Ray Bradbury - Dandelion Wine

“Wait,” said Leo Auffmann out loud. “I didn’t turn the machine on this morning! Saul!”

Saul, standing in the yard below, looked up.

“Saul, did you turn it on?”

“You told me to warm it up half an hour ago!”

“All right, Saul, I forgot. I’m not awake.” He fell back in bed.

His wife, bringing his breakfast up, paused by the window, looking down at the garage.

“Tell me,” she said quietly. “If that machine is like you say, has it got an answer to making babies in it somewhere? Can that machine make seventy-year-old people twenty? Also, how does death look when you hide in there with all that happiness?”

“Hide!”

“If you died from overwork, what should I do today, climb in that big box down there and be happy? Also tell me, Lee, how is our life? You know how our house is. Seven in the morning, breakfast, the kids; all of you gone by eight thirty and it’s just me and washing and me and cooking and socks to be darned, weeds to be dug, or I run to the store or polish silver. Who’s complaining? I’m just reminding you how the house is put together, Lee, what’s in it! So now answer: How do you get all those things I said in one machine?”

“That’s not how it’s built!”

“I’m sorry. I got no time to look, then.”

And she kissed his cheek and went from the room and he lay smelling the wind that blew from the hidden machine below, rich with the odor of those roasted chestnuts that sold in the autumn streets of a Paris he had never known . . .

A cat moved unseen among the hypnotized dogs and boys to purr against the garage door, in the sound of snow-waves crumbling down a faraway and rhythmically breathing shore.

Tomorrow, thought Leo Auffmann, we’ll try the machine, all of us, together.

Late that night he awoke and knew something had wakened him. Far away in another room he heard someone crying. “Saul?” he whispered, getting out of bed.

In his room Saul wept, his head buried in his pillow. “No . . .no . . .” he sobbed. “Over . . . over . . .”

Saul, you had a nightmare? Tell me about it, son.” But the boy only wept.

And sitting there on the boy’s bed, Leo Auffmann suddenly thought to look out the window. Below, the garage doors stood open.

He felt the hairs rise along the back of his neck.

When Saul slept again, uneasily, whimpering, his father went downstairs and out to the garage where, not breathing, he put his hand out.

In the cool night the Happiness Machine’s metal was too hot to touch.

So, he thought, Saul was here tonight.

Why? Was Saul unhappy, in need of the machine? No, happy, but wanting to hold onto happiness always. Could you blame a boy wise enough to know his position who tried to keep it that way? No! And yet . . .

Above, quite suddenly, something white was exhaled from Saul’s window. Leo Auffmann’s heart thundered. Then he realized the window curtain had blown out into the open night. But it had seemed as intimate and shimmering a thing as a boy’s soul escaping his room. And Leo Auffmann had flung up his hands as if to thwart it, push it back into the sleeping house.

Cold, shivering, he moved back into the house and up to Saul’s room where he seized the blowing curtain in and locked the window tight so the pale thing could not escape again. Then he sat on the bed and put his hand on Saul’s back.

A Tale of Two Cities? Mine. The Old Curiosity Shop? Ha, that’s Leo Auffmann’s all right! Great Expectations? That used to be mine. But let Great Expectations be his, now!”

“What’s this?” asked Leo Auffmann, entering.

“This,” said his wife, “is sorting out the community property! When a father scares his son at night it’s time to chop everything in half! Out of the way, Mr. Bleak House, Old Curiosity Shop. In all these books, no mad scientist lives like Leo Auffmann, none!”

“You’re leaving, and you haven’t even tried the machine!” he protested. “Try it once, you’ll unpack, you’ll stay!”

“Tom Swift and His Electric Annihilator—whose is that?” she asked. “Must I guess?”

Snorting, she gave Tom Swift to Leo Auffmann.

Very late in the day all the books, dishes, clothes, linens had been stacked one here, one there, four here, four there, ten here, ten there. Lena Auffmann, dizzy with counting, had to sit down. “All right,” she gasped. “Before I go, Lee, prove you don’t give nightmares to innocent sons!”

Silently Leo Auffmann led his wife into the twilight. She stood before the eight-foot-tall, orange-colored box.

“That’s happiness?” she said. “Which button do I press to be overjoyed, grateful, contented, and much-obliged?”

The children had gathered now.

“Mama,” said Saul, “don’t!”

“I got to know what I’m yelling about, Saul.” She got in the machine, sat down, and looked out at her husband, shaking her head. “It’s not me needs this, it’s you, a nervous wreck, shouting.”

“Please,” he said, “you’ll see!”

He shut the door.

“Press the button!” he shouted in at his unseen wife.

There was a click. The machine shivered quietly, like a huge dog dreaming in its sleep.

“Papa!” said Saul, worried.

“Listen!” said Leo Auffmann.

At first there was nothing but the tremor of the machine’s own secretly moving cogs and wheels.

“Is Mama all right?” asked Naomi.

“All right, she’s fine! There, now . . . there!”

And inside the machine Lena Auffmann could be heard saying, “Oh!” and then again, “Ah!” in a startled voice. “Look at that!” said his hidden wife. “Paris!” and later, “London! There goes Rome! The Pyramids! The Sphinx!” “The Sphinx, you hear, children?” Leo Auffmann whispered and laughed.

“Perfume!” cried Lena Auffmann, surprised.

Somewhere a phonograph played “The Blue Danube” faintly.

“Music! I’m dancing!”

“Only thinks she’s dancing” the father confided to the world.

“Amazing!” said the unseen woman.

Leo Auffmann blushed. “What an understanding wife.”

And then inside the Happiness Machine, Lena Auffmann began to weep.

The inventor’s smile faded.

“She’s crying” said Naomi.

“She can’t be!”

“She is,” said Saul.

“She simply can’t be crying!” Leo Auffmann, blinking, pressed his ear to the machine. “But . . .yes . . .like a baby . . .”

He could only open the door.

“Wait.” There his wife sat, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Let me finish.” She cried some more.

Leo Auffmann turned off the machine, stunned.

“Oh, it’s the saddest thing in the world!” she wailed. “I feel awful, terrible.” She climbed out through the door “First, there was Paris . . .”

“What’s wrong with Paris?”

“I never even thought of being in Paris in my life. But now you got me thinking: Paris! So suddenly I want to be in Paris and I know I’m not!”

“It’s almost as good, this machine.”

“No. Sitting in there, I knew. I thought, it’s not real!”

“Stop crying, Mama.”

She looked at him with great dark wet eyes. “You had me dancing. We haven’t danced in twenty years.”

“I’ll take you dancing tomorrow night!”

“No, no! It’s not important, it shouldn’t be important. But your machine says it’s important! So I believe! It’ll be all right, Lee, after I cry some more.”

“What else?”

“What else? The machine says, ‘You’re young.’ I’m not. It lies, that Sadness Machine!”

“Sad in what way?”

His wife was quieter now. “Lee, the mistake you made is you forgot some hour, some day, we all got to climb out of that thing and go back to dirty dishes and the beds not made. While you’re in that thing, sure, a sunset lasts forever almost, the air smells good, the temperature is fine. All the things you want to last, last. But outside, the children wait on lunch, the clothes need buttons. And then let’s be frank, Lee, how long can you look at a sunset? Who wants a sunset to last? Who wants perfect temperature? Who wants air smelling good always? So after awhile, who would notice? Better, for a minute or two, a sunset. After that, let’s have something else. People are like that, Lee. How could you forget?”