The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [130]
She followed him home from work and sometimes even when he took walks. She always followed a long way behind him. And he did not know.
She would go up to see him in his room. First she scrubbed her face and hands and put some vanilla on the front of her dress. She only went to visit him twice a week now, because she didn’t want him to get tired of her. Most always he would be sitting over the queer, pretty chess game when she opened the door. And then she was with him.
‘Mister Singer, have you ever lived in a place where it snowed in the winter-time?’
He tilted his chair back against the wall and nodded.
‘In some different country than this one--in a foreign place?’
He nodded yes again and wrote on his pad with his silver pencil. Once he had traveled to Ontario, Canada--across the river from Detroit Canada was so far up north that the white snow drifted up to the roofs of the houses. That was where the Quints were and the St. Lawrence River. The people ran up and down the streets speaking French to each other. And far up in the north there were deep forests and white ice igloos.
The arctic region with the beautiful northern lights.
‘When you was in Canada did you go out and get any fresh snow and eat it with cream and sugar? Once I read where it was mighty good to eat that way.’
He turned his head to one side because he didn’t understand.
She couldn’t ask the question again because suddenly it sounded silly. She only looked at him and waited. A big, black shadow of his head was on the wall behind him. The electric fan cooled the thick, hot air. All was quiet. It was like they waited to tell each other things that had never been told before. What she had to say was terrible and afraid. But what he would tell her was so true that it would make everything all right. Maybe it was a thing that could not be spoken with words or writing. Maybe he would have to let her understand this in a different way. That was the feeling she had with him.
‘I was just asking you about Canada--but it didn’t amount to anything, Mister Singer.’
Downstairs in the home rooms there was plenty of trouble.
Etta was still so sick that she couldn’t sleep crowded three in a bed. The shades were drawn and the dark room smelled bad with a sick smell. Etta’s job was gone, and that meant eight dollars less a week besides the doctor’s bill.
Then one day when Ralph was walking around in the kitchen he burned himself on the hot kitchen stove. The bandages made his hands itch and somebody had to watch him all the time else he would bust the blisters. On George’s birthday they had bought him a little red bike with a bell and a basket on the handlebars. Everybody had chipped in to give it to him. But when Etta lost her job they couldn’t pay, and after two installments were past due the store sent a man out to take the wheel away. George just watched the man roll the bike off the porch, and when he passed George kicked the back fender and then went into the coal house and shut the door.
It was money, money, money all the time. They owed to the grocery and they owed the last payment on some furniture.
And now since they had lost the house they owed money there too. The six rooms in the house were always taken, but nobody ever paid the rent on time.
For a while their Dad went over every day to hunt another job.
He couldn’t do carpenter work any more because it made him jittery to be more than ten feet off the ground. He applied for many jobs but nobody would hire him. Then at last he got this notion.