Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [55]
The policeman left.
Paul shut his apartment door, shuffled into his bedroom, and collapsed on the bed.
The next voices Paul heard came from his own side of the wall. The voices were sunny—the voices of his mother and father. His mother was singing a nursery rhyme and his father was undressing him.
"Diddle-diddle-dumpling, my son John," piped his mother, "Went to bed with his stockings on. One shoe off, and one shoe on—diddle—diddle—dumpling, my son John."
Paul opened his eyes.
"Hi, big boy," said his father, "you went to sleep with all your clothes on."
"How’s my little adventurer?" said his mother.
"O.K.," said Paul sleepily. "How was the show?"
"It wasn’t for children, honey," said his mother. "You would have liked the short subject, though. It was all about bears—cunning little cubs."
Paul’s father handed her Paul’s trousers, and she shook them out, and hung them neatly on the back of a chair by the bed. She patted them smooth, and felt the ball of money in the pocket. "Little boys’ pockets!" she said, delighted. "Full of childhood’s mysteries. An enchanted frog? A magic pocketknife from a fairy princess?" She caressed the lump.
"He’s not a little boy—he’s a big boy," said Paul’s father. "And he’s too old to be thinking about fairy princesses."
Paul’s mother held up her hands. "Don’t rush it, don’t rush it. When I saw him asleep there, I realized all over again how dreadfully short childhood is." She reached into the pocket and sighed wistfully. "Little boys are so hard on clothes—especially pockets."
She brought out the ball and held it under Paul’s nose. "Now, would you mind telling Mommy what we have here?" she said gaily.
The ball bloomed like a frowzy chrysanthemum, with ones, fives, tens, twenties, and lipstick-stained Kleenex for petals. And rising from it, befuddling Paul’s young mind was the pungent musk of perfume.
Paul’s father sniffed the air. "What’s that smell?" he said.
Paul’s mother rolled her eyes. "Tabu," she said.
(1955)
MORE STATELY MANSIONS
WE’VE KNOWN the McClellans, Grace and George, for about two years now. They were the first neighbors to call on us and welcome us to the village.
I expected that initial conversation to lag uncomfortably after the first pleasantries, but not at all. Grace, her eyes quick and bright as a sparrow’s, found subject matter enough to keep her talking for hours.
"You know," she said excitedly, "your living room could be a perfect dream! Couldn’t it, George? Can’t you see it?"
"Yup," said her husband. "Nice, all right."
"Just tear out all this white-painted woodwork," Grace said, her eyes narrowing. "Panel it all in knotty pine wiped with linseed oil with a little umber added. Cover the couch in lipstick red—red red. Know what I mean?"
"Red?" said Anne, my wife.
"Red! Don’t be afraid of color."
"I’ll try not to be," Anne said.
"And just cover the whole wall there, those two ugly little windows and all, with bottle-green curtains. Can’t you see it? It’d be almost exactly like that problem living room in the February Better House and Garden. You remember that, of course."
"I must have missed that," said Anne. The month was August.
"Or was it Good Homelife, George?" Grace said.
"Don’t remember offhand," said George.
"Well, I can look it up in my files and put my hand right on it." Grace stood up suddenly, and, uninvited, started a tour through the rest of the house.
She went from room to room, consigning a piece of furniture to the Salvation Army, detecting a fraudulent antique, shrugging partitions out of existence, and pacing off a chartreuse, wall-to-wall carpet we would have to order before we did another thing. "Start with the carpet," she said firmly, "and build from there. It’ll pull your whole downstairs together if you build from the carpet."
"Um," said Anne.
"I hope you saw Nineteen Basic Carpet Errors in the June Home Beautiful."
"Oh yes, yes indeed," Anne said.
"Good. Then I don’t have to tell you how wrong you can go, not building from the carpet. George—Oh, he’s still in the living room."
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