was a pause on Lydia’s side of the wall as she seemed to be paging through her Shakespeare text. Then a sweet but dramatic version of Lydia’s stage voice floated through the air: “‘Thinks’t thou this pain upon all womanhood befalls?’”
Alice knew that was a Lydia creation, not Shakespeare’s. She quickly considered some follow-up line that would rhyme with “befalls”: “beach balls, death shawls, overalls, cat calls, bathroom walls”—and then the perfect line leapt into her mind: “Until the voice of motherhood upon us calls.”
“Jackpot! Jackpot!” screamed Lydia. “That was a rhymed couplet!”
Alice stepped smiling from the stall. “‘We’re a rhymed couplet,’ Nancy said identically.”
They stood and looked at each other the way mutual winners in a big sports event look at each other after the game. Their glee smothered Alice’s pain and they hugged each other tight.
“Do you realize what we just did together?” asked Alice.
“We made some Nancy Swifties and some other funnies.”
“And a rhymed couplet à la Shakespeare.”
“And we did it fast.”
“I know. My brain works like a smooth machine when I’m with you.”
“Greased lightning. We inspire each other.”
“I know. We’re both really smart. I couldn’t say that to anyone but you.”
“I wouldn’t put up with it from anyone but you.”
“We’re the only two in this school who could have done that.”
“I know. Don’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t,” said Alice. “Too big a price to pay.”
“But there is something else I have to tell you,” said Lydia. “Remember how last year we often started our periods on the same day?”
“It was a pretty bizarre coincidence,” said Alice. “Sort of a sisterly thing, you think? Are you getting symptoms now? Am I making you start your period?”
“Afraid not,” said Lydia. “I’ll be on a different schedule this month because I’ve gone on the pill.”
Alice absorbed the announcement. She whispered, as if she was afraid that someone might overhear: “You’re going on the pill?”
Alice trusted Lydia more than anyone, but she already knew that Lydia had not been totally open with her about the fact that she had been seeing the same guy since July, a twenty-year-old who was attending the vocational college in Shellhorn about twenty miles from Dutch Center.
“You look shocked,” said Lydia.
“I am shocked. I knew you were seeing somebody, but I had no idea you were heading in that direction. Who is it?”
“Randy Ver Sloot.”
“Do your folks know?”
“Of course not.”
“Are you going to tell them?”
“Of course not.”
“What if your mom finds the pills?”
“My mom doesn’t snoop in my room.”
“What if you forget to take one?”
“I won’t,” she said.
“Whew,” said Alice. “This is a big one.”
“You’re not going to disown me, are you?”
“I just wasn’t expecting anything like this while you were still in high school. And with this guy Ralph.”
“Randy. Would you rather I hadn’t told you?”
“Is he a Christian?”
“Yes,” she said. “He didn’t go to Christian schools, but he was raised American Reformed.”
“At least he’s allowed to go to movies on Sundays,” said Alice.
“You’ve heard of Marvin Ver Sloot, right?”
“Yes,” said Alice. “Implement business, right?”
“That’s Randy’s dad.”
Alice didn’t know what more to say to the person who had been her best friend since grade school. Alice always assumed Lydia would go on to become something great. A doctor. A college professor. A lawyer or business executive or something. One of her fantasies was that Lydia would one day run for governor and Alice would be her main lawyer / adviser. She couldn’t think of Randy as a step in the direction of that future. Going to a vocational college. To be what? The idea of Lydia with Randy made Alice feel nauseated, and it wasn’t a menstrual nausea. She had lost her. She had lost Lydia.
“Two lovely berries moulded on one stem?”
Her friendship with Lydia really had been like that, the core of them joined more deeply than anyone else could possibly understand. Their friendship had stood outside the calluses on her farm-girl hands, outside the stench of the cattle and hog feedlots, outside the cold water of the bathroom at home, outside her mother’s criticism, even outside the constant needs of her sister Aldah. The way they could laugh together. The way they could challenge each other in playful word games or in understanding difficult passages in literature. Together, each of them was a bigger person than when they were by themselves.
Lydia’s announcement made Alice feel as if everything they had given to each other with their friendship might be gone forever. If Lydia was a lovely berry hanging next to Alice on the same stem, one of them had just ripened and fallen to the ground. Her best friend was having sex with somebody who was learning how to fix lawn mowers!
“Tell me again what those two books were that Miss Den Harmsel assigned you for the summer,” said Alice.
“History stuff,” said Lydia. “I think they’d bore you.”
“I could lend you Beloved and The Grapes of Wrath,” said Alice.
“No, that’s all right,” said Lydia. “I’ve already read them.”
12
Alice wandered into the old redbrick core of the school after lunch, past Miss Den Harmsel’s room and down the granite-floored corridors and along the walls that still had the original dark-wood moldings and down the narrower marble stairways with the wooden handrails that were dark and smooth from hands passing over them for almost a hundred years. The old section of the school did not give her the comfort of the haymow, or even of the cab of the 150, but it always felt like a good place to put herself together and to get grounded when the ground was shifting beneath her.
The old section with
