Chapter Five

“I think Mr. Richards must have been quite handsome when he was a young man,” Al said when I told her he was going to help us make a bookshelf starting next Saturday morning. “If it doesn’t snow, that is. If it snows, Mr. Richards will have to clean the walks.”

Mr. Richards is practically my best friend, outside of Al, but I do not think he was ever what you would call handsome.

“He has great character in his face,” Al said. “And his ears are lovely and close to his head.”

I had never noticed his ears but I made a mental note to check them the next time I saw him.

Al is saving up for contact lenses.

“My mother wears contact lenses,” she said. “She’s in Better Dresses, you know, and they like the people in Better Dresses to be chic. And it makes a world of difference when she has to wear a hat or go to a formal affair. In an evening gown.”

I can’t see Al in either a hat or an evening gown. But that is beside the point.

“Next time you come over, you can watch her,” Al said.

“Watch her what?” I asked. I have only seen Al’s mother a couple of times, outside of the first day they moved in. I do not think she knows my name.

“Watch her slip the lenses in and out,” she said. “It’s very interesting. That is, if it doesn’t make you nervous.”

Al stopped and tightened one pigtail. She likes them neat and even. Those pigtails are her badge of nonconformity, she says. She may be right.

“Why would it make me nervous?” I asked.

“There’s only one thing,” she said. “Can’t you guess? Take a good guess. What would be the most logical thing that could go wrong?”

She sat with her hands on her knees and I knew she was trying to see inside my head to see how my brain works. She made a noise like zzt zzt, which meant she was X-raying my head.

“Figure it out by logic,” she said.

Al says I have a block about logic, that I reject it. That means I am no good at it. My father says that women are not logical by nature.

Al watched me without blinking, like a little baby. Little babies or real little kids can look at you for a long time without blinking. One time in church there was a little kid sitting in front of me and I tried to stare him down about a hundred times. He won every time.

“I have a cramp in my foot,” I said. I got up and jumped around. When I finished she was still watching me.

“I don’t know,” is what I came up with.

Al snorted.

“Just think,” she said, “what would happen if she whipped them in and all of a sudden something went wrong and they kept on going. I mean, where would they end up?”

“On the floor?” I knew this was not the right answer.

Al sighed and closed her eyes. She had lost her patience. She loses her patience often but she is quiet about it. When my mother loses her patience, she tells everybody.

Al sucked in her cheeks. She practices sucking in her cheeks for ten minutes every day. It makes her look very old. It really does the trick. She looks about forty or forty-two.

“I’ll tell you where they end up. I’ll just tell you!” She started waving her arms around. Then she stopped and said she had to go to the bathroom. I have noticed that she frequently has to go to the bathroom when she is in the middle of a story. I guess the excitement is too much for her.

“Where was I?” she said when she came back.

“Where do the contacts end up when something goes wrong,” I said.

“Oh, yes. Well, I’m going to tell you.”

One thing about Al is you cannot rush her when she is telling a story.

Softly she said, “First, they slide down inside your cheek and wiggle around in your throat. Then,” she said, “then …”

She is like Mr. Keogh when he tugs at his ear because he doesn’t know what he’s going to say next. Only she squints up at the ceiling, like maybe there is something written there. Finally she looked at me and smiled.

“Then they slip down inside your stomach and into the large intestine.”

I have never been sure of the difference between the large intestine and the small intestine. They are different in size is all I know.

She looked at the ceiling and then at me. “Then you know where they go?”

I racked my brains to remember the diagram of the stomach we have on the wall in biology class. It is a mess. I do not like that kind of thing. I would make a lousy nurse.

“I’ll tell you,” Al shouted, hopping around on one foot. “They slide right down your legs and into your feet and there is one contact in your left foot and one in your right. All of a sudden you’re walking around on glass. That’s all!”

Al was exhausted. She sank back into her chair.

“Don’t you think you’d better warn your mother?” I asked her.