The Member of the Wedding by Carson Mccullers

was lavender and slowly darkening. She
heard in the neighborhood the sound of evening voices and noticed the light fresh smell of watered grass. This was the time of the early evening when, since the kitchen was too hot, she would go for a little while outdoors. She practiced knife-throwing, or sat before the cold-drink store in the front yard. Or she would go around to the back yard, and there the arbor was cool and dark. She wrote shows, although she had outgrown all of her costumes, and was too big to act in them beneath the arbor; this summer she had written very cold shows—shows about Esquimaux and frozen explorers. Then when night had come she would go again back in the house.
    But this evening Frankie did not have her mind on knives or cold-drink stores or shows. Nor did she want to stand there staring up into the sky; for her heart asked the old questions, and in the old way of the spring she was afraid.
    She felt she needed to think about something ugly and plain, so she turned from the evening sky and stared at her own house. Frankie lived in the ugliest house in town, but now she knew that she would not be living there much longer. The house was empty, dark. Frankie turned and walked to the end of the block, and around the corner, and down the sidewalk to the Wests'. John Henry was leaning against the banisters of his front porch, with a lighted window behind him, so that he looked like a little black paper doll on a piece of yellow paper.
    "Hey," she said. "I wonder when that Papa of mine is coming home from town."
    John Henry did not answer.
    "I don't want to go back in that dark old ugly house all by myself."
    She stood on the sidewalk, looking at John Henry, and the smart political remark came back to her. She hooked her thumb in the pockets of her pants and asked: "If you were going to vote in an election, who would you vote for?"
    John Henry's voice was bright and high in the summer night. "I don't know," he said.
    "For instance, would you cast your vote for C. P. MacDonald to be mayor of this town?"
    John Henry did not answer.
    "Would you?"
    But she could not get him to talk. There were times when John Henry would not answer anything you said to him. So she had to remark without an argument behind her, and all by herself like that it did not sound so very smart: "Why, I wouldn't vote for him if he was running to be dog-catcher"
    The darkening town was very quiet. For a long time now her brother and the bride had been at Winter Hill. They had left the town a hundred miles behind them, and now were in a city far away. They were them and in Winter Hill, together, while she was her and in the same old town all by herself. The long hundred miles did not make her sadder and make her feel more far away than the knowing that they were them and both together and she was only her and parted from them, by herself. And as she sickened with this feeling a thought and explanation suddenly came to her, so that she knew and almost said aloud:
They are the we of me.
Yesterday, and all the twelve years of her life, she had only been Frankie. She was an
I
person who had to walk around and do things by herself. All other people had a
we
to claim, all other except her. When Berenice said
we,
she meant Honey and Big Mama, her lodge, or her church. The
we
of her father was the store. All members of clubs have a
we
to belong to and talk about. The soldiers in the army can say
we,
and even the criminals on chain-gangs. But the old Frankie had had no
we
to claim, unless it would be the terrible summer
we
of her and John Henry and Berenice—and that was the last
we
in the world she wanted. Now all this was suddenly over with and changed. There was her brother and the bride, and it was as though when first she saw them something she had known inside of her:
They are the we of me.
And that was why it made her feel so queer, for them to be away in Winter Hill while she was left all by herself; the hull of the old Frankie left