I'm Dying Laughing Read Free

property in Queens, the owner about to go bankrupt. Depression stories, she said to herself, looking about. Suddenly she laughed and exclaimed, ‘See that! I’ve been here twenty-four years and forty-one days, that is, I was born here, and I never saw her before. And now I’m turning my back on her.’
    They were passing the Statue of Liberty. The men paused and the nearer one turned his head slightly. Emily was fleshy, rosy, wearing a silk dress, tawny background with a big, fruity pattern. He took his elbow off the rail, and their glances slid all over her, fine stockings, small fat feet in purple slippers. She gave them a glance and cheerily said, ‘I won a prize in high school for writing about her. La sforza del destino. Ah, me! I know everything there is to know about that dame. She’s French, their idea of the wheatfed goddess. Her nose is Greek, four feet six inches long; but her waist, oh, her waist, is thirty-five feet round. Mrs Midwest America herself; can you see her in a mother hubbard?’
    She became hilarious. The men glanced at each other.
    She went on, ‘You know, there are 200,000 pounds of copper sheeting in her?’
    The men at once turned to the statue.
    ‘And her mouth, like mine, is three feet wide!’
    The men stared silently, but the statue was left behind. Then they began again, to each other, ‘You know Ross and McKinley? They went down four years ago, January of 1931. Ross is still around, has a little business, junk store, on Second Avenue. McKinley is on relief, living in a flophouse in Harlem. He owed—’
    They turned and strolled forward.
    She said to herself, ‘Oh, well, everyone’s got a lot on their minds, I guess; the days of the locust.’
    She went below for her white spring jacket. She was in a two-berth cabin and there was her sharer, sitting on the bed with whisky in a tooth-glass. It was the dark woman with the bobbed hair, from the deck. There was a gilded steamer basket standing on the shelf near Emily’s bunk.
    Emily said, ‘Help yourself. It’s from the office. What’s your name? Mine’s Emily Wilkes.’
    The woman coughed and looked at her darkly.
    ‘Well, if we’re cabin-mates, I’d better know your moniker,’ Emily said.
    Now the woman said in her soft voice with the Irish intonation of old New York, ‘Mrs Browne, Mrs Walter Browne, the Browne spelled with an e.’
    ‘Is this your first trip to Europe, Mrs Browne?’
    The woman finished her drink and washed out the glass. No answer.
    ‘H’m, well, excuse me. My first trip, except to Staten Island, Arbutus Beach, to study the spot marked X; and once, when I took the ferry from Seattle to Port Angeles on a stormy day of strike, my life in my hands.’
    On the way up, she thought, ‘Good company, I see! Talkative; verbal diarrhea. They probably figured me out and put me in with Signora Sphinx, so I can learn to be refahned before I get to Europe.’
    Warm now, though there was a fresh breeze, she walked round the deck.
    Aft, lounging on a grey-painted locker, was a large man, shirt open to the waist, showing his long, sparsely hairy body. He was fair, a big face with large, open blue eyes, the eyes of a child. This big man saw her, smiled, began shaking with laughter. ‘Who is that?’ She knew him. She walked all round the deck and came back. He was there, but looking tired, his cheeks creased and fallen. His muscular arms burst out of the short sleeves; he had a big putty nose. ‘I know him!’ Five years before—a troublesome student in Seattle, shouting with students at a long table in the canteen, putting them all down, roaring with argument, sitting by himself, moody, dirty, drunk and with his books before him. As she trotted past, he looked at her purple slippers. ‘He does remember! He remembers that after moving to his table, called the Circus, attracted by the circus, I started asking sappy questions. I got the attention of one Bellamy Dark, a “mediocre academic drudge” he said. Modest