JERRY BUMPUS
383
She laughed. "That doesn't count. That wasn't
me."
"Too bad. 1 rather. .. " My voice failed. I whispered, "1 rather liked
her. "
"You
would," she said.
1 groaned.
"See'" She laughed in my face. "1 understand' "
At that moment the sky broke and rain poured down. Tina
jumped to her feet, hiked up her dress, and ran for the house. "What
has he told you?" 1 called. 1 ran after her. "What has he told you about
me?" She laughed over her shoulder, though I couldn't hear her voice
for the rain , the wind, the thunder lumbering across the hea th and up
the lawn.
Ursula Dolman h eld the door open for us and for that slithering
rustle which follows people in from the rain. Ursula lit a lamp, but
Tina, who had run upstairs and returned with her hair gray and
pinned tightly to her head , and wearing one of Mrs. Sheehan's dresses,
long-sleeved, dull purplish-brown like wood, the proper dress for
sitting through dark afternoons, went straight over and turned out the
lamp.
"But my dear. .. " Mrs. Sheehan started.
"No."
In
the overprecise manner of the maiden lady who must
through the brambles each moment presents somehow pass without
snagging her dress, pricking herself, and above all without screaming,
Tina said,
" If
there's a lamp, all we can see is ourselves. 1want to watch
the storm."
She sat down, feet and knees together, her h ands on her lap, no
doubt picking at the wan little violets she herself had sewn onto a
handkerchief.
Shivering in my wet clothes, I sat in silence. 1 cou ld hurry up to
my room and change, but 1 was afraid to leave the room for one
moment. 1 watched her.
In
the darkness she seemed to narrow, shrink
into herself as if right before my eyes she were shriveling. I blinked, and
she was again herself, or at least what 1 could see of her.
1 crossed the room with excessive and unintended slowness to the
lamp. 1 discovered my matches were wet. Of course. I turned to ask
Ursula Dolman for hers.
Ursula Dolman and Mrs. Sheehan sat in the darkness of their
chairs like sphinxes sinking back into the sand. Tina sat bent forward
like a dark C, a doll frazzled and funked by too much rough play. " It's
time." 1 went to the French doors . Thunder journeyed across the sky,
shaking the glass. Hugh Venolio crossed the sky in the yellow cone of
