Free A Southern Exposure by Alice Adams Page B

couldn’t possibly like her.
Much.
And she is just a little depressed about Exeter, where she can’t go. Her mother wants her to go to Vassar after high school, because Cynthia got married instead of going to college at all. But she’s pretty sure Vassar does not take either boys or Negroes.
    Abby’s reference to Harry’s supposed stinginess is somewhat unfair; he will only be surprised by a phone call to Connecticut not made by himself and not explained by Cynthia. With Abby he is a generous father, giving her a quarter a week, which is more allowance than most kids her age get, in Pinehill, that year.
    Thus Abby, on her new bike from Sears, is able each afternoon to get a small sundae at the Darby Dairy Products, otherwise known as the ice-cream parlor. Other kids go there too, with their nickels and dimes; the place is really crowded with kids that Abby halfway knows, from school. To whom she pays no attention whatsoever. Looking at no one except the counter boy, she pays and takes her Dixie cup of ice cream and chocolate sauce outside, to eat quickly before getting back on her bike and continuing her ride around the outskirts of the town—of which she hates almost every inch.

    10    
    Unlike her daughter, Cynthia “adores” this new landscape, this climate. “I think I was born to be Southern,” she tells Harry.
    “Maybe in some other life you were.”
    “I really think so. Why not? Can’t you see me in a hoopskirt, on a wide veranda, fanning away?”
    “All too easily, my love.”
    “Harry, you know you’re really mean. All this light irony—well, you add it all up and it’s heavy. A great boulder of irony, really crushing. You make me feel terrible—”
    “Cynthia, for God’s sake. Just the tiniest teasing.”
    Cynthia smiles. She is sitting at her dresser, getting ready for a party, to which they are already late. Now, instead of answering Harry, she applies a great pouf of powderto her nose, indicating that she attaches no importance whatsoever to this semi-conversation. Which she does not. But this is how, customarily, they communicate. They simply say things to each other, mostly for the sound; they like the atmosphere of conversation thus created. And each grasps some shred of meaning, at least, from the tone, the sound of the other. Harry has understood that Cynthia is impatient with him; she wants just to get on to the party. But from watching her, and her more-than-usually anxious glances at the mirror, he understands how especially anxious she is to please. To be pleasing, and especially pretty for this party at the Hightowers’. “Sometimes I think October is my favorite month,” she tells him.
    He agrees. “It’s been pretty.”
    “Beautiful.”
    Pretty or beautiful, all the days of this month have been warm and clear, so far. Golden days, clear blue days, and high against the sky the pine boughs sigh and sing, bright green, bedazzled with light. Golden poplar leaves rustle in the breeze, and in the long cool shadowed evenings there are more rustling leaves on the hard dirt sidewalks and paths of the town. Driving out that wooded road to the Hightower house, Cynthia is thinking, Tonight I’ll meet him, he’ll be there. Russell Byrd. And maybe we’ll walk outside for a while in Esther’s garden. Maybe. In the magic October night. She says, “It
is
my favorite month.”
    In the garden the acrid scent of dying chrysanthemums, mingled with the livelier smells of rich, moist loamy fall earth, fills the cooling night air.
    Russell Byrd, who is unaccountably, uncharacteristically drunk, asks Cynthia Baird, whom he has just met, “Ma’am, you ever smell fresh-killed pig?”
    Arriving about an hour after the late arrival of the Bairds, and alone, Russell was seized by Jimmy and introduced to Cynthia. Russell then muttered that he must have some air. The garden? Cynthia chose to take this as an invitation, although he did look a little unstable, and she followed