Читать книгу Peyton Place - Grace Metalious - Страница 11

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Selena Cross lay on the folding cot that served as her bed and which was pushed against the wall on the kitchen side of the one-room Cross shack. She was thirteen years old and well developed for her age, with the curves of hips and breasts already discernible under the too short and often threadbare clothes that she wore. Much of the girl’s clothing had been inherited from the more fortunate children of Peyton Place and passed down to Selena through the charity-loving hands of the ladies from the Congregational church. Selena had long dark hair that curled of its own accord in a softly beautiful fashion. Her eyes, too, were dark and slightly slanted, and she had a naturally red, full-lipped mouth over well-shaped, startlingly white teeth. Her skin was clear and of a honey-tan shade which looked as if it had been acquired under the sun but which, on Selena, never faded to sallowness in the long months of the harsh New England winter.

“Put a pair of gold hoops in her ears,” said Miss Thornton, “and she’d look like everybody’s idea of a perfect gypsy.”

Selena was wise with the wisdom learned of poverty and wretchedness. At thirteen, she saw hopelessness as an old enemy, as persistent and inevitable as death.

Sometimes, when she looked at Nellie, her mother, she thought, I’ll get out. I’ll never be like her.

Nellie Cross was short and flabby with the unhealthy fat that comes from too many potatoes and too much bread. Her hair was thin and tied in a sloppy knot at the back of her not too clean neck, and her hands, perpetually grimy, were rough and knobby knuckled, with broken, dirty fingernails.

I’ll get out, thought Selena. I’ll never let myself look like that.

But hopelessness was always at her elbow, ready to nudge her and say, “Oh, yeah? How will you get out? Where could you go, and who would have you after you got there?”

If Lucas was away, or at home but sober, Selena would think, optimistically, Oh, I’ll manage. One way or another, I’ll get out.

But for the most part it was like tonight. Selena lay in her cot and listened to her older brother Paul snoring in his bed against the opposite wall, and to the adenoidal breathing of her little brother Joey, who slept in a cot like her own. But these sounds could not cover the louder ones which came from the double bed at the other end of the shack. Selena lay still and listened to Lucas and Nellie perform the act of love. Lucas did not speak while thus engaged. He grunted, Selena thought, like a rooting pig, and he breathed like a steam engine puffing its way across the wide Connecticut River, while from Nellie there was no sound at all. Selena listened and chewed at her bottom lip and thought, Hurry up, for Christ’s sake. Lucas grunted harder and puffed louder, and the old spring on the double bed creaked alarmingly, faster and faster. At last, Lucas squealed like a calf in the hands of a butcher and it was over. Selena turned her face into her moldy-smelling pillow which was bare of any sort of pillowcase, and wept soundlessly.

I’ll get out, she thought furiously. I’ll get out of this filthy mess.

Her old enemy, hopelessness, did not even bother to answer. He was just there.