current—love letters from former girlfriends and stuff. But this would be interesting enough, we figured. Opening the first box, I found an odd assortment of stuff: an ashtray made of clay with Lester’s initials on the bottom, a pin for perfect attendance, a flag, string, thumbtacks, a model jeep, scissors, wrapping paper, an old wallet.…
Elizabeth kept finding the most interesting stuff in her box. “Oh, m’gosh, his first-grade class picture!” she cried, and gave a little shriek. She showed us the photo with an arrow at the side pointing to a little boy with two missing teeth, grinning broadly. “Is that Lester?”
We howled and dug around some more. We could hear the tap of Lester’s hammer back in his closet. I felt a little like a preschooler, having been given a box to entertain myself so I wouldn’t get in the way.
“Having fun?” Lester called when he heard all the laughter.
“Oh, definitely!” said Elizabeth.
Lester wandered in to see what was so funny. He looked at the picture. “I was a real ladies’ man, all right,” he said, and went back to work.
Pamela seemed to have all Lester’s school papers and notebooks. Every so often we’d hear her chuckle, and then she’d read something to us. But then we heard her say, “What’s this?”
We watched her untape a yellowed piece of tablet paper, used as a wrapper around something else, it seemed. We stared in surprise as out fell a small pair of cotton underpants with lace around the legs.
Elizabeth clapped her hand over her mouth in amusement as we looked wide-eyed at each other.
“What does the paper say?” I asked.
Pamela turned it over. “It’s just a spelling paper. Looks like first or second grade with Lester’s name at the top.”
“What do you suppose…?” Elizabeth said.
Suddenly Pamela took the underpants and pulled them over her head like a hat.
She motioned us to follow her and walked across the hall into Lester’s bedroom.
“Boy, you find all kinds of stuff in boxes, don’t you?” she said. “Ta da, Lester!”
Lester backed himself out of his closet and turned around. He stared at Pamela, then at her head, squinting slightly. “What’s that?” he asked.
Pamela took the underpants off and read the label on the inside. “‘Buster Brown, size 6,’” she said. “Hey, Les, you weren’t a cross-dresser back in elementary school, were you?”
And suddenly, right before our eyes, Lester’s face and neck and ears grew as pink as Elizabeth’s jersey top. He reached out for the underpants, but Pamela snatched them away and held them behind her, eyes flashing mischievously. “Not until we hear the whole story, Les!” she said.
We hooted.
He laughed a little. “Some things were meant to stay private,” he said.
That only made us more curious. “Tell us!” we begged.
He groaned and gave us a look. “Well, I was in second grade, and there was this little dark-haired girl named Maxine—Maxie, we called her—that I had a wild, secret crush on, and I was too shy to tell her.”
“You? Shy?” cried Elizabeth.
“But not shy enough to take off her pants, huh?” teased Pamela.
Lester held up one hand.
“Go on,” I said.
“One day on the playground Maxie jumped off the swings, and when she landed, she must have wet her pants. I didn’t know what had happened at first, I just saw her jump and fall, and then she had this strange look on her face as she glanced around. A few minutes later, though, I was on the monkey bars and saw her go off behind the bushes in one corner and take off her underpants. She just left them there. When the bell rang, she came back and stood in line like everyone else, and I was the only one who knew she was naked under her dress.”
“And you spent the afternoon trying to peek?” asked Pamela.
“No, no. But I kept thinking of her all afternoon, and when school was out, I went back there and got her underpants. They were wet, and there were ants all over them, but I took them home and rinsed them out. I was going to let them dry and then take them back to her the next day, but I was too embarrassed. So I never did. I kept them.”
“Awwwwww!” we sang out together.
“She never knew?”
Lester shook his head. “Nope. One of the tragedies of second grade. And that’s why I am what I am today.”
“A lech?” asked Pamela.
“No! Hey!”
“A ladies’ man,” I said.
“Right,” said Lester. “And now may I have Maxie’s underpants, please?”
Pamela handed them over. “What are you going to do with them?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’d forgot all about them. But if ever there’s a grade school reunion and I go back to Chicago and find Maxine, wouldn’t it be something to walk up to her and say, ‘For you, madame’ and hand her the Buster Browns?” He stuffed them in one pocket.
“Ah! You never forget a first love,” I said.
We went back to search for more of Lester’s secrets, but that was the major find of the day.
Around two o’clock Lester went out to get some pizza for us. The minute he was gone, Pamela said, “I’ve got a great idea.” She picked up the tissue paper that was in the first box and a pair of scissors, and while we watched, she made a life-size cutout of a pair of woman’s underpants, scalloping the pant legs to look like lace. We grinned, puzzled. She cut out a bra next.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Watch,” said Pamela. She took the ball of string and tied an end around an empty picture hanger on the wall of Lester’s bedroom. Then she stretched it across the big window, cut it, and tied the other end around the hinge on his closet door. She took the pair of tissue panties and stapled them to the string, like clothes on a line. Then she stapled the bra. They blew slightly in the breeze.
We shrieked in delight and set to work cutting out more undies—panty hose, more underpants, another bra, a slip, even. By the time we heard Lester’s car pull up again, there was a whole clothesline of women’s tissue-paper undies fluttering in the breeze in front of Lester’s window.
“You’re a genius!” Elizabeth said to Pamela. “Oh, this is sweeeeet!”
“Break time!” Lester called, coming in the door. “Come and get it!” He took two boxes of pizza to the counter in the kitchen, and then, hearing us laughing in his bedroom, came to the doorway and stopped dead still. Suddenly he started to laugh.
“I see the Harpies are at it again,” he said. “Very clever, girls, I must say.”
We thought he’d rip them down, but he said, “George and Paul are coming by tomorrow with some of their stuff, and I think I’ll leave it up, get a rise out of them.”
We laughed some more.
“Of course, if Mr. Watts happens to check our apartment over the weekend, we could be out on our ear,” Lester said. “But he may even want to borrow them for a while. Hang them up in his own window, get the neighbors talking.”
We had a wonderful time!
After the first day of school I came home to find a cardboard box sitting on our porch addressed to me. The mail carrier had set it between the screen and the front door. There was a DEPARTMENT OF RECREATION sticker return address in the upper left corner, and all I could think of was that I probably left something behind at Camp Overlook and they’d finally traced it to me. Sneakers, maybe. But it wasn’t heavy enough for sneakers. In fact, it hardly weighed anything at all. I sure hoped it wasn’t dirty underwear. That would be so embarrassing!
I took it inside, set it on the kitchen table, and opened the flaps. It seemed to be full of shredded paper. I found an envelope, also from the Department of Recreation, with a letter inside from Connie Kendrick:
Hi, Alice.
We found this on the steps of the building last week when we came to work. There’s a letter in it addressed to “Alice,” and we decided that can only mean you. We’re sending the whole thing exactly as we found it. Thanks for being part of our team this past summer. We loved having you.
Connie
Was this a joke? I wondered. I couldn’t see how there could be anything else in the box except paper. Then I found a grocery sack at the bottom, the top folded over. I opened it and lifted out a twig basket. Inside was a note on tablet paper:
Alice,
This for you Becaus that nite I was hiding in the tolet and you hug me I gess you like me a little too. If you decid to keep it maybe you will think of me sometimes.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Patiently Alice