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

“I’m not going to be crazy,” Sadie murmured apologetically.

Evelyn glowered in silence and picked up her fork, but then immediately she let it fall again and turned on her sister with renewed exasperation. “Why don’t you ask me why I’m not going to be crazy?” she demanded. “Harriet’s my sister and Grandma’s my grandma just as much as she is yours, isn’t she?”

Sadie’s eyes had a faraway look.

“If you were normal,” Evelyn pursued, “you’d give me an intelligent argument instead of not paying any attention. Do you agree, Hoffer?”

“Yes, I do,” he answered soberly.

Evelyn stiffened her back. “I’m too much like everybody else to be crazy,” she announced with pride. “At a picture show, I feel like the norm.”

The technical difficulty of disappearing without announcing her plan to Evelyn suddenly occurred to Sadie, who glanced up quite by accident at her sister. She knew, of course, that Harriet was supposed to avoid contact with her family during these vacation months at the doctor’s request and even at Harriet’s own; but like some herd animal, who though threatened with the stick continues grazing, Sadie pursued her thoughts imperturbably. She did not really believe in Harriet’s craziness nor in the necessity of her visits to Camp Cataract, but she was never in conscious opposition to the opinions of her sisters. Her attitude was rather like that of a child who is bored by the tedium of grown-up problems and listens to them with a vacant ear. As usual she was passionately concerned only with successfully dissimulating what she really felt, and had she been forced to admit openly that there existed such a remarkable split between her own opinions and those of her sisters, she would have suffered unbelievable torment. She was able to live among them, listening to their conferences with her dead outside ear (the more affluent sister was also present at these sessions, and her husband as well), and even to contribute a pittance toward Harriet’s support at the camp, without questioning the validity either of their decisions or of her own totally divergent attitude. By a self-imposed taboo, awareness of this split was denied her, and she had never reflected upon it.

Harriet had gone to Camp Cataract for the first time a year ago, after a bad attack of nerves combined with a return of her pleurisy. It had been suggested by the doctor himself that she go with his own wife and child instead of traveling with one of her sisters. Harriet had been delighted with the suggestion and Sadie had accepted it without a murmur. It was never her habit to argue, and in fact she had thought nothing of Harriet’s leaving at the time. It was only gradually that she had begun writing the letters to Harriet about Camp Cataract, the nomads and the wanderlust — for she had written others similar to her latest one, but never so eloquent or full of conviction. Previous letters had contained a hint or two here and there, but had been for the main part factual reports about her summer life in the apartment. Since writing this last letter she had not been able to forget her own wonderful and solemn words (for she was rarely eloquent), and even now at the dinner table they rose continually in her throat so that she was thrilled over and over again and could not bother her head about announcing her departure to Evelyn. “It will be easier to write a note,” she said to herself. “I’ll pack my valise and walk out tomorrow afternoon, while they’re at business. They can get their own dinners for a few days. Maybe I’ll leave a great big meat loaf.” Her eyes were shining like stars.

“Take my plate and put it in the warmer, Hoffer,” Evelyn was saying. “I won’t eat another mouthful until Sadie tells us what we can expect. If she feels she’s going off, she can at least warn us about it. I deserve to know how she feels … I tell every single thing I feel to her and Harriet … I don’t sneak around the house like a thief. In the first place I don’t have any time for sneaking, I’m at the office all day! Is this the latest vogue, this sneaking around and hiding everything you can from your sister? Is it?” She stared at Bert Hoffer, widening her eyes in fake astonishment. He shrugged his shoulders.

“I’m no sneak or hypocrite and neither are you, Hoffer, you’re no hypocrite. You’re just sore at the world, but you don’t pretend you love the world, do you?”

Sadie was lightheaded with embarrassment. She had blanched at Evy’s allusion to her going, which she mistook naturally for a reference to her intention of leaving for Camp Cataract.

“Only for a few days…” she mumbled in confusion, “and then I’ll be right back here at the table.”

Evelyn looked at her in consternation. “What do you mean by announcing calmly how many days it’s going to be?” she shouted at her sister. “That’s really sacrilegious! Did you ever hear of such a crusty sacrilegious remark in your life before?” She turned to Bert Hoffer, with a horror-stricken expression on her face. “How can I go to the office and look neat and clean and happy when this is what I hear at home … when my sister sits here and says she’ll only go crazy for a few days? How can I go to the office after that? How can I look right?”

“I’m not going to be crazy,” Sadie assured her again in a sorrowful tone, because although she felt relieved that Evelyn had not, after all, guessed the truth, hers was not a nature to indulge itself in trivial glee at having put someone off her track.

“You just said you were going to be crazy,” Evelyn exclaimed heatedly. “Didn’t she, Bert?”

“Yes,” he answered, “she did say something like that.…”

The tendons of Evelyn’s neck were stretched tight as she darted her eyes from her sister’s face to her husband’s. “Now, tell me this much,” she demanded, “do I go to the office every day looking neat and clean or do I go looking like a bum?”

“You look O.K.,” Bert said.

“Then why do my sisters spit in my eye? Why do they hide everything from me if I’m so decent? I’m wide open, I’m frank, there’s nothing on my mind besides what I say. Why can’t they be like other sisters all over the world? One of them is so crazy that she must live in a cabin for her nerves at my expense, and the other one is planning to go crazy deliberately and behind my back.” She commenced to struggle out of her chair, which as usual proved to be a slow and laborious task. Exasperated, she shoved the table vehemently away from her toward the opposite wall. “Why don’t we leave the space all on one side when there’s no company?” she screamed at both of them, for she was now annoyed with Bert Hoffer as well as with Sadie. Fortunately they were seated at either end of the table and so did not suffer as a result of her violent gesture, but the table jammed into four chairs ranged on the opposite side, pinning three of them backward against the wall and knocking the fourth onto the floor.

“Leave it there,” Evelyn shouted dramatically above the racket. “Leave it there till doomsday,” and she rushed headlong out of the room.

They listened to her gallop down the hall.

“What about the dessert?” Bert Hoffer asked Sadie with a frown. He was displeased because Evelyn had spoken to him sharply.

“Leftover bread pudding without raisins.” She had just gotten up to fetch the pudding when Evelyn summoned them from the parlor.

“Come in here, both of you,” she hollered. “I have something to say.”

They found Evelyn seated on the couch, her head tilted way back on a cushion, staring fixedly at the ceiling. They settled into easy chairs opposite her.

“I could be normal and light in any other family,” she said, “I’m normally a gay light girl … not a morose one. I like all the material things.”