Nothing That Meets the Eye by Patricia Highsmith

clean as Cleveland curtains, but at least she had brushed them down last night—and at the brown bureau that was her least attractive piece of furniture. Why didn’t Edith look over at the kitchen table where everything was lined up as neatly as a color photograph in a magazine?
    â€œThe gladiolas are beautiful, Millie,” Edith said, looking at the gladiolas Mildred had set in a blue vase atop the bureau. “I grow gladiolas in the backyard.”
    Mildred lighted up appreciatively at Edith’s compliment. “How long am I to have the pleasure of your company, sister?”
    â€œOh, just till—” Edith broke off and looked at the windows with an expression of annoyance.
    A truck or perhaps a cement mixer was rattling and clanking up the avenue. Suddenly Mildred, whose ears had adjusted long ago to the street noises, realized how it must sound to Edith, and writhed with shame. She had quite forgotten the worst feature of her apartment—the noise. The garbage trucks that started grinding around three A.M. were going to be worse.
    â€œIt’s a nuisance,” Mildred said carelessly, “but one gets used to it. What with the housing—” Something else was passing, backfiring like pistol shots, and Mildred realized she couldn’t hear her own voice. She waited, then resumed. “What with the housing being—”
    But Edith silenced her with a hopeless shake of her head.
    A war of horns was going on now, probably a little traffic jam at the corner. That was the way it went, Mildred tried to convey to Edith with a smile and a shrug, all at once or nothing at all. For a few moments their ears, even Mildred’s ears, were filled with the cacophony of car horns, of snarling human voices.
    â€œReally, Millie, I don’t see how you stand this noise day after day,” Edith said.
    Mildred shrugged involuntarily, started to say something, and said nothing after all. She felt inexplicably foolish all at once.
    â€œWhat were you going to say before?” Edith prompted.
    â€œOh. Well, what with the housing being what it is today, New Yorkers can’t be too picky where they live. I have my budget, and I didn’t have any choice but this place and something on Tenth Avenue when I wanted to move from the Bronx. Took me three months to find this.” She said it with a little pride that was instantly quelled by her sister’s troubled regard of the windows. Well, there weren’t any trucks passing now, Mildred thought a bit resentfully, and the traffic jam had evidently cleared up. What was she looking at? Self-consciously, Mildred got up and lowered the window, though she knew it would not help much to lessen the noise. She looked at her geranium. The geranium was nothing but a crooked dry stalk in its pot now, at the extreme left of the windowsill where the sun lingered longest. It must have been three weeks since she’d watered it, and now she felt overcome with remorse. Why was she always rushing so, she forgot all about doing the nice things, all the little things that gave her real pleasure? A wave of self-pity brought tears to her eyes. A lot her sister knew about all she had to contend with, the million and one things she had to think of all by herself, not only at home but at the office, too. You could tell just by looking at Edith she never had to worry or rush about anything, even to take a hard-boiled egg off the stove.
    With a smile, Mildred turned to Edith, and under cover of a “Hungry yet?” ducked into the kitchen to see about the hard-boiled eggs. She balanced the three hot eggs on top of the block of ice in the icebox, so they would cool as fast as possible.
    â€œRemember the time we took the raw eggs by mistake on the picnic, Edie?” Mildred said, laughing as she came back into the living room. It was an old family joke, and one or the other of them mentioned it almost every time they cooked hard-boiled