shafts. The blanket was fleecy and yellow. Her black hair was sprayed across the pillow.
She listened for any sound of Pete in the house, and then remembered he had phoned at nine last night from Richmond. Party sounds had been audible behind his slightly tipsy voice. “Honeybundle? Say, I’m going to stay over here. A great guy named Kip showed up. An old buddy from Tokyo. If Boss Brother comes aroundshowing his teeth, you tell him I’m making a special deal on a million gross of plastic toothpicks.”
That crazy Pete. A man with ten thousand close intimate friends. People were always showing up at some crazy time like three in the morning. And Pete would bound up and get dressed, delighted with them. They’d drink and make crazy talk and kind of close her out of things, somehow.
She pushed the covers aside and sat nude on the edge of the oversized bed. The rink. The skating rink. “Let’s you and me go take a couple of turns around the rink, chubby stuff?” That crazy Pete. All I’m good for.
She held her legs out, ankles together, feet arched like a toe dancer, and was pleased for the ten thousandth time that her legs touched all the way up, evenly, smoothly. Like I was some kind of one-woman harem, she thought. Just wait right here for him. Not like what I thought marriage would be.
The realization she had been avoiding, the little area of dread and excitement, became more clearly defined in her mind. This was Mark’s day off. This week he had Friday off. So for once I won’t go to him. What can he do if I don’t? But she knew she would go. She wished she could have stayed asleep. Since this thing had begun she had slept harder and longer than ever before in her life. Deep sleep, without dreams, that somehow did not leave her feeling refreshed or even completely rested.
She got up and padded across the deep blue rug and turned the air conditioner off. She was twenty-four, four years younger than Pete, a short girl, five foot three. She weighed a hundred and twenty-six pounds. She looked bulky in clothing. Her most becoming outfits were sweater and skirt combinations where she could call attention to the slimness of her waist by wearing wide ornate belts. In any derivative of the sack she looked square as a little box. But in her skin, she was succulently, firmly lovely. If she had any figure defect it was being rather long-waisted, slightly short-legged. The opulence of thighs and calves tapered to tiny ankles, small feet. All of her was rounded, smooth and slightly dusky. Shefelt most comfortable, most confident and at ease with herself in her skin, knowing she looked her very best, and comfortably proud of herself.
Though her maiden name had been Kesson, and the bloodline was vaguely Scots-English-Irish-Dutch, she had blue-black hair, a Mediterranean cast of features, the sulky, sensuous, sexy expression of a nymph in the Mohammedan Paradise who found herself among unsatisfactory infidels. Pete claimed that it was obvious that one of her great-great-grandmothers had had certain dealings with a Spanish gypsy. For the past ten years she had been relentlessly pursued by males from fifteen to sixty, with varying success. A few of those who came to know her well enough to learn the basic contradiction between her appearance and the girl inside could say, with surprise, “You know, Sylvie’s a pretty good kid!” An uncomplicated kid. She was ashamed of the times she had been Bad. And she wished she could always be Good. The relationship with Mark was Bad.
She had been born and brought up—to the age of sixteen—in Lowell, Massachusetts, the middle child of five children of a little, wiry, sour, savage, sallow tool-and-die-maker and a fat, dim, defeated woman who always looked as if she had just finished weeping or was just about to begin. Her childhood was marked by the hard little unpredictable hands of Rudy Kesson, by squalls of rage and pain and terror.
When Sylvia was sixteen she and her best girl
She listened for any sound of Pete in the house, and then remembered he had phoned at nine last night from Richmond. Party sounds had been audible behind his slightly tipsy voice. “Honeybundle? Say, I’m going to stay over here. A great guy named Kip showed up. An old buddy from Tokyo. If Boss Brother comes aroundshowing his teeth, you tell him I’m making a special deal on a million gross of plastic toothpicks.”
That crazy Pete. A man with ten thousand close intimate friends. People were always showing up at some crazy time like three in the morning. And Pete would bound up and get dressed, delighted with them. They’d drink and make crazy talk and kind of close her out of things, somehow.
She pushed the covers aside and sat nude on the edge of the oversized bed. The rink. The skating rink. “Let’s you and me go take a couple of turns around the rink, chubby stuff?” That crazy Pete. All I’m good for.
She held her legs out, ankles together, feet arched like a toe dancer, and was pleased for the ten thousandth time that her legs touched all the way up, evenly, smoothly. Like I was some kind of one-woman harem, she thought. Just wait right here for him. Not like what I thought marriage would be.
The realization she had been avoiding, the little area of dread and excitement, became more clearly defined in her mind. This was Mark’s day off. This week he had Friday off. So for once I won’t go to him. What can he do if I don’t? But she knew she would go. She wished she could have stayed asleep. Since this thing had begun she had slept harder and longer than ever before in her life. Deep sleep, without dreams, that somehow did not leave her feeling refreshed or even completely rested.
She got up and padded across the deep blue rug and turned the air conditioner off. She was twenty-four, four years younger than Pete, a short girl, five foot three. She weighed a hundred and twenty-six pounds. She looked bulky in clothing. Her most becoming outfits were sweater and skirt combinations where she could call attention to the slimness of her waist by wearing wide ornate belts. In any derivative of the sack she looked square as a little box. But in her skin, she was succulently, firmly lovely. If she had any figure defect it was being rather long-waisted, slightly short-legged. The opulence of thighs and calves tapered to tiny ankles, small feet. All of her was rounded, smooth and slightly dusky. Shefelt most comfortable, most confident and at ease with herself in her skin, knowing she looked her very best, and comfortably proud of herself.
Though her maiden name had been Kesson, and the bloodline was vaguely Scots-English-Irish-Dutch, she had blue-black hair, a Mediterranean cast of features, the sulky, sensuous, sexy expression of a nymph in the Mohammedan Paradise who found herself among unsatisfactory infidels. Pete claimed that it was obvious that one of her great-great-grandmothers had had certain dealings with a Spanish gypsy. For the past ten years she had been relentlessly pursued by males from fifteen to sixty, with varying success. A few of those who came to know her well enough to learn the basic contradiction between her appearance and the girl inside could say, with surprise, “You know, Sylvie’s a pretty good kid!” An uncomplicated kid. She was ashamed of the times she had been Bad. And she wished she could always be Good. The relationship with Mark was Bad.
She had been born and brought up—to the age of sixteen—in Lowell, Massachusetts, the middle child of five children of a little, wiry, sour, savage, sallow tool-and-die-maker and a fat, dim, defeated woman who always looked as if she had just finished weeping or was just about to begin. Her childhood was marked by the hard little unpredictable hands of Rudy Kesson, by squalls of rage and pain and terror.
When Sylvia was sixteen she and her best girl
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