Boston (Mass.) -- Fiction; Interpersonal relations -- Fiction
She threw herself into a flurry of things to be done. Sunday and late
and the maid not coming. There was the percolator to put on, the water
to run for her bath, the milk to take in, and the paper, and the caps to
take off the milk bottle and the creambottle, and the flame under the
percolator mustn't be too high and the bath mustn't be too hot. The
familiar morning smells, gasflame, soap, bathwater, coffee-steam, were
vaguely distasteful to her this morning, gave her a feeling of days
succeeding days and years years, as alike and meaningless as
milkbottles. As she was cleaning her teeth she stopped with her mouth
full of lather and the tooth brush in her hand. It was two years and
eight months she'd been living in this apartment. O something must
happen soon. When she had rinsed her mouth she looked at herself a long
while in the tilted mirror over the washbasin. On one side the nickel
fixture of the shower over the bathtub, on the other a glimpse through
the open door into the hall and a patch of blue and green curtain; in
the middle her face, chestnut hair caught loosely away from the narrow
forehead, straight eyebrows darker than her hair, fine lashes. She
stared for a moment intensely in her own grey eyes, then closed them
with a shudder. I have the thin New England lips, she said to herself.
She pulled the nightgown off impatiently and stood with her hands on her
scarcely formed breasts looking down into the pale green of the bathtub.
Somewhere at the end of a long corridor of her mind she ran through the
dappled shadow of woods, naked, swift, chased by someone brown, flushed,
goatfooted. She could feel in her nostrils the roughness of the smell of
Wenny's damp homespun suit. Aprèsmidi d'un Faune, the words formed in
her mind, Music by Claude Debussy, Choreography by M. Nijinski; the big
program in her hands with its smell of glazed printer's ink and the
rustling of dresses about her at the Opera. What are you dawdling about?
she muttered, and stepped into the water and began briskly soaping the
facecloth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account