Are You in the House Alone? (6 page)

Each time I checked a window upstairs, I imagined I heard a ladder against the side of the house. Downstairs,
I’d stand in a dark room, keeping clear of a window, before I went over to it. The shapes of the evergreens outside began to look like human forms. I’d stand against the opposite wall, waiting for them to turn back into trees. But they took their time about it.

I wasn’t quite in my right mind, or I wouldn’t have checked all the windows before remembering the doors. When I did, I ran at all of them, turning both the lock and bolt knobs.

From the kitchen window I saw the garage door was pushed up. Anybody—anybody at all—could see the car was gone. Finally I went to bed. It was easier than standing in the dark, waiting.

I lay up there for two hours, wondering where all the security of nestling into a familiar bed had gone. Wondering what I’d spent all my life thinking about before those past few days. Wondering if it was only the wind or the rustle of footsteps in the leaves on the lawn. Wondering what I should do.

I didn’t sleep, and so I heard our car drive in and the garage door rumble down. Dad had to use two keys on the back door, and I heard them both turn in the locks. Then Mother opened my door and said, “For heaven’s sake, Gail, why did you leave the phone off the hook? It’s absolutely squawking.”

But my eyes were closed and my breathing was regular and my mouth was slightly open. I seemed to be asleep.

*   *   *

At school I was closer to him, whoever he was. At our lockers the next morning, I said to Alison, “I wish we could talk about it. The note.”

She looked at me around her locker door. I could only see half of her face. “It never happened, Gail.”

“Is that the way to handle it?” She bewildered me.

“Yes,” she said, and walked away, not even waiting for me or for the arrival of Sonia Slanek.

When Sonia did appear, coming down the middle of the hall with the crowd dividing to make way for her, I envied the sealed-off world she lived in. Even the befurred, bejeweled, painted shell she put between herself and the rest of us.

All that day I didn’t know what I dreaded more. The next message, or Saturday night, baby-sitting at Mrs. Montgomery’s. It never occurred to me to quit the job. I already felt alone wherever I was.

*   *   *

After Mrs. Montgomery left, I went up and looked in on the kids. One was asleep in a baby bed, the other in a junior bed with her arms thrown back and little bubbles on her lips. Scattered around on the floor were big stuffed Snoopies and a Cookie Monster hand puppet and a Star Trek coloring book. I stepped quietly around them to check the locks on the windows. Lights blazed from the house next door, and I tried to remember the name of the neighbors.

Downstairs the living-room curtains were all drawn. I glanced into the dining room, but there were gauzy white tie-backs on those windows and blackness beyond. So I stayed in the living room, staring at the television for an age before realizing I’d turned the sound too low to hear. I guess I didn’t want to miss hearing the phone.

It rang then. And I let it. Thirty times after I started counting. A long fifteen minutes later it started again and wouldn’t stop.
I’ve already heard all the words. What does it matter?
I lifted the receiver and heard music in the background.

When I didn’t say hello, Mrs. Montgomery said, “Gail, my heavens, are you all right? Surely you heard the phone!
I’m sitting in this booth in an absolute panic. What’s wrong?”

I owed her an explanation. My mind searched for excuses instead. “The television, it was blaring.”

“Are you sure you’re all right? I thought I’d just call to check, and then when—”

“Everything’s fine and the kids are sound asleep. Are you having a good time?” I could hear the Previously Marrieds dance band in the background playing “That Old Black Magic.”

“I’m having the usual time,” Mrs. Montgomery said. “Actually my feet are killing me, and I’m sitting this set out. Anyway, Bob Foster has dumped me and gone off to the card room to play poker, or somewhere. It’s not one of our cozier nights.”

“Who’s Bob Foster?”

“You have to ask? He’s the coach at the high school.”

“Coach Foster? You mean that you and he—”

“I told you this town still had some secrets. Who do you think I dance with at this club—Tony Orlando?” I’d thought I’d convinced her nothing was wrong at my end, but she mentioned that she’d be home early, before midnight. After she hung up, I forgot to ask if she’d tried to call before. Maybe I didn’t want to know.

She was home in half an hour. I heard her voice and Coach Foster’s all the way up the front walk. Opening the front door, I tried to look responsible. Mrs. Montgomery had that look on her face that nice people get when they’re concerned about you. “Gail, you know Coach Foster, don’t you?”

The coach loomed over her shoulder. I’d never seen him in long pants before, let alone a suit and clip-on bow tie. He grunted something at this introduction.

“We haven’t exactly met before,” I said. “They haven’t let a girls’ team on the squash court yet.”

Coach Foster grunted again at that. He looked sickened at the idea of girls on his squash court. I think he was the only man I’d ever seen who still had crew-cut hair. It was sparse and gray.

They came into the hall, and Mrs. Montgomery said, “Oh, Bob, go on out to the kitchen. In the pantry there’s a bottle of White Label with a couple of fingers of Scotch left in it. Fix one for me with a splash of soda. And there’s Gatorade in the refrigerator for you.”

When he lumbered off, she led me straight into the living room. She made a long business of digging my money out of her evening bag. I sat there facing her and feeling guilty about not answering the phone. It seemed I was beginning to feel guilty about a lot of things that weren’t my fault.

“If there’s anything that’s worrying you, Gail,” she said, not looking up from her open purse, “anything at all, you can tell me. After all, as long as you’re sitting with the kids, your problems are mine. If you have any, I mean. You know, we single ladies have to stick together.” She looked up and smiled, a little too brightly.

Whatever I might have said was cut off by Coach Foster, who came into the living room drinking his Gatorade from the bottle. When he handed Mrs. Montgomery her drink, he shot me an irritated look. He wasn’t happy to find me still there.

He was less happy when she said, “Oh, Bob, you wouldn’t mind driving Gail home, would you.” He started to say something, but she didn’t let him. “You can come back afterwards and . . . ah . . . finish your Gatorade.”

It was a moonless, inky-black night. When we drove off
into it, I fought the urge to plaster myself up against the car door. Keeping my distance from Coach Foster. He didn’t help matters by driving along in silence. With any other teacher, I’d have thought I should make some conversation. But then I didn’t think of him as a teacher. He was more like a sulky kid. A very big one.

Something was gnawing at me. Something Mrs. Montgomery had said on the phone about how the coach had wandered off somewhere during the dance. He could have slipped into a phone booth and . . . and I had to stop thinking things like that.

All I wanted was to get home. Then I saw we were almost there, and he’d made all the right turns without asking me where I lived. It was a small thing, but it panicked me. He knew where I lived. Lots of people did, of course. But that was the problem.

When he pulled into our drive, I jerked at the door handle. “Not so fast!” I froze. “Don’t open a door till a car comes to a stop.” He growled that out in his squash-court voice. But the car was stopped by then, and in the next second I was swinging my feet out. Somehow, though, I knew he was reaching across toward me. I whirled around to see his big paw bang the door shut and push the lock button down.

“Thanks,” I yelled, too late. “Thanks for the ride!” He nodded, I think, and the car backed down the drive. It swung around and peeled off in the direction of Mrs. Montgomery’s house.

Instead of running for the front door, I stood beside the drive, watching the car out of sight. I just kept standing there in the middle of the night, tempting fate. Wanting something to happen and then be over. I knew I couldn’t go on much longer being afraid of everybody.

There was a word for that. A psychiatric kind of word. I could end up in a room with bolts on the door and bars on the window and no phone. I was beginning to yearn for that room. And maybe, I thought, maybe that yearning was what I really had to fear.

It was the middle of the next week when I got the second note. And it was the last one.

You’d think broad daylight and a school full of kids would be better than sitting alone in a house at night. But it wasn’t. I guess I began to lose some of my perceptions and sharpen others. I was always looking over my shoulder, but I couldn’t concentrate on the regular routine.

Miss Gernreich held me up to public ridicule in geometry when I couldn’t do last night’s easiest problem on the board. Then later, when she took my homework out of my hand and found I’d done every problem practically right, she gave me a strange look.

But boys. Men. I was looking at them all the time. Trying to see into them. Which was the rotten one? Or were they all rotten? If I didn’t know which one to fear, how could I keep from fearing them all? And hating them? And where did that get me?

I stood at the drinking fountain so long that I was late for English just because I noticed Buddy McEvoy hanging around with his usual gang. I strained to hear what they
were talking about. I couldn’t take my eyes off his spidery hand holding a notebook the way he held a squash racket.

Then I dropped him and thought about all the guys I didn’t even know. There was a whole subculture of townie creeps with boots and Hondas and no place to go. We called them sweathogs. And I was just snobbish enough not even to know their names.

English was taught by the meekest, mildest man on the faculty, Mr. Bauman. He always wore a black tie, and even when he was around, you thought you were in the room alone. And now that was the very thing that worried me about him. How could I know what his frustrations were? And when I tried to imagine them, I couldn’t think about anything else.

We were doing nineteenth-century English poetry from purple mimeographed sheets. Mr. Bauman always came out of himself a little when he read poetry aloud. The poem for that day was Wordsworth’s “Strange Fits of Passion I Have Known.” I guess I went a little batty during the second stanza.

I knew it was a regular love poem of the soulful kind. We’d done them before. But in those four lines I could only see someone creeping toward a girl alone in a big old house, out on the moors, someone getting closer and closer as he bent his way.
Be careful
, I said to the girl in the poem.
Bar the door. Protect yourself. Get help.

Mr. Bauman had stopped reciting. Everybody in the room had turned to look at me, everybody but Alison.
Whatever I’d just thought, I’d said out loud. I looked down, pretending to read the poem, but it was all crumpled up in my hand and the purple ink looked like webs.

“Gail Osburne?” Mr. Bauman said in his soft voice. “Do you have a comment to contribute?”

I shook my head fast and never looked up. Mr. Bauman’s voice droned on through the poem.

But he got all the way to the end of the poem before people stopped giving me sidelong glances.

Finally the day was over. And four more to go. While I was fumbling with my combination lock, somebody stepped up behind me and grabbed me by the shoulders. I jumped, banged my head on the door. Books spilled out of my arms and all over the floor. “Oh
please, please
leave me alone!” I turned to see Steve standing there.

“What is it?” he said. And when I looked in his eyes, I could tell that somebody had told him I’d been acting strange in English class, of all places. “What’s the problem?”

I started to tell him—everything. But Alison came up then, looking around at my books all over the floor. And while I couldn’t think why, I didn’t want her to hear me
telling Steve. Either that or I didn’t want her to hear what he’d reply.

Worried? Embarrassed? Scared? I couldn’t sort through everything I was feeling.

“Look,” Steve said, frowning at me, trying to analyze me. “What about doing something after school tomorrow?” Tomorrow? Tomorrow would be a repeat of today, I knew. Unless I did something about it.

“Tomorrow will be fine,” I told him.

*   *   *

The next morning, when everybody else was filing into Madam Malevich’s class, I was on the train to New York. I had enough baby-sitting money saved to get halfway to Florida, and that’s just where I wished I was going. But I was on the late commuters’ train for Grand Central. My dad had left the house at his usual time, and I figured I’d catch him at his office before he got too involved with his day.

I’d spent an evening pretending that it was all over. No more calls or notes. And it hadn’t worked. It was time to tell somebody. Alison hadn’t been any help at all. Where are people when you need them?

What I expected Dad to do, I don’t know now. Call the police? Keep me home? Watch me night and day? I was already being watched night and day. I knew how that felt. And why did I think that cutting school to see Dad would keep Mother from knowing? I just wasn’t thinking. I was running.

It was a new experience—the train at rush hour. When I looked around, I saw I was the only female in the car. It was packed with Oldfield Village businessmen in trench coats and Brooks Brothers suits. All the faces were smooth as eggs, bent to folded copies of the
Wall Street Journal.
My faceless, unknowable neighbors.