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

RHODA ( Clasping her hands with feeling ) Yes, Why? Why? Why? Why? Oh, what a hideous riddle!

HARRIET You love to pretend that everything is a riddle. You think that’s the way to be intellectual. There is no riddle. I am simply keeping up my end of the bargain.

RHODA Oh, bargains, bargains, bargains!

HARRIET Will you let me finish, you excitable thing? I’m trying to explain that I’m behaving the way I was molded to behave. I happen to be appreciative of the mold I was cast in, and neither heaven, nor earth is going to make me damage it. Your high-strung emotions are not going to affect me. Here’s your milk.

( She enters RHODA’S side of the stage and hands her the milk, but RHODA punches the bottom of the glass with her closed fist and sends it flying out of HARRIET’S hand. HARRIET deals RHODA a terrific blow on the face and scurries back to her own room. There is silence for a moment. Then HARRIET buries her face in her hands and weeps. RHODA exits and HARRIET goes to the chimes and sings. )

HARRIET ( Singing )

I dreamed I climbed upon a cliff,

My sister’s hand in mine.

Then searched the valley for my house

But only sunny fields could see

And the church spire shining.

I searched until my heart was cold

But only sunny fields could see

And the church spire shining.

A girl ran down the mountainside

With bluebells in her hat.

I asked the valley for her name

But only wind and rain could hear

And the church bell tolling.

I asked until my lips were cold

But wakened not yet knowing

If the name she bore was my sister’s name

Or if it was my own.

HARRIET Rhoda?

RHODA What do you want?

HARRIET Go away if you like.

RHODA The moment hasn’t come yet, and it won’t come today because the day is finished and the evening is here. Thank God!

HARRIET I know I should get some terrible disease and die if I thought I did not live in the right. It would break my heart.

RHODA You do live in the right, sweetie, so don’t think about it. ( Pause ) I’ll go and get your milk.

HARRIET I’ll go too. But let’s drink it in here because it really is much pleasanter in here, isn’t it? ( They rise ) Oh, I’m so glad the evening has come! I’m nervously exhausted. ( They exit )

The clay pit had been dug in the side of a long hill. By leaning back against the lower part of its wall, Mary could see the curved highway above her and the cars speeding past. On the other side of the highway the hill continued rising, but at a steeper angle. If she tilted her head farther back, she could glimpse the square house on the hill’s summit, with its flight of stone steps that led from the front door down to the curb, dividing the steep lawn in two.

She had been playing in the pit for a long time. Like many other children, she fancied herself at the head of a regiment; at the same time, she did not join in any neighborhood games, preferring to play all alone in the pit, which lay about a mile beyond the edge of town. She was a scrupulously clean child with a strong, immobile face and long, well-arranged curls. Sometimes when she went home toward evening there were traces of clay on her dark coat, even though she had worked diligently with the brush she carried along every afternoon. She despised untidiness, and she feared that the clay might betray her headquarters, which she suspected the other children of planning to invade.

One afternoon she stumbled and fell on the clay when it was still slippery and wet from a recent rainfall. She never failed to leave the pit before twilight, but this time she decided to wait until it was dark so that her sullied coat would attract less attention. Wisely she refrained from using her brush on the wet clay.

Having always left the pit at an earlier hour, she felt that an explanation was due to her soldiers; to announce simply that she had fallen down was out of the question. She knew that her men trusted her and would therefore accept in good faith any reason she chose to give them for this abrupt change in her day’s routine, but convincing herself was a more difficult task. She never told them anything until she really believed what she was going to say. After concentrating a few minutes, she summoned them with a bugle call.

“Men,” she began, once they were lined up at attention, “I’m staying an hour longer today than usual, so I can work on the mountain goat maneuvers. I explained mountain-goat fighting last week, but I’ll tell you what it is again. It’s a special technique used in the mountains around big cliffs. No machine can do mountain-goat fighting. We’re going to specialize.” She paused. “Even though I’m staying, I want you to go right ahead and have your recreation hour as usual, like you always do the minute I leave. I have total respect for your recreation, and I know you fight as hard as you play.”

She dismissed them and walked up to her own headquarters in the deepest part of the pit. At the end of the day the color of the red pit deepened; then, after the sun had sunk behind the hill, the clay lost its color. She began to feel cold and a little uneasy. She was so accustomed to leaving her men each day at the same hour, just before they thronged into the gymnasium, that now lingering on made her feel like an intruder.

It was almost night when she climbed out of the pit. She glanced up at the hilltop house and then started down toward the deserted lower road. When she reached the outskirts of town she chose the darkest streets so that the coat would be less noticeable. She hated the thick pats of clay that were embedded in its wool; moreover she was suffering from a sense of inner untidiness as a result of the unexpected change in her daily routine. She walked along slowly, scuffing her heels, her face wearing the expression of a person surfeited with food. Far underneath her increasingly lethargic mood lurked a feeling of apprehension; she knew she would be reprimanded for returning home after dark, but she never would admit either the possibility of punishment or the fear of it. At this period she was rapidly perfecting a psychological mechanism which enabled her to forget, for long stretches of time, that her parents existed.

She found her father in the vestibule hanging his coat up on a peg. Her heart sank as he turned around to greet her. Without seeming to, he took in the pats of clay at a glance, but his shifting eyes never alighted candidly on any object.

“You’ve been playing in that pit below the Speed house again,” he said to her. “From now on, I want you to play at the Kinsey Memorial Grounds.” Since he appeared to have nothing to say, she started away, but immediately he continued. “Some day you may have to live in a town where the administration doesn’t make any provision for children at all. Or it may provide you with a small plot of land and a couple of dinky swings. There’s a very decent sum goes each year to the grounds here. They provide you with swings, seesaws and chin bars.” He glanced furtively at her coat. “Tomorrow,” he said, “I drive past that pit on my way out to Sam’s. I’ll draw up to the edge of the road and look down. See that you’re over at the Memorial Grounds with the other children.”

Mary never passed the playgrounds without quickening her step. This site, where the screams of several dozen children mingled with the high, grinding sound of the moving swings, she had always automatically hated. It was the antithesis of her clay pit and the well-ordered barracks inside it.

When she went to bed, she was in such a state of wild excitement that she was unable to sleep. It was the first time that her father’s observations had not made her feel either humiliated or ill. The following day after school she set out for the pit. As she was climbing the long hill (she always approached her barracks from the lower road), she slackened her pace and stood still. All at once she had had the fear that by looking into her eyes the soldiers might divine her father’s existence. To each one of them she was like himself — a man without a family. After a minute she resumed her climb. When she reached the edge of the pit, she put both feet together and jumped inside.