by Paula Fox
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.
“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 thei
r 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.”