by Alice Adams
She tries then to think about the other three husbands, one in Oakland, in Chicago, in Kansas City, but nothing much comes to mind, of them. No faces or words, just shadows, and no true pictures of any of those cities. The only thing she is perfectly clear about is that not one of those other men was named Charles.
On the airplane to Alaska, something terrible, horrible, entirely frightening happens to Gloria, which is: a girl comes and sits in the seat next to hers, and that girl has—the lower part of her right leg missing. Cut off. A pretty dark-haired girl, about the same size as Gloria, wearing a nice blazer, and a kind of long skirt. One boot. Metal crutches.
Gloria is so frightened—she knows that this is an omen, a sign meant for her—that she is dizzy, sick; she leans back and closes her eyes, as the plane bumps upward, zooming through clouds, and she stays that way for the rest of the trip. She tries not to think; she repeats numbers and meaningless words to herself.
At some point she feels someone touching her arm. Flinching, she opens her eyes to see the next-seat girl, who is asking, “Are you okay? Can I get you anything?”
“I’m all right. Just getting the flu, I think.” Gloria smiles in a deliberately non-friendly way. The last thing in the world that she wants is a conversation with that girl: the girl at last getting around to her leg, telling Gloria, “It started with this lump I had, right here.”
Doctors don’t usually feel your legs, during physical examinations, Gloria thinks; she is standing beside Sharon on the deck of the big paddleboat that is slowly ploughing up the Natoma River. It would be possible to hide a lump for a long time, unless it grew a lot, she thinks, as the boat’s captain announces over the bullhorn that they are passing what was once an Indian settlement.
Alaska is much flatter than Gloria had imagined its being, at least around Fairbanks—and although she had of course heard the words, midnight sun, she had not known they were a literal description; waking at three or four in the morning from bad dreams, her nighttime panics (her legs drawn up under her, one hand touching her calf, the lump) she sees brilliant sunshine, coming in through the tattered aluminum foil that Sharon has messily pasted to the window. It is all wrong—unsettling. Much worse than the thick dark fogs that come into San Francisco in the summer; she is used to them.
In fact sleeplessness and panic (what she felt at the sight of that girl with the missing leg has persisted; she knows it was a sign) have combined to produce in Gloria an almost trancelike state. She is so quiet, so passive that she can feel Sharon wondering about her, what is wrong. Gloria does not, for a change, say anything critical of Sharon’s housekeeping, which is as sloppy as usual. She does not tell anyone that she, Gloria, is a cleaning person.
A hot wind comes up off the water, and Gloria remembers that tomorrow they go to Mount McKinley, and the wild life tour.
Somewhat to her disappointment, Mrs. Lawson does not get any postcards from Gloria in Alaska, although Gloria had mentioned that she would send one, with a picture.
What she does get is a strange phone call from Gloria on the day that she was supposed to come back. What is strange is that Gloria sounds like some entirely other person, someone younger even than Gloria actually is, younger and perfectly happy. It is Gloria’s voice, all right, but lighter and quicker than it was, a voice without any shadows.
“I’m back!” Gloria bursts out, “but I just don’t think I want to work today. I was out sort of late—” She laughs, in a bright new way, and then she asks, “She’s not back yet, is she?”
Meaning Miss Goldstein. “No, not for another week,” Mrs. Lawson tells her. “You had a good trip?”
“Fabulous! A miracle, really. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”
Hanging up, Mrs. Lawson has an uneasy sense that some impersonator will come to work in Gloria’s place.
But of course it is Gloria who is already down on her knees, cleaning the kitchen floor, when Mrs. Lawson gets there the following day.
And almost right away she begins to tell Mrs. Lawson about the wild life tour, from Mount McKinley, seemingly the focal point of her trip.
“It was really weird,” says Gloria. “It looked like the moon, in that funny light.” She has a lot to say, and she is annoyed that Mrs. Lawson seems to be paying more attention to her newspaper—is barely listening. Also, Mrs. Lawson seems to have aged, while Gloria was away, or maybe Gloria just forgot how old she looks, since in a way she doesn’t act very old; she moves around and works a lot harder than Sharon ever does, for one example. But it seems to Gloria today that Mrs. Lawson’s skin is grayer than it was, ashy-looking, and her eyes, which are always strange, have got much paler.
Nevertheless, wanting more attention (her story has an important point to it) Gloria raises her voice, as she continues, “And every time someone spotted one of those animals he’d yell out, and the man would stop the bus. We saw caribou, and these funny white sheep, high up on the rocks, and a lot of moose, and some foxes. Not any bears. Anyway, every time we stopped I got real scared. We were on the side of a really steep mountain, part of Mount McKinley, I think, and the bus was so wide, like a school bus.” She does not tell Mrs. Lawson that in a weird way she liked being so scared. What she thought was, if I’m killed on this bus I’ll never even get to a doctor. Which was sort of funny, really, now that she can see the humor in it—now that the lump is mysteriously, magically gone!
However, she has reached the dramatic disclosure toward which this story of her outing has been heading. “Anyway, we got back all right,” she says, “and two days after that, back in Fairbanks, do you know what the headlines were, in the local paper?” She has asked this (of course rhetorical) question in a slow, deepened voice, and now she pauses, her china-blue eyes gazing into Mrs. Lawson’s paler, stranger blue.
“Well, I don’t know,” Lawson obliges.
“They said, BUS TOPPLES FROM MOUNTAIN, EIGHT KILLED, 42 INJURED. Can you imagine? Our same bus, the very next day. What do you think that means?” This question too has been rhetorical; voicing it, Gloria smiles in a satisfied, knowing way.
A very polite woman, Mrs. Lawson smiles gently too. “It means you spared. You like to live fifty, sixty years more.”
Eagerly Gloria bursts out, “Exactly! That’s just the way I figured it, right away.” She pauses, smiling widely, showing her little white teeth. “And then, that very same afternoon of the day we saw the paper,” she goes on, “I was changing my clothes and I felt the calf of my leg where there’d been this lump that I was sort of worried about—and the lump was gone. I couldn’t believe it. So I guess it was just a muscle, not anything bad.”
“Them leg muscles can knot up that way, could of told you that myself,” Mrs. Lawson mutters. “Heavy housework can do that to a person.” But Gloria looks so happy, so bright-faced and shiny-eyed, that Mrs. Lawson does not want to bring her down, in any way, and so she adds, “But you sure are right about that bus accident. It’s a sure sign you been spared.”
“Oh, that’s what I think too! And later we saw these really neat big dogs, in Fairbanks. I’m really thinking about getting a dog. This man I know really likes dogs too, last night we were talking.” Her voice trails off in a happy reminiscence.
Later in the day, though, thinking about Gloria and her story, what she and Gloria said to each other, Mrs. Lawson is not really convinced about anything. The truth is, Gloria could perfectly well get killed by a bus in San Francisco, this very afternoon, or shot by some sniper; it’s been saying in the paper about snipers, all over town, shooting folks. Or Gloria could find another lump, some place else, somewhere dangerous. Missing one bus accident is no sure sign that a person’s life will always come up rosy, because nobody’s does, not for long. Even Miss Goldstein, in China, could fall off of some Chinese mountain.
In a weary, discouraged way Mrs. Lawson moved through the rest of her day. It is true; she is too old and tired for the work she does. Through the big street-floor windows she watches the cold June fog
rolling in from the bay, and she thinks how the weather in California has never seemed right to her. She thinks about Charles, and it comes to her that one Charles could change into the other, the same way that first Charles in such a sudden way turned violent, and wild.
That thought is enough to make her dread the end of her work, and the day, when although it is summer she will walk out into streets that are as dark and cold as streets are in Alaska.
Return Trips
Some years ago I spent a hot and mostly miserable summer in an ugly yellow hotel on the steep and thickly wooded, rocky coast of northern Yugoslavia, not far from the island of Rab. I was with a man whom I entirely, wildly loved, and he, Paul, loved me, too, but together we suffered the most excruciating romantic agonies, along with the more ordinary daily discomforts of bad food, an uncomfortable, poorly ventilated room with a hard, unyielding bed, and not enough money to get away. Or enough strength: Paul’s health was bad. Morosely we stared out over the lovely clear, cool blue water, from our pine forest, to enticing islands that were purplish-gray in the distance. Or else I swam and Paul looked out after me.
Paul’s problem was a congenital heart condition, now correctable by surgery, but not so then; he hurt a lot, and the smallest walks could cause pain. Even love, I came to realize, was for Paul a form of torture, although we kept at it—for him suicidally, I guess—during those endless sultry yellow afternoons, on our awful bed, between our harsh, coarse sheets.
I wanted us to marry. I was very young, and very healthy, and my crazy, unreal idea of marriage seemed to include a sort of transfer of strength. I was not quite so silly as to consciously think that marrying me would “cure” Paul, nor did I imagine a lifelong nurse role for myself. It was, rather, a magic belief that if we did a normal thing, something other people did all the time, like getting married, Paul’s heart would become normal, too, like other, ordinary hearts.
Paul believed that he would die young, and, nobly, he felt that our marriage would be unfair to me. He also pointed out that whereas he had enough money from a small inheritance for one person, himself, to live on very sparingly, there was really not enough for two, and I would do well to go back to America and to the years of graduate study to which my professor mother wanted to stake me. At that time, largely because of Paul, who was a poet, I thought of studying literature; instead, after he died I turned to history, contemporary American. By now I have written several books; my particular interest is in the Trotskyite movement: its rich history of lonely, occasionally brilliant, contentious voices, its legacy of schisms—an odd choice, perhaps, but the books have been surprisingly popular. You might say, and I hope Paul would, that I have done very well professionally. In any case you could say that Paul won our argument. That fall I went back to graduate school, at Georgetown, and Paul died young, as he said he would, in a hospital in Trieste.
I have said that Paul loved me, and so he did, intensely—he loved me more, it has come to seem to me, than anyone since, although I have had my share, I guess. But Paul loved me with a meticulous attention that included every aspect. Not only my person: at that time I was just a skinny tall young girl with heavy dark hair that was fated to early gray, as my mother’s had been. With an old-fashioned name—Emma. Paul loved my hair and my name and whatever I said to him, any odd old memory, or half-formed ambition; he took all my perceptions seriously. He laughed at all my jokes, although his were much funnier. He was even interested in my dreams, which I would sometimes wake and tell him, that summer, in the breathless pre-dawn cool, in the ugly hotel.
And so it is surprising that there was one particular dream that I did not tell him, especially since this dream was so painful and troubling that I remember it still. Much later I even arranged to reënact the dream, an expurgatory ritual of sorts—but that is to get far ahead of my story.
In the dream, then, that I dreamed as I slept with Paul, all those years ago in Yugoslavia, it was very hot, and I was walking down a long, intensely familiar hill, beside a winding white concrete highway. In the valley below was the rambling white house where (long before Yugoslavia) my parents and I had lived for almost five years, in a small Southern town called Hilton. I did not get as far as the house, in the dream; it was so hot, and I was burdened with the most terrific, heavy pain in my chest, a pain that must have come from Paul’s actual pain, as the heat in the dream would have come from the actual heat of that summer.
“Oh, I had such an awful dream!” I cried out to Paul, as I burrowed against his sharp back, his fine damp skin.
“What about?” He kissed my hair.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I was in Hilton. You know, just before my parents’ divorce. Where I had such a good time and my mother hated everything.”
Against my hair he murmured, “Your poor mother.”
“Yes, but she brings it on herself. She’s so difficult. No wonder my father … really. And I don’t want to go to graduate school.”
And so I did not tell Paul my dream, in which I had painfully walked that downhill mile toward the scene of our family’s dissolution, and the heady start of my own adolescence. Instead, in a familiar way, Paul and I argued about my future, and as usual I took a few stray shots at my mother.
And Paul died, and I did after all go to graduate school, and then my mother died—quite young, it now seems to me, and long before our war was in any way resolved.
A very wise woman who is considerably older than I am once told me that in her view relationships with people to whom we have been very close can continue to change even after the deaths of those people, and for me I think this has been quite true, with my mother, and in quite another way with Paul.
I am now going back to a very early time, long before my summer with Paul, in Yugoslavia. Before anyone had died. I am going back to Hilton.
When we arrived in Hilton I was eleven, and both my parents were in their early forties, and almost everything that went so darkly and irretrievably wrong among the three of us was implicit in our ages. Nearly adolescent, I was eager for initiation into romantic, sensual mysteries of which I had dim intimations from books. For my mother, the five years from forty-two or forty-three onward were a desolate march into middle age. My father, about ten months younger than my mother—and looking, always, ten years younger—saw his early forties as prime time; he had never felt better in his life. Like me, he found Hilton both romantic and exciting—he had a marvelous time there, as I did, mostly.
My first overtly sensual experience took place one April night on that very stretch of road, the graveled walk up above the highway that wound down to our house, that I dreamed of in Yugoslavia. I must have been twelve, and a boy who was “walking me home” reached for and took and held my hand, and I felt an overwhelming hot excitement. Holding hands.
About hands:
These days, like most of my friends, I am involved in a marriage, my second, which seems problematical—even more problematical than most of the marriages I see—but then maybe everyone views his or her marriage in this way. Andreas is Greek, by way of Berkeley, to which his parents immigrated in the thirties and opened a student restaurant, becoming successful enough to send their promising son to college there, and later on to medical school. Andreas and I seem to go from friendliness or even love to rage, with a speed that leaves me dizzy, and scared. However, ambivalent as in many ways I am about Andreas, I do very much like—in fact, I love—his hands. They are just plain male hands, rather square in shape, usually callused and very competent. Warm. A doctor, he specializes in kidneys, unromantically enough, but his hands are more like a workman’s, a carpenter’s. And sometimes even now an accidental meeting of our hands can recall me to affection; his hands remind me of love.
I liked Paul’s hands, too, and I remember them still. They were very smooth, and cool.
Back in Hilton, when I was twelve, my mother violently disapproved of my being out at night with boys. Probably sensing just how exciting I found those April n
ights that smelled of privet and lilacs, and those lean, tall, sweet-talking Southern boys, she wept and raged, despairing and helpless as she recognized the beginning of my life as a sensual woman, coinciding as it probably did with the end of her own.
My feckless father took my side, of course. “Things are different down here, my dear,” he told her. “It’s a scientific fact that girls, uh, mature much earlier in the South. And when in Rome, you know. I see no harm in Emma’s going to a movie with some nice boy, if she promises to be home at a reasonable hour. Ten-thirty?”
“But Emma isn’t Southern. She has got to be home by ten!”
My mother filled me with a searing discomfort, a longing to be away from her. Having no idea how much I pitied her, I believed that I hated her.
My father was not only younger than my mother, he was at least a full inch shorter—a small man, compactly built, and handsome. “Has anyone ever told you that you took like that writer fellow, that Scott Fitzgerald?” asked one of the local Hilton ladies, a small brunette, improbably named Popsie Hooker. “Why no, I don’t believe anyone ever has,” my father lied; he had been told at least a dozen times of that resemblance. “But of course I’m flattered to be compared to such a famous man. Rather a devil, though, I think I’ve heard,” he said, with a wink at Popsie Hooker.
“Popsie Hooker, how remarkably redundant,” hopelessly observed my academic mother, to my bored and restless father. They had chosen Hilton rather desperately, as a probably cheap place to live on my father’s dwindling Midwestern inheritance; he was never exactly cut out for work, and after divorcing my mother he resolved his problems, or some of them, in a succession of marriages to very rich women.
