Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

“It’s easy,” said Jean, a popular leader, with curly red hair; her father was a dean of the law school. “You just answer the questions we ask you, or you take the consequences.”

I wasn’t at all sure what consequences were, but I didn’t like to ask.

They began with simple questions. How old are you? What’s your middle name?

This led to more complicated (and crueler) ones.

“How much money does your mother have?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t, of course, and I doubt that she did either, that poor vague lady, too young to be a widow, too old for motherhood. “I think maybe a thousand dollars,” I hazarded.

At this they all frowned, that group of older, wiser girls, whether in disbelief or disappointment, I couldn’t tell. They moved a little away from me and whispered together.

It was close to the end of recess. Down on the playing field below us one of the boys threw the baseball and someone batted it out in a long arc, out to the farthest grassy edges of the field, and several other boys ran to retrieve it. On the level above us, a rutted terrace up, the little children stood in line for turns on the slide, or pumped with furious small legs on the giant swings.

The girls came back to me. “Okay, Emily,” said Jean. “Just tell the truth. Would you rather be covered with honey and eaten alive by ants, in the hot Saraha Desert—or kiss Car Jones?”

Then, as now, I had a somewhat literal mind: I thought of honey, and ants, and hot sand, and quite simply I said I’d rather kiss Car Jones.

Well. Pandemonium: Did you hear what she said? Emily would kiss Car Jones! Car Jones. The truth—Emily would like to kiss Car Jones! Oh, Emily, if your mother only knew! Emily and Car! Emily is going to kiss Car Jones! Emily said she would! Oh, Emily!

The boys, just then coming up from the baseball field, cast bored and pitying looks at the sources of so much noise; they had always known girls were silly. But Harry McGinnis, a glowing, golden boy, looked over at us and laughed aloud. I had been watching Harry timidly for months; that day I thought his laugh was friendly.

Recess being over, we all went back into the schoolroom,and continued with the civics lesson. I caught a few ambiguous smiles in my direction, which left me both embarrassed and confused.

That afternoon, as I walked home from school, two of the girls who passed me on their bikes called back to me, “Car Jones!” and in an automatic but for me new way I squealed out, “Oh no!” They laughed, and repeated, from their distance, “Car Jones!”

The next day I continued to be teased. Somehow the boys had got wind of what I had said, and they joined in with remarks about Yankee girls being fast, how you couldn’t tell about quiet girls, that sort of wit. Some of the teasing sounded mean; I felt that Jean, for example, was really out to discomfit me, but most of it was high-spirited friendliness. I was suddenly discovered, as though hitherto I had been invisible. And I continued to respond with that exaggerated, phony squeal of embarrassment that seemed to go over so well. Harry McGinnis addressed me as Emily Jones, and the others took that up. (I wonder if Harry had ever seen me before.)

Curiously, in all this new excitement, the person I thought of least was the source of it all: Car Jones. Or, rather, when I saw the actual Car, hulking over the water fountain or lounging near the steps of a truck, I did not consciously connect him with what felt like social success, new popularity. (I didn’t know about consequences.)

Therefore, when the first note from Car appeared on my desk, it felt like blackmail, although the message was innocent, was even kind. “You mustn’t mind that they tease you. You are the prettiest one of the girls. C. Jones.” I easily recognized his handwriting, those recklessly forward-slanting strokes, from the day when he had had to write on the blackboard, “I will not disturb the other children during Music.” Twenty-five times. The note was real, all right.

Helplessly I turned around to stare at the back of the room, where the tallest boys sprawled in their too small desks. Truck children, all of them, bored and uncomfortable. There was Car, the tallest of all, the most bored, the least contained. Our eyes met, and even at that distance I saw that his were not black, as I had thought, but a dark slate blue; stormy eyes, even when, as he rarely did, Car smiled. I turned away quickly, and I managed to forget him for a while.

Having never witnessed a Southern spring before, I was astounded by its bursting opulence, that soft fullness of petal and bloom, everywhere the profusion of flowering shrubs and trees, the riotous flower beds. Walking home from school, I was enchanted with the yards of the stately houses (homes of professors) that I passed, the lush lawns, the rows of brilliant iris, the flowering quince and dogwood trees, crepe myrtle, wisteria vines. I would squint my eyes to see the tiniest pale-green leaves against the sky.

My mother didn’t like the spring. It gave her hay fever, and she spent most of her time languidly indoors, behind heavily lined, drawn draperies. “I’m simply too old for such exuberance,” she said.

“Happy” is perhaps not the word to describe my own state of mind, but I was tremendously excited, continuously. The season seemed to me so extraordinary in itself, the colors, the enchanting smells, and it coincided with my own altered awareness of myself: I could command attention, I was pretty (Car Jones was the first person ever to say that I was, after my mother’s long-ago murmurings to a late-arriving baby).

Now everyone knew my name, and called it out as I walked onto the playground. Last fall, as an envious, unknown new girl, I had heard other names, other greetings and teasing-insulting nicknames. “Hey, Red,” Harry McGinnis used to shout, in the direction of popular Jean.

The next note from Car Jones said, “I’ll bet you hate it down here. This is a cruddy town, but don’t let it bother you. Your hair is beautiful. I hope you never cut it. C. Jones.”

This scared me a little: the night before I had been arguing with my mother on just that point, my hair, which was long and straight. Why couldn’t I cut and curl it, like the other girls? How had Car Jones known what I wanted to do? I forced myself not to look at him; I pretended that there was no Car Jones; it was just a name that certain people had made up.

I felt—I was sure—that Car Jones was an “abnormal” person. (I’m afraid “different” would have been the word I used, back then.) He represented forces that were dark and strange, whereas I myself had just come out into the light. I had joined the world of the normal. (My “normality” later included three marriages to increasingly “rich and prominent” men; my current husband is a surgeon. Three children, and as many abortions. I hate the symmetry, but there you are. I haven’t counted lovers. It comes to a normal life, for a woman of my age.) For years, at the time of our coming to Hilton, I had felt a little strange, isolated by my father’s death, my older-than-most-parents mother, by money. By being younger than other children, and new in town. I could clearly afford nothing to do with Car, and at the same time my literal mind acknowledged a certain obligation.

Therefore, when a note came from Car telling me to meet him on a Saturday morning in the vacant lot next to the school, it didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have to go. I made excuses to my mother, and to some of the girls who were getting together for Cokes at someone’s house. I’d be a little late, I told the girls. I had to do an errand for my mother.

It was one of the palest, softest, loveliest days of that spring. In the vacant lot weeds bloomed like the rarest of flowers; as I walked toward the abandoned trellis I felt myself to be a sort of princess, on her way to grant an audience to a courtier.