by Alice Adams
“Let’s face it,” he says grimly. “This is a lot worse than those frozen pipes, and rusty muddy water all over the house.” And Cynthia has to agree that yes, it is probably much worse. Food and waste are intimately revolting, totally so (not to mention the horror of “sick”). They are worse than rust, than any impersonal dirt.
And much worse than theft.
Twice in the past few years Cynthia has had minor but unpleasant surgery, for cysts that turned out to be benign, and she thinks of these operations now; she is reminded of their scheduled unpleasantness. Of feeling well, but knowing that at 7 a.m. she would be rolled onto a gurney and wheeled into a green operating room, from which she would later emerge and wake up feeling terrible. She now feels well, really, but knows that at about five-thirty they will arrive at the house, where they will open a familiar door, and see—something horrible.
She looks across at Roger, whose face is tense, and she decides not to tell him about this analogy. He feels bad enough already. Besides, he has never had an operation.
They have so often driven this exact route that it is possible to be blind to the racing views: the elaborate motel-restaurant clusters, the curious isolated bars that now advertise TOPLESS AND BOTTOMLESS. It is possible to ignore the strong homey smell of onions as they pass the packing plant at Vacaville.
Cynthia is, in fact, thinking about her first visit to that house, when the now familiar door first opened, and she saw that most beautiful room, that house.
It was nine months ago, a warm September day, air that held the barest hint of fall. Cynthia and Roger had only met in June, had been lovers (“in love”) for almost that long, an enchanted summer of discovery. They moved back and forth between Cynthia’s rambling, ferny Mission District flat, and Roger’s trim Telegraph Hill apartment, which held no traces of former wives, or, indeed, little sense of Roger himself. He apologized for its austereness, saying that it wasn’t really where he lived, and he showed her pictures of his true house: long, low-lying, shingled, with a slate roof and stone chimney, on the river. In some pictures there were banks of snow up to the level of the row of windows. Cynthia said yes, it was really beautiful. And still she was unprepared.
They drove across the narrow black bridge; they turned onto a white dirt road, through a meadow of tall grasses, between tall strict dark pines, toward the house. It looked like its pictures, only more beautiful. The shingles just turning silver, the leaves of a wild rosebush beside the steps just yellowing. Cynthia felt her face smile automatically, and at the same time she felt a queasy excitement, in some unspecified place.
They got out of the car, in the clean pine-smelling air, in the sounds of the rushing river, and walked up flagstone steps, across a stone porch, to a massive brassbound door. Which, first putting down their suitcases, Roger with difficulty unlocked. “It always sticks,” he affectionately said; he might have been speaking of an unruly pet.
Then he held open the inner screen door, so that Cynthia had to go in first.
An enormous room. She looked dizzily from a maze of high silvered beams to a huge stone fireplace, to a long leather sofa, velvet chairs, a bearskin rug. Deerheads, mounted at intervals.
She turned, she hid her face against Roger. “It’s too much, it’s too beautiful.”
Not knowing that she meant it, he laughed, and, moving away from her, he went about turning on lamps; he picked up their suitcases and took them into another room.
More beauty: a white room of rough painted wood, three windows that faced the river. A wide brass bed, white-and-yellow quilt. Could anyone sleep there? It turned out that Cynthia, at least that time, could not.
In fact, several of Cynthia’s problems that weekend were physiological: the altitude, or something, took away her appetite; she was perpetually hungry, and unable to eat. A drink, on the rear terrace, overlooking the river, plus a glass of wine at dinner, made her unpleasantly dizzy, in the handsome long dining room that looked out to the verdant flowing meadow, in the deepening green evening light.
And that night she could hardly sleep.
The next day the sight of the lovely yellow poplars saddened her, a sign of fall. What could she and Roger do, after the end of summer? What they did was to continue more or less as they were; then, at Christmas (of course), they quarreled violently, and with no reason. They violently reconciled in January.
Aside from admitting to not feeling very well, Cynthia had not mentioned the non-success of that first weekend. Since later times at that house were generally so good, with wonderful weekends in the snow, it seemed unimportant, her first impression. But she allowed herself to realize that she had been much too aware of the house; she had been almost jealous. As though the house were Roger’s mother? She rejected that as too simple, too “Freudian.” As though the house would outlast her, not only in Roger’s affections but on the earth? This was mysteriously closer to the truth.
Now, once past Sacramento and the dullness of those entwined and endless freeways, the acres of “mobile” homes and depressing, shoddy shopping centers, the worst of the drive is over. They could look forward to the lovely cool ascent into the mountains, the views of small lakes and ponds, the rivers. The distant still-snowcapped peaks, the Sierras, stretching to Nevada.
They could look forward to their desecrated house.
And now Roger says, “We might as well stop for a drink, don’t you think?”
Gratefully: “Yes.”
Somewhat dramatically he mutters, “It hardly matters what time we get there, does it.”
“I suppose not.”
They stop at a nondescript bar beyond Auburn, where often in more cheerful moods they have stopped before, where Roger has always stopped on his way up to his house. The bartender, a fake rural with handlebar mustaches, has lost a lot of weight. “Gave up drinking beer,” he tells someone else, farther down the bar, as he mixes their gin-and-tonics. An unobservant man, he persists in believing that he has known Cynthia as well as Roger for a long time. Do all Roger’s wives and girlfriends look alike? Cynthia wonders, but has not wanted to ask this question; she believes that it would sound jealous, even if she is not; just curious.
Now, in the half-light, Roger’s eyes darken, and his voice is low and intense as he says to Cynthia, “Sometimes I feel like saying, Christ, come on and take it, it’s yours, you know?”
She knows.
“But who would I say that to? We haven’t even identified the criminals yet.” A quick grin. “It’s almost meaningless, these days. Owning anything.”
“It is,” says Cynthia.
The last third of the trip.
Seeing almost nothing, they pass lovely tree-lined canyons with lakes shimmering below, and vistas of distant bare gray Sierra rocks, and quiet ponds. Flowering orchards and fields of tiny multicolored flowers.
Their drinks have intensified rather than lightened their moods. Cynthia is thinking of all the named and nameless threats that haunt everyone alive, in this time and place. Pollution in seas and rivers everywhere. Drought and famine. Rapes and knifings in ghettos and in well-lighted suburban streets. Cancer. Broken glass in Roger’s house. Someone sick. She is also thinking that someone could have been murdered in the house. Killed and left there. Did the sheriff go over it all? Did Mary Drake?
Roger slows down; he signals, and they cross the highway, and turn down the steep road to the river. They go over the bridge, and turn onto the road through the meadow, the high green grass, between the tall dark trees. Beside the porch the lilacs are in full lavender bloom, and the wild rose has tiny tight pink buds.
Roger opens the door, and what they see is awful; but it is not quite as awful as what either of their imaginations had conjured. A game table in one corner of the room has been overturned, and its cast-stone base is smashed. Broken glasses everywhere, as though thrown violently to the floor. Shards of glass stick out from unidentifiable foodstuffs. In the kitchen, there is several inches’ thickness of Cheerios, or whatever
, on the floor. A large cast-iron pot on the stove holds burned popcorn.
Someone has been sick in the sink, but not very. Mary exaggerates.
The bedrooms and the bathrooms and the upstairs dormitory appear to be untouched.
As they are to say to each other from time to time that night and the rest of the days of the weekend, it could have been a great deal worse.
Roger continues to inspect and to remark: “Christ, what’s this red sticky stuff? Cranberries—Jesus!” Cynthia, with no clear plan but with a broom and a dustpan and cardboard box for rubbish, begins to clear up what she can of the surface mess. Roger goes into the kitchen and makes strong drinks for both of them, and he starts in too, with both more energy and more system than she applies.
Their combined efforts work out well, and by a little before midnight the house has a clean, bare look; it might have been washed over by a flood of clear water rather than violated by human beings.
They are by now exhausted, barely sustained by a series of drinks and some scrambled eggs. And, as they have been doing on and off all evening, they try to reconstruct what sort of people the breakers-in were. At first they both thought it must have been some passing fishermen; now Cynthia decides that it was probably some very young kids, boys, about twelve or thirteen. Getting drunk for the first time.
She says, “I can imagine one of them standing on the table, can’t you? Saying, Wow, am I drunk, or something. Imitating grown-ups, television drunks.” And as she speaks she notes that she has lost her thirst for vengeance.
Roger scowls. “I just don’t think it was kids, somehow. More likely some of those lousy summer picnickers. They spend months casing the place.”
The sheriff, who arrives the next morning as they are starting the floor-waxing chore, is red-faced, with a huge beer-swollen stomach carried tenderly in front of him. And, just as predictably, he is sure that it was hippies who broke in; he has never forgotten nor forgiven hippies. Cynthia and Roger thank him for his concern; after he goes they look at each other and sigh, and get back to work.
By the time Mary Drake arrives, at her usual hour, eleven-forty-five, her time to be offered a gin-and-tonic, the whole house shines. Only the table base is still in pieces. And poor Mary is almost visibly disappointed. “Well, I never would have believed—” is what she says.
Apologetically they explain that they’ve really been working. “Both of us,” Cynthia emphasizes: lonely Mary tends to be hard on men.
The three of them with their drinks sit on the rear terrace and speculate further about who broke in. Mary has her own idea. “Lots of times the cops won’t even come because they’re afraid of finding their own kids there,” she says. “Cops’ kids are the worst of all.” Mary has been a social worker.
Cynthia and Roger give this some thought; certainly it is possible. But Mary is such a sad woman, a reminder of old age and loneliness, like a cool fall wind, that they often have to force themselves to be nice, especially Roger, who over the years has grown tired of her evident relish for disaster. She is not glad that they were broken into, really; but she is glad that something has happened, something to animate their conversation and to create a momentary closeness between the three of them. Perceiving this, Cynthia finds it more sad than tiresome.
“I would never have believed that it could look like this again,” Mary repeats, on leaving. And then, a little brighter, “Of course there’s that table base. They really smashed that good, didn’t they now.”
As she frequently does, Cynthia has brought some work up with her: a stack of manuscripts, which, after lunch, she takes into the guest room, where by long-standing habit she usually works. She soon becomes absorbed in her manuscripts—or, rather, in a single manuscript, which strikes her as being exciting; so often she has a sense of lonely wasted effort, of words that are important to one person alone.
At some point in the afternoon she walks through the living room, and she sees that Roger, who is sitting on the floor beside the table that was wrecked, has accomplished a minor miracle: the broken pieces of stone have been fitted together so that the table base looks almost exactly as it did before, only perhaps somewhat older—now it is lined with age, and no less beautiful. Seeing this, how hard and skillfully he has worked, Cynthia is filled with affection for him. She is moved, as she has been before, by his love for his beautiful house. And at the same time, quite irrationally (she thinks), she is envious of the time he spends on it, his total devotion.
And so everything is almost done, and that Saturday night is spent as they often spend Saturday nights up there: good food and wine, some joints, and love, and a lot of sleep.
The next day is balmy, caressingly warm. In the meadow the tall green grasses bend to a slight breeze; chipmunks and tiny birds scamper across the outcroppings of rock, among clusters of trees. A day and a scene that would seem to deny the possibility of evil, of pollution, decay, corruption and misery.
They lunch on the rear terrace, above the noisily rushing river that is still too cold for swimming.
Then, out of nowhere, Roger says, “I’ll bet it was those Mexicans.”
At first Cynthia does not know what he is talking about, although a premonitory chill, like the onset of fall, informs her that this could be the start of one of their less fortunate conversations. False innocent (now she has remembered), she asks, “Mexicans?”
“You know, that noisy group having a picnic. They probably cased the place and then decided to come back. Mad because I ran them off.”
Of course Cynthia remembers the Mexicans, picnicking on the riverbank, on Roger’s property—in their bright clothes, making a lot of noise as they splashed their hands in the rushing cold river water, as they unwrapped and passed around their food. Still, Cynthia felt bad when Roger went over to tell them to leave; a coward, she hid in the house, not wanting to watch their departure. And of course it is possible that being sent off made those people mad, and they came back to desecrate the house. But Cynthia does not believe it.
After dinner Roger goes back to his table, the finishing touches.
Watching him, looking up from time to time as she fails to concentrate on her book, Cynthia has a sudden and curious perception, which is: Roger has actually enjoyed everything about this break-in—the dramatic suspense of the drive up, the speculations as to what they would find, wondering about who had perpetrated this misdeed. Even, looking back, she feels that he was slightly disappointed that it wasn’t worse. He is the proud rescuer of his house, like a man who has restored his wife’s honor.
A few minutes later this view seems somewhat unfair—or not entirely true. But as it retreats from her mind another, simpler thought enters, a single sentence: I cannot marry Roger, or his house.
• • •
And that is true: in the middle of the night Cynthia, unable to sleep, knows that she can’t marry Roger, and for the moment that knowledge makes her feel lonesome, bereft of love, homeless.
And guilty: in her mind she begins to explain herself to the sleeping Roger, who lightly snores beside her. “It’s not just your insisting that the Mexicans ripped you off,” she says, “although I didn’t like that. It’s just that we are too different, and for us to get along I’d have to become more like you, more concerned with owning and taking care of things, better at cleaning up.”
At that moment, as though in answer to another, as yet unspoken thought of Cynthia’s, Roger murmurs, “Caroline.”
Cynthia’s musings take on another tone. “You really don’t know who I am,” she says. “You just keep getting married because you can’t tell women apart; they are just adjuncts to you, and keepers of your house. Well, I’m sure you’ll find another, a Clara, maybe, who will be a lot better at it than I am.”
At last she falls asleep, and wakes to bright morning sunlight on her face. She has just been dreaming of her own flat, on Liberty Street, the ferns and the sunlight there, her cats, the mess. And as she vividly remembers her decision, or r
evelation of the night before, she wonders how it took her so long to come to; of course she can’t marry Roger. And she wonders too how at first that knowledge could have made her feel lonely—homeless, even—when she has a perfectly good place of her own, good friends, great cats.
Roger is already up—not there. She looks at her watch: nine o’clock. She gets up and goes into the kitchen, where there is a note from Roger; he has gone to the hardware store, the plumber, the sheriff’s office. Relieved (she is still not quite ready for the next conversation with Roger), Cynthia makes coffee, and then, as though with a plan, she begins to wander about the house, coffee cup in hand. Perhaps, in her way, she is saying goodbye to the house?
An instinct of some sort leads her to a small corner table, near the bookcases, and there she finds what it is amazing that she did not notice before: a black notebook that is embossed in gilt, “St. Christopher’s School.” Roger himself went to that expensive, ultraconservative school, in the hills of the East Bay, and at first Cynthia thinks, Oh, an old notebook of Roger’s. But the book is new, and it must be twenty years since Roger left St. Christopher’s.
Several realizations come to Cynthia at once, the first being that there is a train to San Francisco at ten-thirty; they have often talked about taking the train, she and Roger—how beautiful it would be, over mountains and valleys, as opposed to the dullness of the drive by car.
And so Cynthia writes a note, which she attaches to the incriminating notebook. “Dear R., Isn’t this hard evidence for my theory about drunk kids? Rich drunk kids at that. I’m taking the train, I hope you won’t mind. Let’s talk in S.F.C.”
Fifteen minutes later, small overnight bag in hand, and sack of manuscripts, she is up on the highway, walking fast toward town, toward the train and the beautiful trip, going home.