I was so glad the War was over.
I stared into the silence of the sky that used to be filled with warplanes.
"It's OK," he said. "I always thank the Kraft people for inventing Kraft dinner because you never have any trouble cooking it. A lot more things should be like Kraft dinner. Nice and Easy. Take it nice and easy is my motto."
"I guess it would be just as well if we don't think about Bill and Betty Ann any more," she replied to his observation about Kraft dinner. "We're never going to see them again, anyway. We got a postcard from them in 1935. I was happy they got married. We haven't heard a word since. Maybe they went to work in a plant during the War. They could be anywhere now, but I think they would have liked this place."
The man was dishing up the Kraft dinner and hamburgers. They would have their dinner and then do some fishing. They would eat their dinner off cheap plates on the couch. When they started eating, they never said another word to each other until they were finished.
"Maybe they don't even fish any more," he said, bringing two plates of food over to the couch where she had just sat down. "People change. They give up fishing. A lot of people are interested in miniature golf. Maybe Bill and Betty Ann don't feel like fishing any more."
"I suppose," she said. "But we're too big to play miniature golf, not unless they wanted to use us for the course. Father."
They both laughed and fell silently to eating their hamburgers and Kraft dinner.
I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there. I think they had forgotten all about me. I sat there watching their living room shining out of the dark beside the pond. It looked like a fairy tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity.
In those days people made their own imagination, like homecooking. Now our dreams are just any street in America lined with franchise restaurants. I sometimes think that even our digestion is a soundtrack recorded in Hollywood by the television networks.
Anyway, I just kept getting smaller and smaller beside the pond, more and more unnoticed in the darkening summer grass until I disappeared into the 32 years that have passed since then, leaving me right here, right now.
Because they never spoke during dinner, I think after they finished eating they probably mentioned a little thing about my disappearance.
"Where did that kid go, Mother?"
"I don't know, Father."
Then they rigged up their fishing poles and got some coffee and just relaxed back on the couch, their fishing lines now quietly in the water and their living room illuminated by kerosene-burning electric floor lamps.
"I don't see him anywhere."
"I guess he's gone."
"Maybe he went home."
RICHARD BRAUTIGAN was born on January 30, 1935 in the Pacific Northwest. He was the author of ten novels, nine volumes of poetry, and a collection of short stories. He lived for many years in San Francisco, and toward the end of his life he divided his time between a ranch in Montana and Tokyo. Brautigan was a literary idol of the 1960s and early 1970s whose comic genius and iconoclastic vision of American life caught the imagination of young people everywhere. Brautigan came of age during the Haight-Ashbury period and has been called "the last of the Beats." His early books became required reading for the hip generation, and Trout Fishing in America sold two million copies throughout the world. Brautigan was a god of the counterculture, a phenomenon who saw his star rise to fame and fortune, only to plummet during the next decade. Driven to drink and despair, he committed suicide in Bolinas, California, at the age of forty-nine.
Footnotes
I kept my word. See [>].
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Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away Page 32