Free Beautiful Girl by Alice Adams Page A

said Cathy, with total candor.
    “Well, let’s see.” Dr. Fredericks, almost alone among his colleagues, was more opposed to protesters than to the war, but bringing up Vietnam had been a ploy. He now thrust his real point home. “I do seem to remember that your stepfather is something of a hunter,” he said.
    Cathy heard the light note of triumph in his voice, to which she reacted with rage and despair and a prolonged silence. Why bother to tell him that Bill only hunted ducks—and only with his father, before that awful old man had died? During the silence, she listened to the leisurely sounds of outlying San Francisco traffic and the faint, distant foghorns from the Bay. Concentrating on these, she was able to stop the echo of Dr. Fredericks’s voice in her mind. Their voices were what she could stand least about adults: Dr. Fredericks’s bored hostility; her teachers’ voices, loud and smug; the alternately anxious and preening, knowing voice of her mother. The only thing that she could remember about her natural father, who had divorced her mother when Cathy was two,was his voice. It was high-pitched, almost a whine—nothing much to miss. Actually, Bill had a nice warm deep voice, until he drank too much and it blurred.
    A heavy truck went by, creaking and lumbering as though weighted with old furniture or barrels of china and glass. Brakes screeched several blocks away. Then the traffic sounds continued as before. For a few minutes there were no foghorns, and then there they were again, discordant, with no rhythm.
    Both Cathy and Dr. Fredericks glanced over at the clock on his desk. Five minutes to go. He sighed softly and pleasurably. He had recently stopped smoking and he enjoyed the air in his expanded lungs. Although he was nearing sixty, he was well preserved. Squash and swimming at his club had kept him in shape; he felt a certain snobbery toward many of his colleagues who were running to fat. He and his wife, who owned and ran an extremely successful chain of gift shops, spent vacations at health spas, playing tennis and dieting together. A blue-eyed Southerner, from West Virginia, Dr. Fredericks liked to view himself as a maverick among psychoanalysts—another breed, one might say.
    Cathy swung her short legs off the couch and sat up. She clutched her knees and faced him. “Look,” she said. “It’s hopeless. You and Mother think it’s important to get married and save marriages and get money and save that, and I don’t.”
    “We’re trying to find out what you do think is important,” he said. He did not bother to conceal his impatience.
    Neither did she. “So am I.”
    “Next week?” They both stood up.
    Out of context (he felt), she giggled.
    Cathy’s parents lived about ten blocks from Dr. Fredericks in the same expensive and fog-ridden San Francisco neighborhood, but instead of going home Cathy walked to the park she often went to, along the broad streets and downthe hill leading toward the Bay. Here the sun was shining. She pulled a small box of raisins from her pocket and began to eat them as she walked.
    The park was surrounded by rolling woods of pine and fir, cypress and eucalyptus, through which on clear days one could catch blue views of the Bay, red glimpses of the Golden Gate Bridge. Cathy walked past creaking swings and a slide crowded with small children. Out on a playing field, lounging about on the beaten grass, there were some kids her own age whom she thought she knew, so she hurried on toward the woods.
    Off the path, she came to a place where there was a large sloping patch of sand. She sat down and reached into the back pocket of her jeans, where there was a very mashed joint, which she lit. She lay back, her left arm protecting her hair from the sand. She sucked in and waited for the melting of her despair.
    The air smelled of the sea, of lemon-scented eucalyptus, of pine and of the dank, dark earth. It was nearly a clear day, but the foghorns sounded more strongly