The Stories of Alice Adams

by Alice Adams

  I laughed—I had always laughed a lot with Jennifer—but at the same time I was thinking that people from single, happy marriages are supposed to marry happily themselves. They are not supposed to make lonely, drunken phone calls to old, almost forgotten friends.

  Mostly, though, I was extremely pleased—elated, even—to have heard from Jennifer at all, despite the bad signs, the clear evidence that she was not in very good shape. As we hung up a few minutes later, I was aware of smiling to myself, the happy recipient of a happy birthday present. And like most especially welcome, sensitive presents, this gift from Jennifer was something that I had not known I needed, but that now I could no longer do without: a friend for talking to.

  I went out for dinner with my new beau in a rare lighthearted mood, but I may have seemed more than a little abstracted. I was thinking of Jennifer, her parents, and California.

  When Jennifer and I were friends, all that time ago, I truly loved her, but I also coveted almost everything about her: her golden curls, small plump hands, her famously sunny disposition, but most especially and most secretly I envied her her parents. I wanted them to be mine.

  I have since learned (hasn’t everyone?) that this is a common fantasy; Freud tells us that many children believe they have somehow ended up with the wrong set of parents. But at the time I naturally did not know this; guiltily I felt that only I had such an evil wish, to be rid of my own parents and moved in with another set. If it could somehow be proved, I thought, that I had been stolen by this dark and somber couple with whom I lived, while all along I was really a Cartwright child—then I would be perfectly happy. And if Jennifer’s parents were mine, then of course Jennifer and I would be truly sisters, as so often we spoke of wishing that we were.

  From the moment I saw them, even before seeing Jennifer, I was drawn to Scott and Nickie Cartwright, a tanned couple getting out of a new wood-paneled station wagon to look at a house for sale, the house next door to our house. I liked their bright splashy clothes, and the easy, careless way they walked and laughed; I wanted them to be the people to buy that house.

  I thought that they looked too young to be parents; that they turned out to have a little girl just my age was a marvelous surprise, a bonus, as it were.

  My own parents did not like the look of the Cartwrights, at first. “Lots of flash” was my Vermont mother’s succinct summation. And my father’s: “That garden they’re buying needs plenty of solid work. I hope they know it.” But fairly soon the four grown-ups took to dropping in on each other for a cup of coffee or a Coke, maybe, during the day; and at night they all got together for drinks. The Cartwrights, from St. Louis, had a sort of loose-style hospitality to which even my fairly stiff-mannered parents responded.

  What must initially have won my stern parents’ approval, though, was the Cartwrights’ total dedication to their garden. Even before actually moving in, they began to spend their weekends digging among the dahlias, pruning hibiscus, trimming orange blossoms, and probing the roots of ivy. And once they lived there, all during the week beautiful Nickie in her short red shorts could be observed out clipping boxwoods, often mowing the lawn. And watering everything.

  On weekends, around dusk if not sooner, the four of them would start in on their Tom Collinses, gin rickeys, or fruity concoctions with rum. Eventually one of the grown-ups (usually Nickie Cartwright) would remember that Jennifer and I should have some supper, and the two men (probably) would go out for some fried clams or pizza. Later on they would pretty much forget all about us, which was fine with Jennifer and me; we could stay up as long as we liked, giggling and whispering.

  All the grown-ups that I knew at that time drank; it was what I assumed grown-ups did when they got together. Jennifer and I never discussed this adult habit, and “drunk” is not a word we would have used to describe our parents, ever. “Drunk” meant a sort of clownish, TV-cartoon behavior.

  My parents as they drank simply talked too much; they told what seemed to me very long dull stories having to do with Santa Barbara history, early architects, all that. The Cartwrights, being younger, listened politely; Nickie laughed a lot, and they sat very close together.

  Certainly my parents were never clownish or even loud; God knows they were not. In a bitter, tight-mouthed way they might argue at breakfast; a few times (this was the worst of all) I could hear my mother crying late at night, all by herself.

  Because I had never heard them do so, I believed that the Cartwrights never argued, and I was sure that beautiful happy Nickie Cartwright never cried, and maybe she did not.

  • • •

  In the days that succeeded that first phone call from Jennifer, I thought considerably about her, about her parents, and mine. With terrible vividness I remembered the strength of my yearning for the Cartwrights, and I was assailed—again!—by the sheer intensity of all that childhood emotion, my earliest passions and guilts and despairs.

  Quite as vividly, though, I also remembered the simple fun that we used to have, Jennifer and I, as children, especially on the beach. Since I had always lived there in Santa Barbara, on the California coast, and the Cartwrights were originally from inland Missouri, I was Jennifer’s guide to the seashore. Bravely kicking our sneakers into tide pools, Jennifer and I uncovered marvels: tiny hermit crabs, long swaying seaweed, all purple. Anemones. Jennifer would squeal at dead fish, in a high, squeamish way, as I pretended not to mind them.

  I also showed Jennifer the more sophisticated pleasures of State Street, the ice-cream parlors and the hot-dog stands. As we both grew up a little, I pointed out the stores. Tweeds & Weeds, my mother’s favorite, was always too conservative for the Cartwright ladies, though. Nickie loved frills and lots of colors; she dressed herself and Jennifer in every shade of pink to tangerine. My mother ordered almost all of my clothes from the Lilliputian Bazaar, at Best & Company.

  Undoubtedly the tide pools and my happy fascination with them to a great extent determined my later choice of a career, although a desire to displease and/or shock my parents must have figured largely also. Biology to them connoted sex, which in a general way they were against.

  And possibly in some way of my own I made the same connection. In any case, I am forced to say that so far I have shone neither professionally nor in a romantic way. I did achieve a doctorate, and some years later an assistant professorship, at relatively early ages, but I do not feel that I will ever be truly distinguished.

  As one of my more kindly professors put it, my interest in marine biology could be called aesthetic rather than scientific. I excel at drawing—urchins, starfish, snails.

  As to my romantic history, it got off to a shaky start, so to speak, with my marriage to a fellow biologist, a man who after two years of me announced that colleagues should not be married to each other. (This could be true, but it had been his idea, originally.) He left me for a kindergarten teacher in Chicago, where his next teaching job happened to be. I became involved with an elderly musicologist, who was married; later with a graduate student in speech and drama, who, I came to believe, used coke, a lot of it.

  Three men, then—my husband and two subsequent lovers—who presented certain problems. However, surely I do too? I am hardly “problem-free” or even especially easy to get along with. I am moody, hypersensitive, demanding.

  In any case, these days as far as men are concerned I am running scared.

  After that first birthday call, Jennifer telephoned again, and again. She seemed to have an unerring instinct for the right time to call, not an easy feat with me. (I once knew a man who always called me when I was brushing my teeth; I used to think that if I really wanted to hear from him I had only to get out my toothbrush.) In Jennifer’s case, though, it may have been that I was simply so glad to hear from her.

  I gathered that her present life was quite reclusive; she did not seem to know where anyone else whom we had known was now. I gathered too that she was quite “comfortably off,” to use an old phrase of my mother’s. My mother t
hought “rich” a vulgar word, and perhaps it is. Anyway, I was very glad that Jennifer was comfortable.

  As I got used to talking to Jennifer again, sometimes I would find myself scolding her. You should get out more, take walks, get exercise, I would say. Go swimming—there must be a pool around. And what about vitamins? Do you eat enough? And Jennifer would laugh in her amiable way, and say she was sure I was absolutely right.

  Jennifer’s memory for long-gone days was extraordinary, though. She reminded me of the day we decided that to be kidnapped would be a thrilling adventure. We put on our best dresses and paraded slowly up and down State Street, conversing in loud voices about how rich (we liked the word) our parents were. Yachts, Spanish castles, trips on the Queen Mary, penthouses in New York—we mentioned all the things the movies had informed us rich people had, and did.

  “You had on your striped linen,” Jennifer perfectly recalled, “and I was wearing my lavender dotted swiss.” She laughed her prolonged, slow chuckle. “We just couldn’t understand why no one picked us up. Rich and adorable as we were. You remember, Jude?”

  Well, I would not have remembered, but Jennifer brought it all back to me, along with our beach walks, the beautiful tide pools, the white sand, the rocks.

  I began to look forward to those phone calls. I felt more and more that my connection with Jennifer was something that I had badly missed for years.

  I believe I would have enjoyed talking to Jennifer under almost any circumstances, probably, but that particular fall and winter were bad times for me—and seemingly the rest of the world: Ethiopia, Nicaragua. In the American Midwest, where I was, unemployment was rife, and terrible. And to make everything worse the snows came early that year—heavy, paralyzing.

  In a personal way, that snowed-in, difficult winter, things were especially bad: I was not getting along at all with my latest beau, the man who came to take me out to dinner on the night of Jennifer’s first phone call. This was particularly depressing since we had got off to a very, very good start—not fireworks, not some spectacular blaze that I would have known to distrust, but many quiet tastes in common, including cats (he had five, an intensely charming fact, I thought, and they all were beautiful tabbies). The truth was that we were quite a lot alike, he and I. Not only our tastes but our defects were quite similar. We were both wary, nervy, shy. Very likely we both needed more by way of contrasting personality—although his former wife had been a successful actress, flamboyant, a great beauty, and that had not worked out too well, either. In any case, we further had in common the fact of being veterans of several mid-life love affairs, both knowing all too well the litany of the condition of not getting along. We exhibited a lessening of interest in each other in identical ways: an increase in our courtesy level. We pretended surprise and pleasure at the sound of each other’s voice on the phone; with excruciating politeness we made excuses not to see each other. (At times it occurred to me that in some awful way I was becoming my parents—those super-polite role models.) And then we stopped talking altogether, my lover and I.

  The next year was to be my sabbatical from the college, and none of my plans seemed to be working out in that direction, either. Nothing available at Woods Hole, nothing in San Diego. Or Berkeley, or Stanford.

  Around March, with everything still going bad and no signs of spring, I realized that I had not heard from Jennifer for several weeks. Some instinct had all along advised me that I should wait to be called, I should not call Jennifer. Now, however, I did; I dialed the number in Santa Barbara. (Easy enough to come by: Jennifer, an unlikely feminist, had returned to her maiden name.)

  It was not a good conversation. Jennifer was very drunk, although it was only about six at night, California time. She was drunk and sad and apologetic, over everything. She was extremely polite, but I felt that she was not even certain who I was; I could have been almost anyone. Any stranger, even, who happened to call, selling magazine subscriptions or offering chances to buy tax-free municipal bonds.

  I was seriously worried, and after a little time I came to certain serious decisions.

  I did the following things, in more or less this order:

  I made an appointment and went to see the head of my department, and after some conversation, some argument, we struck up a bargain, of sorts. I would be granted a year’s leave of absence (this involved less pay than a sabbatical, which was one of my selling points), and in return for this great favor I would teach an extra section of the general-science course for freshmen on my return.

  I put up a notice on the bookstore bulletin board about renting out my house; from a great many applicants (probably I should have asked for more money) I selected a nice young couple from the Music Department. The only problem was that two people in the house would need all my small space; I would have to store everything but the furniture.

  Through a national real-estate outfit I located a real-estate agent in Santa Barbara, who (this seemed an omen, a sure sign that I was on the right track) had a listing just a couple of houses down from Jennifer’s—a garage apartment, mercifully cheap.

  I called Jennifer, and as though it were a joke I said that I was coming out for a year, to take care of her.

  • • •

  And that is where I am now, and what I am doing. My apartment is in an alley half a block from Jennifer’s house, the Cartwright house—and of course from my parents’ house, too, the house that I sold when they died: my money for graduate school. My apartment is tiny, but since I am not there much, no matter. I have room for my drawing board, shelves of books and stacked papers; and outside there is a tiny scrap of a yard, where a neighbor cat comes to visit occasionally (he is beautiful—a pale-gray, long-eared, most delicate-footed creature).

  I am beginning to run into a problem with space for clothes, though. When I first got here, Jennifer was so depressed, she said, by the darkness of my wardrobe (“Judy, you can’t go around like that, not out here, in those professor clothes”) that we have done a lot of State Street shopping, by way of brightening up my look. “But you’re wonderful in that red silk,” Jennifer insisted.

  Jennifer herself, for a person who drinks or who has drunk that much, looks remarkably well. Needless to say, I was more than a little nervous about seeing her again. How would she look? I was so scared, in fact, that I gave very little thought to how I would look to her, and I think actually I am the one who has aged more. Jennifer is thin, a little frail and shaky on her feet, that is true, but her skin is still good, fine and pink, and her eyes are blue and clear. She just looks like a very, very pretty woman, of a certain age.

  The first few weeks of my stay I made all the obvious suggestions having to do with drink: the Betty Ford place, or A.A., or just a plain good doctor. Well, Jennifer refused to go to anything, as I might have known she would—she has always been extremely stubborn. She even says that her doctor says she is perfectly all right. Two explanations for that last occur to me: one, she does not tell her doctor, or did not, how much she really drinks; or, two, the doctor himself is an alcoholic; I’ve heard that a lot of them are.

  I have made a couple of strong advances, though. One is in terms of nutrition. I have instituted a heavy regimen of vitamins, and also I do most of the shopping and cooking. I go down to the docks for fresh fish, and on Saturday mornings there is a Farmers’ Market, with lovely California vegetables and fruits. We eat very well, and I am sure that Jennifer eats a lot more with me around.

  Another considerable advance is that Jennifer has entirely given up hard liquor, and now only drinks wine, white wine. In her big blue Ford station wagon we drive down to the new liquor store just off State Street. A handsome, bright-brassy, airy space. We walk around among the wooden crates and bins and shelves of bottles. This particular store deals mostly in California wines, and there are always some interesting new labels. New wineries keep turning up all over the state, even in very unlikely places, like San Luis Obispo or San Diego. We laugh at some of the names, which a
re often a little outlandish: Witches’ Wish? And we admire the designs of the labels. We have even come to conclude that there is a definite correlation between beautiful labels and first-rate wines. Vichon, for example, one of our favorites, has an especially pretty picture on its bottle.

  One of the best aspects of this whole venture for me is my discovery that after all I really can drink wine, with no ill effects. When I first came out, I would have one glass of wine at dinner, to keep Jennifer company, as it were. Then sometimes two, then sometimes another at home.

  And now, in the late afternoons, though still too early to start over to the Cartwrights’—to Jennifer’s house—I begin to think how nice a cool dry glass of wine would taste, and then I think, Well, why not? This is, after all, a sort of vacation for me. And so I pour myself one. I take the wine outside. I sit in one of the half-collapsed but still quite comfortable rattan chairs, in my tiny yard with its minute view of the evening sea, the sky, the burning sun. I sip, and in a peaceful way I contemplate my return to Santa Barbara.

  I almost never think about my parents, or those old unhappy days spent here with them, growing up. Our family house has been remodeled almost beyond recognition, for which I am grateful. Only very infrequently do I feel its presence as that of a ghost, looming there just next to the Cartwright house.

  I do not worry in the way that I used to about my career—that career, teaching at Minnesota. Marine biology. Sometimes I think I could stay right here forever (someone else could take on the freshman sections), and maybe get into something entirely new. I could walk on the beach and make sketches. (I do that already, of course; I mean I could do it in a more programmatic way.) Maybe someday I would be good enough to have a show, and maybe sell some. Or I could give drawing lessons at some local school. I might even, as we say, meet someone. Some nice young bearded man, with leftist views and a fondness for cats. A farmer, maybe; he might wander into the market some Saturday morning, with some lovely artichokes.