Read Online Families and Survivors by Alice Adams - Free Book Online

broad-hipped, with minuscule breasts. Shame made her gawky, and for a time the only boys who liked her were shrimps. (Were they trying to make her look worse, out there on the dance floor?)
    “Well, at least I’ll get to quit work next month,” Louisa says. “I tell you—this job—in the Purchasing Department. Of course, I don’t see how we’ll manage. Even working Saturday mornings. Michael’s parents—” she vaguely says.
    None of this, besides a generalized sense of discontent (or fear?), makes much sense to Kate, but she decides to wait. She is looking forward to a drink. A martini, she hopes.
    Between blocks of anonymous one-story California architecture, the old car heads toward a reddened sunset sky—heads west. The shade of the sky against the sharp black of the hills pierces Kate with nostalgia for those Virginia years of her late childhood, and she wants to say something to Louisa about what she still thinks of as home, but (out of character—she usually speaks her mind) she does not say this; she senses that Louisa is completely involvedwith her present life. Also, Louisa can be snappish; you have to be sure of her mood.
    And so it is Louisa herself who asks, “Well, what do you hear from home?”
    “Not much. You know Mother and Dad moved up to New Jersey a few years ago.”
    “No, I didn’t.”
    “And I’m so terrible about writing. Only to David.”
    Quickly sympathetic (after all, it is her old friend Kate, not just a dangerous chic guest), Louisa asks, “David—how much longer will he be there, do you think?”
    “Eighteen months, a year and a half.”
    “God, poor Kate.”
    “Well, yes. For one thing, he’s so much fun to live with.”
    (She will not know how this sentence is to haunt her friend, or how Louisa is startled by it. Fun?)
    “And he’s so ambitious,” Kate goes on heedlessly. “He really wants more surgical training. He’s interested in hearts. And lungs.”
    “Oh” is what Louisa says, and then, “Some friends of ours are coming by after dinner, I think.”
    “You were so good to ask me down to dinner.”
    “Oh, it won’t be much. Michael and I don’t—” She lets whatever she meant to say trail off, and Kate suddenly understands that it is not so much that she is afraid of meeting Michael as she is afraid that he will be awful: a monstrous wasting of Louisa.
    As he first appears, coming out to the car from the lamplit doorway of a small and literally vine-covered cottage, Michael is not terrible at all. He is short (well, of course; Kate was prepared for that), a little plump, blond, soft-fleshed, and very smiling. Jolly, he seems, in niceBrooks Brothers clothes. (But why is he so much better dressed than Louisa is?)
    He says, “I’m really glad you could come. Louisa’s Southern Gothic childhood—of course she’s mentioned you a lot.”
    He seems ebulliently eager to please—a quality that Kate finds sympathetic. She smiles, glad to like her old friend’s husband.
    The house is sparsely furnished with cheap-looking things that Kate supposes (rightly) to have come with the rental; a long dark lumpy sofa, some large and shapeless armchairs, a maple table and dining chairs. It is not very clean, tidy Kate discerns. (But she thinks: Who cares? What’s really so important about cleaning a house?) It seems hastily pulled together, books and records stacked in corners—things shoved aside, or hidden.
    Kate says, “God, what a marvelous smell! I never get enough garlic.”
    Louisa laughs with affection. “Kate, you sound so exactly like your
self
,” she says.
    Michael brings in a bottle of bourbon. “I’m afraid this is all we have,” he beams.
    “Marvelous—I’m dying for a drink.” Kate doesn’t like bourbon, but she thinks that perhaps this is just as well; she will drink less.
    “You came down by
train
?” Michael asks, making it sound interesting. “How was it? We always drive, when we go. The Bayshore is my idea of what hell must look