Peyton Place by Grace Metalious Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
♦ 9 ♦
    Allison MacKenzie had never actually visited at Selena's house. She was in the habit of walking down the dirt road to where the Cross shack stood, and of waiting in front of the clearing until her friend came out to her. Many times Allison had wondered why none of the Crosses ever invited her into the house, but she had never quite dared to ask Selena. Once she had asked her mother, but Constance had persisted in saying that the reason was that Selena was ashamed of her home, so Allison had never discussed it with her again. Constance could not seem to understand that Selena was perfect and sure of herself, and that it was only she, Allison, who ever had feelings of shame. But still, it was odd the way no one had ever invited her into the house. Most of the time Selena came right out the shack door as soon as she saw Allison, but once in a while she emerged from the enclosed pen that was attached to the side of the house in which Lucas kept a few sheep. Whenever she had been in the sheep pen, Selena always yelled, “Wait a minute, Allison. I got to wash my feet,” but she never asked Allison to come in while she did so. Usually Selena's little brother Joey tagged along behind his sister, but this Saturday afternoon Selena came out of the house alone.
    “Hi, Selena,” called Allison warmly, her antisocial mood of the previous afternoon forgotten.
    “Hi, kid,” said Selena in the oddly deep voice which Allison found so intriguing. “What'll we do today?”
    The question was rhetorical. On Saturday afternoons the girls always sauntered slowly down the streets of the town, looking into shop windows and pretending that they were grown up and married to famous men. They studied every piece of merchandise in the Peyton Place stores, carefully picking and choosing what they would buy for themselves, for their houses and for their children.
    “That suit would be adorable on little Clark, Mrs. Gable,” they said to one another.
    And, nonchalantly, “Since I divorced Mr. Powell, I just can't seem to work up much interest in clothes any more.”
    Together, they spent every cent Allison could beg from her mother on junk jewelry, motion picture magazines and ice-cream sundaes. Sometimes Selena had a little money which she had earned by doing some odd job for a local housewife, and then she and Allison would go to a movie at the Ioka Theater. Later, they would sit at the soda fountain in Prescott's Drugstore and eat toasted tomato and lettuce sandwiches and drink Coca-Cola. Then, instead of pretending that they were married to motion picture stars, they would play at being well-to-do local housewives out for an afternoon stroll and stopping for tea while their infants slept peacefully in perambulators parked outside Prescott's front door. Allison held a drinking straw, ripped in half as if it were a cigarette, and carried on what she considered a grown-up conversation.
    “When Mr. Beane decided to start up the movie theater,” she said, “he didn't have enough money, so he borrowed from an Irishman named Kelley. That's why the theater is named the Ioka. It stands for I Owe Kelley All.”
    She drew a great deal of satisfaction out of knowing these little town anecdotes and from repeating them, with her own embellishments, while she picked imaginary shreds of