With good reason the short stories of American writer Alice Adams have appeared regularly in the prestigious annual O. Henry Award Collections. [In a review of To See You Again, Baltimore Sun, April 4, 1982] Robert Michael Green describes her gifted writing: "At its best, Alice Adams's reportorial style reminds us of Saroyan, Katherine Mansfield, and Hemingway's most innocent (and charming) stones. That's good company." Adams's concern in her fiction with the experiences of aging and emotions of middle-aged women also puts her in the company of Doris Lessing; her middle-aged heroines, like Lessing's, travel on psychic journeys to themselves, "ripening" or acquiring the greater maturity and wisdom that characterize women of Reifungsroman. During the 1970's—when The Summer Before the Dark was published—and into the early 1980's, Adams wrote a series of short story gems that were collected, titled To See You Again, and published in 1982. Several of the stories in the collection are Reifungsroman in miniature, and three that depict middle-aged women, "Lost Luggage," "A Wonderful Woman," and the title story, "To See You Again" enable readers to experience middle age intensely.

To Adams, middle age for women is often synonymous not with complacency and boredom, but with upheaval in longstanding relationships and with the brave formation of new relationships; Phyllis L. Thorn has observed that Adams "writes especially well of people in their middle years whose marriages have come apart through divorce or death, . . . whose new 'relationships' are tentative and frightening as well as loving, rich, and rewarding" ["Stories of Middle Years and Fresh Beginnings," Seattle Times, May 9, 1982]. Thorn's words aptly describe the situation of the heroines in these three stories. The first two depict middle-aged widows embarking on literal and psychic journeys that promise adventure and self-discovery, a typical pattern in Reifungsromane. Benjamin De Mott has hailed this fictional widow-adventurer as the "new-style picaresque heroine" and notes that in depicting such heroines, Adams is able to explore "the feelings and impulses . . . [that] lie close to the core of contemporary emotional life" ["Stories of Change," The New York Times Book Review, April 11, 1982]. The third story gives us a portrait of a woman not literally but virtually widowed through the mental illness of her husband. She embarks on her journey of self-discovery not by traveling but by taking a job, during which she develops a crush on a young man, In the first two stories especially, the two women start out anxious about the experiences they arc to have, but emerge sounder for them, more self-confident and self-knowledgeable. The third story's protagonist has only an internal journey, a set of fantasies reminiscent of Kate Brown's and Jane Somers's rich inner lives. Yet she, like Adams's other two heroines, also changes, becoming more optimistic about her old age, even if middle age's obstacles to happiness seem formidable to her. As De Mott wryly observes, "Readers in north central middle age will doubtless be heartened .. . by the lively desire and splendid resiliency of this author's senior citizen-changelings." De Mott's tinge of flippancy here probably reflects his own uncomfortable, stereotypical thoughts about aging. He fails to give Adams credit for creating appealing, courageous middle-aged heroines who have the power to change not only themselves, but also readers' common notions of middle age for women.

Felicia Lord is the "wonderful woman" of that ironically titled story. The irony of the title is that while everyone considers her a wonderful woman who copes admirably with the death of her husband and other major difficulties, Felicia disparages her own conduct, insisting she has not acted out of choice or strength of character: "Wonderful is not how Felicia sees herself at all; she feels that she has always acted out of simple—or sometimes less simple—necessity." There is a clear discrepancy between the way she perceives herself and the way others perceive her, especially as the narrator encourages readers to see Felicia in attractive terms, with positive observations filling the opening paragraphs; she is pretty, a "stylish gray-blonde," and strong, a "survivor" of marriage to an alcoholic artist manqué (now dead) and five children (now grown) and of a love affair with a Mexican man, ending in an abortion. In short, she is a determined, complex, active woman whose creative yet unpretentious bent is summed up when the narrator describes her as "a ceramicist who prefers to call herself a potter." Felicia's self-disparagements, conveyed through third-person limited omniscient narration, seem misplaced beside such praise. The narrator does not directly explain the discrepancy between internal and external assessments of Felicia, an omission that, as Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey has suggested, is typical of Adams's reportorial style: "Writing in a deliberately flat style, she refuses to tell you what she expects you to discover for yourself." However, it is clear that Felicia is not accurately or fully acquainted with herself.

In the course of this story Felicia's self-disparagement and ignorance of herself end as she undergoes intensive self-examination while she waits for her lover in a San Francisco hotel. While waiting and wondering whether he will appear for the rendezvous, Felicia, like Kate Brown and Jane Somers, has "remembrances of sex and loves past," a common element of Reifungsroman. This scrutiny of her past enables her to acknowledge her strength, her ability to survive alone, and her basic wonderfulness. Like an enthusiastic and idealistic 16-year-old, she feels exhilarated about her new romance; her future seems brimming with possibilities. Yet the opening sentence suggests that like a naive and vulnerable 16-year-old, she initially fears the failure of this relationship with a man, as she embarks on it "at her age"; her self-deprecating tone in this last phrase is also a reprise of the old attitude that love is for the young and old love is somehow inappropriate. However, reviewing her rich history of romantic attachments allows her to see that she has successfully weathered romantic crises and is equipped either to venture into new love in middle age or to meet her future without a romantic relationship. The traditional borders between the emotional domains of youth and age become blurred in Adams's depiction of Felicia's romantic feelings.

Adams scrutinizes Felicia's panic at the thought that this meeting and this relationship will fail. Self-conscious and insecure in this new "inappropriate" role, Felicia feels less sure of "what she is about" than the bellboy who, she paranoically thinks, smiles knowingly at her. The narrator describes her unsettling emotions, her disorientation in this role of lover at age 59, through physical sensations: Felicia feels a "dizzying lurch of apprehension . . . intense in its impact," and "suddenly quite weak," she has to sit down. As she looks out the window in her dizzy state, even the rooftops have a "crazy variety," reflecting and increasing her disorientation. Felicia's thoughts leap from crazy roofs to questions about her crazy relationship with Martin, a risky departure from her customary kind of man. This "farming sailor" defies her usual categorizing; Martin is "entirely new to her." Is this, she wonders, an imprudent decision by a formerly wonderful, sensible woman—inappropriately daring for a woman just short of 60? Is this a false start on the road to true reifung, such as Kate Brown experienced in her liaison with Jeffrey Merton? And is San Francisco an inappropriate place for this meeting, given its role in her past relationships, the history that she is about to reminisce over? As she waits for Martin, questions and doubts punctuate her inner monologue, mirroring her society's assumptions about youth and age: her romantic feelings and risk taking are deemed embarrassing for one of her "advanced" age. Her fear of failure, then, comes not only from her sense of personal inadequacy, but also from her sense of having overstepped social bounds by reaching for "youthful" pleasures; images of natural catastrophe express her fear of the consequences of this "unnatural" liaison that tampers with nature: "Supposing she isn't 'wonderful' anymore? Suppose it all fails, flesh fails, hearts fail, and everything comes crashing down upon their heads, like an avalanche, or an earthquake?" The doubts that strike her are reminiscent of Jane Somers's dismay as she stands in front of the mirror naked, sees her juiceless body, and fantasizes making love with Richard. Readers increasingly sympathize with Felicia as the waiting period stretches out, sharing her dismay that she may have been abandoned. The doubts, the excitement, the suspense, and a virus combine to make Felicia sick.

Some of Felicia's doubts during this interminable waiting period are eased by the arrival of Martin's telegram informing her that a "crazy delay"—the word "crazy" linking the telegram with the crazy San Francisco roofs and her sense of the craziness of planning such a rendezvous at all—will keep him from her for a few days. The delay enables her to consider whether the liaison itself is crazy, allows her to be sick and convalesce, and gives her time to reexamine her past in order to reassess herself and prepare for her future.

She experiences in abbreviated form (appropriate to the short story) Kate Brown's momentous summer of illness, introspection, and maturation. Felicia reviews her courtship and marriage to Charles and her mothering of their five children, her love affair with Felipe (a false start on the path to maturity), and the recent history of her passion for Martin. As she takes to her bed and reminisces, she feels older, no longer like the romantic 16-year-old for whom the silk and lace lingerie she wears is appropriate, but instead decked out like "an old circus monkey,"—echoing Kate Brown's self-description when ill and aging like a thin, sick monkey. Felicia imagines that the bellboy grins at her with malice and contempt, seeing her as "an abandoned woman, of more than a certain age." She fantasizes her illness spiraling to death and herself becoming "an unknown dead old woman" in this hotel room. Old age, illness, helplessness, abandonment, death: she faces squarely in this fantasy some of the grisly myths about senescence, gathering strength to puncture them.

Moreover, as she remembers her past, Felicia demythicizes it. This demythicizing is necessary so that her past will not have the power to thwart newly developing aspects of her future. First she remembers her fairytale courtship with her husband during the glamour of wartime: brief leaves, dancing all night in elegant hotels, the marriage proposal during a champagne breakfast; Adams selects the concrete details of the reminiscence carefully to suggest its romanticized quality in Felicia's mind. Then Felicia, like Jane Somers, confronts the real emptiness of her marriage, her lack of love for her dead husband; "having seen the lonely, hollow space behind his thin but brilliant surface of good looks, graceful manners," Felicia remembers feeling so sorry for this despairing failed artist that "it was then impossible to leave him." Similarly, Kate Brown contemplates her husband's weakness for affairs with younger women and recognizes the flaws in their marriage. For Kate, Jane, and Felicia, the starry-eyed view of marriage is gone. Felicia dismisses one of her youthful illusions, "a dream of a courtship, and then a dream groom."

As part of her assessment of her marriage, Felicia, like Kate Brown, also scrutinizes her role as a mother. She does not see herself as a good mother, not having liked young children, and is grateful that she has gone beyond the role so that she can see her grown children "with great fondness, and some distance." Unlike Kate, Felicia experiences no empty nest syndrome. She simply dismisses another of her life's myths, that of her being the devoted mother of five. Again she is confronted by the undeniable flatness of her married life: if children are at the center of their marriage and Charles married her mainly to be the mother of his children, she has not discharged her maternal role so "wonderfully."

Felicia also reexamines her "ideal" romantic relationship with her Mexican Communist artist-lover Felipe, whose macho, radical style swept Felicia off her feet. Their passionate affair results in her pregnancy, an emotionally agonizing abortion in San Francisco, and, finally, Felipe's return to his wife. Another dream is shattered: a dream of passionate romance: "And she thought, 'Well, so much for my Latin love affair.'" She is gradually realizing how well she has survived, summoning strength, courage, and the will to go on. Phyllis L. Thorn observes this resilience in many of Adams's female characters: they are "courageous and resourceful people with an appealing talent for starting over and making new beginnings." As she reexamines her history and learns to appreciate her own emotional stamina, Felicia is also convalescing from her physical illness. Her physical recovery reinforces the idea that she is becoming more self-knowledgeable and more self-congratulatory.

The most challenging aspect of Felicia's reminiscence concerns the new history of her relationship with Martin, whom she has known for only a few months. It is too soon to know and trust him, she realizes, yet here she is in San Francisco waiting to meet him. He has asked her to marry him, a proposition that she knows requires mutual trust, but now she ironically doubts whether he will even show up at the hotel. Finally she faces the possibility of a future without him. It may hurt at first, "the possible loss of such a rare, eccentric and infinitely valuable man," but with her history to buttress her, Felicia "realizes that she can stand it, after all, as she has stood other losses, other sorrows in her life. She can live without Martin." Felicia reaches this conclusion out of conviction; she realizes that she is not just whistling in the dark after having reviewed her painful history and track record of survival. She can live alone comfortably. And readers nod approvingly as she goes out to a nice dinner by herself, acknowledging that to dine alone is "really not so bad." However, feelings of weakness and childishness return when, back at the hotel, she is disappointed that Martin has still not arrived.

Like Lessing, Adams uses a dream to explore further Felicia's conflicts and ambivalence about her newly acknowledged autonomy; dreams are central to the heroine's self-examination in most Reifungsroman. She dreams a man comes to her room at night and although thrilled to see him, she is not sure who he is: "Is it her husband Charles, or one of her sons? Felipe? Is it Martin? It could even be a man she doesn't know." She confesses that the dream saddens her, perhaps because in it she is so happy to see the man, suggesting that despite her struggle for autonomy, she is dependent on men for happiness, after all; or she may be saddened because in the dream Martin is identified with the other men in her life with whom her relationships turned out to be disappointing or limited. Her ambivalence about solitude versus male companionship is evident in either interpretation of the dream.

This ambivalence in her dream life is overtaken by Felicia's increasing enjoyment of her own companionship during her waking hours. She appraises herself in the omnipresent mirror of the Reifungsroman and sees, more optimistically than Jane Somers, "a strong healthy older woman." She no longer waits passively in her hotel room for her lover, but tours San Francisco, pleased by her own company. By the time Martin arrives, Felicia has matured by facing her past, becoming comfortable with her present aloneness, and recognizing her own strength for the future.

Martin's arrival in the middle of the night is like her dream: she cannot at first identify who he is. When she does, she is glad to see him. Yet she has learned that her future is not contingent solely upon him or this relationship. Regardless of what may happen in her relationship with Martin, Felicia ends her story confident that she will again be a survivor—finally giving herself credit for being one—a survivor with many options before her. Felicia Lord acknowledges herself "lord" of her own destiny. By empowering Felicia in this way, Adams is no longer giving credence to American society's dualistic notion of youth as an epoch of power and choice and middle age as a time of increasing disenfranchisèment and dependency, particularly for women.

Janet Stone Halloran could be Felicia Lord's sister. The protagonist of "Lost Luggage" describes in a first-person narrative some of the same experiences and thoughts that Felicia has, although she appears to be more self-confident at the beginning of her story than Felicia. Like Felicia, Janet is middle-aged and recently widowed. When the story opens, she has just returned from her first vacation alone, for which she congratulates herself with "more than usual self-approval; you could call it pride or maybe hubris, even." She has enjoyed her own companionship, socialized with other people, successfully negotiated the practical details of traveling. She seems to have adjusted to her middle age, as indicated by her pleasure in her appearance: "I was brown and silver, like a weathering country house, and I did not mind the thought of myself as aging wood." Janet counters the stereotyped images of deterioration, gray hair, increasing wrinkles, and sagging flesh with these lovely images of physical aging as ripening or enhancing one's appearance. Adams has also written positively about her own middle age and gray hair in an autobiographical sketch for Vogue, "On Turning Fifty": "My fifties . . . are the best years of my life, so far . . . and . . . given the proper lighting and a sympathetic photographer, grey hair has a wonderful sheen."

Janet's positive mental outlook initially prevents her from becoming upset over the airline's loss of her suitcase. As the story unfolds, however, she has an emotional relapse triggered by the lost suitcase, a crisis that she has to resolve and whose resolution strengthens her for her future alone. In describing her crisis to the reader, Janet's narrative travels back and forth between her past marriage to Walter and his death, her recent past at the Mexican resort, her present in her San Francisco home, and her future hopes and schemes. The familiar pattern in the Reifungsroman of the flashback or reminiscence to analyze and reassess an important marital or sexual relationship from the past before building a new life, present in Felicia Lord's, Kate Brown's and Jane Somers's stories, is central to this story too.

In a sense, as she confronts her literally lost luggage in her present, Janet is also reexamining, in most cases to jettison, the figurative baggage from her past life: her formerly important relationships, values, priorities, even her traditional methods of meaning making in language. Jettisoning as a practice of the middle-aged is explored in articles on aging in popular magazines, but Adams's heroine practices it uniquely in her use of language. To rethink and dislodge meanings stereotypically associated with terms like "gray hair," "widow," "older woman," and "woman alone" frees her language to acquire new meanings, frees her to create new associations for these terms. Kate Brown freed her language during her "cow sessions." Janet's analytic method of sifting through her past and redefining her life is also patently linguistic; she writes her analyses in a large daybook or journal, like Jane Somers and Caro Spencer. Janet's journal is the one item that she really misses in her lost suitcase, until she realizes that what it contained, its meanings, or any meaning need not depend upon what is actually carried, preserved in writing, or handed down, as if in one sacred vessel, one compendious, universal, canonical volume. She realizes that because it is a process, not a "thing," meaning can be continually recreated, reconceptualized, and particularized. This realization prompts Janet's decision to buy not the duplicate of the lost daybook, but the first of several smaller, more portable and more "losable" journals and to fill the first one with new impressions of her Mexican vacation and her life; she will not attempt to reconstruct the original lost jottings. Like Janet in her journals, Adams in this story also creates new meanings for widowhood and middle age.

As she reminisces about her courtship and marriage to Walter, Janet acknowledges what none of her friends had known because Janet is a reserved person. She establishes an intimate tie with the reader by confessing to a failure of love in her marriage, only a lack of money having prevented divorce. They had married "for love (well, sex, really)," but the mutual attraction had faded and left Janet a lonely woman who read obsessively while Walter indulged a penchant for owning expensive cars. She recalls her lack of sympathy for Walter and his hobby with some guilt because of his early death. Guilt is a major item of Janet's baggage from the past that she has to deal with now. In addition, her recollection of their last vacation together at the Mexican resort reveals much about the emptiness of their relationship and about her former conventional attitude toward aging. During their last vacation, both had experienced "a miasma of incommunicable depression" whose source, she determines, was the thought of their aging together, growing apart and deteriorating: "Our slowing middle-aged flesh seemed to parody its former eager, quick incarnation. .. . Is the rest of our life together, if we stay together, to be such a process of attrition?" Janet's association of aging with a repellent deterioration acts as a metaphor for the deterioration of their repellent relationship. She conjectures that if one's life is not going well or if it is worsening, aging does not seem to improve it, but merely to mock a person with the contrast to what her life had once been. Without a newly rekindled passion or strengthened identity and purpose to offset its decaying powers, such as Jane Somers, Kate Brown, and Felicia Lord acquire, aging may well become a depressing process of attrition. However, Janet must recognize the deterioration of her relationship with Walter, which aging seemed to aggravate, before she can begin ripening.

At the Mexican resort, Janet records her reminiscences and analyzes them in her daybook; her daybook also records her observations in the present of the other guests at the resort as well as her fantasies about her future as a single woman. By writing in the journal, she can move beyond the initial tendency of the newly widowed to whitewash or idealize the marriage, "to remember . . . [only] the good times between us," so that by the end of her vacation her perspective has become wider and more accurate: "I could remember the good days quite as easily as the bad." She acquires an honest appreciation of Walter and their limited marriage and can even feel the injustice of his early death. She also discovers the important role of writing in her daybook to widen her perspective on her marriage and Walter's death and to chart her progress in mourning and adjusting to widowhood. She emphasizes her preoccupation with the effects of writing on herself by mentioning how moved she had been by Doris Lessing's protagonist Anna and her efforts to understand her life through her scrupulous journal keeping in The Golden Notebook. Janet also refers readers to passages in her own journal that, when compared, illustrate her progress, beginning with an early nightmarish scene after Walter's death in which she records her viewing of Walter's body in the funeral home and ending with her calmer reflections about her present and her enthusiastic hopes for her future. Unlike the "process of attrition" she had foreseen in her relationship with Walter alive, she is as a widow now able, in part through therapeutically writing in her journal, to trace the healing return "to my old self, competent and strong" and to foster new self-growth.

With this strong self as a foundation, Janet assumes a "youthful" outlook toward the future, envisions herself "turning [her] life around": "I would experience an exhilarating sense of adventure .. . I could even, I imagined, find a big house to share with some other working women, about my age—not exactly a commune but a cooperative venture. Such prospects excited and to a degree sustained me." Middle-aged Janet confidently imagines herself as a single working woman, a role that blurs the borders between youth and age by invoking images of smart young Mademoiselle businesswomen; and the borders are further blurred by her reference to the commune, youth's challenge to the nuclear family. She does not fantasize about the presence of a man in her future, deciding after observing the conduct of another older single woman at the Mexican resort that the old woman she wants to become is not one who talks too much as if to compensate for not being part of a twosome, or one who buys the company of younger men by paying for their drinks. She will enjoy her singleness, like Felicia.

Because Janet gives the reader much evidence to believe in her new strength, independence, and optimism, the reader is jolted by her severe panic when, back in San Francisco, she realizes her daybook is in her missing suitcase and she may never see it again. She uses a dramatic analogy to describe her panic: "I did not see how I could go on with my life. Everything within me sank. It was as though my respirator, whatever essential machine had kept me breathing, was cruelly removed." The panic is a physical assault, like Felicia's dizzying, weakening lurch of apprehension as she considers the possibility that Martin has abandoned her. Neither woman gives herself credit initially for being able to survive without external support. Janet feels these lost jottings are her lifeline, protecting her from emotional collapse.

Yet as Janet finally discovers, after it becomes apparent that the airline will never locate her luggage, the lost jottings are not so important; it is the process of writing her thoughts down, making connections, making meaning, that matters. Writing in the journal is always a happy time for her as she focuses on herself and sifts through recent or distant events to create meaning out of these experiences. Writing enables her to take charge of her own emotional life.

Janet learns the importance of the process of constant recreating, making new meanings in her life that are not dependent upon those meanings she has inherited and preserved, that baggage she has carried. With this realization, she can resolve her crisis: she will buy a new notebook and start to write again. In deciding to replace the large, bulky, expensive journal with a small, compact one for her journey on the open road of her future, middleaged Janet is jettisoning: she jettisons excess baggage, a bulky journal into which she had thrown some of her bulky, burdensome, no longer relevant feelings, such as guilt about Walter, feelings that she no longer needs to carry with her. Jane Somers and Richard Curtis could have benefited from a similar jettisoning. Janet learns that if she can continue writing—because writing is like living: engaging, experimental, full of risk taking—then what literally happens in her life is almost immaterial. Whatever happens, she will be able to embrace it, absorb it, make sense of it. Writing in her notebook gives Janet dominion over her life.

What the notebook and the process of writing mean for Janet, Adams seems to hope reading the story will mean, vicariously, for readers: an aesthetic, therapeutic experience and analysis of loss, widowhood, and adjustment to a single middle age. That Janet titles the newest chapter in her life, her first entry in her newly purchased journal, "Lost Luggage," the same title that Adams gives her story about Janet, suggests that Adams means us to see this connection between Janet's writing and our reading of Adams's writing.

Janet ends her narrative with a more solidly anchored selfconfidence. She had begun her narrative congratulating herself for looking well as a middle-aged widow and for having survived her first vacation alone. She ends it by quietly stating that she will carry her portable notebook with her during any future trips, testifying to the importance of writing in her life and to her new mobility after some mid-life jettisoning. But the confidence of her very last words, "even if the book were to be lost, the loss would be minimal," testifies to her realization that the power and freedom of her writing to create new meanings in her life reside not in the daybook or in the words, but in herself. She knows now that her "strong-as-Stone" (Stone is her maiden name) strength and happiness have been self-won. The fact that she cheerfully takes on a part-time job and a paying house guest near the end of the narrative suggests that she is on her way to fulfilling the exhilarating vision she had had in Mexico of her future as an older woman alone. That she is optimistically future-oriented is further suggested by her declaration in the final paragraph: "I don't plan to go back to that particular Mexican resort; I believe that it has served its purpose in my life." This twice-visited resort now becomes a part of Janet's past, a chapter of her life's journal jettisoned by the writer to ready her for new jottings and new travels. With its firmly cheerful futurity and its challenge to conventional ways of making meanings about middle age, "Lost Luggage" justifies critic Norbert Blei's claim that Adams's writing "can change our lives" ["The Art of Alice Adams," Milwaukee Journal May 16, 1982].

Adams's vision of aging is more ambivalent in the last story of her collection, the title story, "To See You Again." The middle-aged heroine of "To See You Again," Laura, in a first-person narrative reveals how acutely she is aware of her own and other people's ages and the aging process itself. She, like many in American society, sees age as a major constituent of identity, not always with happy consequences. She dislikes herself because she is old in comparison to a 19-year-old man named Seth, with whom she has become infatuated while teaching an English class at Cornford. Advancing age, on the other hand, will diminish her husband's bouts with severe depression, gradually ending her intermittent widowhood. Aging may also improve her interactions with Seth, decreasing the social disparity between their ages. Although Laura experiences despair partly because of her age, by the end of her story she nevertheless imagines a better future in which the burdens of her middle age will be lightened by her entry into old age.

Laura divides her first-person narrative into four segments: one concerning Seth and her feelings for him, representing her false start on her journey to true reifung; a second concerning an older male friend, Larry Montgomery; the third concerning her husband Gerald, with the Reifungsroman's familiar reminiscence of courtship and review of marriage; and the fourth concerning a fantasy she has about her future with Gerald and Seth, inspired by a play she sees on television. As she moves through all four segments, she also journeys backward and forward along the age continuum, acquiring a perspective on youth, middle age, and old age.

Laura is more obsessed with the inappropriateness of her feelings for Seth than is Felicia. Felicia merely smiles over her 16-year-old-in-love feelings, unseemly for a 59-year-old woman, but Laura feels it is scandalous and shameful for a middle-aged woman like herself to have a crush on a youth. Her discomfort is evident in her every phrase. She tells us that she is "cruelly older than Seth" and imagines how repelled he must be by her age. She censures herself in the middle of imagining the "act of love" with him; "the very idea [is] both terrifying and embarrassing" because she would be exposing her repulsively middle-aged body to his youthful eyes: "How old I must seem to him! Revolting, really, although I am in very good shape 'for my age.' But to him revolting—as I sometimes am to myself." Laura's words convey her self-loathing, the distaste for her aging flesh that Jane Somers intermittently feels when gazing in the mirror. And Laura does not attain the self-approval in middle age or selfconfidence about her old age that Kate Brown and Adams's other two heroines do. She thinks dualistically about aging, and her dualistic imagery reflects her pessimism, as she compares her middle age to the cold of San Francisco, which she then contrasts to Cornford's "adolescent summer—urgent, flushed." Her imagery associates a cold, impassive sterility with middle age while it assigns to adolescence the ripening warmth of insistent sexual passion.

As obsessed as she is with their disparity in age and her aging body, Laura is even more obsessed with the youthful beauty of Seth as she repeatedly describes to us his red-gold curls, green eyes, and bright sensitivity. His beauty seems to increase her own self-loathing as well as her pain at losing him when the semester ends. The barrier between youth and age seems unassailable as the "silly, fatuous" girls, his classmates, literally and metaphorically obstruct her last view of Seth in the classroom; they are her victorious rivals, Seth's peers. Laura tells us that she has put her feelings for Seth in perspective, but her words also suggest that she is still by her feelings for him: "Not quite anguished—I had had worse losses in my life (I have them still)—but considerably worse than 'let down' was how I felt." The only way she can cope with both the age issue and losing him is to fantasize about seeing him in the future, an older, still handsome man, but showing the effects of aging, like herself ("maybe in middle age he will be heavy? I wistfully considered that"). No longer a breathtakingly young and beautiful boy, an older Seth would somehow be more "equal" to her, less idealized.

In the second segment of her narrative, Laura's thoughts turn to Larry Montgomery in an effort to understand both how Seth would feel about her if he knew of her infatuation and what she herself would like from Seth: "Larry is exactly as much older than I am as I am older than Seth. He has what Gerald describes as a crush on me." Like Laura herself, Larry is well preserved: "Larry looks at least ten years younger than he is, trim and tan, with lively blue eyes and fine silver-white hair." Through her comparison of the two relationships she learns that she, like Larry, may have at times acted curtly toward the object of her adoration because she was terrified of revealing her affection for him. She also learns that a sexual affair is probably not what either she or Larry would want: "a stray motel afternoon with Larry was as unimaginable as it would be with Seth. Larry just likes to see me, to be near me, sometimes—and very likely that is what I feel for Seth, pretty much?" The question mark at the end of her sentence suggests that Laura is still in the process of analyzing her feelings in order to understand herself; she is not sure what she wants, or could have, from Seth. She imagines herself domesticating her unruly sexual feelings for him, which she so disparages, by making Seth a family friend and inviting him to her home. As Laura seeks answers to her questions about Seth, gaining knowledge about her identity and a direction for her future, she is mentally ripening, like most protagonists of Reifungsroman.

Important to this ripening process is Laura's probing in the third section of her narrative into her marriage to "sad fat" Gerald, a successful architect who has given her a "most precariously balanced . . . 'good life.'" Her marriage to this severely depressed man has been a cold one, and his bouts with depression have undermined Laura's self-approval: "one problem about living with someone who is depressed is that inevitably you think it has to do with you, your fault, although you are told that it is not." That her self-esteem has been eroded by Gerald's illness is evident in her self-demeaning fantasies about the beautiful Seth. Her contrasting of Seth and Gerald only intensifies her despair about herself, her husband, and her marriage. Gerald's fat old man's body and "heavy as boulders" depression contrast with Seth's thin boy's body and sprightly, elfinlike personal qualities. Even the language she uses to describe her home reflects her view of Gerald and their marriage; their kitchen has an atmosphere of "immaculate" sterility, and she, passionate and angry at being deprived of a passional life, imagines herself countering that sterility by painting it red.

Following the pattern of Reifungsroman, Laura also goes back in her memory to their youth and courtship, which offer another painful contrast to the present. Gerald was then "so beautiful, so dark and thin, . . . so elusive"—qualities of youth that remind us of Seth; and Laura was also young, "a silly undergraduate with a crush on a future architect." The contrast between this past and the present that greets her as she returns home from her final class—Gerald has descended into another depression—dismays her. All that she really has to comfort her is the statement of Gerald's psychiatrist: "With age the cycle [of his bouts with depression] may well lengthen, and the severity of each attack will decrease." The psychiatrist's words—like Lessing's and Adams's messages generally—challenge our common association of the aging process with increased depression and despair. That aging may cure Gerald gives Laura something to look forward to, but her question is, will it come soon enough? Laura's words betray her impatience and escalating despair: "age could take forever, I'm not sure I have that much time." The edgy tone of these words implies that she is enduring an unbearable situation and can only continue to do so a little longer. Time is not passing quickly enough—a phenomenon present in Reifungsroman about middle age, but even more common to Reifungsroman about old age—to cure Gerald, salvage her marriage, and bring Laura some contentment.

To distract herself from the slow passage of time, Laura has only her imagination, which she trains in the fourth section of the story on a television play that she is watching. The play comforts her because in it is an actor who strongly resembles Seth—the obsessed woman sees the face of this youth everywhere—as she imagines he will look in older middle age. She says, "Oh, so that is how he will look: gray, slightly overweight but strong, with a brilliant smile, and those eyes." She soothes herself by fantasizing a future meeting with the older Seth, whom she will finally be able to look at because he will have become "merely handsome." Aging has its benefits after all: not only does it cure people of the depression and despair that often assail them in middle age, but it also equalizes people's original endowments of personal beauty. This prospect offered by Laura's fantasy gives her something to look forward to: "And at that time, your prime and our old age, Gerald's and mine, Gerald will be completely well . . . no more sequences of pain. And maybe thin again. And interested, and content. It's almost worth waiting for." What a pretty fantasy, readers think—"and they lived happily ever after," ripening into an old age that is a blessed release from the disappointments and despair of middle age.

But there are two further considerations: one, this is a fantasy that will probably never come true; and two, Laura uses the word "almost": if a perfect fantasy is not completely (as opposed to "almost") worth waiting for, what is? Instead of being a comfort to Laura, this fantasy's contrast to reality may be too painful for her to enjoy or believe in. Perhaps she is not able to wait anymore, meaning her patience and ability to endure her trials have run out in mid-life. She may have lost the fight against "disillusionment . . . [and] 'the sheer fatigue of living'" [Paul Gray, "Balances," Time, April 19, 1982]. Because she had said, "age could take forever, I'm not sure I have that much time" to wait for the end to Gerald's illness, readers are left at the end of the story with an uneasy feeling about Laura's fragile lease on life, a sense of her inching toward suicide. Old age will be easy for her to embrace, it seems, if she can just make it through a beastly middle age. She has not had the advantages of new love that Jane Somers and Felicia have: their exhilaration and rejuvenation contrast with her despair and shame over her infatuation with Seth; pleasure and happiness seem far removed from Laura's life. Nor does she have the resource of writing in a journal, which improves the tenor and direction of Janet's life. Writing in a journal as a way of coming to terms with the conditions of one's life would be more constructive than escaping from those conditions as Laura does through her fantasies. She seems almost as afflicted by inaction as her clinically depressed husband, achieving no pragmatic resolution of her current problems and foreseeing none in the short run. All is in abeyance till old age. Laura's story ends with her passive resignation to a barely tolerable situation, one that prevents herfrom garnering the happy fruits of ripening self knowledge and maturity. In "To See You Again," Adams presents middle age as a time for reassessing one's life and depicts through Laura some likely results of such a reassessment: self-knowledge and ripening maturity, but also confrontation with failures, losses, and disappointments that may be paralyzing, more difficult to bear, and more treacherous than the challenges of old age.

It is curious that Adams chose to end her volume with this story and to give the collection the title of this story. Its ambiguous message about the aging process departs from the unalloyed optimism about middle age in Janet's and Felicia's stories and in other stories of the collection about old age. The story suggests that the period of middle age may be particularly trying and turbulent. And through the story, readers can understand how we torment ourselves on the issue of age—how we denigrate ourselves and others because of the meanings we attach to words like "middleaged." Perhaps Adams chose to end her book with Laura's story because she is not a whitewasher of reality. That middle age requires some difficult transitions and adjustments to losses is amply attested to also by the struggles of Kate Brown, Jane Somers, Janet, and Felicia. These transitions and adjustments demand of the protagonists real courage and strength of character. What is, nevertheless, evident in these fictional heroines is their authors' belief that many women can develop and unearth rich reserves of courage and strength within themselves.