She wore a pair of blue black shorts, a B.V.D. This summer she was grown so tall that she was almost a big freak, and her shoulders were narrow, her legs too long. Frankie looked, but her eyes were gray as they always were. There was a watery kitchen mirror hanging above the sink. When they walked in the house today it was so queer.' 'I just never saw any two people like them. 'Jealous because your brother going to be married?' There was something about this wedding that gave Frankie a feeling she could not name. The bride was there in a long white train, and the bride also was faceless. The groom in this wedding was her brother, and there was a brightness where his face should be. She saw a silent church, a strange snow slanting down against the colored windows. Frankie sat at the table with her eyes half closed, and she thought about a wedding. It was four o'clock in the afternoon and the kitchen was square and gray and quiet.

John Henry listened and watched them quietly.Īnd Berenice remarked: 'I believe the sun has fried your brains.'įrankie herself almost admitted maybe so. And then, on the last Friday of August, all this was changed: it was so sudden that Frankie puzzled the whole blank afternoon, and still she did not understand. At last the summer was like a green sick dream, or like a silent crazy jungle under glass. The world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer. The three of them sat at the kitchen table, saying the same things over and over, so that by August the words began to rhyme with each other and sound strange. She was in so much secret trouble that she thought it was better to stay at home-and at home there was only Berenice Sadie Brown and John Henry West. The sidewalks finally became too hot for Frankie's feet, and also she got herself in trouble. The sidewalks of the town were gray in the early morning and at night, but the noon sun put a glaze on them, so that the cement burned and glittered like glass. At first Frankie walked around doing one thing and another. In June the trees were bright dizzy green, but later the leaves darkened, and the town turned black and shrunken under the glare of the sun. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old.

Mccullers member of the wedding