"Straight as a stick."
"I like it that way."
"You know I've always been crazy about ragtime and jazz, so I've decided to go in for that. I'm better at it than all that acrobatic ballet you have to do now, though I am working on one jazz number on toes. Bob Noonan is working on some night club dates. So you see, after you left all sorts of things happened."
She said it almost accusingly, Vida thought, as though Ma died to spite her. "What else?"
"Lyle came around after his honeymoon with Clarissa and wanted to know if I'd marry him if he got a divorce or if I'd take him back right away. I never have anything to do with a married man, and I didn't want him even if he were free, so I told him nothing doing. I felt guilty though because you know how disappointed Mother would be. He's her ideal son-in-law."
"But how about Nino, you liked him? You'd almost decided to marry him. Figente's had letters from him asking why he doesn't hear from you."
Lucy took Clem's "Hepaticas" from a drawer and put the painting on the dresser. "Sometimes I take this out and look at it and try to make up my mind. I think of how much I like Nino and how I felt when he left. Then I think of what Figente said about joining the Church and how it would be for forever and it scares me because I want to be sure and I wouldn't want to hurt Nino."
"You shouldn't let Figente influence you. After all, Nino might not care whether you join the Church or not. Figente has become very religious since his last illness."
"I've been sick too," Lucy said dolefully. "I've been going to a doctor. My blood pressure is low and I'm anemic so he gives me liver and iron injections. He's very good-looking."
At that they both laughed and regained something of their old closeness.
They both were not yet twenty, Vida thought, but Lucy had aged the more during the past months, though occasionally, as now, there was a flash of her former buoyancy. What was most symptomatic of her change was the carelessness of her dress, as though she had lost interest in clothes and everything. She had slipped on a sleeveless black crepe de Chine dress, tying a ribbon around her waist as a belt in a manner that made her little stomach stick out. The yoke of her dress, from her throat to below her breasts, was a
