The Member of the Wedding Read Online Free

and over. They just drowsed in the dark shade of the arbor, and Frankie was a person who had never thought about a wedding. That was the way they were that August morning when her brother and the bride walked in the house.
    "Oh, Jesus!" Frankie said. The cards on the table were greasy and the late sun slanted across the yard. "The world is certainy a sudden place."
    "Well, stop commenting about it," said Berenice. "You don't have your mind on the game."
    Frankie, however, had some of her mind on the game. She played the queen of spades, which were trumps, and John Henry threw off a little two of diamonds. She looked at him. He was staring at the back of her hand as though what he wanted and needed was angled eyesight that could cut around corners and read people's cards.
    "You got a spade," said Frankie.
    John Henry put his donkey necklace in his mouth and looked away.
    "Cheater," she said.
    "Go on and play your spade," said Berenice.
    Then he argued: "It was hid behind the other card."
    "Cheater."
    But still he would not play. He sat there sad and holding up the game.
    "Make haste," said Berenice.
    "I can't," he said finally. "It's a jack. The only spade I got is a jack. I don't want to play my jack down under Frankie's queen. I'm not going to do it either."
    Frankie threw her cards down on the table. "See!" she said to Berenice. "He don't even follow the first beginning laws! He's a child! It is hopeless! Hopeless! Hopeless!"
    "Maybe so," said Berenice.
    "Oh," Frankie said, "I am sick unto death."
    She sat with her bare feet on the rungs of the chair, her eyes closed, and her chest against the table edge. The red greasy cards were messed together on the table, and the sight of them made Frankie sick. They had played cards after dinner every single afternoon; if you would eat those old cards, they would taste like a combination of all the dinners of that August, together with a sweaty-handed nasty taste. Frankie swept the cards from the table. The wedding was bright and beautiful as snow and the heart in her was mashed. She got up from the table.
    "It is a known truth that gray-eyed people are jealous."
    "I told you I wasn't jealous," Frankie said, and she was walking fast around the room. "I couldn't be jealous of one of them without being jealous of them both. I sociate the two of them together."
    "Well, I were jealous when my foster brother married," said Berenice. "I admit that when John married Clorina I sent a warning I would tear the ears off her head. But you see I didn't. Clorina got ears like anybody else. And now I love her."
    "J A," said Frankie. "Janice and Jarvis. Isn't that the strangest thing?"
    "What?"
    "J A," she said. "Both their names begin with J A."
    "And? What about it?"
    Frankie walked round and round the kitchen table. "If only my name was Jane," she said. "Jane or Jasmine."
    "I don't follow your frame of mind," said Berenice.
    "Jarvis and Janice and Jasmine. See?"
    "No," said Berenice. "By the way, I heard this morning on the radio that the French people are chasing the Germans out of Paris."
    "Paris," Frankie repeated in a hollow tone. "I wonder if it is against the law to change your name. Or to add to it."
    "Naturally. It is against the law."
    "Well, I don't care," she said. "F. Jasmine Addams."
    On the staircase leading to her room there was a doll, and John Henry brought it to the table and sat rocking it in his arms. "You serious when you gave me this," he said. He pulled up the doll's dress and fingered the real panties and body-waist. "I will name her Belle."
    Frankie stared at the doll for a minute. "I don't know what went on in Jarvis's mind when he brought me that doll. Imagine bringing me a doll! And Janice tried to explain that she had pictured me as a little girl. I had counted on Jarvis bringing me something from Alaska."
    "Your face when you unwrapped the package was a study," said Berenice.
    It was a large doll with red hair and china eyes that opened and closed, and yellow