The Stories of Alice Adams

by Alice Adams

  Now she moved drearily through days of trays and dishes, spilled coffee and gelatinous ash-strewn food, fat cross guests or hyper-friendly ones. She was sustained by her small paycheck and somewhat more generous tips, and by her own large fantasies of ultimate rescue, or escape.

  The Lodge, an ornately Victorian structure with pinnacles and turrets, was on a high bluff two miles south of town, surrounded by sharply sloping meadows which were edged with dark-green cypresses and pines, overlooking the turbulent, shark-infested, almost inaccessible sea. (One more disappointment: talking up the move, Dylan’s mother, self-named Flower, had invented long beach days and picnics; they would both learn to surf, she had said.)

  Breakfast was served at the Lodge from eight till ten-thirty, lunch from eleven-thirty until two, in a long glassed-in porch, the dining room. Supposedly between those two meals the help got a break, half an hour for a sandwich or a cigarette, but more often than not it was about five minutes, what with lingering breakfasters and early, eager lunchers. Dinner was at six, set up at five-thirty, and thus there really was a free hour or sometimes two, in the mid to late afternoon. Dylan usually spent this time in the “library” of the Lodge, a dim, musty room, paneled in fake mahogany. Too tired for books, although her reading habits had delighted English teachers in high school, she leafed through old House Beautifuls, Gourmets or Vogues, avidly drinking in all those ads for the accoutrements of rich and leisurely exotic lives.

  Curiously, what she saw and read made her almost happy, for that limited time, like a drug. She could nearly believe that she saw herself in Vogue, in a Rolls-Royce ad: a tall thin blond woman (she was thin, if not very tall) in silk and careless fur, one jeweled hand on the fender of a silver car, and in the background a handsome man, dark, wearing a tuxedo.

  Then there was dinner. Drinks. Wines. Specifics as to the doneness of steaks or roasts. Complaints. I ordered medium rare. Is this crab really fresh? And heavy trays. The woman who managed the restaurant saw to it that waitresses and bus girls “shared” that labor, possibly out of some vaguely egalitarian sense that the trays were too heavy for any single group. By eight-thirty or so, Dylan and all the girls would be slow-witted with exhaustion, smiles stiffening on their very young faces, perspiration drying under their arms and down their backs. Then there would come the stentorian voice of the manageress: “Dylan, are you awake? You look a thousand miles away.”

  Actually, in her dreams, Dylan was less than two hundred miles away, in San Francisco.

  One fantasy of rescue which Dylan recognized as childish, and unlikely, probably, was that a nice older couple (in their fifties, anyway: Flower was only thirty-eight) would adopt her. At the end of their stay at the Lodge, after several weeks, they would say, “Well, Dylan, we just don’t see how we’re going to get along without you. Do you think you could possibly …?” There had in fact been several couples who could have filled that bill—older people from San Francisco, or even L.A., San Diego, Scottsdale—who stayed for a few weeks at the Lodge, who liked Dylan and tipped her generously. But so far none of them had been unable to leave without her; they didn’t even send her postcards.

  Another fantasy, a little more plausible, more grown up, involved a man who would come to the Lodge alone and would fall in love with Dylan and take her away. The man was as indistinct as the one in the Rolls-Royce ads, as vaguely handsome, dark and rich.

  In the meantime, the local boys who came around to see the other waitresses tried to talk to Dylan; their hair was too long and their faces splotchily sunburned from cycling and surfing, which were the only two things they did, besides drinking beer. Dylan ignored them, and went on dreaming.

  The usual group of guests at the Lodge didn’t offer much material for fantasy: youngish, well-off couples who arrived in big new station wagons with several children, new summer clothes and new sports equipment. Apart from these stylish parents, there were always two or three very young couples, perhaps just married or perhaps not, all with the look of not quite being able to afford where they were.

  And always some very old people.

  There was, actually, one unmarried man (almost divorced) among the guests, and although he was very nice, intelligent, about twenty-eight, he did not look rich, or, for that matter, handsome and dark. Whitney Iverson was a stocky red-blond man with a strawberry birthmark on one side of his neck. Deep-set blue eyes were his best feature. Probably he was not the one to fall in love and rescue Dylan, although he seemed to like her very much. Mr. Iverson, too, spent his late afternoons in the Lodge’s library.

  Exactly what Mr. Iverson did for a living was not clear; he mentioned the Peace Corps and VISTA, and then he said that he was writing; not novels—articles. His wife was divorcing him and she was making a lot of trouble about money, he said: a blow, he hadn’t thought she was like that. (But how could he have enough money for anyone to make trouble about, Dylan wondered.) He had brought down a carload of books. When he wasn’t reading in his room, or working on whatever he was writing, he took long, long walks, every day, miles over the meadows, back and forth to what there was of a town. Glimpsing him through a window as she set up tables, Dylan noted his stride, his strong shoulders. Sometimes he climbed down the steep perilous banks to the edge of the sea, to the narrow strip of coarse gray sand that passed for a beach. Perfectly safe, he said, if you checked the tides. Unlike Dylan, he was crazy about this landscape; he found the sea and the stretching hills of grass and rock, the acres of sky, all marvelous; even the billowing fog that threatened all summer he saw as lovely, something amazing.

  Sometimes Dylan tried to see the local scenery with Whitney Iverson’s eyes, and sometimes, remarkably, this worked. She was able to imagine herself a sojourner in this area, as he was, and then she could succumb to the sharp blue beauty of that wild Pacific, the dark-green, wind-bent feathery cypresses, and the sheer cliffs going down to the water, with their crevices of moss and tiny brilliant wild flowers.

  But usually she just looked around in a dull, hating way. Usually she was miserably bored and hopelessly despondent.

  They had moved down here to the seaside, to this tiny nothing town, Dylan and Flower, so that Flower could concentrate on making jewelry, which was her profession. Actually, the move was the idea of Zachery, Flower’s boyfriend. Flower would make the jewelry and Zach would take it up to San Francisco to sell; someday he might even try L.A. And Zach would bring back new materials for Flower to use—gold and silver and pearls. Flower, who was several months behind in her rent, had agreed to this plan. Also, as Dylan saw it, Flower was totally dominated by Zach, who was big and dark and roughly handsome, and sometimes mean. Dylan further suspected that Zach wanted them out of town, wanted to see less of Flower, and the summer had borne out her theory: instead of his living with them and making occasional forays to the city, as Flower had imagined, it was just the other way around. Zach made occasional visits to them, and the rest of the time, when she wasn’t working or trying to work on some earrings or a necklace, Flower sat sipping the harsh, local red wine and reading the used paperbacks that Zach brought down in big cartons along with the jewelry materials—“to keep you out of mischief,” he had said.

  Flower wore her graying blond hair long, in the non-style of her whole adult life, and she was putting on weight. When she wanted to work she took an upper, another commodity supplied by Zach, but this didn’t do much to keep her weight down, just kept her “wired,” as she sometimes said. Dylan alternated between impatience and the most tender sympathy for her mother, who was in some ways more like a friend; it was often clear to Dylan that actually she had to be the stronger person, the one in charge. But Flower was so nice, really, a wonderful cook and generous to her friends, and she could be funny. Some of the jewelry she made was beautiful—recently, a necklace of silver and stones that Zach said were real opals. Flower had talent, originality. If she could just dump Zach for good, Dylan thought, and then not replace him with someone worse, as she usually did. Always
some mean jerk. If she could just not drink, not take speed.

  From the start Flower had been genuinely sympathetic about Dylan’s awful job. “Honey, I can hardly stand to think about it,” she would say, and her eyes would fill. She had been a waitress several times herself. “You and those heavy trays, and the mess. Look, why don’t you just quit? Honestly, we’ll get by like we always have. I’ll just tell Zach he’s got to bring more stuff down, and sell more, too. And you can help me.”

  This seemed a dangerous plan to Dylan, possibly because it relied on Zach, who Dylan was sure would end up in jail, or worse. She stubbornly stuck with her job, and on her two days off (Mondays and Tuesdays, of all useless days) she stayed in bed a lot, and read, and allowed her mother to “spoil” her, with breakfast trays (“Well, after all, who deserves her own tray more than you do, baby?”) and her favorite salads for lunch, with every available fresh vegetable and sometimes shrimp.

  When she wasn’t talking to her mother or helping out with household chores, Dylan was reading a book that Mr. Iverson had lent her—The Eustace Diamonds, by Trollope. This had come about because one afternoon, meeting him in the library, Dylan had explained the old Vogues, the House Beautifuls scattered near her lap, saying that she was too tired just then to read, and that she missed television. The winter before, she had loved The Pallisers, she said, and, before that, Upstairs, Downstairs. Mr. Iverson had recommended The Eustace Diamonds. “It’s really my favorite of the Palliser novels,” he said, and he went to get it for her—running all the way up to his room and back, apparently; he was out of breath as he handed her the book.

  But why was he so eager to please her? She knew that she was pretty, but she wasn’t all that pretty, in her own estimation; she was highly conscious of the two crooked front teeth, although she had perfected a radiant, slightly false smile that almost hid them.

  “I wonder if he could be one of the Iversons,” Flower mused, informed by Dylan one Monday of the source of her book.

  “The Iversons?” In Flower’s voice it had sounded like the Pallisers.

  “One of the really terrific, old San Francisco families. You know, Huntingtons, Floods, Crockers, Iversons. What does he look like, your Mr. Iverson?”

  Dylan found this hard to answer, although usually with Flower she spoke very easily, they were so used to each other. “Well.” She hesitated. “He’s sort of blond, with nice blue eyes and a small nose. He has this birthmark on his neck, but it’s not really noticeable.”

  Flower laughed. “In that case, he’s not a real Iverson. They’ve all got dark hair and the most aristocratic beaky noses. And none of them could possibly have a birthmark—they’d drown it at birth.”

  Dylan laughed, too, although she felt an obscure disloyalty to Mr. Iverson.

  And, looking at Flower, Dylan thought, as she had before, that Flower could change her life, take charge of herself. She was basically strong. But in the next moment Dylan decided, as she also had before, more frequently, that probably Flower wouldn’t change; in her brief experience people didn’t, or not much. Zach would go to jail and Flower would find somebody worse, and get grayer and fatter. And she, Dylan, had better forget about anything as childish as being adopted by rich old people; she must concentrate on marrying someone who really had money. Resolution made her feel suddenly adult.

  “Honey,” asked Flower, “are you sure you won’t have a glass of wine?”

  “My mother wonders if you’re a real Iverson.” Dylan had not quite meant to say this; the sentence spoke itself, leaving her slightly embarrassed, as she sat with Whitney Iverson on a small sofa in the library. It was her afternoon break; she was tired, and she told herself that she didn’t know what she was saying.

  Mr. Iverson, whose intense blue eyes had been staring into hers, now turned away, so that Dylan was more aware of the mark on his neck than she had been before. Or could it have deepened to a darker mulberry stain?

  He said, “Well, I am and I’m not, actually. I think of them as my parents and I grew up with them, in the Atherton house, but actually I’m adopted.”

  “Really?” Two girls Dylan knew at Mission High had got pregnant and had given up their babies to be adopted. His real mother, then, could have been an ordinary high-school girl? The idea made her uncomfortable, as though he had suddenly moved closer to her.

  “I believe they were very aware of it, my not being really theirs,” Whitney Iverson said, again looking away from her. “Especially when I messed up in some way, like choosing Reed, instead of Stanford. Then graduate school …”

  As he talked on, seeming to search for new words for the feelings engendered in him by his adoptive parents, Dylan felt herself involuntarily retreat. No one had ever talked to her in quite that way, and she was uneasy. She looked through the long leaded windows to the wavering sunlight beyond; she stared at the dust-moted shafts of light in the dingy room where they were.

  In fact, for Dylan, Whitney’s very niceness was somehow against him; his kindness, his willingness to talk, ran against the rather austere grain of her fantasies.

  Apparently sensing what she felt, or some of it, Whitney stopped short, and he laughed in a self-conscious way. “Well, there you have the poor-adopted-kid self-pity trip of the month,” he said. “ ‘Poor,’ Christ, they’ve drowned me in money.”

  Feeling that this last was not really addressed to her (and thinking of Flower’s phrase about the birthmark, “drowned at birth”), Dylan said nothing. She stared at his hands, which were strong and brown, long-fingered, and she suddenly, sharply, wished that he would touch her. Touch, instead of all this awkward talk.

  Later, considering that conversation, Dylan found herself moved, in spite of herself. How terrible to feel not only that you did not really belong with your parents but that they were disappointed in you. Whitney Iverson hadn’t said anything about it, of course, but they must have minded about the birthmark, along with college and graduate school.

  She and Flower were so clearly mother and daughter—obviously, irrevocably so; her green eyes were Flower’s, even her crooked front teeth. Also, Flower had always thought she was wonderful. “My daughter Dylan,” she would say, in her strongest, proudest voice.

  But what had he possibly meant about “drowned in money”? Was he really rich, or had that been a joke? His car was an old VW convertible, and his button-down shirts were frayed, his baggy jackets shabby. Would a rich person drive a car like that, or wear those clothes? Probably not, thought Dylan; on the other hand, he did not seem a man to say that he was rich if he was not.

  In any case, Dylan decided that she was giving him too much thought, since she had no real reason to think that he cared about her. Maybe he was an Iverson, and a snob, and did not want anything to do with a waitress. If he had wanted to see her, he could have suggested dinner, a movie or driving down to Santa Cruz on one of her days off. Probably she would have said yes, and on the way home, maybe on a bluff overlooking the sea, he could have parked the car, have turned to her.

  So far, Dylan had had little experience of ambiguity; its emerging presence made her both impatient and confused. She did not know what to do or how to think about the contradictions in Whitney Iverson.

  Although over the summer Dylan and Whitney had met almost every day in the library, this was never a stated arrangement, and if either of them missed a day, as they each sometimes did, nothing was said. This calculated diffidence seemed to suit them; they were like children who could not quite admit to seeking each other out.

  One day, when Dylan had already decided that he would not come, and not caring really—she was too tired to care, what with extra guests and heavier trays—after she had been in the library for almost half an hour, she heard running steps, his, and then Whitney Iverson burst in, quite out of breath. “Oh … I’m glad you’re still here,” he got out, and he sat down heavily beside her. “I had some terrific news.” But then on the verge of telling her, he stopped, and laughed, and said, “But I’m a
fraid it won’t sound all that terrific to you.”

  Unhelpfully she looked at him.

  “The Yale Review,” he said. “They’ve taken an article I sent them. I’m really pleased.”

  He had been right, in that the Yale Review was meaningless to Dylan, but his sense of triumph was real and visible to her. She felt his success, and she thought just then that he looked wonderful.

  • • •

  September, once Labor Day was past, was much clearer and warmer, the sea a more brilliant blue, than during the summer. Under a light, fleece-clouded sky the water shimmered, all diamonds and gold, and the rocky cliffs in full sunlight were as pale as ivory. Even Dylan admitted to herself that it was beautiful; sometimes she felt herself penetrated by that scenery, her consciousness filled with it.

  Whitney Iverson was leaving on the fifteenth; he had told Dylan so, naming the day as they sat together in the library. And then he said, “Would it be okay if I called you at home, sometime?”

  The truth was, they didn’t have a phone. Flower had been in so much trouble with the phone company that she didn’t want to get into all that again. And so now Dylan blushed, and lied. “Well, maybe not. My mother’s really strict.”

  He blushed, too, the birthmark darkening. “Well, I’ll have to come back to see you,” he said. “But will you still be here?”

  How could she know, especially since he didn’t even name a time when he would come? With a careless lack of tact she answered, “I hope not,” and then she laughed.