To See You Again by Alice Adams

the mid to late afternoon. Dylan usually spent this time in the “library” of the Lodge, a dim, musty room, paneled in fake mahogany. Too tired for books, although her reading habits had delighted English teachers in high school, she leafed through old
House Beautifuls, Gourmets
or
Vogues
, avidly drinking in all those ads for the accoutrements of rich and leisurely exotic lives.
    Curiously, what she saw and read made her almost happy, for that limited time, like a drug. She could nearly believe that she saw herself in
Vogue
, in a Rolls-Royce ad: a tall thin blond woman (she was thin, if not very tall) in silk and careless fur, one jeweled hand on the fender of a silver car, and in the background a handsome man, dark, wearing a tuxedo.
    Then there was dinner. Drinks. Wines. Specifics as to the doneness of steaks or roasts. Complaints. I ordered
medium
rare. Is this crab really
fresh
? And heavy trays. The woman who managed the restaurant saw to it that waitresses and bus girls “shared” that labor, possibly out of some vaguely egalitarian sense that the trays were too heavy for any single group. By eight-thirty or so, Dylan and all thegirls would be slow-witted with exhaustion, smiles stiffening on their very young faces, perspiration drying under their arms and down their backs. Then there would come the stentorian voice of the manageress: “
Dylan
, are you awake? You look a thousand miles away.”
    Actually, in her dreams, Dylan was less than two hundred miles away, in San Francisco.
    One fantasy of rescue which Dylan recognized as childish, and unlikely, probably, was that a nice older couple (in their fifties, anyway: Flower was only thirty-eight) would adopt her. At the end of their stay at the Lodge, after several weeks, they would say, “Well, Dylan, we just don’t see how we’re going to get along without you. Do you think you could possibly …?” There had in fact been several couples who could have filled that bill—older people from San Francisco, or even L.A., San Diego, Scottsdale—who stayed for a few weeks at the Lodge, who liked Dylan and tipped her generously. But so far none of them had been unable to leave without her; they didn’t even send her postcards.
    Another fantasy, a little more plausible, more grown up, involved a man who would come to the Lodge alone and would fall in love with Dylan and take her away. The man was as indistinct as the one in the Rolls-Royce ads, as vaguely handsome, dark and rich.
    In the meantime, the local boys who came around to see the other waitresses tried to talk to Dylan; their hair was too long and their faces splotchily sunburned from cycling and surfing, which were the only two things they did, besides drinking beer. Dylan ignored them, and went on dreaming.
    The usual group of guests at the Lodge didn’t offer much material for fantasy: youngish, well-off couples who arrived in big new station wagons with several children, newsummer clothes and new sports equipment. Apart from these stylish parents, there were always two or three very young couples, perhaps just married or perhaps not, all with the look of not quite being able to afford where they were.
    And always some very old people.
    There was, actually, one unmarried man (almost divorced) among the guests, and although he was very nice, intelligent, about twenty-eight, he did not look rich, or, for that matter, handsome and dark. Whitney Iverson was a stocky red-blond man with a strawberry birthmark on one side of his neck. Deep-set blue eyes were his best feature. Probably he was not the one to fall in love and rescue Dylan, although he seemed to like her very much. Mr. Iverson, too, spent his late afternoons in the Lodge’s library.
    Exactly what Mr. Iverson did for a living was not clear; he mentioned the Peace Corps and VISTA , and then he said that he was writing; not novels—articles. His wife was divorcing him and she was making a lot of trouble about money, he said: a blow, he hadn’t