Beautiful Girl Read Online Free PDF

to stand it, I can promise you that, my dear.”
    Her accent is very Bostonian, his Southern; both tendencies seem to intensify as they talk together.
    She picks up the instrument, plucks the four strings as she sings, “My dog has fleas.”
    “So does Louise,” he sings mockingly, an echo. Tom is fond of simple ridiculous jokes but he feels it necessary always to deliver them as though someone else were talking. In fact, he says almost everything indirectly.
    They both laugh, looking at each other.
    They are still laughing when Jessica comes out from the living room where she has been reading (every summer she rereads Jane Austen) and walks down the length of the porch to where they are, and says, “Oh, a ukulele, how nice, Barbara. Some of our girls used to play.”
    Chivalrous Tom gets up to offer his chair—“Here you are, old dear.” She did not want to sit so close to the hammock but does anyway, a small shapeless woman on the edge of her chair.
    Jessica is only a few years older than Tom but she looks considerably more so, with graying hair and sad brown eyes, a tightly compressed mouth. She has strong and definite Anglo-Saxon notions about good behavior. (They all do, this helpless group of American Protestants, Tom and Jessica, Barbara and Wilfred, which they try and almost succeed in passing on to their children.) Jessica wears no makeup and is dressed in what she calls “camp clothes,” meaning things thatare old and shabby (what she thinks she deserves). “Won’t you play something for us?” she asks Babs.
    “Perhaps you will succeed in persuasion where I have failed,” says Tom. As he sees it, his chief duty toward his wife is to be unfailingly polite, and he always is, although sometimes it comes across a little heavily.
    Of course Jessica feels the currents between Babs and Tom but she accepts what she senses with melancholy resignation. There is a woman at home whom Tom likes too, small, blond Irene McGinnis, and Irene is crazy about Tom—that’s clear—but nothing happens. Sometimes they kiss; Jessica has noticed that Verlie always hides Tom’s handkerchiefs. Verlie also likes Tom. Nothing more will happen with Babs. It is only mildly depressing for Jessica, a further reminder that she is an aging, not physically attractive woman, and that her excellent mind is not compelling to Tom. But she is used to all that. She sighs, and says, “I think there’s going to be a very beautiful sunset,” and she looks across the lake to the mountains. “There’s Mount Washington,” she says.
    Then the porch door bangs open and Wilfred walks toward them, a heavy, dark young man with sleeves rolled up over big hairy arms; he has been washing and polishing his new Ford. He is a distant cousin of Jessica’s. “Babs, you’re not going to play that thing, are you?”
    “No, darling, I absolutely promise.”
    “Well,” Tom says, “surely it’s time for a drink?”
    “It surely is,” says Babs, giggling, mocking him.
    He gestures as though to slap at the calf of her long leg, but of course he does not; his hand stops some inches away.
    Down a wide pine-needled path, some distance from the lodge, there is a decaying birchbark canoe, inside which white Indian pipes grow. They were planted years back by the camper girls. Around the canoe stands a grove of pineswith knotted roots, risen up from the ground, in which chipmunks live. Feeding the chipmunks is what Jessica and Tom’s children do when they aren’t swimming or playing on the beach. Avery and Devlin in their skimpy shorts sit cross-legged on the pine needles, making clucking noises to bring out the chipmunks.
    A small chipmunk comes out, bright-eyed, switching his tail back and forth, looking at the children, but then he scurries off.
    Devlin asks, “Do you like Babs?” He underlines the name, meaning that he thinks it’s silly.
    “She’s O.K.” Avery’s voice is tight; she is confused by Babs. She doesn’t know whether to think, as