The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [43]
She walked out on the front porch and then came back and stood in the hall. All day she and Bubber and Portia and her Dad had been fixing the hall and the dining-room for the party. The decoration was autumn leaves and vines and red crepe paper. On the mantelpiece in the dining-room and sticking up behind the hat rack there were bright yellow leaves.
They had trailed vines along the walls and on the table where the punch bowl would be. The red crepe paper hung down in long fringes from the mantel and also was looped around the backs of the chairs. There was plenty decoration. It was O.K.
She rubbed her hand on her forehead and squinted her eyes.
Bubber stood beside her and copied every move she made. ‘I sure do want this party to turn out all right. I sure do.’
This would be the first party she had ever given. She had never even been to more than four or five. Last summer she had gone to a prom party. But none of the boys asked her to prom or dance, she just stood by the punch bowl until all the refreshments were gone and then went home. This party was not going to be a bit like that one. In a few hours now the people she had invited would start coming and the to-do would begin.
It was hard to remember just how she got the idea of this party. The notion came to her soon after she started at Vocational. High School was swell. Everything about it was different from Grammar School. She wouldn’t have liked it so much if she had had to take a stenographic course like Hazel and Etta had done--but she got special permission and took mechanical shop like a boy. Shop and Algebra and Spanish were grand. English was mighty hard. Her English teacher was Miss Minner. Everybody said Miss Minner had sold her brains to a famous doctor for ten thousand dollars, so that after she was dead he could cut them up and see why she was so smart. On written lessons she cracked such questions as ‘Name eight famous contemporaries of Doctor Johnson,’ and ‘Quote ten lines from ‘The Vicar of Wakefield.’ She called on people by the alphabet and kept her grade book open during the lessons. And even if she was brainy she was an old sourpuss. The Spanish teacher had traveled once in Europe.
She said that in France the people carried home loaves of bread without having them wrapped up. They would stand talking on the streets and hit the bread on a lamp post. And there wasn’t any water in France--only wine.
In nearly all ways Vocational was wonderful. They walked back and forth in the hall between classes, and at lunch period students hung around the gym. Here was the thing that soon began to bother her. In the halls the people would walk up and down together and everybody seemed to belong to some special bunch. Within a week or two she knew people in the halls and in classes to speak to them--but that was all. She wasn’t a member of any bunch. In Grammar School she would have just gone up to any crowd she wanted to belong with and that would have been the end of the matter. Here it was different.
During the first week she walked up and down the halls by herself and thought about this. She planned about being with some bunch almost as much as she thought of music. Those two ideas were in her head all the time. And finally she got the idea of the party.
She was strict with the invitations. No Grammar School kids and nobody under twelve years old. She just asked people between thirteen and fifteen. She knew everybody she invited good enough to speak to them in the halls--and when she didn’t know their names she asked to find out. She called up those who had a telephone, and the rest she invited at school.
On the telephone she always said the same thing. She let Bubber stick in his ear to listen. ‘This is Mick Kelly,’ she said.
If they didn’t understand the name she kept on until they got it.
I’m having a prom party at eight o’clock Saturday night and I’m inviting you now. I live at 103 Fourth Street, Apartment A.’ That Apartment A sounded swell on the telephone. Nearly everybody said they would be delighted. A couple of tough boys tried to be smarty and kept on asking her name over and over. One of them tried to act cute and said,