A Place Apart

by Paula Fox

  Hugh placed his palms together as though he was praying, then he walked over to me. He’d grown a bit, I guess, not much, I was very conscious of the two inches I’d gained since the spring.

  His skin was a lovely olive color.

  “Dear Bird,” he said, and he kissed my cheek the way grownups have kissed me.

  “I love the wallet,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

  He took hold of my hand lightly, and I was startled.

  “I thought of you all the time I was in Italy,” he said. “There was a little boat I rode that went from Bellagio and traveled up Lake Como, almost all the way into Switzerland, and it stopped at the villages at the feet of the great mountains. I wished you were along. What a wonderful time we could have had!”

  “Didn’t you have a wonderful time?” I asked. I heard the sharpness in my voice, and I couldn’t think why it was there.

  “I always went by myself,” he went on, not answering me, “and that’s the way it was everywhere. Jeremy was learning about Italian wine, and my mother was keeping watch over him. They weren’t interested in spending hours on seedy little boats.”

  He let go of my hand. My palm was damp, but his had been cool. I looked at him. He wasn’t really going to tell me anything. Whatever had happened, whatever he had felt about it, would stay buried in him. I would hear only what he chose to tell me.

  The time he had talked about the story his father had drawn for him with crayons that night in his old house when the rain fell so heavily, I had understood him. And when we’d flung sticks and stones at rotten Harry in the woods, I had understood something—I’m not sure what—but something.

  Yet, I was so glad to see him. Now the fun would begin! That’s how he made me feel. That something unexpected and wonderful might happen. Any time. Any day.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  One evening during the first week of school, I was sitting on my bed, staring at the books I’d gotten that day for the new term. The history book was used. I could tell it had gone through a lot of hands. There were mustaches drawn on every person in every picture, even on people who already had mustaches—even on the bowsprit of a nineteenth-century sailing ship. I picked up a thin volume of French short stories. It opened stiffly and smelled of new paper. I happened to glance up then at a poster Ma had had framed for me that hung on the wall over my bed. It was a reproduction of a painting called The Peaceable Kingdom. On the glass that covered it was a reflection of my room: the orange glow of my lamp, a shadowy face that was my face. I sat absolutely still, gazing at that other girl. If it was my room, and I was that girl, I thought, I’d be happy. I looked at my real room and at my real hands holding the little French book of tales, which was opened to a drawing of a windmill. Moulin, I whispered, and it was as though a spell had been broken.

  I felt slightly dizzy and very puzzled. I looked up at the poster again. All I could see was a blurred reflection, and when I tried, in my imagination, to bring back the room and the girl I had seen, it was like grasping a wave in the sea. I heard the phone ring. Ma came to my door.

  “Your friend is calling,” she said. “Not Elizabeth,” she added. She needn’t have. I knew from her voice that it was Hugh.

  He spoke to me quickly. It was like listening to a telegram. No jokes, no stories. The school newspaper would publish the first scene of my play, he said. I must come to the first meeting of the Drama Club, because the play would be discussed by its members. He had already met with two members, and there would be a good deal to talk about. His voice was as smooth and cold as the touch of marble. Make ten copies of the play, he ordered, nine for the Drama Club and one for the newspaper. The public library had a copying machine, he said.

  “You sound like a telegram,” I said.

  “What!” he said, and the word was like a shot.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  And then he hung up.

  I dropped the phone back on its cradle without looking, and it missed and fell to the floor, along with pencils and address book and a scratch pad. Everything lay there in a tangle, the phone buzzing like a June bug when you turn it on its back.

  “Tory?” Ma questioned.

  I picked up everything and put it back. “There’s just too much on the table,” I said. “Why do we always pile up everything on little tables?” I went to the window and stared out at the street. I wasn’t looking at anything. I was dismayed. It was not the first time Hugh had acted as though he were a million miles away. But when that had happened before, although it had made me nervous and unsure, I had liked it, too. It had made him seem mysterious and private, and I often wanted to be that way myself. This was the first time he had spoken to me like a drill sergeant in a movie.

  “Are you okay?” Ma asked.

  “Yes. No,” I said.

  “Shall we take a little walk?”

  I nodded. I was ready to do anything that might take me away from my thoughts.

  It was a warm evening. Ma and I went down Autumn Street, then to Main Street. Except for the Mill, everything was shut for the night. Light streamed onto the sidewalk from houses, and I could see people walking around their rooms, or sitting down in front of the gray squares of their television sets. Looking at them from the outside, I thought of how you could hardly guess what went on inside other people’s lives. I wondered if what I’d seen in my room, in the glass of the painting, was the outside and inside of my own life. By the time Ma and I got back home, I felt better, and we were talking in an ordinary way. She told me she’d decided what she was going to do after we moved to Boston. She had heard of a baccalaureate nursing program that took two years. She liked the idea of being a nurse, she said. She felt it was something she would be able to do.

  “After you get married?” I asked.

  “At the same time,” she said.

  Her voice was as sharp as mine had been. I wondered if I’d ever feel calm when Lawrence Grady was the subject between us, directly or indirectly. Why didn’t Ma try to make me feel less restless and cranky about him? She sat there, looking as stubborn as I felt. What was she being so stubborn about?

  One day, last summer, Elizabeth and I had decided to tell only the truth for six hours. I found out that the truth was not just saying what you felt every minute. It was trying to discover what you did feel that made it so difficult; it was trying to think about what you were really thinking. We had ended up, Elizabeth and I, absolutely silent.

  If I said I hated Lawrence, would that be true? No. Well, then? A thick, smoky cloud drifted through my brain. I tried to find a shape in it the way I’ve tried to see shapes in summer clouds. But the cloud in my mind was not an elephant, or a baby’s foot, or a great fish eating up the sunlight. It was a cloud hiding the shape of something else.

  “Hold out your hand,” Ma said. I did. She put a peeled tangerine on it. I stared at it for a while, then I began to eat it.

  “Good?” she asked.

  “Good and gone,” I answered, swallowing the last piece. And with that, the dark cloud lifted, and I knew what I’d been thinking about behind it. The past, and life with Papa. Good and gone.

  There were some surprises in the first month of school. I was put into an ordinary math class that was taught by a new teacher, Mr. Victor. He wasn’t ordinary. In our first class, Mr. Victor, as thin as a plank, stood up before us and imitated a digital computer. His eyes were large and round and magnified by thick glasses. By shutting one eye, or the other, or by opening both at the same time, he could perhaps suggest to us, he said, the meaning of the term “binomial.” He suddenly jumped from the front of his desk to the side of it “A quantum leap,” he said. He made a pile of paper clips and another of rubber bands, then a combination of the two. “Sets,” he said. “The set of clips, the set of rubber bands, and the intersecting set of clips and bands.” He asked a boy how many lions were in the room. “None,” replied the boy. “That,” Mr. Victor cried, “is the empty set. And we are going to study se
t theory.”

  After a few weeks with Mr. Victor, I began to see the possibility that there was more to math than the torture of X and Y. The surprise was that for the first time I could remember—all the way back to the first grade and the papers I had handed in with so many erasures they looked like the abominable snowman had been nesting in them—I wasn’t scared to walk into class.

  The next surprise was to see my own writing, signed with my name, in the first issue of the school paper. I felt proud and embarrassed at the same time—like an intersecting set. The more I read over what I’d written, and I read it a good deal in my room with the door closed, the more embarrassed I felt. But when I was in school and the kids said, “You’re in the paper,” I felt proud, even though I knew some of them hadn’t read what I’d written.

  The other surprise was a new sophomore named Tom Kyle.

  I was on my way to the Drama Club when I met him. I was feeling important because of a silly thing—being excused from gym. I was alone in the hall, or thought I was, and I circled and skipped down toward the room where the club was meeting. Someone touched one of my outstretched arms. I stopped dead in my tracks. It was a boy I hadn’t seen before.

  “Listen,” he began. I listened, feeling the redness on my face slowly subside. “I’ve been wandering around the halls for hours! Do you happen to know the room where the Drama Club meets?”

  “I’m going there,” I said.

  “I was getting hysterical,” he said as we walked along together. He didn’t sound hysterical. It was the first thing I noticed about him, the way his voice went along in a straight line, like a train crossing a prairie. The second thing I noticed was his clothes. Most everyone in school wore jeans and flannel shirts, but theirs were soft and faded and crumpled, and the jeans and shirt Tom Kyle was wearing looked the way they do the minute after you take the pins and price tags off them. I thought of starch. Tom looked permanently starched.

  I asked him if he was new this year, and he answered yes. I asked him his name, and he told me that. Nothing more.

  In the room where the club met, there were seven or eight people sitting in a circle on straight-backed chairs. Hugh was there, next to an empty chair. He pointed to it. I started forward. But he was not pointing to it for me. It was Tom Kyle who slipped quickly in front of me and went to sit in it. Hugh smiled at me and waved me to another chair.

  “Here’s the author,” he said. At once he turned to Tom and they began to whisper together. I noticed that Tom was small and neat like Hugh, but unlike Hugh, he had long sideburns and they didn’t seem to go with the rest of him.

  I was sitting next to Lucille Groome, a senior I’d seen in school last year but whom I’d never paid any attention to. She had a long face and reddish hair and she seemed to coil about herself; her legs twisted around each other, and her arms were entwined, and even her fingers were curled. I wondered if she was older than the other seniors. She acted as though she thought she was.

  In the fifty minutes I sat there, Lucille and Hugh and Tom did all the talking. When the time was up and we had to go to our classes, I didn’t feel important any more. I threw my gym excuse into the first wastebasket I came across. I tried to get through French class by staring fixedly at my textbook, hoping the teacher wouldn’t call on me. I didn’t think I’d be able to answer in English, much less in French.

  The Drama Club had taken my play apart the way Ma peeled tangerines. How could there be anything left of it? Lucille Groome had said she felt it needed a little romance, and I had protested that it was about a death, and she had said that didn’t mean there couldn’t be romance, pronouncing that word as if she was jeering at it Hugh listened to her, and Tom Kyle listened to him as though there was no one else in the room. The awful thing was that the other people sat there like store dummies and didn’t say anything at all. The three talkers spoke about new scenes I’d have to write; the play was far too short, they agreed; the mother was out, definitely out, and the aunt who had lived in Sicily was definitely in—

  “What aunt?” I protested.

  “A figure of mystery,” Hugh said to Tom.

  “Absolutely!” agreed Tom Kyle excitedly.

  Lucille Groome looked at me and coiled. “You’re a cute writer,” she said. “But the play needs jazzing up. Right?”

  “Right!” exclaimed Hugh.

  “Right!” echoed Tom.

  Even if Hugh had thought all those things that he had said about the play in a voice as cold as a winter wind, it was me he had deserted. He hadn’t even defended me against the new boy, Tom Kyle, or that silly girl! Can anyone let you down? Would Elizabeth or Jed act as if I weren’t real someday? Would Ma? No. Not Ma. I sat there, frozen, staring at the words in the book that could have been written in Persian for all that I understood their meaning. The play! The play! How I hated it this moment! I’d only brought it to the club because Hugh had asked me to. I felt betrayed. It was like being seasick. And the worst of it was that I’d been part of the betrayal.

  The bell rang. I got up and left the room without speaking to anyone.

  I stopped by Elizabeth’s house that afternoon, and while she and I were sitting in the kitchen eating crackers and cheese, Mrs. Marx came in and asked us if we’d found anything to eat, then drifted out.

  “Those pills she takes make her dopey,” she said. She looked so somber, so unhappy, my own trouble seemed less important. I couldn’t put it aside for long, though, so I told her what had happened.

  “All you have to do, Tory, is to say they can’t have what you’ve written. Then take that play and bury it somewhere. It’s been trouble for you since Hugh got hold of it. Take it away from him It’s simple!”

  That’s just what it wasn’t. Simple. The idea of telling Hugh that I couldn’t write any more, that I was through with the whole thing, made me feel ill. If only I’d never begun it!

  “It’s Hugh and what he’ll think that worries you, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “Hugh!” Elizabeth suddenly exploded. Her face crinkled up and she looked fierce.

  “He said he liked it so much, he said—”

  “Said!” she interrupted. “Hugh would say anything. But Hugh wouldn’t have to mean what he says.”

  “But he did mean it!” I insisted. “You don’t understand. You’re tangling everything up because you don’t like him.”

  “I’ve known him since the first grade,” she said. “He’s always been a fake—he just gets better at it. People like Hugh only want to look different from everyone else—on the outside. Inside, Hugh’s a hundred times greedier and meaner than anyone I know! I still remember what he did when we were both in third grade and I brought in some cupcakes for a class birthday party. When no one was looking, he ate four of them. But the awful thing was, he took bites out of all the rest of them! Then he said I’d given them to him!”

  I started to laugh, but I could hear my laughter and it was choked and angry.

  “Lucille Groome told me I was a cute writer,” I said, and I kept on laughing like a fool.

  “In the seventh grade Lucille Groome had a crush on Mel Mellers!” Elizabeth said.

  I fell onto the table, blowing cracker crumbs all over the floor.

  “Can you imagine?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Yes,” I said weakly.

  “You go see Mr. Tate tomorrow and call the whole thing off,” she said.

  “I can’t yet,” I said, thinking the Drama Club would call the whole thing off for me if things went on as they had started that day.

  “Hugh is smart,” I said suddenly, surprising myself.

  “Being smart isn’t everything,” Elizabeth said sadly. “My mother was smart.”

  On my way home, I thought how what Elizabeth had said, the advice she had given me, didn’t match up with the trouble I had. Maybe advice was often like that—a key to a door, but not the door you were locked behind.

  Old Mr. Thames called out to me just before I went up the p
ath to the house.

  “I’ve lost Benny again,” he told me.

  “Benny always comes home,” I said, noticing that Mr. Thames was carrying a flashlight although it was still broad daylight.

  “He’s been gone all day,” he said, and he sighed. “That cat drives me mad,” he said. Benny drove quite a few people mad. He was always walking into people’s houses and curling up in a bed like Goldilocks. I had found him, several times, in my bed, his head on my pillow like a person’s, a big orange and white cat head, his whiskers whiffling as he slept.

  At that moment, Benny crawled out from Mr. Thames’s hedge.

  “You devil!” cried Mr. Thames.

  Benny made a figure eight out of himself, then raced into the house through the open door. Mr. Thames grinned. “A darling cat,” he said, “but unreliable. Thanks, Victoria. I’d hate to lose him.”

  Unreliable, I thought to myself. Everything was unreliable.

  A little after nine o’clock that evening, Hugh telephoned.

  “Have you recovered from the critics?” he asked. I listened intently to his voice. It was confidential. It seemed to say that there were just two of us who mattered, two of us being private. For the first time, I felt outside of our conversation. I felt wary.

  “Do you really agree with that girl?” I asked loudly. “What was she talking about?”

  “Lucille?” he asked. “Lucille is a good actress. She’s always been in the school plays. I don’t completely agree with her. But there was something to it. You and I know there isn’t much plot to the play. That’s all she meant.”

  I drew two bicycle wheels on the pad next to the phone.

  “Victoria? If you’re going to write, you have to get used to criticism,” he said.

  “I can’t make the play longer. I don’t want to,” I said.