The New Yorker Stories

Her husband came to her house after work, and they had dinner. She had a postcard from Sam. She showed it to him—a picture of the Santa Monica Freeway, clogged with cars. The message read, “The small speck between the red and the yellow car is me, doing 110. Love, Sam.” There were no specks between cars, which were themselves only specks in the picture, but Ellen looked and smiled anyway.

The next week there was another postcard—a scowling Indian—which had been mailed to her husband. Sam thanked him for the talk they had before he left. He closed with some advice: “Come West. It’s warm and it’s beautiful. How do you know until you try? Peace, Sam.”

Later that week, while they were on their way to buy groceries, a couple on a motorcycle came out of nowhere and swerved in front of their car, going much too fast.

“Crazy son of a bitch!” her husband said, hitting the brakes.

The girl on the motorcycle looked back, probably to assure herself that they really had got through safely. The girl was smiling. Actually, the girl was too far away for Ellen to see her expression clearly, but she was certain that she saw a smile.

“Crazy son of a bitch,” her husband was saying. Ellen closed her eyes and remembered being in the motorcycle shop with Sam, looking at the machines.

“I want one that will do a hundred with no sweat,” Sam had said to the salesman.

“All of these will do a hundred easy,” the salesman said, smiling at them.

“This one, then,” Sam told him, tapping the handlebars of the one he stood by.

He paid for most of it with cash. She hadn’t taken any rent money from him for a long time, so he had a lot of cash. He wrote a check to cover the rest of it. The salesman was surprised, counting the bills.

“Do you have streamers?” Sam had asked.

“Streamers?”

“Isn’t that what they’re called? The things kids have on their bikes?”

The salesman smiled. “We don’t carry them. Guess you’d have to go to a bicycle shop.”

“I guess I will,” Sam said. “I’ve got to go in style.”

Ellen looked at her husband. How can I be so unsympathetic to him, she wondered. She was angry. She should have asked Sam why she felt that way toward her husband sometimes. He would have explained it all to her, patiently, in a late-night talk. There had been no return address on the postcards. Someday he would send his address, and she could still ask him. She could tell him about the new girl who could have played anything she wanted and who selected “Swanee River.” In the car, with her eyes closed, she smiled, and ahead of them—miles ahead of them now—so did the girl on the motorcycle.

Fancy Flights

Silas is afraid of the vacuum cleaner. He stands, looking out the bedroom door, growling at it. He also growls when small children are around. The dog is afraid of them, and they are afraid of him because he growls. His growling always gets him in trouble; nobody thinks he is entitled to growl. The dog is also afraid of a lot of music. “One Little Story That the Crow Told Me” by the New Lost City Ramblers raises his hackles. Bob Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street” brings bared teeth and a drooping tail. Sometimes he keeps his teeth bared even through the quiet intervals. If the dog had his way, all small children would disappear, and a lot of musicians would sound their last notes. If the dog had his way, he would get Dylan by the leg in a dark alley. Maybe they could take a trip—Michael and the dog—to a recording studio or a concert hall, wherever Dylan was playing, and wait for him to come out. Then Silas could get him. Thoughts like these (“fancy flights,” his foreman called them) were responsible for Michael’s no longer having a job.

He had worked in a furniture factory in Ashford, Connecticut. Sometimes when his lathe was churning and grinding, he would start laughing. Everyone was aware of his laughter, but nobody did anything about it. He smoked hash in the parking lot in back of the factory during his break. Toward the end of his shift, he often had to choke back hysteria. One night, the foreman told him a Little Moron joke that was so funny Michael almost fell down laughing. After that, several people who worked there stopped by to tell him jokes, and every time he nearly laughed himself sick. Anybody there who spoke to him made him beam, and if they told a joke, or even if they said they had “a good one,” he began to laugh right away. Every day he smoked as much hash as he could stand. He wore a hairnet—everyone had to wear a hairnet, after a woman had her face yanked down to within a fraction of an inch of a blade when a machine caught her hair—and half the time he forgot to take it off after he finished work. He’d find out he was still wearing it in the morning when he woke up. He thought that was pretty funny; he might be somebody’s wife, with pink curlers under the net and a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.