Are You in the House Alone? Read Free Page B

heftier days was still taped to the refrigerator door. A curling note lettered in bold black:
    A moment on the lips—
    Forever on the hips
    Right after her divorce she put on a lot of weight. But then she pulled herself together when she joined the Oldfield Village Singles and Previously Marrieds Club. It altered her life, she said. I sat for her every Saturday night, when the club held its parties.
    Losing a skirmish with my conscience, I took the last can of Diet-Rite and flipped off the top. I was just walking back through the hall past the phone when it rang. I answered, but no one spoke at the other end.
    When I try to remember, now that I know who it was, I wonder if there was any sound. I may have heard breathing, or it may have been my own. Every time I said hello, my voice sounded more and more hollow.
    Finally I hung up, and the hellos echoed through the house. I’d just made it back to the living room when the phone rang again. I ran back. But again there was the same tense silence at the other end.
    I said hello only once and then felt that tightness in the throat for the first time: the feeling that I was confronting a silent, voiceless, faceless stranger. Somebody reaching out for me.
    I stood there in the dimness, pressing the receiver intomy ear. The click came when someone, somewhere, hung up.
    The baby sitter’s best defense is calm. Whenever I felt a wave of nervousness or even uncertainty, I had the habit of reaching for the small green stone carved in the heart shape. I’d bought a gold chain for it and was never without it. Steve had given it to me for my sixteenth birthday in the spring. I stood there in the hallway with one hand on the receiver and the other working the little stone heart like a worry bead. And then, automatically, I dialed Steve’s number.
    He answered in the middle of the first ring.
    “Home?” he said.
    “No. I’m still at Mrs. Montgomery’s.”
    “What’s happening?”
    “Nothing . . . What are you doing?”
    “Reading and listening to a tape.”
    “What is it?”
    “As a matter of fact, it’s Rubenstein playing the Chopin Concerto Number One, backed up by the London Symphony, conducted by Skrowaczewski,” Steve said like an FM radio announcer.
    “Turn it up so I can hear it.” I wondered why I’d asked that.
    The music welled up in the background. “Have you freaked out over Skrowaczewski?” he said. We went on talking over the Chopin sound. I don’t know what we said, but his voice pulled me away from the reason I’d called.
    I always liked talking to Steve away from home because I sometimes thought my mother listened on her extension. But I didn’t call him every time I baby-sat because of
his
mother. And in Oldfield Village, having a boy over when you’re sitting is kind of a taboo. I hadn’t broken it yet.
    We were running short of conversation when he said, “Gail, you were practically as smooth as Alison last night at Lord and Lady Lawver’s. You sound different tonight. You okay?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s good. I miss you.” He said that fast. I had a vision of his family sitting in front of the TV one room away, maybe not completely absorbed in
I Wake Up Screaming.
There was a silent moment then, when we both thought of the night before, the rustle from the trees across the lake. The conversation trailed off.
    Later I was sitting in the living room, concentrating on the clock. The minute hand was pushing twelve thirty, and I was running the little green heart up and down the gold chain. The warm stone whispered over the tiny links.
    Steve had given me my birthday present at school. He’d dropped the little white box on my tray in the cafeteria. I hadn’t even noticed it before I lifted the milk carton.
    Between the layers of cotton the heart was wrapped in a tube of graph paper, like an ancient scroll. A Steve touch. On the scroll he’d printed a quotation with little flourishes:
    My heart is turn’d to stone: I strike
    it, and it