Caroline's Daughters by Alice Adams Page B

yearned) to her father, only saying, “I really liked it there. Something about it.”
    And Ralph told her: “That’s pretty amazing. San Marcos is where your grandfather was born, and I used to visit there a lot when I was a boy. They had the prettiest farmhouse down on the river, the most beautiful trees. Your blood must have recognized that place.”
    They both laughed, denying such a possibility, blood recognition, but to Portia that was exactly how it had felt, a surging of all her cells, with her warm blood, toward that place.
    Portia “feels at home” in the Kaltenborn house, in Bernal Heights, to such a degree that she sometimes invites friends for supper, a rare event for her. She likes to cook in that narrow, hopelessly crowded kitchen, with its small vine-tangled deck just outside; she likes looking out to the rusting cans of flowering herbs, cracked terra-cotta pots of alyssum, lobelia and daisies. Ralph and Caroline have visited her there, and Liza and Saul and the children (Portia likes children, generally, and especially these half-niecesand -nephews). Harold has visited her there, and several times Sage. Never Fiona or Jill, however, who are simply too fussy about how things are.
    To celebrate Sage’s good news, the show of her sculpture that is definitely scheduled for October in New York, Portia is making an old favorite dinner for just the two of them; Noel conveniently has some business with clients, over in Orinda. (Portia is pleased, nothing against Noel, really, just that being alone with Sage is a special pleasure.) Salmon and asparagus and brown rice, an endive-and-watercress salad. Sage will bring some fruit for dessert. The simplicity of it all will make it more fun, with minimal chances for culinary disaster. Portia is a fairly good cook but easily distracted, prone to burnings. And Sage’s cooking has gone markedly downhill since her marriage to Noel, quite possibly because he is such a chef, given to flamboyant French feasts, Italian banquets (“Retro-disgusting,” is Fiona’s harsh verdict on Noel’s cooking. “A busboy’s dream.
So
South-of-Market”).
    In Portia’s mind these days Sage is already a big rich success. Large glossy photos of her ceramics in all the fanciest art magazines, and for Sage herself a new house, a big studio. New clothes and trips to Europe. Imagining all that for Sage, Portia’s heart warms: How wonderful Sage will look in her new role as a woman who has arrived. How becoming success will be, since Sage has so surely earned it.
    Bedazzled, literally, by such large generous thoughts, late in the afternoon of the dinner day Portia simultaneously recalls two small lapses of her own: she is not yet dressed and has no idea what to wear, and, worse, she has forgotten to get any wine.
    In a hurried way she pulls on the better of the two sweaters she brought over from Bolinas; it doesn’t matter, but she does wish she had something slightly better for a Sage celebration. Clean jeans. She finds her billfold and heads out the door, which does not lock. Sage will know that she should just go right on in.
    Portia has spent so much time in this neighborhood that she has various neighborhood relationships, people she nods or speaks to,animals she stops to pat along her way. With the Vietnamese family in the corner grocery she has an especially elaborate connection—she really likes them. They are small and shy and highly ceremonious people, as Portia is tall and shy and also excessively polite. Thus any transaction between Portia and My, the mother, and other family members tends to be lengthy.
    â€œI’m having some salmon,” Portia now confides to My, who seems to be alone in the store.
    â€œAh, fish! You like white wine?”
    â€œWell yes, I thought white. I guess some Chardonnay.”
    â€œAh yes! very nice! Chardonnay.” My has lovely large dark eyes, and a terrible scar across her