Caroline's Daughters by Alice Adams Page A

her as a poet, since she believes that they like to, “poet” as a designation makes her more plausible. “I really don’t quite know what I want to do,” Portia has said to Sage. “Do I have to, already?”
    For a living she does several things. She house-sits, with emphasis on plants and pets, and when not house-sitting she works for a young couple who do organic gardening. This last is back in Bolinas, in her cabin (her purchase with her Molly Blair money), whatshe thinks of as home. She also occasionally works, for no money, for a young man named Harold, who also lives in Bolinas, a refugee from a very high-powered East Coast alcoholic-politico father. Harold is trying to start a nursery.
    Of all her occupations Portia’s favorite is the pet- and plant-sitting, the houses. She likes Harold, likes helping him out, but she worries so that he may fail. She is over-identified with Harold, she sometimes thinks.
    Plants and pets and houses, though, she finds extremely reassuring, especially going back to places; she is happiest when working on a more or less regular basis, as she does for a Mrs. Kaltenborn, an elderly, eccentric lady who lives in Bernal Heights but goes to Italy every summer for three weeks, leaving three cats and a house full of ferns and philodendrons, yucca plants and spathofilium. There are ferns especially all over the house, and one of Portia’s chores is to see that the cats do not take bites from the fern leaves, which they like to do, and which always makes them throw up, an ugly green bile.
    The oldest cat is eighteen, she is cross and demanding and extremely talkative, called Pink. She is Portia’s favorite, for reasons that Portia herself does not quite understand. A tailless Manx, Pink walks with that non-existent tail held high, her long thin legs a little uncertain now.
    The other two cats are Burmese, sleek and plump and fairly stupid; Pink dislikes them both. Portia believes that Pink remembers and recognizes her, which could be true. Portia also believes in a curious kinship between herself and Mrs. Kaltenborn; they seem to inhabit each other, which is to say that the absent Mrs. Kaltenborn seems (to Portia) to be present in Pink. Pink is a combination of extreme crossness and an affection that is just as extreme, as is Mrs. K. In any case, Portia feels herself quite permanently attached to both.
    And that semi-shabby, architecturally eccentric neighborhood also appeals to Portia. The grander areas in which she sometimes tends house, or for that matter in which she visits her sisters or her mother—those places, Pacific Heights, Russian Hill and Telegraph, all quite intimidate Portia, they fill her with unease and loneliness. But in this tall narrow crooked house, impractically arranged, Portiafeels a sort of recognition. The house reminds her of herself; like her, it is not quite right.
    In fact Portia is possessed of an exceptionally acute sense of place, a heightened sensitivity to the physical facts of her surroundings. She once had an almost mystical experience, involving “place.” This is what happened:
    A few years back, when Portia was in her early twenties and just out of school, U.C. at Santa Cruz, she and some friends elected to drive across the country, to New York and back, in a more or less random way. (Portia paid for most of the expenses of this trip, her way of getting rid of a lot of her Molly Blair money.) Driving through Texas, they stopped in a town near Austin, called San Marcos, that for no apparent reason appealed very strongly to Portia. Quite literally it appealed: it cried out to her to stay there, everything shouted, the ordinary town square with its small, fairly ugly town hall, the streets of very ordinary two-story houses, with a few rare spacious beauties—and the river, flowing through.
    Returning to San Francisco, more or less in passing Portia mentioned this town (of which she still thought, for which she