Are You in the House Alone? (16 page)

Dad drove me to school. “If I don’t come up with a job pretty soon,” he small-talked, “we may just have to sell the house and move back to New York.” He spoke of joblessness in a pretty bright tone of voice.

He wanted to walk with me right into school but restrained himself. We sat in the car till the first bell rang, and the tide of kids surged from across the street, slapping books on the car hood, flipping butts, yelling, broad-jumping curbs. The thundering herd. After a week of quiet, I’d forgotten about the unnecessary noise pollution. I leaned over and kissed Dad in the last second and slid out of the car. He was still sitting there when I looked back at the door of the school.

They made way for me when I walked down the corridor, a little like they did for Sonia Slanek. At least I thought so. But it wasn’t one big dramatic moment after another. Major scenes you plan for never seem to come along on schedule. Alison spotted me from afar and kept her distance.

I remembered how many times before—say around seventh grade—when I’d vowed never to speak to Alison Bremer
ever
again, over some matter or other. And how we’d be blabbing at each other ten minutes later. That was when we never played for keeps.

Word reached Steve that I was back in school. He was at my elbow by lunch time, silently escorting me a little formally through the cafeteria line. We talked about schoolwork, carefully, across the vast width of the lunch table. Even the salt and peppers seemed significant barriers. I decided he hadn’t heard any of the gossip. He always could go deaf around Valerie Cathcart. Did he want me to tell him what he didn’t know? I couldn’t be sure. “You and Alison have a falling-out?” he asked, out of the blue.

“Yes, a terminal one. Why?”

“Because she just sat down without saying anything. You’re practically back to back. They’re at the next table.”

“They?”

“She and Phil.”

Lunch was too long for our short supply of conversation. Valerie skipped around me between fifth and sixth period, suddenly in a mad dash to be somewhere else. But it was a weirdly normal day. By the end of it, I was feeling my way back into the old routine. There were empty spaces in it that Alison had filled. And Steve. But, proud of myself, I skated around these. People spoke, waved, glanced at my stitches. If somebody looked ready to come up for information, I kept moving. People only care within limits.

I didn’t have Sonia’s . . . visual impact, so I melted into the pack, and besides, I was only last week’s rumor. This week had a new topic. The Arts Assembly with Madam Malevich’s old movie had made waves—and the local paper. Suddenly Oldfield Village was sitting up and taking notice of its celebrity. The one and only movie theater got hold of three or four of her old flicks and was planning to run them back-to-back in a “Dovima Malevich Film Festival.” Posters were plastered all over school.

The next day in drama class, she made no mention of
it. Her hooded eyes skimmed the class as usual, flickering over me with maybe a salute of recognition, then resting on Sonia. She was dressed in a Tyrolean “Heidi” outfit with hair pulled temporarily into braids.

By Wednesday I was hurting. For two days I’d elected not to eat lunch with Steve. One lunch hour in the library. The second at a corner table with a noisy bunch of brown-baggers. I was lonely, but it was too late to go back to bed and be a rape victim. Instead, I pretended that time was passing faster than it really was, urging the weekend nearer. But on Wednesday afternoon the new/old routine came unglued.

Mother’d been conducting a daily countdown to see how fast I’d get home after school. There was no sense in fighting her about it. Maybe in time she’d begin to relax. I wanted to stop by on the way home and see Mrs. Montgomery, only for a moment. Just to reinstate myself as a baby sitter. I wasn’t looking forward to more solitary Saturday nights—at the scene of the crime, but I wasn’t going to let that cheat me out of my sitting money, or change anything. Nothing was going to cripple me.

“Should you be up and around?” Mrs. Montgomery said. She looked almost shocked when she answered the door.

“I’m fine,” I said, bubbling, totally in command, nearly bouncing. I was ready to burst right into her front hall, except that her hand was still on the doorknob.

“Well, come in, Gail,” she said, dropping the hand. Angie and Missy were in the living room, watching
Sesame Street
on the set where I’d spent so many hours with
The Late Show.
My eyes flickered over to the fireplace and the brass poker. I couldn’t help that.

“Come on back to the kitchen,” Mrs. Montgomery said.
“The living room’s being occupied by hostile troops.” Her house was shadowless and unthreatening during the day. It could have been anybody’s. There was still a morning pot of coffee on the stove and the smell of burning from the oven. The kitchen table was swirled with grape jelly. “Not one of my organized days,” she said, transferring a pan of black brownies to the sink.

“Let me help—”

“No!” She whirled around and blew a strand of hair out of her eye. “No, I can manage.” We stared at each other for a second before she said, “You didn’t go back to school, did you?”

“Yes, sure. Couldn’t stay home forever.”

“No, I suppose not.”

The conversation was earthbound. And I needed to start home anyway. “I just came by to say I can start sitting again, on Saturday night.”

“I doubt if your mother—”

“I may have a battle there, but—”

“Don’t fight her, Gail,” she said. “I don’t think you should bother.”

“Look, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to be careful.”

“Yes. Well, so have I.” She turned back toward the sink, changed her mind, and came over to sit down across the table from me. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d
want
to baby-sit any more. It never even crossed my mind.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve found somebody else already.”

“In this town? Not with my luck.”

“Well, then.”

“I just don’t think it’s a good idea, Gail,” she said, very fast. “I—I wouldn’t be easy in my mind, about you or the
kids. After—it—happened, I thought it was all my fault. I felt like an absolute ass going out every Saturday night to that club, carefree as a . . . I almost said a young girl. You’re not all that carefree though.”

“Let’s try it again,” I said. “Then if I find out I can’t stand being in this house alone with the kids, and you can’t stand going out and leaving me in charge, then we can call it off.”

She sat there a long time, picking away at a hangnail, letting time pass as if she hadn’t already made up her mind.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I’d just like to forget it. Phil Lawver—I didn’t even mean to mention his name to you—won’t get what’s coming to him. There’ll be no . . . just conclusion to any of this. So what’s left but to just try to forget it?”

“I don’t see how we can.”

“Well, I don’t mean this to sound harsh. But it happened to you. It didn’t happen to me or to . . . Angie or Missy. It’s hard enough to raise two little girls all alone even without reminders all the time of what can happen.”

“Is that what I am? A reminder?”

“Don’t take it personally,” she said. “I wasn’t ready for this conversation, and so I’m saying everything wrong. Let’s just drop it. I appreciate your help in the past, but things are different now.”

What could be more final? When I got to the front door, she told me to wait a minute. I thought she’d changed her mind, but she ran back down the hall to dig in a drawer of the telephone table. She came back holding out a closed fist. I was afraid she was going to try buying me off—severance pay. But she dropped Steve’s green heart into my hand. When I was walking away down the street under the bare branches, I looked at it and the broken chain.

I walked on, not even trying to see things from Mrs. Montgomery’s viewpoint. I was feeling too lost for that. Determined to be so careful all the time, I made it nearly to the end of the block in a daze. I never heard the MG sports car edging up next to the curb, crackling the leaves in the gutter. It was right beside me and braking to a stop when I looked down to see Phil Lawver in the driver’s seat.

“Want a lift home?” he said. It would have been the perfect casual touch if he’d ever offered me a ride before. His pale blue eyes were washed gray by the time of day. My legs tried to buckle. I caught the side of my shoe in a crack of the brick sidewalk, nearly fell, but didn’t.

Clenching the heart and the chain, I wondered what kind of weapon they’d be. I began walking faster, planning to outdistance a sports car, I guess. The red hood crept forward, pacing me. “Hey, wait a minute, Gail. What’s wrong?”

“I think I can just make it back to Mrs. Montgomery’s,” I said in a pretty stable voice. “She’s at home. She’ll hear me yelling before I get to her door. You remember Mrs. Montgomery’s house, don’t you? It’s just back there.”

“What’s all this about Mrs. Montgomery?” he said in a sensible voice. I forced myself to look at him. His arm in the suede sleeve was resting along the low window. He was guiding the steering wheel with a couple of careless fingers. His blond hair was in shadow, but it looked damp at the ends.

If anybody says or does anything you don’t like, yell bloody murder
, the lawyer had said. Shall I yell now, I wondered, scream bloody murder into the late afternoon air without a soul in sight? Shall I bring all the housewives defrosting dinners to their small-paned windows? What if you yell and nobody cares? I could picture myself in the distance, screaming my heart out there on the sidewalk, while that nice-looking Lawver boy sat astonished in his sports car.

“Keep away from me, Phil,” I said. “I don’t think you understand . . . anything. So just keep away.”

“I didn’t realize.” He looked up at me as the car drifted along. “I just didn’t realize you were that interested in me. You know Alison and I have this thing going. I can’t let anything . . . get in the way of that. Surely you understand.”

I crossed the intersection, reeling from that. No traffic unfortunately. Nothing stirred. Even the songbirds had gone south.

“You don’t remember, do you? You don’t remember the other night,” I said, watching where I walked, wondering if that car door might suddenly swing open.

“Which other night?” Phil asked. He was trying to be patient again.

“You don’t remember that you raped me.”

The wire wheels crinkled through the leaves. “Rape?” he said. “I’d say that was fairly unlikely from both our points of view. I don’t have to . . . rape . . . anybody, and you, well, you’re pretty open-minded.”

“Don’t ever come near me again, Phil. I’ve already seen a law— Just don’t ever come near me again.” Was I repeating myself? Beginning to babble?

“I can’t think why I’d want to,” he said. There was just the slightest edge in his voice, cutting the cool.

We were coming up to old Mr. Wertheimer’s house. The property nobody could ever run across when we were kids, because Mr. Wertheimer had a rock garden out in front with a little flagstone path winding in and out of the marble Cupids and moss roses. Every rock carefully in place.

My hand surprised me by sweeping down and grabbing up one of the border rocks. It was whitewashed, the size of a baseball, heavy as a boulder. The heart and the chain I was clutching fell into the little muddy bowl of earth beneath it.

I whirled around and brought the rock down on the hood of Phil’s car. The explosion of stone against smooth sheet metal. The hood latch sprang open. My red reflection creased. I swung the rock sideways then with a discus thrower’s might. It crashed against the windshield. A star shape of frosted glass appeared between me and Phil’s face. His mouth was open in surprise.

He must have hit the accelerator. The MG jumped forward, and I leapt back, teetering on the curb. He didn’t brake for the next corner. The car was a red blur in the gray distance before I caught my breath.

I walked on then. My fingers felt mashed. I’d broken my nails on the car hood. But there was still a lot of fight in me. If that MG had cruised by again, I could have sent the rock through the side window. Oh, I could have done a lot of things. I could have killed.

Just knowing that helped. Knowing I could give Phil Lawver a little hell, even if that only meant scratching his surfaces. Even that much would have been hell for him.

I knew all about Phil then. I felt drunk with all the knowledge. I knew he was missing an important, human
part. Call it insanity if you feel like making excuses for him. He thought everything belonged to him and that he could do no wrong. Nobody had ever told him otherwise. At that moment it didn’t even chill me to realize how many people there are like that in this world.

But still he was a cripple. When he finally forced himself to prove his virility, he had to stage a horror show to bring it off. Even knocking me out had helped to preserve his privacy.

How scared he must be. How scared he’d always be, always having to forget things he couldn’t stand to remember. It was a life sentence, in solitary confinement. He’d be in his house alone, no matter who was there with him.

What can I say? That thinking this made me feel better? No, but it got me through the moment. I carried the rock from Mr. Wertheimer’s garden all the way home, not thinking about the moments to come.

*   *   *

On Saturday night Mother and Dad and I drove through a winterish rain to the Pilgrim Theatre to see the Dovima Malevich Film Festival. The three of us. I hadn’t been to a show with both my parents since—when, grade school? Something Disney at Radio City. That little family of ours, once three free spirits, hardly connecting, was still in a huddle. The lights were down when we stumbled in to find three seats together. But I was past caring about being seen out on a weekend night chaperoned by my parents. There weren’t any alternatives anyway.

They showed the film we’d seen at school. The thief in the French garden one. And two others a lot like it except that one was a desert picture and the other was set in
wartime—World War I, I guess. The men all wore stiff-billed hats and wrappings around their legs. They went to a bombed-out nightclub where Madam Malevich was a dancer, shedding long-fringed shawls and spinning to silent music. She was always the same. Sinuous, young, with worldly eyes working the camera, impossibly slim. She flickered at us in the darkness, and the fairly unruly crowd would lapse into silences, captured by her over and over.