Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  FRANKIE: What are you doing in my yard? You’re never to set foot on my Papa’s property again. (FRANKIE shakes HELEN.) Son-of-a-bitches. I could shoot you with my Papa’s pistol.

  JOHN HENRY (shaking his fists): Son-of-a-bitches.

  FRANKIE: Why didn’t you elect me? (She goes back into the house.) Why can’t I be a member?

  JOHN HENRY: Maybe they’ll change their mind and invite you.

  BERENICE: I wouldn’t pay them no mind. All my life I’ve been wantin’ things that I ain’t been gettin’. Anyhow those club girls is fully two years older than you.

  FRANKIE: I think they have been spreading it all over town that I smell bad. When I had those boils and had to use that black bitter-smelling ointment, old Helen Fletcher asked me what was that funny smell I had. Oh, I could shoot every one of them with a pistol.

  (FRANKIE sits with her head on the table. JOHN HENRY approaches and pats the back of FRANKIE’s neck.)

  JOHN HENRY: I don’t think you smell so bad. You smell sweet, like a hundred flowers.

  FRANKIE: The son-of-a-bitches. And there was something else. They were telling nasty lies about married people. When I think of Aunt Pet and Uncle Eustace! And my own father! The nasty lies! I don’t know what kind of fool they take me for.

  BERENICE: That’s what I tell you. They too old for you.

  (JOHN HENRY raises his head, expands his nostrils and sniffs at himself. Then FRANKIE goes into the interior bedroom and returns with a bottle of perfume.)

  FRANKIE: Boy! I bet I use more perfume than anybody else in town. Want some on you, John Henry? You want some, Berenice? (She sprinkles perfume.)

  JOHN HENRY: Like a thousand flowers.

  BERENICE: Frankie, the whole idea of a club is that there are members who are included and the non-members who are not included. Now what you ought to do is to round you up a club of your own. And you could be the president yourself. (There is a pause.)

  FRANKIE: Who would I get?

  BERENICE: Why, those little children you hear playing in the neighborhood.

  FRANKIE: I don’t want to be the president of all those little young left-over people.

  BERENICE: Well, then enjoy your misery. That perfume smells so strong it kind of makes me sick.

  (JOHN HENRY plays with the doll at the kitchen table and FRANKIE watches.)

  FRANKIE: Look here at me, John Henry. Take off those glasses. (JOHN HENRY takes off his glasses.) I bet you don’t need those glasses. (She points to the coal scuttle.) What is this?

  JOHN HENRY: The coal scuttle.

  FRANKIE (taking a shell from the kitchen shelf): And this?

  JOHN HENRY: The shell we got at Saint Peter’s Bay last summer.

  FRANKIE: What is that little thing crawling around on the floor?

  JOHN HENRY: Where?

  FRANKIE: That little thing crawling around near your feet.

  JOHN HENRY: Oh. (He squats down.) Why, it’s an ant. How did that get in here?

  FRANKIE: If I were you I’d just throw those glasses away. You can see good as anybody.

  BERENICE: Now quit picking with John Henry.

  FRANKIE: They don’t look becoming. (JOHN HENRY wipes his glasses and puts them back on.) He can suit himself. I was only telling him for his own good. (She walks restlessly around the kitchen.) I bet Janice and Jarvis are members of a lot of clubs. In fact, the army is kind of like a club.

  (JOHN HENRY searches through BERENICE’s pocketbook.)

  BERENICE: Don’t root through my pocketbook like that, Candy. Ain’t a wise policy to search folks’ pocketbooks. They might think you trying to steal their money.

  JOHN HENRY: I’m looking for your new glass eye. Here it is. (He hands BERENICE the glass eye.) You got two nickels and a dime.

  (BERENICE takes off her patch, turns away and inserts the glass eye.)

  BERENICE: I ain’t used to it yet. The socket bothers me. Maybe it don’t fit properly.

  JOHN HENRY: The blue glass eye looks very cute.

  FRANKIE: I don’t see why you had to get that eye. It has a wrong expression—let alone being blue.

  BERENICE: Ain’t anybody ask your judgment, wise-mouth.

  JOHN HENRY: Which one of your eyes do you see out of the best?

  BERENICE: The left eye, of course. The glass eye don’t do me no seeing good at all.

  JOHN HENRY: I like the glass eye better. It is so bright and shiny—a real pretty eye. Frankie, you serious when you gave me this doll a while ago?

  FRANKIE: Janice and Jarvis. It gives me this pain just to think about them.

  BERENICE: It is a known truth that gray-eyed people are jealous.

  FRANKIE: I told you I wasn’t jealous. I couldn’t be jealous of one of them without being jealous of them both. I ’sociate the two of them together. Somehow they’re just so different from us.

  BERENICE: Well, I were jealous when my foster-brother, Honey, married Clorina. I sent a warning I could tear the ears off her head. But you see I didn’t. Clorina’s got ears just like anybody else. And now I love her.

  FRANKIE (stopping her walking suddenly): J.A.—Janice and Jarvis. Isn’t that the strangest thing?

  BERENICE: What?

  FRANKIE: J.A.—Both their names begin with “J.A.”

  BERENICE: And? What about it?

  FRANKIE (walking around the kitchen table): If only my name was Jane. Jane or Jasmine.

  BERENICE: I don’t follow your frame of mind.

  FRANKIE: Jarvis and Janice and Jasmine. See?

  BERENICE: No. I don’t see.

  FRANKIE: I wonder if it’s against the law to change your name. Or add to it.

  BERENICE: Naturally. It’s against the law.

  FRANKIE (impetuously): Well, I don’t care. F. Jasmine Addams.

  JOHN HENRY (approaching with the doll): You serious when you give me this? (He pulls up the doll’s dress and pats her.) I will name her Belle.

  FRANKIE: I don’t know what went on in Jarvis’ mind when he brought me that doll. Imagine bringing me a doll! I had counted on Jarvis bringing me something from Alaska.

  BERENICE: Your face when you unwrapped that package was a study.

  FRANKIE: John Henry, quit pickin’ at the doll’s eyes. It makes me so nervous. You hear me! (He sits the doll up.) In fact, take the doll somewhere out of my sight.

  JOHN HENRY: Her name is Lily Belle.

  (JOHN HENRY goes out and props the doll up on the back steps. There is the sound of an unseen Negro singing from the neighboring yard.)

  FRANKIE (going to the mirror): The big mistake I made was to get this close crew cut. For the wedding, I ought to have long brunette hair. Don’t you think so?

  BERENICE: I don’t see how come brunette hair is necessary. But I warned you about getting your head shaved off like that before you did it. But nothing would do but you shave it like that.

  FRANKIE (stepping back from the mirror and slumping her shoulders): Oh, I am so worried about being so tall. I’m twelve and five-sixth years old and already five feet five and three-fourths inches tall. If I keep on growing like this until I’m twenty-one, I figure I will be nearly ten feet tall.

  JOHN HENRY (re-entering the kitchen): Lily Belle is taking a nap on the back steps. Don’t talk so loud, Frankie.

  FRANKIE (after a pause): I doubt if they ever get married or go to a wedding. Those freaks.

  BERENICE: Freaks. What freaks you talking about?

  FRANKIE: At the fair. The ones we saw there last October.

  JOHN HENRY: Oh, the freaks at the fair! (He holds out an imaginary skirt and begins to skip around the room with one finger resting on the top of his head.) Oh, she was the cutest little girl I ever saw. I never saw anything so cute in my whole life. Did you, Frankie?

  FRANKIE: No. I don’t think she was cute.

  BERENICE: Who is that he’s talking about?

  FRANKIE: That little old pin-head at the fair. A head no bigger than an orange. With the hair shaved off and a big pink bow at the top.
Bow was bigger than the head.

  JOHN HENRY: Shoo! She was too cute.

  BERENICE: That little old squeezed-looking midget in them little trick evening clothes. And that giant with the hang-jaw face and them huge loose hands. And that morphidite! Half man—half woman. With that tiger skin on one side and that spangled skirt on the other.

  JOHN HENRY: But that little-headed girl was cute.

  FRANKIE: And that wild colored man they said came from a savage island and ate those real live rats. Do you think they make a very big salary?

  BERENICE: How would I know? In fact, all them freak folks down at the fair every October just gives me the creeps.

  FRANKIE (after a pause, and slowly): Do I give you the creeps?

  BERENICE: You?

  FRANKIE: Do you think I will grow into a freak?

  BERENICE: You? Why certainly not, I trust Jesus!

  FRANKIE (going over to the mirror, and looking at herself): Well, do you think I will be pretty?

  BERENICE: Maybe. If you file down them horns a inch or two.

  FRANKIE (turning to face BERENICE, and shuffling one bare foot on the floor): Seriously.

  BERENICE: Seriously, I think when you fill out you will do very well. If you behave.

  FRANKIE: But by Sunday, I want to do something to improve myself before the wedding.

  BERENICE: Get clean for a change. Scrub your elbows and fix yourself nice. You will do very well.

  JOHN HENRY: You will be all right if you file down them horns.

  FRANKIE (raising her right shoulder and turning from the mirror): I don’t know what to do. I just wish I would die.

  BERENICE: Well, die then!

  JOHN HENRY: Die.

  FRANKIE (suddenly exasperated): Go home! (There is a pause.) You heard me! (She makes a face at him and threatens him with the fly swatter. They run twice around the table.) Go home! I’m sick and tired of you, you little midget.

  (JOHN HENRY goes out, taking the doll with him.)

  BERENICE: Now what makes you act like that? You are too mean to live.

  FRANKIE: I know it. (She takes a carving knife from the table drawer.) Something about John Henry just gets on my nerves these days. (She puts her left ankle over her right knee and begins to pick with the knife at a splinter in her foot.) I’ve got a splinter in my foot.

  BERENICE: That knife ain’t the proper thing for a splinter.

  FRANKIE: It seems to me that before this summer I used always to have such a good time. Remember this spring when Evelyn Owen and me used to dress up in costumes and go down town and shop at the five-and-dime? And how every Friday night we’d spend the night with each other either at her house or here? And then Evelyn Owen had to go and move away to Florida. And now she won’t even write to me.

  BERENICE: Honey, you are not crying, is you? Don’t that hurt you none?

  FRANKIE: It would hurt anybody else except me. And how the wisteria in town was so blue and pretty in April but somehow it was so pretty it made me sad. And how Evelyn and me put on that show the Glee Club did at the High School Auditorium? (She raises her head and beats time with the knife and her fist on the table, singing loudly with sudden energy.) Sons of toil and danger! Will you serve a stranger! And bow down to Burgundy! (BERENICE joins in on “Burgundy.” FRANKIE pauses, then begins to pick her foot again, humming the tune sadly.)

  BERENICE: That was a nice show you children copied in the arbor. You will meet another girl friend you like as well as Evelyn Owen. Or maybe Mr. Owen will move back into town. (There is a pause.) Frankie, what you need is a needle.

  FRANKIE: I don’t care anything about my old feet. (She stomps her foot on the floor and lays down the knife on the table.) It was just so queer the way it happened this afternoon. The minute I laid eyes on the pair of them I had this funny feeling. (She goes over and picks up a saucer of milk near the cat-hole in back of the door and pours the milk in the sink.) How old were you, Berenice, when you married your first husband?

  BERENICE: I were thirteen years old.

  FRANKIE: What made you get married so young for?

  BERENICE: Because I wanted to.

  FRANKIE: You never loved any of your four husbands but Ludie.

  BERENICE: Ludie Maxwell Freeman was my only true husband. The other ones were just scraps.

  FRANKIE: Did you marry with a veil every time?

  BERENICE: Three times with a veil.

  FRANKIE (pouring milk into the saucer and returning the saucer to the cat-hole): If only I just knew where he is gone. Ps, ps, ps . . . Charles, Charles.

  BERENICE: Quit worrying yourself about that old alley cat. He’s gone off to hunt a friend.

  FRANKIE: To hunt a friend?

  BERENICE: Why certainly. He roamed off to find himself a lady friend.

  FRANKIE: Well, why don’t he bring his friend home with him? He ought to know I would be only too glad to have a whole family of cats.

  BERENICE: You done seen the last of that old alley cat.

  FRANKIE (crossing the room): I ought to notify the police force. They will find Charles.

  BERENICE: I wouldn’t do that.

  FRANKIE (at the telephone): I want the police force, please . . . Police force? . . . I am notifying you about my cat . . . Cat! He’s lost. He is almost pure Persian.

  BERENICE: As Persian as I is.

  FRANKIE: But with short hair. A lovely color of gray with a little white spot on his throat. He answers to the name of Charles, but if he don’t answer to that, he might come if you call “Charlina.” . . . My name is Miss F. Jasmine Addams and the address is 124 Grove Street.

  BERENICE (giggling as FRANKIE re-enters): Gal, they going to send around here and tie you up and drag you off to Mil­ledgeville. Just picture them fat blue police chasing tomcats around alleys and hollering, “Oh Charles! Oh come here, Charlina!” Merciful Heavens.

  FRANKIE: Aw, shut up!

  (Outside a voice is heard calling in a drawn-out chant, the words almost indistinguishable: “Lot of okra, peas, fresh butter beans . . .”)

  BERENICE: The trouble with you is that you don’t have no sense of humor no more.

  FRANKIE (disconsolately): Maybe I’d be better off in jail.

  (The chanting voice continues and an ancient Negro woman, dressed in a clean print dress with several petticoats, the ruffle of one of which shows, crosses the yard. She stops and leans on a gnarled stick.)

  FRANKIE: Here comes the old vegetable lady.

  BERENICE: Sis Laura is getting mighty feeble to peddle this hot weather.

  FRANKIE: She is about ninety. Other old folks lose their faculties, but she found some faculty. She reads futures, too.

  BERENICE: Hi, Sis Laura. How is your folks getting on?

  SIS LAURA: We ain’t much, and I feels my age these days. Want any peas today? (She shuffles across the yard.)

  BERENICE: I’m sorry, I still have some left over from yesterday. Good-bye, Sis Laura.

  SIS LAURA: Good-bye. (She goes off behind the house to the right, continuing her chant.)

  (When the old woman is gone FRANKIE begins walking around the kitchen.)

  FRANKIE: I expect Janice and Jarvis are almost to Winter Hill by now.

  BERENICE: Sit down. You make me nervous.

  FRANKIE: Jarvis talked about Granny. He remembers her very good. But when I try to remember Granny, it is like her face is changing—like a face seen under water. Jarvis remembers Mother too, and I don’t remember her at all.

  BERENICE: Naturally! Your mother died the day that you were born.

  FRANKIE (standing with one foot on the seat of the chair, leaning over the chair back and laughing): Did you hear what Jarvis said?

  BERENICE: What?

  FRANKIE (after laughing more): They were talking about whether to vote for C. P. MacDonald. And Jarvis said, “Why I wouldn’t vote for that scoundrel if he was running to be dogcatcher.” I never heard anything so witty in my life. (There is a silence during which BERENICE watches FRANKIE, but do
es not smile.) And you know what Janice remarked. When Jarvis 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 said I was the right height and had acting talent and ought to go to Hollywood. She did, Berenice.

  BERENICE: O.K. All right! She did!

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

  BERENICE: She did not. I heard her from the window. She only remarked that you probably had already got your growth. But she didn’t go on and on like that or mention Hollywood.

  FRANKIE: She said to me . . .

  BERENICE: She said to you! 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. And that is a serious fault.

  FRANKIE: Aw, quit preaching at me.

  BERENICE: I ain’t preaching. It’s the solemn truth and you know it.

  FRANKIE: I admit it a little. (She sits down at the table and puts her forehead on the palms of her hands. There is a pause, and then she speaks softly.) What I need to know is this. Do you think I made a good impression?

  BERENICE: Impression?

  FRANKIE: Yes.

  BERENICE: Well, how would I know?

  FRANKIE: I mean, how did I act? What did I do?

  BERENICE: Why, you didn’t do anything to speak of.

  FRANKIE: Nothing?

  BERENICE: 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 (raising her hand to her ear): They didn’t!

  BERENICE: They did.

  FRANKIE: 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.

  BERENICE: Quit talking so rude.

  FRANKIE (after a pause): I’m so scared I didn’t make a good impression.