Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

Then he held open the inner screen door, so that Cynthia had to go in first.

An enormous room. She looked dizzily from a maze of high silvered beams to a huge stone fireplace, to a long leather sofa, velvet chairs, a bearskin rug. Deerheads, mounted at intervals.

She turned, she hid her face against Roger. “It’s too much, it’s too beautiful.”

Not knowing that she meant it, he laughed, and, moving away from her, he went about turning on lamps; he picked up their suitcases and took them into another room.

More beauty: a white room of rough painted wood, three windows that faced the river. A wide brass bed, white-and-yellow quilt. Could anyone sleep there? It turned out that Cynthia, at least that time, could not.

In fact, several of Cynthia’s problems that weekend were physiological: the altitude, or something, took away her appetite; she was perpetually hungry, and unable to eat. A drink, on the rear terrace, overlooking the river, plus a glass of wine at dinner, made her unpleasantly dizzy, in the handsome long dining room that looked out to the verdant flowing meadow, in the deepening green evening light.

And that night she could hardly sleep.

The next day the sight of the lovely yellow poplars saddened her, a sign of fall. What could she and Roger do, after the end of summer? What they did was to continue more or less as they were; then, at Christmas (of course), they quarreled violently, and with no reason. They violently reconciled in January.

Aside from admitting to not feeling very well, Cynthia had not mentioned the non-success of that first weekend. Since later times at that house were generally so good, with wonderful weekends in the snow, it seemed unimportant, her first impression. But she allowed herself to realize that she had been much too aware of the house; she had been almost jealous. As though the house were Roger’s mother? She rejected that as too simple, too “Freudian.” As though the house would outlast her, not only in Roger’s affections but on the earth? This was mysteriously closer to the truth.

Now, once past Sacramento and the dullness of those entwined and endless freeways, the acres of “mobile” homes and depressing, shoddy shopping centers, the worst of the drive is over. They could look forward to the lovely cool ascent into the mountains, the views of small lakes and ponds, the rivers. The distant still-snowcapped peaks, the Sierras, stretching to Nevada.

They could look forward to their desecrated house.

And now Roger says, “We might as well stop for a drink, don’t you think?”

Gratefully: “Yes.”

Somewhat dramatically he mutters, “It hardly matters what time we get there, does it.”

“I suppose not.”

They stop at a nondescript bar beyond Auburn, where often in more cheerful moods they have stopped before, where Roger has always stopped on his way up to his house. The bartender, a fake rural with handlebar mustaches, has lost a lot of weight. “Gave up drinking beer,” he tells someone else, farther down the bar, as he mixes their gin-and-tonics. An unobservant man, he persists in believing that he has known Cynthia as well as Roger for a long time. Do all Roger’s wives and girlfriends look alike? Cynthia wonders, but has not wanted to ask this question; she believes that it would sound jealous, even if she is not; just curious.

Now, in the half-light, Roger’s eyes darken, and his voice is low and intense as he says to Cynthia, “Sometimes I feel like saying, Christ, come on and take it, it’s yours, you know?”

She knows.

“But who would I say that to? We haven’t even identified the criminals yet.” A quick grin. “It’s almost meaningless, these days. Owning anything.”

“It is,” says Cynthia.

The last third of the trip.

Seeing almost nothing, they pass lovely tree-lined canyons with lakes shimmering below, and vistas of distant bare gray Sierra rocks, and quiet ponds. Flowering orchards and fields of tiny multicolored flowers.

Their drinks have intensified rather than lightened their moods. Cynthia is thinking of all the named and nameless threats that haunt everyone alive, in this time and place. Pollution in seas and rivers everywhere. Drought and famine. Rapes and knifings in ghettos and in well-lighted suburban streets. Cancer. Broken glass in Roger’s house. Someone sick. She is also thinking that someone could have been murdered in the house. Killed and left there. Did the sheriff go over it all? Did Mary Drake?

Roger slows down; he signals, and they cross the highway, and turn down the steep road to the river. They go over the bridge, and turn onto the road through the meadow, the high green grass, between the tall dark trees. Beside the porch the lilacs are in full lavender bloom, and the wild rose has tiny tight pink buds.

Roger opens the door, and what they see is awful; but it is not quite as awful as what either of their imaginations had conjured. A game table in one corner of the room has been overturned, and its cast-stone base is smashed. Broken glasses everywhere, as though thrown violently to the floor. Shards of glass stick out from unidentifiable foodstuffs. In the kitchen, there is several inches’ thickness of Cheerios, or whatever, on the floor. A large cast-iron pot on the stove holds burned popcorn.

Someone has been sick in the sink, but not very. Mary exaggerates.

The bedrooms and the bathrooms and the upstairs dormitory appear to be untouched.

As they are to say to each other from time to time that night and the rest of the days of the weekend, it could have been a great deal worse.

Roger continues to inspect and to remark: “Christ, what’s this red sticky stuff? Cranberries—Jesus!” Cynthia, with no clear plan but with a broom and a dustpan and cardboard box for rubbish, begins to clear up what she can of the surface mess. Roger goes into the kitchen and makes strong drinks for both of them, and he starts in too, with both more energy and more system than she applies.

Their combined efforts work out well, and by a little before midnight the house has a clean, bare look; it might have been washed over by a flood of clear water rather than violated by human beings.

They are by now exhausted, barely sustained by a series of drinks and some scrambled eggs. And, as they have been doing on and off all evening, they try to reconstruct what sort of people the breakers-in were. At first they both thought it must have been some passing fishermen; now Cynthia decides that it was probably some very young kids, boys, about twelve or thirteen. Getting drunk for the first time.

She says, “I can imagine one of them standing on the table, can’t you? Saying, Wow, am I drunk, or something. Imitating grown-ups, television drunks.” And as she speaks she notes that she has lost her thirst for vengeance.

Roger scowls. “I just don’t think it was kids, somehow. More likely some of those lousy summer picnickers. They spend months casing the place.”

The sheriff, who arrives the next morning as they are starting the floor-waxing chore, is red-faced, with a huge beer-swollen stomach carried tenderly in front of him. And, just as predictably, he is sure that it was hippies who broke in; he has never forgotten nor forgiven hippies. Cynthia and Roger thank him for his concern; after he goes they look at each other and sigh, and get back to work.

By the time Mary Drake arrives, at her usual hour, eleven-forty-five, her time to be offered a gin-and-tonic, the whole house shines. Only the table base is still in pieces. And poor Mary is almost visibly disappointed. “Well, I never would have believed—” is what she says.

Apologetically they explain that they’ve really been working. “Both of us,” Cynthia emphasizes: lonely Mary tends to be hard on men.