Families and Survivors by Alice Adams

she clings to Andrew as they dance—she is in love!
    They go out onto the patio for air; they walk slowly toward a huge concealing clump of shrubbery. Abruptly they stop—they kiss.
    Their bodies grind together, and their mouths—they grasp and reach. They come apart, and Louisa is first to speak. “Andrew, couldn’t we go somewhere in your car—to get ice—anything?”
    “Louisa, I wouldn’t dare.” He is just sober enough to tell the truth. The notion of extramarital love is as frightening to Andrew as anarchy would be (where would it end?); he is both orderly and ambivalent.
    “But, Andrew, I love you. I have for months—”
    “Now, Lou,” he admonishes her. And he tries to joke: “I don’t want you to hate me in the morning.”
    “I love you!”
    (Love?)
    But as she understands what he has said, and that he meant it, she is overwhelmed by a violent wave of nausea.
    She is wretchedly sick, and hung over the next day. And miserably embarrassed.
    The memory of that evening becomes a source of acute discomfort, mingled with the taste of bile. (“Andrew, I love you—” How could she have said it?)
    For days and weeks after that, she and Andrew avoid each other, he out of a shy inability to tell her that, after all, they are friends (or, better, to tell her he’s changed his mind, to take her to a motel on El Camino Real, on the way up to San Francisco: he gives that a lot of thought). And Louisa avoids him out of shame. So at last they both (incorrectly) assume disapproval on the other’s part.

Six / 1958
    The scalloped neckline of Louisa’s flowered taffeta dress is coyly designed to half reveal breasts; Louisa fumbles at it, her fingers pleat the gaps. She has come to have lunch with Kate, in Kate’s sprawling Victorian flat on Potrero Hill. Taffeta—at lunch, on Potrero Hill? She must have been crazy (she must be crazy).
    The dress was a present from Mrs. Wasserman, who occasionally goes rushing through Filene’s Basement propelled by some curious grab bag of emotions toward Louisa—possibly guilt, less probably generosity. The result is a large box of clothes: dresses, sweaters, once a coat (but a size 8, not much help, and of course these bargains cannot be returned, even if Louisa dared complain). Louisa writes letters of profuse thanks (her ineradicable Southern training, from Caroline) and she wears the clothes. For all she knows, they are terrific, and becoming to her. So faulty at this time is her own sense of herself that she has no idea what she looks like, much less what she should wear.
    Kate is wearing a blue denim skirt (a wraparound—sheis four months pregnant), a pink oxford-cloth shirt, small pink scarf. She looks wonderful; she always does. “Louisa, you’re so dressed up,” she has inevitably said. But added, “Your hair looks marvelous. I love it long.”
    (Her hair?)
    This long-planned and often postponed visit (Louisa and Michael have been living in San Francisco, “The City,” for a couple of years now) is not going terribly well. Kate’s second child, a little girl, is at home with a cold, which makes her cross, and demanding of her mother—so much so that Kate, the affectionate friend, is divided. And this pregnancy is more difficult than the other two: Kate feels queasy a lot of the time, and she worries about the baby (who will be a beautiful blond girl, to be named Louisa).
    Louisa keeps eying the phone. She has to call someone, a man named Dan, to say that she can meet him this afternoon. (Kate will be her excuse.) But Dan drives a cab; he is almost never at home—when should she call? Also it is not entirely certain that he will want to see her. (It never is—she must be crazy.)
    Kate’s flat has a look that Louisa finds striking, and that she cannot at first define, but then it comes to her that the rooms look like Kate herself: Louisa could almost have come in and named this place as Kate’s. Vigorous and forthright colors, dark greens in the living room