Complete Stories

by Dorothy Parker

  In the first place Mrs. Cuzzens is never wholly at her ease in an elevator. One of her liveliest anecdotes concerns an aunt of hers on her mother’s side who was once a passenger in an elevator which stopped short midway between floors, and doggedly refused to move either up or down. Fortunately it all ended happily. Cries for help eventually caught the attention of the janitor—it seemed little short of providential that he had always had quite a turn for messing around with machinery—and he succeeded in regulating the power so that Mrs. Cuzzens’ aunt reached her destination practically as good as new. But the episode made a terrific impression on Mrs. Cuzzens.

  Of course it is rather dark on the ground floor, but Mr. and Mrs. Cuzzens regard that as one of the big assets of their apartment. Mrs. Cuzzens had a pretty nasty example of the effects of an oversunshiny place happen right in her own family. Her sister-in-law—not, Mrs. Cuzzens is careful to specify, the wife of the brother in the insurance business, but the wife of the brother who is on the road for a big tire concern, and is doing very well at it—hung some French-blue draperies at her living-room windows. And in less than a year the sunlight turned those curtains from their original color to an unwholesome shade of greenish yellow. Why, the change was so marked that many people, seeing them in this state, almost refused to believe that they had ever been blue. Mrs. Cuzzens’ sister-in-law, as is perfectly understandable, was pretty badly broken up about it. Naturally Mrs. Cuzzens would hate to have a thing like that happen in her own home.

  There is another advantage to living on the ground floor. The rent there is appreciably smaller than it is on the stories above, although Mr. and Mrs. Cuzzens seldom if ever work this into the conversation. Well, it is easy to overlook it, in the press of more important reasons for occupying their apartment.

  A Mean Eye for Freak News

  Mrs. Cuzzens has a fund, to date inexhaustible, of clean yet stimulating anecdotes, of which the one about the elevator and the one about the curtains are representative. She specializes in the unique. Hers is probably the largest collection in the country of stories of curious experiences, most of them undergone by members of her intimate circle. She is generous almost to a fault in relating them too. About any topic that happens to come up will be virtually certain to remind her of the funny thing that once happened to her Aunt Anna or the queer experience her Cousin Beulah had that time in Springfield.

  Her repertory of anecdotes undoubtedly had much to do with attracting Mr. Cuzzens to her, for Mr. Cuzzens leans heavily to the out-of-the-ordinary himself. In his after-dinner reading of the newspaper he cheats a bit on the front-page items, just murmuring the headlines over, and gathering from them a rough idea—if you could really speak of Mr. Cuzzens as harboring a rough idea—of what is going on in the way of the conventional hold-ups and graft inquiries. But he casts a mean eye over the oddities in the day’s news. He never misses the little paragraph about the man in Winsted, Connecticut, who intrusts a family of orphaned eggs to the care of a motherly cat, with gratifying results to one and all; or the report of the birth on an ocean liner, to a couple prominent in steerage circles, of a daughter, named Aquitania Wczlascki in commemoration of the event.

  These specialties of Mr. and Mrs. Cuzzens work in together very prettily. They provide many an evening of instructive and harmless entertainment, while so far as expense goes, the only overhead is three cents for an evening paper.

  Mr. Cuzzens puts on the slippers he got last birthday, and Mrs. Cuzzens unhooks a bit here and there as the evening wears on and she can feel reasonably sure that no one will drop in. As they sit about the grained-oak table in the glow of the built-in chandelier Mr. Cuzzens will read aloud some such fascinating bit of current history as the announcement of the birth, in Zanesville, Ohio, of a calf with two heads, both doing well. Mrs. Cuzzens will cap it with the description, guaranteed authentic, of a cat her mother’s cousin once possessed which had a double set of claws on each foot.

  Clever Mr. Cuzzens

  When the excitement of this has died down Mr. Cuzzens will find an item reporting that a famous movie star has taken a load off the public’s mind by having her eyelashes insured for one hundred thousand dollars. That will naturally lead his wife to tell the one about the heavy insurance her Uncle David carried, and the perfectly terrible red tape his bereaved family had to go through before they could collect.

  After twenty minutes or so passed in their both listening attentively to Mrs. Cuzzens’ recital, Mr. Cuzzens’ eye, sharpened by years of training, will fall on an obscure paragraph telling how an apple tree near Providence was struck by lightning, which baked all the fruit. Mrs. Cuzzens will come right back with the story of how her little nephew once choked on a bit of the core of a baked apple, and the doctor said it might have been fatal if he had got there half an hour later.

  And so it goes, back and forth, all evening long.

  But the Cuzzens have their light side too. They often make a night of it at the movies. In fact Mr. Cuzzens, who is apt to be pretty slangy at times, says that he and the little woman are regular movie fans. Mr. Cuzzens loses himself so completely in the display that he reads each subtitle aloud. If it seems to him worthy, and if the operator leaves it on long enough, he reads it through twice. Both he and his wife take deeply to heart the news pictures, showing a grain elevator destroyed by fire in Florence, Georgia; or the living head of Uncle Sam formed by a group of Los Angeles school children.

  Any trick effects on the screen leave Mrs. Cuzzens bewildered. She can never figure out how, for example, they make a man seem to walk up the side of a house. However, Mr. Cuzzens is awfully clever at all that sort of thing—more than one person has told him he should have gone in for mechanical work—and he explains the process on the way home.

  Occasionally Mr. and Mrs. Cuzzens patronize the drama. There is a theater near them to which come plays almost direct from their run lower down on Broadway. The casts are only slightly changed; just substitutions in five or six of the leading roles. Both the Cuzzenses prefer comedies of the wholesome type, setting themselves on record as going to the theater to be amused. They say that they wouldn’t go around the corner to see one of those unpleasant plays, for there is enough trouble in this world, anyway. And after all, who is there that can give them any argument on that one?

  Now and then they devote an evening to cards, playing a little interfamily game with Mr. Cuzzens’ married sister and her husband. The sport is kept absolutely clean. No money changes hands.

  In the daytime, while Mr. Cuzzens is busy at his office—he is with a firm that makes bathroom scales, and it’s as good as settled that they are going to do something really worth while for him the first of the year—Mrs. Cuzzens is occupied with her own activities. She often complains that the days aren’t half long enough for her, but nothing really satisfactory has been done to remedy this, as yet. Much of her time is devoted to shopping, for there are always button molds to be matched, or a strip of linoleum for the washtubs to be priced, or a fresh supply of trick paper for the pantry shelves to be laid in. She is almost over-conscientious about her shopping. It is no unusual thing for her to spend an entire day in a tour of the department stores, searching for a particular design of snap fastener or the exact match of a spool of silk. She reaches home at the end of one of these days of toil pretty well done up, but still game.

  And then there are her social duties. She is one of the charter members of a bridge club which numbers just enough to fill two tables comfortably. The club meets every fortnight, giving the players a chance to compete for the brocade-covered candy box—the winner must supply her own candy, which is no more than fair—or the six embroidered, guest-room-size handkerchiefs, which the hostess donates in the interest of sport.

  During these functions Mrs. Cuzzens takes part in a great deal of tense conversation about the way the skirt was gathered over the hips and came down longer in front. She also gives, and receives, ideas on novel fillings for sandwiches, effective patterns for
home-knit sweaters, and simple yet snappy dishes for Sunday-night supper.

  Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Cuzzens is a native of New York. Up to a year or so after their marriage they helped swell the population of a town in Illinois which at the last census had upward of one hundred thousand inhabitants. They celebrate Old Home Week by a visit to the folks every year, but they congratulate themselves heartily that Mr. Cuzzens’ business prevents their staying more than a week. For they agree that after eight years’ residence in what Mr. Cuzzens aptly calls the big city they could never bring themselves to live in a small town again.

  As Mrs. Cuzzens puts it, life in New York is so much broader.

  THE SECOND FLOOR EAST

  The Parmalees are always intending to move, but somehow they never get around to it. Several times Mrs. Parmalee has come out flat with the statement that the very next day she is going to look for an apartment farther downtown. But what with one thing and another coming up, she never seems to be able to make it.

  Yet after all, as they argue, they might be a whole lot worse off than staying right where they are. Of course they are pretty far uptown, away from the theaters and restaurants; but everybody in their crowd, including themselves, has a car. So, to use Mr. Parmalee’s very words, they should worry! It has often been remarked of Mr. Parmalee that it is not so much what he says as the way he says it.

  Again, Mrs. Parmalee points out that it doesn’t really matter much where they live, for they are hardly ever home, anyway. To which Mr. Parmalee retorts, just like a flash, that she has said a forkful!

  And when you come right down to it, Mrs. Parmalee has seldom said a truer thing. It is indeed a cold night for the Parmalees when they have nothing to gather around but their own gas logs. The evening begins to hang heavy along around half past seven, and from then on things get no better rapidly.

  The Parmalees are not ones to lose themselves in reading. Just let Mr. Parmalee see who won the first race, and give him a look at the financial page to ascertain whether Crucible Steel is plucking at the coverlet, and he is perfectly willing to call it a day as far as the pursuit of literature is concerned. As for Mrs. Parmalee, she masters the really novel murders and the better-class divorce cases, while for her heavier reading she depends on the current installment of the serial running in one of the more highly sexed magazines. That done with, she is through for the month.

  Conversation could not be spoken of as a feature of the evening, either. Mr. Parmalee has been called, over and over again, a perfect scream when he is out on a party. But at home he doesn’t really extend himself. A couple of half-hearted assents to his wife’s comments on the shortcomings of the janitor and the unhealthful effects of such changeable weather—and that’s, as someone has phrased it, that.

  Life in the Parmalee Set

  So you can see for yourself about the only thing left in the way of parlor entertainment is to come to the mat. The Parmalees’ battles are not mere family events; they come more under the head of community affairs. The entire apartment house takes an interest, almost a pride in them. Take them when they get going really strong and you won’t miss a syllable, even as far off as the top-floor apartment on the other side of the house. On a clear night with the wind in the right direction the people living three houses down have been able to enjoy every word of it.

  The bouts almost invariably end in a draw. Mr. Parmalee, it is true, has a somewhat broader command of language than his wife, but she has perfected a short contemptuous laugh which is the full equivalent of a nasty crack. It leaves Mr. Parmalee practically flat, with nothing more inspired to offer than an “Is that so?” or a “Yeah, you’re perfect—you are!”

  But these sporting events take place only rarely. The Parmalees have little time to indulge in home pleasures. Theirs is a full and sociable life. Mr. Parmalee is in what he jocosely calls the automobile game, and most of his friends are engaged in the same pursuit. And as their wives are Mrs. Parmalee’s intimates, you can just imagine how nice and clubby that makes everything.

  Their social day begins around five o’clock, when the dozen or so members of their set meet at one or another’s apartment, for cocktails. The Parmalee coterie has been seriously inconvenienced since prohibition went into what has been called effect. It means that they can no longer meet at a hotel or a restaurant, as they used to in the old days. It is badly out of their way to gather at someone’s house, for it often involves their having to go all the way downtown again for dinner. But they have to make the best of it, just like you or me.

  And it is comforting to know that the gentlemen still manage, as a rule, to pick up a little something here and there before they are met by what Mr. Parmalee calls, with screaming effect, their better seven-eighths. The ladies, collectively, are usually referred to, by their husbands and by one another, as the girls—which is something of an understatement.

  Up to the time of meeting, Mrs. Parmalee, like the rest of the girls, has put in a crowded afternoon at a matinee, the hairdresser’s or the manicure’s; a blinding polish on the finger nails is highly thought of by both the male and female members of the Parmalees’ set. There is usually a great deal of trying on to be done, also, which does much toward taking up Mrs. Parmalee’s time and Mr. Parmalee’s money. He likes to see his wife dressed as elaborately as the wives of his friends. He is pretty fairly reasonable about the price of her clothes, just so long as they look as if they cost a lot. Neither of the Parmalees can see the point of this thing of paying high prices for unobtrusive garments. What they are after, Mr. Parmalee says, is their money’s worth. As is only just.

  Mrs. Parmalee and her friends dress with a soothing uniformity. They all hold the same ideas about style; really you’d seldom find a more congenial group in every way. All the girls, including Mrs. Parmalee, are fundamentally large and are increasing in weight almost daily. They are always going to start dieting next Monday.

  In general style and get-up the girls resemble a group of very clever female impersonators. They run to rather larger and more densely plumed hats than the fashion absolutely insists upon, and they don’t go in for any of your dull depressing colors. Always heavily jeweled, they have an adroit way of mingling an occasional imitation bracelet or necklace with the genuine articles, happily confident that the public will be fooled. In the warm weather their dresses are of transparent material about the arms and shoulders, showing provocative glimpses of very pink ribbons and of lace that you could hardly tell from the real.

  There is a great deal of hearty gayety at the afternoon meetings of the crowd. You couldn’t ask to see people among whom it is easier to get a laugh. Any popular line, such as “You don’t know the half of it,” or “You’d be surprised,” is a sure-fire hit, no matter in what connection it is used. You might think that these jests would lose a little of their freshness after months of repetition, but you were never so wrong in your life. They never fail to go over big.

  After a couple of hours of crackling repartee and whole-hearted drinking the Parmalees and their crowd set out for dinner. They dine at a downtown restaurant, if they plan going en masse to the theater afterwards. Otherwise they group themselves in their cars—most of the motors, like Mr. Parmalee’s, are perquisites of being in the automobile game—and drive to some favorite road house, where they not only dine but get in some really constructive drinking during the evening. Mr. Parmalee is the life and soul of these parties. It is, his friends often say, as good as a show to hear him kid the waiter.

  Guess-What-It-Cost-Sports

  Dancing occurs sporadically after dinner, but most of the time is devoted to badinage. There is much good-natured banter, impossible to take in bad part, about the attentions paid by various of the husbands to the wives of various of the other husbands.

  Often the conversation takes a serious turn among the men, as they tell about how much they had to pay for the last case of it. Stories are related of the staggering prices exacted for highballs at some restaurant where they will
still listen to reason; and someone is sure to tell about the dinner he gave the night before, giving the menu in full detail, and as a climax calling upon his audience to guess what the grand total of the check was. These anecdotes are told with the pride that other sportsmen exhibit in telling about the size of the fish they caught.

  The ladies spend what could be figured up to be the greater part of the evening in going out to the dressing room to keep their color schemes up to the mark.

  In the warmer months the Parmalees make no radical change in their way of living. But though they do not go away for any long vacation they get a welcome glimpse of Nature by motoring to Long Beach for dinner three or four times a week with the rest of their crowd. They also manage to get a lot of wholesome country air and a refreshing eyeful of green grass down at the Belmont Park track.

  What with all this talk of hard times and tight money wherever you go, it is cheering to see the Parmalees, who seem always to have it to spend. In his homey little chats with his wife Mr. Parmalee often gets quite worked up over where the money to meet their expenses is coming from; but he never lets it trouble him in his social life. Mr. Parmalee is a great advocate of being a good fellow when you have it. After all, as he has it figured out, the last places you can cut down are on theater tickets and restaurant checks and liquor.

  It is also pleasant, in these days of change and restlessness, to think of the Parmalees going right along, never so much as thinking of wanting anything different. I wouldn’t want to be the one to say that there is never just a dash of hard feeling between certain members of the crowd; the Parmalees never claimed to be any more than human. But such little differences as may spring up from time to time are easily dissolved in alcohol, and the crowd goes right on again, as usual.