DO come out and visit. I mean, really!!! Right now!!! You'll have a MARVELOUS time!!! The people here are just FANTASTIC and I'm sure you'll love every single one of them. Do write and tell me you'll come. We'll all be looking forward to seeing you-and me most of all!!! I can't wait, simply cannot wait, to see you!!!
Love and kisses Mary Alice Haslam
A postscript at the end said, "That's my married name. I'm getting my own back but that won't be for another couple of months. DO COME SEE ME!!! "
"Annie," she said, staring at the wall. It'd been years since anyone had called her that How very little Mary Alice had changed from the girl, her roommate, at school. And-she thought with a sudden pang of her lost girlhood-how very nice it would be to see her. She'd write her immediately. It sounded like exactly the right tonic for her right now.
WomanSchool? she wondered. What was that? It sounded like something she had some sort of partnership in. Or perhaps she owned it A licensed school of some sort? She couldn't imagine. And where was Studio City? She reached for the almanac and finally found it: a small suburb of Los Angeles, separated from the main city by a sizeable mountain range but-if the highway map were right-not far from the Hollywood complex. She'd never been in Los Angeles. The one time Ed had gone there he'd gone alone; he had a speech to make at some dull convention and he hadn't recommended the trip as anything she might enjoy. Very well; very well… She checked the letterhead again (obviously something done on a hand press, but not unattractive for all that). There was a telephone number listed. She picked up the desk set and dialed…
Two days later she walked down the ramp from her plane at L.A. International, her eyes eagerly scanning the crowd for signs of her friend and recognizing nobody. It was well after eleven p.m., but she noticed with a shock that even Florida's idea of informality (as reflected in her own ensemble, purchased in Miami Beach) was decidedly too studied for Los Angeles, if this crowd were any sort of accurate cross-section. The new short hairdo was all right, though: the only really nice thing she'd brought back from her European trip. It helped dispel the feeling of being horribly, pretentiously overdressed.
"Annie!" a voice said from down the way. Somehow even the voice-not unduly loud, but capable of carrying quite a distance, she remembered from all those years before-seemed to come with underlined capital letters and triple exclamation points attached. There'd been a strange Betty Hutton sort of competent-but-vulnerable air about her that her girl friends had found far more appealing than the men they met had. Suddenly, looking for her, Nan wondered what kind of man she'd married-and divorced.
Suddenly she spotted her. And she couldn't believe it
Mary Alice had been the neat type: prim whites and pinks, closed shoes even in hottest summertime, hair always just so. Now the woman who stood before her, her face split by a happy smile, wore a thin sweater with no bra underneath-showing nipples, even areolas, quite clearly under the semi-sheer cloth-and trim, but stained, blue jeans, with canvas shoes. Her hair was waist-length, but had been braided into a single brown pigtail that hung-not at all unattractively, Nan thought with a start-down one side of her neck.
"My…gosh!" Mary Alice said. Nan looked at her, her own jaw dropping, her own responses shorted out for the moment. "Wow…look at you, for Pete's sake! Just look at you!" The smile was genuine; it was as real as anything in the world. Nan couldn't be happier to see anyone she knew in the whole world. And, her hesitation over, she swept into Mary Alice's arms for a warm hug and a kiss on the cheek that wet her face with sudden salt tears.
"Oh, honey…I've spoiled your makeup…Tm so sorry, but I…"
"Oh, Mary Alice," Nan said, meaning every word of it, "you're the nicest sight I've seen in a year." And the two swept off, arm in arm, to get her baggage.
Mary Alice drove a Volkswagen bus. "You have to have something like this," she explained as they sped up the San Diego Freeway toward the mountains. "I mean, if you're hauling stuff around the way I am a good deal of the time. I'd like to have something with a little more poop, you know-but I've got every nickel invested in this place of mine. It's all I can do to meet the nut half the time. I mean, you wouldn't believe" (here Nan's mind supplied capital letters and three exclamation points again) "how many licenses you've got to carry here, how many taxes you have to pay."
"What kind of school is it?" Nan said. She'd shared some-but not many-confidences with Mary Alice so far; she'd mentioned losing her husband, for instance, but not that she'd gained something in the neighborhood of twenty million dollars in the process. She wasn't sure just why she'd held back.
"Well, gosh…you'll see. I started to get you a nice reservation at the Sportsmen's Lodge or somewhere, but I thought, gee, I couldn't just let you go the first night I've been so excited ever since I heard from you the other day, I just couldn't. I hope you don't mind staying with me tonight. I want to show you the place, and…well, gee. It's just fantastic to see you, hon."
"You too, dear," Nan said. And found herself meaning it. She was a sweetheart, just as Nan had remembered her. Only something had happened to make her open up even further. She'd been hurt, perhaps…and had recovered from it Nan sighed, thinking. When would she recover from Ed? Or were all these changes she was going through part of the process?
They were climbing now. "Hey, look up ahead, sugar," Mary Alice said. "I never get over how pretty this is. I mean, here you are right in the middle of this big fantastic city, you know, and all of a sudden they run his eight-lane highway over this whole cotton-picking mountain range. I mean look. And when we get to the top…there, look. Have you ever seen anything like it? That's the Valley. It's, like, only this teeny little part of L.A., and here its population's about the size of Baltimore's or something. It's nothing but this…this big damn sort of bedroom community, really, but you can find just about anything in it that you can find in Philly. Honest, hon, I love it. Gee, just look at that." And Nan had to admit to herself that the sight was impressive: a giant city, spreading out as far as the eye could see, visible from the top of the mountain they were crossing. The lights were as bright as those of an entire, large Eastern city, and they didn't stop for miles and miles.
"But your school," she said. "You were going to tell me about it."
"Yeah," Mary Alice said. She took the off-ramp to the Ventura Freeway, heading East. She drove with a man's confidence and competence, Nan noticed. "Well, I had this idea, back when my marriage was falling apart and I needed something to kind of throw myself into. I'd always wanted to learn about ceramics, and nobody had any classes-oh, gee, wait'll you see this ceramics teacher I just hired, he's a dream-anyhow, I thought, why? Why weren't there any schools specializing in that? I mean for adults? No credit or anything. Just learn how to do it, you know, and learn well. Right? Yeah. But I learned Joe was gonna fight the divorce, and I got me this fan-tas-tick lawyer, and he soaked Joe for this nice big fat wad-oh, a hundred thou or so, you know-and I thought, Mary Alice, you're going into the school business. Anyhow, I had the house, and there was this crummy old motor court-remember those? With the little cabins and all?-next door, and when it came up for sale for delinquent taxes…"
The story waffled pleasantly on as the little bus sped through the night. At a particularly un-likely-looking off-ramp Mary Alice swung the wheel expertly to one side and steered them out of the traffic. In a few blocks she turned off, went up a long driveway, and pulled up in the middle of a nest of disreputable-looking shacks, parking behind a billboard advertising the school.