A Place Apart (2 page)

That time was sealed away now. When I thought of it, I always saw myself as a very small child. In those days, my mother and father, and Uncle Philip and Aunt Ethel and Jed, had Sunday dinners together. In the summers, we all went down to Cape Cod for picnics on the beach, and on rainy days, Jed and I used to play in the attic of our house. Even though Jed was three years older than I was, he loved that attic as much as I did—the old trunks with lids so heavy it took both of us to lift them, and boxes full of buttons, and heaps of dusty books, and old postcards covered with spidery handwriting, which we tried to decipher, and a stack of hats we pretended had been brought over by the first colonists.

Then, one day when the turkey wishbone was still drying in a cupboard, and there was still one piece of mince pie left over from Thanksgiving, Papa fell down on the sidewalk on his way to work in the high school where he was the principal, and by the time the ambulance came, they told us later, he was dead from a heart attack.

After that it seemed as if our house got emptier day by day, even though people came to keep us company and brought us food. If I was downstairs, I could feel the emptiness on the top floor, and when I was on the top floor, I was afraid the first floor was being boarded up and would look like those condemned buildings I passed on the way to school.

It rained all through Christmas—at least, that's how I remember it—and Ma and I hardly spoke to each other. Every time I looked at her, she had a cigarette in her mouth. She was getting thinner by the day. When she fixed our supper, she'd stand over the stove and stare down at the frying pan until whatever was in it began to send up a smoke signal.

Time passed and all the minutes hurt. I went back to school, where everyone looked sorry for me, and I took a bath now and then and washed my teeth with plain water once in a while, and Ma and I had our silent meals. One night in late January, when I was fighting with my math homework, Ma said we had to sell the house. Papa had not been practical, she told me, and she sounded angry, as though it was Papa's fault for not knowing he would die so suddenly and when he was still young. Not much insurance, she said, and there were a lot of bills mounting up. She sounded strange and hard, as though she were having a fight with someone and knew she was losing.

I started to cry and to shout. We couldn't sell the house! We just couldn't! Ma went and closed herself into her bedroom, and I wandered through the dark rooms all evening. I climbed up to the attic and turned on the weak light and sat down there among the old books and the dust. I knew there was nothing I could do. Our life was changed. It had been two months, then, since Papa had died. I think I hadn't believed it until that moment in the attic. I hadn't believed he'd died for good.

I stayed with Uncle Philip while Ma looked for a new place to live. In the end, she picked New Oxford; first, because she thought it would be a lot cheaper for us to live out of the city and beyond the suburbs of Boston, and second, because Papa had once gone to a boarding school near the village. But later we found out that the school had gone bankrupt and had been turned into a nursing home for old people.

While I was staying with Uncle Philip, Jed came home from his prep school on the weekend. From the way he acted with me, it was hard to believe we'd ever played together and been good friends as well as cousins. That first night, we had an argument about which television program to watch, and it ended with Jed throwing a book—not exactly at me, but in my direction. My uncle sent him to his room. Jed gave me a foul look as he left, and I felt a mean laugh rising up in me. A hint of it must have showed on my face because Uncle Philip looked at me sternly.

“You remind him, Tory,” he said.

“Of what?” I asked, but I knew what he was going to say next. And he did.

“Of his mother's death.”

“Well—he reminds me, too!” I cried, still feeling mean, but not like laughing. Uncle Philip didn't say anything to me for a long time. I was left alone with my thoughts, which were mostly about how unfair everything was.

The day Ma told me she had found a house on Autumn Street, I felt an odd little thrill. But after we moved into the house on a fierce cold afternoon in February, our old suitcases bulging, the string around the packing boxes frozen stiff, our upright piano sounding terminally out of tune as I hit middle C, and when I saw the rotten planks piled up in the yard near a collapsed shed, and the four miserable stunted apple trees in the front yard, and the yellowed bits of torn lace curtain at the living-room window, the floors covered with gruesome brown linoleum, the iodine-colored cracks in the wall, and the kitchen stove that must have been excavated from the Tigris River after the first flood—my heart sank and the thrill about the name of Autumn Street was all gone.

Somehow, that first evening, we made a meal. We shoveled the grease and rust out of the oven. We walked to a shopping mall on the outskirts of New Oxford and bought pork chops and baking potatoes. And we sat on boxes in the tiny kitchen and ate our supper with our plates on our laps.

“Ma, this is awful!” I said.

“I know it is. But listen! Wait until spring! We can make it better. And the apple trees will bloom. Wait till you see what fresh paint can do!” She put down her fork and lit her hundredth cigarette of the day.

“You won't live to see the trees in bloom,” I said, “if you don't quit hammering at yourself with those coffin nails.”

Ma started to cry, the tears falling onto her plate, her mouth open, her eyes staring at me. I don't ever remember seeing anyone cry like that except a baby. I felt so alarmed, so frightened! Just the way I had once, long ago, when Papa rented a rowboat to take us for a row on some New Hampshire lake, and when we got out a ways the boat began to sink. That time, Papa had carried me ashore.

Suddenly I grabbed one of Ma's cigarettes from the pack on the floor and I stuck it in my mouth.

“Give me a match!” I shouted.

Ma shut her mouth and snatched the cigarette out of mine. She took hold of my hand.

“Listen, Victoria. The Boston house has been sold, so we've got a bit of money in the bank, enough to help fix this place up and keep us going until I figure out what kind of work I can do. The school you'll be going to is small, and you'll get to know everyone. And it's interesting to live in a village, a real village … also, we have a back yard, we didn't have one in Boston—”

“—We didn't have anything in Boston but our beautiful house,” I interrupted.

“We are going to
have
to make it all right here,” she said.

“Who bought our house?” I asked.

“A realty company,” she answered. “They're going to put up an apartment building in our old neighborhood—”

“They're going to knock our house down?” I cried.

She was silent.

I wasn't hungry any more. Finally, I said, “We've burned our ships,” remembering something I had read in a history book about Hernando Cortez when he landed on the shores of Mexico.

“Yes,” she said quietly. Then she smiled at me, and I smiled back. It was as if a fever had dropped, a fever we had both had for the last two months.

“You'd better unpack a few clothes,” she said. “You'll be starting school on Monday.” Then she got up and washed the dishes.

That night, we made up our beds where the moving men had left them. We floated like small barges among the debris of everything we owned, boxes of plates and books and pots and pans, albums of photographs, lamps, a few chairs, and the big table that used to be in our dining room in Boston.

“We've got too much stuff,” I said to Ma.

“We'll have a yard sale,” she replied sleepily.

“Don't smoke in bed,” I said. A pale light from a street lamp washed over the room, and I could see a thin trail of smoke rising from somewhere around Ma's pillow.

“Ma? Remember Pompeii!”

“Always …” Ma murmured. I saw her heave up and put out her cigarette. I listened to her breathing for a while, and the comfort of it carried me off to sleep.

A new regional school was going to be built just outside New Oxford, I heard later, but the one I found myself in Monday morning looked like an old-fashioned railroad station, one made of dull red bricks and with turrets. Somewhere in the middle of it there was a gym, because at various times during the day I could hear the thunk of a basketball.

No one paid me much attention that first morning except the teachers, who made a special effort to point out to me how much I had missed learning by skipping the fall semester. They weren't unfriendly; they just pronounced their words very loudly when they spoke to me. I ate lunch in the cafeteria, which must have been a classroom in the past; there were still a few desks nailed to the floor.

I played the time game with myself—tomorrow it would be easier; next week I wouldn't remember how strange I felt today; next month it would be as if I'd always been in this school. But sitting there, alone, eating a dry, wizened hot dog and beans as hard as pebbles, I thought to myself, Only the present tense is real, the past and the future are just grammar.

A tall, thin girl with short, dark, curly hair suddenly sat down next to me.

“We're in the same social-studies class,” she said. I nodded, my mouth full of beans. “My name is Elizabeth Marx.”

“Victoria Finch,” I said.

“Are you from around here?”

“Now I am. I used to live in Boston.”

“Oh. That little town to the east.”

I nodded again.

“In a week, you'll feel better,” she said. “And in a month, you'll feel you've always been here.”

I said, “That's what I was thinking.”

Elizabeth Marx was right. In a month, the strangeness had worn off. I knew most of the other students in the freshman class, and the teachers no longer spoke to me as if I were deaf.

In the shopping mall, Ma and I found a hardware store where we could buy window shades on sale. Everything in those shops and markets was on sale—television sets, shoes, furniture, and clothes. Ma and I put up the shades and felt private, and better. We painted the walls a kind of celery color Uncle Philip had picked out for us, and we had discovered oak floors after the linoleum had been ripped up, so we polished them and put down some small, bright rag rugs. The local piano tuner, who came to tune our upright, was a comedian. When he hit a chord to see what kind of condition the piano was in, he fell down on the floor shouting, “I've been killed!” But he got it into playing shape.

Our living room was just about the size of my old bedroom in Boston, but I could barely recall how horrible it had looked when we had moved in. It was fresh and cheerful now, except it was always a little muddy near the front door, which opened right onto the front yard. We didn't have enough closet space, so Uncle Philip drove over one weekend with an old wardrobe he had found in a Boston junk store. It just fit into my little bedroom; it was like having an extra room. I liked it especially because it had a big iron key that you could lock the door with. There was nothing we could do about the size of the kitchen, but Uncle Philip rescued it from eternal night by putting in a window over the sink so you could look out into the yard when you were washing the dishes. Ma took some money out of the bank and bought a new stove, but we just bought a new rubber stopper for the old lead sink. Ma said she didn't dare trifle with the plumbing in the house. Every time we turned on the water, it sounded as if there were a pond full of croaking bullfrogs in the cellar.

In the early spring, we had a yard sale, and the dining table went, along with a good many other things I had thought I wouldn't be able to bear to part with. We made around $300 from the sale, and afterwards we had an especially good supper on trays in the living room. The house felt light and pleasant. It had stopped being a problem.

Outside, in the light that was lengthening every day, I saw fat sweet buds on the four apple trees. We'd cleaned up the back yard so that Ma could plant a vegetable garden. We knew most of our neighbors now. One of them had told Ma there was a junior college just a few miles from New Oxford that offered extension courses for adults. Ma spent evenings looking through the college catalogue.

“I'd like to earn a living,” she said. “I have to. But I'd especially like to be skilled at something.”

“You take care of me,” I said.

“That's not going to be a lifetime job,” she said, smiling.

I didn't want to think about lifetimes.

“I'll take care of you,” I said. “Later.”

“I don't want to be taken care of,” she said, and she looked away from me at a table where my father's picture sat in a silver frame. We didn't have much to say to each other for the rest of the evening.

The next morning, which was Saturday, I woke to hear the wind blowing wildly. I got dressed and drank some grapefruit juice and went to the living-room window. The branches of the apple trees were moving stiffly as the gusts hit them, and there was a kind of pale haze around them even though their buds were not fully opened. Beyond them, I could see Mt Crystal rising up like a volcano. It was the only real mountain in this part of the country, and the road that led to its peak was about five miles from the village. Forests of evergreens rode up its slopes, and the great rocks near the top glistened in the morning light. It was said to be over three thousand feet high. When I heard that, I gave up the idea of riding my bike to the top. Or to the bottom, for that matter.

I was suddenly aware there were people on the street in front of our house. There was the postman, and Mr. Thames, the old man who lived across the street, and Mrs. O'Connor and her three children, all standing stock-still and staring off in the same direction.

I ran out to see what they were looking at. And there in the sky was a great scarlet kite. It rose and fell like a bird, and I realized I was smiling, like the other people who were standing there, because the whole day seemed to be ringing like a bell, an early spring day, with a scarlet bird for a bell ringer. I could see a small figure standing on the hill at the end of Autumn Street. I walked toward the hill, and the small figure became a boy, his hands guiding the kite as though he were conducting an orchestra. Just as I began to climb the slope, the kite swooped, then fell straight to earth. The boy was winding up the string by the time I reached him. He glanced at me and kept on winding.