The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride by Hortense Calisher

with some enmity.
    “We weren’t going to—” Lottie said, a hand out toward the stove, her eyes on her sister. “Were we.”
    Emily said nothing right away; she had that power, not always an easy one for a woman to have. It gave him time to wonder if the picnic people had angered the sisters into retreat by their not buying, or was it the opposite entirely, that the sisters were too delicate with acquaintances to push their trade? But more than anything, he wondered not only why he never thought of the town’s doubletalk as much as he did here, but why he never understood it better than he did here—though from all sides. It never occurred to him, the lake air being as calm as Hiawatha here, and the quartered-oak floor of the bay jutting out so strong upon it with its cargo of housewifery—that its owners might not know themselves why they did what.
    Just then, the two men outside who knew him rapped on the glass. Weatherstripped though it was, it was no proof against their sharp summer voices.
    “Which one is it, Jim? Can’t have ’em both. Where’s your mate?”
    They kept up a chorus of this, knocking their tin mugs against the house, until a couple of the women came and got them, not without peering in themselves, though all that handwork women do makes them manage their eyes better.
    “See what you’re in for, Jim!” one of the men called out, and the other man, with a grinning wave of the hand said something too, but the lake air sopped it away. The white gloom of the afternoons in these parts came and settled, temporarily taking away the spring; always in these parts the winter comes and stands for a moment, in any season. The two girls watched it, a land-ghost they were used to, but Jim thought of canal weather, different always from the very land it traveled, the mornings blue with their own business and boat-notions, even in a freeze, or a fog. As for other ghosts, no matter what the mixture of names was around Sand Spring, none of the three saw anything but what was immediate. White people didn’t see Indian ghosts. Nor do many in the modern age see classical ones—though those three would have a chance at it.
    Lottie, at the glass, peered after the two men. “They must have been rushing the growler,” she said.
    Jim stayed mum; in addition to his inborn barge-quiet, he’d learned in France to get along by watching expressions. But Emily had already seen his, having picked up that talent right at home.
    “No,” he said, as if she’d pulled a string in him, “I don’t know what it means. Rushing the growler—what’s that?”
    “You can see he’s never lived over a stable, or near a saloon,” said Emily thoughtfully and over his head—as if she and her sister were standing in their shifts, talking him over at bedtime. Again, like last time, he had a sense of messages given and taken between her and him, if only by being withheld. She hadn’t much of a neckline. No criticism—but the differentiation was going to have to start somewhere. He had a sneaking wish that one of the sisters could have had a sign on her somewhere, such as having the name of some former girl of his who had worked out, or a string of amber beads like his mother’s. To trust entirely to luck in these matters had always seemed to him a bit dirty; it was more gentlemanly to proceed from choice.
    “Of course not,” said Lottie, equally over his head. “He grew up on a barge.”
    They often talk like this, very literal, very simple—the sugar-people, the fat ones. From which other people take it that they’re as simple inside, and what’s worse, they take it so themselves.
    Curiously enough, though he was thinking of them both in their shifts, it wasn’t Lottie he could see best, for all her marshmallow meat, but the other one. He could see her standing in hers in front of him, or even naked, thin and intense, more emotion to her than there was line, though she would have her points of it, and a little