Return to Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

Author:Grace Metalious
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Northeastern University Press

8

IN PEYTON PLACE, the black-tarred sidewalks softened in the summer sun and were scarred with U-shaped heel marks that would show forever. Green Meadow Pond was filled with screaming, splashing children, and all day long the cicadas hummed in the trees. But it was a good summer, with rain in proportion to sunlight, so that the northern countryside had an almost tropical lushness. There was a heavy, ripe greenness to everything that stunned the granite-spined farmers, who were too used to either drought or the puny growth caused by no sunshine at all.

“There's somethin’ almost indecent about it,” said Kenny Stearns aloud, snipping still another red rose from one of his heavily laden bushes. He looked at the thick green of his lawn and saw his apple tree with its burden of swelling fruit so heavy that the branches hung almost to the ground. “Yep,” he said. “Almost indecent. Like a whore with big breasts and honey between her legs.”

It was easy, that year, to blame the unheard-of, green summer for just about everything. At the Harrington Mills, workers shirked their jobs and gazed out the factory windows while Leslie screamed in impotent rage and blamed the weather. Young girls who had clung to their virginity with leechlike tenacity now surrendered, with little squeals of anguished joy, to the erect demands of their teen-aged lovers. They returned home with their behinds covered with poison ivy, their arms dotted with mosquito bites and their hair full of pine needles.

As Matthew Swain said to Seth Buswell, “If all the maidenheads lost in the woods this summer were laid end to end, they'd reach clear from here to the planet Saturn.”

Fathers blamed mothers, mothers blamed boys, boys blamed girls, girls blamed themselves and everybody blamed the weather for everything except the behavior of Selena Cross. For Selena there was no excuse in the eyes of Peyton Place.

“Who is he?”

“Actor feller from over to Silver Lake.”

“Come up here from down to New Yawk.”

“Usta be in the movin’ pitchers.”

“Hmph. Think a girl like Selena'd know better. After all, it ain't as if she was born yesterday and didn't know no better.”

“Ayeh. There's one girl learned whatcha call the facts of life early. And the hard way.”

“Think she'd have a little shame, a girl like that. But no. There she goes, flauntin’ herself right in front of the whole town.”

For Selena Cross it was a summer of such unbearable sweetness that every moment was almost like pain. There was an ache in not being able to clutch every second that passed, to have to let the hours go, and finally the whole day.

“When I was young,” said Selena, “I thought I knew all there was to know about love.”

“And what do you know now, my darling?” asked Tim, stroking the soft inside of her arm. “I mean now that you're an old woman of twenty-five.”

“I know that I didn't know a thing until now,” she said, and turned to rest her forehead gently on his chin.

They were lying side by side on the beach at Silver Lake, talking softly, caressing each other.

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