Picked-Up Pieces Read Online Free Page B

this book Janice talks about them getting a farm. The fourth and last, to come out in 1991 if we all live, is tentatively titled
Rabbit Is Rich
. Nice, huh?
    Q (
turning tape recorder down to pianissimo
): Not bad.
Pas mal
. Not bad.
    A (
gratefully, his shingling hand itching
): Thanks. Thanks a lot.
Farewell to the Middle Class

 
(Hitherto Published Only, Strange to Say, in Japanese, as One of a Series of Ads for Suntory Whisky, on the Strength of its having been Written under the Influence of Alcohol)
    T ODAY I WAS TOLD I had made half a million dollars. My wife calls me a half-ass millionaire. The man on the other end of the phone seemed a little disappointed that I couldn’t react. He had swung the deal and felt closer to it than I did. I expressed a doubt, just to make conversation, and that produced a series of phone calls on his part that produced anotherhundred thousand dollars. The second time he called, my wife kept shouting “Give it away!” from the other room, and I could hardly hear him, and explained that he had given my wife a headache, and he laughed, thinking I was making a joke. I wasn’t.
    Sad, yes. I couldn’t think of how to keep the government from taking the major share. The contract wasn’t even signed, and I was a tax dodger. I couldn’t think where to put the money. Our savings accounts were full to the insurable maximum. My wife had a new electric dishwasher, and I had a new pair of Fiberglas skis. We lived in an old house in the middle of an old neighborhood, making a little more than our neighbors but too lazy to spend it and taking a (if you examine it closely) snobbish pride in our worn-out sneakers, our dented cars, our threadbare backyard full of broken toys and unharvested dog dung.
    Tonight I am a rich man. Tomorrow my wife is thirty-eight. I went out in a blizzard and bought her, rapidly, at the five and ten and then the local electric shop, a Joan Baez record, an electric waffle iron, and a four-slice toaster. In the old days, I would have bought her either the toaster or the waffle iron, but not both. I also bought some four-ninety wine. I said to the liquor-store proprietor, with whom I have grown intimate over the years, that people who paid five bucks for a bottle of wine must be nuts. Then I bought some. It was all a routine, half-planned on my part. He laughed, though. And the strange thing is, the wine was terrific, really distinctly better than three-dollar Bordeaux, or two-dollar Almadén. Fuller, smokier, with more grape, more landscape, more sorrow in it. We drank it all and, drunk, horsed around with the kids, who were feeling sorry for the old toaster and old waffle iron. The smaller girl took these appliances up to her bed and tucked them in. The snow kept coming. I had to cancel a church meeting that was going to be held at my house—too many old people on the committee to make it up the slippery curb.
    Now I stand here, frugging to the Joan Baez record, looking out my window at my neighbor’s television screen through the snowstorm. He is a train conductor and watches television every night from six to midnight. His endurance is fabulous. It is beautiful. His bluish set, more familiar to my wife and myself than the moon, is beautiful. We have watched it from our bedroom window often, before making love, after making love, before fights, after them. Its electric shadows twitch. Its blue is smeared, glorified, made abstract by the snow, the falling flurryingflying snow, falling in clumps, bunched; only God could make so much snow. Five hundred thousand flakes. My neighbor’s wife’s head, silhouetted by the set, turns, and I guess I am visible, and she is watching. I turn off the light and keep frugging. Go, Joan. Good-bye, good-bye. She is doing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” in German.
Sagt mir wo die Blumen sind
. Good-bye, dear neighborhood of smoking chimneys and speckled roofs. My children yearn to be put to bed. One of the boys had a bath and is