the time she didn't intend to be that way, but sometimes, faced with Mel's indifference, her fiery temper got the better of her---as it had on the telephone tonight.
After the week-long argument, which never really ended, their quarrels became more frequent; they also stopped trying to conceal them from the children, which was impossible, anyway. Once---to the shame of them both---Roberta announced that in future after school she would be going to a friend's house first, "because when I stay home, I can't do my homework while you're fighting."
Eventually a pattern was established. Some evenings Mel accompanied Cindy to certain social events which he had agreed on in advance. Otherwise, he stayed longer hours at the airport and came home less frequently. Finding herself alone much more, Cindy concentrated on what Mel sneered at as her "junior league charities" and "silly social climbing."
Well, maybe at times, Cindy thought, it did look silly to Mel. But she didn't have much else, and it so happened she enjoyed the social status competition---which was what it was, really. It was all very well for a man to criticize; men had plenty of activities to occupy their time. In Mel's case there was his career, his airport, his responsibilities. What was Cindy supposed to do? Stay home all day and dust the house?
Cindy had no illusions about herself so far as mental acuity went. She was no great intellect, and she knew that in lots of ways, mentally, she would never measure up to Mel. But then, that was nothing new. In their early years of marriage, Mel used to find her occasional mild stupidities amusing, though nowadays when he derided her---as he had taken to doing lately---he seemed to have forgotten that. Cindy was also realistic about her former career as an actress---she would never have made the grade to stardom, or have come close to it. It was true that, in the past, she sometimes implied that she might have done so if marriage had not ended her theatrical activity. But that was merely a form of self-defense, a need to remind others---including Mel---that she was an individual as well as being the airport manager's wife. Within herself Cindy knew the truth---that as a professional actress she would almost certainly not have risen above bit parts.
The involvement in social life, however---in the mise en scène of local society---was something Cindy could handle. It gave her a sense of identity and importance. And although Mel scoffed, and denied that what Cindy had done was an achievement, she hadmanaged to climb, to be accepted by socially conspicuous people whom she would not have met otherwise, and to be involved in events like tonight's... except that on this occasion she needed Mel as escort, and Mel---thinking first of his goddamned airport, as always---had let her down.
Mel, who had so much in the way of identity and prestige, had never understood Cindy's need to carve out some kind of individuality for herself. She doubted if he ever would.
Just the same, Cindy had gone ahead. She also had plans for the future which she knew would entail a monstrous family battle if she and Mel stayed married. It was Cindy's ambition to have her daughter Roberta, and later Libby, presented as debutantes at the Passavant Cotillion, glittering apex of the Illinois deb season. As the girls' mother, Cindy herself would garner social status.
She had once mentioned the notion casually to Mel, who reacted angrily, "Over my dead body!" Debutantes and their silly, simpering mothers, he advised Cindy, belonged to an age that was gone. Debutante balls, he declared---and thank goodness there were few of them left---were an anachronistic perpetuation of a snobbery and class structure which the nation was fortunately shedding, though---judging by people who still thought as Cindy did---not nearly fast enough. Mel wanted his children to grow up (he told Cindy) with the knowledge that they were equal to others, but not with some conceited, misguided notion that they were socially superior. And so on.
Unusual for Mel, whose policy declarations were normally brief and concise, he had gone on for some time.
Lionel, on the other hand, thought the whole thing was a good idea.
Lionel was Lionel Urquhart. At the moment he hovered alongside Cindy's life in the shape of a question mark.
Curiously, it was Mel who had brought Cindy and Lionel together to begin with. Mel had introduced them at a civic luncheon which Lionel was attending because of something architectural he had done for