The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [44]
Bubber was sharp as a briar. ‘Haga me usted el favor, señorita,’ he answered as a comeback.
It was grand to take Spanish at Vocational. There was something about speaking in a foreign language that made her feel like she’d been around a lot. Every afternoon since school had started she had fun speaking the new Spanish words and sentences. At first Bubber was stumped, and it was funny to watch his face while she talked the foreign language. Then he caught on in a hurry, and before long he could copy everything she said. He remembered the words he learned, too. Of course he didn’t know what all the sentences meant, but she didn’t say them for the sense they made, anyway. After a while the kid learned so fast she gave out of Spanish and just gabbled along with made-up sounds. But it wasn’t long before he caught her out at that--nobody could put a thing over on old Bubber Kelly.
‘I’m going to pretend like I’m walking into this house for the first time,’ Mick said. ‘Then I can tell better if all the decorations look good or not.’
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