by Alice Adams
And so I flew across the country in a wild mixture of fear and excitement, a state that was all too familiar to me: it was how I felt on getting married (rightly, as things turned out); how I felt each time I went to meet my lover. Often, when the phone rang I was afraid.
My apprehensive state increased in Washington—at the airport, where we were to change planes to go south, to go home. And by the time we were on that second plane, heading up through small puffy clouds in a pastel-blue sky, I was babbling to Simon, crazily: “Remind me to show you—take you—tell you about—”
He was fine, so far. Filled, perhaps, with nice kindergarten stories about little boys going to visit their grandparents, my volatile, difficult, demanding and adored young son sat buckled into his seat in seeming contentment. He listened to the ravings of his mother, himself at peace, sipping his diet cola (ludicrous, such a tall thin child, but having failed him in large ways I have tended to yield on small issues). I gulped vodka.
The plane landed and skidded along a red clay field—my part of the South is made almost entirely of red clay; the rest is dust. And we headed toward a one-story white clapboard building, the terminal. In front there was a high wire fence, next to which stood a portly, white-haired, red-faced man, very erect, in a white linen suit: my father. I would of course have known him anywhere, picked him out in any crowd, but what I first thought was: Oh! I’d forgotten how short he is. By reasonable standards he is not short, almost six feet, but I had been involved with unreasonably tall men: my husband, six two, and my lover, an impossible six four. My son too will be very tall.
We got out, Simon and I holding hands down the steps; for an instant I felt my father’s eyes pass across and not recognize us. But then he did, and we were all upon each other, embracing and saying familiar blank words and smelling familiar smells: his cigarette-smoked clothes and breath, shaving lotion and mint (mints to kill the smell of bourbon). I don’t know what about me seemed or smelled familiar: I switch perfumes a lot and drink scentless vodka—or Simon, whom he had only seen two or three times before, at widely spaced intervals.
Another thing I had forgotten about my father: he is impossible to understand until you have been with him for several days. He has a heavy Southern accent and he speaks extremely fast, generally with a cigarette in his mouth. And so, as we drove over the long flat white miles toward home, over swamps, past creeks and dried-out rutted farmland where the only shade was a single chinaberry tree, we did not exactly have a conversation. I said that my husband was fine but working too hard—“you know how he is” (which my father did not know). I didn’t mention trouble with the landlady and certainly not my dangerous lover.
Between us, forgotten by us both, Simon sat forward on his seat and stared at everything.
As we approached our town, “New hospital!” my father cried out triumphantly, and he pointed toward a towering white mass of concrete and glass and steel that rose unrelatedly from a spreading pine grove. Its busy parking lot was islanded with buckets of thin young trees; the landscaping confirmed the newness of the place—to me it all looked raw and hostile. And so large: I had a quick image of all the inhabitants of our small town being sucked inside.
Just then my father was saying something about Dudley Farmer (I thought) and then (surely unconnectedly)—“psychoanalyst, from Boston, Harvard College, I believe, doing some sort of research”—but I really couldn’t hear this either.
When we got to the house—a big, pillared box, imposingly back from the river—the sun was still high, yellow-hazed above the brown slow water, but actually it was five o’clock. “Time for a drink!” said my father, as he did each day at that time.
I was suddenly exhausted, and strangely inwardly tearful: a drink seemed a good idea. My mother was still asleep; she spends the afternoon sleeping off the lunchtime sherry, and then it’s time to start again. And so we sat on the porch and waited for her entrance, while Simon ran down to the dock, where he took off his shoes and waded at the shallow muddy river edge.
My father was going on about the wonderful new hospital, the gift of a prominent (and dreadful right-wing rich red-neck, I thought) local family, and he mentioned again, with one of his curious jolting laughs, the psychoanalyst who had come down from Boston to do some work in the hospital, research. (“Artistic Negro children” is what my father said; I later learned he meant autistic—in his accent, impossible to tell.) And in a dreamy bleary way I thought, Good, I will have a summer romance with the Boston shrink. God knows I could use one, or both.
My mother is one of those women who, having been great beauties, forever retain that air; automatically people defer to and wait on her. All my life I had watched her performances with a defeated, angry envy, as I too deferred and waited on her. It was hard to believe that we belonged to the same sex, much less the same family. Now she came in, scarves floating around that faded golden head; my father and I stood up and she kissed us both, and we started getting things for her: a special drink, an ashtray and then another scarf that she had left upstairs in her bedroom.
I told her that I was fine, that it was good to be home. That she looked wonderful.
“Did Daddy tell you about poor Dudley Farmer?” she asked me next. “Has to have this terrible operation on his stomach, they say they’re going to take out most of it. He’s scared, I tell you. Supposed to lose a lot of weight.”
“Is Dudley fat?” This seemed incredible: Dudley had been tall and lithe, a basketball star, with severe dark-blue eyes and an ironic mouth.
“Oh, very fat, you wouldn’t recognize him, not any way. Got fat because of his ulcers, and now they have to operate.”
The sun was lowering now; I watched it set over the river, as I had thousands of times before (but had it ever set into just those violet clouds, that pink?). And I thought, Oh, the strangeness of the intensely familiar, the wild confusions involved in coming home! It was truly as though I had never left, and at the same time as though I were a stranger, new to that place and to those people, my parents.
Forgetting Simon (as I’m sure they often forgot about me, at his age), they were getting a little drunk as we sat there in the barely cooling air, among fireflies and flowery smells from the shrubbery—until Simon came running up and said he was hungry. The maid had gone home—my parents were “good to the help”—and so my unmaternal mother said, “Why don’t you go and see what’s in the icebox?” just as she used to say to me, making me feel lonely and neglected. But Simon thought this was great—was freedom: no cross father telling him to eat his meat first. He came back after a while with an unbelievably messy sandwich, which looked to be made of chicken and peanut butter and chutney, which he had put together all by himself—and no one forced him to eat it.
The rest of us skipped dinner. I ate a hard-boiled egg on the way to bed, and slept hungrily, with agonizing dreams; I probably wept.
And the next day I fell in love with the Boston doctor.
Or, rather, the next afternoon. That morning, clutching Simon by the hand, wearing my new white shorts and hiding behind very large dark glasses, I wandered through the town—invisible.
The main street of our town is like that of so many small Southern towns: tacky, tawdry, unchanging. The Chatham Dairy Products, to which all of us in high school used to rush each afternoon, to pile around those tables, eating sundaes out of Dixie Cups, showing off for each other—the boys being funny, the girls laughing.
The Little Athens: a dark and dirty beer parlor, with high rickety curtained booths, where Dudley and I often began our evenings, began to kiss and grasp at each other, before we rushed out to his car, rushed down the highway to our small private clearing in a thicket of honeysuckle and crape myrtle, parked. (Adolescent sex, or, usually, non- or almost-sex: what a ghastly preparation for anything! How can anyone romanticize it? How can I?) Until Dudley dumped me and took up with Mary Sue, and then dumped her for a young married woman in another town.
Adolescent memories are n
ot only the most recent and thus the most available, they are also the least subtle, the simplest. Below them stretch deeper, darker layers. However, instead of telling Simon about the time I lost my nickel on the way to Sunday school and hid under the giant magnolia tree (that one, there) feeling criminal, I took him to the dime store, where we bought two toy boats and a shovel and pail, and then we continued to the A&P, with my mother’s shopping list—to which I added a pound of hamburger; I had decided on certain precautions against skipping dinner.
After that, since the groceries were to be delivered, we walked some more, Simon noticing and asking questions about things, as I remembered everything that had ever happened to me, my whole past assailing me like light continuously thrown stones.
Lunch, naps—for my half-drunk parents, my exhausted son. My father had muttered (I could still barely understand him) that the Boston doctor might come by with a book, and so I sat down out on the porch with a book of my own in my lap, in my short white shorts, in the glaring yellow afternoon sun. Waiting.
After a while I heard a car pull into our drive, behind the house; from the creaking sound of it, a very old car. (A doctor, with an old car? I thought, Terrific.) I heard the engine cut off, a door slam; I saw a tall man come around the corner. A man whom I got up and walked down the steps to greet.
Love at first sight is a silly feeling on one’s face: standing there in the heavy sunlight, near a clump of hydrangeas, I looked up at his craggy reddish face, with large ears and sandy-grayish hair, and I knew that I was falling in love, and among other things I felt very foolish.
We said our names to each other: who would I be but Claire, the prodigal, as he later put it, and he of course was the Harvard-Boston shrink, the local prize and curiosity. Dr. C. S. Jones—Caleb Saltonstall—“My mother had some pretty embarrassing ambitions”—this too came later. Caleb.
Caleb and Claire.
We stood there laughing, like much younger, lighter-hearted people than we were.
I asked, “Do you want some iced tea, or something?” Why don’t you touch me? We had not shaken hands.
He looked at his watch, and frowned unhappily. “I guess not, I’ve got a patient in twenty minutes.” He looked at me.
And I, that formerly frightened, beaten down into self-hatred and ugliness—that young woman said, “Will you come back tonight? They all fall asleep about ten.”
“Yes.” We looked at each other again, but that quickly became too intense, my naked blue eyes into his dark brown, and we began to laugh—softly, this time, since we had just mentioned sleeping people. We wished that both now and tonight their sleep would be profound.
Hurriedly, I suppose to get things straight right away, I said, “I’m here with my son Simon. He’s four. My husband’s in San Francisco. Sort of a trial separation.” I had not thought in those terms before, but those words, when said to Caleb, became true.
He hesitated for one instant. “Me too. Wife and kids in Boston. I keep so busy down here partly not to be besieged. God forbid I should be lonely. And I guess you’d call three thousand miles a separation, if not a trial.”
We laughed, as all summer we were to laugh, at both the gravest and the most inconsequential matters. We laughed between our wildest encounters of love, and we talked almost not at all—and that, for that summer, for both of us was perfect.
He got up and we walked, touching shoulders in the accidental way that children might, toward his car. I said again, “You’ll come around ten?”
“Of course.”
By then he was sitting in his car, and I reached in, uncontrollably to touch his cheek.
Thus it was I who first invited, initiated, insisted—who first touched. And how lovely, with us, was the unimportance of that.
I went back into the house, where everyone was still asleep, where no one knew that anything important had occurred. Restless, elated and agitated, I walked through all those too-well-known overburdened rooms, staring at all the strange-familiar mahogany and silver, at heavy portraits of relatives who suddenly had a comical look of madness. At crazed mirrors which I considered crashing to the floor, so strong was my need for a commemorative gesture. At last in my wandering I came to the breakfast room (a room in which no one had ever had breakfast), where the phone was, and so, as though this had been my plan, I dialed my lover’s San Francisco office, in itself a forbidden act. Collect.
Just after two, back there in San Francisco. He would quite possibly be just returned from lunch, possibly a little drunk.
He was, returned and drunk.
I said that I planned not to see him again, that it was all over. He said that he saw no reason whatsoever (a favorite lawyer word of his) for such a statement, nor for my call. I could imagine him sitting there, angrily twisting his too long legs—a way he has when exasperated. For good measure he threw in a few obscenities; I threw a few back, and hung up, feeling much better. Perhaps he did too? I would prefer to think not. But I had taken a step, my first for quite a while.
I took a long bath and put on a new light dress.
A little before six my father came downstairs, stretching and yawning and saying offhandedly, as though it were something I had already been told (this is an old trick of his), that Dudley Farmer and his wife and Mary Sue (my “old friend,” the former belle who had inexplicably not yet married) were all coming by for drinks. In half an hour. I was thinking that in four more hours it would be ten, and Caleb would come; and so the impact of this information was less momentous than it might have been. I was not even frightened.
Dudley and his wife came first. She was a girl from another state, whom I had not met before, and for whom I felt an instant sympathy, a liking; it later occurred to me that we were somewhat alike.
But poor Dudley: my dangerous and violently handsome early love was muffled in fat, those terrific dark-blue eyes looked out, frightened, from folds of pale flesh. It was terrible: I wanted to hold him in my arms, to say, Don’t worry, your operation won’t be nearly as bad as you think it will be. Instead I embraced Simon, who had come in just then, so tardily awakened from his nap, and I introduced my son to my old friend.
They too liked each other on sight. My diffident difficult son told Dudley that he had never seen a cigarette lighter like the one Dudley had, and Dudley showed Simon how to use it, and how to light cigarettes for ladies, which Simon continued to do for the rest of that much too long cocktail hour.
(Three and a half more hours.)
Mary Sue arrived, and my first thought was: Well, she’s got much better-looking, and at the same time I wondered if my brand-new feeling for Caleb would make me finally a kindly, charitable person. We greeted each other with that odd mixture of warmth and tentativeness which is seemingly the way of not quite old friends, and that odd brushing of cheeks that women do to each other, and I decided that yes, she did look better: thinner, a little sadder and certainly wiser than in her young and mindless, very popular days.
A thing to be said about Southern belles is that in fact they are often not very pretty. Mary Sue at an early age was plump and nearsighted, with mouse-colored hair. However, she laughed easily and often, she was friendly and nonassertive and she kept that mousy hair in perfect curls, her nails a perfect pink. My mother, seeing me moping around the house on Saturday nights, in the months after Dudley’s defection, used to say, “I do not see what those boys see in that Mary Sue. Tacky! Dumb! You wait, when that girl is thirty she’s going to weigh two hundred pounds. Claire, you are one hundred times prettier than that girl.” Just not saying, So how come you’re sitting at home and she’s out with the best-looking boy in town? How come Dudley dumped you for her? But my mother is often wrong: I was never all that much prettier than Mary Sue, and at thirty, a few years hence, thin Mary Sue was to marry an extremely successful architect, from Atlanta.
We all sat around on that porch where I had seemingly spent half my life just sitting around, and we talked in the desultory way that I was used to.
No one asked any but the most perfunctory questions about my life in San Francisco; I need not have worried. Actually they probably did not believe that such a place existed.
However, there were some things I wanted to know, and I did ask, although circuitously. Had the schools changed much? Jobs for black people? Bussing? Well, I was told, there had been a little trouble here and there, but not bad at all, nothing like what had gone on in Beaumont and Hilton. Meaning: we here have better manners, we act better than people in other, even neighboring places.
“Has your mother taught you about collecting fireflies in a fruit jar, to light up your room at night?” Dudley asked Simon. Of course I had not, and the three of us went into the kitchen to find some jars.
“You look really good,” Dudley said to me. “Better than ever.” His old grin.
“You look—” I began, not sure what I was going to say.
“I’ve got to get rid of fifteen more pounds before this lousy operation,” he told me.
“When is it?”
“End of August.”
“Well, worrying about operations is always the worst of them,” I babbled. This may well be true, but I could not have known it was; I had only been hospitalized for the birth of Simon, to which I greatly looked forward. Having a child would win me favor with my husband, I then thought.
Back out on the porch everyone had more drinks, and Dudley, who was not drinking, took Simon down to the clumps of lilac at the edge of the lawn where the fireflies were, and he showed Simon how to capture them.
And at last everyone was gone, at last we had dinner and I put Simon to bed and my parents went upstairs to fall into their beds. And it was ten o’clock and I was out on the porch again, aware of veins that pulsed in my throat, and watching some fireflies that must have eluded Simon.