"Elizabeth Hand - Last Summer on Mars Hill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hand Elizabeth)

years of hiding in her round peasant's face. Her voice was hoarse as she
asked,
"So you'll be there soon?"

Moony nodded. She curled a long tendril of hair, dark as her mother's but
finer,
and brushed her cheek with it. "I'm just gonna pull my hair back. Jason'll
give
me shit if I don't."

Ariel laughed. Jason thought that they were all a bunch of hippies. "Okay."
She
crossed the room unsteadily, touching the backs of chairs, a windows ill, the
edge of a buoy hanging from the wall. When the screen door banged shut behind
her Moony sighed with relief.

For a few minutes she waited, to make sure her mother hadn't forgotten
something, like maybe a joint or another glass of wine. She could see out the
window to where people were starting downhill toward the gazebo. If you didn't
look too closely, they might have been any group of summer people gathering
for
a party in the long northern afternoon.

But after a minute or two their oddities started to show. You saw them for
what
they really were: men and women just getting used to a peculiar middle age.
They
all had hair a little too long or too short, a little too gray or garishly
colored. The women, like Ariel, wrapped in clothes like banners from a
triumphant campaign now forgotten. Velvet tunics threaded with silver,
miniskirts crossing pale bare blue-veined thighs, Pucci blouses back in vogue
again. The men more subdued, in chinos some of them, or old jeans that were a
little too bright and neatly pressed. She could see Martin beneath the lilacs
by
the gazebo, in baggy psychedelic shorts and T-shirt, his gray-blond hair
longer
than it had been and pulled back into a wispy ponytail. Beside him Jason
leaned
against a tree, self-consciously casual, smoking a cigarette as he watched the
First Night promenade. At sight of Ariel he raised one hand in a lazy wave.

And now the last two stragglers reached the bottom of the hill. Mrs. Grose
carrying her familiar, an arthritic wheezing pug named Milton: Ancient Mrs.
Grose, who smelled of Sen-sen and whiskey, and prided herself on being one of
the spiritualists exposed as a fraud by Houdini. And Gary Bonetti, who (the
story went) five years ago had seen a vision of his own death in the City, a
knife wielded by a crack-crazed kid in Washington Heights. Since then, he had
stayed on at Mars Hill with Mrs. Grose, the community's only other year-round
resident.