A Place Apart

by Paula Fox

  We wandered into a big department store and spent a few moments looking at handbags that cost more than we’d earned with our play group. I was making up my mind which one I wanted when Elizabeth whispered into my ear, “Let’s get out of here right now!”

  Just as we reached the sidewalk, Elizabeth swayed as though she was going to faint.

  “What’s the matter?” I cried.

  She gripped my arm and said, “I’ve got to sit down. There’s a coffee shop across the street.”

  We crossed against the lights, and cars honked and drivers yelled at us, but Elizabeth went ahead blindly. Once inside the coffee shop, Elizabeth slumped into a seat. I ordered tea and muffins from the waitress. After a bit, Elizabeth looked at me, then opened her bag and took out a pack of cigarettes.

  “The world is going up in smoke,” I muttered.

  “I wish it would,” she said.

  I knew now she was going to tell me something I didn’t want to hear. I kept on stubbornly talking about how awful cigarettes are for people, until finally Elizabeth said her mother had driven her to them.

  “All spring, she kept asking me if I’d started smoking secretly—and she began to kiss me when I came home from school. She’s not done that since I was little. One day, I realized she was just sniffing around my face to catch tobacco fumes, and I was hurt and angry. That’s when I did start smoking. She goes through my bureau drawers and my pockets, so I hide my packs in the mailbox of an old lady who lives a couple of houses down the street. Once, I got there just as the postman did, and when he opened the mailbox and saw all those cigarettes, he looked so startled—”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “You should have written an address on them,” I said.

  But Elizabeth said harshly, “It’s not funny. Nothing is funny about what I’m telling you.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” I cried out, my voice much louder than I’d expected. A man in a hard hat at the next table looked over at us. I smiled at him nervously, and nodded as though to say everything was under control.

  “I’m going to run away,” Elizabeth said. “Today.”

  “You’re kidding!” I exclaimed. I was astonished. I stared at her, at her lovely curly hair I was always wishing I had, at her smooth unbitten fingernails, and then at her sad, sad face.

  “I’m not kidding,” she said. She smashed out her cigarette and instantly lit up another. I grabbed her hands. She pulled away. I said. “Please, whatever it is, your mother, or something else—just don’t smoke those things. You’ll get like Ma. She can’t stop.”

  She shook her head back and forth in a bewildered way, then she put the cigarette out, and her eyes filled with tears.

  “I’ve got to get away from my mother. That’s what it is,” she said. “She’s at me every minute except when I’m in school or with you. What am I doing? she asks, even when she sees me at the table doing homework. What do you and I talk about? Do I ever see boys after school? In the middle of the night, I see her walking around my room like a phantom. Sometimes she just stands over my bed and stares down at me, and I nearly stop breathing. When Daddy comes home, he hides inside a newspaper, or else he makes a hill of legal documents and then ducks down behind them. At dinner, he tries to talk to me about ordinary things, and she looks at both of us as though she couldn’t understand English any more. She’ll suddenly shout, ‘What do you mean!’”

  “You’ve never told me it was so bad,” I said.

  “I always told you how she nagged me. And I was ashamed. Besides, you’ve had Hugh Todd on the brain.”

  I pushed away my cup of tea.

  “Oh, I know you can’t help it, thinking about Hugh. I know a person can creep in another person’s brain and never leave them alone. Something has crept into my mother’s brain. I think she hardly sleeps any more.”

  “Oh! That’s not true!” I cried. “I’m not that way about Hugh. He’s my friend just as you’re my friend.”

  Why had my voice gone thin and high? I didn’t feel that I was lying. I did have a frantic sense of wanting to hide something. I watched a tear slide down Elizabeth’s chin and drop right into her cup of tea. Suddenly I felt glum and hopeless. What can you do if your own thoughts slip away before you can catch them?

  “I think about you a lot, too,” I said, and then, although I could barely get the words out, I added, “Maybe in not quite the same way as I think about Hugh.”

  She looked at me humbly and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that! It’s just what Mom does. Weeks after we’ve had company, she’ll suddenly yell at me for something I did that night that I can’t even remember. Now I did it to you. That’s what I’m afraid of, that I’ll become just like her.”

  “When did it get so bad?”

  “It always has been, but this summer, it’s been like a volcano blowing up.”

  “But she let us have the play group—she didn’t complain about the little kids wrecking her garden—”

  “Don’t you see? She wanted me there, where she could keep an eye on me! Didn’t you notice? Whenever I looked up at my house, there she was, standing at the window, staring at me!”

  “You can’t run away! She’ll send the police after you!”

  “I don’t care!” she wailed suddenly, as she pressed a paper napkin against her face. When she spoke again, it was in a whisper. “I didn’t put my money in the bank. I’ve got it all with me.” She wiped her eyes with the napkin. “I’m going to Cape Cod. I can get a job in Provincetown waiting on tables. They’ve got a thousand restaurants there—and they don’t care how old you are as long as you can carry a tray.”

  “It’s too late!” I exclaimed. “It’s already the middle of August.”

  “Oh, Tory!” she burst out. “I’m so embarrassed! About everything!” Then she really did cry. The man in the hard hat leaned over and asked, “Is there something wrong, children?”

  “Her pet dog died,” I said quickly.

  “What a shame!” he said. His sympathy made me feel terribly guilty. “I had a pet once, too, and he died. But you get over it. You get over everything in time.”

  In time for what? I wondered, as I went to the cashier and paid our check. So many things people said were really strange if you thought about them. I managed to push Elizabeth out to the sidewalk, and we walked here and there, paying no attention to where we were going, and Elizabeth sobbed and people would look at her, then hurriedly turn away. Finally she nearly stopped. She sniffled a few times, then I grabbed her hand. “Look!” I said. We were standing in front of a barber shop, and there was a sign in the window that read: Haircuts 25 cents, if you’re over 95. If you bring your parents, it’s free!

  Elizabeth laughed as wildly as she had been crying. So did I. The barber grinned at us through the window. I suddenly wanted to ask Elizabeth if I looked like an engineer. But I didn’t. There are a lot of idiotic thoughts you just have to keep to yourself.

  She dumped her tear-soaked paper napkins in a trash can and ran her hand through her hair.

  “I thought you’d stay with me until the afternoon,” she said in a calm voice. “Then I’ll take the bus to Province-town. We used to spend summers there, Mom and me, and Daddy would come down on weekends. I know I can find a room in one of those boardinghouses on Commercial Street.”

  “What about September? What about school? And your father—”

  “I can’t think about all that. You shouldn’t ask me either. It’s like asking someone with a broken leg what they think about the Industrial Revolution.”

  “What do you think about the Industrial Revolution?” I asked. Elizabeth’s smile was pale and slight, but it was a smile. She said, “Your mother is nice.”

  “Nice!” I exclaimed. “What’s that? Anyhow, she isn’t nice all the time. You’d be surprised. I’ve been surprised.”

  We didn’t go to the Glass Museum or to a movie because we both realized, at the same moment, that we were fiercely hungry, and when we found an It
alian restaurant, we burst through the door as though a pack of wolves was at our heels. But once my hunger pangs had been stopped by a big soup bowl of tortellini, and then by a biscuit tortoni, all I could think about was how to persuade Elizabeth not to run away.

  I knew it would end in a calamity. It would be terrible for me—not to have Elizabeth around. And I was helpless with an absolute sense that no matter how old I felt, I was young. My life wasn’t in my own hands. I looked at Elizabeth as she scraped the last bit of the tortoni out of its little paper cup with her spoon. She looked so serious. So intent. I thought, You think of running away when you’re not free. If you are, you walk away.

  After we finished eating, Elizabeth said we’d better go over to the bus station and see about the schedule for Cape Cod. I was getting money out of my change purse. I looked up to ask her if she had a quarter for part of the tip.

  My hair nearly stood on end. Elizabeth’s face was twice as big as it had been!

  It was as though she’d been inflated with a bicycle pump.

  She saw how I was staring at her, and she put her hands on her face. Then she said one word: “Hives!”

  There was no more talk about Cape Cod buses. I got a taxi and took her to the emergency room of the nearest hospital.

  The doctor was a young Indian man, and he looked at Elizabeth and said, “Good heavens, child! You look like the moon rising over the Ganges River! What have you been eating?”

  Elizabeth told him that she had had allergies when she was little but that they hadn’t bothered her in years. All she’d eaten was tortellini and tortoni. That was benign food, he said, although it could increase a person’s girth. He gave her a shot of something and wrote out a prescription.

  We sat for a time in the emergency room so that Dr. Singh could keep an eye on Elizabeth. I watched him listen to the heartbeat of a very old man, and I saw him push back a white lock of the old man’s hair from his forehead. The old man put his hand on the doctor’s arm and pressed it. Then a mother brought in a little boy with a great jagged cut on his leg, and he cried so terribly while Dr. Singh was stitching him up that I gave up the idea of ever becoming a doctor. The little boy’s crying, the old man so pale and exhausted-looking, the smells in that room, made me feel I was just going to topple over and faint, so I was very glad when Dr. Singh came over and looked at Elizabeth and said, “Okay, you can go now. Take care of yourself, Moon.”

  Elizabeth’s face was still slightly swollen when we got to the place where we were to meet Ma and Lawrence Grady. They didn’t seem to notice that she looked a bit odd; they didn’t even notice we were nearly half an hour late. They looked cheerful and cool and pleased. Mr. Grady suddenly put his arm around my shoulders. I edged away. He instantly removed his arm. I felt apologetic, and I moved back toward him. He didn’t try again.

  “Did you have a pleasant day?” asked Ma as we got into Mr. Grady’s car. “Did you do everything you planned to do?”

  “Wonderful!” I said, and I laughed. The sound I made belonged in an attic in a movie about a haunted house. But no one seemed to give it a second thought.

  When we dropped Elizabeth off, I looked up at the windows of her house. Now that I knew what I knew, it looked like a huge trap to me, with a spring somewhere in it that would snap shut when Elizabeth stepped over the threshold.

  Mr. Grady stayed for supper. I didn’t have much to say to him. He asked me to call him Lawrence. I did, once. He was making more of a fuss over me than he ever had. It made me nervous, as if he was trying to overhear what I was thinking about. Ma was stern with me, speaking in short sentences like a telegram. I knew she wished I was more responsive. I couldn’t be.

  I had a hard time getting to sleep that night. The events of the day repeated themselves over and over in my brain. I felt fretful and a little sick. Finally, I gave up and got out of bed.

  There wasn’t a breath of air stirring. Each leaf on the trees, and the hard little apples, looked painted and flat and unreal. A moon drifted out of and then behind smoky clouds. Autumn Street was something left over from a war between the worlds, all jagged black shadows and houses that looked caved in. I ate a lot of saltines with jam and drank some stale orange juice. Then I lurched back to bed, caught my toe in a hole in the sheet, then ripped it entirely. I must have slept a little while, because when the telephone rang, I bounded up as if I’d been stung by a wasp. It was just a few minutes before 7 a.m.

  I got to the phone before Ma did. She stood, in the door to her bedroom, stooped over and looking frightened. I knew what we were both thinking about—the phone call that had brought us the news of Papa’s death.

  “Yes?” I whispered into the mouthpiece. It was Elizabeth.

  “Mom is in the hospital,” she said in a level voice. “When I got home, I was too tired to remember to hide those cigarettes. She found them. She started to scream that I was killing myself, so she might as well gobble up all the pills in the medicine chest and kill herself, too. She locked herself in the bathroom. Daddy had to break the door down. I just wanted to tell you …” Her voice cracked like a plate and she hung up.

  Mrs. Marx stayed in the hospital until the end of the summer. When she came home, Elizabeth told me she was quiet and thin and sad. She never asked Elizabeth anything: not where she’d been, not where she was going or what she was thinking about. She had to take special pills twice a day and she would have to take them for a long time.

  Elizabeth said there were two ways, now, that she’d known her mother—crazy and noisy, and sane and silent—and she wondered if there would ever be a third way.

  I thought how I had once wanted to describe my entire life to another person and have them explain my secrets to me. It occurred to me now that you had to keep a few secrets to yourself, and that they weighed a good deal. Sometimes, they could drive you crazy.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Every summer, as far back as I can remember, my father and my mother and I had taken a trip. On a morning in August, there would be three suitcases on the front steps, and a picnic basket for our first day’s traveling, and a little canvas bag of maps and guides. When I think of those Augusts past, it is like looking at an old patchwork quilt. There are the islands off Cape Cod, and here is the Gaspé Peninsula, or Prince Edward Island, and in the middle of the quilt is an absolutely motionless lake, as blue as a sapphire, and that was in the Adirondack Mountains. Once, we drove south seven hundred miles to Cape Hatteras … coastal rats, my father called us.

  I remember all those boring hours in the back seat of the car, crumbs in the upholstery from all the crackers I ate, along with the broken bits of crayons I used to color books to pass the time, and on the floor of the car, crumpled and torn pages of comic books that look old five seconds after you’ve read them. I remember all the stops for gas and food and bathroom, or sometimes just to stretch our legs in some wooded spot where Papa would exclaim over the beer cans and garbage left about, and Ma would calm him down.

  The place I remember best was a pond at the end of a narrow gray road in Maine that had led us through a thick forest, and Papa had said that that forest was what the French fur trappers saw, hunters who had come to these parts long before they were settled by other Europeans, traveling across the ocean in long, narrow boats to an unknown land.

  We didn’t always have a good time. One August, it rained every single day on the island off the coast of Maine that Papa had wanted to visit, and I just wandered around the stony beach tripping over mountains of slimy brown seaweed. At least, that’s how I remember it.

  Ma and I couldn’t manage a long trip. We only had our bicycles. So we decided to take a bus to a village a few miles north of Boston where Ma had heard there was a pretty, old inn built on a cliff over the water. We planned to go for a week.

  I liked the idea of going off with my mother and not having to see Lawrence Grady for a few days. There were things about him that made me snarl inside. He had supper with us the night before we left. Ma said she
was putting on too much weight, and from now on, she was just going to have coffee and half a grapefruit for breakfast.

  “Not me!” said Lawrence Grady. “My breakfast is sacred!”

  Imagine anybody thinking their breakfast was sacred! Ma just laughed as though he had made a good joke. I left the table. Wait until I told Hugh about the “sacred breakfast”! I imagined Hugh meeting Lawrence Grady, Hugh, polite and distant, with a slightly amused expression which Mr. Grady wouldn’t see at all. And Mr. Grady would be uneasy because Hugh would be so very, very courteous. Afterward, Hugh would imitate him for me, and tell me all the things that were funny about him. Suddenly I felt ashamed. I had a sense of myself bringing people to Hugh so he could chew them up.

  In the morning, I looked at our two suitcases by the front door. No picnic basket, no canvas bag of maps, no third suitcase.

  “You’re not dead,” I whispered.

  Ma had heard me. “He is,” she said, and took my hand in hers.

  “It’s different for you,” I said in sudden anger. “I can’t get a new father!”

  She picked up her suitcase. “Who can?” she asked. I would have said more but she looked dangerous and I let it drop. We didn’t speak much on the trip to Boston.

  Just before we changed to the bus traveling north, Ma took a half-empty pack of cigarettes out of her bag.

  “Witness this,” she said, and dropped the pack into a trash bin. “Now, if you see me sneaking into a tobacco store, you can make a citizen’s arrest.”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “But I’ll try.”

  The vacation seemed to begin right then. Ma talked all the way to Edgewater, the place where we were to spend our week. I saw her glancing frequently at the smokers bathed in their clouds. Then her voice got louder. Talking must have made her feel better. I didn’t always listen closely, even though I was interested in her stories about the boarding school she had gone to when she was my age.