by Alice Adams
By the time I had entered high school, along with all those others who were by now my familiar friends, Car was a freshman in the local university, and his family had moved into town. Then his name again was bruited about among us, but this time as an underground rumor: Car Jones was reputed to have “gone all the way”—to have “done it” with a pretty and most popular senior in our high school. (It must be remembered that this was more unusual among the young then than now.) The general (whispered) theory was that Car’s status as a college boy had won the girl; traditionally, in Hilton, the senior high-school girls began to date the freshmen in the university, as many and as often as possible. But this was not necessarily true; maybe the girl was simply drawn to Car, his height and his shoulders, his stormy eyes. Or maybe they didn’t do it after all.
The next thing I heard about Car, who was by then an authentic town person, a graduate student in the university, was that he had written a play which was to be produced by the campus dramatic society. (Maybe that is how he finally met his movie star, as a playwright? The column didn’t say.) I think I read this item in the local paper, probably in a clipping forwarded to me by my mother; her letters were always thick with clippings, thin with messages of a personal nature.
My next news of Car came from my uncle, the French professor, a violent, enthusiastic partisan in university affairs, especially in their more traditional aspects. In scandalized tones, one family Thanksgiving, he recounted to me and my mother, that a certain young man, a graduate student in English, named Carstairs Jones, had been offered a special sort of membership in D.K.E., his own beloved fraternity, and “Jones had turned it down.” My mother and I laughed later and privately over this; we were united in thinking my uncle a fool, and I am sure that I added, Well, good for him. But I did not, at that time, reconsider the whole story of Car Jones, that most unregenerate and wicked of the truck children.
But now, with this fresh news of Carstairs Jones, and his wife the movie star, it occurs to me that we two, who at a certain time and place were truly misfits, although quite differently—we both have made it: what could be more American dream-y, more normal, than marriage to a lovely movie star? Or, in my case, marriage to the successful surgeon?
And now maybe I can reconstruct a little of that time; specifically, can try to see how it really was for Car, back then. Maybe I can even understand that kiss.
Let us suppose that he lived in a somewhat better than usual farmhouse; later events make this plausible—his family’s move to town, his years at the university. Also, I wish him well. I will give him a dignified white house with a broad front porch, set back among pines and oaks, in the red clay countryside. The stability and size of his house, then, would have set Car apart from his neighbors, the other farm families, other truck children. Perhaps his parents too were somewhat “different,” but my imagination fails at them; I can easily imagine and clearly see the house, but not its population. Brothers? sisters? Probably, but I don’t know.
Car would go to school, coming out of his house at the honk of the stained and bulging, ugly yellow bus, which was crowded with his supposed peers, toward whom he felt both contempt and an irritation close to rage. Arrived at school, as one of the truck children, he would be greeted with a total lack of interest; he might as well have been invisible, or been black, unless he misbehaved in an outright, conspicuous way. And so he did: Car yawned noisily during history class, he hummed during study hall and after recess he dawdled around the playground and came in late. And for these and other assaults on the school’s decorum he was punished in one way or another, and then, when all else failed to curb his ways, he would be held back, forced to repeat an already insufferably boring year of school.
One fall there was a minor novelty in school: a new girl (me), a Yankee, who didn’t look much like the other girls, with long straight hair, instead of curled, and Yankee clothes, wool skirts and sweaters, instead of flowery cotton dresses worn all year round. A funny accent, a Yankee name: Emily Ames. I imagine that Car registered those facts about me, and possibly the additional information that I was almost as invisible as he, but without much interest.
Until the day of truth or consequences. I don’t think Car was around on the playground while the game was going on; one of the girls would have seen him, and squealed out, “Oooh, there’s Car, there he is!” I rather believe that some skinny little kid, an unnoticed truck child, overheard it all, and then ran over to where Car was lounging in one of the school buses, maybe peeling an orange and throwing the peel, in spirals, out the window. “Say, Car, that little Yankee girl, she says she’d like to kiss you.”
“Aw, go on.”
He is still not very interested; the little Yankee girl is as dumb as the others are.
And then he hears me being teased, everywhere, and teased with his name. “Emily would kiss Car Jones—Emily Jones!” Did he feel the slightest pleasure at such notoriety? I think he must have; a man who would marry a movie star must have at least a small taste for publicity. Well, at that point he began to write me those notes: “You are the prettiest one of the girls” (which I was not). I think he was casting us both in ill-fitting roles, me as the prettiest, defenseless girl, and himself as my defender.
He must have soon seen that it wasn’t working out that way. I didn’t need a defender, I didn’t need him. I was having a wonderful time, at his expense, if you think about it, and I am pretty sure Car did think about it.
Interestingly, at the same time he had his perception of my triviality, Car must have got his remarkable inspiration in regard to his own life: there was a way out of those miserably boring classes, the insufferable children who surrounded him. He would demand a test, he would leave this place for the high school.
Our trellis meeting must have occurred after Car had taken the test, and had known that he did well. When he kissed me he was doing his last “bad” thing in that school, was kissing it off, so to speak. He was also insuring that I, at least, would remember him; he counted on its being my first kiss. And he may have thought that I was even sillier than I was, and that I would tell, so that what had happened would get around the school, waves of scandal in his wake.
For some reason, I would also imagine that Car is one of those persons who never look back; once kissed, I was readily dismissed from his mind, and probably for good. He could concentrate on high school, new status, new friends. Just as, now married to his movie star, he does not ever think of having been a truck child, one of the deprived, the disappointed. In his mind there are no ugly groaning trucks, no hopeless littered playground, no squat menacing school building.
But of course I could be quite wrong about Car Jones. He could be another sort of person altogether; he could be as haunted as I am by everything that ever happened in his life.
Teresa
Some time ago, on the west coast of Mexico, there was a cluster of thatched huts around a lovely horseshoe cove, a tiny town to which no tourists ever came; the tourists went rather to Acapulco, a couple of hundred kilometers to the south, or to Ixtapanejo, perhaps thirty kilometers north. Back from the cove and the beach, and its huts, green jungle-covered mountains rose up steeply, a range that continued inland almost all the way to Mexico City.
At that time, in that small town, there was a young girl named Teresa, about sixteen. Teresa was not beautiful, nor even pretty, but something about her made more than one boy stare at her in a spellbound, desirous way. Her small face was dark and fierce, with its high-bridged nose and burning black eyes, her thin purposeful mouth and black, black hair. Her body too was small and dark, and neatly made, and strong. She had an odd way of walking: perhaps through shyness she tended to skip, like a bird. Several of the boys, and some older men too, stared at Teresa in an improper way, but especially a boy named Ernesto often looked at her; and since Ernesto’s glance was briefer, more respectful, than the others she sometimes returned it with a quick look of her own, although neither of them smiled.
Teresa at that time was excessively shy, perhaps partly because nothing that she saw of her own face pleased her, in the broken mirror beside the crucifix in her mother’s hut. (Her father had left for somewhere, Guerrero, maybe, after the birth of her youngest brother.) She saw no reason why anyone should stare, least of all Ernesto Fuentes, who, although rather small, was straight-backed and almost handsome, very serious, with thunderous dark eyes and a curious sun-bleached streak in his heavy dark hair.
Teresa was an inward, thoughtful girl; she thought much more than she spoke: about Ernesto, of course, and about the coconut plantations where Ernesto and most of the men and boys of the village worked. She thought about Señor Krupp, the blond, mustached plantation owner, who drank beer or tequila all day and who was rumored to have an evil temper. And she thought about Ixtapanejo, and the incomprehensible tourists who came there, pale Northern people who tried to blacken their bodies on the beach. (She did not think about Acapulco, having never been there and having heard very little about it.) And, what must have also contributed to her shyness, she found much in her surroundings to fear: the staring men, and Señor Krupp, and even the Ixtapanejo tourists, who spoke so loudly in their own tongues and even more loudly and incorrectly in Spanish.
The person of whom Teresa was least afraid, with whom she talked as easily as she did with anyone, was Aurelia, an older cousin of hers. Aurelia was already married, to Francisco, a bad man who beat her when he drank and who did not work, but Aurelia had no fear of Francisco nor of anyone. She had established a thatched-roof restaurant in Ixtapanejo, on the beach, where she served the tourists fresh oysters and clams, and red snapper that she cooked in a special way, and quantities of beer. She did not even own the land where her restaurant squatted, there on the beach overlooking the green-glass sea, but Aurelia had explained to Teresa that what she did was not truly illegal; there was something in the laws of Mexico that favored the rights of Indian-blooded people. “And anyone can see that we have much Indian blood,” said Aurelia, with one of her big laughs.
Aurelia very much liked her tourists, especially the North Americans; and she liked Teresa, often worrying about her shyness, and her fears. She had tried to persuade Teresa to come to work at the restaurant, speaking of large gratuities and sometimes presents. But Teresa could not bring herself even to think of taking orders and remembering and counting beers and asking for money and making the change correctly. Once, on an errand, she had gone to the restaurant, and the very look and the sound and the oil-sweet smell of those people had weakened her legs and tightened her breath, so that she was barely able to speak to Aurelia.
The town where Teresa lived at that time was so small that there was not a proper cantina, just a hut like the others in which beer was sold, and ice-cream bars. But there was a large, bright-colored machine for playing records, North American music, mostly: fast hard band music for dancing, and some slower Spanish songs. The boys of the village often gathered there at night, some of them buying beer, and on many nights several girls, in small groups, would walk past, in a slow, indifferent way. Two boys, or more, might saunter toward the girls, and invite them to dance, and maybe the girls would say yes. The ground around the hut was as hard and smooth and bare as any floor, and most of the boys and many of the girls danced barefoot, in the light warm breeze from the sea, in the flowery darkness.
On a certain night, one especially hot November, the season of rains, Aurelia, visiting from Ixtapanejo, persuaded Teresa to take a walk past the dancing place. Normally, Teresa stayed at home with the younger children; she would work on some small jars that the village potter had commissioned her to paint, to be sold in Ixtapanejo. Her shyness kept her at home, and a feeling that she was too clumsy for dancing. But Aurelia was very persuasive; with her, Teresa would be absolutely safe, she reasoned. No one would ask a married woman to dance, and thus it would be impolite for anyone to invite Teresa.
Fat and bright-eyed, darker even than Teresa, Aurelia was in an especially good mood that night. She was rich, she said; some North Americans who were returning that day to New York had given her a great many pesos. She bought them both ice-cream bars, as the music machine played Beatles songs. Teresa saw Ernesto standing outside with a group of boys, their white shirts silver in the dark, but she did not look at him, not really.
Aurelia and Teresa were on the point of unwrapping their ice cream, standing inside the hut, when they heard a thundering commotion. Teresa thought, An earthquake! Many years ago she had felt such a thing and had been told what it was, that trembling of the world beneath her feet, and naturally she had not forgotten. But this shaking was not an earthquake; it came from huge horses, a group of them just arrived, galloping up outside, and some shouting men.
The first man to enter the hut was tall and fat and blond, with a big yellow mustache; he looked like a North American but he spoke in Spanish, and before anyone had said his name Teresa knew that he was Señor Krupp, Carlos Krupp, the owner of many plantations. Even in the heat he wore leather clothes, and his face was red, perspiring. Other big blond men, very likely his brothers, followed him in, and they all opened their cold dripping bottles of beer, and drank from them, with a noisy rude gulping.
Then suddenly, and with no warning—she had no idea that he had seen her—Señor Krupp turned on Teresa, and with his huge blond-haired hand he grasped her chin; she closed her eyes as she heard him say, “And this lovely young girl, whose is she?”
Almost fainting (although a part of her that she had not known existed wanted to spit in his hand), Teresa heard Aurelia begin to speak: “It’s Teresa, sir, my cousin—”
And then another voice, a young boy’s, but stern and confident: Ernesto, of course. “Teresa Valdez is my friend, sir.”
Startled, Teresa opened her eyes to see the look that then passed between the two men: Ernesto, at her side, and Señor Krupp, who was leaning sideways against the big music machine, which had unaccountably stopped playing. She saw that both men had forgotten her; in their look was violence, and murder, purely male and somehow familiar.
But nothing happened then. Perhaps Señor Krupp was too tired, or knew himself to be drunk, for he said, “Well, in that case my congratulations—Fuentes, I think your name is?” However, his eyes and his voice were stone cold, Northern, unforgetting and unforgiving.
Teresa and Aurelia, with Ernesto following, were able then to slip outside and into the clearing, where at one edge of the open space the great pawing, sweating horses were tied, and the other boys had gathered, staring at the horses. As Teresa and Aurelia moved away, toward the darkness that hid the rest of the huts, Teresa turned back to Ernesto, and for an instant they smiled at each other. Of course she wanted to thank him, but she could not say it.
The following night it rained, and Teresa stayed at home. She was very nervous, agitated.
The night after that was miraculously clear, millions of stars in the vast black sky, above the darker sea. It seemed right, then, for Teresa to walk past the hut with some other girls, and to say yes to Ernesto, coming up to ask her to dance.
That was the beginning of an unusual time in Teresa’s life. Despite some trembling in her blood, and new bodily heats, she was unafraid; to be with Ernesto very soon seemed natural to her. She even found that she could dance with him. For the first time she felt herself to be a girl exactly as other girls; when she was not with Ernesto she spent time with girlfriends, laughing, discussing eye makeup. And when Ernesto drew her away from the clearing, into darkness, and then stopped and turned to her, holding their mouths together, that seemed natural too, nothing to fear. Even later when, farther away, in a hidden grove of vines, the heat of both their bodies forced them to lie down in the cool silver sand—even then, Teresa was not afraid; it did not seem a sin. She trusted Ernesto. She thought, but did not say, Love, you are my love.
After a few months spent in this way, months that included some long white beach afternoons with Ernesto, splashing at the edge of the waves, an
d a trip to Ixtapanejo, slowly some of Teresa’s fears and forebodings began to return, including, of course, a new one, that she should be with child. She was not, and then she began to fear that Ernesto would leave her, as her father had left her mother. They talked so little, Teresa and Ernesto, and she did not know what was in his mind.
“He will want to marry you, he is a very serious boy,” said Aurelia.
“That is possible,” Teresa agreed, although she blushed. And then she tried to tell her cousin, her friend, what was in her heart. “But when I think of the future, the years ahead of me, I see darkness, shadows. Sometimes something worse, some disaster, perhaps a giant earthquake. And when I see these things I think that I should not marry Ernesto.”
Aurelia frowned. “You are as superstitious as a grandmother. You should learn to read fortunes in the sand.”
However, Teresa could feel that Aurelia took her fears seriously; it was as though Aurelia was able to see Teresa’s visions of evil. And that was frightening to Teresa, a confirmation of her fears.
Still frowning slightly, Aurelia changed the direction of their talk. She said, “You really should come to work for me. Ernesto could find some work in Ixtapanejo.”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Teresa, vaguely.
It was that very night, however, that Ernesto told Teresa that he had almost finished building his own hut on the plantation, Señor Krupp’s plantation, where he worked. Where Señor Krupp permitted such building, for his workers. Then they should marry, Ernesto said. “You are so good, I want you always in my life.”
They were married in January, just after the New Year—a day of the new moon, which Teresa had chosen, for luck. (The earthquake, years back, had taken place at a time of the full moon.)
And indeed, a long time of happiness and luck did succeed their marriage, so that Teresa became greatly less fearful, almost forgetting her former black forebodings.