Read Online Rich Rewards by Alice Adams - Free Book Online Page A

adults that I had little emotional energy left for other children, perhaps even interest in them. School was simply a filler for my days, and bridged the hours until it was time to go and get Uncle Don.
    But why, each evening that winter in Frederick, did all of us arrange ourselves in my grandfather’s car and drive outto the cellophane factory to fetch Uncle Don from work? Stuart could perfectly well have gone by himself, or Stuart and my grandfather. But no, we all went—all except the great-aunts, who stayed at home to take care of adorable little Peggy—every workday at four-thirty, in order to be there when the factory whistle blew at five. Quite possibly my grandfather thought our massed and dignified presence would somehow compensate for the indignity of Don’s job; I now think that must have been it.
    Grandfather sat beside Stuart, up in the front seat; my grandmother and Margaret and I sat in the back.
    When Don came out of the factory and walked over to where we were, and got in the back seat, I would move over to my grandmother’s lap, or Margaret’s.
    EXCEPT : one night Don got into the car, and kissed Margaret, as he always did, and then he said, “Gosh, honey, you look tired. Here, let me take Daphne.”
    And so that night we drove home through an exceptionally vivid scarlet sunset, with me perched dizzyingly on Don’s strong hard knees. Once he said, with a small indulgent chuckle, “Just relax, Daphne. Try to take it easy.” Words that I was to hear quite often, later in life. Wanting badly to lean back against him, to relax, instead I bounced as hard as I could, up and down, until he cried out, “That’s enough! Daphne, cut it out!”
    Did that circumstance ever recur? I cannot remember, but I do recall my wild hopes that it might; on any evening Don might say to Margaret, “Honey, you look tired. I’ll take Daphne.”
    And toward that small hope, involving that little possibility of pleasure, I directed all my days, my waking hours.
    *
    Many years later, as a just-divorced young woman, I was involved with a man who was married, who was rarely free to see me. And it came to me at last, without my consciously thinking of Don and of those meager old hopes, that those few enchanted hours were not really worth the weeks and months of waiting, of waste.
    Without exactly knowing how, I was aware of being considered “difficult” that year. The problem may have been that I was living with people who were more than half a century older than I was. In any case, at some point generous Margaret must have said to her mother and father, “You all look just plain exhausted. You let us take Daphne over here for a while.… Why, no, it won’t be the least bit of trouble.”
    And that is when I began to be truly terrible.
    At dinner I played with my food, staring at Uncle Don, and sometimes, if no one noticed that I wasn’t eating, I would make distorted, ludicrous faces, until helplessly Don would shout, “Daphne, for God’s sake, eat your dinner! We’re almost ready for dessert.”
    Or, I wouldn’t be ready when Stuart came to take Don to the factory and me to school.
    Once, at dinner, when Don had been urging me somewhat more strongly than usual to finish my chicken and rice, whatever, so that dessert could be served, I said to him, on an uncontrollable sudden impulse, in a loud cold voice, “You shut up, you damn fool.”
    Well.
    After a literally stunned silence, mild-mannered Don began to shout: “You little brat, you go upstairs this minute!” How often, before, he must have longed to shout exactly that.
    And so, terrified of what I had done, and giddily excited by his aroused attention, I went upstairs alone to bed, and quite probably I cried, my melodramatic self-pity at last justified. And later Aunt Margaret came up with a plate of dessert and comforting words, and an admonition that Don worked hard and got very tired. We must all be considerate.
    Did Don and Margaret worry that their