Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

Outside a strong wind has come up, creaking the walls and rattling windowpanes.

In the middle of the night, in what has become a storm—lashing snow and violent wind—Rose wakes up, terrified. From the depths of bad dreams, she has no idea where she is, what time it is, what day. With whom she is. She struggles for clues, her wide eyes scouring the dark, her tentative hands reaching out, encountering Susannah’s familiar, fleshy back. Everything comes into focus for her; she knows where she is. She breathes out softly, “Oh, thank God it’s you,” moving closer to her friend.

As soon as I got on the bus, in the Greyhound station in Sacramento, I had a frightened sense of being in the wrong place. I had asked several people in the line at Gate 6 if this was the express to San Francisco, and they all said yes, but later, reviewing those assenting faces, I saw that in truth they all wore a look of people answering a question they have not entirely understood. Because of my anxiety and fear, I took a seat at the very front of the bus, across from and slightly behind the driver. There nothing very bad could happen to me, I thought.

What did happen, immediately, was that a tall black man, with a big mustache, angry and very handsome, stepped up into the bus and looked at me and said, “That’s my seat. You in my seat. I got to have that seat.” He was staring me straight in the eye, his flashing black into my scared pale blue.

There was nothing of his on the seat, no way I could have known that it belonged to him, and so that is what I said: “I didn’t know it was your seat.” But even as I was saying that, muttering, having ceased to meet his eye, I was also getting up and moving backward, to a seat two rows behind him.

Seated, apprehensively watching as the bus filled up, I saw that across the aisle from the black man were two women who seemed to be friends of his. No longer angry, he was sitting in the aisle seat so as to be near them; they were all talking and having a good time, glad to be together.

No one sat beside me, probably because I had put my large briefcase in that seat; it is stiff and forbidding-looking.

I thought again that I must be on the wrong bus, but just as I had that thought the driver got on, a big black man; he looked down the aisle for a second and then swung the door shut. He started up the engine as I wondered, What about tickets? Will they be collected in San Francisco? I had something called a commuter ticket, a book of ten coupons, and that morning, leaving San Francisco, I’d thought the driver took too much of my ticket, two coupons; maybe this was some mysterious repayment? We lurched out of the station and were on our way to San Francisco—or wherever.

Behind me, a child began to shout loud but not quite coherent questions: “Mom is that a river we’re crossing? Mom do you see that tree? Mom is this a bus we’re riding on?” He was making so much noise and his questions were all so crazy—senseless, really—that I did not see how I could stand it, all the hour and forty minutes to San Francisco, assuming that I was on the right bus, the express.

One of the women in the front seat, the friends of the man who had displaced me, also seemed unable to stand the child, and she began to shout back at him. “You the noisiest traveler I ever heard; in fact you ain’t a traveler, you an observer.”

“Mom does she mean me? Mom who is that?”

“Yeah, I means you. You the one that’s talking.”

“Mom who is that lady?” The child sounded more and more excited, and the black woman angrier. It was a terrible dialogue to hear.

And then I saw a very large white woman struggling up the aisle of the bus, toward the black women in the front, whom she at last reached and addressed: “Listen, my son’s retarded and that’s how he tests reality, asking questions. You mustn’t make fun of him like that.” She turned and headed back toward her seat, to her noisy retarded son.

The black women muttered to each other, and the boy began to renew his questions. “Mom see that cow?”

And then I heard one of the black women say, very loudly, having the last word: “And I got a daughter wears a hearing aid.”

I smiled to myself, although I suppose it wasn’t funny, but something about the black defiant voice was so appealing. And, as I dared for a moment to look around the bus, I saw that most of the passengers were black: a puzzle.

The scenery, on which I tried to concentrate, was very beautiful: smooth blond hills, gently rising, and here and there crevasses of shadow; and sometimes a valley with a bright white farmhouse, white fences, green space. And everywhere the dark shapes of live oaks, a black drift of lace against the hills or darkly clustered in the valleys, near the farms.

All this was on our left, the east, as we headed south toward San Francisco (I hoped). To our right, westward, the view was even more glorious: flat green pasturelands stretching out to the glittering bay, bright gold water and blue fingers of land, in the late May afternoon sunshine.

The retarded boy seemed to have taken up a friendly conversation with some people across the aisle from him, although his voice was still very loud. “My grandfather lives in Vallejo,” he was saying. “Mom is that the sun over there?”

Just then, the bus turned right, turned off the freeway, and the driver announced, “We’re just coming into Vallejo, folks. Next stop is Oakland, and then San Francisco.”

I was on the wrong bus. Not on the express. Although this bus, thank God, did go on to San Francisco. But it would be at least half an hour late getting in. My heart sank as I thought, Oh, how angry Hortense will be.

The bus swung through what must have been the back streets of Vallejo. (A question: why are bus stations always in the worst parts of town, or is it that those worst parts grow up around the station?) As our bus ground to a halt, pushed into its slot in a line of other Greyhounds, before anyone else had moved, one of the women in the front seat stood up; she was thin, sharply angular, in a purple dress. She looked wonderful, I thought. “And you, you just shut up!” she said to the boy in the back.

That was her exit line; she flounced off the bus ahead of everyone else, soon followed by her friend and the handsome man who had dislodged me from my seat.

A few people applauded. I did not, although I would have liked to, really.

This was my situation: I was working in San Francisco as a statistician in a government office having to do with unemployment, and that office assigned me to an office in Sacramento for ten weeks. There was very little difference between the offices; they were interchangeable, even to the pale-green coloring of the walls. But that is why I was commuting back and forth to Sacramento.

I was living with Hortense (temporarily, I hoped, although of course it was nice of her to take me in) because my husband had just divorced me and he wanted our apartment—or he wanted it more than I did, and I am not good at arguing.

Hortense is older than I am, with grown-up children, now gone. She seems to like to cook and take care; and when I started commuting she told me she’d meet me at the bus station every night, because she worried about the neighborhood, Seventh Street near Market, where the bus station is. I suppose some people must have assumed that we were a lesbian couple, even that I had left my husband for Hortense, but that was not true; my husband left me for a beautiful young Japanese nurse (he is in advertising), and it was not sex or love that kept me and Hortense together but sheer dependency (mine).

A lot of people got off the bus at Vallejo, including the pale fat lady and her poor son; as they passed me I saw that he was clinging closely to his mother, and that the way he held his neck was odd, not right. I felt bad that in a way I had sided against him, with the fierce black lady in purple. But I had to admit that of the two of them it was her I would rather travel with again.