The End of a Primitive Read Free Page A

jumping up and down in such glee that impulsively she hastened from its view and stumbled over the three-cornered chair, falling against the glass-topped coffee tables, and upsetting the glass ashtray over her prized pink carpet.
    She had to laugh. Mattie, her black cleaning woman who came in three days each week, would swear that she’d been drunk. Now she felt a little drunk. Briskly she set herself to her morning routine.
    She got her copy of the New York Herald-Tribune from the mat outside her door, first peeping through the Judas window to make certain the coast was clear; put on water to boil for coffee; lingered for a moment to watch the antics on the television screen; then devoted the customary five minutes to bodily functions, glancing at the lead stories the while. Vaguely the television voice penetrated her consciousness, “casting” the morning news, which, in modern usage is the province of the “newscaster”. The headlines from both sources were the same: TRUMAN SEIZES STEEL INDUSTRY; the same names cropped up: John L. Lewis, Dean Acheson, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mayor William O’Dwyer, Queen Juliana and Prince Bernard; NATO was praised with faint damning; the State Department was damned with faint praise; the Soviet Union was damned outright; nothing was praised outright; McCarthy had found two thousand communists hiding among the President’s bright print sport shirts; all five-star generals had decided to run for President, but MacArthur, who had become a six-star general since his recall from Korea, had the jump on the others, due no doubt to the extra star which the Truman Democrats hinted he had pinned on his tunic himself without the proper authority; everyone had agreed “It was time for a change”, but no one was clear as to what was to be changed from what to what other than Republicans who were insistent that Democrats be changed to Republicans; Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas urged a “peasants’ revolution” to end economic slavery in backward areas; a Harvard professor suggested that it was a “peasants’ revolution” that had started all the trouble in the first place, but he had been quickly convicted as a communist spy by McCarthy and when last seen was rapidly disappearing beneath the ledge of a twelfth storey window from which he had recently jumped; the U.N. forces in Korea had killed seven thousand Chinese communists the day before, but the war still dragged on, due no doubt to the fact, as a Columbia University professor pointed out, that seventeen thousand Chinese communists had been born during the night.
    After digesting this news, Kriss showered, brushed her teeth, put on a fresh girdle, taking the stocking fasteners from the soiled one in the garment bag inside her closet door where she put her soiled underwear and stockings for the maid to wash, the soiled linen in the hamper in the bath going out to the laundry. Now she felt sufficiently presentable to brave the television eyes. From the middle drawer of her storage cabinet she selected a pair of nylons from a loose pile, first inspecting them for runs. Then she went to the kitchen, poured the boiling water into the drip coffee pot, inserted two slices of expensive white bread into the automatic toaster, and returned to her dressing, pausing for a moment before the closet mirror. In the nylons her legs were slim and svelte, nowadays the only pleasure derived from her reflection. Her hips were held reasonably flat and hard by the girdle but, to her infinite disgust, that old demon bicycle tire went leering around her middle. She’d have to begin dieting, she resolved for the thousandth time. Although it really wasn’t her food, she amended; it was too much drinking. Well, she could stop that too. It was time she stopped, before she became one of those big baywindowed mannish women whom she so despised. But she shouldn’t complain too much about her weight: now, when she became slim, her breasts