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

“What old friends?” said the boy, scowling more and more furiously. “What old friends? To me this is just another shit-house where poor people imbibe spirits in order to forget the state of their income, which is non-existent.”

He sat up very straight and glared at Bernice.

“I guess that is true, in a way,” she said vaguely, “but I feel that there is something more.”

“That’s just the trouble.”

Meanwhile Frank, the bartender, had been listening to Bernice’s conversation with Dick. It was a dull night and the more he thought about what the boy had said, the angrier he felt. He decided to go over to the table and start a row.

“Come on, Dick,” he said, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt. “If that’s the way you feel about this place, get the hell out of here.” He yanked him out of his seat and gave him a terrific shove so that Dick staggered a few steps and fell headlong over the bar.

“You big fat-head,” Dick yelled at the bartender, lunging out at him. “You hunk of retrogressive lard. I’ll push your white face in for you.”

The two were now fighting very hard. Bernice was standing on the table and pulling at the shirts of the fighters in an attempt to separate them. She was able to reach them even when they were quite a distance from the table because the benches terminated in posts at either end, and by grabbing hold of one of them she could swing out over the heads of the fighters.

Miss Goering, from where she was now standing, could see the flesh above Bernice’s stocking whenever she leaned particularly far out of her booth. This would not have troubled her so much had she not noticed that the man who had been rolling the wooden balls had now moved away from his post and was staring quite fixedly at Bernice’s bare flesh wherever the occasion presented itself. The man had a narrow red face, a pinched and somewhat inflamed nose, and very thin lips. His hair was almost orange in color. Miss Goering could not decide whether he was of an exceedingly upright character or of a criminal nature, but the intensity of his attitude almost scared her to death. Nor was it even possible for Miss Goering to decide whether he was looking at Bernice with interest or with scorn.

Although he was getting in some good punches and his face was streaming with sweat, Frank the bartender appeared to be very calm and it seemed to Miss Goering that he was losing interest in the fight and that actually the only really tense person in the room was the man who was standing behind her.

Soon Frank had a split lip and Dick a bloody nose. Very shortly after this they both stopped fighting and walked unsteadily towards the washroom. Bernice jumped off the table and ran after them.

They returned in a few minutes, all washed and combed and holding dirty handkerchiefs to their mouths. Miss Goering walked up to them and took hold of each man by the arm.

“I’m glad that it’s all over now, and I want each of you to have a drink as my guest.”

Dick looked very sad now and very subdued. He nodded his head solemnly and they sat down together and waited for Frank to fix them their drinks. He returned with their drinks, and after he had served them, he too seated himself at the table. They all drank in silence for a little while. Frank was dreamy and seemed to be thinking of very personal things that had nothing to do with the events of the evening. Once he took out an address book and looked through its pages several times. It was Miss Goering who first broke the silence.

“Now tell me,” she said to Bernice and Dick,” “tell me what you are interested in.”

“I’m interested in the political struggle,” said Dick, “which is of course the only thing that any self-respecting human being could be interested in. I am also on the winning side and on the right side. The side that believes in the redistribution of capital.” He chuckled to himself and it was very easy to tell that he thought he was conversing with a complete fool.

“I’ve heard all about that,” said Miss Goering. “And what are you interested in?” she asked the girl.

“Anything he is interested in, but it is true that I had believed the political struggle was very important before I met him. You see, I have a different nature than he has. What makes me happy I seem to catch out of the sky with both hands; I only hold whatever it is that I love because that is all I can really see. The world interferes with me and my happiness, but I never interfere with the world except now since I am with Dick.” Bernice put her hand out on the table for Dick to take hold of it. She was already a little drunk.

“It makes me sad to hear you talk like this,” said Dick. “You, as a leftist, know perfectly well that before we fight for our own happiness we must fight for something else. We are living in a period when personal happiness means very little because the individual has very few moments left. It is wise to destroy yourself first; at least to keep only that part of you which can be of use to a big group of people. If you don’t do this you lose sight of objective reality and so forth, and you fall plunk into the middle of a mysticism which right now would be a waste of time.”

“You are right, darling Dickie,” said Bernice, “but sometimes I would love to be waited on in a beautiful room. Sometimes I think it would be nice to be a bourgeois.” (She said the word “bourgeois,” Miss Goering noticed, as though she had just learned it.) Bernice continued: “I am such a human person. Even though I am poor I will miss the same things that they do, because sometimes at night the fact that they are sleeping in their houses with security, instead of making me angry, fills me with peace like a child who is scared at night likes to hear grown people talking down in the street. Don’t you think there is some sense in what I say, Dickie?”

“None whatsoever!” said the boy. “We know perfectly well that it is this security of theirs that makes us cry out at night.”

Miss Goering by now was very anxious to get into the conversation.

“You,” she said to Dick, “are interested in winning a very correct and intelligent fight. I am far more interested in what is making this fight so hard to win.”

“They have the power in their hands; they have the press and the means of production.”

Miss Goering put her hand over the boy’s mouth. He jumped. “This is very true,” she said, “but isn’t it very obvious that there is something else too that you are fighting? You are fighting their present position on this earth, to which they are all grimly attached. Our race, as you know, is not torpid. They are grim because they still believe the earth is flat and that they are likely to fall off it at any minute. That is why they hold on so hard to the middle. That is, to all the ideals by which they have always lived. You cannot confront men who are still fighting the dark and all the dragons, with a new future.”

“Well, well,” said Dick, “what should I do then?”

“Just remember,” said Miss Goering, “that a revolution won is an adult who must kill his childhood once and for all.”

“I’ll remember,” said Dick, sneering a bit at Miss Goering.

The man who had been rolling the balls was now standing at the bar.

“I better go see what Andy wants,” said Frank. He had been whistling softly all through Miss Goering’s conversation with Dick, but he seemed to have been listening nevertheless, because as he was leaving the table he turned to Miss Goering.

“I think that the earth is a very nice place to be living on,” he said to her, “and I never felt that by going one step too far I was going to fall off it either. You can always do things two or three times on the earth and everybody’s plenty patient till you get something right. First time wrong doesn’t mean you’re sunk.”