Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [37]
Hi ho.
• • •
I was enchanted by my new middle name, by the way. I ordered that the Oval Office of the White House be painted pale yellow immediately, in celebration of my having become a Daffodil.
And, as I was telling my private secretary, Hortense Muskellunge-13 McBundy, to have the place repainted, a dishwasher from the White House kitchen appeared in her office. He was bent on a very shy errand, indeed. He was so embarrassed that he choked every time he tried to speak.
When he at last managed to articulate his message, I embraced him. He had come out of the steamy depths to tell me ever-so-bravely that he, too, was a Daffodil-11.
“My brother,” I said.
36
WAS THREE NO substantial opposition to the new social scheme? Why, of course there was. And, as Eliza and I had predicted, my enemies were so angered by the idea of artificial extended families that they constituted a polyglot artificial extended family of their own.
They had campaign buttons, too, which they went on wearing long after I was elected. It was inevitable what those buttons said, to wit:
• • •
I had to laugh, even when my own wife, the former Sophie Rothschild, took to wearing a button like that.
Hi ho.
• • •
Sophie was furious when she received a form letter from her President, who happened to be me, which instructed her to stop being a Rothschild. She was to become a Peanut-3 instead.
Again: I am sorry, but I had to laugh.
• • •
Sophie smouldered about it for several weeks. And then she came crawling into the Oval Office on an afternoon of particularly heavy gravity—to tell me she hated me.
I was not stung.
As I have already said, I was fully aware that I was not the sort of lumber out of which happy marriages were made.
“I honestly did not think you would go this far, Wilbur,” she said. “I knew you were crazy, and that your sister was crazy, too. But I did not believe you would go this far.”
• • •
Sophie did not have to look up at me. I, too, was on the floor—prone, with my chin resting on a pillow. I was reading a fascinating report of a thing that had happened in Urbana, Illinois.
I did not give her my undivided attention, so she said, “What is it you’re reading that is so much more interesting than me?”
“Well—” I said, “for many years, I was the last American to have spoken to a Chinese. That’s not true any more. A delegation of Chinese paid a call to the widow of a physicist in Urbana—about three weeks ago.”
Hi ho.
• • •
“I certainly don’t want to waste your valuable time,” she said. “You’re certainly closer to Chinamen than you ever were to me.”
I had given her a wheelchair for Christmas—to use around the White House on days of heavy gravity. I asked her why she didn’t use it. “It makes me very sad,” I said, “to have you go around on all-fours.”
“I’m a Peanut now,” she said. “Peanuts live very close to the ground. Peanuts are famous for being low. They are the cheapest of the cheap, and the lowest of the low.”
• • •
That early in the game, I thought it was crucial the people not be allowed to change their Government-issue middle names. I was wrong to be so rigid about that. All sorts of name-changing goes on now—here on the Island of Death and everywhere. I can’t see that any harm is done.
But I was severe with Sophie. “You want to be an Eagle or a Diamond, I suppose,” I said.
“I want to be a Rothschild,” she said.
“Then perhaps you should go to Machu Picchu,” I said. That was where most of her blood relatives had gone.
• • •
“Are you really so sadistic,” she said, “that you will make me prove my love by befriending strangers who are now crawling out from damp rocks like earwigs? Like centipedes? Like slugs? Like worms?”
“Now, now,” I said.
“When was the last time you took a look at the freak show outside the fence?” she said.
The perimeter of the White House grounds, just outside the fence, was infested daily with persons claiming to be artificial relatives of Sophie or me.
There were twin male midgets out there, I remember, holding a banner that said “Flower Power.”
There was