Flying to America by Donald Barthelme

of Business,” shesaid, “I thought at last! I thought now we can move to Stamford and have interesting neighbors. But they’re not interesting. The giraffe is interesting but he sleeps so much of the time. The mailbox is rather interesting. The man didn’t open it at 3:31 P.M. today. He was five minutes late. The government lied again.”
    With a gesture of impatience, Brian turned on the light. The great burst of electricity illuminated her upturned tiny face. Eyes like snow peas, he thought. Tamar dancing. My name is in the dictionary, in the back. The Law of Bilateral Good Fortune. Piano bread perhaps. A nibble of pain running through the Western World. Coriolanus.
    “Oh God,” she said, from the floor. “Look at my knees.”
    Brian looked. Her knees were blushing.
    “It’s senseless, senseless, senseless,” she said, “I’ve been caulking the medicine chest. What for? I don’t know. You’ve got to give me more money. Ben is bleeding. Bessie wants to be an S.S. man. She’s reading The Rise and Fall. She’s identified with Himmler. Is that her name? Bessie?”
    “Yes. Bessie.”
    “What’s the other one’s name? The blond one?”
    “Billy. Named after your father. Your Dad.”
    “You’ve got to get me an air hammer. To clean the children’s teeth. What’s the name of that disease? They’ll all have it, every single one, if you don’t get me an air hammer.”
    “And a compressor,” Brian said. “And a Pinetop Smith record. I remember.”
    She lay on her back. The shoulder pads clattered against the terrazzo. Her number, 17, was written large on her chest. Her eyes were screwed tight shut. “Altman’s is having a sale,” she said. “Maybe I should go in.”
    “Listen,” he said. “Get up. Go into the grape arbor. I’ll trundle the piano out there. You’ve been chipping too much paint.”
    “You wouldn’t touch that piano,” she said. “Not in a million years.”
    “You really think I’m afraid of it?”
    “Not in a million years,” she said, “you phony.”
    “All right,” Brian said quietly. “All right .” He strode over to the piano. He took a good grip on its black varnishedness. He began to trundle it across the room, and, after slight hesitation, it struck him dead.

Henrietta and Alexandra
    A lexandra was reading Henrietta’s manuscript.
    “This,” she said, pointing with her finger, “is inane.”
    Henrietta got up and looked over Alexandra’s shoulder at the sentence.
    “Yes,” she said. “I prefer the inane, sometimes. The ane is often inutile to the artist.”
    There was a moment of contemplation.
    “I have been offered a thousand florins for it,” Henrietta said. “The Dutch rights.”
    “How much is that in our money?”
    “Two hundred sixty-six dollars.”
    “Bless Babel,” Alexandra said, and took her friend in her arms.
    Henrietta said: “Once I was a young girl, very much like any other young girl, interested in the same things, I was exemplary. I was told what I was, that is to say a young girl, and I knew what I was because I had been told and because there were other young girls all around me who had been told the same things and knew the same things, and looking at them and hearing again in my head the things I had been told I knew what a young girl was. We had all been told the same things. I had not been told, for example, that some wine waspiss and some not and I had not been told . . . other things. Still I had not been told a great many things all very useful but I had not been told that I was going to die in any way that would allow me to realize that I really was going to die and that it would all be over, then, and that this was all there was and that I had damned well better make the most of it. That I discovered for myself and covered with shame and shit as I was I made the most of it. I had not been told how to make the most of it but I figured it out. Then I moved through a period of depression, the depression engendered by