by John Updike
“Really?” It was hard to come down out of my own exalted preoccupations—the sublime sex with Genevieve at the still center of our scandal, the obscure doom that gathered around black-haired, hot-blooded Ann Coleman one night late in 1819—and enter into the difficult small world of this male child, but I must, I must. “When have you last had your eyes checked?”
“A while ago. He said the right eye was sort of sleepy and maybe the next time I should get a prescription.”
“Well, then,” I said, too briskly. “We’ll get you a prescription.”
“Glasses’ll make me look dumb,” Buzzy protested.
“You’ll only have to wear them when you read.”
“Yeah.” Dear child, thus quickly and meekly he had accepted the embarrassment of glasses, of a yoke slipped onto his face. Yet, braver and more realistic than I, he did not give up on his basic point. “I can see the words O.K., it’s that they don’t add up in my head—they’re like scrambled.”
“Well, there’s such a thing as dyslexia, maybe we should have you tested. Some people’s brains reverse the letters; it has nothing to do with general intelligence.”
He respectfully considered this palliation I was offering him, but insisted, “I’m not smart. Andrew is smart. He gets things right away. Daphne, too, even though she’s a girl. Not that that makes any difference.” In the Ford era, it should in fairness be admitted, genuine attitudinal progress was being made against racism and sexism, especially in the minds of the middle-class young.
“You’ve always seemed smart to me,” I told Buzzy. “All your collections and interests. You’ve always gotten good grades. Not top, but good.” I, my mother would have been the first to proclaim, had always gotten top grades. And where had they brought me? To postgraduate work in adultery and child neglect.
“Until last year,” he said. “Until the seventh grade, and now the eighth. You haven’t been around.”
He meant it mildly, factually, but it stunned me. The moonlight blue on the shreds of snow in the yard, seen through the twigs at Buzzy’s window. A sense of gentle endless falling. A deeply serious wound in things which the world usually conspires to let us ignore. I had to say it: “Do you think that’s the reason? Because I’m not here? If I came back, do you think you could concentrate on your reading better?”
He was quick to excuse me. “Naa. I don’t think that much about it any more. A lot of the kids’ parents have broke up.”
“That’s like saying everybody’s starving makes your own stomach feel full.” He smiled at this, I could see. My eyes had grown accustomed to the dark of his room. Forms had shapes, rounded into being by crescents of bluish light. “Buzzy,” I said, “I’m sorry. Your mother and I—what can I say? We’re trying to work things out for the rest of our lives. We both love you a lot. I feel rotten about this, rotten all the time.”
“It has nothing to do with you, Dad. It’s my problem.”
His voice sounded stern, even. “Oh, baby.” I wanted to rest my head on his chest, but distrusted the melodramatic impulse. Why should he, with everything else weighing on him, have to pity me? “You’re so brave to say that. We’ll get some tests done, and see if there’s anything wrong with your reading skills.” The academic phrase made me hear that I was copping out. He had raised a serious issue, he was trying to face a limit to his life, a something like death, and I should address it with him, this one night when I was here in the house again as an occupant. “There’s different kinds of smartness,” was all I could think to say. “You can be very sensitive and intuitive and artistic and not do very well on academic tests. Lots of great people, like Einstein and Edison, didn’t do well at school. Not that I’m saying you won’t do well; it’s just there’s more to life than school. None of us are as smart as we’d like to be, but what can you do? If we were smarter, we wouldn’t be us.”
He saw that I had done my best, that my vial of consolation had been emptied. “O.K.,” he said, excusing me to go, and added, “Maybe I’ve just been being lazy. The stuff they have you read is so dumb, Animal Farm and like that, showing how lousy Communism is.”
“I’m sure that’s it,” I said, rising in relief, he having found the way out for me. “Don’t be lazy,” I could say now. “Give your teachers a chance. They’re people, too. They’re trying. We’re all in this together.”
Together in this pitiful world, I meant. I had meant to say good night to Daphne, but her door was closed and no light showed beneath it. Downstairs, I said to Norma in the pantry, where she was pouring herself some vermouth, “Poor guy, I can’t stand it. I’ve fucked up his head.”
“Oh, don’t be so self-centered.”
“That’s what he told me. But you’re both just being sweet. Where’s my mother?”
“Gone up. I had to steer her toward the stairs. She’s in terrific shape, really, but then suddenly she’s just had it.”
“Me, too. I’m shaking. I feel so bad for Buzzy, so helpless. Let’s get him some dyslexia tests.”
“He’s had them. Less than two years ago. They said he was fine. Have you really forgotten?”
“I can’t remember everything. Let’s get him tested again, and at least get him glasses, for Christ’s sake. What kind of goof-off parent are you, anyway? Andy says you’re out every night with jerks.”
She looked at me oddly, coolly, as if I were shouting to get her attention. “He did not,” she said. She was sure of him, she lived with him, I didn’t. “He wouldn’t say any such thing. You seem upset. How about a slosh?”
The ceiling of the pantry was very low and the overhead light pressed on our heads, carving downward shadows on our faces. Norma didn’t wear lipstick, her lips were the same pale flesh as her chin and as the fingers holding up to her lips the glass of pale-green fluid. The only time she had ever had her hair done in a beauty parlor had been on a boat we took to Europe the summer before she became pregnant with Andy, and the spray-set beehive made her so self-conscious she couldn’t rest until she had swum it away in the ship’s pool. Her lips in the harsh overhead light were colorless cushions of slightly cracked flesh. Her freckles this time of year had faded. There were areas—the nape of her neck, and the insides of her upper arms, and the sub-buttock sections she bared when opening her legs to me—where freckles never appeared. “Want to try out your old bed?” she lightly asked, glancing away from me toward a corner of the pantry shelves, where the dustiest teacups rested.
I did, but said, “Come on, Norma. I can’t do it to her.”
“You did it to me. Are doing it.”
“After many a year. And it’s not right. I’m trying to make everything right, let’s just move on. Let me go back across the river. I’ll be back here again in time for breakfast, I promise.”
The Queen of Disorder in her artistic insouciance rarely became angry, but when she did, it frightened me. Her eyes, the color of her vermouth, suddenly developed red rims, and her lips tightened so the cracks in them doubled in number. “No, damn it. She’s your mother, you stay here with her. I’ll go to bed alone like I always do. Your virtue, if that’s what it is, is safe with me, buster.”
In haughty silence, her cheeks mottled with rage as my mother’s hands had been mottled with age, she showed me to my room—her studio, a large space we had made of two small maid’s rooms by breaking down the wall between them, early in the years of our ownership. I had been a jolly householder back then, friend to the sledgehammer and the plasterer’s hawk. The space now was given over to Norma’s painting and paintings; the walls, loaded with canvases, supported along the baseboards additional leaning sheaves, thick as collapsed dominoes, few of the paintings finished but all of them containing some passages of feathery offhand rightness, these areas often away from the center, where she had worked less intensely. Where she concentrated, the paint got heavy and stiff. Some of the paintings were fruit-and-vegetable still lifes, their subjects overtaken by organic rot, and others showed vistas seen from the house, often w
ith the mullions of the window included, like the bars of a cage. A few—relatively very few—were of the children, painted unsmiling, with severed feet and uncompleted arms, and two or three had taken up a new subject, Norma herself, beheld in a mirror, wearing that furtive three-quarters glance self-portraits have, whether by Van Gogh or Velázquez. It must have been hard for her, who was always looking away, to gaze steadfastly into her own evasive eyes. One canvas, painted presumably in the summer, showed her nude from the waist up—from a little below the waist, actually, though the pearly blank of her lower belly, its glow built of the most ephemerally faint blues and blue-greens and diluted ochres, was unfinished. Even if she had finished, her pubic bush would have fallen below the edge of the canvas. The whole room smelled strongly of oils and turps. Though in so many ways relaxed, Norma had been ever shy of my face between her legs, because of her smell; but this more powerful smell bloomed wherever she painted. My bed was to be an old airfoam-slab sofa left over from the Kirkland Street apartment, circa 1960. Newer acquisitions of furniture had chased it in here, where the cats and dogs used it as a bed while their mistress painted and sipped her afternoons away, into the dimness of dusk. Its rough gray fabric was covered with animal hairs, as if to weave a second cloth; for the night it had been made up in starchy lemon-colored sheets and some old blankets fragrant, I discovered when I lay down upon my narrow pallet, of mothballs.
I could not sleep. This I do remember. The sound of my estranged wife’s feet, first in shoes and then without, over my head in our old bedroom, and the nostalgic pungence of her oily paints all around me kept me awake with erotic possibilities unseized and all the more attractive for that. I must have masturbated, trying to be tidy and quiet about it, though the little screwed-in tapered legs of the sofa had a distinct wobble and squeak. The household animals, barred from a space they could usually include in their roamings, mewed and rubbed and scratched outside the closed door, and only reluctantly padded away. The radiators, responding to the melancholy tidal soughing of the furnace below, ticked and gurgled in a way to which I had become unaccustomed. Around eleven-thirty, Andrew came home, the Volvo in the driveway as loud as a gravel-crusher, and his ransacking of the kitchen for a final snack as tumultuous as the raid of an army platoon. Then, as the inhabitants of the house settled and the thermostat bid the furnace be quiet, my room with its many windows grew chilly. Like Ann Coleman, I wanted the servants to come and build a fire. There were no shades on the tall staring panes and the moonlight fell in in plangent rectangles. An owl down in the woods by the river issued its sickly interrogative call, like some luminous ectoplasm lumpily pouring. The sleep of the others in the house, three generations all tied to me and all emotionally deprived on my account, pressed down upon me as I gingerly and then furiously twisted between the rumpling sheets and sought harmony with the pillow, softer and flatter than the two back in my shabby but accustomed rooms in Adams.
After an hour or two I found that not only could I not sleep, I could not breathe. The wealth of animal hair and dander under my nose had reawakened my childhood asthma. To those allergens were added stabs of local unsilence (floor creaks, contraction in the cooling and heating system, scurries of nocturnal rodentia in the walls, not to mention the whispers and muffler-snorts of belated traffic from the winding streets of Wayward as our great honeycomb of nubile females dismissed its last drones) and a panicked sense of being in the wrong place, of being dirt as defined above [this page]. The harder I tried to suck in breath, the harder this normally unconscious feat became. My spine seemed to be closing with my sternum like the chamber walls in that horror-story of Poe’s. Absurdly, in my panic and chilly sweat, I found myself reminded, speaking of dirt in the wrong place, of Jennifer Arthrop’s visit a year before and wanted to fuck her, to finish the scene another way, a way that seemed more fitting than her awkward exit, and did so, in my head, while my hand performed wonders on my disbelieving, drowsy prick and my lungs, momentarily self-forgetful, supplied oxygen to my agitated organism.
But once the little bliss of ejaculation (and what a curious bliss it is—like turning a somersault, it seemed to me as a boy, or like meeting a giant in a narrow mountain tunnel where he has to hunch—a somehow icy sensation, in tight-knit adolescence) was the second time achieved, my respiratory distress returned, so badly I had to get out of bed, wrapping a moth-bally blanket about me, and walk around the room inspecting Norma’s paintings by cobalt-blue moonlight. Around three, exhausted and breathless to the point of insanity, I tiptoed forth and crept up the complaining stairs and down the long hall to my former bedroom. Its door was ajar, and I stood in its maw for a minute, listening to the rasp of my wife’s deep sleep, sensing the infrared blob of her body warmth, but then thought of Genevieve, similarly asleep in another de-husbanded cell of our community, and wondered really what Norma could do for me at this point, self-drained as I genitally was, and self-exempted from restful wedlock. I made my way back downstairs, snubbing with a barefoot kick the wagging, purring advances of the awakened animals, and closed my door in the hope that my ghostly excursion would have quieted my spirit enough for it to squeeze past my laboring lungs into sleep. But it had not. My breathing got worse; my bones ached in an invisible bear-hug. I began to fear I really might smother—s(Mother), to deconstruct the crisis a little. Her presence, though unconscious, beneath this roof threw onto my moral condition a starker northern light than was usually shed among the friendly obfuscations of the college environment, where we all stood pre-acquitted by the great liberations of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, who to such universal amazement and relief had shifted villainy from the individual to the society. Not that my mother, herself an exile from the cozy simplicities of Hayes, was overtly judgmental; it was her in me that was condemning me to be garrotted, the traditional Spanish penalty for robbery, for being caught in the wrong house. I later tried to transfer my sensations of suffocating moral impossibility onto Ann Coleman, in a composition already quoted, and so have perhaps included enough about them in this semi-solicited bundle of memories, impressions, and aborted history.
After four o’clock, moving with the slow-motion efficiency of a zombie, I pantingly dressed myself, slipped from the darkened house into my dormant Corvair, and beneath a setting gibbous moon drove through unpopulated streets across the empty bridge to the hospital in Adams, lit up on its urban hillside like a sinking ship. Gasping, joking, bathing myself in humiliation as a chicken bathes in dust, I was processed by the night nurse and a poor unshaven interne in rumpled green scrubs. His giant yawns displayed a mouth of healthy yellow molars. He gave me a shot of adrenaline and, when my breathing had miraculously returned to the realm of possibility, a quite unnecessary EKG, the chilly gel of whose electric contacts I took to be his punishment for my waking him.
Released, I took in the view of spired Adams and inhaled God’s misty air. The moonless dawn held a surprisingly busy stir of early traffic. I drove back to Wayward in time to share a cup of coffee with my mother, an early riser. I had picked up some doughnuts at a just-opening Korean bakery on Federal Street, and she was old-fashioned enough to see them as a delicacy and not a hazard to her health. She was all sympathy and fine fettle, as if my night of misery had restored her to active motherhood.
The groggy day crept by. I realized I had, by an underground procedure, passed from Norma’s troubled realm to my mother’s more ancient queendom. She settled me upstairs in her room, the guest room, in her temporary bed, an old cherry fourposter I had once mistakenly bid for and won at an auction in White River Junction, when we were furnishing our first house, the apple-green Cape-and-a-half in Hanover. As the day progressed, my mother brought me toast and tea in the intervals of my dozing, and displayed me to my children as a man who had suffered enough. Propped up on pillows, books and teacups scattered around my knees, I lay on the high mattress with that curious elevated feeling, of hollow triumph, which a sleepless night bestows. When not attending to me, the old lady was
conducting negotiations in the kitchen with Norma. In mid-afternoon my mother announced, “We’ve decided to move me over to Adams, to your place. It may be the last chance I’ll ever have to spend a night in a bachelor’s quarters.” So as darkness returned I returned with the source of my being to grubby, comfy Adams.
And here, before driving her the next morning to Logan Airport and the plane back to Tampa, I gave her my bed, polluted by more than one partner, and slept in deep comfort on the futon, still redolent of Genevieve’s dulcet dark-eyed little girls’ guiltless slumbers. My mother, too, slept well for a change. “I never liked to complain,” she said the next morning, “but Norma’s housekeeping has always made me nervous. You never know what you’ll find in the kitchen drawers, or what animal’s going to jump into bed with you.” This was, as directly as she could give it, her blessing on my leaving. Nothing in nature, not even the expansive force of water as it turns into ice, is as relentless as a mother’s love for a son. We had had a good time the night before, dopey as I was; we warmed up two Stouffer’s TV dinners and laid in a fresh supply of cinnamon doughnuts, and sat up talking about the old days in Hayes—nothing special, just the streets themselves, house by house, store by store, and what had happened to the people, most of them dead or moved away by now, faces and names with a storybook quality for me, my first experience of humanity. The muscular ogres clanging metal down at the garage, the hunchbacked dwarf who ran the notions shop, the widow’s evil eye at the lace window of the unpainted frame house. When between us we recovered a lost name, or pictured together an all-but-forgotten house or storefront, we would laugh with sheer joy, having defeated time. These exertions of remembering made my mother younger; animated expressions flitted down from a vanished Vermont and alighted, girlish migrants, upon her sallow, granulated Florida face.
Retrospect, I would reinvent our conversation and fill in more details, but this episode, once I convulse in my estranged wife’s fragrant studio, kidnap my mother, and filially install her in my tawdry love nest, belongs outside our assigned venue, the Gerald Ford era—its impact, significance, and influence. My mother and I properly belong to the Roosevelt administrations, particularly the second term, in which I learned to talk and navigate three-dimensional space and developed my sense of a solitary self distinct from her warm, nurturing body. By the time of the 1938 Congressional elections, in which the Republicans (it is sometimes forgotten) gained seventy-five seats in the House and seven in the Senate, I had, under her guidance, with the help of a bottle whose rubber nipple tasted artificial and sour and whose milk was either too hot or too cold, given up suckling. That, and my exit from her womb the month before Landon awoke and found himself to be a loser, presumably fortified me for all the weanings with which life abounds. And yet, when my mother died in 1978, in the hopeful early reign of the evangelical engineer Carter, I was taken unaware by what a loss it was. Who now would remember me as a Keds-shod boy padding along the brick sidewalks of our tilted, maple-shaded downtown? Who was left to share cinnamon doughnuts with me as if they were, far from “junk food,” a gourmet treat? The dear soul had left me alone with my eventual death. The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.