My Sister's Hand in Mine (40 page)

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.”

Everything Is Nice

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.

“That one is a porcupine,” said the woman, pointing a henna-stained finger into the basket.

This was true. A large dead porcupine lay there, with a pair of new yellow socks folded on top of it.

She looked again at the woman. She was dressed in a haik, and the white cloth covering the lower half of her face was loose, about to fall down.

“I am Zodelia,” she announced in a high voice. “And you are Betsoul's friend.” The loose cloth slipped below her chin and hung there like a bib. She did not pull it up.

“You sit in her house and you sleep in her house and you eat in her house,” the woman went on, and she nodded in agreement. “Your name is Jeanie and you live in a hotel with other Nazarenes. How much does the hotel cost you?”

A loaf of bread shaped like a disc flopped on to the ground from inside the folds of the woman's haik, and she did not have to answer her question. With some difficulty the woman picked the loaf up and stuffed it in between the quills of the porcupine and the basket handle. Then she set the basket down on the top of the blue wall and turned to her with bright eyes.

“I am the people in the hotel,” she said. “Watch me.”

She was pleased because she knew that the woman who called herself Zodelia was about to present her with a little skit. It would be delightful to watch, since all the people of the town spoke and gesticulated as though they had studied at the
Comédie Française.

“The people in the hotel,” Zodelia announced, formally beginning her skit. “I am the people in the hotel.”

“‘Good-bye, Jeanie, good-bye. Where are you going?'

“‘I am going to a Moslem house to visit my Moslem friends, Betsoul and her family. I will sit in a Moslem room and eat Moslem food and sleep on a Moslem bed.'

“‘Jeanie, Jeanie, when will you come back to us in the hotel and sleep in your own room?'

“‘I will come back to you in three days. I will come back and sit in a Nazarene room and eat Nazarene food and sleep on a Nazarene bed. I will spend half the week with Moslem friends and half with Nazarenes.'”

The woman's voice had a triumphant ring as she finished her sentence; then, without announcing the end of the sketch, she walked over to the wall and put one arm around her basket.

Down below, just at the edge of the cliff's shadow, a Moslem woman was seated on a rock, washing her legs in one of the holes filled with sea water. Her haik was piled on her lap and she was huddled over it, examining her feet.

“She is looking at the ocean,” said Zodelia.

She was not looking at the ocean; with her head down and the mass of cloth in her lap she could not possibly have seen it; she would have had to straighten up and turn around.

“She is
not
looking at the ocean,” she said.

“She is looking at the ocean,” Zodelia repeated, as if she had not spoken.

She decided to change the subject. “Why do you have a porcupine with you?” she asked her, although she knew that some of the Moslems, particularly the country people, enjoyed eating them.

“It is a present for my aunt. Do you like it?”

“Yes,” she said. “I like porcupines. I like big porcupines and little ones, too.”

Zodelia seemed bewildered, and then bored, and she decided she had somehow ruined the conversation by mentioning small porcupines.

“Where is your mother?” Zodelia said at length.

“My mother is in her country in her own house,” she said automatically; she had answered the question a hundred times.

“Why don't you write her a letter and tell her to come here? You can take her on a promenade and show her the ocean. After that she can go back to her own country and sit in her house.” She picked up her basket and adjusted the strip of cloth over her mouth. “Would you like to go to a wedding?” she asked her.

She said she would love to go to a wedding, and they started off down the crooked blue street, heading into the wind. As they passed a small shop Zodelia stopped. “Stand here,” she said. “I want to buy something.”

After studying the display for a minute or two Zodelia poked her and pointed to some cakes inside a square box with glass sides. “Nice?” she asked her. “Or not nice?”

The cakes were dusty and coated with a thin, ugly-colored icing. They were called
Galletas Ortiz.

“They are very nice,” she replied, and bought her a dozen of them. Zodelia thanked her briefly and they walked on. Presently they turned off the street into a narrow alley and started downhill. Soon Zodelia stopped at a door on the right, and lifted the heavy brass knocker in the form of a fist.

“The wedding is here?” she said to her.

Zodelia shook her head and looked grave. “There is no wedding here,” she said.

A child opened the door and quickly hid behind it, covering her face. She followed Zodelia across the black and white tile floor of the closed patio. The walls were washed in blue, and a cold light shone through the broken panes of glass far above their heads. There was a door on each side of the patio. Outside one of them, barring the threshold, was a row of pointed slippers. Zodelia stepped out of her own shoes and set them down near the others.

She stood behind Zodelia and began to take off her own shoes. It took her a long time because there was a knot in one of her laces. When she was ready, Zodelia took her hand and pulled her along with her into a dimly lit room, where she led her over to a mattress which lay against the wall.

“Sit,” she told her, and she obeyed. Then, without further comment she walked off, heading for the far end of the room. Because her eyes had not grown used to the dimness, she had the impression of a figure disappearing down a long corridor. Then she began to see the brass bars of a bed, glowing weakly in the darkness.

Only a few feet away, in the middle of the carpet, sat an old lady in a dress made of green and purple curtain fabric. Through the many rents in the material she could see the printed cotton dress and the tan sweater underneath. Across the room several women sat along another mattress, and further along the mattress three babies were sleeping in a row, each one close against the wall with its head resting on a fancy cushion.

“Is it nice here?” It was Zodelia, who had returned without her haik. Her black crepe European dress hung unbelted down to her ankles, almost grazing her bare feet. The hem was lopsided. “Is it nice here?” she asked again, crouching on her haunches in front of her and pointing at the old woman. “That one is Tetum,” she said. The old lady plunged both hands into a bowl of raw chopped meat and began shaping the stuff into little balls.

“Tetum,” echoed the ladies on the mattress.

“This Nazarene,” said Zodelia, gesturing in her direction, “spends half her time in a Moslem house with Moslem friends and the other half in a Nazarene hotel with other Nazarenes.”

“That's nice,” said the women opposite. “Half with Moslem friends and half with Nazarenes.”

The old lady looked very stern. She noticed that her bony cheeks were tattoed with tiny blue crosses.