Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [56]
What the heck was I supposed to do in Baltimore? It was exactly as though I had been killed in Vietnam, and now Margaret had to make a new life for herself. And I was a freak to my own children. They, too, looked at me as though I were wearing nothing but a black garterbelt.
And wouldn’t my wife and kids be proud of me when I told them that I hadn’t been able to answer more than a quarter of the questions on the examination for admission to graduate studies in Physics at MIT?
Welcome home!
As I was about to go into the Chinese restaurant, two pretty girls came out. They, too, showed contempt for me and my haircut and my uniform. So I said to them, “What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever before seen a man wearing nothing but a black garterbelt?”
BLACK GARTERBELTS WERE on my mind, I suppose, because I missed Jack Patton so much. I had survived the war, but he hadn’t, and the present he sent me only a few days before he was shot dead, as I said before, was a skin magazine called Black Garterbelt.
So there we were in that restaurant, with me on my third Sweet Rob Roy. Margaret and her mother, again acting as though I were 6 feet under in Arlington National Cemetery, did all the ordering. They had it served family style. Nobody asked me how I had done on the exam. Nobody asked me what it was like to be home from the war.
The others gabbled on to each other about all the tourist sights they had seen that day. They hadn’t come along to keep me company and give me moral support. They were there to see “Old Ironsides” and the belfry where Paul Revere had waved the lantern, signaling that the British were coming by land, and so on.
Yes, and, speaking of belfries, it was on this same enchanted evening that I was told that my wife, the mother of my children, had a remarkable number of ancestors and collateral relatives with bats in their belfries on her mother’s side. This was news to me, and to Margaret, too. We knew that Mildred had grown up in Peru, Indiana. But all she had ever said about Peru was that Cole Porter had been born there, too, and that she had been very glad to get out of there.
Mildred had let us know that her childhood had been unhappy, but that was a long way from saying that she, which meant my wife and kids, too, was from a notorious family of loonies there.
IT TURNED OUT that my mother-in-law had run into an old friend from her hometown, Peru, Indiana, during the tour of “Old Ironsides.” Now the old friend and his wife were at the table next to ours. When I went to urinate, the old friend came with me, and told me what a hard life Mildred had had in high school, with both her mother and her mother’s mother in the State Hospital for the Insane down in Indianapolis.
“Her mother’s brother, who she loved so much,” he went on, shaking the last droplets from the end of his weenie, “also went nuts in her senior year, and set fires all over town. If I was her, I would have taken off like a scalded cat for Wyoming, too.”
As I say, this was news to me.
“Funny thing—” he went on, “it never seemed to hit any of them until they were middle-aged.”
“If I’m not laughing,” I said, “that’s because I got out on the wrong side of the bed today.”
NO SOONER HAD I returned to our table than a young man passing behind me could not resist the impulse to touch my bristly haircut. I went absolutely ape-poop! He was slight, and had long hair, and wore a peace symbol around his neck. He looked like the singer Bob Dylan. For all I know or care, he may actually have been Bob Dylan. Whoever he was, I knocked him into a waiter carrying a heavily loaded