Flying to America

by Donald Barthelme

  “Well?”

  “Anne didn’t know it was a joke. You can’t make jokes that are based on people not knowing things. It’s not fair. It’s demeaning to women.”

  “Why to women?”

  “Women don’t pay attention to silly things like that. All that detail. And there’s one more thing.”

  “Which is?

  “You should take the laundry sometimes. Just because we’re women doesn’t mean that we have to take the laundry all the time.”

  “O.K. Good point.”

  “Also I met this interesting guy there last time. He’s a professional whistler.”

  In hog heaven the hogs wait in line for more heaven. No not right, no waiting in line, it’s unheavenly, unhogly. The celestial sty is quilted in kale, beloved of hogs. A male hog walks up to a female hog, says, “Want to get something going?” She is repulsed by his language, says, “Bro, unless you can phrase that better, you’re chilly forever.” No, that’s not right, this is hog heaven, they fall into each other’s trotters, nothing can be done wrong here, nothing wrong can be done. . . .

  In the mornings, large figures shrouded in terry cloth lurch back and forth between the several bedrooms and the single bathroom. Dore runs, in the mornings, picks up breakfast at the market on the way back, fresh Italian rolls, green garlicked Kräuterbutter, a quarter pound of breast of veal. She has become the manager of breakfast, takes pride in varying the fare, fine cheeses one day, a robust kidney stew the next, blueberry crepes and then chicken-fried steak with beaten biscuits. “This breaded burlap,” Veronica says, “nicely done, but what are you, trying to kill us, or what?”

  “Try more pepper.”

  Still in her sweats, she washes the dishes and stows them away, then settles down with the “Business Day” section of the Times, REVCO GETS $1.16 BILLION BUY-OUT BID, TROUBLED FARM BANKS TO GET REGULATORY AID, JAPANESE SETBACK ON CHIP PRICES. Scratching a bare foot with one hand, flipping pages with the other. Then she showers, dips into MTV (shoulder to shoulder with Anne for fifteen minutes). Then she’s off to the New School for her Tuesday class, Investment Strategies for the Eighties.

  “How’d you get in?” Simon asks.

  “I’m auditing,” she says. “I go early and get a seat. The class is so big they never take roll.”

  “You getting anything out of it?”

  “You can’t play unless you have something to play with. Still, it’s educational.”

  After class, her nap. She throws herself on her bed and is dead to the world for an hour and a half, wearing only spun-sugar V-shaped briefs by Olga. Simon stares, on occasion, at the beautiful body at rest, facedown on the bed. What miracles of bawdiness it can perform without thinking, the operator quite unaware. In sleep, she scratches her belly. He feels the urge to sit on the edge of the bed (hurl himself into the bed), but does not. At night, she either puts herself together for Fizz or reads Dickens. She’s bought four Dickens novels in worn Everyman editions at the Strand and is moving through them methodically. “The thing about Dickens is,” she tells him, “he knew the value of a pound when you didn’t have one. All his people are scrambling for money.”

  “So?” Simon says.

  “I identify with that.”

  Late at night she sits with Simon drinking a Dos Equis and listening to Horace Silver.

  “You’re the mother of these guys,” he says.

  “I’m not. Last among equals.”

  “Veronica’s a handful.”

  “She’s her own person. I admire her. She’s the smartest.”

  “How long have you three known each other?”

  Dore giggles. “We all worked for a retail outlet in Denver. It was called Frederick’s of Hollywood of Denver. It had nothing to do with the real Frederick’s of Hollywood.”

  “Is that clothes?”

  “Yes. Clothes.”

  What if they all lived happily ever after together? An unlikely prospect. What was there in his brain that forbade such felicity? Too much, his brain said, but the brain was a fair-to-middling brain at best, the glucose that kept it marching, metabolized crème brûlée, was present, but there was not enough vinegar in this brain, it lacked vinegar.

  What was there to do with these women? He’d send them to MIT, make architects of them! Women were coming into the profession in increasing numbers. The group could chat happily about mullions, in the evening by the fireside; tiring of mullions, turn to cladding; wearying of cladding, attack with relish the problems of blast-cleaned pressure-washed gun-applied polymer-cement-coated steel. Quel happiness!

  Someone would get pregnant, everyone would get pregnant. At seventy he’d be dealing with Pampers and new teeth. The new children would be named Susannah, Clarice, and Buck. He’d stroll out on the lawn, in the twilight, and throw the football at Buck. The football would rocket about two feet, then head for the greensward. The pitiful little child would say, “Kain’t anybody here play this game?”

  Lightning. Four o’clock in the afternoon. The women are in the kitchen, enjoying the display in the big windows.

  Anne says, “What are we going to do about this bozo?”

  “What’s to do?” Veronica asks.

  “He hasn’t hurt anything. Yet,” says Dore.

  “He’s been very circumspect.”

  “I think too circumspect.”

  “I think he thinks he’s doing the right thing.”

  “He uses too much butter when he cooks. He’s making pasta, he throws half a stick of butter in just before he serves it.”

  “Butter makes everything taste better.”

  “He looks around to see if anyone’s watching before he throws it in. Then he whips it around in there real quick. Hoping it will melt before anybody sees it.”

  “It’s just an effort to raise the level. That kind of shows I think an effort to raise the level of life, that’s not too terrible. Typically American.”

  A majestic crash. They jump.

  “That was a biggie.”

  “Not too bad.”

  “But what of us? What are we going to do?”

  “Bide our time.”

  “I like that expression.”

  “Have you ever hung out with an architect before?”

  “I knew this guy, he was a contractor, he contracted Port-O-Sans.”

  “What are they?”

  “Moveable outhouses.”

  “Good Lord this man is old.”

  “Fifty-three. Old enough to be our father.”

  “Yet he has a certain spirit.”

  “He’s indifferent.”

  “I don’t think he’s indifferent. He fucks well enough. Not the best I’ve ever seen.”

  “He can’t tell us apart.”

  “Oh I don’t think that’s true. He asked me when my birthday was.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “I told him. July 3.”

  “Well what does that prove?”

  “He’s thoughtful. He can tell one from another. He’s interested in us as individuals.”

  “Maybe it’s just a façade. Maybe he just knows what to do to make us think he cares about us as individuals and is doing it.”

  “Why would he do that? If he cares about us as individuals?”

  “Because he likes us to have the feeling that he cares about us as individuals? Because it makes things more warm?”

  “Well if he wants to make things more warm I’d say that was something in his favor.”

  “Yes but you have to make a distinction between making things seem a certain way and having them really be a certain way.”

  “Well even if he’s only interested in making things seem a certain way that means he’s not indifferent. To the degree that he makes the effort.”

  “That’s true.”

  “But maybe, on the other hand, he really cares. About us as individuals.”

  “How would we know?”

  The three women looked for jobs but were turned down by Bendel�
��s, Bergdorf’s, Bloomingdale’s, Lord & Taylor, Charles Jourdan, Ungaro, Altman’s, Saks, Macy’s. They tried all the modeling agencies, starting with Ford and working their way down the list. Simon designed and had printed the composites for them and they left these at every ad agency of any size in the city. They applied for substitute-teacher positions but found this a closed shop, they needed New York State credentials, which they didn’t have. In a moment of desperation they filed applications for the fire department but were told they were so far down on the list they had no reasonable hope of consideration before 1999, when they would be too old to begin training.

  Anne and Veronica are fighting.

  “Stupid bitch!”

  “Asshole!”

  “C’mon, guys,” Simon says. “What’s the deal?”

  “She’s a motherfucker and a dumb motherfucker,” Anne says.

  “Look who’s talking,” Veronica says, jumping out of Anne’s reach. “Miss Slut of 1986.”

  “What’s this about? What’s the issue?”

  “Simon you’re so fucking reasonable,” Veronica says, sitting down on the couch.

  “I say, what’s going on?”

  “She got us a job,” Anne says.

  “Terrific,” says Simon. “What’s the job?”

  “Convention. The National Sprinkler Association. At the Americana. We have to stand under these things and get sprinkled. I won’t do it.”

  “What if they gave us raincoats?”

  “It’s not raincoats they want to see.”

  “What if I said transparent plastic raincoats?”

  “I might do it with transparent plastic raincoats.”

  “I’ll call the guy and see what he says. It’s two hundred each.”

  “Raincoats and body stockings.”

  “No thrill in body stockings.”

  “Let them use their vile imaginations.”

  “I just feel like a body.”

  “What in God’s name do you think they want?”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Look at it this way,” Simon says. “A body is a gift. A great body is a great gift.”

  “All I need. A Unitarian minister.”

  “You don’t have to take the job.”

  “We don’t have any money.”

  “You want me to make a little pile of money and burn it right here on the floor? There’s enough money around. Take it easy. Wait until you find something you want.”

  “We’re concubines.”

  “You can make everything sound as terrible as you want,” Simon says. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Who with?”

  Simon’s wife’s lawyer’s letter arrives and outlines her demands: She wants full custody of the child, the Pine Street house, both cars, $65,000 a year in alimony, child support at a level consonant with the child’s previous style of life, 50 percent of all retirement funds, IRA, Keogh, and the firm’s, 50 percent of his partnership interest in the firm in perpetuity, and 50 percent of all odds and ends of stocks, bonds, cash, and real property not subsumable under one of the previous rubrics. The client has been severely damaged in all ways by Simon’s desertion and the years of fiendish abuse that had preceded it, the letter suggests.

  “What are you going to do?” Veronica asks.

  “Give it to her, I guess.”

  “Were you really that bad?”

  “He may be overstating it a bit.”

  The professional whistler’s wife calls and says that if the resident bitches and tarts don’t keep their hands off her husband she will cause a tragic happenstance.

  “She sounds a little pissed,” Anne says.

  “These housewives,” says Veronica. “I guess you can’t blame them they don’t have the latitude.”

  Dore says, “Let her come around, her ass is grass.”

  “Simon is passive.”

  “I don’t this he’s so passive; he grasps you very tightly. I think the quality of the embrace is important.”

  “I think he’s more active than passive. I’m still sore. I don’t call that passive.”

  “He’s slender.”

  “You call that slender?

  “I except the paunch.”

  “He can go maybe eighteen times in a good month.”

  “That’s depressing.”

  “I think it’s depressing.”

  “We pretend to be O.K.”

  “I’m fine. I’m really fine.”

  “I was fine. Spent a lot of time on it, buffing the heels with one of those rocks they sell in the drugstore, oiling the carcass with precious oils — then I found out. How they exploit us and reduce us to nothing. Mere knitters.”

  “How’d you find out?”

  “Read it in a feminist text.”

  “I heard they’re not gonna let us read any more books.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Just around. On the Rialto.”

  “Maybe it would be better for us so we wouldn’t be exacerbated.”

  “You’re like one of those people who lay down the flag in the dirt before it’s time.”

  “Well that’s what you say you fool.”

  “I want the car of my dreams.”

  “What is it?”

  “Camaro.”

  “You’re like one of those people who have really shitty dreams, know what I mean? Really shitty dreams.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “I played in a band once.”

  “What was your instrument?”

  “Tambourine.”

  “Can’t get a union card for tambourine.”

  “My knee all black-and-blue, I banged my tambourine on it. First the elbow, then the knee.”

  “I saw a beautiful ass. In a picture. It was white and was walking away from the camera. She was holding hands with a man. He was naked too. It was a beautiful picture.”

  “How’d that make you feel?”

  “Inferior.”

  “Well that’s what you say you idiot.”

  “I’d like to light up a child’s life, I apologize I was wrong.”

  “Yes you were wrong.”

  “But I still think what I think.”

  “It’s hard to get a scrape when you want to light up a child’s life.”

  “I’ve done it three times.”

  “Leaves you heavy of heart.”

  “It does.”

  Simon was a way station, a bed and breakfast, a youth hostel, a staging area, a C-141 with the jumpers of the 82nd Airborne lined up at the door. There was no place in the world for these women whom he loved, no good place. They could join the underemployed half-crazed demipoor, or they could be wives, those were the choices. The universities offered another path but one they were not likely to take. The universities were something Simon believed in (of course! he was a beneficiary), but there was among the women an animus toward the process that would probably never be overcome, not only impatience but a real loathing, whose source he did not really understand. Veronica told him that she had flunked freshman English three times. “How in the world do you do that?” he asked. “Comma splices,” she said. “Also, every time I wrote down something I thought, the small-section teacher said that it was banal. It probably was banal.” Simon found what the women had to say anything but banal, instead edged and immediate. Maybe nothing that could be rendered in a five-hundred-word theme, one bright notion and 450 words of hay. Or psychology: Harlow, rhesus monkeys, raisins, reward. People did master this stuff, more or less, and emerged more or less enriched thereby. Compare and contrast extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, giving examples of each. Father-beaten young women considering extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. “We all went through this,” he told them, and Dore said, “Yeah, and you smart guys did the Vietnam War.” Simon had opposed the Vietnam War in all possible ways short of self-immolation but could not deny that it was a war constructed by people who had labored through Psychology I, II, III, and IV and Main Currents of West
ern Thought. “But, dummy, it’s the only thing you’ve got,” he said. “Your best idea.” “I have the highest respect for education,” she said. “The highest. I’d be just as dreary when I came out as when I want in.”

  Veronica comes into his room looking very gloomy.

  “We have to talk,” she says. She’s wearing a rather sedate dark-blue nightgown, one he hasn’t seen before.

  “What’s the matter?

  “Dore. She’s falling apart.”

  “In what way?”

  “She’s lost her joy of life.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “She tries to hide it from you.”

  “Maybe it’s just temporary.”

  “I’ve never seen her like this. She’s been reading terrible books. Books about how terrible men are and how they’ve kept us down.”

  “That should make her feel better, not worse. I mean, knowing the causes.”

  “Don’t need your cheapo irony, Simon. She’s very upset.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Talk to her.”

  “What can I say? I agree with half that stuff and think the other half is garbage.”

  “Well it’s not for you to decide, is it? Whenever we say something you don’t like you say we’re hysterical or crazy.”

  “Me?”

  “Men in general.”

  “Have I ever said you were hysterical or crazy?”

  “Probably you didn’t want to stir us up. Probably you were thinking it and were just too tactful to say it.”

  “Are you sure it’s Dore who’s got this problem?”

  “She’s been lending us the books. What else do we have to do with our time?”

  “So you’re all upset.”

  “The truth shall make you free.”

  “What makes you think this stuff is the truth?”

  “Thirty-five percent of all American women aren’t allowed to talk at dinner parties. Think about that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s in a book.”

  Veronica’s trampoline is leaning against the wall and Veronica is throwing books at it to see how far they will bounce. Buddenbrooks in a paper edition bounces a good twelve feet. Dore is painting her legs red, with a two-inch brush and a big jar into which she has crumbled bright-red Easter-egg glazes. Anne is threatening to cut off her long dark hair. She stands poised, a hank in one hand, scissors in the other, daring anyone to interfere. “Anybody messes with me gets the scissors in the medulla.” Simon senses unrest.