Jane Bowles - My Sister's Hand in Mine - The Collected Works of Jane Bowles

“Thank you very much, ma’am,” said the old man. His tone had changed to that of a servant, and Miss Goering felt even more ashamed of having believed what he had told her.

“Is there any particular place that you would like to go?” she asked him.

“No, ma’am,” he said, shuffling along beside her. He no longer seemed in the least inclined to talk.

There was no one walking along the main street except Miss Goering and the old man. They did pass a car parked in front of a dark store. Two people were smoking on the front seat.

The old man stopped in front of the window of a bar and grill and stood looking at some turkey and some old sausages which were on display.

“Shall we go in here and have something to eat with our little drink?” Miss Goering asked him.

“I’m not hungry,” the man said, “but I’ll go in with you and sit down.”

Miss Goering was disappointed because he didn’t seem to have any sense of how to give even the slightest festive air to the evening. The bar was dark, but festooned here and there with crepe paper. “In honor of some recent holiday, no doubt,” thought Miss Goering. There was a particularly nice garland of bright green paper flowers strung up along the entire length of the mirror behind the bar. The room was furnished with eight or nine tables, each one enclosed in a dark brown booth.

Miss Goering and the old man seated themselves at the bar.

“By the way,” said the old man to her, “wouldn’t you like better to seat yourself at a table where you ain’t so much in view?”

“No,” said Miss Goering, “I think this is very, very pleasant indeed. Now order what you want, will you?”

“I will have,” said the man, “a sandwich of turkey and a sandwich of pork, a cup of coffee, and a drink of rye whisky.”

“What a curious psychology!” thought Miss Goering. “I should think he would be embarrassed after just having finished saying that he wasn’t hungry.”

She looked over her shoulder out of curiosity and noticed that behind her in a booth were seated a boy and a girl. The boy was reading a newspaper. He was drinking nothing. The girl was sipping at a very nice cherry-colored drink through a straw. Miss Goering ordered herself two gins in succession, and when she had finished these she turned around and looked at the girl again. The girl seemed to have been expecting this because she already had her face turned in Miss Goering’s direction. She smiled softly at Miss Goering and opened her eyes wide. They were very dark. The whites of her eyes, Miss Goering noticed, were shot with yellow. Her hair was black and wiry and stood way out all over her head.

“Jewish, Rumanian, or Italian,” Miss Goering said to herself. The boy did not lift his eyes from his newspaper, which he held in such a way that his profile was hidden.

“Having a nice time?” the girl asked Miss Goering in a husky voice.

“Well,” said Miss Goering, “it wasn’t exactly in order to have a good time that I came out. I have more or less forced myself to, simply because I despise going out in the night-time alone and prefer not to leave my own house. However, it has come to such a point that I am forcing myself to make these little excursions—”

Miss Goering stopped because she actually did not know how she could go on and explain to this girl what she meant without talking a very long time indeed, and she realized that this would be impossible right at that moment, since the waiter was constantly walking back and forth between the bar and the young people’s booth.

“Anyway,” said Miss Goering, “I certainly think it does no harm to relax a bit and have a lovely time.”

“Everyone must have a wonderfully marvelous time,” said the girl, and Miss Goering noticed that there was a trace of an accent in her speech. “Isn’t that true, my angel Pussycat?” she said to the boy.

The boy put his newspaper down; he looked rather annoyed. “Isn’t what true?” he asked her. “I didn’t hear a word that you said.” Miss Goering knew perfectly well that this was a lie and that he was only pretending not to have noticed that his girl friend had been speaking with her.

“Nothing very important, really,” she said, looking tenderly into his eyes. “This lady here was saying that after all it did nobody any harm to relax and have a lovely time.”

“Perhaps,” said the boy, “it does more harm than anything else to date to have a lovely time.” He said this straight to the girl and completely ignored the fact that Miss Goering had been mentioned at all. The girl leaned way over and whispered into his ear.

“Darling,” she said, “something terrible has happened to that woman. I feel it in my heart. Please don’t be bad-tempered with her.”

“With whom?” the boy asked her.

She laughed because she knew there was nothing else much that she could do. The boy was subject to bad moods, but she loved him and was able to put up with almost anything.

The old man who had come with Miss Goering had excused himself and had taken his drinks and sandwiches over to a radio, where he was now standing with his ear close to the box.

Away in the back of the room a man was bowling up a small alley all by himself; Miss Goering listened to the rumble of the balls as they rolled along the wooden runway, and she wished that she were able to see him so that she could be at peace for the evening with the certainty that there was no one who could be considered a menace present in the room. Certainly there was a possibility that more clients would enter through the door, but this had entirely slipped her mind. Hard though she tried, it was impossible for her to get a look at the man who was rolling the balls.

The young boy and the girl were having a fight. Miss Goering could tell by the sound of their voices. She listened to them carefully without turning her head.

“I don’t see why,” said the girl, “that you must be furious immediately just because I have mentioned that I always like to come in here and sit for a little while.”

“There is absolutely no reason,” said the boy, “why you should want to come in here and sit more than in any other place.”

“Then why — then why do you come in?” the girl asked hesitantly.

“I don’t know,” said the boy; “maybe because it’s the first thing we hit after we leave our room.”

“No,” said the girl, “there are other places. I wish you would just say that you liked it here; I don’t know why, but it would make me so happy; we’ve been coming here for a long time.”

“I’ll be God-damned if I’ll say it, and I’ll be God-damned if I’ll come here any more if you’re going to invest this place with witches’ powers.”

“Oh, Pussycat,” said the girl, and there was real anguish in her tone, “Pussycat, I am not talking about witches and their powers; not even thinking about them. Only when I was a little girl. I should never have told you the story.”

The boy shook his head back and forth; he was disgusted with her.

“For God’s sake,” he said, “that isn’t anything near what I mean, Bernice.”

“I do not understand what you mean,” said Bernice. “Many people come into this place or some other place every night for years and years and without doing much but having a drink and talking to each other; it is only because it is like home to them. And we come here only because it is little by little becoming a home to us; a second home if you can call our little room a home; it is to me; I love it very much.”

The boy groaned with discontent.

“And,” she added, feeling that her words and her tone of voice could not help working a spell over the boy, “the tables and the chairs and the walls here have now become like the familiar faces of old friends.”