Are You in the House Alone? (3 page)

I turned off the set and checked my watch against the mantel clock. Eleven thirty-one. Twenty-nine minutes until the going baby-sitter rate rose seventy-five cents an hour. Not that I was miserly, not then. In fact I felt I owed Mrs. Montgomery a rebate. She always had Angie and Missy fed and bedded before I came on duty, even though the older one was nearly five and hyperactive. So it was easy money at Mrs. Montgomery’s. All I had to do was hold the fort and stare at my homework or the set.

She kept a pretty meager refrigerator, but it was always good for a can of Diet-Rite. I drifted down the dark hall to the kitchen. The sink was full of dirty dishes. I wouldn’t have minded washing them except that Mrs. Montgomery never exploited her sitters with domestic chores. She didn’t go in much for chores herself.

A monument to her heftier days was still taped to the refrigerator door. A curling note lettered in bold black:

Right after her divorce she put on a lot of weight. But then she pulled herself together when she joined the Oldfield Village Singles and Previously Marrieds Club. It altered her life, she said. I sat for her every Saturday night, when the club held its parties.

Losing a skirmish with my conscience, I took the last can of Diet-Rite and flipped off the top. I was just walking back through the hall past the phone when it rang. I answered, but no one spoke at the other end.

When I try to remember, now that I know who it was, I wonder if there was any sound. I may have heard breathing, or it may have been my own. Every time I said hello, my voice sounded more and more hollow.

Finally I hung up, and the hellos echoed through the house. I’d just made it back to the living room when the phone rang again. I ran back. But again there was the same tense silence at the other end.

I said hello only once and then felt that tightness in the throat for the first time: the feeling that I was confronting a silent, voiceless, faceless stranger. Somebody reaching out for me.

I stood there in the dimness, pressing the receiver into
my ear. The click came when someone, somewhere, hung up.

The baby sitter’s best defense is calm. Whenever I felt a wave of nervousness or even uncertainty, I had the habit of reaching for the small green stone carved in the heart shape. I’d bought a gold chain for it and was never without it. Steve had given it to me for my sixteenth birthday in the spring. I stood there in the hallway with one hand on the receiver and the other working the little stone heart like a worry bead. And then, automatically, I dialed Steve’s number.

He answered in the middle of the first ring.

“Home?” he said.

“No. I’m still at Mrs. Montgomery’s.”

“What’s happening?”

“Nothing . . . What are you doing?”

“Reading and listening to a tape.”

“What is it?”

“As a matter of fact, it’s Rubenstein playing the Chopin Concerto Number One, backed up by the London Symphony, conducted by Skrowaczewski,” Steve said like an FM radio announcer.

“Turn it up so I can hear it.” I wondered why I’d asked that.

The music welled up in the background. “Have you freaked out over Skrowaczewski?” he said. We went on talking over the Chopin sound. I don’t know what we said, but his voice pulled me away from the reason I’d called.

I always liked talking to Steve away from home because I sometimes thought my mother listened on her extension. But I didn’t call him every time I baby-sat because of
his
mother. And in Oldfield Village, having a boy over when you’re sitting is kind of a taboo. I hadn’t broken it yet.

We were running short of conversation when he said, “Gail, you were practically as smooth as Alison last night at Lord and Lady Lawver’s. You sound different tonight. You okay?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. I miss you.” He said that fast. I had a vision of his family sitting in front of the TV one room away, maybe not completely absorbed in
I Wake Up Screaming.
There was a silent moment then, when we both thought of the night before, the rustle from the trees across the lake. The conversation trailed off.

Later I was sitting in the living room, concentrating on the clock. The minute hand was pushing twelve thirty, and I was running the little green heart up and down the gold chain. The warm stone whispered over the tiny links.

Steve had given me my birthday present at school. He’d dropped the little white box on my tray in the cafeteria. I hadn’t even noticed it before I lifted the milk carton.

Between the layers of cotton the heart was wrapped in a tube of graph paper, like an ancient scroll. A Steve touch. On the scroll he’d printed a quotation with little flourishes:

I cradled it in my palm, Steve’s stone heart. And because the clatter of the cafeteria is no place for sentiment, I only said, “I had to fall for an intellectual. I give up. What’s the flattering quotation from?”

“You’re gaining on me,” he said. “Last fall you’d have thought I wrote it myself.”

“As a matter of fact, not,” I said. “Last fall you were still writing things like, ‘I’ll weave white violets into—’”

“All right, all right,” he said, “forget last fall. It’s from
Othello.
”

So that night I started reading
Othello.
I tried not to be nudged too far by Steve’s attempts at compensatory education. There were times when he made me feel like a benumbed Playboy bunny. And, after all, I was on the honor roll, even if I wasn’t on the top of it. I was well into
Othello
before I found out it was about a jealous husband who smothers his wife.

It was like Steve to extract a few lines of love from a tragedy.

Behind the mantel clock was a mirror. Something moved in it and made me shift my gaze from the clock’s hands. Somebody had stepped into the dark hall directly behind me. I jumped half off the sofa, and my fingers jerked at the stone heart. The chain popped at the back of my neck and fell in a gold puddle in my hand.

“Oh Lord, Gail, I didn’t mean to scare you.” Mrs. Montgomery stepped into the light of the living room. Then she turned back into the hall and said to someone out on the front steps, “No, really, I think not. It’s late. I’ll say good night to you here.” As she closed the door, I pulled myself together.

“You must have been miles away not to hear the key in the door,” she said, striding into the room. “But look, I’m sorry I scared you. Everything go all right? Kids quiet? Any calls?”

“Calls,” I said, “but no one at the other end.”

“It’s this dratted small town service. The phone’s dead half the time and wildly erratic the other half. But they bill you with stunning regularity.” She fell into an easy
chair and kicked her somewhat knobby feet out of a pair of high-heeled sandals.

“Everybody danced for a good three hours,” she said and wiggled her toes. “Just to prove we still can. It was a cross between a college hop and an old folks’ home. I wouldn’t be your age again for anything, but I wish my feet were.” I was already computing my sitter fee. “Well, what’s the damage?” When I told her, she said, “I don’t worry when you’re here. One of the several drawbacks of life in this quaint community is that most of the youngsters—people—your age are so rich they don’t need the extra money.”

I knew that better than she did. She was digging through her little beaded handbag for the money. When she handed it over, there was a considerable wad. I counted three dollars over.

“It’s for the jeweler to fix your chain,” she said. And I realized I was still holding it in my hand. I tried to give the money back, but she waved it away. “All my fault,” she said.

Then she was struggling back into her shoes and bending over to fasten up the buckles. “I’m driving you home tonight.”

“That’s silly,” I said. “It’s only five blocks, and besides the kids—”

“The kids will be all right for ten minutes. You’re jumpy and you’re pale. You don’t need a walk home in the dark, and it’s too late to call your dad out of bed to come over for you.”

When we were driving along the empty street, Mrs. Montgomery said, “Sometimes I feel guilty tying up your Saturday nights. You go out with the Pastorini boy, don’t you?”

“There are absolutely no secrets in this hamlet.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said with emphasis.

“Yes, we go together. But we sort of . . . limit it.”

A loud silence followed. “That’s cryptic.”

“Well, my parents aren’t wild about the idea, and his probably aren’t either.”

“Romeo and Juliet in western Connecticut,” she said. “I can’t stand it.”

“Neither can I. I get all the selections from Shakespeare I need directly from Steve.”

“I must have been misinformed about the youth culture. You go around spouting Shakespeare at each other? I was under the impression you were all majoring in remedial reading—no offense meant.”

“Well, Steve’s head is packed with scholarship. It occasionally overflows.”

“He’s very bright, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And so are you.”

“Less intellectual. Maybe less motivated. And we’re both very young.”

Mrs. Montgomery made a wild turn into our street. “When the very young mention that they’re very young, I suspect dark plots and hidden secrets. Do you know what I’m doing?”

“No. What?”

“Idly prying. Tell me to shut up.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “I always profit by talking to older women of broad experience.”

“That crack could be the end of a beautiful friendship. End of the line!” she said, taking our front drive too near an ornamental shrub.

The lights of Mrs. Montgomery’s car were swinging back down the drive and I was fitting the key into our front door
when I heard the ringing inside. But as I ran across the front hall toward the phone, it fell silent.

Yes
, I said almost out loud.
I’m home now, whoever you are.

A hard frost over the weekend killed Indian summer and turned the sugar maples along Meeting Street into a gold riot. I contemplated rushing winter by putting on my down jacket and my Frye boots, just to limber them up. But settled for digging down to the bottom of the cedar chest for my favorite red English wool scarf. Then I walked out into the postcard-pretty Monday morning, turning the scarf around my neck.

The white spire of the Episcopal church pointed to a dark blue sky. The commuters were gunning along to catch the eight ten to Grand Central. I ambled past the rows of artfully restored houses, breathing in the expensive suburban air—past the pale brick center-hall Georgians with their bull’s-eye windowpanes, the renovated clapboard inns, the Cape Cod saltboxes, and Mr. Wertheimer’s brown-shingled bungalow with the fussy little rock garden in front.

You had to live here for a century or two in order to belong, but I thought of how we city people outnumbered
the locals now: from the Lawvers at one end of the social scale to the Pastorinis somewhat below the middle and right down to the Shulls at the bottom. Our name for the natives was
townies
, but I never used it on Steve.

After a few years and a lot of colonial restoration—a lot of Dutch doors and old glass in new frames and split-shake shingles and carriage lamps beside the doors. And everything in Williamsburg red or Williamsburg green or Williamsburg beige—we tended to look flinty-eyed on new arrivals too. The current wave of people like the Slaneks, who were buying up the barns outside of town to add artiness to the countryside. The townies called them hippie-dippies. Slang gets to Oldfield Village late, but it lingers.

I went on past the Lawvers’ stone gates. It’s the last house before the Village Center. Then came the Bremers’ hardware store: The Colonial Craftsman, with a black iron eagle spreading wings over the revolving door. The British Motors Automotive Garage with a cupola on its roof, maybe to help Paul Revere warn the townies that the New Yorkers were coming. Lamston’s five and ten, disguised with barn siding. The dinky Pilgrim Theater. And a discreet vine-covered cottage which was the local headquarters of the Planned Parenthood Organization.

I’d paid a visit there last spring, just after my sixteenth birthday. And every time I went past afterward, I walked a little faster. I partly expected Mrs. Raymond to leap out of the front door and scream at me, “Yoo-hoo! I know who
you
are!”

As I turned up Litchfield Street, the sight of our Volvo pulled up at the Sunoco pumps made me stop dead. I knew Mother hadn’t taken Dad to the station and then kept the car.

He was standing beside the attendant, watching him fill the tank. He looked like he had all day, and I wondered
why he wasn’t halfway to work in New York on the seven forty. But I didn’t have time to cross over and ask him.

The high school’s an exact reproduction of Independence Hall. On the outside. Inside, it’s the unadorned, institutional scene, lit by overhead globes filling with dead flies. The halls are lined with banging brown lockers. When I twirled the lock on mine that morning, it reminded me, as usual, of how things had started with Steve.

One day at the very beginning of last year when we’d just moved up from middle school, I found a folded note stuck in the vents on my locker door. I whipped it out and opened it up to find a poem. It was printed with all those little flourishes that later came to stand for Steve in my mind. But not then, of course. It wasn’t even signed. It just said:

I didn’t know what to make of it. This off-season valentine. This home-grown Hallmark card. Being fifteen and starved for romance, I was pretty curious to know who’d sent it. But then I decided it was really meant for Alison. She and I always had adjoining lockers, and the boys had always buzzed around her even before they were buzzing around anybody: before she settled in with Phil Lawver.