Free Almost Perfect by Alice Adams Page B

love, she and Tony—Cats—and they are all over each other, hands clutching and groping, unchaste kisses exchanged. As the two couples face each other in a green plastic booth. In the Jump Room, in the Outer Mission.
    They are drinking margaritas. This is a Mexican place; at one end of the room, an enthusiastic mariachi group, in taut black pants, flowing ties and large black hats, is singing an endless ballad of love and betrayal and blood. From the ceiling, Christmas decorations are still suspended, tinfoil angels and stars, dusty green plastic wreaths.
    “You feel right at home here?” Richard whispered this to Stella as they first came in and sat down. His smile was teasing.
    “Well, not exactly.” But she smiled too, as though she really liked it anyway.
    In any case, she does not feel at home with Tony and Valerie. She tells herself that they are very good, nice, kind and generally well-intentioned people (probably), especially Tony; she can see how Richard would like him and feel at home with him. But they express themselves in ways that she is unused to, that she cannot fall in with.
    “You’re Mexican?” Tony asks her, early on, having clearly been primed by Richard (but she wonders: Exactly what did Richard say, explaining her to Tony?).
    “Uh, yes. My mother’s Mexican.”
    “I love Mexicans.” Tony beams.
    “Me too.” Saying this, Valerie looks at Tony. “They’re so—so
real
.”
    But my mother wasn’t real at all, Stella does not say. My mother, Delia, had dyed-blond hair and did not even look very Mexican, not in one of the thousands of ways of looking “Mexican.” My mother was ashamed of her own mother, Serena, the vendor of flowers; when we visited Serena in Oaxaca, my mother pretended to be a tourist. And going to Dalton and Hunter College did not exactly fill me with national pride. But none of this seems possible to explain, certainly not now, in this group.
    “These drinks are just so good,” says Valerie, beaming, to Tony. “I just don’t care if they make me drunk. Or fat.”
    “Baby, I love every ounce you’ve got.” Tony beams back.
    “These are good margaritas,” Stella tells Richard. A lie: the drinks are much too sweet.
    “You don’t think they’re a little too sweet?” he counters, frowning.
    “Well, I guess.”
    Across the table Tony and Valerie are kissing—again. Do they love each other more than we do? Stella wonders. Accept each other more? She feels very stiff and uncomfortable. Lost. Unconnected to Richard, as though whatever bond had drawn and bound them together had dissolved in this smoky, noisy air. Or perhaps had never existed; perhaps it was false and all wrong from the start.
    They all drink more margaritas, and eventually they eat: platters of shrimp, some beans and enchiladas, which Tony proclaims the best, the most authentic, he ever had. To which Richard shouts agreement (everyone seems to have forgotten the supposed Mexican among them, Stella notes). In fact Tony and Valerie do not address Stella at all; they talk between themselves, and occasionally one or the other of them will toss a small speech across the table in Richard’s general direction—a speech having to do with their own love affair, their grand passion.
    Valerie: “Can you believe this guy? The first time we went out, I thought if he didn’t kiss me I’d die.”
    Tony: “This little girl’s got the greatest singing voice you ever heard, I’m telling you. She’s going places. She’s something else.”
    And so on, all night.
    “Because you’re a fucking snob, and they could feel it. What do you think they are, insensitive?”
    Richard, lurching and accusatory, holds to the frame of the door, Stella’s door, which they have just come through. Any minute he will leave, will rush back out into the night, rush dangerously across the city, in his open car. Gone. Maybe dead. She will never see him again.
    Stella experiences ferocious anxiety. Panic. A huge bird caged in her