(eng) Kurt Vonnegut by Timequake

Author:Timequake [Timequake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

30

One time when Allie was maybe fifteen and I was ten, she heard somebody fall down our basement stairs: Bloompity, bloomp, bloomp. She thought it was I, so she stood at the top of the stairs laughing her fool head off. This would have been 1932, three years into the Great Depression.

But it wasn’t I. It was a guy from the gas company, who had come to read the meter. He came clumping out of the basement all bunged up, and absolutely furious.

Another time, when Allie was sixteen or older, since she was driving a car with me as a passenger, we saw a woman come out of a stopped streetcar horizontally, headfirst and parallel to the pavement. Her heels had caught somehow.

As I’ve written elsewhere, and said in interviews, Allie and I laughed for years about that woman. She wasn’t seriously hurt. She got back on her feet OK.

One thing that only I saw, but which Allie liked to hear about anyhow, was a guy who offered to teach a beautiful woman not his wife how to do the Tango. It was at the tail end of a cocktail party that had pretty much petered out.

I don’t think the man’s wife was there. I can’t imagine he would have made the offer if his wife had been there. He was not a professional dance instructor. There were maybe ten people in all there, including the host and hostess. This was in the days of phonographs. The host and hostess had made the tactical mistake of putting an acetate recording of Tango music on their phonograph.

So this guy, his eyes flashing, his nostrils flaring, took this beautiful woman in his arms, and he fell down.

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