Free A Place Apart by Paula Fox Page A

children, the youngest being three, whose parents were glad to park them with us for the mornings. Right away, we found out a few things about little kids—they like big pans of water in which they can wash things, their own shoes, for instance, and they like jelly sandwiches to eat as well as to carry in their pockets.
    The first week was the hardest because we had no capital to buy equipment with, but the second week, after the parents paid us, we bought a few things, beach balls, shovels with which to dig up Mrs. Marx’s begonias, blocks, and a few little trucks. And we made do with odds and ends we found in our houses, rusty pots and wooden spoons and a muffin tin Ma had used to mix paint in. Most of the children tired of things pretty quickly, but there were a couple of loony ones who would keep on doing the same thing until you lifted them up and carried them to something else. Making mud pies, we discovered, was by far the most popular activity. As Ma said, mud cooking wasn’t likely to go out of style for a long time.
    The afternoons belonged to us. We had our routine. First we went to the village bakery and bought sugar doughnuts. Then we got on our bicycles and rode for miles, stopping to eat our doughnuts when we got tired.
    We talked. That was the summer of talking—Elizabeth and I, sitting under a tree, somewhere off a blacktop road, talking about our lives, about ourselves. We got more attached to each other than we’d even been in the spring, and the feeling between us shut out everyone else; just because we were alone inside that feeling, it often made me sad, as though we’d been shipwrecked and only had one another. There were two people I couldn’t speak about to Elizabeth. One was Hugh. If I told her the bad thoughts I had about him, I knew she would agree with them. If I told her all the things I loved about him, she would become cold and distant. But I wanted to talk about him! Sometimes I felt I was brimming over like a cup with feelings about Hugh, and there were moments when I almost hated Elizabeth, because she didn’t make it possible for me to even say his name. Not unless I was willing to fight with her. When those moments came, I couldn’t look at her, I couldn’t speak. Then she’d ask, “What’s the matter, Tory?” and I’d answer, “Nothing.” That’s one word that can cover a big territory of something. Since there was no one I could talk about Hugh with, I talked to myself about him. Once I tried to draw a picture of him. But I can’t draw at all. The clumsy marks of my pencil embarrassed me as much as if he’d been standing there, looking over my shoulder at the drawing.
    The other person I didn’t mention was Mrs. Marx. She was unlike Elizabeth in every way and I sometimes wondered if Elizabeth had been adopted.
    Mrs. Marx was a person made out of electric wires. She seemed to hum with messages you couldn’t make out, except you knew they carried news of trouble, of accidents. Often, during our mornings with the little kids, I’d glance up at the Marx house and I’d see Mrs. Marx staring at us from a window, a restless ghost, her eyes glaring and huge like someone who never sleeps. She always asked us questions that sounded as though she suspected us of criminal activities.
    For instance, she wouldn’t say, What are you going to do this afternoon? Instead, she’d say, “ Now , what are you two up to?” And once she laughed wildly while she was watching us put away the play-group equipment in the garage.
    â€œSecrets!” she cried. “I know your secrets! I know them all!”
    What was strange was that Elizabeth never made any comments about her mother’s behavior. But I would see her shoulders droop and her head bow down, and on our bike rides, after such a scene with her mother, she would pedal fiercely and my legs would ache trying to keep up with her. The older I