by Alice Adams
Each year the lady brings her dictionary of Spanish words, and each year she speaks more, and she seems better able to understand Teodola. In the mornings after taking her breakfast the lady always sits for a time on the terrace of her room, in former years with her husband (whom now Teodola has almost forgotten, as even her own dead husband has dimmed in her mind), in recent years alone. She reads from books, she writes in another small book, she writes on postcards. But she seems for most hours just to rest there, to regard the flowers that border her terrace, the bushes and vines; the pink, red, purple blossoms, white butterflies, black hummingbirds. The far-off sea.
In her own late years Teodola is often unclear as to seasons, except to observe that the weather, which should never change, now does so; there is rain, even coolness, quite unexpectedly. There is thus no seasonal way for her to know precisely the day of the arrival of the lady, except that she does know: her dreams inform her. She begins to dream of the lady, several nights of such dreams, and then there will come a morning when she knocks on a certain door—and there is La Señora, the very white lady in her light white clothes, embracing Teodola—a small quick light kiss on each cheek, like the kiss of a bird—and the lady saying, “Ah, Teodola, well, here I am again. I never believe I’m going to make it ever again, but here I am. And how happy I am to see you! You look very well—you have had a good year? Your health has been good—and your children? Tell me, how many grandchildren by now? Please, I want you to say all their names to me.”
And Teodola will begin to recite: “Ernesto, Felipe, Sara, Elvira, Carlos, Eva. And the infant Jimenez, Jimmy.” Then both she and the lady will laugh from sheer happiness, Teodola being happy to see the lady again, the lady who now will be there for quite a while; and the lady, who is every year more white, and smaller in her bones, is happy to be resting in the warm bright days, to be watching her birds and flowers, and the gold-blue ocean waves.
There must come a year when the lady does not appear; this is something that Teodola has considered. The lady is very old: one day she must die. What Teodola does not know is in what way she herself will receive this information. It is possible that she will simply dream of the death of the lady, but even if such a dream did come she would not quite trust it, for lately she has received information from dreams that is quite unreliable. She has seen her husband alive again, and wanting more sons, wanting ever more sons, and she has dreamed of her grandchildren old and dying in wars—all craziness.
But someday the lady will be permanently gone, and in the meantime Teodola’s own days go faster and faster, always less time between dawn, the moment of leaving her hut just outside the village, and sunset, the long tired downhill home-ward trudge.
Teodola is much respected by the other room maids. They respect her right to private naps, sometimes, in an unused room just next to the storeroom of linens. They do not ask that she carry the largest stacks of clean sheets, or full trays of new glasses. They even (usually) obey her when Teodola says that a certain floor must be dusted yet once again, especially in the room of the señora, who at any moment could still reappear. The maids and the girl waitresses too all respect Teodola, but they do not have true friendship for her; to them Teodola seems just a woman alone, become old and strange. Teodola knows of their feelings, but such isolation is a part of becoming old that one must accept, she believes.
However, on a certain day all the waitress girls and the hotel maids together decide to play a trick on Teodola, a trick that is at last too much for her.
It begins quite early one morning, when Teodola is walking slowly up the steep dirt road, all crevassed and full of holes, toward the main hotel road, and on her way she encounters a very young and pretty waitress girl, Elisabeta, who says to her, “Oh Teodola, have you heard the news? La Señora does not come this year. She has died up in the north, in New York.”
Teodola experiences a sharp sudden pain, but she frowns, refusing to be teased in this way, and by this particularly foolish girl, who is always much too familiar with the manager. “You know nothing,” she tells the girl. “You are so silly, believing whatever a man says to you!”
Elisabeta makes an angry face, but she hurries away without more lying.
But later on that same day when Teodola insists that one of the room maids, Margarita, again dust the floor of the room of the lady, Margarita simply stares at Teodola and asks her, “But why, Teodola? Why dust the floor? You know that we have heard that the lady is dead.”
Although it is not yet noon the sun is especially hot, and Teodola already is very tired; she had just been thinking of her coming nap. Perhaps for those reasons she is crosser than she intended to be with Margarita. “Enough of your teasing and laziness!” she cries out. “You say anything that arrives in your head to avoid doing work. You tell lies!”
Margarita shakes her head in an angry way, as Teodola recalls that she, Margarita, is the aunt of Elisabeta: of course, it is a story that the two of them together have concocted, for tormenting Teodola.
Teodola herself then sets about dusting the floor in the room of the lady, and that work is a comfort to her. As always, she feels the presence of the lady there; she can almost smell the flower-sweet scent of the lady’s clothes, can almost hear the sound of the lady’s voice, as she tries new Spanish words.
In the afternoon of that day two other maids try the same trick on Teodola, both of them saying, “Teodola, did you hear? La Señora has died.” But by now Teodola knows not to say anything whatsoever, not to gratify them by her anger, nor to show that she knows that they lie. She ignores them; she does her work of making the beds and arranging the flowers in all the bedside tables. Those words have given her a queasy feeling, though, an inner blackness.
At the end of the day, the huge red sun slipping down below the line of the darkening sea, Teodola starts home. The walk seems much longer and harder than usual, but at last she arrives at her hut. Too tired to eat, she lies down on her mattress, and is soon fast asleep.
Night comes without her waking, and with it strange dreams. In one of them the señora has indeed arrived at the hotel but she herself, Teodola, has died. Very strange indeed: within the dream Teodola knows that she is dreaming, and that nothing in the dream is true—of course if she were dead she would not be dreaming. Yet when she struggles very hard to wrest herself from sleep and from the dream, she cannot. She is powerless against her sleep, against the dream.
New Best Friends
“The McElroys really don’t care about seeing us anymore—aren’t you aware of that?” Jonathan Ferris rhetorically and somewhat drunkenly demands of his wife, Sarah Stein.
Evenly she answers him, “Yes, I can see that.”
But he stumbles on, insisting, “We’re low, very low, on their priority list.”
“I know.”
Jonathan and Sarah are finishing dinner, and too much wine, on one of the hottest nights of August—in Hilton, a mid-Southern town, to which they moved (were relocated) six months ago; Jonathan works for a computer corporation. They bought this new fake-Colonial house, out in some scrubby pinewoods, where now, in the sultry, sulfurous paralyzing twilight no needle stirs, and only mosquitoes give evidence of life, buzz-diving against the window screens.
In New York, in their pretty Bleecker Street apartment, with its fern-shaded courtyard, Sarah would have taken Jonathan’s view of the recent McElroy behavior as an invitation to the sort of talk they both enjoyed: insights, analyses—and, from Sarah, somewhat literary speculations. Their five-year marriage has always included a great deal of talk, of just this sort.
However, now, as he looks across the stained blond maple table that came, inexorably, with the bargain-priced house, across plates of wilted food that they were too hot and tired to eat—as he focusses on her face Jonathan realizes that Sarah, who never cries, is on the verge of tears; and also that he is too drunk to say anything that would radically revise what he has already said.
Sarah does begin to cry.
“I know we’re low on their list,” she chokes. “But after all we only met them a couple of months before they moved away. And they’d always lived here. They have family, friends. I’ve always accepted that. I even said it to you. So why do you have to point it out?”
If he could simply get to his feet, could walk around the table and say, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it—then at least temporarily there would be an improvement in the air between them, a lifting of the heavy night’s burden. But Jonathan cannot move; it is so hot his shirt is still stuck to his back, as it has been all day. And he is exhausted.
Besides, what he just said about the McElroys (who at first seemed an instrument of salvation; Sarah was crazy about them) is all too true: Hugh and Hattie McElroy, who moved to Santa Fe in June, now are back for the wedding of a son, and Sarah has barely seen them. And she used to see Hattie almost every day. On this visit, though, the McElroys have come to Sarah and Jonathan’s once for dinner, and Sarah saw Hattie at a large lunch party (given by Hattie’s old friend Popsie Hooker).
Of course, having lived here forever, the McElroys are indeed involved with family and friends, as Sarah has just said. But really, Jonathan now furiously thinks (as Sarah must have thought), at least they could call her; they could meet for tea, or something.
Weeping, Sarah looks blotchy, aged, distorted; her fine, just-not-sharp features are blurred. “Piquant” is the word that Jonathan’s mother has found for Sarah’s face. “Well, I wouldn’t call her pretty, in any conventional way, but her face is so intelligent, so—piquant.” To Jonathan, her face is simply that, her own; he is so close to her that he rarely thinks about it, except that a sudden, unexpected sight of her can deeply move him still. She simply looks like a young woman who is crying, almost any young woman.
Thinking this, it occurs to Jonathan that he has never seen another man cry, and he himself would like to weep, at this moment; it is so hot, they are both so unhappy, everything seems lost. He pulls himself together, though, after this frightening thought, and then he remembers that in fact he did see his own father in tears, as he lay dying, in Mass. General Hospital; big heavy tears ran down his father’s long lined white face.
“You must think I’m really stupid,” Sarah gets out.
No, you’re the brightest girl I ever met, Jonathan does not say. Nor does he add, But that was a stupid remark.
Stupid is the last thing that Sarah is, actually, and during their New York married life (before this) she had no trouble getting the part-time editorial jobs that she liked, or books to review. Those occupations used to absorb much of Sarah’s time, and her plentiful energy, and Jonathan knows that lack of any such work down here contributes to her unhappiness; it is not just disappointment with the McElroys.
In New York, in a vague, optimistic way (they have been generally happy people, for these times), as they discussed the projected move to Hilton, Sarah and Jonathan assured each other that since it was a university town, not just any old backward Southern city, there would be work of some sort available to her, at the university press, or somewhere. Saying which they forgot one crucial fact, which is that in or around any university there are hundreds of readily exploitable bright students’ wives, or students, who grasp at all possible, however low-paying, semi-intellectual work.
And so for Sarah there has been little to do, in the too large, uncharming house, which (Jonathan has unhappily recognized) Sarah has been keeping much too clean. All her scrubbing and waxing, her dusting and polishing have a quality of desperation, as well as being out of character; his old busy Sarah was cheerfully untidy, which was quite all right with Jonathan, who did not mind housework.
Unsteadily, they now clear the table and wash up. They go upstairs to bed; they try to sleep, in the thick damp heat.
Sarah and Jonathan’s first month in Hilton, February, was terrible for them both. Cold, dark and windy, and wet, a month of almost unrelenting rains, which turned the new red clay roads leading out to their house into tortuous slicks, deeply rutted, with long wide puddles of muddy red water, sometimes just frozen at the edges. Cold damp drafts penetrated their barnlike house; outside, in the woods, everything dripped, boughs sagged, and no birds sang.
March was a little better: not yet spring, none of the promised balmy Southern blue, and no flowers, but at least the weather cleared; and the blustery winds, though cold, helped to dry the roads, and to cleanse the air.
And, one night at dinner, Sarah announced that she had met a really wonderful woman, in a bookstore. “My new best friend,” she said, with a tiny, half-apologetic laugh, as Jonathan’s heart sank, a little. They both knew her tendency toward somewhat ill-advised enthusiasms: the charming editor who turned out to be a lively alcoholic, given to midnight (and later) phone calls; the smart young film critic who made it instantly clear that she hated all their other friends. The long line of initially wonderful people, the new best friends, who in one way or another became betrayers of Sarah’s dreams of friendship.
However, there was another, larger group of friends she’d had for years, who were indeed all that Sarah said they were, smart and loyal and generous and fun. Jonathan liked those friends, now his friends, too. Life with Sarah had, in fact, made him more gregarious, changing him from a solitary, overeducated young man with a boring corporation job, despite an advanced degree in math, into a warmer, friendlier person. Sarah’s talkative, cheery friends were among her early charms for Jonathan. He simply wondered at her occasional lapses in judgment.
Hattie McElroy, the new best friend (and the owner, it turned out, of the bookstore where they had met), was very Southern, Sarah said; she was from Hilton. However, except for her accent (which Sarah imitated, very funnily), she did not seem Southern. “She reads so much, I guess it gives her perspective,” Sarah said. And, with a small pleased laugh, “She doesn’t like it here very much. She says she’s so tired of everyone she knows. They’re moving to Santa Fe in June. Unfortunately, for me.”
After that, all Sarah’s days seemed to include a visit to Hattie’s bookstore, where Hattie served up mugs of tea, Sarah said, along with “super” gossip about everyone in town. “There’s an old group that’s unbelievably stuffy,” Sarah reported to Jonathan. “People Hattie grew up with. They never even want to meet anyone new. Especially Yankees.” And she laughed, happy to have such an exclusive connection with her informative and amusing new friend.
“Any chance you could take over the bookstore when they leave?” asked Jonathan, early on. “Maybe we could buy it?” This was during the period of Sarah’s unhappy discovery about the work situation in Hilton, the gradually apparent fact of there being nothing for her.
“Well, the most awful thing. She sold it to a chain, and just before we got here. She feels terrible, but she says there didn’t seem any other way out, no one else came around to buy it. And the chain people are even bringing in their own manager.” Sarah’s laugh was rueful, and her small chin pointed downward as she added, “One more dead end. And damn, it would have been perfect for me.”
The next step, Jonathan dimly imagined, would be a party or dinner of some sort at the McElroys’, which he could not help mildly dreading, as he remembered the film critic’s party, at which not only was almost everyone else gay (that would have been all right, except that some of the women did seem very hostile, to him) but they all smoked—heavily, some of them pipes and cigars—in three tiny rooms on Horatio Street.
However, it was they who were to entertain the McElroys at dinner, Sarah told him. “And I think just the four of us,” she added. “That way it’s easier, and I can make something great. And besides, who else?”
All true: an imaginative but fluky cook, Sarah did best on a small scale. And, too, the only other people they knew were fellow-transferees, as displaced and possibly as lonely as themselves, but otherwise not especially sympathetic.
The first surprise about Hattie McElroy, that first April night, was her size: she was a very big woman, with wil
d bleached straw-looking hair and round doll-blue eyes, and about twenty years older than Jonathan would have imagined; Sarah spoke of her as of a contemporary. Hugh McElroy was tall and gray and somewhat dim.
And Hattie was a very funny woman. Over drinks, she started right in with a description of a party she had been to the night before. “I was wearing this perfectly all-right dress, even if it was a tad on the oldish side,” Hattie told them, as she sipped at her gin. “And Popsie Hooker—Can you imagine a woman my age, and still called Popsie? We went to Sunday school together, and she hasn’t changed one bit. Anyway, Popsie said to me, ‘Oh, I just love that dress you’re wearing. I was so sorry when they went out of style five years ago.’ Can you imagine? Isn’t she marvellous? I just love Popsie, I truly do.”
For such a big woman, Hattie’s laugh was small, a little-girl laugh, but Jonathan found himself drawn to her big friendly teeth, her crazy hair.
Sarah, it then turned out, had met Popsie Hooker; early on in their stay in Hilton she had gone to a luncheon that Popsie gave for the new corporation wives. And, Sarah told Hattie, “She made a little speech that I didn’t quite understand. About how she knew we were all very busy, so please not to write any thank-you notes. It was odd, I thought.”
Hattie’s chuckle increased in volume. “Oh, you don’t understand Southern talk, not at all! I can tell you don’t. That meant you were all supposed to write notes, and say you just couldn’t resist writing, even if she said not to, since her lunch party was just so lovely.”