Three Days of Rain
By Richard GreenbergLina is crazy, but it's easy to think she's just Southern. "Lina" is pronounced like "Carolina." She is talking to Ned about her boyfriend Theo, who is Ned's best friend and business partner. (Walker and Nan are Lina's children.)
LINA:
I want to be something. I want to be... a painter! Or... a writer, a belletrist! Or a blues singer or just a very intriguing alcoholic... I am so terribly old. I'm a Southern woman who admits to thirty - God alone knows what the truth of things must be. I'm nothing.
Theo looks at me and sees... something from Anais Nin. Just because I'm gloomy sometimes, and opaque, sometimes. And because when he picked me up, we were sketching naked men at the Arts Student League. These sorts of things impress him. He is so naive; he is so easilly astonished. He sees me as one of those girls from fifteen years ago: all Quattrocento-pale and dull-eyed and glazed and smugly silent because they possess the secret of the universe and you don't.
I don't. That's what's funny - I am never silent - he must notice that. I smother the day in speech because I know nothing and I want to speak back to me and tell me - what?
What is it that some people in cities seem to know? What is this secret that is constantly eluding me?
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