Dream When You're Feeling Blue - PDF
نویسندگان: Elizabeth Berg
خلاصه: T WAS KITTY’S TURN TO SLEEP with her head at the foot of the bed. She
didn’t mind; she preferred it, actually. She liked the mild disorientation that came from
that position, and she liked the relative sense of privacy—her sisters’ feet in her face, yes,
but not their eyes, not their ears, nor the close, damp sounds of their breathing. And at the
foot of the bed she was safe from Louise, who often yanked mercilessly at people’s hair
in her sleep.
Tonight Kitty was last to bed, having been last in the bathroom. Everybody liked
it when Kitty was last in the bathroom because, of the eight people living in the house,
she always took the longest. Apart from the normal ablutions, she did things in there:
affected poses she thought made her look even more like Rita Hayworth—she did look
like Rita Hayworth, everyone said so. She filed her fingernails, she experimented with
combining perfumes to make a new scent, she creamed her face, she used eyebrow pencil
to make beauty marks above her lip. She also read magazines in the bathroom because
there, no one read over her shoulder. Oh, somebody would bang on the door every time
she was in there, somebody was always banging on the bathroom door, but a girl could
get a lot done in a room with a locked door. Kitty could do more in five minutes in the
bathroom than in thirty minutes anywhere else in the house, where everyone in the family
felt it their right—their obligation!—to butt into everyone else’s business.
When Kitty came out of the bathroom, she tiptoed into the bedroom, where it
appeared her sisters were already asleep—Tish on her side with her knees drawn up tight,
Louise with the covers flung off. Kitty crouched down by Louise and whispered her
sister’s name. Kitty wanted to talk; she wasn’t ready to sleep yet. But Louise didn’t
budge.