U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [384]
-168-What she liked at the beach was playing the game where you rol ed a little bal over the clean narrow varnished boards into holes with numbers and there was a Jap there in a clean starched white coat and shelves and shelves of the cutest little things for prizes: teapots, little china men that nodded their heads, vases for flowers, rows and rows of the prettiest Japanese dol s with real eyelashes some of them, and jars and jugs and pitchers. One time Margie won a little teapot shaped like an elephant that she kept for years. Fred and Agnes didn't seem to think much of the little Jap who gave the prizes but Margie thought he was lovely, his face was so smooth and he had such a funny little voice and his lips and eyelids were so clearly marked just like the dol s' and he had long black eyelashes too. Margie used to think she'd like to have him to take to bed with her like a dol . She said that and Agnes and Fred laughed and laughed at her so that she felt awful ashamed. But what she liked best at Hol and's Beach was the
vaudevil e theater. They'd go in there and the crowds and laughs and racket would die away as the big padded doors closed behind them. There'd be a movingpicture going on when they went in. She didn't like that much, but what she liked best in al the world were the il ustrated songs that came next, the pictures of lovely ladies and gentlemen in colors like tinted flowers and such lovely dresses and big hats and the words with pansies and forgetmenots around them and the lady or gentleman singing them to the dark theater. There were always boats on ripply streams and ladies in lovely dresses being helped out of them, but not like at Broad Channel where it was so glary and there was nothing but mudflats and the slimysmel y piles and the boatlanding lying on the ooze when the tide went out, but lovely blue ripply rivers with lovely green banks and weepingwil owtrees hanging over them. After that it was vaudevil e. There were acrobats and trained seals and men in straw hats who told funny jokes and ladies that danced.
-169-The Merry Widow Girls it was once, in their big black hats tipped up so wonderful y on one side and their sheathdresses and trains in blue and green and purple and yel ow and orange and red, and a handsome young man in a cutaway coat waltzing with each in turn.
The trouble with going to Hol and's Beach was that
Fred would meet friends there and keep going in through swinging doors and coming back with his eyes bright and a smel of whiskey and pickled onions on his breath, and halfway through the good time, Margie would see that worried meek look coming over Agnes's face, and then she'd know that there would be no more fun that day. The last time they al went over together to the beach they lost Fred although they looked everywhere for him, and had to go home without him. Agnes sobbed so loud that everybody stared at her on the train and Ed Otis the conductor who was a friend of Fred's came over and tried to tel her not to take on so, but that only made Agnes sob the worse. Margie was so ashamed she decided to run away or kil herself as soon as she got home so that she wouldn't have to face the people on the train ever again. That time Fred didn't turn up the next day the way he usual y did. Joe Hines came in to say that a guy had told him he'd seen Fred on a bat over in Brooklyn and that he didn't think he'd come home for a while. Agnes made Margie go to bed and she could hear her voice and Joe Hines's in the kitchen talking low for hours. Margie woke up with a start to find Agnes in her nightgown getting into bed with her. Her cheeks were' fiery hot and she kept say-ing, "Imagine his nerve and him a miserable trackwalker.
. . . Margie. . . . We can't stand this life any more, can we, little girl?"
"I bet he'd come here fussing, the dreadful old thing," said Margie.
"Something like that. . . . Oh, it's too awful, I can't
-170-stand it any more. God knows I've worked my fingers to the bone." Margie suddenly came out with, "Wel , when the cat's away the mice wil play," and was surprised at how long Agnes laughed though she was crying too.