Are You in the House Alone?

by Richard Peck

  They were a blur of crushed-velvet wrap-around coats, shades, and platform shoes. One of the guys, no bigger than I was, stepped out in front of me, cupped his hand, wiggling a finger. “Hey, momma, whatcher hurry? Want a little action? Wanna get it on? Wanna—”

  I walked around him in the flow of pedestrians. He should have scared me out of my wits. But I nearly went blind with hatred instead. If he had something to prove about himself, what made him think he could use me? Did I owe him something because I was female and he was male?

  It was the first time I’d thought anything like that. I wished I’d had something very sharp and very lethal in my hand. I was ready to use it, on anybody. Then suddenly I was starved. I stopped at a Chock full o’Nuts and had two cream cheese sandwiches and an orange drink.

  * * *

  I don’t know why I half expected my mother to be meeting all the trains, but I did. She wasn’t the first person I saw when I got off at the station though. The first familiar face was Valerie Cathcart’s. She was heading home down Meeting Street with an armload of books. School was just out.

  Valerie’s father’s a doctor. That should put her in the middle of the best group in school, but it didn’t work that way for her. She was only half in a gang whose every other phrase was “How gross!” and even they could take her or leave her. So she worked in the school office during her free period and built a small empire as the school busybody.

  When she spotted me, she broke into a gallop. It was too late to cross the street to avoid a head-on with her. “Jeez,” Valerie said, puffing up to me, “where you been all day, Gail? Miss Roseberry in the office called your mom third period and I listened on the extension. Your mom was really grossed out. When she found out you weren’t in school, she didn’t know what to say. Then she called back in about five minutes and asked if Steve Pastorini was in school. But he was. Jeez, where’ve you been?”

  I opened my mouth to tell her. But something else came blurting out. “What business is it of yours? Do I owe you an explanation for everything I do? I’m sick of living in this fishbowl, and I’m sick of rejects like you who get their kicks from listening in on extensions because you don’t have a life of your own.” We were both breathless when I could stop talking. I seemed to have a lot to say all of a sudden to pathetic Valerie, for all the good it would do.

  “How gross,” she said, staring at me with her little pig eyes. “How rank. Excuse me for being alive.” Her big soft face began to crumple up, and I felt disgusted with myself only because I’d have to apologize to her. But later, not now.

  For nearly a half hour after I got home, I thought I wasn’t going to get into it with my mother. I’d never skipped school in my life, and I thought the first time ought to be the occasion for some fireworks. But when I came in, only her gaze followed me up the stairs.

  It was nearly time for Dad to come home before she cracked my door and actually asked if she could come in. “Want to talk about it?” she said in a neutral voice.

  “I went in to New York to see Dad.”

  “Oh.” She hesitated in the doorway for a moment, digesting that. “I suppose we should have told you before. But your dad didn’t want you to worry. You know how he always thinks you’re still a little girl.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “No. I just wish you were, sometimes.”

  “So do I, sometimes. Maybe that’s why I went.”

  She came all the way into the room then, walking carefully to show we were going to have a conversation, not a confrontation. “It’s very hard for him—your dad.”

  “Yes, I know. I understand.”

  “And that’s why I’m taking this awful real-estate sales course, though I don’t suppose it’ll do much—”

  “Yes, I understand that too. I wish I could say something to Dad. I don’t know what, but—”

  “Oh no, honey. I wouldn’t if I were you. It would just be another burden to him if he thought you knew.”

  “That’s the way we are, isn’t it? All three of us. We keep everything locked up tight inside us because . . . because one little leak might cause an explosion, and we’d all go flying apart.”

  “That’s melodramatic,” Mother said, “and I don’t know what good talking would do. It wouldn’t get Neal—your dad—a job, would it? I, for one, would probably get hysterical. I’m near enough that point anyway.”

  So am I, I thought, trying to reject the idea that I was so much like my mother. “It’ll just help your dad if he thinks you’re not worrying,” she was saying. “You shouldn’t be having problems at your age.”

  “Didn’t you have problems at my age?”

  It was nearly dark, and she looked young, sitting on my bed with her knees pulled up under her and the crow’s feet around her eyes invisible. Usually I hated it when she came in and flopped down on my bed. But this time we were both making allowances. “Oh, I don’t know what I was like then. It seems so long ago. It was so long ago.”

  “Mother, I’m going to go out with Steve tomorrow night, if he’s free. You’ll be at your class, and Dad will be at his board meeting. I don’t feel like staying home alone. I don’t want to.”

  She didn’t hear those last words. “Oh, Gail, not on a school night. You know how your dad feels about—”

  “You’re the one who doesn’t want me going out with Steve, Mother. Let’s not kid ourselves.”

  She’d wrinkled my bedspread up into a little fan of pleats, running the edge of her thumbnail down the folds. “All right, we won’t kid ourselves about that. I almost wish— I do wish we’d never moved up here. I thought it would be—an ideal environment for you. That we wouldn’t have the worry people do, raising a daughter in the city, facing all those problems.”

  “Why does Steve seem like such a problem to you, Mother? He’s not a poor boy from a slum. If anybody’s poor, it’s us.”

  “I hope you know how that sounded. Now maybe you can understand why I don’t want you telling your dad you know he’s out of work.”

  “Is it because Steve’s from an Italian family?”

  “I’m not a bigot. And I’m not—Lydia Lawver.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “You take the pill, don’t you, Gail.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes.”

  “How long?”

  “Since last spring. Right after my birthday. I wasn’t sure I could get a prescription if I was under sixteen.”

  “And you got them from Dr. Cathcart! And he didn’t inform me! I think that’s . . . unethical.”

  “No, I didn’t get them from him. But I got them in a perfectly safe, legal way.”

  Mother tried to smooth out the mess she’d made of the bedspread. “I wish you wouldn’t take those pills. You know about the side effects. They’re really not sure if there aren’t links with blood clots and strokes and heart attacks and—”

  “But you take them, Mother. The only difference is yours are in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and I keep mine under my scrapbook in that drawer over there where you must have found them.”

  She looked away then but went on talking as if I hadn’t said anything. “Well, then if you really didn’t get them from Dr. Cathcart, who on earth did you go to?”

  “The Planned Parenthood Organization. Down on Meeting Street.”

  “Where? You didn’t.”

  “I did.”

  “But that place is for—for married people.”

  “Not entirely. They have a youth counseling division. Mrs. Raymond who works there says it’s the biggest part of the program.”

  “Now don’t start telling me all the girls at school are on the pill,” she snapped. “Don’t tell me since everybody’s on the pill, you have to be too. It’s not a driver’s license or—or—”

  “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 sh
e 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?”

  CHAPTER

  Seven

  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.