Are You in the House Alone? (8 page)

“I’m not saying that, Mother. It’s just that I’m not the only one.”

“Well, is Alison Bremer on them too?”

“I don’t know, Mother. But no, I don’t suppose she is.”

“Did Steve Pastorini—”

“It was my decision. Entirely mine. But I did it because of Steve. That’s better than if I’d done it because of . . . a lot of boys, isn’t it?” I waited a long time for an answer to that, but I didn’t get it.

Instead, Mother said, “Well, tell me how you got them—the
pills. You can’t just march in that place and demand a prescription, can you?”

“No. There’s a whole procedure. Nobody told me about it, and I was scared when I went in the first night. But the volunteer there, they call them support workers—it was Mrs. Raymond, and she—”

“What Mrs. Raymond?”

“I don’t know her first name. She volunteers there in the evening.”

“You don’t mean Eleanor Raymond in my garden club!”

“Yes, she’s the one.”

“Why I see Eleanor Raymond every week. She—well, go on.”

“She was very helpful. She knew who I was, but she didn’t make a big thing about it. We went over the various birth control devices. She had a sort of set patter for it, but left time for me to ask questions. She volunteers there because she wants to help people, Mother.”

“Yes . . . I suppose so.”

“And then she told me to come back in a week after I’d thought things over. Decided which method I wanted, if any.”

“And then you went back there. How did you have the nerve?”

“I just did. And I said I wanted the pill. I had to see a doctor that time. He was volunteering there too. A gynecologist. I don’t know where his regular practice is. And after an examination, he gave me a prescription.”

“A thorough examination?”

“A pelvic examination. I have the prescription filled at Walton’s Drugstore, and I pay for it out of my sitting money.”

“So it was as easy as that.”

“It wasn’t that easy, Mother. It wasn’t an easy decision.”

“I just don’t want you to get hurt,” she said. “If you have to . . . experience everything now, what do you have to look forward to?”

The question hung in the air until the phone began to ring. The sound made the glass things on my dressing table vibrate. Three rings, then four before Mother slipped off the bed and went into her room. I heard her pick up the extension and say, “Hello?” in her usual, somewhat brittle voice. “Hello?” she said louder. “Hello? Hello?”

Steve had a paper due on Roosevelt and the New Deal, so it was an effort to convince him that we were going out at night in the middle of the week. But I didn’t care where. The library would have been as good as anyplace else. Anywhere away from phones. And he was ready to grill me about my unexplained absence on Tuesday. I got off with a half truth, telling him about Dad being out of work. “I was worried about him,” I said.

“Is that what’s been bothering you lately?”

“Isn’t that enough?” I darted off to Gernreich’s geometry.

*   *   *

I had it all timed so that he’d pick me up a few minutes after Dad and Mother left. A few minutes, no more. Dad left on schedule, walking down to the Village Hall for his board meeting. But Mother dawdled, changed her clothes twice.

“Come in, Stephen,” I heard her say. She must have
seen him coming up the walk and made it to the door before he rang. I was just starting down the stairs.
This is all I need. If she attacks him for being her daughter’s seducer.

But she was on her dignity, with a little added open-mindedness. “We never get to see enough of you, Stephen,” she accused kindly. I stopped on the stairs, trying to see Steve through her eyes. How does a plumber’s son look to the wife of an unemployed professional man? The class system seemed to be lying in a heap of rubble on the hall rug. I wondered if Mother knew that the Pastorinis were more secure in their world than we were in ours. I wondered if that was a taunt to her. It would have been so much easier for her if Steve had been a sweathog: cigarette dangling from bad teeth, shifty eyes, black leather over bad posture.

But he wasn’t that. He was next year’s valedictorian who happened to be having a Relationship with her daughter. Puppy love and The Pill. She may have taken it all more seriously that it was. I could see why she was off balance. But I couldn’t see Steve through her eyes. I could barely see him through mine. I was beginning to feel pretty cut off from everybody.

The library was closed. A sign on the door said: “Due to continuing budget cuts and increased operating expenses, this library will no longer observe evening hours until further notice.”

“The lake?” Steve said. “We’ll build a fire in the cabin stove. There’s kindling.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“No, I guess not,” he said. “You’re someplace where I can’t find you.” So we drove around, up and down Meeting Street, out along the Woodbury Road and into the country. Past the barn where the Slaneks lived, with trapezoid-shaped windows throwing light across a weedy yard where
Mr. Slanek’s welded I-beam sculpture stood around, casting angular shadows.

It was pouring rain, and I was steaming inside my slicker. Once, on a straight stretch of road, Steve reached over and took my hand. I jumped and pulled away without thinking. “It’s not you,” I tried to explain. “It’s me.”

We stopped at Friendly’s, which was midweek empty. A couple of malteds didn’t loosen our tongues. Steve wasn’t the type to fill in with easy conversation. I had the feeling he was brooding about his unwritten Roosevelt paper.

It was almost a relief when the door burst open, and a gang of sweathogs, mostly male in black leather, flocked in, streaming rain water and glittering with chrome studs. They staked out three or four booths. Blue air and that eye-cutting sweet pot smell hung over them. They were all heads, of course.

“Okay,” the waitress bawled from the safe distance of the soda fountain. “Don’t smoke that junk in here. Cigarettes yes. Joints no.”

The sweathogs greeted this interruption with a barrage of catcalls, mostly beginning with the word
mother.
There were a couple of girls with them. Girls you sometimes saw at school, but not usually. The loud one was LaVerne Shull who always wore three-quarter-length boots, wide at the tops like a drum majorette’s. She withdrew a pack of Kents from her boot top and offered them around to the guys who were smoking their roaches down to hot husks of brown paper.

“Hey? They close school?” LaVerne yelled over the din of the others. “I mean, they close school or sumpin?” She struggled to get the attention of the others who were trying to spell out words on the table with a squeeze bottle of ketchup. “I mean, look there’s Steve Pastorini and Little
Miss What’s-Her-Name over there. What are
they
doing out on a school night?”

A couple of the guys muttered what we might be doing out on a school night. LaVerne shrieked. She went on and on, trying to draw the gang that was already all over her closer and closer.

“Let’s go,” I said to Steve.

“That way LaVerne wins,” Steve said. “Besides, I grew up with them, every one of them. My people. LaVerne’s dad is probably playing pinochle with my dad right now down at the VFW.”

I wanted to tell him that he wasn’t one of them any more. But I guessed he knew that. The decibel level of LaVerne’s shrieks had lowered considerably. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a hand that wasn’t hers trailing like a vine in under her blouse.

We left, after a decent interval, if that’s the way to put it. But there wasn’t anywhere to go, and I was in no hurry to get home. We drove up and down country roads, listening to the windshield wipers. I reached over and took Steve’s hand and he held it, loosely.

“Did you know,” I said, “we’re being followed?”

“What?”

“There’s a car way behind us. It’s made the last four or five turns we have, and we’re not really going in any particular direction.”

He glanced in the rear-view mirror. “There’s a car back there, but way back. Could have been different cars on different roads.”

“No. It’s the same one.”

“You can’t be sure about that, Gail. What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing at all. I’m just telling you somebody’s following us, and I thought you’d like to know. Point of interest.”

He either didn’t believe me or didn’t want to, for a mile or so. But then he swung the car suddenly into a side road, so fast we nearly grazed a stone wall. It was a farmer’s lane, with a darkened house at the end and a barnlot turnaround. We circled in it, throwing up a wave of mud. He killed the lights, and we sat there in the dark with the rain pounding the hood. There was a car way off on the main road, with headlights low to the ground, fanning out. But it wasn’t moving.

We were there a long time, sitting apart, until Steve was as nervous as I was. He flicked on the lights and gunned off down the lane. The other car in the distance leaped forward a second later. By the time we got down to the end of the lane it had roared by on the road. Its tail lights were only red pinpoints ahead of us when we turned out of the lane. Then it was gone.

“It was really traveling,” Steve muttered. “I didn’t think any of LaVerne’s mob had a car that fast.”

“Maybe they don’t,” I said.

*   *   *

“Hand it over to me right now!” I snapped my fingers right under Alison’s nose. “Don’t even unfold it.” I’d come down the hall Thursday morning just in time to see her pull a note out of my locker vent.

“Oh, Gail,” she said, trying to look superior and concerned all at once, “why don’t you just throw it away? Why give anybody the satisfaction of reading it and getting all upset? It’s probably some, oh, I don’t know, some scramble-brained girl who’s jealous and trying to do a number on your head. Not worth fussing about.”

“How would you feel if somebody was doing this particular number on
your
head, Alison? Or couldn’t anything like that ever possibly happen to
you
? Just give it to me.” I had to take it out of her hand. I’d have fought her for it,
torn her hair out, like LaVerne Shull would. When I unfolded it, Alison turned away.

It was almost the same as the first note. He’d said it all before. He’d been living with his same psycho plans ever since. And so had I.

I fumbled it into my book bag, wedged it between Wood’s
Masters of English Literature
and Waddell’s
Basic Principles of Plane Geometry.
I turned around with a mask of calm on my face. “Look how cool I am, Alison. Like you said before, it never happened.” My head throbbed, and I felt a flash of hate for her. Because it wasn’t happening to her. Because she knew. Because she was saying all the wrong things—inadequate words like
fuss.
What did I want her to say? That twisted letter writers like this one are all talk, that they only harm themselves? I wouldn’t have believed her.

I gagged then and thought I was going to lose my breakfast. But I kept swallowing and swallowing until my eyes burned and my face felt like paper.

Sonia outdid herself that morning. She was wearing a Spanish shawl that looked like it had come off the top of a piano. It was embroidered in limes and pineapples in living color, with a fringe. She’d circled it around her smooth hair and draped it over one shoulder, pinned with a velvet rose. And under it she wore basic black, something like an evening gown, with beads following the seams on the skirt down to high-heeled suede boots. “She’s really going too far,” Alison said, though she only glanced at Sonia and kept a worried eye on me. Sonia swept past us on a cloud of Evening in Paris cologne.

It was the monthly Arts Assembly day. I marched through it like a sleepwalker and right into the auditorium for the double period after lunch. We were supposed to sit according to homerooms, but everybody juggled around to be with friends. Steve had staked out a couple of seats for us over on one side in case the performance of the day was the Oldfield String Quartet or Girls’ Junior Glee or something like that. Steve generally liked to sit by a window where he could see to read in case the culture was too home-grown. “Wake me up if it turns out to be Beverly Sills or the Vienna Philharmonic. Otherwise, don’t.” I could think of a way of waking him up. I could reach down in my book bag and hand him the latest note. But I didn’t.

The teachers started up the side aisles with poles to pull the black-out shades down. “A flick,” Steve muttered out of the side of his mouth. “Hope it’s not the product of a hand-held camera.”

In the gloom, somebody scurried in and flopped down in the empty seat beside me. Anything like that made me jump out of my skin. But when I turned to see who it was, Valerie Cathcart’s moonface was staring inches from me. She flinched when she recognized me, and even started out of her seat. “No, wait, Val. Listen, I’m sorry I bit your head off the other day down by the station. I was in a funky mood.”

“Oh, it’s all right,” Valerie said in the tone of one who’s had a lot of forgiving to do in her time. “What’s the movie, do you know? They don’t even know in the office, either that or they’re not telling. If it was about, you know, personal hygiene or something in that area, they wouldn’t be showing it to the guys and
us
, at the same time, would they?”

“I doubt it, Val. So don’t get your hopes up.”

“Oh, but I didn’t mean— Oh, it’s starting now. Look that’s Miss Venable on the stage.” It took Valerie to tell me who Miss Venable was. She’d just come that fall to be a guidance counselor. And unless you were Valerie Cathcart or a juvenile offender, you wouldn’t have run into her. Miss Venable had that I’m-fighting-for-control look that new faculty members have until they’re broken in.

“All right now,” she shouted. “Let’s settle down and have some order here!” The spotlight scanned the stage in front of the screen, trying to find her. She was sidestepping herself, trying to get into the light. “Let’s have less unnecessary conversation, and I mean it!” A lot of the conversation came from people wondering who she was.