Samuel Johnson Is Indignant Read Free Page B

She’d account for him. She’d give it to him—right in the clock! He’d say: Get the old bag off my dark wood paneling! That’s my mother! What a barney, hoo-ha! She’d give him a mouse, all right! He’d say: Get the old bag in her pink suit away from in front of my dark wood paneling! Get him, mother! Sic him! Old Iowa bag. Come in here with her replaced hip, her replaced knee, one leg shorter than the other, built-up shoe. Determined. She’d lam him in his little Mary, quick and smart, she’d have the edge on him. What’s this? he would have said. Kick this old lady out of here! In her spring suit. He might have used bad language about her too: Kick this old fart out of here! Maybe I should have taken my whole family in there with me. Brother watching, father watching, sister getting up to help. But Mother’s the one who would floor him. Mother would thrash him, she’d baste his jacket. She’s high-rent. She would have said, Be nice to her! He wasn’t nice to me. That’s my daughter! He wasn’t nice. She would have given him a piece of her fist. See this?—shaking it right in his pan. Names for him. She doesn’t come as a water-carrier for anyone. Annihilate him, Mother! Crush him! No more—Bam!—President of this place. New President, please! Better one, please. Oh boy! Sock! You’ll see, Mr. President! Summer-complaint! Dog’s breakfast!

Companion
    We are sitting here together, my digestion and I. I am reading a book and it is working away at the lunch I ate a little while ago.

Blind Date
    â€œThere isn’t really much to tell,” she said, but she would tell it if I liked. We were sitting in a midtown luncheonette. “I’ve only had one blind date in my life. And I didn’t really have it. I can think of more interesting situations that are like a blind date—say when someone gives you a book as a present, when they fix you up with that book. I was once given a book of essays about reading, writing, book collecting. I felt it was a perfect match. I started reading it right away, in the back seat of the car. I stopped listening to the conversation in the front. I like to read about how other people read and collect books, even how they shelve their books. But by the time I was done with the book, I had taken a strong dislike to the author’s personality. I won’t have another date with her !” She laughed. Here we were interrupted by the waiter, and then a series of incidents followed that kept us from resuming our conversation that day.
    The next time the subject came up, we were sitting in two Adirondack chairs looking out over a lake in, in fact, the Adirondacks. We were content to sit in silence at first. We were tired. We had been to the Adirondack Museum that day and seen many things of interest, including old guide boats and good examples of the original Adirondack chair. Now we watched the water and the edge of the woods, each thinking, I was sure, about James Fenimore Cooper. After some parties of canoers had gone by, older people in canvas boating hats, their quiet voices carrying far over the water to us, we went on talking. These were precious days of holiday together, and we were finishing many unfinished conversations.
    â€œI was fifteen or sixteen, I guess,” she said. “I was home from boarding school. Maybe it was summer. I don’t know where my parents were. They were often away. They often left me alone there, sometimes for the evening, sometimes for weeks at a time. The phone rang. It was a boy I didn’t know. He said he was a friend of a boy from school—I can’t remember who. We talked a little and then he asked me if I wanted to have dinner with him. He sounded nice enough so I said I would, and we agreed on a day and a time and I told him where I lived.
    â€œBut after I got off the phone, I began thinking, worrying. What had this other boy said about