Camilla Read Online Free PDF Page B

father and I eat breakfast together, and I felt that it would be easier for me to talk to him if I didn’t have to see him till evening.
    My mother came out of the bedroom just as I was putting on my hat and coat. “Camilla, where are you going?” she demanded. She did not look like the Sleeping Beauty or a princess in a fairy tale this morning. Her face looked white and all the lines in it were dragged down by tiredness and anxiety and other things I was not able to read, and she held her dressing gown around her as though she were cold.
    â€œI’m going to meet Luisa for breakfast.”
    â€œFor breakfast! Why?”
    â€œI think she’s—disturbed—about something,” I said.
    â€œAre you—are you all right, darling?” my mother asked.
    â€œYes, thank you.”
    â€œAre you—are you coming right home after school?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “I guess so.”
    â€œBut you won’t be late?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “I have to go now, Mother. I promised Luisa I’d meet her right away.”
    I kissed my mother and left, and I felt terribly isolated and the way I imagine a stranger in a foreign country would feel, because I did not know what to say to either my mother or my father. Talking to them had become like talking to strangers, where you have to search wildly for something casual and unimportant to say.
    I took Jacques’s doll with me and left it in the coatroom at school for Luisa, because I couldn’t bear to leave anything at home that would remind me so continually of Jacques. I used to pray desperately that he would not come to our apartment. Now I did not ask for quite as much; I asked simply that my father should never come home early and see Jacques with my mother again. And then I wondered: Why did Father come home early yesterday afternoon?
    So I left the doll in the coatroom for Luisa and went to the drugstore around the corner where she was waiting for me. There was a cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice, almost exactly the color of her hair, on the counter before her. “I’m so upset I can’t possibly eat another thing for breakfast,” she exclaimed as I climbed up on the stool beside her. “Anyhow, I’m broke.”
    â€œI can lend you fifty cents,” I said. “What’s the matter?”
    â€œOh,
them
again, of course, Mona and Bill.” Luisa always called her parents by their first names.
    â€œWhat now?” I asked.
    â€œOh, they had a fight last night when they came in. At first they tried to whisper so Frank and I wouldn’t hear, and they whispered louder and louder and finally they yelled and Mona ended up throwing a whole Beethoven symphony at my father, record by record. From the number of crashes it sounded like the Ninth.”
    She took a big swallow of coffee and then made a face. Luisa’s mouth moves more than any other mouth I have ever seen when she talks or even when she just listens. Whenever I try to describe it, it sounds ugly and perhaps taken by itself it would be, but in her face it doesn’t give the effect of being ugly at all. It is a long mouth, almost as though someone had taken a knife and made a slash across her face; and the lips are narrow but because they are so flexible you don’t get any impression of thinness or sharpness. Frank calls Luisa ugly, but the thing I like about her face is that it is like a windy morning with lots of clouds moving rapidly across the sky, all lights and shadows; and though she has red hair her eyes are not green like mine, but are like bright chinks of blue. And her face is very white, with as many freckles as the woman in the ladies’ room of the restaurant.
    â€œI don’t see why they couldn’t have had their fight before they came home,” Luisa said. “The worst part was when people stuck their heads out of windows and told them to shut up.” She