“I love my country,” said Sis, for no apparent reason. “I love it to death!”
“Sure you do, Hon,” said Janet. “I could murder Bozoe for upsetting you with her loony talk. You were so peaceful until she came in.”
“Read that letter,” said Sister. After a moment she repeated, as if from a distance: “Read the letter.”
Janet was perplexed. Obviously food was not going to distract Sis, and she had nothing left to suggest, in any case, but some Gorton’s Codfish made into cakes, and she did not dare to offer her these.
What a rumpus that would raise, she said to herself. And if I suggest turning on the television she’ll raise the roof. Stay off television and codfish cakes until she’s normal again. Working at a lunch counter is no joke.
There was nothing she could do but do as Sis told her and hope that she might fall asleep while she was reading her the letter. “Damn Bozoe anyway,” she muttered audibly.
“Don’t put on any acts,” said Sis, clearly awake. “I hate liars and I always smell an act. Even though I didn’t go to college. I have no respect for college.”
“I didn’t go to college,” Janet began, hoping Sis might be led on to a new discussion. “I went to commercial school.”
“Shut up, God damn you! Nobody ever tried to make a commercial school sound like an interesting topic except you. Nobody! You’re out of your mind. Read the letter.”
“Just a second,” said Janet, knowing there was no hope for her. “Let me put my glasses on and find my place. Doing accounts at the garage year in and year out has ruined my eyes. My eyes used to be perfect.” She added this last weakly, without hope of arousing either sympathy or interest.
Sis did not deign to answer.
“Well, here it is again,” she began apologetically. “Here it is in all its glory.” She poured a neat drink to give herself courage. “As I believe I just wrote you, I have been down to the bar and brought a drink back with me. (One more defeat for me, a defeat which is of course a daily occurrence, and I daresay I should not bother to mention it in this letter.) In any case I could certainly not face being without one after the strain of actually boarding the bus, even if I did get off without having the courage to stick on it until I got where I was going. However, please keep in mind the second reason I had for stopping short of my destination. Please read it over carefully so that you will not have only contempt for me. The part about the responsibility I feel toward you. The room here over Larry’s Bar and Grill is dismal. It is one of several rented out by Larry’s sister whom we met a year ago when we stopped here for a meal. You remember. It was the day we took Stretch for a ride and let him out of the car to run in the woods, that scanty patch of woods you found just as the sun was setting, and you kept picking up branches that were stuck together with wet leaves and dirt.…”
From the Notebooks
The Iron Table
They sat in the sun, looking out over a big new boulevard. The waiter had dragged an old iron table around from the other side of the hotel and set it down on the cement near a half-empty flower bed. A string stretched between stakes separated the hotel grounds from the sidewalk. Few of the guests staying at the hotel sat in the sun. The town was not a tourist center, and not many Anglo-Saxons came. Most of the guests were Spanish.
“The whole civilization is going to pieces,” he said.
Her voice was sorrowful. “I know it.” Her answers to his ceaseless complaining about the West’s contamination of Moslem culture had become increasingly unpredictable. Today, because she felt that he was in a very irritable mood and in need of an argument, she automatically agreed with him. “It’s going to pieces so quickly, too,” she said, and her tone was sepulchral.
He looked at her without any light in his blue eyes. “There are places where the culture has remained untouched,” he announced as if for the first time. “If we went into the desert you wouldn’t have to face all this. Wouldn’t you love that?” He was punishing her for her swift agreement with him a moment earlier. He knew she had no desire to go to the desert, and that she believed it was not possible to continue trying to escape from the Industrial Revolution. Without realizing he was doing it he had provoked the argument he wanted.
“Why do you ask me if I wouldn’t love to go into the desert, when you know as well as I do I wouldn’t. We’ve talked about it over and over. Every few days we talk about it.” Although the sun was beating down on her chest, making it feel on fire, deep inside she could still feel the cold current that seemed to run near her heart.
“Well,” he said. “You change. Sometimes you say you would like to go.”
It was true. She did change. Sometimes she would run to him with bright eyes. “Let’s go,” she would say. “Let’s go into the desert.” But she never did this if she was sober.
There was something wistful in his voice, and she had to remind herself that she wanted to feel cranky rather than heartbroken. In order to go on talking she said: “Sometimes I feel like going, but it’s always when I’ve had something to drink. When I’ve had nothing to drink I’m afraid.” She turned to face him, and he saw that she was beginning to have her hunted expression.
“Do you think I ought to go?” she asked him.
“Go where?”
“To the desert. To live in an oasis.” She was pronouncing her words slowly. “Maybe that’s what I should do, since I’m your wife.”
“You must do what you really want to do,” he said. He had been trying to teach her this for twelve years.
“What I really want.… Well, if you’d be happy in an oasis, maybe I’d really want to do that.” She spoke hesitantly, and there was a note of doubt in her voice.
“What?” He shook his head as if he had run into a spiderweb. “What is it?”
“I meant that maybe if you were happy in an oasis I would be, too. Wives get pleasure out of making their husbands happy. They really do, quite aside from its being moral.”
He did not smile. He was in too bad a humor. “You’d go to an oasis because you wanted to escape from Western civilization.”
“My friends and I don’t feel there’s any way of escaping it. It’s not interesting to sit around talking about industrialization.”
“What friends?” He liked her to feel isolated.
“Our friends.” Most of them she had not seen in many years. She turned to him with a certain violence. “I think you come to these countries so you can complain. I’m tired of hearing the word civilization. It has no meaning. Or I’ve forgotten what it meant, anyway.”
The moment when they might have felt tenderness had passed, and secretly they both rejoiced. Since he did not answer her, she went on. “I think it’s uninteresting. To sit and watch costumes disappear, one by one. It’s uninteresting even to mention it.”
“They are not costumes,” he said distinctly. “They’re simply the clothes people wear.”