Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [23]
It was the one and only time that she would ever be irrationally committed to being the mother of Eliza and me.
• • •
Eliza and I sensed this sudden jungle alliance telepathically, I think. At any rate, I remember that the damp velvet linings of my sinus cavities were tingling with encouragement.
We left off our crying, which we were no good at doing anyway. Yes, and we made a clear demand which could be satisfied at once. We asked to be tested for intelligence again—as a pair this time.
“We want to show you,” I said, “how glorious we are when we work together, so that nobody will ever talk about parting us again.”
We spoke carefully. I explained who “Betty and Bobby Brown” were. I agreed that they were stupid. I said we had had no experience with hating, and had had trouble understanding that particular human activity whenever we encountered it in books.
“But we are making small beginnings in hating now,” said Eliza. “Our hating is strictly limited at this point—to only two people in this Universe: To Betty and Bobby Brown.”
• • •
Dr. Cordiner, as it turned out, was a coward, among other things. Like so many cowards, she chose to go on bullying at the worst possible time. She jeered at Eliza’s and my request.
“What kind of a world do you think this is?” she said, and so on.
So Mother got up and went over to her, not touching her, and not looking her in the eyes, either. Mother spoke to her throat, and, in a tone between a purr and a growl, she called Dr. Cordiner an “overdressed little sparrow-fart.”
18
SO ELIZA AND I were retested—as a pair this time. We sat side-by-side at the stainless steel table in the tiled diningroom.
We were so happy!
A depersonalized Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner administered the tests like a robot, while our parents looked on. She had furnished us with new tests, so that the challenges would all be fresh.
Before we began, Eliza said to Mother and Father, “We promise to answer every question correctly.”
Which we did.
• • •
What were the questions like? Well, I was poking around the ruins of a school on Forty-sixth Street yesterday, and I was lucky enough to find a whole batch of intelligence tests, all set to go.
I quote:
“A man purchased 100 shares of stock at five dollars a share. If each share rose ten cents the first month, decreased eight cents the second month, and gained three cents the third month, what was the value of the man’s investment at the end of the third month?”
Or try this:
“How many digits are there to the left of the decimal place in the square root of 692038.42753?”
Or this:
“A yellow tulip viewed through a piece of blue glass looks what color?”
Or this:
“Why does the Little Dipper appear to turn about the North Star once a day?”
Or this:
“Astronomy is to geology as steeplejack is to what?”
And so on. Hi ho.
• • •
We made good on Eliza’s promise of perfection, as I have said.
The only trouble was that the two of us, in the innocent process of checking and rechecking our answers, wound up under the table—with our legs wrapped around each others’ necks in scissors grips, and snorting and snuffling into each others’ crotches.
When we regained our chairs, Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner had fainted, and our parents were gone.
• • •
At ten o’clock the next morning, I was taken by automobile to a school for severely disturbed children on Cape Cod.
19
IT IS SUNDOWN AGAIN. A bird down around Thirty-first Street and Fifth, where there is an Army tank with a tree growing out of its turret, calls out to me. It asks the same question over and over again with piercing clarity.
“Whip poor Will?” it says.
I never call that bird a “whippoorwill,” and neither do Melody and Isadore, who follow my lead in naming things. They seldom call Manhattan “Manhattan,” for example, or “The Island of Death,” which is its common name on the mainland. They do as I do: They call it “Skyscraper National Park,” without knowing