Free To See You Again by Alice Adams Page A

look drunk. Maybe some kind of a drug she took.”
    The young woman, Claire Williston, who is not on drugs, or drunk, has been deeply mortified by those tears, which came on her like a fit, a seizure. Generally she is a disciplined person; she behaves well, even under emotional stress. She does not make scenes, does not cry in public, and rarely cries alone.
Maudlin
, she is censoriously thinking, and, How could I have done this to myself? How could I take a flight that would go right over Hilton?
    Vague about the specifics of geography, she had simply not realized what any map could have told her: flying from Atlanta to Washington of course you go right over Hilton, the small mid-Southern town where Claire was born and lived for the years until she went away to school up North. To which, except for one fatal summer and her father’s funeral, she has not been back for years, and where, as she sees it, she cannot ever now go back. But here she is, directly overhead.
    At last, gaining some control over the tears, she continues silently to castigate herself: for not having thought through the implications, geographic and otherwise, of flying all over the South except to Hilton. It is precisely the sort of “unconscious” mistake that people who pride themselves onrationality, on control, are most prone to make, she tells herself; it is how they do themselves in, finally.
    In a professional way her own life is indeed rational, is even a moderate success. Based in San Francisco, she is the West Coast editor of a national magazine; she likes the work, and is paid fairly well. (A less successful side of her life, containing the unconscious mistakes of which she accuses herself, has to do with intemperate love affairs, occasional poor judgment as to friends. Flying right over the place you don’t want to see or think about.) This is the last leg of a fact-finding trip in which she has thought in an abstract way about “the South,” or “the new South,” and has not thought about Hilton, or her on the whole painful upbringing there, or the searing love affair which took place on that last summer visit. Now, as a treat, she is on her way to see Susan, an old friend in Washington; she has filled a notebook with observations for the article she will write, but she has reserved some lighter conversational notes for Susan: her fantasy that all the food in New Orleans comes from a single subterranean kitchen with a gigantic black vat of béchamel; her dislike of the self-conscious, daily-manicured prettiness of Charleston; her encounter with the awful loudmouthed racist (
still
) cabdriver in Atlanta: “On Fridays, once they’s had they lunch, they’s no holding them till midnight, with they singing and they dancing and they razor fights.” It was Susan who occupied her thoughts, until the land below began to look so overwhelmingly familiar and she heard the man across from her: “Say, aren’t we passing over Hilton?”
    At this altitude actual landmarks are impossible to recognize, but as she continues to look down, Claire feels the most powerful pull toward that land, as if there were some special gravity into whose range she has flown. And then a remarkable event occurs; over the loudspeaker comes this announcement: “Well, folks, we’re going to be making a littleunscheduled stopover right about now. Be landing down at Raleigh-Durham for a little adjustment in the oil-filter system. Won’t take no more’n a minute.”
    Dear God, I do not deserve this, Claire thinks, and at the same time, crazily, she wonders if the plane has been compelled by the same pull that she felt, like an event in science fiction. Dabbing at her face, making a few cosmetic repairs (at which the men across from her sigh with relief: when a woman can tend to her face, she’s pretty much all right, they think), she watches as the descending plane approaches the familiar pine-lined, long gray grass field. It bumps down; a few passengers applaud. The