The Stories of Alice Adams (v5)

by Alice Adams

  The Saturday of the McElroy son’s wedding, however, is surprisingly cool, with an almost New England briskness in the air. That familiar-feeling air gives Jonathan an irrational flutter of hope: maybe the next night, Sunday, will be a reasonable evening. With the sort of substantive conversation that he and Sarah are used to, instead of some nutty Southern doubletalk. With this hope, the thought comes to Jonathan that Hattie imitating Popsie Hooker is really Hattie speaking her own true language. Dare he voice this to Sarah, this interesting perception about the nature of mimicry? Probably not.

  Sarah spends a lot of Saturday cooking, so that it can all be served cold on Sunday night; she makes several pretty vegetable aspics, and a cold marinated beef salad. Frozen lemon soufflé. By Saturday night she is tired, but she and Jonathan have a pleasant, quiet dinner together. He has helped her on and off during the day, cutting up various things, and it is he who makes their dinner: his one specialty, grilled chicken.

  Their mood is more peaceful, more affectionate with each other than it has been for months, Jonathan observes (since before they came down here? quite possibly).

  Outside, in the gathering, lowering dusk, the just perceptibly earlier twilight, fireflies glimmer dimly from the pinewoods. The breeze is just barely cooler than most of their evening breezes, reminding Jonathan of the approach of fall—in his view, always a season of hope, of bright leaves on college campuses, and new courses offered.

  Having worked so much the day before, Sarah and Jonathan have a richly indolent morning; they laze about. Around noon the phone rings, and Sarah goes to answer it. Jonathan, nearby, hears her say, “Oh, Hattie. Hi.”

  A very long pause, and then Sarah’s voice, now stiff, all tightened up: “Well, no, I don’t see that as a good idea. We really don’t know Popsie—”

  Another long pause, as Sarah listens to whatever Hattie is saying, and then, “Of course I understand, I really do. But I just don’t think that Jonathan and I—”

  A shorter pause, before Sarah says again, “Of course I understand. I do. Well, sure. Give us a call. Well, bye.”

  As she comes out to where Jonathan stands, waiting for her, Sarah’s face is very white, except for her pink-tipped nose—too pink. She says, “One more thing that Hattie, quote, couldn’t get out of. A big postwedding do at Popsie Hooker’s. She said of course she knew I’d been working my head off over dinner for them, so why didn’t we just put it all in a basket and bring it on over there. They’d come and help.” Unconsciously, perhaps, Sarah has perfectly imitated Hattie’s inflections—even a few prolonged vowels; the effect is of a devastating irony, at which Jonathan does not smile.

  “Jesus” is all he says, staring at Sarah, at her glistening, darkening eyes, as he wonders what he can do.

  Sarah rubs one hand across her face, very slowly. She says, “I’m so tired. I think I’ll take a nap.”

  “Good idea. Uh, how about going out to dinner?”

  “Well, why not?” Her voice is absolutely level, controlled.

  “I’ll put some things away,” Jonathan offers.

  “Oh, good.”

  In the too small, crowded kitchen, Jonathan neatly packages the food they were to have eaten in freezer paper; he seals up and labels it all. He hesitates at marking the date, such an unhappy reminder, but then he simply writes down the neutral numbers: 8, 19. By the time they get around to these particular packages they will not attach any significance to that date, he thinks (he hopes).

  He considers a nap for himself; he, too, is tired, suddenly, but he decides on a walk instead.

  The still, hot, scrubby pinewoods beyond their house are now a familiar place to Jonathan; he walks through the plumy, triumphant weeds, the Queen Anne’s lace and luxuriant broomstraw, over crumbling, dry red clay. In the golden August sunlight, he considers what he has always recognized (or perhaps simply imagined that he saw) as a particular look of Sundays, in terms of weather. Even if somehow he did not know that it was Sunday, he believes, he could see that it was, in the motes of sunlight. Here, now, today, the light and the stillness have the same qualities of light and stillness as in long-past Sundays in the Boston suburb where he grew up.

  Obviously, he next thinks, they will have to leave this place, he and Sarah; it is not working out for them here, nothing is. They will have to go back to New York, look around, resettle. And to his surprise he feels a sort of regret at the thought of leaving this land, all this red clay that he would have said he hated.

  Immersed in these and further, more abstract considerations (old mathematical formulas for comfort, and less comforting thoughts about the future of the earth), Jonathan walks for considerably longer than he intended.

  Hurrying, as he approaches the house (which already needs new paint, he distractedly notes), Jonathan does not at all know what to expect: Sarah still sleeping (or weeping) in bed? Sarah (unaccountably, horribly) gone?

  What he does find, though, on opening the front door, is the living room visibly pulled together, all tidied up: a tray with a small bowl of ice, some salted almonds in another bowl, on the coffee table. And Sarah, prettily dressed, who smiles as she comes toward him. She is carrying a bottle of chilled white wine.

  Jonathan first thinks, Oh, the McElroys must have changed their minds, they’re coming. But then he sees that next to the ice bowl are two, and only two, glasses.

  In a friendly, familiar way he and Sarah kiss, and she asks, “How was your walk?”

  “It was good. I liked it. A real Sunday walk.”

  Later on, he will tell her what he thought about their moving away—and as Jonathan phrases that announcement he considers how odd it is for him to think of New York as “away.”

  Over their first glass of wine they talk in a neutral but slightly stilted way, the way of people who are postponing an urgent subject; the absence of the McElroys, their broken plans, trivializes any other topic.

  At some point, in part to gain time, Jonathan asks her, “Have I seen that dress before?” (He is aware of the “husbandliness” of the question; classically, they don’t notice.)

  Sarah smiles. “Well, actually not. I bought it a couple of months ago. I just haven’t worn it.” And then, with a recognizable shift in tone, and a tightening of her voice, she plunges in. “Remember that night when you were talking about the McElroys? When you said we weren’t so high on their priority list?”

  Well, Jesus, of course he remembers, in detail; but Jonathan only says, very flatly, “Yes.”

  “Well, it’s interesting. Of course I’ve been thinking about them all day, off and on. And what you said. And oh dear, how right you were. I mean, I knew you were right—that was partly what I objected to.” Saying this, Sarah raises her face in a full look at him, acknowledging past pain.

  What can he say? He is quiet, waiting, as she continues.

  “But it’s interesting, how you put it,” she tells him. “How accurately. Prophetic, really. A lot of talk, and those letters! All about wonderful us, how great we are. But when you come right down to it—”

  “The bottom line is old friends,” Jonathan contributes, tentatively.

  Pleased with him, Sarah laughs, or nearly; the sound she makes is closer to a small cough. But “Exactly,” she says. “They poke a lot of fun at Popsie Hooker, but the reality is, that’s where they are.”

  He tries again. “Friendships with outsiders don’t really count? Does that cut out all Yankees, really?” He is thinking, Maybe we don’t have to leave, after all? Maybe Sarah was just settling in? Eventually she will be all right here?

  Grasping at only his stated question, about Yankees, Sarah gleefully answers, “Oh, very likely!” and she does laugh. “Because Yankees might do, oh, almost anything at all. You just can’t trust a one of them.”

  As she laughs again, as she looks at Jonathan, he recognizes some obscure and nameless danger in the enthusiastic glitter of her eyes, and he has then the quite irrational thought that she is looking at him as though he were her
new best friend.

  However, he is able quickly to dismiss that flashed perception, in the happiness of having his old bright strong Sarah restored to him, their old mutually appreciative dialogue continuing.

  He asks her, “Well, time to go out to dinner?”

  “Oh yes! Let’s go,” she says, quickly getting to her feet.

  A Public Pool

  Swimming

  Reaching, pulling, gliding through the warm blue chlorinated water, I am strong and lithe: I am not oversized, not six feet tall, weighing one eighty-five. I am not myself, not Maxine.

  I am fleet, possessed of powerful, deep energy. I could swim all day, swim anywhere. Sometimes I even wonder if I should try the San Francisco Bay, that treacherous cold tide-wracked water. People do swim there, they call themselves Polar Bears. Maybe I should, although by now I like it here in the Rossi Pool, swimming back and forth, doing laps in the Fast Lane, stretching and pulling my forceful, invisible body.

  Actually the lane where I swim is not really Fast. I swim during Recreational Swimming, and during Rec. hours what was Fast during Laps is roped off for anyone to use who does laps—Slow, Medium, or genuinely Fast, which I am not.

  Last summer I started off in Slow, and then I could not do many lengths at a time, 16 or 18 at most, and only sidestroke. But I liked it, the swimming and the calm, rested way it seemed to make me feel. And I thought that maybe, eventually I might get thinner, swimming. Also, it takes up a certain amount of time, which for an out-of-work living-at-home person is a great advantage. I have been laid off twice in the past five years, both times by companies going out of business; I have a real knack, my mother says. And how many hours a day can a young woman read? That is a question my mother often asks. She is a downtown saleslady, old but blonde, and very thin.

  So—swimming.

  After a month or so I realized that I was swimming faster than most of the people in Slow, and that some people who could barely swim at all were in my way. For another two or three weeks I watched Medium, wondering if I dare try to swim in there. One day I forced myself, jumping into Medium, the middle lane. I felt very anxious, but that was hardly an unfamiliar or unusual sort of emotion; sometimes shopping for groceries can have the same effect. And actually Medium turned out to be okay. There were a few hotshots who probably belonged in Fast but were too chicken to try it there, but quite a few people swam about the same as I did, and some swam slower.

  Sometime during the fall—still warm outside, big dry yellow sycamore leaves falling down to the sidewalks—the pool schedule changed so that all the lap swimming was geared to people with jobs: Laps at noon and after five. Discouraging: I knew that all those people would be eager, pushy aggressive swimmers, kicking big splashes into my face as they swam past, almost shoving me aside in their hurry to get back to their wonderful jobs.

  However, I found out that during Rec. there is always a lane roped off for laps, and the Rec. hours looked much better: mid to late afternoon, and those can be sort of cold hours at home, a sad end of daytime, with nothing accomplished.

  In any case, that is why I now swim my laps during Rec., in the Fast lane. In the rest of the pool some little kids cavort around, and some grownups, some quite fat, some hardly able to swim at all. Sometimes a lot of school kids, mostly girls, mostly black, or Asian. A reflection of this neighborhood, I guess.

  To Meet Someone

  Of course I did not begin swimming with any specific idea that I might meet someone, any more than meeting someone is in my mind when I go out to the Ninth Avenue Library. Still, there is always that possibility: the idea of someone is always there, in a way, wherever I go. Maybe everywhere everyone goes, even if most people don’t think of it that way?

  For one thing, the area of the Rossi Recreation Center, where the pool is, has certain romantic associations for me: a long time ago, in the sixties, when I was only in junior high (and still thin!), that was where all the peace marches started; everyone gathered there on the Rossi playing field, behind the pool house, with their placards and flags and banners, in their costumes or just plain clothes. I went to all the marches; I loved them, and I hated LBJ, and I knew that his war was crazy, wicked, killing off kids and poor people, mostly blacks, was how it looked to me. Anyway, one Saturday in May, I fell in with a group of kids from another school, and we spent the rest of that day together, just messing around, walking almost all over town—eating pizza in North Beach and smoking a little dope in the park. Sort of making out, that night, at one of their houses, over on Lincoln Way. Three guys and a couple of girls, all really nice. I kept hoping that I would run into them somewhere again, but I never did. Or else they, too, underwent sudden changes, the way I did, and grew out-of-sight tall, and then fat. But I still think of them sometimes, walking in the direction of Rossi.

  Swimming, though: even if you met someone it would be hard to tell anything about them, beyond the most obvious physical facts. For one thing almost no one says anything, except for a few superpolite people who say Sorry when they bump into you, passing in a lane. Or, there is one really mean-looking black woman, tall, and a very fast swimmer, who one day told me, “You ought to get over closer to the side.” She ought to have been in East, is what I would like to have said, but did not.

  The men all swim very fast, and hard, except for a couple of really fat ones; most men somersault backward at the end of each length, so as not to waste any time. A few women do that, too, including the big mean black one. There is one especially objectionable guy, tall and blond (but not as tall as I am), with a little blond beard; I used to watch him zip past, ploughing the water with his violent crawl, in Fast, when I was still pushing along in Medium. Unfortunately, now he, too, comes to swim in Rec., and mostly at the same times that I do. He swims so fast, so roughly cutting through the water; he doesn’t even know I am there, nor probably anyone else. He is just the kind of guy who used to act as though I was air, along the corridors at Washington High.

  I have noticed that very few old people come to swim at Rossi. And if they do you can watch them trying to hide their old bodies, slipping down into the water. Maybe for that reason, body shyness, they don’t come back; the very old never come more than once to swim, which is a great pity, I think. The exercise would be really good for them, and personally I like very old people, very much. For a while I had a job in a home for old people, a rehabilitation center, so-called, and although in many ways it was a terrible job, really exhausting and sometimes very depressing, I got to like a lot of them very much. They have a lot to say that’s interesting, and if they like you it’s more flattering, I think, since they have more people to compare you with. I like real old people, who look their age.

  People seem to come and go, though, at Rossi. You can see someone there regularly for weeks, or months, and then suddenly never again, and you don’t know what has happened to that person. They could have switched over to the regular lap hours, or maybe found a job so that now they come very late, or early in the morning. Or they could have died, had a heart attack, or been run down by some car. There is no way you could ever know, and their sudden absences can seem very mysterious, a little spooky.

  Garlic for Lunch

  Since my mother has to stay very thin to keep her job (she has to look much younger than she is), and since God knows I should lose some weight, we usually don’t eat much for dinner. Also, most of my mother’s money goes for all the clothes she has to have for work, not to mention the rent and the horrible utility bills. We eat a lot of eggs.

  However, sometimes I get a powerful craving for something really good, like a pizza, or some pasta, my favorite. I like just plain spaghetti, with scallions and garlic and butter and some Parmesan, mostly stuff we have already in the house. Which makes it all the harder not to yield to that violent urge for pasta, occasionally.

  One night there was nothing much else around to eat, and so I gave in to my lust, so to speak. I made a big steaming bowl of oniony, garlicky, buttery s
paghetti, which my mother, in a worse than usual mood, ate very little of. Which meant that the next day there was a lot left over, and at noontime, I was unable not to eat quite a lot of it for lunch. I brushed my teeth before I went off to swim, but of course that doesn’t help a lot, with garlic. However, since I almost never talk to anyone at Rossi it didn’t much matter, I thought.

  I have worked out how to spend the least possible time undressed in the locker room: I put my bathing suit on at home, then sweatshirt and jeans, and I bring along underthings wrapped up in a towel. That way I just zip off my clothes to swim, and afterward I can rush back into them, only naked for an instant; no one has to see me. While I am swimming I leave the towel with the understuff wrapped up in it on the long bench at one side of the pool, and sometimes I have horrible fantasies of someone walking off with it; however, it is comforting to think that no one would know whose it was, probably.

  I don’t think very much while swimming, not about my old bra and panties, nor about the fact that I ate all that garlic for lunch. I swim fast and freely, going up to the end with a crawl, back to Shallow with my backstroke, reaching wide, stretching everything.

  Tired, momentarily winded, I pause in Shallow, still crouched down in the water and ready to go, but resting.

  Just then, startlingly, someone speaks to me, a man’s conversational voice. “It’s nice today,” he says. “Not too many people, right?”

  Standing up, I see that I am next to the blond-bearded man, the violent swimmer. Who has spoken.

  Very surprised, I say, “Oh yes, it’s really terrific, isn’t it. Monday it was awful, so many people I could hardly move, really terrible. I hate it when it’s crowded like that, hardly worth coming at all on those days, but how can you tell until you get here?” I could hear myself saying all that; I couldn’t stop.

  He looks up at me in—amazement? disgust? great fear, that I will say even more. It is hard to read the expression in his small blue bloodshot eyes, and he only mutters, “That’s right,” before plunging back into the water.