A Place Apart (15 page)

“I couldn't help it,” Tom said, sitting down next to Hugh. “I had to clean up something in the science lab—Edsey was standing over me like a vampire. God! I was going crazy! But she wouldn't let me go. Sorry.”

Tweedledum and Tweedledee, I thought, looking at the two of them, and I've been their rattle. Something unfroze in me, and something else flew out of my mind—perhaps, at last, that hope that things could be different, could be the way they once were. It was easy now for me to say what I wanted to say.

“You didn't have to hurry for me,” I said. “I've already told Hugh you'll have to find another play.”

Tom looked at Hugh as though he was waiting for important information.

“I'm going,” I said.

“Then go,” said Hugh, his head bent down, one hand flat and still on the table.

Tom looked blank. As I stood and picked up my mittens, he started to fiddle with the metal napkin container. He said, “What a tacky place! This is empty again.”

I walked out of the Mill without looking back.

I got to school the next morning earlier than I ever had. A few kids were already there. Seventh- or eighth-graders, breathing out vapor in the cold, their books piled up on the steps. I wondered what thoughts were hidden under their hats. The three boys stood apart, and one punched another on the arm as though in slow motion. The two girls were huddled on the steps. As I passed them, one of the girls drew off a glove and showed the other her fingernails, which were painted a dark red. They both smiled dreamily. It was an odd world.

Mr. Tate was in his classroom looking through some papers.

He looked grumpy when he saw me, and I felt a flash of sympathy for him. I knew how often I just wanted to sit by myself in my room and not have someone walk in and talk at me.

“Can I speak to you, Mr. Tate?” I asked.

“Help yourself,” he said.

“I don't want my play to be used for the graduation program,” I said.

“Your play? You mean those scenes you wrote last term?”

“I told Hugh Todd, so I thought I'd better tell you.”

“We haven't decided yet about a play,” he said.

“I thought Hugh had spoken to you …”

“He did say something. But I believe he intended—or, at least, I thought he'd intended—to read your scenes for an assembly, the way the Drama Club did
Spoon River Anthology
one year and
A Child's Christmas in Wales
—I believe that was several years ago. I don't think we talked about the program for graduation. In any case, the principal has to be in on that decision, and I do, too.”

I was speechless.

Mr. Tate was staring at me. “Perhaps Hugh, in his enthusiasm for what you'd written, gave you the wrong impression,” he said.

“No!” I cried out. “He told me it was settled!”

“He shouldn't have done that,” Mr. Tate said. “Are you very disappointed?”

I wanted to shout at him that I'd been twice-fooled, and that life was so unfair! But I couldn't say that. The balloon he had pricked had been as much mine as Hugh's. I felt shriveled.

“Victoria?”

“I'm not disappointed,” I croaked. “I couldn't have written a real play. I didn't even want to.”

“You do good work,” he said in a kind voice. “You're a good student.”

I left Mr. Tate and started toward my first class. Down the hall, I saw Hugh and, right behind him, hurrying with quick little steps, Tom Kyle. Ma's friend Zack got two cigars from his daydream. But my hands were empty.

When, a week later, the day before Christmas vacation began, I saw Mr. Tate heading toward the room where the Drama Club met, I knew any question about my scenes would be answered by him. It was over. I didn't have anything more to do.

Ma told me we were going to spend a week in Boston at Uncle Philip's and I was so relieved I nearly felt happy. I didn't want to be around New Oxford for a while.

We cleaned the house from top to bottom and finished up everything in the refrigerator. We wrapped presents and packed our suitcases. Just before Lawrence was due to pick us up to drive us to Boston, I ran over to old Mr. Thames's house with a present for Benny I'd found in a store at the shopping mall. It was a furry ball full of catnip. Benny picked it up at once, and the way he gripped it with his teeth made him look like a cat Father Time. Mr. Thames said I was to have a present, too, and to pick anything I wanted from the things in his living room. I saw a bowl of glass fruit on a table. There were cherries and a plum and a small brown pear with a bright-green glass leaf. My hand went out to it, then I pulled it back and looked uncertainly at Mr. Thames.

“The fruit?” he asked. “Take whatever you like. Now, Tory, I'm so old I say what I mean. Don't be bashful!”

I put the pear on my palm.

“When we first moved to New Oxford, I had a dream about a pear just like this one,” I said.

“It's a Seckel pear,” Mr. Thames said. “It's good luck for you to find a thing you've dreamed about.”

I thanked him, thinking to myself that there were a few things I'd dreamed about that I wouldn't like to run into in daylight.

Ma and Lawrence talked about apartments and heating costs and when we should put our New Oxford house up for sale all the way to Boston, and I was so bored I started pulling at the threads of an old sweater I was wearing, and I nearly had it unraveled by the time we got to the outskirts of the city.

Ma turned around from the front seat and exclaimed, “Tory! What are you doing!”

“Remodeling,” I said. Lawrence glanced back at me and started to laugh.

“Don't encourage her,” Ma said.

I felt grim. But when Uncle Philip opened the door to his apartment, and I saw Jed standing and grinning by the Christmas tree and supper all spread out on the table, I began to feel a touch better.

On Christmas Eve, we went to a midnight church service. When I saw the choirboys, I wondered if Hugh had looked the way they did when he was their age, nine or ten, I guess, good as gold in their black gowns and surplices, holding their music in their grubby small hands. We walked home in the crisp, black night, not talking much, and the next morning, after a huge breakfast, we opened our presents. Elizabeth had given me a silver chain with a silver bird hanging from it. She must have looked in a lot of places to find such a pretty thing.

I put on the new jacket Ma had given me, and Jed and I went out and walked for miles. It was comfortable between us, almost the way it had been years ago when we played in the attic together.

After we got back, I got the anthology of poems Lawrence had given me and began to look at it. A marker fell out, and Lawrence said from the sofa, “I thought you'd like that poem, Tory.” I'd lost the place. He came over and turned the pages and then said, “There.” I looked at the poem. It was by Theodore Roethke, and it was called “My Papa's Waltz.” I felt a little shock and I looked at Lawrence, who had gone back to the sofa and was sitting next to Ma. His glasses had slipped down his nose. He was looking at a newspaper, bending forward under a lamp. I saw there was a lot of gray in his hair. I noticed that he was holding Ma's hand in his own. She was just sitting there, looking drowsy, her eyes half closed. I looked at Jed, who was trying to take apart a puzzle of wood, and then at Uncle Philip, who was reading a cookbook Ma had given him. I felt tearful enough to melt away. Would I ever be able to hang on to a feeling for more than five minutes?

When I got into bed, I read the poem. Even though the father in it was not like mine, the feeling was. I understood that Lawrence was telling me he knew how I felt by pointing out that particular poem. Ma, who shared the guest room with me, said from the other bed, “Did you read it?”

“Yes.”

“It's lovely, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“Tory. It's as hard to be grown-up as to grow up.”

“I know,” I said. It wasn't true. So I said, “It can't be harder.”

Ma didn't speak for a moment. Then she said, “It's amazing what people can make out of this difficult life.”

I turned out my light and she turned out hers. I lay in the dark thinking how Hugh would like that poem. I imagined copying it out for him and leaving it in his locker. I had never written him a note or a letter. I imagined him reading it, and then asking me to have coffee with him, and everything being the way it had been at the beginning. I fell asleep in a daydream of happiness.

It was a nice week. Jed and I went to movies and walked out on a few, and to museums, and one day Lawrence took us to lunch at an Italian restaurant and I drank a glass of Chianti, and things were very merry. One afternoon, Jed and I returned some books to the library for Uncle Philip. Jed had to look up something in a medical dictionary for his schoolwork. We spent the afternoon looking at descriptions of diseases, and by the time we got out of the library, we were shell-shocked. “We'd be dead if we had everything we think we have,” I said. “Do I look like I have a fever?” Jed asked. “Just leprosy,” I said. “Take an aspirin.” On our last night, we all played Monopoly and I cleaned up. I was so triumphant that even Uncle Philip got annoyed with me. “I'm glad you're not my landlord,” he said.

We returned to our cold house on Sunday. Lawrence started a fire in the stove and Ma made us an early supper out of the groceries she'd bought in Boston. There were still a few days before school began. I was sorry I'd cleaned my room so well. I didn't even have any homework to do. The minute we'd driven into New Oxford, all the troubles that seemed to have gone away in Boston came flying back to me like a flock of noisy crows.

I picked up the phone and called Elizabeth.

“I love the necklace,” I said.

“I loved the gloves. Green is my favorite color,” she said.

I thought of Frank Wilson's green sneakers and I made a face at the phone.

“I'm glad you're back,” she said. “Listen, Frank's been working on an old junk car for months and he's got it ready to run. He wants to drive up Mt. Crystal tomorrow evening. Will you come with us? I've only been up to the top in the summer. But at this time of year, you're supposed to be able to see three states and the lights of Boston if it's a clear night.”

I didn't want to go at all, but I felt Elizabeth was trying to include me in her life in some way, and also, I figured I'd better hang on to whatever was left for me in New Oxford.

“I'll ask Ma,” I said, “and I'll call you back in the morning.”

When I went to bed and turned out the light, a ray from the street lamp struck the little glass pear on my bureau, which old Mr. Thames had given me. I remembered Uncle Philip telling me that my pear dream meant I'd have to find my own country. If I had, I thought, most of the population had fled from it.

CHAPTER NINE

It should have been a straightforward question, but when I asked Ma if I could go for a ride with Frank and Elizabeth, I heard my voice and it was wheedling and slick and not straightforward at all. Ma suddenly darted off to the kitchen, saying she'd left something on the stove, and when she came back she was frowning, and she asked me what I had asked her as though it had been a year ago. Why was she being so difficult? I described Frank's car—which I had not seen—and told her what good friends Elizabeth and Frank were. The more I talked, the falser I sounded. Ma was sitting on the sofa, staring at the stove. I went and stood in front of it. Finally, she looked up at me. Her expression was puzzled, but all she said was, “Tory, you can go, but be home by ten.” I grabbed the phone and called Elizabeth. “Why are you whispering?” she asked. I shouted that I'd meet her in ten minutes. Then I hung up and flung on my clothes and got out in a hurry. And when the door closed behind me and I looked down the dark street and felt the cold wind and saw the shut-away, secret look of the houses, I felt on my own and alone and worried.

I was glad that I had told Elizabeth—on an impulse I hadn't given a thought to—that I'd meet them in front of the old movie house. But why? I ran nearly all the way there as though I could leave my confusion behind me on my own doorstep. I slowed down on Main Street and stared into the windows of the bakery where a sleeping cat had curled itself next to a stale-looking loaf of bread. I wished I was asleep, too.

It was fiercely cold and the usual group wasn't hanging around under the marquee. But just in front of it was a parked black car, and I could see Elizabeth and Frank sitting in the front seat. She waved at me through the windshield. My heart skipped a beat; I felt breathless as though I was riding the crest of a high wave and had, all at once, glimpsed the sliding, shifting sand far below.

As I drew close, I could smell fresh paint on the car, which looked like an antique. It was just a black box with wheels and a narrow running board. Frank reached over Elizabeth's shoulder and opened the back door, and I climbed up and in.

“Hello, Vicky,” he said. Elizabeth shot him a look but said nothing. Did he call her Lizzie? I wondered. She looked very sedate, sitting there with her hands folded on her lap.

Frank turned on the ignition. “Takes a while each time,” he said to no one in particular.

“There's Tom Kyle,” Elizabeth said suddenly, as the car coughed and rattled.

He was standing in front of the entrance to the Mill, and the door was closing behind him. I saw him look up and down the street, then wrap his long scarf around his neck. He stamped one foot, then the other, stared up at the sky, then, as his glance fell, he saw us. He smiled faintly in our direction, and the anger I'd seen on his face disappeared as though a hand had smoothed it away. He walked slowly toward us and Elizabeth cranked down her window and called hello.

“Is this a car?” he asked Frank.

“Made by hand,” Frank said, “every inch of it.” He looked slyly at Elizabeth. “Want to come with us?” he asked. “We're going up Mt. Crystal.”