The Stories of Alice Adams

by Alice Adams

  There was some overlapping, or crossing, among those three social groups; there were hybrids, as it were. In fact, I was such a crossbreed myself: literally my mother and I were town people—my dead father had been a banker, but since his brother was a professor we too were considered faculty people. Also my mother had a lot of money, making us further élite. To me, being known as rich was just embarrassing, more freakish than advantageous, and I made my mother stop ordering my clothes from Best’s; I wanted dresses from the local stores, like everyone else’s.

  Car Jones too was a hybrid child, although his case was less visible than mine: his country family were distant cousins of the prominent and prosperous dean of the medical school, Dean Willoughby Jones. (They seem to have gone in for fancy names, in all the branches of that family.) I don’t think his cousins spoke to him.

  In any case, being richer and younger than the others in my class made me socially very insecure, and I always approached the playground with a sort of excited dread: would I be asked to join in a game, and if it were dodge ball (the game I most hated) would I be the first person hit with the ball, and thus eliminated? Or, if the girls were just standing around and talking, would I get all the jokes, and know which boys they were talking about?

  Then, one pale-blue balmy April day, some of the older girls asked me if I wanted to play truth or consequences with them. I wasn’t sure how the game went, but anything was better than dodge ball, and, as always, I was pleased at being asked.

  “It’s easy,” said Jean, a popular leader, with curly red hair; her father was a dean of the law school. “You just answer the questions we ask you, or you take the consequences.”

  I wasn’t at all sure what consequences were, but I didn’t like to ask.

  They began with simple questions. How old are you? What’s your middle name?

  This led to more complicated (and crueler) ones.

  “How much money does your mother have?”

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t, of course, and I doubt that she did either, that poor vague lady, too young to be a widow, too old for motherhood. “I think maybe a thousand dollars,” I hazarded.

  At this they all frowned, that group of older, wiser girls, whether in disbelief or disappointment, I couldn’t tell. They moved a little away from me and whispered together.

  It was close to the end of recess. Down on the playing field below us one of the boys threw the baseball and someone batted it out in a long arc, out to the farthest grassy edges of the field, and several other boys ran to retrieve it. On the level above us, a rutted terrace up, the little children stood in line for turns on the slide, or pumped with furious small legs on the giant swings.

  The girls came back to me. “Okay, Emily,” said Jean. “Just tell the truth. Would you rather be covered with honey and eaten alive by ants, in the hot Sahara Desert—or kiss Car Jones?”

  Then, as now, I had a somewhat literal mind: I thought of honey, and ants, and hot sand, and quite simply I said I’d rather kiss Car Jones.

  Well. Pandemonium: Did you hear what she said? Emily would kiss Car Jones! Car Jones. The truth—Emily would like to kiss Car Jones! Oh, Emily, if your mother only knew! Emily and Car! Emily is going to kiss Car Jones! Emily said she would! Oh, Emily!

  The boys, just then coming up from the baseball field, cast bored and pitying looks at the sources of so much noise; they had always known girls were silly. But Harry McGinnis, a glowing, golden boy, looked over at us and laughed aloud. I had been watching Harry timidly for months; that day I thought his laugh was friendly.

  Recess being over, we all went back into the schoolroom, and continued with the civics lesson. I caught a few ambiguous smiles in my direction, which left me both embarrassed and confused.

  That afternoon, as I walked home from school, two of the girls who passed me on their bikes called back to me, “Car Jones!” and in an automatic but for me new way I squealed out, “Oh no!” They laughed, and repeated, from their distance, “Car Jones!”

  • • •

  The next day I continued to be teased. Somehow the boys had got wind of what I had said, and they joined in with remarks about Yankee girls being fast, how you couldn’t tell about quiet girls, that sort of wit. Some of the teasing sounded mean; I felt that Jean, for example, was really out to discomfit me, but most of it was high-spirited friendliness. I was suddenly discovered, as though hitherto I had been invisible. And I continued to respond with that exaggerated, phony squeal of embarrassment that seemed to go over so well. Harry McGinnis addressed me as Emily Jones, and the others took that up. (I wonder if Harry had ever seen me before.)

  Curiously, in all this new excitement, the person I thought of least was the source of it all: Car Jones. Or, rather, when I saw the actual Car, hulking over the water fountain or lounging near the steps of a truck, I did not consciously connect him with what felt like social success, new popularity. (I didn’t know about consequences.)

  Therefore, when the first note from Car appeared on my desk, it felt like blackmail, although the message was innocent, was even kind. “You mustn’t mind that they tease you. You are the prettiest one of the girls. C. Jones.” I easily recognized his handwriting, those recklessly forward-slanting strokes, from the day when he had had to write on the blackboard, “I will not disturb the other children during Music.” Twenty-five times. The note was real, all right.

  Helplessly I turned around to stare at the back of the room, where the tallest boys sprawled in their too small desks. Truck children, all of them, bored and uncomfortable. There was Car, the tallest of all, the most bored, the least contained. Our eyes met, and even at that distance I saw that his were not black, as I had thought, but a dark slate blue; stormy eyes, even when, as he rarely did, Car smiled. I turned away quickly, and I managed to forget him for a while.

  Having never witnessed a Southern spring before, I was astounded by its bursting opulence, that soft fullness of petal and bloom, everywhere the profusion of flowering shrubs and trees, the riotous flower beds. Walking home from school, I was enchanted with the yards of the stately houses (homes of professors) that I passed, the lush lawns, the rows of brilliant iris, the flowering quince and dogwood trees, crape myrtle, wisteria vines. I would squint my eyes to see the tiniest pale-green leaves against the sky.

  My mother didn’t like the spring. It gave her hay fever, and she spent most of her time languidly indoors, behind heavily lined, drawn draperies. “I’m simply too old for such exuberance,” she said.

  “Happy” is perhaps not the word to describe my own state of mind, but I was tremendously excited, continuously. The season seemed to me so extraordinary in itself, the colors, the enchanting smells, and it coincided with my own altered awareness of myself: I could command attention, I was pretty (Car Jones was the first person ever to say that I was, after my mother’s long-ago murmurings to a late-arriving baby).

  Now everyone knew my name, and called it out as I walked onto the playground. Last fall, as an envious, unknown new girl, I had heard other names, other greetings and teasing-insulting nicknames, “Hey, Red,” Harry McGinnis used to shout, in the direction of popular Jean.

  The next note from Car Jones said, “I’ll bet you hate it down here. This is a cruddy town, but don’t let it bother you. Your hair is beautiful. I hope you never cut it. C. Jones.”

  This scared me a little: the night before I had been arguing with my mother on just that point, my hair, which was long and straight. Why couldn’t I cut and curl it, like the other girls? How had Car Jones known what I wanted to do? I forced myself not to look at him; I pretended that there was no Car Jones; it was just a name that certain people had made up.

  I felt—I was sure—that Car Jones was an “abnormal” person. (I’m afraid “different” would have been the word I used, back then.) He represented forces that were dark and strange, whereas I myself had just come out into the light. I had joined the world of the normal. (My “normality” later included three marriages to
increasingly “rich and prominent” men; my current husband is a surgeon. Three children, and as many abortions. I hate the symmetry, but there you are. I haven’t counted lovers. It comes to a normal life, for a woman of my age.) For years, at the time of our coming to Hilton, I had felt a little strange, isolated by my father’s death, my older-than-most-parents mother, by money. By being younger than other children, and new in town. I could clearly afford nothing to do with Car, and at the same time my literal mind acknowledged a certain obligation.

  Therefore, when a note came from Car telling me to meet him on a Saturday morning in the vacant lot next to the school, it didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have to go. I made excuses to my mother, and to some of the girls who were getting together for Cokes at someone’s house. I’d be a little late, I told the girls. I had to do an errand for my mother.

  It was one of the palest, softest, loveliest days of that spring. In the vacant lot weeds bloomed like the rarest of flowers; as I walked toward the abandoned trellis I felt myself to be a sort of princess, on her way to grant an audience to a courtier.

  Car, lounging just inside the trellis, immediately brought me up short. “You’re several minutes late,” he said, and I noticed that his teeth were stained (from tobacco?) and his hands were dirty: couldn’t he have washed his hands, to come and meet me? He asked, “Just who do you think you are, the Queen of Sheba?”

  I am not sure what I had imagined would happen between us, but this was wrong; I was not prepared for surliness, this scolding. Weakly I said that I was sorry I was late.

  Car did not acknowledge my apology; he just stared at me, stormily, with what looked like infinite scorn.

  Why had he insisted that I come to meet him? And now that I was here, was I less than pretty, seen close up?

  A difficult minute passed, and then I moved a little away. I managed to say that I had to go; I had to meet some girls, I said.

  At that Car reached and grasped my arm. “No, first we have to do it.”

  Do it? I was scared.

  “You know what you said, as good as I do. You said kiss Car Jones, now didn’t you?”

  I began to cry.

  Car reached for my hair and pulled me toward him; he bent down to my face and for an instant our mouths were mashed together. (Christ, my first kiss!) Then, so suddenly that I almost fell backward, Car let go of me. With a last look of pure rage he was out of the trellis and striding across the field, toward town, away from the school.

  For a few minutes I stayed there in the trellis; I was no longer crying (that had been for Car’s benefit, I now think) but melodramatically I wondered if Car might come back and do something else to me—beat me up, maybe. Then a stronger fear took over: someone might find out, might have seen us, even. At that I got out of the trellis fast, out of the vacant lot. (I was learning conformity fast, practicing up for the rest of my life.)

  I think, really, that my most serious problem was my utter puzzlement: what did it mean, that kiss? Car was mad, no doubt about that, but did he really hate me? In that case, why a kiss? (Much later in life I once was raped, by someone to whom I was married, but I still think that counts; in any case, I didn’t know what he meant either.)

  Not sure what else to do, and still in the grip of a monumental confusion, I went over to the school building, which was open on Saturdays for something called Story Hours, for little children. I went into the front entrance and up to the library where, to the surprise of the librarian, who may have thought me retarded, I listened for several hours to tales of the Dutch Twins, and Peter and Polly in Scotland. Actually it was very soothing, that long pasteurized drone, hard even to think about Car while listening to pap like that.

  When I got home I found my mother for some reason in a livelier, more talkative mood than usual. She told me that a boy had called while I was out, three times. Even before my heart had time to drop—to think that it might be Car, she babbled on, “Terribly polite. Really, these bien élevé Southern boys.” (No, not Car.) “Harry something. He said he’d call again. But, darling, where were you, all this time?”

  I was beginning to murmur about the library, homework, when the phone rang. I answered, and it was Harry McGinnis, asking me to go to the movies with him the following Saturday afternoon. I said of course, I’d love to, and I giggled in a silly new way. But my giggle was one of relief; I was saved, I was normal, after all. I belonged in the world of light, of lightheartedness. Car Jones had not really touched me.

  I spent the next day, Sunday, in alternating states of agitation and anticipation.

  On Monday, on my way to school, I felt afraid of seeing Car, at the same time that I was both excited and shy at the prospect of Harry McGinnis—a combination of emotions that was almost too much for me, that dazzling, golden first of May, and that I have not dealt with too successfully in later life.

  Harry paid even less attention to me than he had before; it was a while before I realized that he was conspicuously not looking in my direction, not teasing me, and that that in itself was a form of attention, as well as being soothing to my shyness.

  I realized too, after a furtive scanning of the back row, that Car Jones was not at school that day. Relief flooded through my blood like oxygen, like spring air.

  Absences among the truck children were so unremarkable, and due to so many possible causes, that any explanation at all for his was plausible. Of course it occurred to me, among other imaginings, that he had stayed home out of shame for what he did to me. Maybe he had run away to sea, had joined the Navy or the Marines? Coldheartedly, I hoped so. In any case, there was no way for me to ask.

  Later that week the truth about Car Jones did come out—at first as a drifting rumor, then confirmed, and much more remarkable than joining the Navy: Car Jones had gone to the principal’s office, a week or so back, and had demanded to be tested for entrance (immediate) into high school, a request so unprecedented (usually only pushy academic parents would ask for such a change) and so dumbfounding that it was acceded to. Car took the test and was put into the sophomore high-school class, on the other side of town, where he by age and size—and intellect, as things turned out; he tested high—most rightfully belonged.

  I went to a lot of Saturday movies with Harry McGinnis, where we clammily held hands, and for the rest of that spring, and into summer, I was teased about Harry. No one seemed to remember having teased me about Car Jones.

  Considering the size of Hilton at that time, it seems surprising that I almost never saw Car again, but I did not, except for a couple of tiny glimpses, during the summer that I was still going to the movies with Harry. On both those occasions, seen from across the street, or on the other side of a dim movie house, Car was with an older girl, a high-school girl, with curled hair, and lipstick, all that. I was sure that his hands and teeth were clean.

  • • •

  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 clip
ping 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.