Superior Women

by Alice Adams

  “It was when I lost my job that everything went bad,” Florence tells Megan. They are on the plane, flying east, just now above the sharp and snowy Rockies. “It’s supposed to work the other way around, I know,” says Florence. “The man gets laid off and there goes the marriage. But with us, like I say, it was me laid off, ‘retired,’ is how they put it, and even though Harry still went off to that old shop of his every day, there I was at home every night, which he wasn’t used to, nowhere near.

  “He’d got into the habit of going out a lot, he told me at first, eating out by himself, which at first I believed. You see these old guys in restaurants, with their papers, halfway flirting with waitresses and looking perky enough. And at first I got sort of a kick out of fixing for myself, fresh salads and fruit things and funny breads, all food they’d never heard of at the drive-in.

  “But then it began to strike me pretty funny. There we were, me and Harry, old married folk, supposedly, and legally that was true, we surely were. And every night him getting all fixed up to go out by himself, as he said, and me cooking fancy suppers just for me. So I made this little suggestion that maybe we could combine what we were doing, now and then. Sometimes he could maybe take me out, and other times I’d cook up something nice for him.

  “And then, well, Harry acted like I’d made some immoral proposition to him. That’s a men’s trick, I’ve noticed—have you ever, Meg? When you say something they don’t like to hear or that makes them feel someways guilty, the first thing you hear is that you’re the one that’s crazy. Have you noticed?

  “Well, he acted so peculiar that I knew something must be up, so I just up and asked him, was there some good reason we could not go out at the same time and to the same place?

  “And then, at last it came out about this lady, this kind person who took him in to feed while I was gallivanting, that’s the very word he used, I swear it to you. Gallivanting out at the drive-in, he said. Well, if toting trays and clearing off slop and always moving faster than you can, if that’s gallivanting I guess that’s what I was doing.

  “I said to him, in that case maybe we should see a lawyer, so’s he could divorce me and set up with this nice lady, this forty-five-year-old chick. Well, that’s another men thing—they all hate that word, divorce. They act like it’s some bad invention that women thought up. Always want to have their cake and eat it, men do, is what I think. Cowards, most of them.

  Megan is thinking, perhaps irrelevantly, of Henry, who never said that she was crazy. Who is not a coward. Who did not want to have his cake and eat it, unless you count Lavinia, whom Megan does not believe he has seen again.

  • • •

  About that, Megan is right. Henry will be invited by Lavinia and Potter to their wedding anniversary party, and he will decline.

  “Maybe there’ll be some kind of work for me to do in New York,” says Florence, above the Mississippi River. “I know I’m too old for waitressing, although in some ways it seemed an ideal sort of life for me.” She laughs. “Maybe you and me could open a restaurant?”

  Megan is becoming somewhat adept at reading her mother’s mind, and has noted that although Florence says a great deal, she also leaves a lot out. And so Megan now says, “Well, sure. But you don’t have to be in such a hurry to get busy again. I have my work, and there’s a lot for you to see in New York.”

  Megan is also wondering what she will do with her mother when she herself does stop working, a step that she considers more and more often.

  It is clear to her that Florence will live forever.

  Epilogue

  June 1983. Georgia. A softly blue day that seems both a respite and a reward, after the punishing cold rains, the ferocious storms of the winter and spring just preceding.

  In the relative cool of midmorning, Megan has begun to set the table for the people in Peg’s house: Megan herself, and Florence, Peg, and Vera. Henry Stuyvesant, a weekend resident. Jackson Clay, who has been “visiting” since April. And two current temporary guests: Peg’s son, Rex Sinclair, and Megan’s old friend Biff, who has come down from New York to celebrate Florence’s eighty-third birthday—today. Biff and Florence became great friends during Florence’s sojourn with Megan in New York. Lovely friends—and Megan thinks then of the first sentence in Florence’s letter to her from San Francisco, the letter that incited her rescue mission: “I am living in a lovely house, with some lovely friends.” Megan smiles, thinking that this could more accurately describe her own current situation.

  She is distributing place cards, which seems a very silly effort for this particular group, but Florence herself has made the cards, painting small blue flowers on them all (forget-me-nots, Megan decides). Remembering old rules about not seating husbands and wives or lovers together, and considering the impossibility of applying those dicta to these people, Megan smiles further, and concludes that they might just as well sit where they usually do.

  The brutally cold and wet past winter and the cruel spring of freak snowstorms, rains, and floods have left in that area a strange legacy of growth. In the distance, where the creek overflowed and remained overflowed, its gentle slow water turned into ravaging, churning mud, on those beaten banks bright new honeysuckle vines have started up from the old; and in the meadow, the ancient furrowed field that lay half the winter under heavy snow or muddy waters, tiny wild flowers now insanely bloom, riotous colors, among brilliant upshooting leaves of grass.

  Around the house, Peg’s house (they all still think of it as Peg’s although in legal fact it now belongs equally to Peg and Vera, Megan, Florence) more blooms: Vera’s roses, everywhere, in bushes and climbing over trellises, all the way down along the road to the still upright tobacco barn (now converted: Megan lives there, Henry stays there with her on weekends). White roses, yellow, palest pink, and the deepest, most brilliant scarlet. And wisteria, gone mad: now, after a false, aborted start in April, it blooms and falls all over the porch, all heavy and full, sensuously lavender, fragrant.

  It is all so lush, so too beautiful, really, that Megan wonders if the group of new women who are expected tomorrow, whom she is driving to Atlanta to pick up tomorrow, won’t be just a little daunted, or depressed? The contrast could be too much?

  The house is run now as a temporary shelter, a way-station hospitality house for the homeless, mostly women but sometimes men too. There are nine in the group that Megan will pick up tomorrow, from an Episcopal church in Atlanta. Megan and Peg are in close touch with churches in Washington and in Atlanta, which themselves have served as shelters, over the long and viciously punishing winter.

  The task of driving, picking up new people, has fallen to Megan through a process of elimination: neither Vera nor Florence drives at all, while Peg genuinely hates to; and Henry, who still teaches at Chapel Hill, is there only on weekends.

  Actually Megan does not much care for driving either, and she is still uneasy with the big old cumbersome VW van out on the road, but under the circumstances these seem inadmissible feelings.

  Once, though, one of the women whom Megan was driving down from Washington—it was late at night; they had been slowed in Virginia by car trouble, had to wait for a new generator, in the rain—that woman, who was sitting in the front seat next to Megan, quietly pulled out a long curved open knife, from her big shabby plastic bag. “You just pull over, I’ll take all of everyone’s money, now,” the woman said, softly, but with a sort of desperate violence.

  Megan pulled over off the highway, in the wet hot black Southern night, smelling of privet and red clay dust—they were in South Carolina, near the Georgia state line. “I don’t think anyone has any money on them but me, and I don’t have much left,” Megan told the woman, in a small polite voice that later struck her as ludicrous.

  She had chosen this particular woman as her front seat companion on the simple grounds that she looked even worse than the rest, her face more sadly sagging, with great dark sunken eyes, her heavy body creaking with defeat. As Megan handed
over the few dollars, all she had left after paying for the generator (the small-town garage had refused her credit cards), she thought, You’ll be lucky to make it through another day.

  Not having even asked for money from the other women, or for Megan’s cards, the woman climbed out of the van, went off into the rain.

  Megan had to give up the money and let the woman out, she thought at the time; she had no choice—feeling the fearful breath of the five other shabby women from the backseats of the car.

  But later it seemed to her that she had handled it all wrong: surely some kindly, cajoling phrases would have worked? The woman didn’t really want to go off like that, probably. And that incident still frightens Megan; recalling the fearful glitter of those huge old eyes, Megan closes her own eyes against it, and she shudders, chilled.

  In any case, for both acknowledged and for hidden reasons Megan dreads those drives. One dark and impossibly “neurotic” fear is that they simply won’t like her; they won’t speak, will be silent, surly. And sometimes that has been much the case; there are long drives during which no one responds to anything Megan says, to her tiny efforts at jokes, at reassurance.

  Nor does it all go smoothly when the formerly homeless people are actually settled there, either. There have been some scaring illnesses among them, bad personal episodes, racist incidents (a woman objected that Jackson was sleeping down the hall from her room, and used the same bathroom; another woman whispered to Peg that she suspected that Vera might have “a touch of color” in her). Accusations of theft, when small valuables have been misplaced. A man who insisted that Henry looked at him “suggestively.” Several people with seemingly chronic depressions.

  By now, naturally, strong relationships have developed between this house and the nearest doctors’ offices, the small local hospital, and the local police—all these connections of an exemplarily cordial nature, thanks to strenuous efforts from all.

  But what they are doing seems still a plausible venture, as they all say to each other from time to time, Peg to Vera to Meg to Florence, to Henry, recently to Jackson; they accomplish at least a small amount of good. A few weeks, in some cases months, of good food and rest generally prove helpful to the people who come to them. “We don’t hurt anybody, ever, and it’s a whole lot better than leaving them out on the streets,” as Florence has put it.

  Also, the variety of personalities offered by the house works out; there is someone for everyone, as it were, some possible temporary friend. A woman who was somehow turned off by Megan might take up with Vera, or with Florence. Peg, or Henry. Jackson, for the past two months.

  Perhaps the most useful task of all, and the hardest, is the effort made to find jobs, or at least some plausible, affordable housing to send the people on to. Or dredged-up families, or friends. This is how Megan spends most of her time; she has a room full of files, which she keeps meticulously complete and up to date. She spends hours and days on the phone and writing letters, following possible leads. She lavishes considerably more care on placing these people than she formerly did on placing books, as Henry has pointed out to her. “Obviously, you think that any person is valuable.” “Well yes, I guess I do. And I’d really had it with all those nonbooks.”

  Megan, like Florence with her drive-in customers, makes a lot of friends. People send her postcards.

  She (Megan) worked out an interest in the agency, which Leslie now controls and very capably runs (despite the fact that she and Benny now are married, and that they have somehow produced a daughter). Megan spends most of each October and May in New York, at the Gramercy Park—ostensibly to see to her business there, actually because she loves New York, still, especially during those months, and she needs time away from Georgia, from that work, even from her friends, and her mother.

  It is fortuitous that Florence’s birthday occurs during a rare interval when there are no needy guests. Or only Rex and Biff, both of whom could be considered family.

  And other celebrations, too, are involved in this day: their project, and loose arrangement for living and working together, has been going on for almost exactly three years, since the summer of 1980 (just before the election of Mr. Reagan). It was during that summer that Megan and Florence, who had visited Peg several times, and talked about the possibility of developing a shelter, moved down in a permanent way. And Henry came down to visit, and to help, and he continued both to visit and to help. In his view he is a sort of weekend husband to Megan, which is not precisely how she sees it herself.

  In any case, three years, and there they still are. Peg and Vera. Megan, Florence. Henry.

  And: this present June marks forty years, forty years, that Peg and Megan have known each other, a fact that until the actual lunch they have somehow not really talked about.

  • • •

  At the last minute Megan chooses a conventional seating arrangement, men alternating with women; thus, she is seated between Henry and Biff, on the sunny, wisteria-sheltered side of the porch. And Peg, between Rex and Jackson, is across the table.

  Midway through lunch, or nearly, then, Megan leans across the table to tell Peg what has obviously been much on her mind all morning. “I can see it all so clearly!” she says. “Forty years, I don’t believe it. I can see the three of you coming into the smoking room at Cabot, Cathy in those dumb green pajamas, with calomine all over her face. I was talking to Janet Cohen, and right away I knew Lavinia didn’t like her, before I even knew Lavinia.”

  Peg frowns just slightly, at the effort of recall. “I don’t remember that so much as seeing you in Hood’s, and all those bran muffins we used to eat.” Now gray and lean, and lined, and considerably happier than she was in those old days, Peg smiles in a tolerant way at her glimpse of that former bulky, awkward self.

  “Oh yes, Hood’s. I used to look at you three and think being friends with you would be the greatest thing in the world. You all looked so Eastern.”

  Although he has heard much of this before, Biff is still the most ardent listener in the group. “Oh, how I remember those freshman feelings,” he now puts in. “My first year at Harvard I fell in love with everyone I saw.”

  “I hated everyone at Tulane,” says Rex, with a handsome scowl. “What a bunch of assholes.”

  Peg regards him with some concern, wondering as she often does what to say to him, and concluding, again, that it doesn’t matter.

  Partly to fill in what has become a silence, Megan rushes on. “What I can’t remember, though, and sometimes I try to, is a conversation that Cathy and I had, much later on, after we all got to be friends, sort of. It was about those old boarding school books, where there were always four friends. You know, Grace Harlow, all those?”

  It is Vera who laughs, who says, “Oh yes, the most wonderful trash. I used to gobble them up. It drove my poor upward ascendant folks nuts, they wanted me to be an intellectual.”

  “Seems to me like they got pretty much what they wanted, girl,” Jackson tells her in his most phonily “Negro” voice.

  Megan persists with her memory, though; she has clearly given some thought to the theme of four friends. “It seemed so perfectly us,” she says. “Those girls in the books. We were classics. Always four of them, and one was kind and jolly. That’s you, Peg.”

  “Yes, and too big and noisy, ‘jolly.’ I know.” Peg grins.

  “And one was rich and beautiful and rich and wicked. Lavinia, naturally. And one was poor and innocent and slightly simple, from the provinces. That’s got to be me, although Cath and I used to argue, she thought it could be her. But I always thought she would have to be the mysterious fourth.”

  They are quiet, Megan and Peg remembering Cathy, until Henry says, “I do wish I’d met Cathy. I think she was mysterious.”

  “That’s true, she was, and I wish you had too. You would have liked her,” Megan tells him. But Cathy would have been intimidated by Henry, at least at first, she further reflects—as she was herself, years ago, meeting him at Adam Marr’
s improbable White Plains house.

  “Well now, I wish I’d met the beautiful rich wicked one, that Lavinia.” It is Jackson who has said this, and he is mildly surprised when no one responds, at all. Only, after a pause Megan tells him, “It wouldn’t have worked out for you, Jackson, gorgeous as you are.”

  They smile at each other—good friends, occasional and very secret lovers.

  Jackson’s first visit to the group there in Georgia lasted for a month; his second, eight months later, lasted for three.

  Megan and Peg believe that the real reason he visits is that he has laid out a fine seven-mile run: down their hill and across the furrowed meadow to the creek, several miles on a path along the bank, and back across the fields and up to the house. He does this every day. He also helps considerably, as they all do, in the running of the house. He likes to cook, and he is, like Megan, “good with people.”

  Megan thinks, though, that now this stay with them is almost over, despite his run. He spends more and more time listening to music in his room, at the end of the attic. He combs every music store in Atlanta for new tapes, of new groups. Megan believes that he is getting ready to play again.

  Megan has a recurring fantasy concerning Jackson that no one knows about—surely not Henry, Megan’s weekend lover, her almost-husband, and in many ways her closest friend—and surely not Jackson himself.

  In the fantasy, Megan and Jackson drive down to Atlanta and register at a hotel.

  Like sexual addicts, which perhaps they are, or very young lovers, which clearly they are not (but perhaps with a kind, late-middle-aged persistence of vision they see each other as young: Jackson as hard-muscled, as taut, and Megan as smoothly voluptuous as when they first met, some thirty-nine years back), all afternoon they make love, in that room. They exhaust each other’s bodies and imaginations, they lie soaked in sweat, in secretions, in their sea-smelling bed. They laugh a lot, they bathe and dress and drive back home, to their separate quarters.