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

“I’ll leave now,” he said, “but in return for the potatoes, will you come and have supper with me at a restaurant tomorrow night?”

She had not received an invitation of this kind in many years, having deliberately withdrawn from life in town, and she did not know how to answer him. “Do you think I should do that?” she asked.

Mr. Drake assured her that she should do it and she accepted his invitation. On the following afternoon, Mrs. Perry waited for the bus at the foot of the short cement bridge below the house. She needed help and advice from her sister about a lavender dress which no longer fitted her. She herself had never been able to sew well and she knew little about altering women’s garments. She intended to wear her dress to the restaurant where she was to meet John Drake, and she was carrying it tucked under her arm.

Dorothy Alvarez lived on a side street in one half of a two-family house. She was seated in her parlor entertaining a man when Mrs. Perry rang the bell. The parlor was immaculate but difficult to rest in because of the many bright and complicated patterns of the window curtains and the furniture covers, not the least disquieting of which was an enormous orange and black flowerpot design repeated a dozen times on the linoleum floor covering.

Dorothy pulled the curtain aside and peeked out to see who was ringing her bell. She was a curly-headed little person, with thick, unequal cheeks that were painted bright pink.

She was very much startled when she looked out and saw her sister, as she had not been expecting to see her until the following week.

“Oh!” Dorothy exclaimed.

“Who is it?” her guest asked.

“It’s my sister. You better get out of here, because she must have something serious to talk to me about. You better go out the back door. She don’t like bumping up against strangers.”

The man was vexed, and left without bidding Dorothy goodbye. She ran to the door and let Mrs. Perry in.

“Sit down,” she said, pulling her into the parlor. “Sit down and tell me what’s new.” She poured some hard candy from a paper bag into a glass dish.

“I wish you would alter this dress for me or help me do it,” said Mrs. Perry. “I want it for tonight. I’m meeting Mr. Drake, my neighbor, at the restaurant down the street, so I thought I could dress in your house and leave from here. If you did the alteration yourself. I’d pay you for it.”

Dorothy’s face fell. “Why do you offer to pay me for it when I’m your sister?”

Mrs. Perry looked at her in silence. She did not answer, because she did not know why herself. Dorothy tried the dress on her sister and pinned it here and there. “I’m glad you’re going out at last,” she said. “Don’t you want some beads?”

“I’ll take some beads if you’ve got a spare string.”

“Well I hope this is the right guy for you,” said Dorothy, with her customary lack of tact. “I would give anything for you to be in love, so you would quit living in that ugly house and come and live on some street nearby. Think how different everything would be for me. You’d be jollier too if you had a husband who was dear to you. Not like the last one.… I suppose I’ll never stop dreaming and hoping,” she added nervously because she realized, but, as always, a little too late, that her sister hated to discuss such matters. “Don’t think,” she began weakly, “that I’m so happy here all the time. I’m not so serious and solemn as you, of course.…”

“I don’t know what you’ve been talking about,” said Alva Perry, twisting impatiently. “I’m going out to have a dinner.”

“I wish you were closer to me,” whined Dorothy. “I get blue in this parlor some nights.”

“I don’t think you get very blue,” Mrs. Perry remarked briefly.

“Well, as long as you’re going out, why don’t you pep up?”

“I am pepped up,” replied Mrs. Perry.

* * *

Mrs. Perry closed the restaurant door behind her and walked the full length of the room, peering into each booth in search of her escort. He had apparently not yet arrived, so she chose an empty booth and seated herself inside on the wooden bench. After fifteen minutes she decided that he was not coming and, repressing the deep hurt that this caused her, she focused her full attention on the menu and succeeded in shutting Mr. Drake from her mind. While she was reading the menu, she unhooked her string of beads and tucked them away in her purse. She had called the waitress and was ordering pork when Mr. Drake arrived. He greeted her with a timid smile.

“I see that you are ordering your dinner,” he said, squeezing into his side of the booth. He looked with admiration at her lavender dress, which exposed her pale chest. He would have preferred that she be bareheaded because he loved women’s hair. She had on an ungainly black felt hat which she always wore in every kind of weather. Mr. Drake remembered with intense pleasure the potato bake in front of the fire and he was much more excited than he had imagined he would be to see her once again.

Unfortunately she did not seem to have any impulse to communicate with him and his own tongue was silenced in a very short time. They ate the first half of their meal without saying anything at all to each other. Mr. Drake had ordered a bottle of sweet wine and after Mrs. Perry had finished her second glass she finally spoke. “I think they cheat you in restaurants.”

He was pleased she had made any remark at all, even though it was of an ungracious nature.

“Well, it is usually to be among the crowd that we pay large prices for small portions,” he said, much to his own surprise, for he had always considered himself a lone wolf, and his behavior had never belied this. He sensed this same quality in Mrs. Perry, but he was moved by a strange desire to mingle with her among the flock.

“Well, don’t you think what I say is true?” he asked hesitantly. There appeared on his face a curious, dislocated smile and he held his head in an outlandishly erect position which betrayed his state of tension.

Mrs. Perry wiped her plate clean with a piece of bread. Since she was not in the habit of drinking more than once every few years, the wine was going very quickly to her head.

“What time does the bus go by the door here?” she asked in a voice that was getting remarkably loud.

“I can find out for you if you really want to know. Is there any reason why you want to know now?”

“I’ve got to get home some time so I can get up tomorrow morning.”

“Well, naturally I will take you home in my truck when you want to go, but I hope you won’t go yet.” He leaned forward and studied her face anxiously.

“I can get home all right,” she answered him glumly, “and it’s just as good now as later.”

“Well, no, it isn’t,” he said, deeply touched, because there was no longer any mistaking her distinctly inimical attitude. He felt that he must at any cost keep her with him and enlist her sympathies. The wine was contributing to this sudden aggressiveness, for it was not usually in his nature to make any effort to try to get what he wanted. He now began speaking to her earnestly and quickly.

“I want to share a full evening’s entertainment with you, or even a week of entertainment,” he said, twisting nervously on his bench. “I know where all the roadside restaurants and dance houses are situated all through the county. I am master of my truck, and no one can stop me from taking a vacation if I want to. It’s a long time since I took a vacation — not since I was handed out my yearly summer vacation when I went to school. I never spent any real time in any of these roadside houses, but I know the proprietors, nearly all of them, because I have lived here all of my life. There is one dance hall that is built on a lake. I know the proprietor. If we went there, we could stray off and walk around the water, if that was agreeable to you.” His face was a brighter red than ever and he appeared to be temporarily stripped of the reserved and cautious demeanor that had so characterized him the evening before. Some quality in Mrs. Perry’s nature which he had only dimly perceived at first now sounded like a deep bell within himself because of her anger and he was flung backward into a forgotten and weaker state of being. His yearning for a word of kindness from her increased every minute.