Everything is Nice (27 page)

"Those little cookers are not very smelly either," Laura continued. "And Beryl could easily bring you plates and cutlery from the main dining room. You could tip her and she would even wash the plates each day and return them to you."

"I don't want to eat in my cabin," Sally said. But the spirit which had moved her a while ago to reprimand Laura was gone, and instead the familiar sensation of heaviness and impotence invaded her limbs and her head.

"Well, I think you really do," said Laura casually, turning away and glancing about the room, as if to demonstrate that she was losing interest in the conversation, "I suppose you really do but you haven't got a sterno cooker."

Sally half shut her eyes. "This is the attack, all right," she said to herself. "But I'll sit through it this time and not defend myself. It's nearly over anyway, I think."

Sally was correct in her guess that Laura's attack was nearly over. In fact, no sooner had she voiced this opinion to herself than Laura was on her feet.

"I am going upstairs," she said, "to drag the Cassalottis down here. I want my beer. Come with me."

Sally rose a little uncertainly to her feet. It was difficult for her to get up quickly when she was in a nervous state, and for one awful moment she thought she was going to fall back in her chair once more, but she managed to reach Laura's side looking fairly normal. They left the dining room and went into a small dark hallway. Laura, who was very familiar with the Cassalotti house, pulled on a door which opened onto a closed stairway. The walls of the stairway were papered in a small flower pattern and very dirty. They started to mount the stairs—slowly because of their steepness. Sally felt her head turning a little. The air in the stairway was stale. But her dizziness was more the result of Laura's proximity than of the bad air in the stairway. Since there was no bannister, she let the flat of her palm travel along the cold, flower-papered wall. This comforted her to a certain extent until they reached the landing.

The terrible gloom and boredom that had descended upon Laura earlier in the day, back at Camp Cataract, had now completely vanished, not from her memory but from her feelings. At last the day was cluttered with possibilities and adventures. The ascension of the stairs aided her optimism, and by the time she reached the landing a happy excitement was fully upon her.

"Cassalottis!" she called in her husky voice, now ringing with gaiety.

"Hello, Laura Seabrook." Rita Cassalotti's voice was gentle but without warmth.

Laura fairly galloped down the length of the uncarpeted hallway, knocking into a wrought iron stand that supported a trough of ferns on the way. The stand teetered for a moment on its high legs, but it did not fall over.

"I want beer, you bums," Laura shouted as she flung open the Cassalottis' parlor door. Greetings were exchanged while Sally hung back in the hallway, not caring to move forward or backward. She knew that Laura wanted to be rid of her.

"She's moved on to the Cassalottis and everybody else might as well be dead," Sally reflected. "But I'll stay. Certainly I shan't come and go at her convenience." Her head was beginning to ache as a result of the afternoon's complications.

She promised herself that on the following day she would go down into the chasm a mile south of Camp Cataract, where descent was more gradual, and walk along the river bed. She reminded herself too that she had already gone three quarters of the way toward directing her life current, as she termed it, into a peace stream, in spite of her bad nervous system. "Camp Cataract," she said to herself, "is definitely carrying off the honors, and
not
my sister's apartment." This thought cheered her up and she started down the hall toward the parlor, where the girls were laughing and talking so loudly that they did not even notice her entering the room.

Mr Cassalotti was there, Berenice and Rita—his oldest daughters—an aunt, and some of the younger children. Everyone was dressed, with the exception of Rita Cassalotti, who was wearing a pink wrapper made of an imitation thick velours. There were more ferns here in the upstairs parlor, just like the ones Laura had barely missed knocking over in the hallway. A linoleum stamped with a red and black design covered the floor. The chairs and the sofa were all occupied by the family, with the exception of one odd Victorian chair made of carved black wood in Chinese style, which stood near a window and was seldom used.

Sally seated herself in this chair and folded her hands in her lap. "Now we'll see how far she'll go," she thought, fixing her eyes on Laura, and she felt elated without noticing that she did.

Rita Cassalotti had a small head and eyes a little too close together but she was pretty. Her teeth were very even and the canines beautifully shaped. Men adored her but she was neither vain nor inclined toward flirtation or love-making. She loved the food she got at home, her bedroom furniture and her clothing. Her body was unexpectedly heavier than anyone would have guessed just from seeing her small head and slender neck, but she was not fat, merely soft and round, although only a sensitive man—even if a stranger—might have sensed the coldness lurking in her soft frame.

"What brings you here this afternoon, Laura Seabrook?" Rita questioned her pleasantly.

"I was so bored at Camp Cataract," said Laura, "that I thought the world was coming to an end. Then I remembered that you always cheered me up." This statement was true, at least partially. The Cassalottis did cheer Laura up, but she had forgotten that her original intention had been to pursue Sally and not to visit the Cassalottis.

Rita let out a peal of merry laughter. She always reacted more strongly to what seemed to her the grotesque than to situations or states of feelings that might easily have been included in the content of her own life.

"Do you have a sewing machine, there at Camp Cataract?" Rita asked with a twinkle in her eye.

"No... I'm not sure," Laura answered her.

Rita thought this was even more hysterically funny than Laura's first statement.

"Rita! Stop being foolish—you sound like a dope." Her younger sister Berenice silenced her with a look from her big flashing eyes. She was a swarthy, short-legged girl with dark bushy hair and a raucous low voice. Her chin was delicately cleft and her nose was Roman and very beautiful. She was enthusiastic and tempestuous, with a warmth not often encountered in a young girl.

"Why are you talking about machines?" she stormed at Rita.

"Well," said Rita, not in the least disturbed by her sister's outburst. "She said she thought the world was coming to an end, and I thought that if she had a sewing machine she could make some dresses when she didn't know what else to do."

"You're crazy," said Berenice.

"No, I'm not," Rita answered, laughing merrily again. "What's crazy about a sewing machine? You're the one who's on the crazy side, not me."

"Laura's got a lot of trouble," said Berenice. "She wouldn't get no relief from a sewing machine."

"No?" Rita raised her eyebrows and looked questioningly at Laura. "Maybe not," she said with half-hearted interest. The conversation seemed to be losing its grotesque quality and turning on the serious. The very prospect of hearing about anyone else's trouble tired Rita and she yawned.

Mr. Cassalotti, who had not bothered to greet either Laura or Sally, was sitting on a small cane chair and staring ahead of him with hands thrust in his pockets. Without warning he got up from his chair and started toward the door.

"Poppa," said Berenice, "where are you going?"

"I'm going to let the beer out and make raviolis. Come on downstairs and we'll have a little party." He looked back over his shoulder at Laura and nodded to her without changing his expression.

"Just plain havoc, with no thought behind it," Sally was thinking. "That's what she likes, instead of the beautiful. She thinks it's exciting and adventurous to sit indoors in the afternoon with people eating raviolis and drinking beer. She doesn't know where real happiness lies. If she could only be persuaded to stay outdoors a little more. It would be at least a beginning."

Laura was hustling the Cassalottis through the parlor door as hastily as she could, in her eagerness to get at the beer. The children remained always silent and strange whenever Laura appeared. They leaned against the wall looking after her with sober brown eyes.

The Cassalotti sisters, followed by Laura and Sally, started down the steep stairway single file.

"Gee, it's nice you came," said Berenice affectionately to Laura, who was behind her. She turned around and squeezed Laura's leg to emphasize her pleasure. "It will only take Poppa a little while to get the raviolis going, and we can drink beer while we wait anyhow ..." She gave Rita a little shove and pulled her hair. "Why don't you get dressed, you?" she said.

At that moment Laura's joy at being among the Cassalottis reached its peak—and with it came a familiar chill at the bottom of her heart.

"Oh, God," thought Laura. "I had almost forgotten for a moment. I wish I could be really here, having the kind of fun I think it is to be here."

She was quite accustomed to this cold fright that gripped her heart whenever her pleasure was acute, but it was not fright itself that interested her. She was quite sure that most sensitive people were familiar with this feeling. What disturbed her more than the fright was the chain of questions it always awakened in her mind about whatever she was doing, so that she could never wholeheartedly enter into anything for more than a few seconds at a time.

"How exhausting," she said to herself as she felt the chill settling like a thick fog around her heart. The tormenting question which followed in the wake of her anguish was this: should she consider the anguish to be the natural underlying side of life itself, that side which gives depth and gravity to the sense of living from hour to hour, and which is to be endured simply and accepted, or was it on the other hand a signal for a departure—a signal for a decision? It was this last possibility that she found so upsetting, for she was actually, in her thinking at least, a very conscientious person.

They reached the landing and Laura stood for a second, uncertainly, with Sally waiting behind her on the bottom step.

She wished she had the courage to go out the door onto the wooden porch and thence down the road through the pine woods, instead of sitting down to eat ravioli and to drink beer. The very thought that such an action was incumbent upon her made her feel faint.

"A silly struggle over two silly alternatives—to eat ravioli or to walk in the woods," she whispered to herself, without believing it. She bit her lips hard and a happy thought struck her: "The Cassalottis would be very insulted if I left. How could I have overlooked it?" The relief she felt, having voiced this sentence to herself, was immediate. Her face lost its hunted animal look, and she took long strides in the direction of the dining room.

The others had gone back into the kitchen behind the dining room and were watching Mr. Cassalotti, who was using the ravioli machine. He was very neat and very systematic in his cooking, being a great admirer of both American factory technique and sanitation. He had already selected four cartons and labeled them neatly with the names of friends. "You can take these back to Camp Cataract with you when you go," he said to Laura. "Tell them a ravioli present from Gregorio Cassalotti— and remind them that Wednesday night is Chicken Cassalotti night. Chicken Cacciatore died when Chicken Cassalotti was born." He laughed to himself.

He did not in any way resemble Laura's conception of an Italian, except physically. He was industrious and really only happy when he worked. The girls took the beer into the dining room and they all seated themselves near the glassed-in scene, including Sally, who sat with her chair exaggeratedly far from the table and turned sideways.

"Pull yourself in," said Berenice.

"No, thank you," Sally answered her. "I'm not going to eat or drink. I'm all right here."

Berenice stared at Sally uncomprehendingly, but she felt herself so remote from the other woman that she could not, as she ordinarily would have done, urge her to join them in eating and drinking.

The Cassalotti sisters had brought to the table about fifteen bottles of beer. Laura, so recently released from her small but painful struggle, was giddy as a result of her escape. There still lurked a doubt in her heart but it was a muffled doubt, reserved for a little later. She was determined now to get drunk, and to have the Cassalottis share her renewed gaiety. With Berenice she did not concern herself, for this girl's gaiety, though of a completely different variety (with real joy as its source, rather than pained joy), matched her own. So it was to Rita she addressed herself.

"Rita, do you like Sunday?" she asked her. Rita's face remained closed, and she appeared to have no intention of answering Laura's question at all. Often she did not answer Laura's questions with even so much as a nod of her head. This made Laura all the more determined to find out how Rita felt about everything. She tried formulating her question to Rita differently.

"Do Sundays make you nervous?" she asked this time.

"I don't know," said Rita, without the faintest expression in her voice.

"I like 'em, good weather or bad," put in Berenice. "If it's good weather, I go fishing or hunting for berries and mushrooms, and if it's bad weather I listen to the radio. In the winter, of course, I don't go after berries or mushrooms."

"Do you go after berries and mushrooms too, on Sundays?" Laura asked Rita, interrupting Berenice.

Sally was exasperated with Laura for showing such a keen interest in Rita Cassalotti's Sundays.

"Why doesn't she ask me what I do on Sunday, instead of asking that trollop? She certainly can't do much of any interest if she stays in her wrapper all day."

"If only Berenice would keep her mouth shut for a minute," Laura thought. "I might then be able to drag something out of Rita." She was a little put out with herself for not being able to imagine Rita's attitude toward Sunday. But all the while Berenice continued to fill the glasses with beer the moment they were emptied, so that Laura very soon cared less and less about finding out anything from Rita.