Free A Place Apart by Paula Fox

remarked, ‘Yes, they have money.’”
    â€œI didn’t mean just money,” I said.
    â€œYou’re getting mud all over the floor,” she said. “What rich people are you talking about?”
    I took off my muddy shoes, but I didn’t answer her question. She was kneeling next to the chair, the paint-brush in one hand, a cigarette in the other. She looked kind to me, very kind. I’d never noticed that about the way she looked before.
    â€œWhat does an engineer look like?” I asked her.
    â€œLike anyone else,” she answered. “What a peculiar question! You must have had an interesting afternoon.”
    I didn’t tell her about my afternoon. I didn’t tell her about Jeremy Howarth, who, I knew, was nasty whether he was drunk or sober. And I didn’t mention Hugh’s house, so odd and beautiful, sitting over the river like a fortress, and how mean I thought they all were, Hugh’s mother, and her husband, and even Hugh, too, and that the meanness was not only in what they said but in the way they looked and dressed and moved.
    I went to the dictionary and looked up the word Hugh had used to describe what he wanted to be someday. Impresario. The manager, organizer, or director of an opera or ballet company … I had been the impresario’s entertainment that afternoon.
    I felt thick and restless. A heavy thing had come to burden me; the burden was that I cared so much about Hugh—and I had begun to not want to.
    School ended. We all went to see the play. Only the parents went to the evening performance. It was fun to see the people we knew in makeup and clothes that weren’t theirs. When the curtain fell, we all applauded for a long time, and everyone who had been involved with putting on the play came out to bow. Except Hugh. Later, I heard that he and his mother and Howarth had left that afternoon for Boston and, I suppose, to go from there to Italy.
    During the summer, I got some postcards from him. Most of them were from Florence or Siena or Bellagio on Lake Como, where his mother and Howarth had rented a house. But two of the cards, although they had Italian postmarks, weren’t views of Italy.
    One was from Disney World in Orlando, Florida, and it said they had a rodent problem in the area and I’d be advised to stay away. The other looked as though he’d found it in an attic. It was a cartoon of a baby wearing a big pink bonnet and a frilly pink dress. She was standing on a beach, and in one hand she carried a pail and shovel. The caption said: The Beach at Santa Monica. On the back, Hugh had written, “Finish that play and I’ll make a star of you!” It was signed: Louis B. Mayer.
    Ma told me Louis B. Mayer had been a big movie man before I was born, back in the 1930’s. I didn’t laugh much, even though I felt Hugh would have expected me to. Ever since the afternoon with rotten Harry in the little pond in the wood, I had such contrary feelings about Hugh. If I had known how, I would have tried to talk about them, to anyone, to a passing horse. I didn’t know how.
    I didn’t do much work on my scenes. Other things came along to distract me. School seemed far away. I didn’t think of it. Hugh really was far away. But he was often in my thoughts, like a toothache in the brain.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Elizabeth and I didn’t have any luck finding jobs. New Oxford was not a center of industry. Once, there must have been little stores, hardware and dry goods and a 5-and-10, and maybe a butcher shop. The big shopping malls had taken most of their customers, and there was no work for us in the few places that hung on, places like the Mill or the bakery or the little grocery store, where there was dust on the tuna-fish cans and the peanut butter was dry and stony. You would have needed an ax to spread it.
    We had to start a business of our own, a kind of super baby-sitting. We managed to find eight little