Read Online A Southern Exposure by Alice Adams - Free Book Online Page A

leer on the face of Jimmy Hightower).
    Well, so much the worse for her, is what Russ would like to say. What he actually mumbles is “Well, maybe. One of these days.”
    He tells Brett not to bother him with the phone, and asks if she would mind going to the post office from now on.
    She wouldn’t mind.

     8     
    Although Brett has been proclaimed “well” by her doctor, and has no more overt, identifiable symptoms, she does not quite feel herself to be well. She feels a pervasive sort of lassitude and a corresponding lowness in her spirits. And her heart, or something that is interior and important, seems out of control; she feels wild flutterings, plus occasional stabs of pain. Not enough to tell a doctor about, could she even find the words for whatever is wrong. She wonders about the Change; she is much too young for that, isn’t she? But—could the operation in San Francisco (Brett does not think, has never thought, the word “abortion”)—could that have brought it on early? Or done some other awful thing to her inside?
    Very likely because of the way she is herself, Russ seems strange to her. He seems to be acting oddly, although perhaps he is not, is the same old Russ. One night she dreams that Russ is having some big illicit love affair, and she thinks, in the dream, Well, that explains a lot. But in the morning she recalls that this is another symptom of the Change, crazy, groundless jealousy, and so she tries to put the dream out of her mind.
    The afternoon (now years ago, before Deirdre Yates went off to California and then came back), the time that she saw them, caught in that moment like pinned butterflies, although her heart jolts hard when she thinks of it, she tries to forget that too. It was nothing, she tells herself; people run into each other like that all the time in Pinehill. It was slightly odd that Russ didn’t say, “Guess who I ran into downtown today.” But not significant. A meaningless encounter. However, it has stayed all this time in Brett’s mind, it is vividly fixed there: those two faces, Deirdre’s and Russ’s, as they seemed to stare at each other.
    Russ does not like having dinner with his children. Nor, when Brett was a child (when she was SallyJane), did her parents have dinner with her; she was always fed by her mother’s succession of maids—Mrs. Caldwell “could not keep help,” as the local ladies whispered behind her back, an awful indictment. Brett thus feels that she is continuing a tradition, doing as her parents did, and doing right by Russ in feeding the children first; she forgets, when she thinks along those lines, the difference between feeding one child and dinner for five, and although it is true that she has help (unlike her mother, Brett keeps any help forever), still the effort involved in those six-o’clock children’s meals is large and often exhausting, increasingly so, forwhich Brett castigates herself, with no self-pity or even sympathy.
    After the children have been fed and bathed and are settled, more or less, in bed, Russ and Brett have a drink together, usually in the kitchen, while she makes the preparations for their private dinner. This drink together is often interrupted by calls of need from the children’s room: “I want a drink of water. A sandwich. I want
you
.”
    “Honey, you’re much too lenient with them. You make them worse. They’re getting spoiled,” Russ complains.
    But Brett is unable not to go in to them, at least for a minute, if only to say, “Now go to sleep, you’ve had your dinner, you don’t need a sandwich now.” Dimly she recalls childhood loneliness, old needs of her own, for which she never cried out. In a way she is pleased that her children ask for what they want, despite the inconvenience for grownups.
    Lately, though, since Kansas, Brett has been too tired, really, for either the children or for Russ. The only thing that gets her through is the drink, or drinks. She has come to count