Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [13]
Eliza and I, thinking as halves of a single genius, proposed that the Constitution be amended so as to guarantee that every citizen, no matter how humble or crazy or incompetent or deformed, somehow be given membership in some family as covertly xenophobic and crafty as the one their public servants formed.
Good for Eliza and me!
• • •
Hi ho.
7
HOW NICE it would have been, especially for Eliza, since she was a girl, if we had been ugly ducklings—if we had become beautiful by and by. But we simply grew more preposterous with each passing day.
There were a few advantages to being a male 2 meters tall. I was respected as a basketball player at prep school and college, even though I had very narrow shoulders and a voice like a piccolo, and not the first hints of a beard or pubic hair. Yes, and later on, after my voice had deepened and I ran as a candidate for Senator from Vermont, I was able to say on my billboards, “It takes a Big Man to do a Big Job!”
But Eliza, who was exactly as tall as I was, could not expect to be welcomed anywhere. There was no conceivable conventional role for a female which could be bent so as to accommodate a twelve-fingered, twelve-toed, four-breasted, Neanderthaloid half-genius—weighing one quintal, and two meters tall.
• • •
Even as little children we knew we weren’t ever going to win any beauty contests.
Eliza said something prophetic about that, incidentally. She couldn’t have been more than eight. She said that maybe she could win a beauty contest on Mars.
She was, of course, destined to die on Mars.
Eliza’s beauty prize there would be an avalanche of iron pyrite, better known as “Fool’s Gold.”
Hi ho.
• • •
There was a time in our childhood when we actually agreed that we were lucky not to be beautiful. We knew from all the romantic novels I’d read out loud in my squeaky voice, often with gestures, that beautiful people had their privacy destroyed by passionate strangers.
We didn’t want that to happen to us, since the two of us alone composed not only a single mind but a thoroughly populated Universe.
• • •
This much I must say about our appearance, at least: Our clothing was the finest that money could buy. Our astonishing dimensions, which changed radically almost from month to month, were mailed off regularly, in accordance with our parents’ instructions, to some of the finest tailors and cobblers and dressmakers and shirtmakers and haberdashers in the world.
The practical nurses who dressed and undressed us took a childish delight, even though we never went anywhere, in costuming us for imaginary social events for millionaires—for tea dances, for horse shows, for skiing vacations, for attending classes at expensive prep schools, for an evening of theater here in Manhattan and a supper afterwards with lots of champagne.
And so on.
Hi ho.
• • •
We were aware of all the comedy in this. But, as brilliant as we were when we put our heads together, we did not guess until we were fifteen that we were also in the midst of a tragedy. We thought that ugliness was simply amusing to people in the outside world. We did not realize that we could actually nauseate strangers who came upon us unexpectedly.
We were so innocent as to the importance of good looks, in fact, that we could see little point to the story of “The Ugly Duckling,” which I read out loud to Eliza one day—in the mausoleum of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.
The story, of course, was about a baby bird that was raised by ducks, who thought it was the funniest-looking duck they had ever seen. But then it turned out to be a swan when it grew up.
Eliza, I remember, said she thought it would have been a much better story if the little bird had waddled up on shore and turned into a rhinoceros.
Hi ho.
8
UNTIL THE EVE of our fifteenth birthday, Eliza and I never heard anything bad about ourselves when we eavesdropped from the secret passageways.
The servants were so used to us