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

principal had again invited her to retire, and she’d again declined the invitation. To us, the principal was a myth because he never came out of his office. To Madam Malevich he was a joke. He was young enough to be her son, but I suppose she just planned to outlive him. Maybe she will.
    Drama was an elective. Still, we turned our schedules inside out to get in her class. It was known as an easy A when Madam Malevich bothered to record the grades. But more than that, she seemed to fill a hole in our neat, set lives. She didn’t teach drama as a subject. She
was
the drama, and to her the world really was a stage.
    She’d never been known to mount a student production. “I haf no time for amateurs. Young persons truly innerestedin a theatrical career do not piddle their time away in Oldfield Village,” she said more than once. “If they are at school at all, they are attending the High School for Performing Arts in New York City and going for auditions and open calls in their free time.
    “And what are
you
doing in your bounteous free time?” she would ask, scanning the class with a cobra’s eye. “Malevich will tell you! Making puppy’s eyes at one another at Shakey’s Pitzah Parlor and Friendly’s Ice Cream Store and volfing Big Macs in parking lots and making the road to Powdermill Lake perilous wiz your fresh new drivers’ licenses!”
    This stinging attack on our life style brought forth satisfied grins from all over the room. What other teacher even recognized that we had a life style?
    “Or you, Barnie Whitman,” she said that Monday morning, warming up. “Your free time is gobbled up tuning that Pinto car of yours.” She pointed an arthritic, bright-nailed finger at his slouching form. Barnie, a townie, ducked his head and smiled proudly at his grease-blackened paws.
    “My God, is a piece of junk of the Ford Motor Company a fine Stradivarius violin to be tuned wiz such delicacy?”
    Her eye swept over Sonia, but she never put her on the spot. Of course, she couldn’t miss her. Maybe Sonia’s stage makeup and monkey fur reminded Madam Malevich of an earlier, more glamourous age. Or maybe Sonia was a relief from the safe sameness of the rest of us. Later I thought about that and wonder still.
    “Alison Bremer, is that geometry you do in your lap? Put it avay. Mathematics? No. If you haf talents, they lie elsewhere.” And then her eyes rose halfway up her forehead, and they seemed to embrace the whole room, waiting withprofessional timing for our reaction. Giggles, more grins, and even applause because we knew this was a performance: Malevich without malice.
    We knew, too, that, crackpot though she was, she observed us with a sharp eye, in between bouts of vagueness. Most of the kids thought she was actually crazy, but I never did.
    And always before her monologue rambled on to the theater or film-making, she’d hit us with the one-liner to bring us down in a heap: “My God, all so young and so lifeless. At your age already I vas
somebody
!”

CHAPTER
Four
    “Yes, but who?” Steve said at lunch. “You’re always reporting that she was somebody, but who?”
    “How do I know?” I said. “She doesn’t dwell on the past like most old people do. I suppose she was an actress or something.”
    “Are you interested in drama, and does she teach any?”
    “Not much—to both questions.”
    “Then why waste your time on that joke course?” Steve was in one of his dark, Lord Byron moods, and I was wishing lunch was over because there was no talking him out of them. He took Advanced Placement History while I was being entertained by Madam Malevich. And he was always getting at me about not being bustass enough.
    “I doubt that I qualify for AP History, for one thing,” I said, skidding deeper into the argument. “And anyway, ‘History is little else than a picture of human crimes and misfortunes.’”
    “Where did you dig up Voltaire to throw at me?” he asked, half