Slow Sculpture by Theodore Sturgeon Page A

her look up. “What are you looking at?”
    He didn’t answer her question. “Why do you claim to be twenty-two?” he asked instead, and quick as the rebound of billiard ball from cue ball, propelled by hostility, inclusive as buckshot, her reply jetted up:
“What’s it to you?”
But it never reached her lips; instead she said, “I have to,” and then sat there astounded. Once she had worn out a favored phonograph record, knew every note, every beat of it, and she had replaced it; and for once the record company had made a mistake and the record was not what the label said it was. The first half-second of that new record was like this, a moment of expectation and stunned disbelief. This was even more immediate and personal, however; it was like mounting ten steps in the dark and finding, shockingly, that there were only nine in the flight. From this moment until she left the kitchen, she was internally numb and frightened, yet fascinated, as her mind formed one set of words and others came out.
    “You have to,” asked Sam mildly, “the way you have to be in the movies? You just
have
to?”
    The snarl,
have I kept it a secret?
came out, “It’s what I want.”
    “Is it?”
    There didn’t seem to be any answer to that, on any level. She waited, tense.
    “What you’re doing—the job at the radio station—living here in this town instead of someplace else—all of it; is what you’re doing the best way to get what you want?”
    Why else would I put up with it all—the town, the people—you?
But she said, “I think so.” Then she said, “I’ve thought so.”
    “Why don’t you talk to young Halvorsen? He might be able to find something you’d do even better’n going to Hollywood.”
    “I don’t
want
to find anything better!” This time there was no confusion.
    From the other end of the room, Bitty asked, “Were you always so all-fired pretty, Mary Haunt? Even when you were a little girl?”
    “Everyone always said so.”
    “Ever wish you weren’t?”
    Are you out of your mind?
“I … don’t think so,” she whispered.
    Gently, Sam asked her, “Did they throw you out, gal? Make you leave home?”
    Defiantly, defensively,
They treated me like a little princess at home, like a piece of fine glassware. They carried my books and felt good all day if I smiled. They did what I wanted, what they thought I wanted, at home or in town. They acted as if I was too good to walk that ground, breathe that air, they jumped at the chance to take advantage of being at the same place at the same time; they did everything for me they could think of doing, as if they had to hurry or I’d be gone. Throw me out? Why, you old fool!
“I left home my own self,” she said. “Because I had to, like—” But here words failed her, and she determined not to cry, and she determined not to cry, and she cried.
    “Better drink your coffee.”
    She did, and then she wanted something to eat with it, but couldn’t bear to sit with these people any longer. She sniffed angrily. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she said. “I never overslept before.”
    “Long as you know what you want,” said Sam, and whether that was the stupid, non-sequitur remark of a doddering dotard, or something quite different, she did not know. “Well,” she said, rising abruptly; and then felt foolish because there was nothing else to say. She escaped back to her room and to bed, and huddled there mostof the day dully regarding the two coddled ends of her life, pampering in the past and pampering in the future, while trying to ignore today with its empty stomach and its buzzing head.
VII
    During Prohibition it had been a restaurant, in that category which is better than just “nice” but not as good as “exclusive”; the town was too small then to have anything exclusive. Now it was a bar as well, and although there was imitation Carrara on some walls, and a good deal of cove-lighting, the balcony had never been altered