A Place Apart by Paula Fox Page A

dark-lilac color, and there was a sickle moon. Other people were out walking, too, along the cliff edge. I suddenly thought of Hugh’s father, plunging over a cliff in his rented car, and I felt a stab of fear at the thought of all the things that can happen to a person, and I wondered what might happen to me.
    Ma put her arm around my shoulders, and I leaned against her. I realized that I was as tall as she was, and I would have to stoop to rest my head on her shoulder the way I used to.
    â€œI’m glad we had this week together,” she said. “It’s been a bit boring, I know, but in a pleasant way, hasn’t it?”
    I laughed a little, glad she had known how I was feeling and relieved to be distracted from my thoughts. We paused at the stairs that led to the beach. A boy of about twelve, wearing a bright-red sweatshirt, was sitting on the top step, blowing softly into a harmonica.
    â€œWant to go down?” Ma asked.
    But I didn’t. It looked dark and lonely down there where the little waves breaking made a chalky line against the shore.
    â€œTory,” she said. Her voice had changed. It was solemn. I glanced at her quickly, at her profile, and I saw, just past her forehead, a star that seemed for an instant to be attached to her.
    â€œWhat would you think if I got married again?” she asked. “Would you find it very hard to take?”
    I didn’t answer. I wanted time to go backward, just two minutes, to when we’d been silent, listening to the boy play his harmonica. I had known what she was going to say—the way you suddenly hear a tune someone is whistling and you realize that same tune was in your head a second before you heard it.
    â€œTory,” she said again, her voice low and less grave. For a moment, I imagined myself to be a crazy queen who could tell everyone what they had to do: Jump off the cliff! Bring me a golden harp! Never marry again!
    At that same moment, an ancient woman, small as a peanut, wearing floppy white tennis shoes that shone in the dusky light, passed us hurriedly. She was singing to herself: Greensleeves is all my joy …
    â€œThe Yankee cuckoo,” Ma said.
    â€œI don’t know how I feel about your getting married,” I said. “I guess it’s not up to me.” My voice rose as if I was asking a question.
    â€œNo. It isn’t,” she said. “But I care about the way you feel.”
    I would have to live at home three more years. At home! How would Lawrence Grady fit his big self into our little house? Maybe I would be the one, not Elizabeth, to drop out of school and get a job waiting on tables in Province-town. Did they have restaurants there in the winter?
    â€œIs he going to move in with us?”
    â€œNo. We’ll have to find a bigger place. We’ve been talking about it—”
    â€œâ€”Is that why you went to Marblehead? To look for a place?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou didn’t tell me.”
    She looked out at the sea. “I didn’t know how to. I don’t know how to even now. That’s why I just said it.”
    â€œHis breakfasts are sacred,” I muttered.
    Ma pretended she hadn’t heard that. “We’ve decided to look in Boston,” she said. “You and I can go to school there as well as in New Oxford.”
    â€œI’ll have to leave Elizabeth,” I said, thinking about leaving Hugh. But Hugh himself was going to be leaving in another year. I felt I’d been suddenly dropped back into that empty landscape of my first weeks in New Oxford, and then further back, to those terrible days in our old house in Boston when Ma and I had seemed to drift around like dry leaves. And then I went back years, back to a round kitchen table, and in the middle of it a big glass bowl of floating island, and Papa lifting out the meringues with a spoon and piling my plate with them. I wanted, suddenly, to see Hugh standing in front of me.