Are You in the House Alone? Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 feeling in that kitchen. They were respectful toward him. That’s the only word I can think of. His dad was a greatbig 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’tmuch 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