Other Plans by Constance C. Greene Page A

She woke from these dreams of failure with her heart pounding.
    An only child, Ceil longed for siblings. Her friends were always telling tales of being sent away from the table for horsing around, or for excessive burping. One girl she knew had four brothers and, adding insult to injury, fifteen cousins of both sexes.
    Ceil felt her life was impoverished by the endless quiet dinners, murmured conversations, Jell-O for dessert. She yearned for a long, loud, crowded table, passing great dishes of peas and carrots and potatoes up and down, fighting over who would get the outside piece or the second joint. She had never been sent from the dinner table. How she had wished for someone to misbehave with.
    Ceil’s mother and father were both teachers; serious, dedicated, no-nonsense people who tithed to their church, drove an eight-year-old car, and never played cards for money. Her mother favored dresses of flowered rayon or nylon, bought a size too large to allow for added poundage when it came, as it surely would. Her father wore brown trousers and a jacket of greenish tweed or, on special occasions, a navy blue suit that she knew would last him all his days. They were wonderful people. She loved them with all her heart. They, in turn, worshiped her and, though they tried to conceal the fact, never quite got over the fact that they’d produced her. Her mother, who was not otherwise given to jesting, used to say that the gypsies must have brought her, for she bore no resemblance to them, or to anyone else in either of their families. They, the least vain of people, had one vanity, and her name was Ceil. Long-legged, narrow-waisted, with a luminous complexion, she was not beautiful but she had something.
    Henry had asked for her hand in the old-fashioned way. She had warned her parents what they could expect after the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding had been dealt with. Despite this preparation, her father had done something terribly discomfiting to her.
    â€œI don’t know,” her father kept saying, stalking around the living room with his hands locked behind his back. “I just don’t know.”
    Finally, she’d said, “Don’t know what, Daddy?” feeling tears of exasperation building behind her eyes. She hadn’t been absolutely positive that she wanted to marry Henry until her father kept up his litany of “I don’t knows.” Then, in a flash, she knew that Henry was the man for her.
    â€œThey’re talking about a draft,” Ceil’s father warned. “Things don’t look good in Southeast Asia, not good at all.” It was just before the outbreak of Vietnam.
    â€œHenry’s too old to be drafted,” Ceil said. “Much too old.” Henry was twenty-nine.
    Ceil had never actually slept with a man before Henry. There’d been plenty of jockeying in back seats, on beach blankets, lots of flashing skin, unlikely bulges. But no actual skin-to-skin stuff. When the real thing came along, the act of making love leisurely came as a surprise. It was both what it was cracked up to be, and not. Henry was tender and considerate, when what it turned out she was looking for was Tarzan. Or Don Quixote.
    As a girl, Ceil had been an avid reader of sex manuals. She and her friends spent many a Saturday afternoon circling the right stores, hesitating, darting in and out, reluctant to be the first inside. They giggled over the pictures, memorizing the page numbers of particularly revelatory ones. There was even a section devoted to describing ways to drive men wild with your lips, your tongue, even your teeth. One of Ceil’s friends, whose father was a dentist, went crazy over the teeth section, which was maddeningly silent on the question of her braces.
    An older girl, with violet eyes and breasts of startling dimensions, boasted a penchant for vodka and older men with mustaches, and had connections in Manhattan and Paris, if you could believe everything she