Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

No more phone calls to Clover. Hope and Josiah busy themselves with other people; there is always someone new around, if you look, and Hope and Josiah have little other occupation—although, like many idle people, they always sound very busy indeed.

Sometimes, still, they talk about Clover. They hope she isn’t too badly off, they say to each other, in sepulchral voices.

Or, in an opposite mood, Josiah will cheerily announce, “Well, there’s always a great deal to be said for dropping an old friend.”

Being out of touch with her, there is no way that they could know that this is one of the happiest seasons of Clover’s entire life, this finally arrived-at spring. Too busy and happy to know that she has been dropped (such a confusion often seems to exist between the dropper and the droppee), she sometimes says to Gregory, with whom she is living now, “I suppose I really should call Hope and Josiah?”

“As you will, my darling, but don’t think of it as ‘should.’ Call them when you want to see them, and only then.”

She smiles. “That’s just the problem: I don’t want to see them at all.” And then she says, “Gregory, you are the nicest man I’ve ever known.”

He laughs. “Should you say that again I would be in danger of taking you seriously.”

One afternoon in late spring, near Memorial Day, Josiah comes home to tell Hope that he has discovered the most marvelous bookstore down in the Marina. “And the woman who runs it—well, you’ll have to see for yourself. She’s got to be eighty, if she’s a day, and absolutely mad, surely certifiable. She says she’s related to both Isadora Duncan and Gertrude Stein, can you believe it? It turns out that she lives not far from here, and since tomorrow’s a holiday I’ve asked her over for dinner. Ça va , my love?”

Hope, who has been relatively happy in the last few months, more or less alone with Josiah, now feels her heart sink, familiarly, and she thinks, as she has too many times before, of suicide: shouldn’t she just leave Josiah alone with his new freak friend?

But then she thinks, Really, why should I bother? I could just go on a nice long trip to Bali, Tahiti, maybe, by myself.

The idea is suddenly terrifically attractive.

Because she looked older than she was, eighteen, and was very pretty, her two slightly crooked front teeth more than offset by wheat-blond hair and green eyes, Dylan Ballentyne was allowed to be a waitress at the Cypress Lodge without having been a bus girl first. She hated the work—loathed, despised it—but it was literally the only job in town, town being a cluster of houses and a couple of stores on the northern California coast. Dylan also hated the town and the wild, dramatically desolate landscape of the area, to which she and her mother had moved at the beginning of the summer, coming down from San Francisco, where Dylan had been happy in the sunny Mission District, out of sight of the sea.

Now she moved drearily through days of trays and dishes, spilled coffee and gelatinous ash-strewn food, fat cross guests or hyper-friendly ones. She was sustained by her small paycheck and somewhat more generous tips, and by her own large fantasies of ultimate rescue, or escape.

The Lodge, an ornately Victorian structure with pinnacles and turrets, was on a high bluff two miles south of town, surrounded by sharply sloping meadows which were edged with dark-green cypresses and pines, overlooking the turbulent, shark-infested, almost inaccessible sea. (One more disappointment: talking up the move, Dylan’s mother, self-named Flower, had invented long beach days and picnics; they would both learn to surf, she had said.)

Breakfast was served at the Lodge from eight till ten-thirty, lunch from eleven-thirty until two, in a long glassed-in porch, the dining room. Supposedly between those two meals the help got a break, half an hour for a sandwich or a cigarette, but more often than not it was about five minutes, what with lingering breakfasters and early, eager lunchers. Dinner was at six, set up at five-thirty, and thus there really was a free hour or sometimes two, in the mid to late afternoon. Dylan usually spent this time in the “library” of the Lodge, a dim, musty room, paneled in fake mahogany. Too tired for books, although her reading habits had delighted English teachers in high school, she leafed through old House Beautifuls, Gourmets or Vogues , avidly drinking in all those ads for the accoutrements of rich and leisurely exotic lives.

Curiously, what she saw and read made her almost happy, for that limited time, like a drug. She could nearly believe that she saw herself in Vogue , in a Rolls-Royce ad: a tall thin blond woman (she was thin, if not very tall) in silk and careless fur, one jeweled hand on the fender of a silver car, and in the background a handsome man, dark, wearing a tuxedo.

Then there was dinner. Drinks. Wines. Specifics as to the doneness of steaks or roasts. Complaints. I ordered medium rare. Is this crab really fresh ? And heavy trays. The woman who managed the restaurant saw to it that waitresses and bus girls “shared” that labor, possibly out of some vaguely egalitarian sense that the trays were too heavy for any single group. By eight-thirty or so, Dylan and all the girls would be slow-witted with exhaustion, smiles stiffening on their very young faces, perspiration drying under their arms and down their backs. Then there would come the stentorian voice of the manageress: “ Dylan , are you awake? You look a thousand miles away.”

Actually, in her dreams, Dylan was less than two hundred miles away, in San Francisco.

One fantasy of rescue which Dylan recognized as childish, and unlikely, probably, was that a nice older couple (in their fifties, anyway: Flower was only thirty-eight) would adopt her. At the end of their stay at the Lodge, after several weeks, they would say, “Well, Dylan, we just don’t see how we’re going to get along without you. Do you think you could possibly …?” There had in fact been several couples who could have filled that bill—older people from San Francisco, or even L.A., San Diego, Scottsdale—who stayed for a few weeks at the Lodge, who liked Dylan and tipped her generously. But so far none of them had been unable to leave without her; they didn’t even send her postcards.

Another fantasy, a little more plausible, more grown up, involved a man who would come to the Lodge alone and would fall in love with Dylan and take her away. The man was as indistinct as the one in the Rolls-Royce ads, as vaguely handsome, dark and rich.

In the meantime, the local boys who came around to see the other waitresses tried to talk to Dylan; their hair was too long and their faces splotchily sunburned from cycling and surfing, which were the only two things they did, besides drinking beer. Dylan ignored them, and went on dreaming.

The usual group of guests at the Lodge didn’t offer much material for fantasy: youngish, well-off couples who arrived in big new station wagons with several children, new summer clothes and new sports equipment. Apart from these stylish parents, there were always two or three very young couples, perhaps just married or perhaps not, all with the look of not quite being able to afford where they were.

And always some very old people.

There was, actually, one unmarried man (almost divorced) among the guests, and although he was very nice, intelligent, about twenty-eight, he did not look rich, or, for that matter, handsome and dark. Whitney Iverson was a stocky red-blond man with a strawberry birthmark on one side of his neck. Deep-set blue eyes were his best feature. Probably he was not the one to fall in love and rescue Dylan, although he seemed to like her very much. Mr. Iverson, too, spent his late afternoons in the Lodge’s library.