Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

But now, with this fresh news of Carstairs Jones, and his wife the movie star, it occurs to me that we two, who at a certain time and place were truly misfits, although quite differently—we both have made it: what could be more American dream-y, more normal, than marriage to a lovely movie star? Or, in my case, marriage to the successful surgeon?

And now maybe I can reconstruct a little of that time; specifically, can try to see how it really was for Car, back then. Maybe I can even understand that kiss.

Let us suppose that he lived in a somewhat better than usual farmhouse; later events make this plausible—his family’s move to town, his years at the university. Also, I wish him well. I will give him a dignified white house with a broad front porch, set back among pines and oaks, in the red clay countryside. The stability and size of his house, then, would have set Car apart from his neighbors, the other farm families, other truck children. Perhaps his parents too were somewhat “different,” but my imagination fails at them; I can easily imagine and clearly see the house, but not its population. Brothers? sisters? Probably, but I don’t know.

Car would go to school, coming out of his house at the honk of the stained and bulging, ugly yellow bus, which was crowded with his supposed peers, toward whom he felt both contempt and an irritation close to rage. Arrived at school, as one of the truck children, he would be greeted with a total lack of interest; he might as well have been invisible, or been black, unless he misbehaved in an outright, conspicuous way. And so he did: Car yawned noisily during history class, he hummed during study hall and after recess he dawdled around the playground and came in late. And for these and other assaults on the school’s decorum he was punished in one way or another, and then, when all else failed to curb his ways, he would be held back , forced to repeat an already insufferably boring year of school.

One fall there was a minor novelty in school: a new girl (me), a Yankee, who didn’t look much like the other girls, with long straight hair, instead of curled, and Yankee clothes, wool skirts and sweaters, instead of flowery cotton dresses worn all year round. A funny accent, a Yankee name: Emily Ames. I imagine that Car registered those facts about me, and possibly the additional information that I was almost as invisible as he, but without much interest.

Until the day of truth or consequences. I don’t think Car was around on the playground while the game was going on; one of the girls would have seen him, and squealed out, “Oooh, there’s Car, there he is! ” I rather believe that some skinny little kid, an unnoticed truck child, overheard it all, and then ran over to where Car was lounging in one of the school buses, maybe peeling an orange and throwing the peel, in spirals, out the window. “Say, Car, that little Yankee girl, she says she’d like to kiss you.”

“Aw, go on.”

He is still not very interested; the little Yankee girl is as dumb as the others are.

And then he hears me being teased, everywhere, and teased with his name. “Emily would kiss Car Jones—Emily Jones!” Did he feel the slightest pleasure at such notoriety? I think he must have; a man who would marry a movie star must have at least a small taste for publicity. Well, at that point he began to write me those notes: “You are the prettiest one of the girls” (which I was not). I think he was casting us both in ill-fitting roles, me as the prettiest, defenseless girl, and himself as my defender.

He must have soon seen that it wasn’t working out that way. I didn’t need a defender, I didn’t need him. I was having a wonderful time, at his expense, if you think about it, and I am pretty sure Car did think about it.

Interestingly, at the same time he had his perception of my triviality, Car must have got his remarkable inspiration in regard to his own life: there was a way out of those miserably boring classes, the insufferable children who surrounded him. He would demand a test, he would leave this place for the high school.

Our trellis meeting must have occurred after Car had taken the test, and had known that he did well. When he kissed me he was doing his last “bad” thing in that school, was kissing it off, so to speak. He was also insuring that I, at least, would remember him; he counted on its being my first kiss. And he may have thought that I was even sillier than I was, and that I would tell, so that what had happened would get around the school, waves of scandal in his wake.

For some reason, I would also imagine that Car is one of those persons who never look back; once kissed, I was readily dismissed from his mind, and probably for good. He could concentrate on high school, new status, new friends. Just as, now married to his movie star, he does not ever think of having been a truck child, one of the deprived, the disappointed. In his mind there are no ugly groaning trucks, no hopeless littered playground, no squat menacing school building.

But of course I could be quite wrong about Car Jones. He could be another sort of person altogether; he could be as haunted as I am by everything that ever happened in his life.

Some time ago, on the west coast of Mexico, there was a cluster of thatched huts around a lovely horseshoe cove, a tiny town to which no tourists ever came; the tourists went rather to Acapulco, a couple of hundred kilometers to the south, or to Ixtapanejo, perhaps thirty kilometers north. Back from the cove and the beach, and its huts, green jungle-covered mountains rose up steeply, a range that continued inland almost all the way to Mexico City.

At that time, in that small town, there was a young girl named Teresa, about sixteen. Teresa was not beautiful, nor even pretty, but something about her made more than one boy stare at her in a spellbound, desirous way. Her small face was dark and fierce, with its high-bridged nose and burning black eyes, her thin purposeful mouth and black, black hair. Her body too was small and dark, and neatly made, and strong. She had an odd way of walking: perhaps through shyness she tended to skip, like a bird. Several of the boys, and some older men too, stared at Teresa in an improper way, but especially a boy named Ernesto often looked at her; and since Ernesto’s glance was briefer, more respectful, than the others she sometimes returned it with a quick look of her own, although neither of them smiled.

Teresa at that time was excessively shy, perhaps partly because nothing that she saw of her own face pleased her, in the broken mirror beside the crucifix in her mother’s hut. (Her father had left for somewhere, Guerrero, maybe, after the birth of her youngest brother.) She saw no reason why anyone should stare, least of all Ernesto Fuentes, who, although rather small, was straight-backed and almost handsome, very serious, with thunderous dark eyes and a curious sun-bleached streak in his heavy dark hair.

Teresa was an inward, thoughtful girl; she thought much more than she spoke: about Ernesto, of course, and about the coconut plantations where Ernesto and most of the men and boys of the village worked. She thought about Señor Krupp, the blond, mustached plantation owner, who drank beer or tequila all day and who was rumored to have an evil temper. And she thought about Ixtapanejo, and the incomprehensible tourists who came there, pale Northern people who tried to blacken their bodies on the beach. (She did not think about Acapulco, having never been there and having heard very little about it.) And, what must have also contributed to her shyness, she found much in her surroundings to fear: the staring men, and Señor Krupp, and even the Ixtapanejo tourists, who spoke so loudly in their own tongues and even more loudly and incorrectly in Spanish.