Families and Survivors by Alice Adams Page A

too?
    Then Louisa goes over to sit on the grass with Sally and Alex and Grace.
    It is a marvelous balmy April day. The softly petaled fruit trees are in bloom at the end of the garden, and Sally’s thick sweet peas, all lovely pastel shades, climb with their tiny tentacles to almost cover the Chapin side of the fence. In the back of this row of houses—the Chapins’, Mrs. Cornwallis’s—the tawny California hills lie sloping gently under the sun, here and there darkened with the shadow of a cloud, and darkly patched at intervals with live oaks, spreading green. (Hills that within the next few years are to be raped by subdivisions.)
    The other families on that street where the Wassermans and Chapins live have more money (much) than Michael and Louisa do, but they are uneducated people, white-collar workers, whose houses and whose children are kept immaculate, the children not allowed to run naked through hoses in the summer, children sent to Sunday School on Sundays. Although she knows better (she thinks), Louisa is made uncomfortable by those people, those Ike-supporters who are later to be called Middle Americans—she is made to feel that she is a disgrace. Thank God the Chapins are there—but somehow they are less disgraceful than she is.
    The Magowan children, though uniformly blond, are otherwise remarkably unlike. Douglas, the oldest, is tall and erect, and an absolutely fearless child: no swing too high for him, no dog too large. Allison, the middle child, is so far the “difficult” one. Nervous and a little shy, much too thin, with scabbed knees, today she runs over from the other children to cling to her mother’s arm.
    “Mommy, I don’t feel like hiding eggs.” The children have all been given baskets of eggs to hide; later in the afternoon, in theory, they will all go hunting for the ones the others hid.
    “Darling, please don’t whine. I can’t stand the sound.”
    She says it so pleasantly, and yet with such certainty. Grace knows her own mind. And Louisa hopelessly envies that confident, smooth motherhood. Maude’s whines affect her own stomach, so that she tends to respond angrily; Maude’s tantrums make her physically sick. But today Maude is fine. (Why?)
    Jennifer, the youngest Magowan, is placid and plump. (And she is to remain so, despite family disasters and her own troubled first love affair.)
    “But I don’t know where to put any eggs!” Allison complains.
    Grace laughs. “You don’t? Not in the whole big garden?” Then she whispers, but so that they all can hear: “I bet you never thought of a high-up place. You see those plum trees? Where the branches spread out?”
    And Allison runs off.
    No wonder Sally Chapin admires Grace so much. (“She’s really the neatest girl.”) Grace can do anything, and does: she bakes all their bread, plus cakes and pies and cookies; she upholsters furniture—marvelous junk that she and Alex have refinished themselves; she makes all the clothes that her daughters wear, and sometimes shirts for Alex and Douglas. She also plays the piano, a funny sort of honky-tonk that she picked up somewhere in her New Hampshire girlhood, and she is very good at charades. Today she is wearing a yellow halter dress, exhibiting terrific breasts. It is true that Grace has everything.
    But today Louisa doesn’t really mind. She is in love with Andrew, and it seems just barely possible that he might love her, or perhaps sometime kiss her: at a party they could go out together for more ice, or hot dogs. Something.
    And, looking over at Andrew, Louisa is suddenly struck, so that she cries out, “Andrew, it’s just come to me: you look so much like a boy I grew up with. John Jeffreys.”
    Sally laughs a little; she looks curiously at Louisa. “Some old boyfriend out of your Southern past?”
    “Well, no.” She laughs. “I should have been so lucky.” (She has picked up a lot of Yiddishisms from Michael, which, characteristically, she overdoes.) “Every girl in