Flying to America by Donald Barthelme Read Free Book Online Page B

to make love. “No,” she said. Edward said something funny. Pia tried to laugh. She was holding a piece of cake with a red-and-white flag on top. Edward bought a flashlight. Pia laughed. Pia still didn’t want to go to bed with Edward. It was becoming annoying. He owed the government back home a thousand dollars. Edward laughed and laughed. “I owe the government a thousand dollars,” Edward said to Pia, “did you know that?” Edward laughed. Pia laughed. They had another glass of wine. Pia was pregnant. They laughed and laughed. Edward turned off the radio. “The lights went out,” he said in Danish. Pia and Edward laughed. “What are you thinking about?” Edward asked Pia and she said she couldn’t tell him just then because she was laughing.

The Piano Player
    O utside his window five–year–old Priscilla Hess, square and squat as a mailbox (red sweater, blue lumpy corduroy pants), looked around poignantly for someone to wipe her overflowing nose. There was a butterfly locked inside that mailbox, surely; would it ever escape? Or was the quality of mailboxness stuck to her forever, like her parents, like her name? The sky was sunny and blue. A filet of green Silly Putty disappeared into fat Priscilla Hess and he turned to greet his wife who was crawling through the door on her hands and knees.
    “Yes?” he said. “What now?”
    “I’m ugly,” she said, sitting back on her haunches. “Our children are ugly.”
    “Nonsense,” Brian said sharply. “They’re wonderful children. Wonderful and beautiful. Other people’s children are ugly, not our children. Now get up and go back to the smokeroom. You’re supposed to be curing a ham.”
    “The ham died,” she said. “I couldn’t cure it. I tried everything. You don’t love me anymore. The penicillin was stale. I’m ugly and so are the children. It said to tell you goodbye.”
    “It?”
    “The ham,” she said. “Is one of our children named Ambrose? Somebody named Ambrose has been sending us telegrams. How many do we have now? Four? Five? Do you think they’re hetero-sexual?” She made a moue and ran a hand through her artichoke hair. “The house is rusting away. Why did you want a steel house? Why did I think I wanted to live in Connecticut? I don’t know.”
    “Get up,” he said softly, “get up, dearly beloved. Stand up and sing. Sing Parsifal .”
    “I want a Triumph,” she said from the floor. “A TR–4. Everyone in Stamford, every single person, has one but me. If you gave me a TR–4 I’d put our ugly children in it and drive away. To Wellfleet. I’d take all the ugliness out of your life.”
    “A green one?”
    “A red one,” she said menacingly. “Red with leather seats.”
    “Aren’t you supposed to be chipping paint?” he asked. “I bought us an electronic data processing system. An IBM.”
    “I want to go to Wellfleet,” she said. “I want to talk to Edmund Wilson and take him for a ride in my red TR–4. The children can dig clams. We have a lot to talk about, Bunny and me.”
    “Why don’t you remove those shoulder pads?” Brian said kindly. “It’s too bad about the ham.”
    “I loved that ham,” she said viciously. “When you galloped into the University of Texas on your roan Volvo, I thought you were going to be somebody. I gave you my hand. You put rings on it. Rings that my mother gave me. I thought you were going to be distinguished, like Bunny.”
    He showed her his broad-shouldered back. “Everything is in flitters,” he said. “Play the piano, won’t you?”
    “You always were afraid of my piano,” she said. “My four or five children are afraid of the piano. You taught them to be afraid of it. The giraffe is on fire, but I suppose you don’t care.”
    “What can we eat,” he asked, “with the ham gone?”
    “There’s Silly Putty in the deepfreeze,” she said tonelessly.
    “Rain is falling,” he observed. “Rain or something.”
    “When you graduated from the Wharton School