Читать книгу Pink Magic - Margaret Lee Runbeck - Страница 3

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Up to the time I went to Mexico to study Art, I had never been in love, except with a horse.

This fact is almost unbelievable when you consider that I am sixteen years and three months old. But it is due to a gruesome but unavoidable circumstance. You see, I am five feet eight inches tall, and weigh a trifle over one hundred and hum-um pounds, nood. Also, not to mince matters, I wear glasses.

Lots of people don’t believe in numerology. But I am definite proof that there is much truth in it. Because numbers like those I’ve just admitted certainly affect what happens in a girl’s life. Particularly her love-life (or is there any other life?).

My size has always been a big problem in my family. And big is the word. Mummy says that when I was born I was conspicuously normal, but from then on I kept getting more conspicuous and less normal every year. Due, I suppose, to the very scientific diet I have always been kept on.

Mummy herself was an underprivileged child, having been born in 1908. She never was given any vitamins, minerals, or cod-liver oil, or even spinach. As a result, she grew up very beautiful.

Petite is the word Mummy always finds being used about herself, and to me it is the most wonderful word in the language. All my own troubles can be traced to bulk. Just brute bulk. And, to make it even worse, brains.

But Mummy is an ideal woman. And for a great hulk of bulk like me to have to live constantly in the shadow of something petite like Mummy is agony. I find that sentence has a serious non sequitur in it. But then, up until this last month, my life was one long non sequitur.

From the start I made the mistake of inheriting myself from Daddy, and that shows you right there how clumsy I was, to pass up Mummy’s lovely little chromosomes and pile up a mountain of Daddy’s. From the beginning I have been somebody who stubbed my toe against mountains, when molehills were just as handy.

This last paragraph sounds as if I didn’t appreciate Daddy. He’s a wonderful person. For a man, that is. But as a woman he’d be very inconvenient. And most disappointing to anyone who made the mistake of thinking of him as one.

All the things which show on me, I got from Daddy. All the nice invisible things which don’t show came from Mummy... my romantic nature, my clinging-vineness, my pretty conceits (an eighteenth-century word seldom used now, and too bad, since it is very nice equipment for romance).

Mummy not only lets these qualities show in plain view on her personality, she definitely uses them as other women use make-up. On her they look good. But on me... well, on me they’re about as decorative as mascara would be on the eye of a potato.

I often think, “If only people looked like themselves.” If the outside of me looked like the inside really is, I’d have long dreamy hair such as is found only in Italian masterpieces, or in Baudelaire’s poetry, lotus fingertips with nails which always stay clean, the roe’s nose standing in a field of lilies as mentioned in the Song of Solomon, and hot lips.

But instead, I look wholesome. I look like a close-up of a child in a scene where everything else is photographed in long shot. This is a technical motion-picture term I learned from Estrellita about whom I’ll tell later.

Mummy’s way of saying it is that I look like I’m being seen through a telescope.

“Never mind, darling. You were made for bigger worlds to conquer,” Mummy says whenever I try to squeeze past something and upset it. That is Mummy’s pretty way of expressing unpretty fact. Not accurate, but endearing. Me, on the contrary, am not endearing, but I am embarrassingly exact. I call a spade a spade and let the chips fall where they may. Quite often they fall in front of me, and I, being nearsighted, trip over them and land flat on my face.

But enough of philosophy.

What I intend to tell you is how my life was completely transformed in four weeks. How I was made over, from an all-too-wholesome child into a dangerous woman with power to change other people’s lives, in four short weeks. Without even having to mail in a box top.

Thinking back over the whole thing, I realize it was all Fate. Last year I didn’t believe in anything. But this year I know that Fate plainly has picked me out to be one of her pawns. I am not sure what a pawn is, but I am sure I am one.

Fate obviously planned the whole dramatic month from beginning to end. From the beginning when I stepped on one pair of my glasses and the horse stepped on the other pair, both of us grinding them to powder, clear through to the end you can trace the delicate hand of Fate. My foot and the horse’s foot might not be instantly recognized as the delicate hand of Fate, but that is a figure of speech.

It began... as one’s very life must... with one’s father. My father is different from most men, being a scientist. That is why I have my cursed, unfeminine brains, I suppose. Brains are just an occupational disease in my family. My father, I might as well admit, is Elmo Thorndike Prowder, the anthropologist, whose book published this year on the sex development of the race has been widely sold and narrowly read.

My father is very bitter about this, having been betrayed by his publisher into allowing a provocative title to be put on some very dull but imposing statistics and tables. Sex, as my father sees it, is a dull but imposing subject, suited more to tables than to any other type of furniture. This is the kind of joke which infuriates Daddy when he encounters it in a review of his monumental work. I tried it out now, just to see how it feels.

At any rate, bitter though he is about the hoax his publisher played on him, we have enjoyed what he calls catastrophic prosperity ever since the New York Times ran up the temperature of its best-sellers’ list by putting Daddy’s book at the top of the thermometer.

Mummy, naturally, has never seen it as anything but a delightful “I-told-you-so!” Mummy, who after all is in a unique position to know, says she always knew he had it in him.

At any rate, it was Daddy’s desire for a very quiet summer in Maine which started me on my great adventure in Mexico. Daddy finds popularity very unnerving. He can take everything, he says, except the women. An unnecessary admission, surely, in a man of Daddy’s age, which must be hovering precariously near forty-five, when women, to put it delicately, become anachronisms in a man’s life.

Mummy’s reasons for wanting me to study Art in Mexico were much more complex, of course, since Mummy, I’m sure it is unnecessary to stress, is all woman. Mummy always advances three or four unshakably sensible reasons for doing what she wants to do, but her real purpose always lies at the bottom of her subconscious, submerged but unaltered, like a coin on the floor of a lake.

“This is the right summer for Lambie to grapple with Art,” Mummy said. “Next year, God willing, she’ll have other things on her mind.”

It would have made Mummy very unhappy if I’d said, “This year, God willing or not, I have other things on my mind.” So of course I didn’t say it.

I suppose right here I might as well dispose of the Lambie business as painlessly as possible.

I have fought a losing fight for years against that loathsome name. The alternative, alas, is equally grim, for my parents selected singularly obnoxious people to name me after. Ursula F. Prowder is written on my Mexican tourist card, and one of my frequent nightmares is that someone is making me tell what the F. stands for, before a large roomful of my peers. When people definitely crowd me into a corner about it, I pretend it is a family name... Fulsome, or Fenwicke, or Fitzsimmons.

But even that dodge leaves me leading with my Ursula. My best friends, of whom I’ve never had more than one or two, and they were also misfits, problem children or geniuses, have never been able to make anything affectionate-sounding out of the name. Some people at Miss Winslow’s tried to call me Urs last winter. Then one smartie-pants put a w in front of it. So, much as I don’t like Lambie, I answer to it. But I do draw the line at Lambie-Pie.

But back to my summer. “The sixteenth year is the hardest, darling,” Mummy said confidentially. “You’re just neither fish nor fowl this year. So keep your mind on Art.”

“My mind’s stuck on it like a band-aid,” I said gloomily.

“If we were going to some really isolated place for the summer it wouldn’t matter.”

“I could get over my leprous condition in secret,” I said bitterly.

“You know what I mean. We must be realistic about it,” Mummy said. “The Garland girls will be about, and that will be just unnecessarily painful for you to see. So Art’s the thing for you, my pet.”

“And besides,” I said cruelly, just to even up for her being so realistic about me, “you’d like to enjoy Daddy alone this summer. I compete.”

“Exactly,” said Mummy, who has also heard of the Oedipus angle. “I’d like to keep my eye on him alone. And not go cross-eyed trying to watch you both.”

Art, as a matter of fact, was not exactly a new escape mechanism for me. I’ve been crawling behind it for years, whenever I didn’t feel comfortable in what was happening around me.

“Lambie’s so ghastly talented, Mummy often says to people. We don’t know which side of her to develop.”

Privately, I’ve always intended that if I should turn out to be the complete flop I thought I most likely should... from a human-relations aspect, I mean... I’d just make-believe I’d given up everything else for Art. Just the way when I used to be dragged to dancing school, I used to make-believe I was madly interested in the bugs on the bushes outside the window, in case nobody intended asking me to dance. Art... bugs... it’s all the same. Only one’s more dignified than the other.

But actually who would want to be a Great Painter if she could be a Great Loveress? Now that I know I can be the G.L., I can frankly admit this deep subconscious deception without shame.

So, because the Garland girls always have their terraces and their tennis court crowded with fascinating men, so that I have to go around in ragged dungarees pretending I’m above such time-wasting and think they’re all silly little bee-itches, and because Mummy has faith that by another summer my bulk will be more captivatingly distributed about my frame so that the sight of the svelte and smirking Garland girls won’t give me a neurosis, I made-believe I was nuts about Art. Particularly a month of it in Mexico.