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

Mrs. Perry sat drinking her wine more and more quickly and her resentment mounted with each new glass.

“I know all the proprietors of dance houses in the county also,” she said. “My sister Dorothy Alvarez has them up to her house for beer when they take a holiday. I’ve got no need to meet anybody new or see any new places. I even know this place we are eating in from a long time ago. I had dinner here with my husband a few times.” She looked around her. “I remember him, ” she said, pointing a long arm at the proprietor, who had just stepped out of the kitchen.

“How are you after these many years?” she called to him.

Mr. Drake was hesitant about what to do. He had not realized that Mrs. Perry was getting as drunk as she seemed to be now. Ordinarily he would have felt embarrassed and would have hastened to lead her out of the restaurant, but he thought that she might be more approachable drunk and nothing else mattered to him. “I’ll stay with you for as long as you like,” he said.

His words spun around in Mrs. Perry’s mind. “What are you making a bid for, anyway?” she asked him, leaning back heavily against the bench.

“Nothing dishonorable,” he said. “On the contrary, something extremely honorable if you will accept.” Mr. Drake was so distraught that he did not know exactly what he was saying, but Mrs. Perry took his words to mean a proposal of marriage, which was unconsciously what he had hoped she would do. Mrs. Perry looked at even this exciting offer through the smoke of her resentment.

“I suppose,” she said, smiling joylessly, “that you would like a lady to mash your potatoes for you three times a day. But I am not a mashed-potato masher and I never have been. I would prefer,” she added, raising her voice, “I would prefer to have him mash my potatoes for me in a big restaurant kitchen.” She nodded in the direction of the proprietor, who had remained standing in front of the kitchen door so that he could watch Mrs. Perry. This time he grinned and winked his eye.

Mrs. Perry fumbled through the contents of her purse in search of a handkerchief and, coming upon her sister’s string of beads, she pulled them out and laid them in her gravy. “I am not a mashed-potato masher,” she repeated, and then without warning she clambered out of the booth and lumbered down the aisle. She disappeared up a dark brown staircase at the back of the restaurant. Both Mr. Drake and the proprietor assumed that she was going to the ladies’ toilet.

Actually Mrs. Perry was not specifically in search of the toilet, but rather for any place where she could be alone. She walked down the hall upstairs and jerked open a door on her left, closing it behind her. She stood in total darkness for a minute, and then, feeling a chain brush her forehead, she yanked at it brutally, lighting the room from a naked ceiling bulb, which she almost pulled down together with its fixtures.

She was standing at the foot of a double bed with a high Victorian headboard. She looked around her and, noticing a chair placed underneath a small window, she walked over to it and pushed the window open, securing it with a short stick; then she sat down.

“This is perfection,” she said aloud, glaring at the ugly little room. “This is surely a gift from the Lord.” She squeezed her hands together until her knuckles were white. “Oh, how I love it here! How I love it! How I love it!”

She flung one arm out over the window sill in a gesture of abandon, but she had not noticed that the rain was teeming down, and it soaked her lavender sleeve in a very short time.

“Mercy me!” she remarked, grinning. “It’s raining here. The people at the dinner tables don’t get the rain, but I do and I like it!” She smiled benignly at the rain. She sat there half awake and half asleep and then slowly she felt a growing certainty that she could reach her own room from where she was sitting without ever returning to the restaurant. “I have kept the pathway open all my life,” she muttered in a thick voice, “so that I could get back.”

A few moments later she said, “I am sitting there.” An expression of malevolent triumph transformed her face and she made a slight effort to stiffen her back. She remained for a long while in the stronghold of this fantasy, but it gradually faded and in the end dissolved. When she drew her cold shaking arm in out of the rain, the tears were streaming down her cheeks. Without ceasing to cry she crept on to the big double bed and fell asleep, face downward, with her hat on.

Meanwhile the proprietor had come quietly upstairs, hoping that he would bump into her as she came out of the ladies’ toilet. He had been flattered by her attention and he judged that in her present drunken state it would be easy to sneak a kiss from her and perhaps even more. When he saw the beam of light shining under his own bedroom door, he stuck his tongue out over his lower lip and smiled. Then he tiptoed down the stairs, plotting on the way what he would tell Mr. Drake.

Everyone had left the restaurant, and Mr. Drake was walking up and down the aisle when the proprietor reached the bottom of the staircase.

“I am worried about my lady friend,” Mr. Drake said, hurrying up to him. “I am afraid that she may have passed out in the toilet.”

“The truth is,” the proprietor answered, “that she has passed out in an empty bedroom upstairs. Don’t worry about it. My daughter will take care of her if she wakes up feeling sick. I used to know her husband. You can’t do nothing about her now.” He put his hands into his pockets and looked solemnly into Mr. Drake’s eyes.

Mr. Drake, not being equal to such a delicate situation, paid his bill and left. Outside he crawled into his freshly painted red truck and sat listening desolately to the rain.

* * *

The next morning Mrs. Perry awakened a little after sunrise. Thanks to her excellent constitution she did not feel very sick, but she lay motionless on the bed looking around her at the walls for a long time. Slowly she remembered that this room she was lying in was above the restaurant, but she did not know how she had gotten there. She remembered the dinner with Mr. Drake, but not much of what she had said to him. It did not occur to her to blame him for her present circumstance. She was not hysterical at finding herself in a strange bed because, although she was a very tense and nervous woman, she possessed great depth of emotion and only certain things concerned her personally.

She felt very happy and she thought of her uncle who had passed out at a convention fifteen years ago. He had walked around the town all the morning without knowing where he was. She smiled.

After resting a little while longer, she got out of bed and clothed herself. She went into the hall and found the staircase and she descended with bated breath and a fast-beating heart, because she was so eager to get back down into the restaurant.

It was flooded with sunshine and still smelled of meat and sauce. She walked a little unsteadily down the aisle between the rows of wooden booths and tables. The tables were all bare and scrubbed clean. She looked anxiously from one to the other, hoping to select the booth they had sat in, but she was unable to choose among them. The tables were all identical. In a moment this anonymity served only to heighten her tenderness.

“John Drake,” she whispered. “My sweet John Drake.”

The highest street in the blue Moslem town skirted the edge of a cliff. She walked over to the thick protecting wall and looked down. The tide was out, and the flat dirty rocks below were swarming with skinny boys. A Moslem woman came up to the blue wall and stood next to her, grazing her hip with the basket she was carrying. She pretended not to notice her, and kept her eyes fixed on a white dog that had just slipped down the side of a rock and plunged into a crater of sea water. The sound of its bark was earsplitting. Then the woman jabbed the basket firmly into her ribs, and she looked up.