A Place Apart (14 page)

“Did he get a job?” I asked.

“Eventually. But not that day.”

“He must have been furious with himself.”

“He was.”

“Does all that have something to do with me?”

“In a way.”

She cut us pieces of leftover carrot cake and made herself a cup of coffee.

“Speaking of cigars—” she said. “I could use one myself.” She looked at me. “But I won't.”

“What has it got to do with me?”

“Have you spoken to Mr. Tate about Hugh's intention to use your play? Has the principal, or any other people in charge of the graduation program, accepted the idea?”

“Well—not really. Hugh just said Mr. Tate could help me with the play—”

“Have you actually talked to Mr. Tate?”

“No,” I answered.

“Tory, you'd better get out of the tobacco store.”

“Hugh thinks—”

“It's Hugh's dream, not yours, and from what you've told me, it's not anyone else's either.”

“It's real to him,” I said.

“Perhaps it is. But he can't make it come true with a playwright who doesn't want to be a playwright. I know how much you like him. I think you went along with him because you were afraid he wouldn't like you if you didn't”

I groaned out loud.

“Do you remember how, after I took you to a concert when you were around eight years old, you found an old evening gown in the attic trunk and you dressed up in it, and when I walked into the living room, there you were, standing by the piano, bowing to an invisible audience? Remember that?”

“I was little then,” I said.

“Anybody, any age, can have daydreams. You know, you did have piano lessons—for a month. You hated them. What you liked was the bowing.”

“Maybe I should have taken up the oboe,” I said.

I felt cheerful then, while we were doing the dishes, and afterward, when we both read in the living room. I felt cheerful until I turned out my bedside lamp. Then I fell down a bottomless hole, my stomach preceding me by several feet. I couldn't speak to Mr. Tate yet. That would be real, all too real. It would end everything. I knew I was clutching at something—hanging on to a thing I couldn't see. I tried different names for it—disappointment, embarrassment, anger. Just before I fell asleep, I knew what it was. Hope. Hope that Hugh had only forgotten me for a little while at the Drama Club meeting, that he had just been businesslike, practical. Hope that everything was still as it had been, that Hugh didn't care about Tom Kyle except for Tom's interest in the Drama Club, that once things were cleared up, we would be as we had been—special friends.

I glimpsed Hugh in the hall in school, and Lucille Groome snaking along, and Tom in his ever-new clothes. Thoughts about them went around in my mind like a hamster's turning wheel. Although I did my schoolwork and my chores at home and helped Ma with the shopping and talked to people at school, I felt frozen and breakable.

One dawn, I woke up and found my blankets all over the floor. I got up and started to clean my room. I stubbed my toes on books and boxes, and I dropped things as soon as I picked them up. I realized there were tears on my face. I hadn't known I was crying. I went and crawled into my wardrobe and curled up like Ma had that time I caught her smoking. I cried until I heard my alarm clock go off. I unwound myself and got dressed. When Papa died, I knew why I was suffering. I hadn't known you could suffer without knowing the reason for it.

Frank Wilson passed me at the entrance to school without a word or a look. That irritated me, and I had an impulse to try to get his interest. The impulse lasted only until I got to my locker. I yanked open the little rusted metal door, and a note from Hugh fell on the floor.

“I miss you,” it said. “I'm thinking about you even though you think I'm not.”

A drawing was enclosed with the note, and he had printed a title under it. It read:
Absence makes the heart grow apples.
At first, it looked like a doodle. Then I made out a lopsided heart with two little trees growing out of it, and each tree had one apple hanging from a crooked branch.

I wanted to shout with happiness. I forgot how only a few hours earlier I'd been sobbing in my wardrobe. Everything was all right. I'd been making up the wrong daydream, like Ma's friend, Zack. I was so happy, I failed a French quiz from thinking about how happy I was and not how irregular French verbs are.

In the afternoon, I tried to write a new scene. I finished two pages. They were awful. Nothing had changed. Nothing would change until I spoke to Mr. Tate.

I saw Mr. Tate four days every week. I was always the last student to leave the class. That was because each time I'd make up my mind to speak to him, I'd change it when he looked at me.

Why was I so afraid of something that had already happened?

I was relieved that we were reading short stories now, not plays, and that our assignments were ordinary, like writing the biography of an imaginary relative, or a comparison of three of the characters we had read about.

I hadn't realized it was almost Thanksgiving until I nearly knocked over two little kids from the first grade who were carrying papier-mâché turkey down the hall.

It was a year since Papa had died. I asked Ma what we were going to do about Thanksgiving. She answered me very carefully, as though she were afraid she would drop her words on the floor. Lawrence and Uncle Philip and Jed were coming to spend the day with us. I didn't want anyone to come, but in the end I was glad they all did. Getting dinner was hard work and I didn't have time to think about much.

The exact day came. Neither Ma nor I spoke about Papa at first. I had a strange, deep feeling of embarrassment. In the late afternoon, we went for a walk, and we hardly spoke. On the way home, I said I wanted to go to the cemetery behind the Congregational Church. When we got there, I showed Ma Letitia Cass's tombstone.

“Maybe it's better if people are buried in the ground,” she said. “Then you have a place where you can visit them.”

“Can you read the Latin?” I asked.

“My Latin is pretty rusty,” she said. She stooped down and ran her fingers over the letters engraved on the stone. I looked down at her, and I wanted to hold on to her forever.

“Little soul … where will you find a home … poor, naked little soul, without your old power of joking …” she said slowly. “I think it goes something like that.” She stood up next to me. “I believe that's what the Emperor Hadrian was supposed to have said on his deathbed.”

We went home and had a supper of leftover turkey, and Ma finally began to speak of Papa, telling me how they had met, and how they had married, and all the places they had lived. I had heard those stories before, but I was glad to hear them again.

“Do you want the turkey wishbone?” she asked me, holding it out.

I shook my head, and she smiled at me and threw the wishbone away.

Elizabeth came to spend the afternoon with me the next Monday. We stopped in the bakery and bought sugar doughnuts and ate them on the way home, the wind blowing the crumbs behind us as we walked. The sky looked full of snow it couldn't let go of.

Elizabeth said hello to Ma, then walked right into my room, and when I followed, she closed the door.

“I have to tell you something,” she said, sitting down on my bed. “I hope you won't get mad.”

I began to get mad.

“Why are you looking like that?”

“Don't tell me not to get mad,” I said.

“You know, you're really hard to get along with these days … up and down … like a roller coaster.”

I didn't say anything.

“Do you feel unhappy about Hugh?” she asked me gently.

“What about him?” I asked in a rough voice.

“I know you don't see much of him now.”

“He's busy.”

“Oh, Tory!”

I went and looked out my window. A few flakes of snow had begun to fall. It had held off a long time. The November days had been cold, so cold I had just rushed from one warm place to another without looking at the sky. Now it was coming, the first snow of winter which brought such a hush and softness to everything, which made the world look so surprising. It only made me sad.

“He's got Tom Kyle following him around now,” Elizabeth said. I turned and looked at her. She was touching her curly hair, then she twisted the little amethyst ring she always wore on her finger. I looked at her cable knee socks, the neat hem of her brown skirt. I thought of the mismatched socks I was wearing, which were hidden by my blue jeans.

“Why shouldn't Tom Kyle follow him around?” I asked stiffly. “I followed him around. Maybe there are things about him that you don't know. Maybe he isn't just a greedy little rat! Maybe he's different.” My throat seemed to be closing up. “Maybe he's interesting!” I gasped. Then I turned my back to her and watched the big snowflakes sliding down the pane. Tom Kyle! I had hated him at first. I had wished savage, cruel things to happen to him. But I didn't hate him any more. When I saw him bending over the drinking fountain in school, bending so carefully as though he were afraid he would wrinkle, it wasn't hatred I felt. It wasn't that he looked pathetic, more like he didn't belong anywhere. It was difficult to hate someone who looked the way you felt.

“I guess I've been unfair about Hugh,” Elizabeth was saying. “I'm sorry. I don't want to be mean to you. That's why I wanted to tell you I went to a movie with Frank Wilson.”

“Why would you want to tell me that?”

“I mean—I went out with Frank. And I'm going out with him again.”

“That's nice.”

“You used to say you couldn't stand him.”

“That's nice, too.”

“Oh, Tory!” she exclaimed for the second time.

Something in me unclenched and I felt slack and indifferent. So I smiled. “Really, you don't have to apologize or explain to me,” I said.

“I'll be fifteen in a few months,” she said.

I burst into laughter. “Congratulations!” I said. She laughed a little, and we went out of my room and drank some cocoa and talked about school and skiing and Mr. Mellers, whose beard now covered most of his face, so he seemed to be looking out of a thicket. Finally she went home.

Ma had gone out. I sat and stared at Elizabeth's empty cup. I didn't care about Frank, yet I felt deserted. Hugh had dropped me, Elizabeth and Frank had taken each other up, and I was just hanging around, waiting.

I went to school feeling determined and grim and lonely; there was some comfort in the work I had to do. It was like a wall behind my back, something to lean on. Elizabeth and I saw each other and went sleigh riding together and she let me borrow her skis. We didn't speak of Frank or Hugh. Even though we still had fun together, a kind of nervous fun, there were moments of silence between us that were painful. I couldn't ask her about Frank Wilson. If it had been someone else she was interested in, I knew I would have asked her everything. When a certain distant look came over her face, I would know she was mooning over Frank, and then I would just want to get away from her.

The meeting of the Drama Club was getting closer. But I didn't do anything, just let it slide. Nothing seemed important.

Hugh came up to me in the hall one day and asked me to meet him at the Mill. My heart didn't lift any more than it does when I have to go to the dentist.

As I walked down the hill, every sound was clear as a bell. I heard the chains on car tires clanking on the icy street. New Oxford was covered with snow, its roofs and trees and yards, and there was ice along the edges of the Matcha River. The Mill was crowded. If I hadn't been feeling the way I was, it might have looked cozy and sweet to me—people coming in there for a little warmth and something hot to drink on a cold winter's day in a New England village that looked like a picture on a calendar. Hugh was already there, waiting for me in a booth.

He stood up as I slid into my seat. I felt suddenly shy and I didn't even say hello, just sat there.

“Take off your snowsuit, Bird,” he said.

“I can't do what you want,” I said. “I've tried. You'll have to find a real play.”

He reached across the table and pulled my mittens off my hands. I let him. We both looked at my hands for a minute. I didn't try to hide them. Then I folded them together and looked straight at him. It seemed a very long time since I had last seen him. There were the beginnings of sideburns growing on his cheeks.

“Your play is real,” he said softly. “I'm going to help you with it.”

The waitress was standing next to the table looking coldly at Hugh.

“What would you like, Victoria?” he asked me.

I shook my head. He ordered coffee. The waitress sighed and went away. He smiled at me steadily, and I turned my head so as not to see that smile, which seemed to me like the glare off a surface of ice.

“You're sulking,” he said at last. “Come on! You're not a sulker.”

“I don't know what I am,” I said. “And neither do you.”

He laughed at that. I thought of how I once was so pleased by his laughter.

“I've missed you,” he said.

How was he able to make it seem that it was my fault he had stopped looking for me?

“It's going to be fine, Birdie,” he said. “You're feeling a little discouraged. It happens to writers.”

“I'm not a writer,” I said.

The coffee came, and he pushed the sugar container across the table to me. “Have your daily two pounds,” he said.

At that moment, the door of the Mill opened and Tom Kyle came in and hurried over, unwrapping a scarf from around his neck.

“You're late,” Hugh said sharply. I almost laughed out loud. This coffee time hadn't been, as I'd imagined, just for Hugh and me. They'd planned to see me together. And Hugh had only been filling in the time until Tom Kyle arrived.