Beautiful Girl by Alice Adams

rug repaired. There was a rip in it that could get larger, or could trip one of them. It made sense—Philip finally took the rug off to be sewn. He had mentioned some people on Union Street who did things with hides and who had the right machines for skins.
    Having decided so rationally on what had happened, Deborah felt better, but not very much better. Some cobweb of fear or anxiety clung to her mind, and she could not brush it off. She knew that she would not feel entirely well and reassured until she spoke to Philip. She concentrated on his phone call, which always came early in the afternoon, though by no stated arrangement. They would say whatever had happened in the day so far, and make some plan for the evening. Or Philip would say that he would see her later—meaning ten or eleven that night.
    Naturally, since she was eager for Philip to call, several other people did instead, and each time her heart jumped as she answered, “Hello?”
    Her mother said, “Darling, how are you? I was wondering if you and Philip are possibly free to come to dinner tomorrow? A couple of my professors from State are coming—youknow, the ones who were out on strike—and I thought you might have fun with them.”
    Meaning: her mother thought the professors, who must have been quite young, would have a better time (and think better of her) if they met her hippie daughter with her longhaired, bearded boyfriend.
    “Sure. I’ll check with Philip,” Deborah said, and then listened to her mother’s continuing voice, which was grateful and full of love.
    Once, when she was stoned, Deborah had said to Philip, “My mother’s love comes at me like jelly. I have to be careful and stay back from it, you know? All that total approval I get poured over me. She doesn’t even know who I am.”
    Philip’s mother, in Cincinnati (“She pronounces it with a broad ‘a’—can you imagine? Cincin
nah
ti.” He, too, was a person displaced from the upper middle class), did not approve of him at all—his beard or his long hair, his Goodwill or Army-surplus clothes. Dropping out of Princeton to come to an art school in San Francisco. She had not been told about the commune in Mendocino; nor, presumably, about Deborah. “I don’t mind her,” he said. “She’s sort of abrasive, bracing, like good sandpaper. She does her own thing, and it’s very clear where we’re both at.”
    Philip talked that hip way somewhat ironically, hiding behind it. “I think I’m what those idiot behavioral scientists call a post-hippie,” he once said. “Sounds sort of like a wooden Indian, doesn’t it?” But he had indeed put various things behind him, including drugs, except for an occasional cigarette. For him, Deborah had thrown out all her posters, and with him she had moved from Hesse and Tolkien to Mann and Dostoevski. “Let’s face it, babe, they’ve got more to say. I mean, they’ve really got it all together.”
    After her mother’s call, two friends called (about nothing), and finally there was the call from Philip.
    She said, “Wow, Philip, what are you trying to tell me?” as she had planned to, but she felt no conviction.
    “What?”
    “The desk drawer on the bed.”
    “What drawer?”
    “Did you take the zebra rug to be sewn?”
    “No. Deb, are you trying to tell me that we’ve been ripped off, as they say?”
    Crazily enough, this was a possibility she had not considered, but now she thought, Of course, it happens all the time.
    “Debby,” he was saying, “would you please look around and see what else is gone?”
    As best she could, she did look around; she found her shoe box full of jewelry—the ugly inherited diamonds that she never wore—intact under her sweaters, and the stereo safely in its corner. The books, the records. His pictures. She came back to the phone and told him that.
    “But aside from the stereo what else could they have taken?” she asked. “We don’t have TV and appliances, stuff like that. Who wants