Free The Cat's Pajamas by Ray Bradbury Page A

next day it was forgotten. He bounced back. That was more than she could say for herself. He was like a string of firecrackers set off to explode all through the echoing house.
    She slid from the bed. Let’s try and make it better, she thought. Let’s keep the face right. She looked in the mirror. Is there any way, she wondered, to paint a smile on?
    He handed her a dust mop and a kiss after the instantaneous burnt breakfast.
    â€œOnward, upward, excelsior!” he cried. “Do you realize that man’s preoccupation is not with love or sex or getting on or keeping up with the Joneses? It is not for fame or fortune! No, man’s longest battle, mistress, is with the element of dust. It comes in every joint and elbow of the house! Why, if we sat down and rocked in our rocking chairs for a year we’d be buried in dust, the cities would be lost, the gardens would be deserts, the living rooms dustbins! Christ, I wish we could pick the whole house up and shake it out!”
    They worked.
    But she tired. First it was her back and then it was, “My head aches.” He brought her aspirin. And then it was sheer exhaustion from the many many rooms. She had lost count of the rooms. And the particles of dust in the rooms? God, it ran into the billions! She went sneezing and running her small nose into a hankie, confused and bitter-red, all through the house.
    â€œYou’d better sit down,” he said.
    â€œNo, I’m all right,” she said.
    â€œYou’d better go rest.” He wasn’t smiling.
    â€œI’ll be fine. It’s not lunchtime yet.”
    That was the trouble. The first morning, and herself tired already. And she felt a rush of guilty color to her cheeks. Because it was a strange tiredness made of unnecessary strains and superfluous actions and tensions. You can only deceive yourself so far, no further. She was tired, yes, but not of the work, only of this place. Not twenty hours new in it, and already tired of it, sick of it. And he saw her sickness. One small part of her face showed it. Which part she could not tell. It was like a puncture in a tube, you couldn’t tell where the puncture was until you submerged the tube and then bubbles rose in the water. She didn’t want him to know her sickness. But every time she thought of her friends coming to see her and what they would say to one another at their private teas: “Whatever happened to Maggie Clinton?” “Oh, didn’t you hear? She married that writer fellow and they live on Bunker Hill. On Bunker Hill, can you imagine? In an old haunted house or some such!” “We must go up some time.” “Oh, yes, it’s priceless. The thing is toppling over, simply toppling. Poor Mag!”
    â€œYou used to be able to play I-don’t-know-how-many tennis sets every morning and afternoon, with a round of golf thrown in,” he said.
    â€œI’ll be all right,” she said, knowing nothing else to say.
    They were on the landing. The morning sun fell through the tinted rim glasses of the high window. There were little pink glasses and blue glasses and red and yellow and purple and orange glasses. The many colors glowed on her arms and on the banister.
    He had been staring for some moments at the little colored windowpanes. Now he looked at her. “Pardon the melodramatics,” he said. “But I learned something when I was a kid, pretty young. My grandmother had a hall and at the top of the stairs was a window with little colored glass in it, just like this. I used to go up and look through the colored panes, and—” He tossed down the dust rag. “It’s no use. You wouldn’t understand.” He walked down the stairs away from her.
    She stood looking after him. She looked at the colored panes. What had he been trying to say, some ridiculous, obvious thing he had decided finally not to say? She moved to the window.
    Through the pink pane the world was