The Member of the Wedding Read Online Free Page B

was dark bearded and the other half bright glazed with paint. Both eyes were strange. Frankie had wandered around the tent and looked at every booth. She was afraid of all the Freaks, for it seemed to her that they had looked at her in a secret way and tried to connect their eyes with hers, as though to say: we know you. She was afraid of their long Freak eyes. And all the years she had remembered them, until this day.
    "I doubt if they ever get married or go to a wedding," she said. "Those Freaks."
    "What freaks you talking about?" said Berenice.
    "At the fair," said Frankie. "The ones we saw there last October"
    "Oh, those folks."
    "I wonder if they make a big salary," she said.
    And Berenice answered: "How would I know?"
    John Henry held out an imaginary skirt and, touching his finger to the top of his big head, he skipped and danced like the Pin Head around the kitchen table.
    Then he said: "She was the cutest little girl I ever saw. I never saw anything so cute in my whole life. Did you, Frankie?"
    "No," she said. "I didn't think she was cute."
    "Me and you both," said Berenice.
    "Shoo!" John Henry argued. "She was, too."
    "If you want my candy opinion," said Berenice, "that whole crowd of folks down yonder at the fair just give me the creeps. Ever last one of them."
    Frankie watched Berenice through the mirror, and finally she asked in a slow voice. "Do
I
give you the creeps?"
    "You?" asked Berenice.
    "Do you think I will grow into a Freak?" Frankie whispered.
    "You?" said Berenice again. "Why, certainy not, I trust Jesus."
    Frankie felt better. She looked sidewise at herself in the mirror. The clock ticked six slow times, and then she said: "Well, do you think I will be pretty?"
    "Maybe. If you file down them horns a inch or two"
    Frankie stood with her weight resting on her left leg, and she slowly shuffled the ball of her right foot on the floor. She felt a splinter go beneath the skin. "Seriously," she said.
    "I think when you fill out you will do very well. If you behave"
    "But by Sunday," Frankie said. "I want to do something to improve myself before the wedding."
    "Get clean for a change. Scrub your elbows and fix yourself nice. You will do very well."
    Frankie looked for a last time at herself in the mirror, and then she turned away. She thought about her brother and the bride, and there was a tightness in her that would not break.
    "I don't know what to do. I just wish I would die."
    "Well, die then!" said Berenice.
    And: "Die," John Henry echoed in a whisper.
    The world stopped.
    "Go home," said Frankie to John Henry.
    He stood with his big knees locked, his dirty little hand on the edge of the white table, and he did not move.
    "You heard me," Frankie said. She made a terrible face at him and grabbed the frying pan that hung above the stove. She chased him three times around the table, then up through the front hall and out of the door. She locked the front door and called again: "Go home."
    "Now what makes you act like that?" said Berenice. "You are too mean to live."
    Frankie opened the door to the stairway that led up to her room, and sat down on one of the lower steps. The kitchen was silent and crazy and sad.
    "I know it," she said. "I intend to sit still by myself and think over everything for a while."
    This was the summer when Frankie was sick and tired of being Frankie. She hated herself, and had become a loafer and a big no-good who hung around the summer kitchen: dirty and greedy and mean and sad. Besides being too mean to live, she was a criminal. If the Law knew about her, she could be tried in the courthouse and locked up in the jail. Yet Frankie had not always been a criminal and a big no-good. Until the April of that year, and all the years of her life before, she had been like other people. She belonged to a club and was in the seventh grade at school. She worked for her father on Saturday morning and went to the show every Saturday afternoon. She was not the kind of person ever to think of