by Richard Peck
“Where did you dig up Voltaire to throw at me?” he asked, half interested.
“Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. I got ready for this argument because we’ve had it before. Does it strike you that we’re fighting more lately and making up less?”
“Not particularly.”
We’d finished eating, and so there was nothing left to do with our hands. I gazed at his. They weren’t a boy’s hands. They were long and tapering and strong. When we argued, I always escaped by thinking of those man’s hands cradling my face, caressing the back of my neck, touching my hair. Weaving imaginary white violets in it, I guess.
“Maybe you have too much drive, and I don’t have enough. Maybe we’re just not suited to each other.” It sounded weirdly like my mother practicing ventriloquism with me as the dummy.
Why couldn’t we just let each other go? It was a first love, and it was cooling. There’d be others, for both of us. I can say that now, I couldn’t then. I’d have bitten off my tongue first.
“Maybe you’re looking for excuses to break up. Keep looking and you’ll find them,” Steve said in a low, acidy voice.
“I’m not looking for anything,” I said, which meant nothing. I was still staring at his hands, but I could feel his brown eyes behind the glasses trained on my face.
“It’s just that I hate seeing you fall in with Alison and the rest of them,” he said.
“But I am one of the rest of them. I’m just another decadent New Yorker who pushed in here and ruined the town for its rightful owners. And as far as Alison’s concerned, she’s my best friend, and believe me I could use one!”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Alison said, suddenly appearing, tray in hand. “I don’t want to butt in, but this sounds like a conversation that could have a sticky end.”
“A slick line, Alison,” Steve said. “And true. Sit down. I have to go to the chem lab before fifth period. You can have my chair. In fact, you’re welcome to it.”
“What’s he going to do in the chem lab in that mood—blow himself up?” Alison murmured to me. She was determined to lighten the mood. As Steve turned away, making a point of not saying anything to me, she said, “Oh Steve, are you coming to the squash match? It’ll be Phil’s moment of glory. He’s planning to murder Exeter.”
First Madam Malevich and now a squash match. In Steve’s view there was no end to our frivolities. “No. I’ve got to help Dad after school and then get in a couple of hours at the library before it closes.”
When he was gone, Alison said, “He’s really bearing down on that I’m-from-a-working-class-family-and-don’t-you-forget-it bit, isn’t he? You’re in for a bumpy road with that guy. He’s sexy, though.”
“What do you know about it?” I said, and we were off, giggling those giggles Steve loathed.
But then, very soberly, Alison said, “Phil’s such a . . . New England puritan. I fantasize about other guys sometimes.”
* * *
On the squash court Phil Lawver was aggressive enough. He wore a leather support glove on his serving hand, and even his practice shots slammed the small black ball in blurring zigzags that hit every wall.
The school has squash mainly to give it tone. We competed with the private schools where it’s very big. A gentleman’s game. And that day we were playing the top two players from Exeter Academy, where they have thirteen courts and the game’s nearly a religion.
Phil’s teammate was another superior townie, Buddy McEvoy. He was short, wiry, and, I thought, creepy. He held the racket lightly in his spidery hand and wore a sweatband. Phil and he were well-practiced partners, bobbing and weaving and never falling over each other. Phil—tall and tense. Buddy—low-slung and loose.
The Exeter boys, still in their warm-up suits, kept giving them worried looks out of the corners of their eyes. The game was slow in starting. Though the referees were already in their positions around the balcony, Coach Foster was still on the court, fiddling with towels and trying to give Phil and Buddy unnecessary last-minute pointers. He was the kind of coach who always wears shorts: a middle-aged adolescent.
Finally it got going, and Oldfield won the serve. Phil, the golden boy, drew his racket back in slow motion, and the ball seemed to explode against the far wall, just above the line. The cube we sat in was deafening with the sound of the ball and the skid of shoes on the floor. My mind wandered. I was there only because of Alison, and her eyes never left Phil.
But he was in another world of frenzied, punishing action. I never have understood the jock mentality. He’d ricochet against the side wall sometimes, knocking the wind out of himself. But only for a split second. Then he’d be back in position, and you could see his grip tightening on the racket. He was all over the court, working Exeter harder and harder.
We took them, three out of five. The coach was on the floor before the first spatter of applause, trying to toss towels over all the players’ necks. Phil twirled his racket on the court and wrenched off the glove. When Buddy McEvoy ran over to throw his arms around him, Phil dodged past to shake the hands of the Exeter players. They looked dazed by the trouncing. But they took the diplomat’s hand. There was a look of well-bred disgust on their faces for coming all the way from New Hampshire to get wiped out by a public school.
Alison sat forward on the bleacher seat, wishing for Phil to look up at her, but he was holding the locker-room door for the other team. Suddenly the court was empty and quiet. After the stands cleared, we strolled out onto the campus, and Alison lit up a Virginia Slim. She cradled one hand under her elbow and blew smoke up into the tree limbs.
She was only half through it when she flipped it away and said, “I’m not going to wait for Phil. He’s foul company after a match. Takes him all evening to unwind.”
That wasn’t what she meant at all. Alison and I could often read each other’s mind. “Who am I trying to kid?” she said. “Phil’s probably dressed and already gone. I could stand under this tree all night, undiscovered. It’s funny about him. He keeps me in one of two places. Half the time I’m on a pedestal. The other half, I’m in a closet. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.”
But we both knew why Alison bothered. All that status and security Phil and his family stood for. And without another word we headed back into school. When we got to our lockers, it was nearly five. The janitors were beginning to push their brooms down the hall. I suppose Alison and I both saw it at the same time. There was a note sticking out of the vent in my locker.
It was painstakingly folded into the smallest possible shape. I pulled it out, and in block letters on the outside was my full name. GAIL OSBURNE.
Let there be no mistake about who this note is for, I thought even before I unfolded it. Somehow, I didn’t want to open it at all. Alison was just behind me, not even pretending to turn her lock.
Inside the neat lettering was black on the page right down to the bottom. Someone had a lot to say. The first line began, “I’M WATCHING YOU, YOU—”
That’s almost the only line I can make myself repeat now. My mind kept rejecting the words. Instead I noticed the even margins, the accurate punctuation. But the words. All the things someone thought I was. And all the things someone planned to do to me, to make me do. Every perverted, sadistic, sick, and sickening ugly act. A twisted porno movie playing in somebody’s brain.
And then at the bottom, in block letters, centered perfectly:
YOU KNOW YOU WANT IT. YOU’LL GET IT. AND YOU WON’T HAVE LONG TO WAIT.
I held onto the page because my hands were frozen. I could hear Alison’s breathing beside my ear, coming in shorter and shorter gasps. I could even hear the bump and slide of the janitors’ brooms. And my heart.
“Stop it!” Alison shrieked. “Stop reading that garbage!” She reached around me and grabbed the paper out of my hand. I think I was grateful. I didn’t want it to be there. “It isn’t—”
“It isn’t what?” I needed to keep hearing a human voice.
“I don’t know what
I mean. It isn’t anybody we know. It couldn’t be.”
“I think it is,” I said. “But it isn’t anybody sane.” Then I started running.
The white picket fences flashed by. And I pounded on over the sidewalks past the solid old trees whose roots made mounds and breaks in the bricks. I was sure if I looked up, I’d see some terrible crack running across the perfect blue dome of the sky. And maybe the spire of the Episcopal church lying on its side.
At the first sight of our house, I had to stop running. I’d outgrown the kid’s privilege of dashing home—with a skinned knee or something—and bursting into tears at the front door.
But when I got there, my eyes and my face and my throat were dry. I felt sick, but the running had helped that too. When I pushed open the front door, I noticed for the first time that unless we were all away, we never kept it locked.
Inside, I tried to let the house calm me. The antique ivory wall paneling that followed the staircase up and curved with it at the landing. The little pewter candlestick lamp on the stand beside the telephone. All orderly, ordinary, usual.
I thought the house was empty, and that seemed right because I’d never felt so alone. But my mother was sitting in the living room. The lights weren’t on, and she was sitting in the leather chair holding a drink. Neither the darkness nor the drink seemed odd at the time.
“Gail, come in here.” It was pointless to try to act like nothing was wrong, but I tried. It’d been a long time since I’d felt like confiding in my mother.
“Look at you,” she said, putting down her drink. “You’re trying not to cry. What has that Steve Pastorini done to you?”
CHAPTER
Five
The tears burned my eyes and probably gleamed in the dark. I’d heard my mother’s one-liners on Steve a hundred times. Now of all times I had to hear the same thing again. It was like being pushed very near the edge of some place deep, possibly bottomless.
She was sitting there in the trim tweed pants outfit she often changed into just before Dad came home. I’d always tried to match her pulled-together coolness, and it was a game neither of us won. Maybe she didn’t seem as . . . untouchable to me as she once had, but we still weren’t getting through to each other.
“Sit down. Something’s wrong, and if it isn’t Steve, who is it?”
“I don’t know.” That much was true, but of course it didn’t sound true. It sounded like I was covering up for Steve. The crazy thought flashed through my mind that I was. But then I wasn’t in control of my thoughts. Except to know that I couldn’t tell my mother about that note. I could feel the filth of it smeared on me. And nobody was going to see that, especially her. Nothing like that could ever possibly have happened to her. What I really wanted was a long, steaming hot bath.
But I wasn’t going to get it. She’d have followed me up the stairs.
“I don’t have anything against Steve—or his family whom we don’t even know. But I don’t see the point in your getting emotionally involved when you so obviously aren’t right for each other.”
“But then you don’t know him very well, do you, Mother?” I was falling right in with her, trying to match that mildly bored, all-knowing New York tone.
“How could I? When he comes to pick you up for a date, he hardly crosses the threshold.”
“He’s not a clod, Mother. He’s sensitive enough to know where he’s not welcome.” Challenging my mother’s hospitality was a cheap shot, and I knew it. The whole point in living in Oldfield Village was to play the social game by the rules. I couldn’t go on with this argument even though it was an escape from what was really on my mind.
“Look, Mother, Steve isn’t the problem right now, as far as I’m concerned. Please, let’s just leave it at that.”
“Gail, have you and Steve— I mean, are you and he—”
“Mother, please don’t ask me that.”
The Volvo honked in the drive: Dad announcing himself. Mother jumped out of her chair and flicked on one of the lamps. She remembered the glass on the table. And in the confidential voice she uses with her friends, she said, “I just felt I had to have a drink this evening for some reason.” She looked right at me, and there wasn’t any coolness in her eyes.
She picked up the drink and almost ran out to the kitchen with it. I heard the ice cubes clinking into the sink just before Dad opened the back door. We didn’t lock that either.
* * *
It was the middle of that week when Mother started a night-school course at Danbury. She didn’t say anything about it until the last minute. I’d supposed she was probably going to take lessons in flower arranging or gourmet cooking, but it was a class in how to sell real estate. She saw I was surprised at that, but it was time for her to leave. She was dropping Dad at a board meeting. He sat on a community planning committee, approving architectural restoration proposals.
As they left, Mother delivered her usual speech. “You won’t have any of your friends over while we’re gone, will you, Gail?”
“No, Mother, I won’t ask Steve over.”
Having the house to myself had always been a luxury. But the minute I was alone, the note seemed to materialize in my hands.
I’M WATCHING YOU, YOU . . .
If I’d only been able to talk it over with someone.
YOU KNOW YOU WANT IT . . .
And Alison knew. But we hadn’t mentioned it. We’d been careful not to. I couldn’t bring it up, and, I supposed, neither could she. Maybe she could understand how dirty it made me feel. I’d left the note in her hands.
But we were the only two who knew. No, that wasn’t right.
YOU’LL GET IT . . .
We were two out of the three who knew. I never considered telling Steve about it.
AND YOU WON’T HAVE LONG TO WAIT . . .
I was up in my room later, just standing around, when the phone rang. It must have been ringing in my head before it even started. It went on and on while I stood with one hand flat and damp against the cool glass top on my dressing table. Then I knew the ringing would never stop until I answered, no matter how long I waited. Someone knew I was in the house by myself. Someone knew where I was all the time.
I went in to Mother and Dad’s room where the extension is and sat down on their bed. There was only the light from the hall slanting in across the bedspread and my hands bunched in my lap.
When I picked up the receiver, I didn’t say anything. The voice at the other end said just one word. I knew what it was and what it meant. You see it written on walls sometimes.
He said it so fast that it could have been anybody’s voice. Then the click. Then the dial tone.
There are twenty-eight windows in our house. I know because I checked the lock on every one of them. I’d turn off the lights at the doors before I went into the rooms. I knew how I’d look, silhouetted against the glow of one window after another. It was as if I could almost be the stranger who might be standing under the trees at the end of the lawn. The stranger who maybe followed me around all four sides of the house, moving from shadow to shadow. Except that he wasn’t a stranger.
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.