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

John Drake, an equally reserved person, occupied the tenement below hers. He owned a truck and engaged in free-lance work for lumber companies, as well as in the collection and delivery of milk cans for a dairy.

Mr. Drake and Mrs. Perry had never exchanged more than the simplest greeting in all the years that they had lived here in the hillside house.

One night Mr. Drake, who was standing in the hall, heard Mrs. Perry’s heavy footsteps, which he had unconsciously learned to recognize. He looked up and saw her coming downstairs. She was dressed in a brown overcoat that had belonged to her dead husband, and she was hugging a paper bag to her bosom. Mr. Drake offered to help her with the bag and she faltered, undecided, on the landing.

“They are only potatoes,” she said to him, “but thank you very much. I am going to bake them out in the back yard. I have been meaning to for a long time.”

Mr. Drake took the potatoes and walked with a stiff-jointed gait through the back door and down the hill to a short stretch of level land in back of the house which served as a yard. Here he put the paper bag on the ground. There was a big new incinerator smoking near the back stoop and in the center of the yard Mrs. Perry’s uncle had built a roofed-in pigpen faced in vivid artificial brick. Mrs. Perry followed.

She thanked Mr. Drake and began to gather twigs, scuttling rapidly between the edge of the woods and the pigpen, near which she was laying her fire. Mr. Drake, without any further conversation, helped her to gather the twigs, so that when the fire was laid, she quite naturally invited him to wait and share the potatoes with her. He accepted and they sat in front of the fire on an overturned box.

Mr. Drake kept his face averted from the fire and turned in the direction of the woods, hoping in this way to conceal somewhat his flaming-red cheeks from Mrs. Perry. He was a very shy person and though his skin was naturally red all the time it turned to such deep crimson when he was in the presence of a strange woman that the change was distinctly noticeable. Mrs. Perry wondered why he kept looking behind him, but she did not feel she knew him well enough to question him. She waited in vain for him to speak and then, realizing that he was not going to, she searched her own mind for something to say.

“Do you like plain ordinary pleasures?” she finally asked him gravely.

Mr. Drake felt very much relieved that she had spoken and his color subsided. “You had better first give me a clearer notion of what you mean by ordinary pleasures, and then I’ll tell you how I feel about them,” he answered soberly, halting after every few words, for he was as conscientious as he was shy.

Mrs. Perry hesitated. “Plain pleasures,” she began, “like the ones that come without crowds or fancy food.” She searched her brain for more examples. “Plain pleasures like this potato bake instead of dancing and whisky and bands.… Like a picnic but not the kind with a thousand extra things that get thrown out in a ditch because they don’t get eaten up. I’ve seen grown people throw cakes away because they were too lazy to wrap them up and take them back home. Have you seen that go on?”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Mr. Drake.

“They waste a lot,” she remarked.

“Well, I do like plain pleasures,” put in Mr. Drake, anxious that she should not lose the thread of the conversation.

“Don’t you think that plain pleasures are closer to the heart of God?” she asked him.

He was a little embarrassed at her mentioning anything so solemn and so intimate on such short acquaintance, and he could not bring himself to answer her. Mrs. Perry, who was ordinarily shut-mouthed, felt a stream of words swelling in her throat.

“My sister, Dorothy Alvarez,” she began without further introduction, “goes to all gala affairs downtown. She has invited me to go and raise the dickens with her, but I won’t go. She’s the merriest one in her group and separated from her husband. They take her all the places with them. She can eat dinner in a restaurant every night if she wants to. She’s crazy about fried fish and all kinds of things. I don’t pay much mind to what I eat unless it’s a potato bake like this. We each have only one single life which is our real life, starting at the cradle and ending at the grave. I warn Dorothy every time I see her that if she doesn’t watch out her life is going to be left aching and starving on the side of the road and she’s going to get to her grave without it. The farther a man follows the rainbow, the harder it is for him to get back to the life which he left starving like an old dog. Sometimes when a man gets older he has a revelation and wants awfully bad to get back to the place where he left his life, but he can’t get to that place — not often. It’s always better to stay alongside of your life. I told Dorothy that life was not a tree with a million different blossoms on it.” She reflected upon this for a moment in silence and then continued. “She has a box that she puts pennies and nickles in when she thinks she’s running around too much and she uses the money in the box to buy candles with for church. But that’s all she’ll do for her spirit, which is not enough for a grown woman.”

Mr. Drake’s face was strained because he was trying terribly hard to follow closely what she was saying, but he was so fearful lest she reveal some intimate secret of her sister’s and later regret it that his mind was almost completely closed to everything else. He was fully prepared to stop her if she went too far.

The potatoes were done and Mrs. Perry offered him two of them.

“Have some potatoes?” she said to him. The wind was colder now than when they had first sat down, and it blew around the pigpen.

“How do you feel about these cold howling nights that we have? Do you mind them?” Mrs. Perry asked.

“I surely do,” said John Drake.

She looked intently at his face. “He is as red as a cherry,” she said to herself.

“I might have preferred to live in a warm climate maybe,” Mr. Drake was saying very slowly with a dreamy look in his eye, “if I happened to believe in a lot of unnecessary changing around. A lot of going forth and back, I mean.” He blushed because he was approaching a subject that was close to his heart.

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Mrs. Perry. “A lot of switching around is no good.”

“When I was a younger man I had a chance to go way down south to Florida,” he continued. “I had an offer to join forces with an alligator-farm project, but there was no security in the alligators. It might not have been a successful farm; it was not the risk that I minded so much, because I have always yearned to see palm trees and coconuts and the like. But I also believed that a man has to have a pretty good reason for moving around. I think that is what finally stopped me from going down to Florida and raising alligators. It was not the money, because I was not raised to give money first place. It was just that I felt then the way I do now, that if a man leaves home he must leave for some very good reason — like the boys who went to construct the Panama Canal or for any other decent reason. Otherwise I think he ought to stay in his own home town, so that nobody can say about him, ‘What does he think he can do here that we can’t?’ At least that is what I think people in a strange town would say about a man like myself if I landed there with some doutbful venture as my only excuse for leaving home. My brother don’t feel that way. He never stays in one place more than three months.” He ate his potato with a woeful look in his eye, shaking his head from side to side.

Mrs. Perry’s mind was wandering, so that she was very much startled when he suddenly stood up and extended his hand to her.