Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [27]
“Now, now—” I said.
“That overdressed sparrow-fart of a mother of yours is surely no relative of mine,” she said.
“Now, now—” I said.
“And you don’t consider yourself a relative of mine, do you?” she said.
“What can I say?” I said.
“That’s why we’re visiting you—to hear all the wonderful things you have to say,” she said. “You were always the brainy one. I was just some kind of tumor that had to be removed from your side.”
• • •
“I never said that,” I said.
“Other people said it, and you believed them,” she said. “That’s worse. You’re a Fascist, Wilbur. That’s what you are.”
“That’s absurd,” I said.
“Fascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody tells them they’re superior,” she said.
“Now, now—” I said.
“Then they want everybody else to die,” she said.
• • •
“This is getting us nowhere,” I said.
“I’m used to getting nowhere,” she said, “as you may have read in the papers and seen on television.”
“Eliza—” I said, “would it help at all for you to know that Mother will be sick for the rest of our lives about that awful thing we did to you?”
“How could that help?” she said. “That’s the dumbest question I ever heard.”
• • •
She looped a great arm over the shoulders of Norman Mushari, Jr. “Here’s who knows how to help people,” she said.
I nodded. “We’re grateful to him. We really are.”
“He’s my mother and father and brother and God, all wrapped up in one,” she said. “He gave me the gift of life!
“He said to me, ‘Money isn’t going to make you feel any better, Sweetheart, but we’re going to sue the piss out of your relatives anyway.’”
“Um,” I said.
“But it sure helps a hell of a lot more than your expressions of guilt, I must say. Those are just boasts about your own wonderful sensibilities.”
She laughed unpleasantly. “But I can see where you and Mother might want to boast about your guilt. After all, it’s the only thing you two monkeys ever earned.”
Hi ho.
24
I ASSUMED THAT ELIZA had now assaulted my self-respect with every weapon she had. I had somehow survived.
Without pride, with a clinical and cynical sort of interest, I noted that I had a cast-iron character which would repel attacks, apparently, even if I declined to put up defenses of any other kind.
How wrong I was about Eliza’s having expended her fury!
Her opening attacks had been aimed merely at exposing the cast iron in my character. She had merely sent out light patrols to cut down the trees and shrubs in front of my character, to strip it of its vines, so to speak.
And now, without my realizing it, the shell of my character stood before her concealed howitzers at nearly point-blank range, as naked and brittle as a Franklin stove.
Hi ho.
• • •
There was a lull. Eliza prowled about my livingroom, looking at my books, which she couldn’t read, of course. Then she returned to me, and she cocked her head, and she said, “People get into Harvard Medical School because they can read and write?”
“I worked very hard, Eliza,” I said. “It wasn’t easy for me. It isn’t easy now.”
“If Bobby Brown becomes a doctor,” she said, “that will be the strongest argument I ever heard for the Christian Scientists.”
“I will not be the best doctor there ever was,” I said. “I won’t be the worst, either.”
“You might be a very good man with a gong,” she said. She was alluding to recent rumors that the Chinese had had remarkable successes in treating breast cancer with the music of ancient gongs. “You look like a man,” she said, “who could hit a gong almost every time.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Touch me,” she said.
“Pardon me?” I said.
“I’m your own flesh. I’m your sister. Touch me,” she said.
“Yes, of course,” I said. But my arms seemed queerly paralyzed.
• • •
“Take your time,” she said.
“Well—” I said, “since you hate me so—”
“I hate Bobby Brown,” she said.
“Since you hate Bobby Brown—” I said.
“And Betty Brown,” she said.
“That was so long ago,” I said.
“Touch me,” she said.
“Oh, Christ, Eliza!” I said. My arms still wouldn’t move.
“I’ll touch you,” she said.
“Whatever you say,” I said. I was scared