Everything is Nice

by Jane Bowles

  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 matter
ed to him. "I'll stay with you for as long as you like," he said.

  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.