Collected Stories of Carson McCullers (43 page)

Berenice did not laugh. Her dark eye glanced down in a corner, quickly saw the joke, and then looked back at Frankie. Berenice wore her pink crepe dress and her hat with the pink plume was on the table. The blue glass eye made the sweat on her dark face look bluish also. Berenice was stroking the hat plume with her hand.

"And you know what Janice remarked?" asked Frankie. "When Papa mentioned about how much I've grown, she said she didn't think I looked so terribly big. She said she got the major portion of her growth before she was thirteen. She did, Berenice!"

"O.K.! All right."

"She said she thought I was a lovely size and would probably not grow any taller. She said all fashion models and movie stars—"

"She did not," said Berenice. "I heard her. She only remarked that you probably had already got your growth. But she didn't go on and on like that. To hear you tell it, anybody would think she took her text on the subject."

"She said—"

"This is a serious fault with you, Frankie. Somebody just makes a loose remark and then you cozen it in your mind until nobody would recognize it. Your Aunt Pet happened to mention to Clorina that you had sweet manners and Clorina passed it on to you. For what it was worth. Then next thing I know you are going all around and bragging how Mrs. West thought you had the finest manners in town and ought to go to Hollywood, and I don't know what all you didn't say. You keep building on to any little compliment you hear about yourself. Or, if it is a bad thing, you do the same. You cozen and change things too much in your own mind. And that is a serious fault."

"Quit preaching at me," Frankie said.

"I ain't preaching. It is the solemn truth."

"I admit it a little," said Frankie finally. She closed her eyes and the kitchen was very quiet. She could feel the beating of her heart, and when she spoke her voice was a whisper. "What I need to know is this. Do you think I made a good impression?"

"Impression? Impression?"

"Yes," said Frankie, her eyes still closed.

"Well, how would I know?" said Berenice.

"I mean how did I act? What did I do?"

"Why, you didn't do anything."

"Nothing?" asked Frankie.

"No. You just watched the pair of them like they was ghosts. Then, when they talked about the wedding, them ears of yours stiffened out the size of cabbage leaves—"

Frankie raised her hand to her left ear. "They didn't," she said bitterly. Then after a while she added, "Some day you going to look down and find that big fat tongue of yours pulled out by the roots and laying there before you on the table. Then how do you think you will feel?"

"Quit talking so rude," said Berenice.

Frankie scowled down at the splinter in her foot. She finished cutting it out with the knife and said, "That would have hurt anybody else but me." Then she was walking round and round the room again. "I am so scared I didn't make a good impression."

"What of it?" said Berenice. "I wish Honey and T.T. would come on. You make me nervous."

Frankie drew up her left shoulder and bit her lower lip. Then suddenly she sat down and banged her forehead on the table.

"Come on," said Berenice. "Don't act like that."

But Frankie sat stiff, her face in the crook of her elbow and her fists clenched tight. Her voice had a ragged and strangled sound. "They were so pretty," she was saying. "They must have such a good time. And they went away and left me."

"Sit up," said Berenice. "Behave yourself."

"They came and went away," she said. "They went away and left me with this feeling."

"Hooee!" said Berenice finally. "I bet I know something."

The kitchen was silent and she tapped four times with her heel: one, two, three—
bang!
Her live eye was dark and teasing and she tapped with her heel, then took up the beating with a dark jazz voice that was like a song.

Frankie got a crush!
Frankie got a crush!
Frankie got a crush!
On the
Wedd
-ing!

"Quit," said Frankie.

Frankie got a crush!
Frankie got a crush!

Berenice went on and on, and her voice was jazzed like the heart that beats in your head when you have fever. Frankie was dizzy, and she picked up the knife from the kitchen table.

"You better quit!"

Berenice stopped very suddenly. The kitchen was suddenly shrunken and quiet.

"You lay down that knife."

"Make me."

She steadied the end of the handle against her palm and bent the blade slowly. The knife was limber, sharp, and long.

"Lay it down, DEVIL!"

But Frankie stood up and took careful aim. Her eyes were narrowed and the feel of the knife made her hands stop trembling.

"Just throw it!" said Berenice. "You just!"

All the house was very quiet. The empty house seemed to be waiting. And then there was the knife whisde in the air and the sound the blade made when it struck. The knife hit the middle of the stairway door and shivered there. She watched the knife until it did not shiver any longer.

"I am the best knife-thrower in this town," she said.

Berenice, who stood behind her, did not speak.

"If they would have a contest I would win."

Frankie pulled the knife from the door and laid it on the kitchen table. Then she spat on her palm and rubbed her hands together.

Berenice said finally: "Frances Addams, you going to do that once too often."

"I never miss outside of a few inches."

"You know what your father said about knife-throwing in this house."

"I warned you to quit picking with me."

"You are not fit to live in a house," said Berenice.

"I won't be living in this one much longer. I'm going to run away from home."

"And a good riddance to a big old bad rubbage," said Berenice.

"You wait and see. I'm leaving town."

"And where you think you are going?"

Frankie looked at all the corners of the room, and then said, '"I don't know."

"I do," said Berenice. "You going crazy. That's where you going."

"No," said Frankie. She stood very still, looking around the queerly pictured wall, and then she closed her eyes. "I'm going to Winter Hill. I'm going to the wedding. And I swear to Jesus by my two eyes I'm never coming back here any more."

She had not been sure that she would throw the knife until it struck and shivered on the stairway door. And she had not known that she would say these words until already they were spoken. The swear was like the sudden knife; she felt it strike in her and tremble. Then when the words were quiet, she said again:

"After the wedding I'm not coming back."

Berenice pushed back the damp bangs of Frankie's hair and finally she asked: "Sugar? You serious?"

"Of course!" said Frankie. "Do you think I would stand here and swear that swear and tell a story? Sometimes, Berenice, I think it takes you longer to realize a fact than it does anybody who ever lived."

"But," said Berenice, "you say you don't know where you're going. You going, but you don't know where. That don't make no sense to me."

Frankie stood looking up and down the four walls of the room. She thought of the world, and it was fast and loose and turning, faster and looser and and bigger than ever it had been before. The pictures of the war sprang out and clashed together in her mind. She saw bright flowered islands and a land by a northern sea with the gray waves on the shore. Bombed eyes and the shuffle of soldiers' feet. Tanks and a plane, wing broken, burning and downward-falling in a desert sky. The world was cracked by the loud battles and turning a thousand miles a minute. The names of places spun in Frankie's mind: China, Peachville, New Zealand, Paris, Cincinnati, Rome. She thought of the huge and turning world until her legs began to tremble and there was sweat on the palms of her hands. But still she did not know where she should go. Finally she stopped looking around the four kitchen walls and said to Berenice:

"I feel just exactly like somebody has peeled all the skin off me. I wish I had some cold good chocolate ice cream."

Berenice had her hands on Frankie's shoulders and was shaking her head and staring with the live eye narrowed into Frankie's face.

"But every word 1 told you was the solemn truth," she said. "I'm not coming back here after the wedding."

There was a sound, and when they turned they saw that Honey and T. T. Williams were standing in the doorway. Honey, though he was her foster brother, did not resemble Berenice—and it was almost as though he came from some foreign country, like Cuba or Mexico. He was light-skinned, almost lavender in color, with quiet narrow eyes like oil, and a limber body. Behind him stood T. T. Williams, and he was very big and black; he was gray-haired, older even than Berenice, and he wore a church suit with a red badge in the buttonhole. T. T. Williams was a beau of Berenice, a well-off colored man who owned a colored restaurant. Honey was a sick, loose person. The army would not include him, and he had shoveled in a gravel pit until he broke one of his insides and could not do heavy work any more. They stood dark and grouped together in the door.

"What you all creep up like that for?" asked Berenice. "I didn't even hear you."

"You and Frankie too busy discussing something," said T.T.

"I am ready to go," said Berenice. "I been ready. But do you wish a small little quickie before we start?"

T. T. Williams looked at Frankie and shuffled his feet. He was very proper, and he liked to please everybody, and he always wanted to do the right thing.

"Frankie ain't no tattle-tale," said Berenice. "Is you?"

Frankie would not even answer such a question. Honey wore a dark red rayon slack suit and she said: "That sure is a cute suit you got on, Honey. Where did you get it?"

Honey could talk like a white school-teacher; his lavender lips could move as quick and light as butterflies. But he only answered with a colored word, a dark sound from the throat that can mean anything. "Ahhnnh," he said.

The glasses were before them on the table, and the hair-straightening bottle that held gin, but they did not drink. Berenice said something about Paris and Frankie had the extra feeling that they were waiting for her to leave. She stood in the door and looked at them. She did not want to go away.

"You wish water in yours, T.T.?" asked Berenice.

They were together around the table and Frankie stood extra in the door alone. "So long, you all," she said.

"'Bye Sugar," said Berenice. "You forget all that foolishness we was discussing. And if Mr. Addams don't come home by dark, you go on over to the Wests'. Go play with John Henry."

"Since when have I been scared of the dark?" said Frankie. "So long."

"So long," they said.

She closed the door, but behind her she could hear their voices. With her head against the kitchen door she could hear the murmuring dark sounds that rose and fell in a gentle way. Ayee—ayee. And then Honey spoke above the idle wash of voices and he asked: "What was it between you and Frankie when we come in the house?" She waited, her ear pressed close against the door, to hear what Berenice would say. And finally the words were: "Just foolishness. Frankie was carrying on with foolishness." She listened until at last she heard them go away.

The empty house was darkening. She and her father were alone at night, as Berenice went to her own home direcdy after supper. Once they had rented the front bedroom. It was the year after her grandmother died, when Frankie was nine. They rented the front bedroom to Mr. and Mrs. Marlowe. The only thing Frankie remembered about them was the remark said at the last, that they were common people. Yet for the season they were there, Frankie was fascinated by Mr. and Mrs. Marlowe and the front room. She loved to go in when they were away and carefully, lightly meddle with their things—with Mrs. Marlowe's atomizer which skeeted perfume, the gray-pink powder puff, the wooden shoe-trees of Mr. Marlowe. They left mysteriously after an afternoon that Frankie did not understand. It was a summer Sunday and the hall door of the Marlowes' room was open. She could see only a portion of the room, part of the dresser and only the footpiece of the bed with Mrs. Marlowe's corset on it. But there was a sound in the quiet room she could not place, and when she stepped over the threshold she was startled by a sight that, after a single glance, sent her running to the kitchen, crying: Mr. Marlowe is having a fit! Berenice had hurried through the hall, but when she looked into the front room, she merely bunched her lips and banged the door. And evidently told her father, for that evening he said the Marlowes would have to leave. Frankie had tried to question Berenice and find out what was the matter. But Berenice had only said that they were common people and added that with a certain party in the house they ought at least to know enough to shut a door. Though Frankie knew she was the certain party, still she did not understand. What kind of a fit was it? she asked. But Berenice would only answer: Baby, just a common fit. And Frankie knew from the voice's tones that there was more to it than she was told. Later she only remembered the Marlowes as common people, and being common they owned common things—so that long after she had ceased to think about the Marlowes or fits, remembering merely the name and the fact that once they had rented the front bedroom, she associated common people with gray-pink powder puffs and perfume atomizers. The front bedroom had not been rented since.

Frankie went to the hall hatrack and put on one of her father's hats. She looked at her dark ugly mug in the mirror. The conversation about the wedding had somehow been wrong. The questions she had asked that afternoon had all been the wrong questions, and Berenice had answered her with jokes. She could not name the feeling in her, and she stood there until dark shadows made her think of ghosts.

Frankie went out to the street before the house and looked up into the sky. She stood staring with her fist on her hip and her mouth open. The sky was lavender and slowly darkening. She heard in the neighborhood the sound of evening voices and noticed the light fresh smell of watered grass. This was the time of the early evening when, since the kitchen was too hot, she would go for a little while outdoors. She practiced knife-throwing, or sat before the cold-drink store in the front yard. Or she would go around to the back yard, and there the arbor was cool and dark. She wrote shows, although she had outgrown all of her costumes, and was too big to act in them beneath the arbor; this summer she had written very cold shows—shows about Esquimaux and frozen explorers. Then when night had come she would go again back in the house.