Are You in the House Alone?

by Richard Peck

  “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.

  CHAPTER

  Three

  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’ll be so gentle you won’t know I’m there

  I’ll weave white violets into your hair

  For there isn’t anything I wouldn’t share

  And one day you’ll know just how much I can care.

  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.

  But hope and pride mingled to keep me from readdressing the note to Alison’s locker vents. Then, a couple of weeks later when I’d half forgotten about it, I found some ugly little white plastic flowers stuck in the vents. Lamston products and not quite violet-shaped, but I made the connection.

  I’d felt eyes boring into my back. And I turned around to find Steve Pastorini behind me, trying to look casual. I won’t say I hadn’t noticed him before. I had. Curly dark hair, glasses repaired with tape at the nosepiece, and one of those rock-hard chins more New England than Italian, softened by the eyes. He was a townie, or I’d have already known him better. And he had a reputation as a bustass, which is our vulgar term for an overachiever, academically. It was later that I found out he studied most of his waking hours because he wanted to, not because he had to.

  He was leaning against the opposite row of lockers with the heels of his construction boots together and his hands jammed down in his Levi pockets. We walked out of school together that afternoon.

  What was it like at first? We talked in riddles and circled around each other with probing words. “What’s your very favorite . . .?” “What’s the first thing you can remember?” “What would you do if you didn’t have to do anything?” And, “Why aren’t you more like me?” “Why aren’t I more like you?” Finally, “Did you ever like-love anybody before? This much?”

  All the questions everyone asks without leaving time enough for answers. Wanting to close all the distances between us fast to make up for all those thousands of years we hadn’t known each other. We were on opposite sides of the ethnic fence, and then we were holding each other very close. Like every other two people drawing together, we were brother and sister, and then we were lovers. And after that we weren’t sure what we were.

  It didn’t take the other kids long to think of us as kind of an old married couple. The cooler you act, the quicker they know.

  I’d only met his family once. It was back early last spring, and we’d walked all the way out to his house after school, meaning to do homework together. I figured out early that with Steve learning had a higher priority than loving. We were still pretty much in the hand-holding stage. Later, I guess he wouldn’t have taken me home.

  The Pastorinis lived in a house with a big front porch across the front, the badge of a townie family. The first thing New Yorkers do is tear off the porch and replace it with dwarf evergreens. And it was painted blue. Not Williamsburg blue. Robin’s-egg blue.

  The Pastorinis had a big country kitchen with a deep freeze the size of a coffin and there was oilcloth on the table. A linoleum square was laid like a rug on the floor, not quite reaching to the walls. There was a fluorescent fixture in the ceiling and a picture of Jesus, with dried palms from Palm Sunday tacked behind, on one of the cupboard doors. I pretended it didn’t seem strange, but I looked around a lot.

  Mrs. Pastorini didn’t seem to want to come into the kitchen. But it was getting on toward dinner time (“supper time” at their house), and finally she hurried in to the stove. “You kids just keep right on with your work,” she said, smiling shyly.

  I was trying to do a theme for English and got, I think, about four or five sentences written. Steve’s dad came home and was in the middle of the kitchen before he saw us there. He couldn’t place me, not even after Steve mumbled a kind of introduction.

  The thing I noticed about Steve’s parents can’t be put into words. They didn’t say that much. They were gentle, gentler than he was in a way. But there was a definite f
eeling in that kitchen. They were respectful toward him. That’s the only word I can think of. His dad was a great big man, with hands the size of baseball mitts—nothing like Steve’s hands at all. “I used to try and help him when he took math,” Mr. Pastorini said to me. Even if he couldn’t figure out who I was, he was pleased that I seemed to be studying. “Oh, I guess that was back about the eighth grade. Seems like last night, but it wasn’t. When he come to algebra, though, he was away over my head. Didn’t need any help off of me anyhow.”

  “Oh, come on, Dad,” Steve said. But Mr. Pastorini just stood over us, beaming down at him.

  * * *

  Alison rushed up to her locker. We had six more jumps on the hall clock before the bell for drama class. Describing first love is a little like describing the person you once thought was your best friend. It’s safer to stick to surface impressions—the way the firelight from the Lawvers’ hearth had played across her serene-looking face that Friday night. She had a highly polished surface.

  I remember two or three summers ago she’d said to a girl we both knew, “You must be getting popular. I see you everywhere I go.” She’d refined her approach since then. More human, I thought. But whether she was getting more human or less, I always remembered how much I liked her when I first came to Connecticut.

  I was in the I-hate-everything eleven-year-old stage anyway, and moving out of New York to the boondocks was a bitter pill. Was I glad that practically the first person who even looked my way at school was Alison Bremer. She hardly even remembered living in New York herself. Still, she put up with my instant nostalgia for the Big Town. And in my books that made her neat, my all-purpose word of approval. Once when my mother still went back to shop in Manhattan, she took Alison and me along. There wasn’t much shopping. Instead we went to see the Rockettes’ morning show and then had lunch at the Soup Bar at Lord & Taylor. We wore ourselves out that day, and I realized I was glad to come home to Oldfield Village. I don’t suppose Alison even remembered that time. She kept her sights pretty much on the future.

  I could see her future myself. Even without the Lawver connection, she projected a clear image of an uppercrust Oldfield Village society dame. I could see her spending the rest of her life slipping in and out of a wood-paneled station wagon in a gored skirt with a Gucci bag on her arm. Never more than just pretty enough. And always in her usual kind of easy-going haste. She’d go to Yale or to its nearest women’s college and then come back to marry Phil and be the queen of the PTA.

  “Good thing we’ve got drama first period,” she said, throwing and grabbing at her books. “I can get the geometry finished. Did you get it?”

  “All but the last three problems.”

  “Shoot. Those are the ones I don’t have.”

  And then Alison and I observed a moment of silence. Sonia Slanek was coming to school. That was her first year there—her only year. So we’d had just six weeks to study her. The Slaneks lived in a converted barn out on the Woodbury Road. Her father was a sculptor, with his studio in the haymow. People said they’d come from the SoHo district of New York where artists have their lofts. I think as far as Sonia was concerned, she was still back there.

  She lived in her own private world, and you could read that much in her eyes, which were fixed and just slightly out of focus. None of us had ever seen anything like her. It was as if she dedicated her whole life to creating a work of very weird modern art—bizarre and beautiful in a way. And the art object was herself.

  Her hair was auburn—about the color of mine. But every day it was different, rolled sometimes in a flattened mushroom shape or pompadoured like the 1940s.

  Without the makeup, her face might have been relatively blah. It was heart-shaped, and the cleft in her chin was its only landmark without the cosmetics. On that Monday morning her eyelids were wonderfully shaded in pale peacock blue. Penciled in just beyond the ends of her plucked eyebrows were the suggestions of butterfly wings. Her mouth was very small, and she’d reshaped it in subtle brown lipstick with little Cupid’s-bow points at the center of her upper lip.

  She was wearing a black monkey-fur jacket with three-quarter sleeves. It was obviously a Women’s Exchange rummage sale item. But burnished, even combed, to perfection. It had never looked that good on the monkey. She wore long black kid gloves, the kind grand matrons wear in old movies. And on one wrist, over the glove, a single, perfectly plain ivory bracelet.

  Her slacks were velvet printed in art deco pyramids and rainbows, all colors, and enormously belled at the bottom. The cuffs swished around a pair of lemon yellow shoes with three-inch platforms. She walked directly down the center of the hall, swaying slightly. I don’t suppose she even had a locker. She never carried books. Whenever she took notes in a class, she drew out a small stenographic pad from her needlepoint purse and wrote in it with a pen that had a long tassel on it.

  “It’s kitsch,” Alison said, “but she’s certainly got it all together.”

  The bell rang then, and we darted off to meet the second extreme character of the day.

  After Sonia, if there’s such a thing as a bright spot in a school day, it was the class presided over by a woman named Dovima Malevich. Most of the seniors and as many of us juniors as could get in rioted to take her class. She was perfectly capable of saying, “Call me Madam,” and she said she was Russian. Her accent came and went. But there were no other Russians around Oldfield Village to challenge her claim.

  She had a hawk’s head perched on a pigeon’s body. Her hair seemed to be painted on in black lacquer with a wide white center part. Even adults regarded her as elderly. She had to be well past seventy-five, they said. The only reason she had the teaching job was that she’d been a friend of the late senior Mrs. Lawver, who’d run the school board like Catherine the Great.

  The senior Mrs. Lawver was in the ground, but Madam Malevich taught on, in defiance of the Connecticut retirement laws. “I haf bin in for small talk wiz the principal,” she’d sometimes say at the beginning of class when her accent was heaviest. “And we haf come to another of our unnerstandings.”

  This meant that the principal had again invited her to retire, and she’d again declined the invitation. To us, the principal was a myth because he never came out of his office. To Madam Malevich he was a joke. He was young enough to be her son, but I suppose she just planned to outlive him. Maybe she will.

  Drama was an elective. Still, we turned our schedules inside out to get in her class. It was known as an easy A when Madam Malevich bothered to record the grades. But more than that, she seemed to fill a hole in our neat, set lives. She didn’t teach drama as a subject. She was the drama, and to her the world really was a stage.

  She’d never been known to mount a student production. “I haf no time for amateurs. Young persons truly innerested in a theatrical career do not piddle their time away in Oldfield Village,” she said more than once. “If they are at school at all, they are attending the High School for Performing Arts in New York City and going for auditions and open calls in their free time.

  “And what are you doing in your bounteous free time?” she would ask, scanning the class with a cobra’s eye. “Malevich will tell you! Making puppy’s eyes at one another at Shakey’s Pitzah Parlor and Friendly’s Ice Cream Store and volfing Big Macs in parking lots and making the road to Powdermill Lake perilous wiz your fresh new drivers’ licenses!”

  This stinging attack on our life style brought forth satisfied grins from all over the room. What other teacher even recognized that we had a life style?

  “Or you, Barnie Whitman,” she said that Monday morning, warming up. “Your free time is gobbled up tuning that Pinto car of yours.” She pointed an arthritic, bright-nailed finger at his slouching form. Barnie, a townie, ducked his head and smiled proudly at his grease-blackened paws.

  “My God, is a piece of junk of the Ford Motor Company a fine Stradivarius violin to be tuned wiz such delicacy?”

  Her eye swept over Sonia, but she nev
er put her on the spot. Of course, she couldn’t miss her. Maybe Sonia’s stage makeup and monkey fur reminded Madam Malevich of an earlier, more glamourous age. Or maybe Sonia was a relief from the safe sameness of the rest of us. Later I thought about that and wonder still.

  “Alison Bremer, is that geometry you do in your lap? Put it avay. Mathematics? No. If you haf talents, they lie elsewhere.” And then her eyes rose halfway up her forehead, and they seemed to embrace the whole room, waiting with professional timing for our reaction. Giggles, more grins, and even applause because we knew this was a performance: Malevich without malice.

  We knew, too, that, crackpot though she was, she observed us with a sharp eye, in between bouts of vagueness. Most of the kids thought she was actually crazy, but I never did.

  And always before her monologue rambled on to the theater or film-making, she’d hit us with the one-liner to bring us down in a heap: “My God, all so young and so lifeless. At your age already I vas somebody!”

  CHAPTER

  Four

  “Yes, but who?” Steve said at lunch. “You’re always reporting that she was somebody, but who?”

  “How do I know?” I said. “She doesn’t dwell on the past like most old people do. I suppose she was an actress or something.”

  “Are you interested in drama, and does she teach any?”

  “Not much—to both questions.”

  “Then why waste your time on that joke course?” Steve was in one of his dark, Lord Byron moods, and I was wishing lunch was over because there was no talking him out of them. He took Advanced Placement History while I was being entertained by Madam Malevich. And he was always getting at me about not being bustass enough.

  “I doubt that I qualify for AP History, for one thing,” I said, skidding deeper into the argument. “And anyway, ‘History is little else than a picture of human crimes and misfortunes.’”