A Place Apart by Paula Fox

citizen’s arrest.”
    â€œDo you mean it?”
    â€œI 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.
    I was thinking about Hugh Todd, thinking that here I was, on a lumpy seat in a tattered old bus, and he was probably sitting on a velvet chair in a palace in Italy. I wondered what he was like when he was by himself, walking down a street alone, and if he ever thought of me. I missed him then, with a sharp gloomy missing that didn’t seem to have much to do with the thousands of miles between us.
    We arrived at Edgewater at twilight. Main Street was only a few blocks long. A spindly handrail ran along the sidewalk on the water side, opposite the little shops that sold magazines or bathing suits. Down below the rocky cliffs, I could see the gray ocean, which lay there like the earth’s armor. Our inn was at the north end of the village.
    Ma had once told me about five blind philosophers who were touching an elephant, trying to figure out what it was, and each philosopher described the whole animal according to the part he’d got hold of.
    I think someone must have hired that same gang to build the inn. It wandered all over the rocks on different levels. None of the windows matched, and we had to spend some time figuring out which, among so many doors, was the entrance.
    We went up a long flight of broad creaking stairs to our room. It was big and smelled musty and stale, and the bed coverlets were as thin as paper. But that first evening, when we sat in the dining room, which looked out over the Atlantic, it felt fine, much better than a motel. We were brought little ordinary glasses filled with ordinary tomato juice, but the glasses stood on pretty plates covered with faded flowers and that made it seem like a party. I looked out the big, dusty window next to our table, and I could see lights over the water. It was as though the black sky and the black water were only a thick cloth and those pinpoints of light showed another ocean and another sky that was always light.
    The week went slowly for me. I was bored except when I was reading Wuthering Heights. Lawrence Grady had given it to me before we left. It was a small book, not much larger than my hand, and I liked its size and neatness nearly as much as I liked the story. With our books, and a bag of apples and cheese, Ma and I would go to the Edgewater beach, a collar of round gray stones at the bottom of the cliffs which we climbed down to on rickety wooden stairs.
    It was the first time I remember ever feeling restless alone with my mother. I wrote a long letter to Elizabeth, including two pages I left blank except for a question mark in the middle of each one, and I told her part of my thoughts. I wrote quickly until my fingers began to ache. As I read the letter over, I counted thirty-two I’ s, so I added a description of some other people in the inn that was so boring it made me groan out loud. In my mind, I wrote to Hugh, and that letter was marvelous and it made him leap from the velvet chair in the palace in Italy and rush to the nearest airport and fly home. I even began the letter in reality, but the moment I had written the two words: Dear Hugh, I flung down the pen and felt my face turn red. My handwriting was childish and, even worse, looked pudgy! His writing was neat and clear, each letter formed so distinctly. I was glad I didn’t have his address.
    On our last evening in Edgewater, after supper, after a long, blue day like the one Hugh had described in Tierra del Fuego, Ma and I took a walk.
    The sea was a