The Diary Read Free Page A

wavelets of sunlight found their way through the rips to shimmy over his face. Not an especially handsome face, she thought, but certainly an arresting one: narrow and sharp-featured as if honed by hard, clean strokes of an ax, with high, planed cheekbones and tanned skin the dusky gold of just-pressed cider. His heavy brows, the color of the charcoal pencil his fingers were loosely curled about, stood out in marked contrast to his fair hair. His eyes were so blue they seemed to crackle.
    â€œTell you what,” he said. “Let me have a go at you, and if you don’t like it, it’s on the house.”
    Elizabeth felt herself prickle with unaccustomed heat. She was glad her mother wasn’t here, for she would have railed at the mere thought of any boy “having a go” at her daughter, however innocent his intentions. (Mildred Harvey was at that moment sequestered in the main pavilion with the panel judging pickles and preserves, a job she took as seriously as a high government office.) The fact that it was “the Keener boy”—as AJ had been known ever since his parents had died in that auto wreck and he’d gone to live with his mother’s folks, Joe and Sally Keener—would have rendered her positively apoplectic.
    For her part, Elizabeth wouldn’t have minded if he had made a pass. Oh, she’d have made a show of minding, but only because it was expected. Among her kind, the only acceptable response to such crude behavior (not that any man in Emory would’ve dared make a pass at the daughter of Mildred Harvey) was to either turn a blind eye or fell the would-be Lothario with a withering glance. Should the fellow persist, a sharp scolding, or in extreme instances a slap across the face, might be in order. That a good girl might fall prey to such a seduction was unthinkable. Elizabeth, at twenty, was educated in the ways of the birds and the bees—it was the modern age, after all—but for unmarried ladies of her class, the region of the female anatomy discreetly referred to as the “flower of womanhood” was strictly off-limits to members of the opposite sex and even, for the most part—aside from basic hygiene—to oneself. There had been some progress since the corseted era of her mother’s youth, but for a young lady to be known as “easy,” even in the year 1951, was about as ruinous as having a reputation for setting cars on fire.
    But while Elizabeth had her standards, she often wondered what it would be like. She’d only gone so far as to let Bob remove her blouse and, once, her bra (they were practically engaged, which made it permissible) while they’d been steaming up the windows of his Buick coupe. She wouldn’t have described it as unexciting, but there hadn’t been any of the unexpurgated thrills of Lady Chatterley’s Lover , a contraband copy of which had recently fallen into her hands via her friend Dot, who’d obtained it from a cousin in England. Elizabeth had breathlessly devoured the novel in a single night behind the locked door of her bedroom, yet whenever she tried to imagine herself in similar throes of passion with Bob, it struck her as a bit silly. However much she looked forward to their wedding day, she could never quite envision him weaving wildflowers through her pubic hair or assigning nicknames to their private parts.
    Now, squirming a bit under AJ’s scrutiny, she thought, I bet nothing would embarrass him . The thought sent a fresh surge of blood to her cheeks. If her hat hadn’t been partially hiding her face, it would have been apparent to anyone looking on that AJ was having a decidedly bracing effect on her. But, amazingly, even that wasn’t enough to make her walk away.
    â€œAll right, it’s a deal,” she told him. “Just don’t make me look bad, that’s all I ask.”
    Another man might have insisted that no artist could possibly make her