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

“I don’t like men,” Sadie announced without venom, and she was about to follow Harriet when her attention was arrested by the eyes of the man nearest her. Slowly lowering his corn cob to his plate, he stared across at her, his mouth twisted into a bitter smile. She stood as if rooted to the ground, and under his steady gaze all her newborn joy rapidly drained away. With desperation she realized that Harriet, darting in and out between the crowded tables, would soon be out of sight. After making what seemed to her a superhuman effort she tore herself away from the spot where she stood and lunged after Harriet shouting her name.

Harriet was at her side again almost instantly, looking up at her with a startled expression. Together they returned to the souvenir booth, where Sadie stopped and assumed a slightly bent position as if she were suffering from an abdominal pain.

“What’s the trouble?” she heard Harriet asking with concern. “Are you feeling ill?”

Instead of answering Sadie laid her hand heavily on her sister’s arm and stared at her with a hunted expression in her eyes.

“Please try not to look so much like a gorilla,” said Harriet in a kind voice, but Sadie, although she recognized the accuracy of this observation (for she could feel very well that she was looking like a gorilla), was powerless to change her expression, at least for a moment or two. “Come with me,” she said finally, grabbing Harriet’s hand and pulling her along with almost brutal force. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

She headed down a narrow path leading into a thickly planted section of the grove, where she thought they were less likely to be disturbed. Harriet followed with such a quick, light step that Sadie felt no pull behind her at all and her sister’s hand, folded in her own thick palm, seemed as delicate as the body of a bird. Finally they entered a small clearing where they stopped. Harriet untied a handkerchief from around her neck and mopped her brow. “Gracious!” she said. “It’s frightfully hot in here.” She offered the kerchief to Sadie. “I suppose it’s because we walked so fast and because the pine trees shut out all the wind.… First I’ll sit down and then you must tell me what’s wrong.” She stepped over to a felled tree whose length blocked the clearing. Its torn roots were shockingly exposed, whereas the upper trunk and branches lay hidden in the surrounding grove. Harriet sat down; Sadie was about to sit next to her when she noticed a dense swarm of flies near the roots. Automatically she stepped toward them. “Why are they here?” she asked herself — then immediately she spotted the cause, an open can of beans some careless person had deposited inside a small hollow at the base of the trunk. She turned away in disgust and looked at Harriet. Her sister was seated on the fallen tree, her back gracefully erect and her head tilted in a listening attitude. The filtered light imparted to her face an incredibly fragile and youthful look, and Sadie gazed at her with tenderness and wonder. No sound reached them in the clearing, and she realized with a pounding heart that she could no longer postpone telling Harriet why she had come. She could not have wished for a moment more favorable to the accomplishment of her purpose. The stillness in the air, their isolation, the expectant and gentle light in Harriet’s eye, all these elements should have combined to give her back her faith — faith in her own powers to persuade Harriet to come home with her and live among them once again, winter and summer alike, as she had always done before. She opened her mouth to speak and doubled over, clutching at her stomach as though an animal were devouring her. Sweat beaded her forehead and she planted her feet wide apart on the ground as if this animal would be born. Though her vision was barred with pain, she saw Harriet’s tear-filled eyes, searching hers.

“Let’s not go back to the apartment,” Sadie said, hearing her own words as if they issued not from her mouth but from a pit in the ground. “Let’s not go back there … let’s you and me go out in the world … just the two of us.” A second before covering her face to hide her shame Sadie glimpsed Harriet’s eyes, impossibly close to her own, their pupils pointed with a hatred such as she had never seen before.

It seemed to Sadie that it was taking an eternity for her sister to leave. “Go away … go away … or I’ll suffocate.” She was moaning the words over and over again, her face buried deep in her hands. “Go away … please go away … I’ll suffocate.…” She could not tell, however, whether she was thinking these words or speaking them aloud.

At last she heard Harriet’s footstep on the dry branches, as she started out of the clearing. Sadie listened, but although one step followed another, the cracking sound of the dry branches did not grow any fainter as Harriet penetrated farther into the grove. Sadie knew then that this agony she was suffering was itself the dreaded voyage into the world — the very voyage she had always feared Harriet would make. That she herself was making it instead of Harriet did not affect her certainty that this was it.

* * *

Sadie stood at the souvenir booth looking at some birchbark canoes. The wind was blowing colder and stronger than it had a while ago, or perhaps it only seemed this way to her, so recently returned from the airless clearing. She did not recall her trip back through the grove; she was conscious only of her haste to buy some souvenirs and to leave. Some chains of paper tacked to the side of the booth as decoration kept flying into her face. The Indian chief was smiling at her from behind the counter of souvenirs.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I’m leaving,” said Sadie, “so I want souvenirs.…”

“Take your choice; you’ve got birchbark canoes with or without mailing cards attached, Mexican sombrero ashtrays, exhilarating therapeutic pine cushions filled with the regional needles … and banners for a boy’s room.”

“There’s no boy home,” Sadie said, having caught only these last words.

“How about cushions … or canoes?”

She nodded.

“Which do you want?”

“Both,” she answered quickly.

“How many?”

Sadie closed her eyes. Try as she would she could not count up the members of the family. She could not even reach an approximate figure. “Eleven,” she blurted out finally, in desperation.

“Eleven of each?” he asked raising his eyebrows.

“Yes … yes,” she answered quickly, batting the paper chains out of her face, “eleven of each.”

“You sure don’t forget the old folks at home, do you?” he said, beginning to collect the canoes. He made an individual package of each souvenir and then wrapped them all together in coarse brown paper which he bound with thick twine.

Sadie had given him a note and he was punching his money belt for the correct change when her eyes fell on his light, freckled hand. Startled, she shifted her glance from his hand punching the nickel belt to his brick-colored face streaked with purple and vermilion paint. For the first time she noticed his Irish blue eyes. Slowly the hot flush of shame crept along the nape of her neck. It was the same unbearable mortification that she had experienced in the clearing; it spread upward from her neck to the roots of her hair, coloring her face a dark red. That she was ashamed for the Indian this time, and not of her own words, failed to lessen the intensity of her suffering; the boundaries of her pride had never been firmly fixed inside herself. She stared intently at his Irish blue eyes, so oddly light in his brick-colored face. What was it? She was tormented by the sight of an incongruity she couldn’t name. All at once she remembered the pavilion and the people dining there; her heart started to pound. “They’ll see it,” she said to herself in a panic. “They’ll see it and they’ll know that I’ve seen it too.” Somehow this latter possibility was the most perilous of all.