Families and Survivors by Alice Adams

Author:Alice Adams [Adams, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Girls & Women, Juvenile Fiction, Girls, Southern State, United States, California, Southern States, People & Places
ISBN: 9780394491677
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1975-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

“She wrote that? But that’s terrific.”

“Well, I know it’s awful to quote your kids.” She laughs. “Michael thinks it’s anti-Semitic.” Of course this is untrue; she is trying to be funny, and it works. Andrew laughs hard, his quirky eyebrows raised. “How are Sally and the boys?”

Everyone is fine; no one seems to have changed at all. Why do they no longer see each other? This question lies between them, insufficiently answered by the fact that Michael and Louisa have moved up to San Francisco.

They have drinks, but it is being with Andrew that makes Louisa high; she is elated, she feels herself transformed. And later, remembering that lunch, it becomes an almost holy event. “Andrew sort of saved my life, that day,” she tells John Jeffreys, whom many years later she loves, and marries. “I’d lost track of who I was.”

Wanting to know everything (really everything about Andrew), Louisa even asks about the Magowans.

“They’ve had a lot of trouble with Allison—that’s the middle kid,” says Andrew, and Louisa remembers a shy and too thin little girl, with scabs always on her bony knees (who couldn’t think where to hide Easter eggs, until her wonderful mother, Grace, told her where).

“She’s really sick,” says Andrew. “Sally says she won’t eat and she throws up all the time.”

“Anorexia,” Louisa mechanically says. Michael has explained that it is the opposite of (“and of course that makes it related to”) her colitis.

“What’s weird is that Grace makes it sound like a bad cold, and Alex never mentions it at all. It makes it hard to be with them.”

“I’ll bet. ‘Denial’ is what Michael would say they’re doing.”

But Louisa is too happy to talk about the Magowans, or Michael; she has already forgotten what Andrew has just told her about them.

What would Andrew say, she wonders at some point, if she told him that she was in love with a Negro, committing adultery with a Negro man? (Screwing and getting screwed by one.) But she is not, not now, in love with King. She despises him; she wishes he were dead.

She asks, “And, Andrew, what about you? Are you writing a lot?”

A sad smile. “Not really. I seem to spend all my time winding up to write, and then not. And you know, Sally and the boys—not that it’s their fault that I don’t write,” he says ambiguously.

And then he says, “Louisa, Lou—I don’t know how to say this, but I’d give five years of my life to go back to that time—that time with you. Jesus, what a stuffy ass I was.”

He takes her hand, very gently.

Louisa feels her face heating, her blood race. It is impossible to look at Andrew.

“If only—don’t you think we could?” he says softly (and too vaguely). He has no clear plan. He is not saying: “Let’s walk out to the lobby and take a room in the hotel upstairs.”

And so she has to say no (and besides her slip is torn and pinned together). She says, “Andrew, I’m

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