Main Street - Sinclair Lewis (little red riding hood ebook .txt) 📗

as she examined her wardrobe she flung her ancient black velvet frock on the floor and raged, “They’re disgraceful. Everything I have is falling to pieces.”

There was a new dressmaker and milliner, a Mrs. Swiftwaite. It was said that she was not altogether an elevating influence in the way she glanced at men; that she would as soon take away a legally appropriated husband as not; that if there was any Mr. Swiftwaite, “it certainly was strange that nobody seemed to know anything about him!” But she had made for Rita Gould an organdy frock and hat to match universally admitted to be “too cunning for words,” and the matrons went cautiously, with darting eyes and excessive politeness, to the rooms which Mrs. Swiftwaite had taken in the old Luke Dawson house, on Floral Avenue.

With none of the spiritual preparation which normally precedes the buying of new clothes in Gopher Prairie, Carol marched into Mrs. Swiftwaite’s, and demanded, “I want to see a hat, and possibly a blouse.”

In the dingy old front parlor which she had tried to make smart with a pier glass, covers from fashion magazines, anemic French prints, Mrs. Swiftwaite moved smoothly among the dress-dummies and hat-rests, spoke smoothly as she took up a small black and red turban. “I am sure the lady will find this extremely attractive.”

“It’s dreadfully tabby and small-towny,” thought Carol, while she soothed, “I don’t believe it quite goes with me.”

“It’s the choicest thing I have, and I’m sure you’ll find it suits you beautifully. It has a great deal of chic. Please try it on,” said Mrs. Swiftwaite, more smoothly than ever.

Carol studied the woman. She was as imitative as a glass diamond. She was the more rustic in her effort to appear urban. She wore a severe high-collared blouse with a row of small black buttons, which was becoming to her low-breasted slim neatness, but her skirt was hysterically checkered, her cheeks were too highly rouged, her lips too sharply penciled. She was magnificently a specimen of the illiterate divorcee of forty made up to look thirty, clever, and alluring.

While she was trying on the hat Carol felt very condescending. She took it off, shook her head, explained with the kind smile for inferiors, “I’m afraid it won’t do, though it’s unusually nice for so small a town as this.”

“But it’s really absolutely New-Yorkish.”

“Well, it⁠—”

“You see, I know my New York styles. I lived in New York for years, besides almost a year in Akron!”

“You did?” Carol was polite, and edged away, and went home unhappily. She was wondering whether her own airs were as laughable as Mrs. Swiftwaite’s. She put on the eyeglasses which Kennicott had recently given to her for reading, and looked over a grocery bill. She went hastily up to her room, to her mirror. She was in a mood of self-depreciation. Accurately or not, this was the picture she saw in the mirror:

Neat rimless eyeglasses. Black hair clumsily tucked under a mauve straw hat which would have suited a spinster. Cheeks clear, bloodless. Thin nose. Gentle mouth and chin. A modest voile blouse with an edging of lace at the neck. A virginal sweetness and timorousness⁠—no flare of gaiety, no suggestion of cities, music, quick laughter.

“I have become a small-town woman. Absolute. Typical. Modest and moral and safe. Protected from life. Genteel! The Village Virus⁠—the village virtuousness. My hair⁠—just scrambled together. What can Erik see in that wedded spinster there? He does like me! Because I’m the only woman who’s decent to him! How long before he’ll wake up to me?⁠ ⁠… I’ve waked up to myself.⁠ ⁠… Am I as old as⁠—as old as I am?

“Not really old. Become careless. Let myself look tabby.

“I want to chuck every stitch I own. Black hair and pale cheeks⁠—they’d go with a Spanish dancer’s costume⁠—rose behind my ear, scarlet mantilla over one shoulder, the other bare.”

She seized the rouge sponge, daubed her cheeks, scratched at her lips with the vermilion pencil until they stung, tore open her collar. She posed with her thin arms in the attitude of the fandango. She dropped them sharply. She shook her head. “My heart doesn’t dance,” she said. She flushed as she fastened her blouse.

“At least I’m much more graceful than Fern Mullins. Heavens! When I came here from the Cities, girls imitated me. Now I’m trying to imitate a city girl.”

XXX I

Fern Mullins rushed into the house on a Saturday morning early in September and shrieked at Carol, “School starts next Tuesday. I’ve got to have one more spree before I’m arrested. Let’s get up a picnic down the lake for this afternoon. Won’t you come, Mrs. Kennicott, and the doctor? Cy Bogart wants to go⁠—he’s a brat but he’s lively.”

“I don’t think the doctor can go,” sedately. “He said something about having to make a country call this afternoon. But I’d love to.”

“That’s dandy! Who can we get?”

“Mrs. Dyer might be chaperon. She’s been so nice. And maybe Dave, if he could get away from the store.”

“How about Erik Valborg? I think he’s got lots more style than these town boys. You like him all right, don’t you?”

So the picnic of Carol, Fern, Erik, Cy Bogart, and the Dyers was not only moral but inevitable.

They drove to the birch grove on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. Dave Dyer was his most clownish self. He yelped, jigged, wore Carol’s hat, dropped an ant down Fern’s back, and when they went swimming (the women modestly changing in the car with the side curtains up, the men undressing behind the bushes, constantly repeating, “Gee, hope we don’t run into poison ivy”), Dave splashed water on them and dived to clutch his wife’s ankle. He infected the others. Erik gave an imitation of the Greek dancers he had seen in vaudeville, and when they sat down to picnic supper spread on a lap-robe on the grass, Cy climbed a tree to throw acorns at them.

But Carol could not frolic.

She had made herself young, with