Everything is Nice

by Jane Bowles

  "I'll have to get out on the ground," she said to herself three or four times. Behind her she could hear the subdued voices of the two other women and Berenice. But they seemed far away, as if they were speaking in a separate room. She felt along the glass several times as if she would find a way of going through the window to get outside, but in a moment she sighed and turned around, scanning the room for the right door. In order to reach it she had to pass the table where the others were sitting. But she kept her head high and was in truth scarcely aware of their presence at all.

  Unfortunately Laura was drinking her eighth beer, which suddenly changed her mood into one of lachrymose affection.

  "Sally, sweetheart," she called as Sally stalked past the table. "Sally, darling, where are you going?" Sally already had her hand on the knob and was pulling on it, but Laura sprang to her feet and reach Sally's side before she was able to get through the door.

  "You have to come and eat your ravioli, because it's delicious, but if you won't eat you can talk to Berenice and Rita and me," Laura said to her. Putting her arms around Sally she searched her face with tenderly swimming eyes.

  Sally looked as though she were about to be sick, but with unexpected energy she wrenched herself loose from Laura's embrace and fairly flew out of the room.

  The evening air was cold and still, now that the storm had passed, and the sky near the horizon was green, the color green that chills the heart of a person of melancholic or tempestuous nature. But Sally did not even notice it. No natural sight ever depressed her and she did not know what it was to be melancholic.

  Pine cones, now soggy and darker-colored after the rain, were scattered about underneath the trees. Sally's sister Henrietta liked to paint pine cones different colors and then heap them into a bowl for decoration.

  Sally felt infinitely weary as she looked at these cones, which seemed to be scattered about the grass as far as her eye could see. However (and in spite of the fact that pine cones were abundant in all the surrounding region and lay scattered about even at the very door of her own cabin at Camp Cataract), she felt challenged to gather some, soggy as they were, to take back to her sister. She had nothing but her hat to carry them in, which she determined to use. Squatting down on her heels, she was quickly absorbed in selecting the most perfect cones. In her thoughts there was not a shadow of concern about Laura or the Cassalotti sisters. As far as she was concerned, they did not exist.

  Laura had never seen Sally out of control before, and she returned to the table worried and yet excited. Although she was drunk enough to behave carelessly, her instincts forbade her to follow Sally out of doors.

  "What do you suppose got into her?" Laura asked.

  "A jackass," said Berenice.

  Rita reprimanded her sister. "You don't have to use such talk," she said to her.

  "She was quite beside herself when she left the room," Laura added, ignoring Berenice's language. Laura knew that she should not be discussing Sally with the Cassalottis, who were certain to interpret her more simply than her unbalanced nature merited.

  "She's a stuck-up jackass," Berenice said again. "She doesn't want to associate with us or have you associating with us either. Don't you think I've known it all along? She didn't eat those raviolis just to insult Poppa. I'd like to see the rotten stinking food they got at her house."

  "Fried skunk," said Rita placidly, without a smile.

  "That's right." Berenice nodded her approval.

  Laura had not expected the conversation about Sally to be on such a low level as this. She was particularly surprised to hear Berenice attack Sally so bitterly, since it had never occurred to her that Berenice could be anything but warmhearted and generous toward everyone.

  "Poppa took a lot of trouble making that ravioli for her, and he's a very busy man. I didn't care how the crazy loon acted with us, but she's got to be decent with Poppa. She can't come in here anymore now, that's all.. . . Let her go to a stuck-up place."

  "Sally isn't stuck-up," said Laura, who could never be dishonest. "She is high-strung but not stuck-up. High and strict. She's got systems for living."

  "So have Rita and me got systems, and one of them is not to look like a rat bit us if we are served food in somebody else's house. We say thank you and we eat our food. So do you, Laura. Don't make excuses for her. Anyway, she hates us."

  Berenice was calming down. She scraped at her empty plate with her fork for a little while. Then soon the glow returned to her face, and her eyes were once again shining with warmth and enthusiasm.

  "Life is too short ..." she said, smiling at Laura, and she poured some more beer. But Laura felt ashamed now to have referred to Sally's behaviour at all, and she was determined to continue the conversation so as to vindicate in some way the cheapness of her original impulse to gossip.

  "I don't think Sally hates you," she said to Berenice. "It's very possible that she loves you."

  Berenice opened her eyes wide with incomprehension.

  "It's not a bit unusual to love and to hate the same person," Laura continued. Her tone was didactic.

  "Unusual," said Berenice. "It's impossible." But she spoke hesitatingly because she was really at sea thus far in the conversation.

  "No, no," Laura insisted. "That's partly why living is such trouble. We are likely to love and to hate the very same person at the very same time, and yet neither emotion is more true than the other. You have to decide which you're going to cater to, that's all. Fortunately, if you are at all decent, you manage to keep pushing love a little bit ahead . . . but it can be very, very difficult keeping it that way. I was that way about my mother, and I have been that way about one other person, but particularly my mother."

  "Oh, no—" The words escaped Berenice involuntarily.

  "Oh, yes!" Laura was vehement. "Sometimes I wanted to hit Mother so hard that it would knock her head right off her body. She's dead now but I think I would feel the same way if she were alive."

  Berenice didn't say anything. She clasped both hands tightly around her glass of beer and stared ahead of her. Rita Cassalotti had long since been occupied with some private concern and remained mute.

  After a moment Berenice broke the silence. "I've got to go out now," she announced. Cocking her head to one side, she smiled at Laura—a charming smile that showed the dimple in her cheek— and she looked for all the world like a young girl taking leave of her hostess at a tea party.

  "But," said Laura, horrified at this unexpected announcement, "I thought we had hours ahead of us still. You didn't say anything...."

  Berenice stood up. "I've got to go into town," she said, and once more she tilted her head to one side and smiled enchantingly at Laura, but without meeting Laura's eye.

  Berenice was leaving, and Laura knew somehow that she had no appointment, and knew too that no word she could utter would bring Berenice back into the room. Laura's cheeks were hot with shame. She could not bear to have Berenice turn away from her this way, although a moment before she had considered Berenice so shallow that she was ashamed to discuss Sally with her. She was in a panic lest Berenice should cast away their friendship, and her shame sprang from a suspicion that she had ruined something in Berenice's heart—not because of Berenice but because such a misdeed would reflect seriously on her own character.

  "Oh, my God," Laura said to herself, "why did I bring up my theory about love and hate? She'll never, never forgive me."

  Laura had a wild respect for people who were capable of becoming so offended that they rose from their chairs and left the room where they were sitting, and sometimes even the house. And if it was for an ideal that they showed such offense and not for any egoistic personal reason, Laura regarded them as saints.

  "She must forgive me," she repeated to herself, "she must, or it will be a real calamity."

  She recalled the moment on the bottom step, when she had not obeyed the seemingly mystical challenge to walk through the wet woods instead of sitting down to eat her raviolis. So now
, by not having had the courage to heed this compulsion, she had lost the Cassalottis as well. In moments of stress she was very apt to see connections between her intimate world and the actions of other people, as if the adverse behavior of others was dependent at least indirectly upon an earlier wrong decision concerning a private matter of her own. She realized the idiocy of such reasoning but at the same time she thought that everyone else felt that way without noticing it. Certainly nothing was so personal to her as this way of being. In fact it was impossible for her to give it up.

  Even so, to witness the shock Berenice had suffered as a result of her own careless remark was to Laura the worst possible punishment, because in the face of Berenice's distress, which overwhelmed this girl so naturally that any question or doubt as to whether she could choose or not choose to overlook her feelings was unthinkable, Laura's own feelings against herself assumed a groteque and petty quality which made her blush. She continued, however, even though humiliated, to suspect that had she not eaten raviolis but really gone walking instead through the woods, she would not have found herself faced by the present quandary. How she was able to feel herself to be grotesque and comical, and at the same time so important that the outcome of her decisions controlled somehow the behaviour of people not in the least connected to it, was a puzzle to Laura herself.

  She saw all these things and even more, for she was educated enough in psychological matters to conceive that the source of Berenice's own violent reaction to her remarks about hating her mother lay not in what she, Laura, had decided earlier on the bottom step, or even in Berenice's genuine moral indignation, but in a hatred that Berenice might have felt and concealed from herself, at one time or another, toward her own mother. Laura knew about such things but they did not help her one bit when she was in the midst of a calamity.

  With all these details very clear in her mind, still (like a person who jumps deliberately into a pit) she was falling deeper and deeper by the second into such an abject terror of Berenice's resentment that she longed for forgiveness more than for anything in the world. She appealed to Rita, hoping that after all she had imagined something amiss in Berenice's behavior while actually everything was really just as it had been a little while before. She had often enough imagined that she had horrified a friend when nothing of the kind had occurred.

  "Rita, did Berenice have an appointment?" she asked.

  "No, she didn't have no appointment," Rita said, shrugging her shoulders.

  "Where did she go then, Rita?" Laura insisted, fixing her eyes on Rita's face.

  "She went flying away with the birdies," said Rita Cassalotti, and with sudden animation she stretched out both her arms and moved them up and down in imitation of a bird's flight.

  To see Rita thus unconcerned and jesting made Laura feel her plight ever more keenly, for she needed someone's sympathy badly right then. She plucked at Rita's pink sleeve, trying to halt the upward motion of her arm.

  "Please stop flying, Rita, and talk to me."

  She looked so peculiar that Rita burst out laughing.

  "Rita," Laura pleaded, "why do you think she went away?"

  Rita shrugged her shoulders. She never paid much attention to Berenice's comings and goings, and had actually scarcely taken notice when Berenice left the table. Rita yawned and got up. "I'm going to get dressed," she said. "I've got a real complete appointment tonight, including dinner, movies, drinks and dancing—with a married guy, too." She started to leave the room and Laura followed behind her. They mounted the stairs together in silence. Laura knew that Rita wanted to be left alone but she was far too nervous to remain by herself and her pride was nonexistent.

  "I've got to get dressed," said Rita when she found Laura was behind her even in the bedroom.

  "Oh, but please, Rita, let me stay here," Laura begged her, and she searched her mind rapidly for a topic of conversation that might interest Rita. "Rita," she said, her eyes full of concern, "I'm terribly worried about your going around with a married man."

  "Why?" Rita asked with no interest. She took off her wrapper and stood before Laura in her bloomers. "I'm not afraid of his wife," she said, thrusting her chin out.

  "But morally it's wrong." Laura searched her brain frantically, trying to remember at least one reasonable argument against adultery, but she couldn't think of any.

  "If he don't go with me, he'll go with someone else," Rita said flatly. "Not that I give a hoot whether I go with him or anyone else. They're all alike, the men, and I never cared for their company much."

  "Why not, Rita?" Laura asked her with great interest.

  "I don't know," Rita said, "I just don't care for them. I wish you'd let me dress by myself," she said. "I can't keep my mind on it with you here."

  There was nothing left for Laura to do but leave. She thought it was irritating that a dumbbell like Rita Cassalotti needed her privacy at all, and she went out angry as well as forlorn.

  "I've ruined everything," she said to herself, descending the stairway slowly, one step at a time.

  Not knowing whether it was useless or not to wait for Berenice's return, she wandered aimlessly about the dining room, straightening chairs and stopping now and then to gaze at the glassed-in scene, so provokingly flooded with light when the dining room itself lay in darkness. The orange truck driven by the celluloid baby held her eye. The doll, not designed to sit up, had been tilted against the back of the seat with its legs curled in the air almost over its head.

  In spite of the incongruity apparent in this combination, she was overcome with boredom, looking at it as if she were seeing it not for the first but for the thousandth time. She turned herself away, almost in embarrassment, as though she herself were responsible for what she saw in the glass case. She would have liked to ponder on the mysterious effect these two objects had on her, but just then the full realization that Berenice Cassalotti would never have faith in her again seemed, like an ocean wave, to break over her head and wash all other thoughts away.

  She hurried out of the dining room and into the store. It was empty. On all other occasions Berenice had taken her to the door flushed with beer and pleasure, and filled with the anticipation of Laura's next visit, for in Berenice's joyous heart even a departure took on the aspect of a return.

  Laura closed the door behind her and started toward the road that led out of the village to Camp Cataract. It was a wide sandy road bordered by such tall pine trees that, with the exception of a few sunny hours at midday, the road lay constantly in the shadows. The sandy earth was cold and no grass grew anywhere.

  Far ahead of her, out of hearing but not out of sight, Laura could see Sally walking along, her handbag swinging from her wrist. She was walking slowly, with small steps, her head bent, and at a pace suitable to a city street.

  Laura had forgotten about her completely.