A Place Apart (5 page)

I guess I smiled, because he saluted me and went back up the hill toward school. It was hard for me to understand what had happened, but there was one thing I knew: Hugh hadn't been jealous, he'd been insulted.

When I got home, I found Ma in the kitchen. Ashes fell from her cigarette onto her sweater. She was slicing a potato so clumsily it was as if she'd never seen one before.

Everyone seemed stupid to me suddenly. I went to my own room and heaved my books at my bed. I felt terrible. I felt murderous. I wondered if the people who decided what special movies to show up in school had a movie about that.

CHAPTER THREE

On a night a few weeks before the end of school, Hugh telephoned me to ask if he could come by for a while and bring two seniors he'd been working with in the O'Neill play. Ma said it would be all right as long as they didn't stay too late. It was Friday, and I'd done most of my homework. The only thing I had had in mind to do that evening was to try and put together a cardboard model of an Elizabethan theater Uncle Philip had sent me. He'd been giving me models since I was little. I was not good at making them; I wasn't handy with glue or paste, and cutting and matching. I either got the glue in my hair or crusts of paste all over my hands. There would come a moment when I'd start slashing away with the scissors, snipping off those essential little tabs that fit other tabs. What I'd end up with wouldn't be the castle or cathedral or manor house Uncle Philip had given me but a shack for hoboes. But I always felt obliged to try once more. Grownups get some idea about you in their minds, and it won't go away. “Just keep on working at it, Tory,” Uncle Philip would say when he saw the shambles I'd made. “It'll come to you.”

Now I stuck the model under a pile of books, took a sneaker of mine from the living-room couch and hurled it into my bedroom, and changed my wrinkled shirt for another shirt that was just as wrinkled but of a different color.

A few minutes later, Hugh arrived with Stanley Bender, who was editor of the school paper, and Carl Meadows, the captain of the basketball team. It was strange to see Hugh with other boys.

Elizabeth had asked me once if I'd noticed that Hugh had no close friends. I'd said, “So what? He's not running in a popularity contest,” and she'd replied, “Oh, yes, he is! In a king contest!” Sometimes, I think there are just two questions one is always trying to answer: Is one all right? Or isn't one? For some people, having twenty friends instead of one or two means you're high up on the all-right scale—even if you can't remember all their names. Elizabeth doesn't really think that way, but she didn't understand Hugh. He had less trouble with those two questions than anyone I'd ever known. He didn't need a lot of people clamoring that he was all right.

Stanley was much taller than Hugh, and when he wasn't sitting down, he leaned over himself like a rain-soaked cornstalk. Carl was just as tall, but he stood very straight. They looked around the living room, nodding and grinning, and the house seemed as small as Hansel and Gretel's cottage.

It was the middle of May but there was a chill in the air. It had rained all day, and through the window I could see the fresh dark-green leaves of the apple trees gleaming with wetness. Inside, the room was warmed by a little Swedish stove Ma had had installed. Ma stayed around for a while, opening the seam of a dress she was altering. The sound of the scissors ripping threads, and the smell of a log burning in the stove, the sense of being safe inside, made the evening feel like winter. After Ma went off to her room with a book, I made a big pot of cocoa and filled a bowl with potato chips. They were gone in two minutes. Then Stanley lit up a French cigarette from a pack he'd bought in Boston. It had a strong, pleasant smell. I picked up the pack and looked at the French words, and I had the feeling we'd all been transported to a foreign city.

Hugh sat in a chair, but Stanley and Carl sprawled on the sofa. At first, I didn't pay much attention to what they were saying—I was too interested in watching them, in hearing the sound of their voices, which rose and fell as they interrupted each other or talked at the same time. They laughed differently. Stanley brayed, and Carl shouted, “Hah! Hah!” and then bowed his head over his chest so the tail end of the laugh was muffled. Hugh would begin by smiling, then he would hold his breath as though the laughter were going backward.

I could see how easy Carl and Stanley were together, but there was something different in their voices when either of them spoke to Hugh. It was a small difference, but it was there. It reminded me of how I felt when I was rattling on to someone I didn't know well, and how, all at once, I'd feel the strangeness of that other person, and then my own strangeness, and my voice would falter and I'd get self-conscious.

Stanley told us about all the poems and stories he had to turn down for the school paper some months, how a kind of plague of awful writing would sweep through the school like an epidemic. He'd have to write poems himself and sign them with names he dug up from thirty-year-old school rolls. If there was one thing he was looking forward to about being through with high school, it was not having to read some composition sent in by a seventh-grader about the planet Grock being invaded by lizardmen with overdeveloped brains.

Carl remarked that he'd written that particular story, and Stanley said everyone wrote that story at least once, and anyhow, Carl hadn't even been in New Oxford when he was in the seventh grade. Then Carl talked about how it was always expected of a tall black boy that he would play basketball, and how he, who was a tall black boy, had been determined to have nothing to do with sports of any kind. But one day, someone stuck a basketball in his hands, and he dribbled it a few feet and heaved it into the basket, and at that instant became captain.

They spoke about music for a while, and Stanley said he'd heard that the three-man rock group that had been hired for the senior graduation party actually lived up on Mt. Crystal in a cave, and all of them slept on stone ledges wrapped up against the cold in their long beards, and that they were able to play the worst rock in the world because of some strange substance they drank which was their only nourishment. Carl said he liked songs from old-fashioned musical comedies. He stood up and suddenly began to sing “I'll See You Again,” in a fluttery tenor voice, holding his hand over his heart as though he were making fun of it. I could see that Hugh was crazy about Carl singing that song. He was smiling and holding his breath so long I thought he'd pass out.

For a while they talked about what they wanted to do with their lives. Stanley said he was going to be the editor of the only newspaper in a medium-sized town, and he was going to write editorials to tell his readers what they ought to think. Carl said that for a man who sneered at Grock and the lizardmen, Stanley was taking up the wrong profession. They both looked questioningly at Hugh.

“I'm going to try to survive,” he said.

We all stared at the stove for a moment, then Stanley said, “Well, man, that's what we're talking about!”

I went out to the kitchen to get some cookies. When I came back, they were at it again, all interrupting each other, talking about what it would be like to be fifty, about war, about why human beings were so wild to kill each other, about life on other planets and whether the upper Amazon would be a resort area by the time they were all middle-aged, and about religion, and how long it would take for the polar ice caps to melt, and what was outside of the universe itself.

Stanley ate a handful of cookies and remarked that he'd like to die while he was eating junk food—burgers and fries and fried clams—and that it drove his father crazy because his father was a great cook. Carl started talking about his troubles with mathematics, how it was a language he couldn't learn. And I said that I couldn't do an equation to save my life.

They looked at me in astonishment as though they'd truly forgotten I was there. I was half sorry they'd realized I
was
there. I'd never heard boys talk together the way they'd been talking.

I asked Stanley where he was going to college, and he told me Wisconsin. Carl said he was going to a university in New York and that he wanted to be an archaeologist. Hugh said he wasn't going to go to college for a while. He was going to live in Italy, he thought. We all looked at him.

“What are you going to do there?” asked Stanley.

“Live with an Italian family, perhaps,” he replied. “I've been in school thirteen years.” I thought, I was eight months old when he started school. He said, “I want time off before they get me.”

Stanley said, “Man, we're already
half gotten!
”

Hugh looked at me. “What about you, Victoria?” he asked. “Do you have secret plans?”

“I don't know yet,” I said.

“I hear you're writing a really good play,” Stanley said.

“It's not a play,” I said quickly. I felt a touch of fear, and I was surprised by it. Hugh must have talked about the scene to Stanley and that bothered me. So I explained it was just for English credit. Then Hugh suddenly stood up and said he'd forgotten that he had brought along a book he was making and he wanted to show it to us. He was going to illustrate it himself, he said, and have a printer his mother knew make a few copies. It was a book for tired children, a hateful alphabet book, he said, as he took some drawings out of his jacket pocket and spread them on the table near the lamp. We went over to look at them, and I passed close by an old pickle crock Ma and I had found in the house when we moved in and which she'd filled that morning with lilacs. I sniffed the scent of the flowers, and the wood smoke and the cocoa, and the joy I felt as I leaned over the table with those boys and looked down at Hugh's work was like the billowing out of a sail when the wind takes it.

A
was for Airports, Airedales, Apologies, Actuarial Tables, Accountants.
B
was for Bratwurst, Beaches, Bel Canto, Bovines, Bathos. And there were drawings, odd little squiggles, neat and intricate. Stanley said the Airedale wasn't quite right, but the one for Apologies was very good. And Hugh replied he was better at drawing abstract things than concrete ones. He sounded a bit proud of himself.

After that, they got ready to go. I walked with them to the end of Autumn Street. Hugh whispered to me, “Your house is so nice. It's like something from a Babar story.” I was glad that he hadn't said that when Ma was around. She wouldn't have understood; she would have thought he was being patronizing.

When I left them and started back home, they all sang “I'll See You Again,” and they sang me past the apple trees and all the way up to the path, and I thought, This is the best night of my life!

The next morning at breakfast, Ma said, “That's an elegant little cricket, that Hugh Todd.”

“He's not a bug,” I replied.

“I don't know that I really care much for him,” she went on while she was cutting the sections of a grapefruit. I realized she was telling me not to care for him either. “I don't like his smile,” she said. “It's as though he's watching himself in a mirror all the time.”

“Ma, stop! He's a friend of mine!”

“I was telling you what I think.”

“You were telling me what I ought to think.”

Ma picked up her cup of coffee, drank too fast, choked, and looked at me with her eyes glittering.

“And I didn't ask you,” I muttered. I knew I'd better not say another word. But I wanted to fight. I knew it would be a different kind of fighting from what was usual between us. I felt anger that had an edge like a razor. Ma didn't say any more. The sound of our spoons and knives striking plates was loud, and when I put butter on my toast, it crackled like a fire. I got more and more uneasy. Bad news was in the air.

But on Monday morning I had good news. I had passed the math course. Just. It had been like climbing a ladder carrying two suitcases packed with rocks. That's what I told Hugh that afternoon after school. “You'll always pass, Birdie,” he said. “Let's go have a cup of coffee at the Mill.”

I told myself I couldn't expect him to take my math troubles seriously, but I wished he wouldn't call me Birdie. I suspected there was a private joke for him in it—maybe I
did
look like a bird. But I was happy he'd asked me to have coffee with him instead of a malted milk, and that he sounded so sure of himself, not nervous and boastful the way Frank Wilson had when he had asked me to go to the movies with him.

The Mill was a steamy, narrow lunchroom on Main Street with a plastic turkey in the window that had been in it ever since I'd come to live in New Oxford. Right next to the lunchroom was an old movie house that had seen better days. On Saturdays, it showed cartoons and movies for little children. Hardly anyone went to it. Instead, people drove to the shopping centers scattered around the countryside where there were theaters built like buses or airplanes. Often, as I walked by that movie house, I thought of dusty curtains, and cartoons about cats and mice playing to the empty seats while a real cat took care of its kittens beneath the stage.

“Coffee, please,” Hugh ordered in a sharp voice. He didn't even look up at the waitress when she said, “Why—yes, sir!” But I did. She was staring at him, and her smile was angry. For a split second, I looked at Hugh sitting across from me in that booth. He was extracting a paper napkin from its metal container with extreme care, his mouth set, a frown wrinkling his brow. What I saw in that second was how he might appear to someone else, not me, and how old he looked, and I knew he would not change, really, and the strange thought came to me that he would never get bigger, only shrink. He smiled, and I saw him as I usually saw him.

“Are you really going to go and live in Italy?” I asked.

The waitress put down two cups of coffee in front of me. He drew one toward himself. “The saucer is dirty,” he remarked.