Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

“Sure looks like it. Yep, I bet you’re right.”

At that moment the woman’s tears begin, and after a startled minute or two they start to whisper. “Say, whatever’s eating her, do you reckon?” one of them asks.

“Haven’t got the foggiest notion; she sure don’t look drunk. Maybe some kind of a drug she took.”

The young woman, Claire Williston, who is not on drugs, or drunk, has been deeply mortified by those tears, which came on her like a fit, a seizure. Generally she is a disciplined person; she behaves well, even under emotional stress. She does not make scenes, does not cry in public, and rarely cries alone. Maudlin , she is censoriously thinking, and, How could I have done this to myself? How could I take a flight that would go right over Hilton?

Vague about the specifics of geography, she had simply not realized what any map could have told her: flying from Atlanta to Washington of course you go right over Hilton, the small mid-Southern town where Claire was born and lived for the years until she went away to school up North. To which, except for one fatal summer and her father’s funeral, she has not been back for years, and where, as she sees it, she cannot ever now go back. But here she is, directly overhead.

At last, gaining some control over the tears, she continues silently to castigate herself: for not having thought through the implications, geographic and otherwise, of flying all over the South except to Hilton. It is precisely the sort of “unconscious” mistake that people who pride themselves on rationality, on control, are most prone to make, she tells herself; it is how they do themselves in, finally.

In a professional way her own life is indeed rational, is even a moderate success. Based in San Francisco, she is the West Coast editor of a national magazine; she likes the work, and is paid fairly well. (A less successful side of her life, containing the unconscious mistakes of which she accuses herself, has to do with intemperate love affairs, occasional poor judgment as to friends. Flying right over the place you don’t want to see or think about.) This is the last leg of a fact-finding trip in which she has thought in an abstract way about “the South,” or “the new South,” and has not thought about Hilton, or her on the whole painful upbringing there, or the searing love affair which took place on that last summer visit. Now, as a treat, she is on her way to see Susan, an old friend in Washington; she has filled a notebook with observations for the article she will write, but she has reserved some lighter conversational notes for Susan: her fantasy that all the food in New Orleans comes from a single subterranean kitchen with a gigantic black vat of béchamel; her dislike of the self-conscious, daily-manicured prettiness of Charleston; her encounter with the awful loudmouthed racist ( still ) cabdriver in Atlanta: “On Fridays, once they’s had they lunch, they’s no holding them till midnight, with they singing and they dancing and they razor fights.” It was Susan who occupied her thoughts, until the land below began to look so overwhelmingly familiar and she heard the man across from her: “Say, aren’t we passing over Hilton?”

At this altitude actual landmarks are impossible to recognize, but as she continues to look down, Claire feels the most powerful pull toward that land, as if there were some special gravity into whose range she has flown. And then a remarkable event occurs; over the loudspeaker comes this announcement: “Well, folks, we’re going to be making a little unscheduled stopover right about now. Be landing down at Raleigh-Durham for a little adjustment in the oil-filter system. Won’t take no more’n a minute.”

Dear God, I do not deserve this, Claire thinks, and at the same time, crazily, she wonders if the plane has been compelled by the same pull that she felt, like an event in science fiction. Dabbing at her face, making a few cosmetic repairs (at which the men across from her sigh with relief: when a woman can tend to her face, she’s pretty much all right, they think), she watches as the descending plane approaches the familiar pine-lined, long gray grass field. It bumps down; a few passengers applaud. The plane moves toward the bright beige terminal building.

Passengers get up and move along the aisle, murmuring to each other that they might as well get some air, maybe coffee; the men across from Claire, with a short glance at her, go out with new just-unwrapped cigars in their hands. She remains fixed in her seat; she watches as almost everyone else leaves, and then she turns to the window again. No longer crying, she has just realized that she is deeply afraid to go into the terminal; she might see someone she knows, or once knew. Maybe even Spencer Goddard, that summer’s fatal lover, still living in nearby Hilton, presumably with his wife.

She looks toward the pinewoods, the lacing of bright fall leaves, and she thinks of something else that she will say to Susan, describing this last leg of her trip, her South revisited: “Seeing those woods made me actually burst into tears,” she will say. “But you know how I always loved the woods down there. When I was a kid there I spent all my time outdoors.”

Or maybe she won’t tell anyone, ever, about crying in that awful way, at the sight of familiar woods.

The great thing about the woods, from a child’s point of view, was that parents almost never came along; the woods were quite safe then, and there was a lot to do: you could dam up streams or build tepees, wade in the creek or swing on the heavy grapevines, or just run—race through dead leaves and overgrown corn furrows, in the smells of pine and dirt and sun.

Later, of course, the woods took on other meanings; they offered romantic shelter and privacy for kissing, touching—whatever forms early love took. Although actually (or so Claire thought) there was always something inherently sexual in that landscape: the lushness of it all, the white overflowing waterfalls and dense green caves of honeysuckle vines—and, in the fall, crimson leaves as bright as blood. The hiding and kissing, those heats and fears of love all came early for Claire, but for many years, all the years of her true childhood, she was busy with dams and Indian huts, with swinging out into the sky, wading and trying not to fall into the creek.

One afternoon, when she must have been five or six, a small dark skinny child, Claire did fall into the creek; she fell right off a log on which she and some other children had all been crossing to the other side—off, splash, into the water. Not hurt, she stood up, soaking wet, her pink dress streaked with brown. The other children, all older than Claire, began to point and laugh at her, and she laughed, too, enjoying all the attention and the drama. “Oh, my mother will kill me!” she cried out as the other kids went on laughing. And then one by one, accidentally on purpose, they all fell in, and stood around in their soaking wet clothes, in the hot, hot sun. It was a wonderful day, until it was time to go home, and then Claire began to get scared. Of course no one would kill her, but they would be very mad. Her mother, Isabel, would look at her and yell, because Claire was so careless, and her father, Bayard, might do almost anything, depending on how drunk he was; he might even yell at her mother for yelling at Claire, and hug Claire, but in a way that hurt. The only safe grown-up person was Lobelia, the maid, but there was no way to make sure of seeing Lobelia first, and Claire approached her parents’ large stone hilltop house cold and heavy with fear.

There were five or six cars in the driveway, and then she remembered that they were having a party; good, she could go right into the kitchen, to Lobelia, and with luck they might forget all about her; she could sneak some food up the backstairs to her room, some ham and beaten biscuits, whatever.