Joyfully Retired

by Alice Adams

This short story was told in the first person and the reader never knows her name. I call her Alice after the author’s name. It felt as if this really was Alice’s story.

When Alice was ten-years-old her mother, Margot, moved them both to North Carolina because the ouija board said to do it. Margot opened an antiques business on the side porch. and set about creating a new life for herself. Alice was sent off to take walks around their new little town and then given a new bicycle to explore even further. Occasionally, Alice went along with Margot to buy new antiques. She fell in love with the area.

“I was excited by the novelty of the landscape. The red clay banks that led up to the thick pine groves, the swollen brown creeks half hidden by flowering tangled vines. Bare, shaded yards from which rose gaunt, narrow houses. Chickens that scattered, barefoot children who stared at our approach.”

As Alice explored the area on her bike she next fell in love with a beautiful house on a hill. The occupants, a mother and daughter her age, were the opposite of her own mother. So was the house.

“Inside, the house was cluttered with odd mixtures of furniture. I glimpsed a living room, where there was a shabby sofa next to a pretty, “antique” table. We walked through a dining room that contained a decrepit mahogany table surrounded with delicate fruitwood chairs. . . Books overflowed from rows of shelves along the walls. I would have moved in at once.”

During that summer in the early nineteen-forties Alice was at that house so often she began to feel like a member of the family. And, as a member of the family, she began to see why the mother was always so sad and vulnerable. She saw a side of the often-absent father not normally seen by outsiders.

The story felt like a long letter from a friend who was explaining to me the circumstances and outcome of childhood friends. If it was a letter from a friend, my friend is a beautiful, descriptive writer as I’m sure you’ve seen in these quotes. A short story but powerfully beautiful writing.

About the author: Alice Adams (1926-1999) has written over a hundred short stories and ten novels, and has received numerous awards.

This story first appeared in The New Yorker in 1975. I read it in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison.

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