by Alice Adams
Graham has no idea, really, of what to do, but he is aware of strong feelings that lead him to Carol. He goes over and puts his arms around her. Behind him he hears the gentle voice of Susannah, who is saying, “Oh Carol, that’s terrible. God, that’s awful.”
Carol’s large eyes are teary, but in a friendly way she disengages herself from Graham; she even smiles as she says, “Well, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that. But you see? You really can’t tell what’s happened to anyone.”
And Susannah: “Oh, you’re right, of course you are.…”
And Rose: “It’s true, we do get arrogant.…”
Graham says that he thinks they should eat. The food is hot; they must be hungry. He brings the dinner to them at the table, and he serves out hot food onto the heated plates.
Carol and Rose are talking about the towns they came from: Vallejo, California, and Manchester, Vermont.
“It’s thirty miles from San Francisco,” Carol says. “And that’s all we talked about. The City. How to get there, and what was going on there. Vallejo was just a place we ignored, dirt under our feet.”
“All the kids in Manchester wanted to make it to New York,” Rose says. “All but me, and I was fixated on Cambridge. Not getting into Radcliffe was terrible for me—it’s why I never went to college at all.”
“I didn’t either,” Carol says, with a slight irony that Graham thinks may have been lost on Rose: Carol would not have expected to go to college, probably—it wasn’t what high-school kids from Vallejo did. But how does he know this?
“I went to work instead,” says Rose, a little priggishly (thinks Graham).
“Me too,” Carol says, with a small laugh.
Susannah breaks in. “Dad, this is absolutely the greatest dinner. You’re still the best cook I know. It’s good I don’t have your dinners more often.”
“I’m glad you like it. I haven’t cooked a lot lately.”
And Rose, and Carol: “It’s super. It’s great.”
Warmed by praise, and just then wanting to be nice to Rose (partly because he has to admit to himself that he doesn’t much like her), Graham says to her, “Cambridge was where I wanted to go to school, too. The Harvard School of Design. Chicago seemed second-best. But I guess it’s all worked out.”
“I guess.” Rose smiles.
She looks almost pretty at that moment, but not quite; looking at her, Graham thinks again, If it had to be another girl, why her? But he knows this to be unfair, and, as far as that goes, why anyone for anyone, when you come to think of it? Any pairing is basically mysterious.
Partly as a diversion from such unsettling thoughts, and also from real curiosity, he asks Carol, “But was it worth it when you got to the city?”
She laughs, in her low, self-depreciating way. “Oh, I thought so. I really liked it. My first job was with a florist on Union Street. It was nice there then, before it got all junked up with body shops and stuff. I had a good time.”
Some memory of that era has put a younger, musing look on Carol’s face, and Graham wonders if she is thinking of a love affair; jealously he wonders, Who? Who did you know, back then?
“I was working for this really nice older man,” says Carol, in a higher than usual voice (as Graham thinks, Ah). “He taught me all he could. I was pretty dumb, at first. About marketing, arranging, keeping stuff fresh, all that. He lived by himself. A lonely person, I guess. He was—uh—gay, and then he died, and it turned out he’d left the store to me.” For the second time that night tears have come to her eyes. “I was so touched, and it was too late to thank him, or any thing.” Then, the tears gone, her voice returns to its usual depth as she sums it up, “Well, that’s how I got my start in the business world.”
These sudden shifts in mood, along with her absolute refusal to see herself as an object of pity, are strongly, newly attractive to Graham; he has the sense of being with an unknown, exciting woman.
And then, in a quick, clairvoyant way, he gets a picture of Carol as a twenty-year-old girl, new in town: tall and a little awkward, working in the florist shop and worrying about her hands, her fingers scratched up from stems and wires; worrying about her darkening blond hair and then, deciding, what the hell, better dye it; worrying about money, and men, and her parents back in Vallejo—and should she have put the baby out for adoption? He feels an unfamiliar tenderness for this new Carol.
“You guys are making me feel very boring,” says Susannah. “I always wanted to go to Berkeley, and I did, and I wanted to go to L.A. and work in films.”
“I think you’re just more direct,” amends Rose, affectionate admiration in her voice, and in her eyes. “You just know what you’re doing. I fall into things.”
Susannah laughs. “Well, you do all right, you’ve got to admit.” And, to Graham and Carol: “She’s only moved up twice since January. At this rate she’ll be casting something in August.”
What Graham had earlier named discomfort he now recognizes as envy: Susannah is closer to Rose than she is to him; they are closer to each other than he is to anyone. He says, “Well, Rose, that’s really swell. That’s swell.”
Carol glances at Graham for an instant before she says, “Well, I’ll bet your father didn’t even tell you about his most recent prize.” And she tells them about an award from the A.I.A., which Graham had indeed not mentioned to Susannah, but which had pleased him at the time of its announcement (immoderately, he told himself).
And now Susannah and Rose join Carol in congratulations, saying how terrific, really great.
Dinner is over, and in a rather disorganized way they all clear the table and load the dishwasher.
They go into the living room, where Graham lights the fire, and the three women sit down—or, rather, sprawl—Rose and Susannah at either end of the sofa, Carol in an easy chair. For dinner Carol put on velvet pants and a red silk shirt. In the bright hot firelight her gray eyes shine, and the fine line under her chin, that first age line, is just barely visible. She is very beautiful at that moment—probably more so now than she was fifteen years ago, Graham decides.
Susannah, in clean, faded, too tight Levi’s, stretches her legs out stiffly before her. “Oh, I’m really going to feel that skiing in the morning!”
And Carol: “Me too. I haven’t had that much exercise forever.”
Rose says, “If I could just not fall.”
“Oh, you won’t; tomorrow you’ll see. Tomorrow …” says everyone.
They are all exhausted. Silly to stay up late. And so as the fire dies down, Graham covers it and they all four go off to bed, in the two separate rooms.
Outside a strong wind has come up, creaking the walls and rattling windowpanes.
In the middle of the night, in what has become a storm—lashing snow and violent wind—Rose wakes up, terrified. From the depths of bad dreams, she has no idea where she is, what time it is, what day. With whom she is. She struggles for clues, her wide eyes scouring the dark, her tentative hands reaching out, encountering Susannah’s familiar, fleshy back. Everything comes into focus for her; she knows where she is. She breathes out softly, “Oh, thank God it’s you,” moving closer to her friend.
Greyhound People
As soon as I got on the bus, in the Greyhound station in Sacramento, I had a frightened sense of being in the wrong place. I had asked several people in the line at Gate 6 if this was the express to San Francisco, and they all said yes, but later, reviewing those assenting faces, I saw that in truth they all wore a look of people answering a question they have not entirely understood. Because of my anxiety and fear, I took a seat at the very front of the bus, across from and slightly behind the driver. There nothing very bad could happen to me, I thought.
What did happen, immediately, was that a tall black man, with a big mustache, angry and very handsome, stepped up into the bus and looked at me and said, “That’s my seat. You in my seat. I got to have that seat.” He was staring me straight in the eye, his flashing black into my scared p
ale blue.
There was nothing of his on the seat, no way I could have known that it belonged to him, and so that is what I said: “I didn’t know it was your seat.” But even as I was saying that, muttering, having ceased to meet his eye, I was also getting up and moving backward, to a seat two rows behind him.
Seated, apprehensively watching as the bus filled up, I saw that across the aisle from the black man were two women who seemed to be friends of his. No longer angry, he was sitting in the aisle seat so as to be near them; they were all talking and having a good time, glad to be together.
No one sat beside me, probably because I had put my large briefcase in that seat; it is stiff and forbidding-looking.
I thought again that I must be on the wrong bus, but just as I had that thought the driver got on, a big black man; he looked down the aisle for a second and then swung the door shut. He started up the engine as I wondered, What about tickets? Will they be collected in San Francisco? I had something called a commuter ticket, a book of ten coupons, and that morning, leaving San Francisco, I’d thought the driver took too much of my ticket, two coupons; maybe this was some mysterious repayment? We lurched out of the station and were on our way to San Francisco—or wherever.
Behind me, a child began to shout loud but not quite coherent questions: “Mom is that a river we’re crossing? Mom do you see that tree? Mom is this a bus we’re riding on?” He was making so much noise and his questions were all so crazy—senseless, really—that I did not see how I could stand it, all the hour and forty minutes to San Francisco, assuming that I was on the right bus, the express.
One of the women in the front seat, the friends of the man who had displaced me, also seemed unable to stand the child, and she began to shout back at him. “You the noisiest traveler I ever heard; in fact you ain’t a traveler, you an observer.”
“Mom does she mean me? Mom who is that?”
“Yeah, I means you. You the one that’s talking.”
“Mom who is that lady?” The child sounded more and more excited, and the black woman angrier. It was a terrible dialogue to hear.
And then I saw a very large white woman struggling up the aisle of the bus, toward the black women in the front, whom she at last reached and addressed: “Listen, my son’s retarded and that’s how he tests reality, asking questions. You mustn’t make fun of him like that.” She turned and headed back toward her seat, to her noisy retarded son.
The black women muttered to each other, and the boy began to renew his questions. “Mom see that cow?”
And then I heard one of the black women say, very loudly, having the last word: “And I got a daughter wears a hearing aid.”
I smiled to myself, although I suppose it wasn’t funny, but something about the black defiant voice was so appealing. And, as I dared for a moment to look around the bus, I saw that most of the passengers were black: a puzzle.
The scenery, on which I tried to concentrate, was very beautiful: smooth blond hills, gently rising, and here and there crevasses of shadow; and sometimes a valley with a bright white farmhouse, white fences, green space. And everywhere the dark shapes of live oaks, a black drift of lace against the hills or darkly clustered in the valleys, near the farms.
All this was on our left, the east, as we headed south toward San Francisco (I hoped). To our right, westward, the view was even more glorious: flat green pasturelands stretching out to the glittering bay, bright gold water and blue fingers of land, in the late May afternoon sunshine.
The retarded boy seemed to have taken up a friendly conversation with some people across the aisle from him, although his voice was still very loud. “My grandfather lives in Vallejo,” he was saying. “Mom is that the sun over there?”
Just then, the bus turned right, turned off the freeway, and the driver announced, “We’re just coming into Vallejo, folks. Next stop is Oakland, and then San Francisco.”
I was on the wrong bus. Not on the express. Although this bus, thank God, did go on to San Francisco. But it would be at least half an hour late getting in. My heart sank as I thought, Oh, how angry Hortense will be.
The bus swung through what must have been the back streets of Vallejo. (A question: why are bus stations always in the worst parts of town, or is it that those worst parts grow up around the station?) As our bus ground to a halt, pushed into its slot in a line of other Greyhounds, before anyone else had moved, one of the women in the front seat stood up; she was thin, sharply angular, in a purple dress. She looked wonderful, I thought. “And you, you just shut up!” she said to the boy in the back.
That was her exit line; she flounced off the bus ahead of everyone else, soon followed by her friend and the handsome man who had dislodged me from my seat.
A few people applauded. I did not, although I would have liked to, really.
This was my situation: I was working in San Francisco as a statistician in a government office having to do with unemployment, and that office assigned me to an office in Sacramento for ten weeks. There was very little difference between the offices; they were interchangeable, even to the pale-green coloring of the walls. But that is why I was commuting back and forth to Sacramento.
I was living with Hortense (temporarily, I hoped, although of course it was nice of her to take me in) because my husband had just divorced me and he wanted our apartment—or he wanted it more than I did, and I am not good at arguing.
Hortense is older than I am, with grown-up children, now gone. She seems to like to cook and take care; and when I started commuting she told me she’d meet me at the bus station every night, because she worried about the neighborhood, Seventh Street near Market, where the bus station is. I suppose some people must have assumed that we were a lesbian couple, even that I had left my husband for Hortense, but that was not true; my husband left me for a beautiful young Japanese nurse (he is in advertising), and it was not sex or love that kept me and Hortense together but sheer dependency (mine).
A lot of people got off the bus at Vallejo, including the pale fat lady and her poor son; as they passed me I saw that he was clinging closely to his mother, and that the way he held his neck was odd, not right. I felt bad that in a way I had sided against him, with the fierce black lady in purple. But I had to admit that of the two of them it was her I would rather travel with again.
A lot of new people began to get on the bus, and again they were mostly black; I guessed that they were going to Oakland. With so many people it seemed inconsiderate to take up two seats, even if I could have got away with it, so I put my briefcase on the floor, at my feet.
And I looked up to find the biggest woman I had ever seen, heading right for me. Enormous—she must have weighed three times what I did—and black and very young.
She needed two seats to herself, she really did, and of course she knew that; she looked around, but almost all the seats were taken, and so she chose me, because I am relatively thin, I guess. With a sweet apologetic smile, she squeezed in beside me—or, rather, she squeezed me in.
“Ooooh, I am so big,” she said, in a surprisingly soft small voice. “I must be crushing you almost to death.”
“Oh no, I’m fine,” I assured her, and we smiled at each other.
“And you so thin,” she observed.
As though being thin required an apology, I explained that I was not that way naturally, I was living with an overweight friend who kept me on fish and salads, mostly.
She laughed. “Well, maybe I should move in with your friend, but it probably wouldn’t do me no good.”
I laughed, too, and I wondered what she did, what job took her from Oakland to Vallejo.
We talked, and after a while she told me that she worked in Oakland, as well as lived there, not saying at what, but that she was taking a course in Vallejo in the care of special children, which is what she really wanted to do. “ ‘Special’ mean the retards and the crazies,” she said, but she laughed in a kindly way, and I thought how good she probably would be with kids.
I told her about the retarded boy who got off the bus at Vallejo, after all those noisy questions.
“No reason you can’t tell a retard to quiet down,” she said. “They got no call to disturb folks, it don’t help them none.”
Right away then I felt better; it was okay for me not to have liked all that noise and to have sided with the black woman who told the boy to shut up.
I did like that big young woman, and when we got to Oakland I was sorry to see her go. We both said that we had enjoyed talking to each other; we said we hoped that we would run into each other again, although that seemed very unlikely.
• • •
In San Francisco, Hortense was pacing the station—very worried, she said, and visibly angry.
I explained to her that it was confusing, three buses leaving Sacramento for San Francisco at just the same time, five-thirty. It was very easy to get on the wrong one.
“Well, I suppose you’ll catch on after a couple of weeks,” she said, clearly without much faith that I ever would.
She was right about one thing, though: the San Francisco bus station, especially at night, is a cold and scary place. People seem to be just hanging out there—frightened-looking young kids, maybe runaways, belligerent-looking drunks and large black men, with swaggering hats, all of whom look mysteriously enraged. The lighting is a terrible white glare, harsh on the dirty floors, illuminating the wrinkles and grime and pouches of fatigue on all the human faces. A cold wind rushes in through the swinging entrance doors. Outside, there are more dangerous-looking loiterers, whom Hortense and I hurried past that night, going along Seventh Street to Market, where she had parked in a yellow zone but had not (thank God) been ticketed.
For dinner we had a big chef’s salad, so nutritious and slenderizing, but also so cold that it felt like a punishment. What I really would have liked was a big hot fattening baked potato.
I wondered, How would I look if I put on twenty pounds?