Are You in the House Alone? Read Online Free PDF

pretty enough. And always in her usual kind of easy-going haste. She’d go to Yale or to its nearest women’s college and then come back to marry Phil and be the queen of the PTA.
    “Good thing we’ve got drama first period,” she said, throwing and grabbing at her books. “I can get the geometry finished. Did you get it?”
    “All but the last three problems.”
    “Shoot. Those are the ones I don’t have.”
    And then Alison and I observed a moment of silence. Sonia Slanek was coming to school. That was her first year there—her only year. So we’d had just six weeks to study her. The Slaneks lived in a converted barn out on the Woodbury Road. Her father was a sculptor, with his studio in the haymow. People said they’d come from the SoHo district of New York where artists have their lofts. I think as far as Sonia was concerned, she was still back there.
    She lived in her own private world, and you could read that much in her eyes, which were fixed and just slightly out of focus. None of us had ever seen anything like her. It was as if she dedicated her whole life to creating a work of very weird modern art—bizarre and beautiful in a way. And the art object was herself.
    Her hair was auburn—about the color of mine. But every day it was different, rolled sometimes in a flattened mushroom shape or pompadoured like the 1940s.
    Without the makeup, her face might have been relatively blah. It was heart-shaped, and the cleft in her chin was its only landmark without the cosmetics. On that Monday morning her eyelids were wonderfully shaded in pale peacock blue. Penciled in just beyond the ends of her plucked eyebrows were the suggestions of butterfly wings. Her mouth was very small, and she’d reshaped it in subtle brown lipstick with little Cupid’s-bow points at the center of her upper lip.
    She was wearing a black monkey-fur jacket with three-quarter sleeves. It was obviously a Women’s Exchange rummage sale item. But burnished, even combed, to perfection. It had never looked that good on the monkey. She wore long black kid gloves, the kind grand matrons wear in old movies. And on one wrist, over the glove, a single, perfectly plain ivory bracelet.
    Her slacks were velvet printed in art deco pyramids and rainbows, all colors, and enormously belled at the bottom. The cuffs swished around a pair of lemon yellow shoes with three-inch platforms. She walked directly down the center of the hall, swaying slightly. I don’t suppose she even had a locker. She never carried books. Whenever she took notes in a class, she drew out a small stenographic pad from her needlepoint purse and wrote in it with a pen that had a long tassel on it.
    “It’s kitsch,” Alison said, “but she’s certainly got it all together.”
    The bell rang then, and we darted off to meet the second extreme character of the day.
    After Sonia, if there’s such a thing as a bright spot in a school day, it was the class presided over by a womannamed Dovima Malevich. Most of the seniors and as many of us juniors as could get in rioted to take her class. She was perfectly capable of saying, “Call me Madam,” and she said she was Russian. Her accent came and went. But there were no other Russians around Oldfield Village to challenge her claim.
    She had a hawk’s head perched on a pigeon’s body. Her hair seemed to be painted on in black lacquer with a wide white center part. Even adults regarded her as elderly. She had to be well past seventy-five, they said. The only reason she had the teaching job was that she’d been a friend of the late senior Mrs. Lawver, who’d run the school board like Catherine the Great.
    The senior Mrs. Lawver was in the ground, but Madam Malevich taught on, in defiance of the Connecticut retirement laws. “I haf bin in for small talk wiz the principal,” she’d sometimes say at the beginning of class when her accent was heaviest. “And we haf come to another of our unnerstandings.”
    This meant that the