Read Online A Southern Exposure by Alice Adams - Free Book Online Page B

on that—that big slug of bourbon over ice, with a little sugar and bitters so it qualifies, really, as an old-fashioned. A civilized cocktail that anyone might drink. Sometimes, to help her through the children’s dinner, all that, she has a small private not-quite old-fashioned while she’s cooking for them. Frying the chicken, broiling the hamburgers or hot dogs, whatever. And the bourbon helps. It dims the children’s noise; it removes her somewhat from their passionate rages, their fights.
    The only problem is that by the time that is all over and she has begun to drink in a serious way with Russ, and to fix his dinner, she is extremely tired—not drunk exactly, but just a little out of control. She burns things. She fearssaying things that should not be said. Fears saying, “Do you love me?” Or saying, “Deirdre Yates?”
    But she does not say either of those forbidden things. She says very little. She sometimes in a mild way complains to Russ of headaches, but she is not quite sure that he notices.
    She continues to feel that he is somewhere else.

     9     
    Abigail hates the local school. “I can’t understand anything anyone says, and I know it all anyway. We read those books last year. Some kids come in from the country on trucks, and they’re all much older than we are because in the winter the trucks can’t get into town and they have to stay home. Those kids seem dumb but I don’t think they are.”
    Abby is in fact fascinated by those large children from out in the country; they are called “truck children.” So large and mysterious—she cannot imagine their lives at home, where they live, but she thinks of large bare houses, babies crawling across cold linoleum, babies crying, and fathers in dirty overalls. The very size of some of these children is frightening. Seated at small tables, in the smallchairs arranged for much younger children, their legs are thrust awkwardly aside. Some of the girls have breasts already; they cross their arms over their chests and duck their heads down shyly. They don’t know the answers when the teacher calls on them, and the teacher seems to know they will not.
    One of the largest, darkest, and by far the noisiest of the truck children (mostly they are quiet, shy) is a boy named Edward Jones. He teases Abby, seeming to regard her as someone alien, foreign,
wrong.
“Abby Talk-Funny,” he mutters, just out of the teacher’s hearing. “Say something in English, can’t ya?” He jumps out at her from behind the stack of garbage cans in back of the school. “Gabby Abby, big and flabby,” he chants. She is afraid of Edward Jones, with his black hair, his flashing black eyes, and his long, long legs.
    Abby does not become friends right away with any of the children she met at the Bigelows’ party.
    “I want to go to the Negro school,” she tells Cynthia and Harry. “Why can’t I? These kids are just dopey jerks, I like Negroes better. I could have friends there. Is there some law that I have to go to an all-white school? I thought public school meant Negroes too.”
    “There probably is some law,” her father tells her.
    “Would you like to go to a boarding school?” asks Cynthia.
    “I would if they had Negro children too.”
    Cynthia: “I can’t exactly write to a school and ask if they have Negro students. Or can I?”
    Harry: “I don’t see why not. What I don’t see is how we’d afford it.”
    “Well, there’s that. But the real point is, she’s too young to go away to school.”
    “True enough.”
    “But maybe one of those nice Quaker schools in Pennsylvania.”
    “Are Negroes ever Quakers?”
    “I don’t know. But you don’t have to be a Quaker to go to those schools.” Cynthia pauses, musing. “I think I’ll write to one of them, just in case. Some girls I knew in Connecticut went to one.”
    “Cynthia, I tell you, we can’t afford it.”
    “Maybe a scholarship? She has terrific grades.”
    “Even with a