Free After the War by Alice Adams Page B

lively scientific mind—she knew that “orgasms” were what she had experienced before, while “necking heavily” with boys, in backseats, on sofas in darkened rooms. And boys did too; they “reached a climax” sometimes, making stains on their pants that embarrassed them a lot, poor things. She had always enjoyed, looked forward to that moment of release, that “climax,” although in a way it was less pleasurable than all the intense and sometimes frantic kissing and touching that went on before. The “foreplay,” which was always referred to in texts as being very important, especially to women, “crucial to their pleasure,” but somehow, in some cases, said to be difficult.
    However, none of those earlier experiences seemed to have any relevance at all to what happened with her and Joseph—happened for the first time in New York, when Sylvia and Dan, the parents, were away, and back at Swarthmore in his room, where she was not supposed to be—and now down here in Pinehill. Her previous experience, such as it was, and her reading did not get anywhere near it.
    When she was older and went to med school, Abby thought, she would study this enormous and misunderstood difference in orgasms. Freud, she thought, had oversimplified. Clitoral versus vaginal, that was not the issue. Unless, and she smiled to herself, unless what she experienced with Joseph was both at once.
    • • •
    Gently caressing her, just enough to wake her up, Joseph was saying, “But now I can.”
    And so they did. Again.
    The sex between her parents, Harry and Cynthia, thought Abby, must be really good too, which would explain almost everything: why they stayed together all these years, and why they made so many excuses to go off and take naps. During which there were always non-sleeping sounds. And as for Cynthia’s occasional crushes on other men—a long time ago, Mr. Byrd, father of Abby’s friend Melanctha, Russ; and now this Derek, the broadcaster—they were only that, big crushes. Cynthia was a romantic, her daughter recognized, and recognized too that she herself was not romantic; she was a realist, with a scientific bent.
    Years ago, when Abby had first started kissing boys, she liked it so much that she thought she was a nymphomaniac, but with no idea of the meaning of the word. Probably, she now thought, “highly sexed” was more like it.
    And most likely, she thought, the realistic plan would be for her to marry Joseph. To get all that over with, so to speak. She could go to Harvard Med (she was not yet worried about getting in) and Joseph to MIT, and they would live in Boston, somewhere in between. And after they both got degrees they might have a few children, or maybe not. They would both work hard and they would always make love, wonderfully.
    She wondered what Joseph would think of her plan, but decided to postpone asking him for a while.
    • • •
    “My parents,” Joseph told Abby as together they ate Odessa’s good chicken fricassee and greens, “my parents are not entirely to be trusted.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “Well, Communists are tricky. They change their minds. They change directions like a boat in some shifting wind. The wind of course being the Soviet Union. Mr. Stalin.”
    Abby laughed; her body’s pure euphoria made even serious observations light and funny to her. “My mother’s sort of unreliable too,” she said. “But in a quite different way.”
    “Not so totally different, when you think about it,” Joseph mused. “They’re all romantics. Just in different areas. I mean, your mother’s not exactly political.”
    Abby laughed again. “No, she thinks Roosevelt is very handsome, and she loves his voice.” She added, “And I think you’re very handsome.”
    Now Joseph laughed. “And I think you’re very nuts. No, as a matter of fact you’re not. Not nuts. But speaking of handsome, I’m a little worried about the way my parents are about Ben. They’re too crazy about him. I