My Sister's Hand in Mine (39 page)

Mrs. Perry hesitated. “Plain pleasures,” she began, “like the ones that come without crowds or fancy food.” She searched her brain for more examples. “Plain pleasures like this potato bake instead of dancing and whisky and bands.… Like a picnic but not the kind with a thousand extra things that get thrown out in a ditch because they don't get eaten up. I've seen grown people throw cakes away because they were too lazy to wrap them up and take them back home. Have you seen that go on?”

“No, I don't think so,” said Mr. Drake.

“They waste a lot,” she remarked.

“Well, I do like plain pleasures,” put in Mr. Drake, anxious that she should not lose the thread of the conversation.

“Don't you think that plain pleasures are closer to the heart of God?” she asked him.

He was a little embarrassed at her mentioning anything so solemn and so intimate on such short acquaintance, and he could not bring himself to answer her. Mrs. Perry, who was ordinarily shut-mouthed, felt a stream of words swelling in her throat.

“My sister, Dorothy Alvarez,” she began without further introduction, “goes to all gala affairs downtown. She has invited me to go and raise the dickens with her, but I won't go. She's the merriest one in her group and separated from her husband. They take her all the places with them. She can eat dinner in a restaurant every night if she wants to. She's crazy about fried fish and all kinds of things. I don't pay much mind to what I eat unless it's a potato bake like this. We each have only one single life which is our real life, starting at the cradle and ending at the grave. I warn Dorothy every time I see her that if she doesn't watch out her life is going to be left aching and starving on the side of the road and she's going to get to her grave without it. The farther a man follows the rainbow, the harder it is for him to get back to the life which he left starving like an old dog. Sometimes when a man gets older he has a revelation and wants awfully bad to get back to the place where he left his life, but he can't get to that place—not often. It's always better to stay alongside of your life. I told Dorothy that life was not a tree with a million different blossoms on it.” She reflected upon this for a moment in silence and then continued. “She has a box that she puts pennies and nickles in when she thinks she's running around too much and she uses the money in the box to buy candles with for church. But that's all she'll do for her spirit, which is not enough for a grown woman.”

Mr. Drake's face was strained because he was trying terribly hard to follow closely what she was saying, but he was so fearful lest she reveal some intimate secret of her sister's and later regret it that his mind was almost completely closed to everything else. He was fully prepared to stop her if she went too far.

The potatoes were done and Mrs. Perry offered him two of them.

“Have some potatoes?” she said to him. The wind was colder now than when they had first sat down, and it blew around the pigpen.

“How do you feel about these cold howling nights that we have? Do you mind them?” Mrs. Perry asked.

“I surely do,” said John Drake.

She looked intently at his face. “He is as red as a cherry,” she said to herself.

“I might have preferred to live in a warm climate maybe,” Mr. Drake was saying very slowly with a dreamy look in his eye, “if I happened to believe in a lot of unnecessary changing around. A lot of going forth and back, I mean.” He blushed because he was approaching a subject that was close to his heart.

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Mrs. Perry. “A lot of switching around is no good.”

“When I was a younger man I had a chance to go way down south to Florida,” he continued. “I had an offer to join forces with an alligator-farm project, but there was no security in the alligators. It might not have been a successful farm; it was not the risk that I minded so much, because I have always yearned to see palm trees and coconuts and the like. But I also believed that a man has to have a pretty good reason for moving around. I think that is what finally stopped me from going down to Florida and raising alligators. It was not the money, because I was not raised to give money first place. It was just that I felt then the way I do now, that if a man leaves home he must leave for some very good reason—like the boys who went to construct the Panama Canal or for any other decent reason. Otherwise I think he ought to stay in his own home town, so that nobody can say about him, ‘What does he think he can do here that we can't?' At least that is what I think people in a strange town would say about a man like myself if I landed there with some doutbful venture as my only excuse for leaving home. My brother don't feel that way. He never stays in one place more than three months.” He ate his potato with a woeful look in his eye, shaking his head from side to side.

Mrs. Perry's mind was wandering, so that she was very much startled when he suddenly stood up and extended his hand to her.

“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.

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.