Die a Little (4 page)

Bill couldn't get over his doubts, and watching the woman tugging at the hem of her cotton shift dress over and over and bemoaning her fate to have such a rotten son with her own blood, her own blood running through his veins, he paused a long second before following Lester toward the bedroom.

The small room was immaculate. Not a boy's room at all, Bill thought, still working on his theory that this boy had beat town months, years before, or had been killed in Korea or maybe died before he'd reached adolescence. He'd seen stranger, after all.

The twin bed was tidily made. A chair against one wall had a football resting on it. A snapshot of a pretty girl with a scarf sat on the dresser top, along with a small trophy. As Lester bent down to look under the bed, Bill moved to the trophy out of curiosity. He was thinking, This doesn't look like a sports trophy, more like a--

It was at this moment that the closet door slammed open with a deadly clap and a boy of about fifteen stormed out with a thick Louisville Slugger in both hands. Before Bill could get his gun, the boy was on him, pounding. They both fell to the floor with a thud, and the mother was screaming in horror as Bill shouted to Lester, "Shoot him, shoot him," with the blows coming straight to his head.

He could feel his skull cracking, denting like a melon before everything went blurry, then black.

In what was actually only a few seconds later, Bill's eyes shot open just as the bat was about to come straight down on his head. He found himself shooting, and the boy fell backward, like a duck in a shooting gallery. The mother, apparendy just as surprised as Bill that her son was in the apartment, fainted in grand style. Fighting to keep conscious, Bill managed to radio for backup right before he passed out again.

It turned out that Lester had panicked. When the boy began pummeling Bill, he ran out of the apartment, and they found him several blocks away, hiding in an alley.

Bill was in the hospital for two weeks with a fractured skull, dislocated shoulder, and lacerations on his face and chest.

The boy was seriously wounded but not killed. Bill, even in his half-conscious state, had managed to hit him in the shoulder to disable him.

After he was discharged from the hospital, Bill was honored by the chief of police. His attacker turned out to have been involved in the murder of another officer earlier that day, and Bill became a minor Die a Little -- 20 --

hero, which enabled his dreamed-for reassignment to the prosecutor's office, unheard of for a twenty-seven-year-old.

I tell Alice all of this, and she is silent, washing slowly, eyes focused, mascara dewy, flecked. She listens as I try to tell her in a way to make her understand, understand everything. I know the way I tell it is everything: There is so much to know about my brother. Some things she might already understand, some things she should, she must recognize. When I finish, she looks at me with an expression heavy with meaning, about what she now knows about her husband and somehow, somehow what she now seems to think she knows about me.

Suddenly, we are jolted out of the moment by a knock on the kitchen door. I walk over to the window, expecting to see a partygoer returning for a forgotten coat. Instead, it is a tiny, dark-haired girl who looks about sixteen.

"Neighbor?" I ask, beckoning Alice.

Alice looks past my shoulder. When she does, I see something pass over her face quickly but unmistakably.

Recovering quickly, she assembles a smile of happy surprise at the intrusion and, nearly tumbling into the dish rack, moves past me to open the door.

"Lois." She waves the girl in, wiping her hands on her apron.

"Come in. Um, Lora, there's someone I'd like you to meet." With a sharp red grin, the girl enters. Closer now, I can see she is older than she first appeared, perhaps in her mid-twenties. And, as if in some slapstick silent movie about a misbehaving wife, she wears an unmistakable black eye.

"Hi, honey," she hums with a vaguely southern intonation. "Got a steak?"

"Lois, Lora. Lora, Lois," Alice says tightly as she opens the refrigerator. Alice, being Alice, does have a steak on hand. She hands it to Lois, who slaps it across her cheek and slumps down at the kitchen table.

Not sure what to make of the scene, I mentally reject a series of things to say. Each one sounds ridiculous, given the circumstances.

It is at this point that I remember Alice's story about her friend Lois: Where there's smoke there's fire.

As I try to find my voice, I notice a starburst of broken blood vessels between Lois's lid and temple.

"I got socked," she burbles, smiling lazily under the steak.

"I didn't mean to--"

"It's okay. I'd stare, too. It's a peach." She doesn't move as she speaks, as if determined not to let the steak budge an inch. As if doing so might allow her face to fall off.

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"Lois is a friend from the studios. She's an actress."

"I'm an actress, all right," Lois slurs, staring straight at me with a sad smile.

"In pictures?"

"That's right."

"Have you been in any I might know?'

"You can see me jerk a soda next to Dana Andrews in one. In another, I wave a big peacock feather over Maria Montez. And if I knew how to swim, I'd be wearing a tiara in a tank right now over at MGM in the new Esther Williams picture."

"That's great," I say. "I mean, so many actresses can't get any work."

"They don't know the right people," she replies, still smiling. Alice looks at her, turning the water off at the sink.

"I guess it's connections along with the talent," I say, removing my apron. "And luck."

"Lois makes her own luck," Alice says.

I turn to Lois, who looks back at me with a wink.

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[?]*[?]

One Sunday, I receive a message from my building manager that Alice called while I was out and is desperate for me to come over.

When I arrive, feeling a twinge of trepidation, what I find is both less and more worrying.

There are huge platters of food everywhere--on the large Formica table, leaves out, on the kitchen counters, on the seats of the chairs, even on the top of the refrigerator and the windowsills. Round plates of deviled eggs, quivering tomato aspic, large glass bowls of seven-layer salad, smudgy glass tureens of trifle, copper molds filled with fruit-studded Jell-O--where is the suckling pig, I wonder. And then Alice amid all this, hair pulled tightly back, flushed almost obscenely, glassy sheen of sweat on her face, neck, collarbones. The radio, teetering precariously on the windowsill next to a dish of creamed spinach with bacon, blares jazzy Cuban love songs. Her eyes, my God, her eyes are very nearly radiating, blinking spasmodically, pupils pulsing.

"It's a surprise party, Lora! A party for our darling, our Bill." I gather my breath. "What's the occasion?"

"I had this revelation, Lora." She tears out at me, smile like a pulled rubber band. "You don't even know. I woke up with it. He works so hard. And that story you told me. Oh my God."

She clutches her hand to her chest before continuing. "He carries this crazy city on his shoulders, and what does he get? We take him for granted. Well, I do. Look at what he does, each and every day.

"This is for him, Lora. I just leaped out of bed and headed for the grocery store. I still had my slippers on, Lora. The store manager followed me around the whole time. He was afraid I might fall. He carried my groceries to the car. I've been cooking, baking all day. All day. I hope Bill doesn't get home before it's all finished.

"I need you, Lora. I need you to hang those decorations in the bags over there. And make the phone calls.

"We need to hang the lights, arrange the tiki torches, pass out the ashtrays, the bamboo coasters I bought. These wonderful coconut tumblers that I'll fill with daiquiri. Can you make daiquiris, Lora? I don't know how, but I bought ten pounds of ice."

She can't stop moving, stop talking. She is like a windup toy, or dominoes falling, unstoppable.

At no point do I stop and ask Alice anything. I just put on my apron. There doesn't seem to be anything I can say to stop her. I don't know what I would say. So, within a few minutes of first seeing the spectacle, I am hanging palm fronds from streamers to the sound Die a Little -- 23 --

of ukulele music, listening to Alice make phone call after phone call, her voice pressed and hot.

Somehow, somehow--for Alice alone could make something like this work--it all comes together, and by the time my brother comes home, wide-eyed and weary, Alice's whirring energy melds seamlessly with the larger excitement of a group of neighbors and a handful of fellow teachers and my godparents, all swept up in Alice's frenzy and heads bobbing under pulsing tiki lights and the purple and red luminescence of dozens of bright lanterns.

And all of them, everyone she invites, show up. And they all eat and they dance and they toast Bill as if they had actually started that day thinking of what they might say about his hard work and strong character. And Bill keeps looking around dazedly, not knowing what to say, biting his lower lip and spinning slightly, plate sagging in his hand, dripping pineapple glaze on the patio, too stunned to lift his wrist and steady himself.

As Alice drags out a tub of firecrackers to the delight of the crowd, I sidle up beside him. He looks down at me, putting a drowsy arm around my shoulder, his finger tickling my ear. We stand there, without saying anything, watching Alice dart around like a firefly. It seems like we are both thinking the same thing. Or at least, what I am thinking in full, he is wondering in part. How long can this go on? This fever pitch, this spinning, quaking thing before us. Forever or a little less?

And then, so soon after it might have been the following week...

"But, Bill, you're telling me Alice is qualified to teach high school?"

"She is. I mean, she's qualified to teach home economics. She studied it. At Van Nuys Community College." He's followed me into my car after lunch, sits down next to me on the bench seat.

"Well, she'd have to get her teaching certificate." I shrug. "It takes months of coursework and student teaching." I wonder if Bill's sudden urgency has anything to do with the surprise party.

"No, no. She has her teaching certificate. She got it to teach in Lomita about four years ago. But then she finally got in the seamstresses' union and started working for the studios instead."

"Really? Well, that's great, Bill," I say, meaning it, really meaning it. Alice content means Bill content, after all.

And anyone could see Alice was desperate to channel her energy into a new project. "Long afternoons," she'd say to me, eyes a little too bright, neck a little too straight, teeth a little on edge, "the afternoons, Lora, are endless."

"So do you think you could talk to Don Evans? Maybe offer to bring her in so he could meet her? I'm sure if they met her, they'd see she'd be a great addition. I'm sure she'd charm the pants off them.

And the kids would love her."

Die a Little -- 24 --

"But I'm not sure what I say means much. For hiring, especially.

I'm not senior faculty."

"But you'll try?" He looks down at me, squeezing my fingers gently.

"She's my sister now, isn't she?" I smile.

As it happens, it is all too easy. Principal Evans is eager to make a quick hire, with Miss Lincoln ready to leave and begin planning her wedding. It seems like the whole process unfolds effortlessly, with Alice coming for an interview and receiving a modest offer two days later, contingent on her submitting appropriate credentials. Within three weeks, she will be in the classroom.

"Tell me everything about these girls, Lora," she says, the table in front of her papered with open books (Mrs. Lovell's First Book of Sewing, Teaching Domestic Arts to the Young, The National Association of Home Economics Teachers Presents a Guide for Lesson Plans), pads of paper, notes, an oversize calendar filled with notations like "Begin pillowcase" and "Basting work." Two pencils poked out of her upswept hair.

"What do you want to know?"

"Anything. I don't even know what to ask. What do I say? Will they do what I ask them to?"

"You taught before, to get your certificate. Just do what you did then."

"But these girls... are they very ... what are they like?"

"They're just girls. They do what they're told. Just don't let them get the better of you. You know, passing notes, talking behind their hands to each other during class."

"I'm going to start with a simple project: napkins. Then a pillowcase. We'll work up to grander things: an evening jacket with shirring."

I bite my lip. "That's fine, Alice. But I don't think you can have fourteen-or fifteen-year-olds make evening jackets. They're not spending their time at nightclubs."

Alice looks up at me, eyes wide. "No, no, of course not. But they might wear it to a dance. They go to dances, after all, don't they?"

"Yes, but these girls aren't as ... sophisticated as the ones in Los Angeles. They're small town girls, really. What if you made a nice flounced skirt instead?"

"Is that what Miss Lincoln had them make?"

"No. No, I think they made middy blouses or jumpers."

Alice looks down at her calendar, hands shaking slightly. "You think I'm a fool." She smiles weakly.

Die a Little -- 25 --