by John Updike
The silence from the young people troubles him. He prods it. -He says, “Some storm last night. I heard on the radio this morning the underpass at Eisenhower and Seventh was flooded for over an hour.”
Then he says, “You know it seems gruesome to me, all these gas stations closed up like somebody has died.”
Then he says, “Did you see in the paper where the Hershey company has had to lay off nine hundred people because of the truckers’ strike? Next thing we’ll be in lines for Hershey bars.”
The boy is intently passing a Freihofer’s Bakery truck and Harry responds for him: “The downtown stores are all pulling out. Nothing left in the middle of the city now but the banks and the post office. They put that crazy stand of trees in to make a mall but it won’t do any good, the people are still scared to go downtown.”
The boy is staying in the fast lane, and in third gear, either for the pep or because he’s forgotten there is a fourth. Harry asks him, “Getting the feel of it, Jamie? If you want to turn around, there’s an intersection coming up.”
The girl understands. “Jamie, we better turn around. The man wants to get home for supper.”
As Jamie slows to ease right at the intersection, a Pacer - silliest car on the road, looks like a glass bathtub upside-down - swings left without looking. The driver is a fat spic in a Hawaiian shirt. The boy slaps the steering wheel in vain search for the horn. Toyota indeed has put the horn in a funny place, on two little arcs a thumb’s reach inside the steering-wheel rim; Harry reaches over quick and toots for him. The Pacer swerves back into its lane, with a dark look back above the Hawaiian shirt. Harry directs, `Jamie, I want you to take a left at the next light and go across the highway and take the next left you can and that’ll bring us back.” To the girl he explains, “Prettier this way.” He thinks aloud, “What can I tell you about the car I haven’t? It has a lot of locks. Those Japanese, they live on top of each other and are crazy about locks. Don’t kid yourselves, we’re coming to it, I won’t be here to see it, but you will. When I was a kid nobody ever thought to lock their house and now everybody does, except my crazy wife. If she locked the door she’d lose the key. One of the reasons I’d like to go to Japan - Toyota asks some of their dealers but you got to have a bigger gross than I do - is to see how you lock up a paper house. At any rate. You can’t get the key out of the ignition without releasing this catch down here. The trunk in back releases from this lever. The locking gas cap you already know about. Did either of you hear about the woman somewhere around Ardmore this week who cut into a gas line and the guy behind her got so mad he sneaked his own locking gas cap onto her tank so when she got to the pump the attendant couldn’t remove it? They had to tow her away. Serve the bitch right, if you ask me.”
They have taken their two lefts and are winding along a road where fields come to the edge so you can see the clumps of red earth still shiny from where the plow turned them, and where what businesses there are -LAWNMOWERS SHARPENED, PA. DUTCH QUILTS - seem to stem from an earlier decade than those along Route 111, which runs parallel. On the banks ofthe road, between mailboxes some of which are painted with a heart or hex design, crown vetch is in violet flower. At a crest the elephant-colored gas tanks of Brewer lift into view, and the brick-red rows as they climb Mt. Judge and smudge its side. Rabbit dares ask the girl, “You from around here?”
“More toward Galilee. My mother has a farm.”
And is your mother’s name Ruth? Harry wants to ask, but doesn’t, lest he frighten her, and destroy for himself the vibration of excitement, of possibility untested. He tries to steal another peek at her, to see if her white skin is a mirror, and if the innocent blue in her eyes is his own, but his bulk restrains him, and the tightness of the car. He asks the boy, “You follow the Phillies, Jamie? How about that seven-zip loss last night? You don’t see Bowa commit an error that often.”
“Is Bowa the one with the big salary?”
Harry will feel better when he gets the Toyota out of this moron’s hands. Every turn, he can feel the tires pull and the sudden secret widen within him, circle upon circle, it’s like seed: seed that goes into the ground invisible and if it takes hold cannot be stopped, it fulfills the shape it was programmed for, its destiny, sure as our death, and shapely. “I think you mean Rose,” he answers. “He’s not been that much help, either. They’re not going anywhere this year, Pittsburgh’s the team. Pirates or Steelers, they always win. Take this left, at the yellow blinker. That’ll take you right across One Eleven and then you swing into the lot from the back. What’s your verdict?”
From the side the boy has an Oriental look - a big stretch of skin between his red ear and red nose, puffy eyes whose glitter gives away nothing. People who gouge a living out of the dirt are just naturally mean, Harry has always thought. Jamie says, “Like I said we were looking around. This car seems pretty small but maybe that’s chust what you’re used to.”
“Want to give the Corona a whirl? That interior feels like a palace after you’ve been in one of these, you wouldn’t think it would, it’s only about two centimeters wider and five longer.” He marvels at himself, how centimeters trip off his tongue. Another five years with these cars and he’ll be talking Japanese. “But you better get used,” he tells Jamie, “to a little scaling down. The big old boats have had it. People trade ‘em in and we can’t give ‘em away. Wholesale half of ‘em, and the wholesalers turn ‘em into windowboxes. The five hundred trade-in I’d allow you on yours is just a courtesy, believe me. We like to help young people out. I think it’s a helluva world we’re coming to, where a young couple like yourselves can’t afford to buy a car or own a home. Ifyou can’t get your foot on even the bottom rung of a society geared like this, people are going to lose faith in the system. The Sixties were a lark in the park compared to what we’re going to see if things don’t straighten out.”
Loose stones in the back section of the lot crackle. They pull into the space the Corolla came from and the boy can’t find the button to release the key until Harry shows him again. The girl leans forward, anxious to escape, and her breath stirs the colorless hairs on Harry’s wrist. His shirt is stuck to his shoulder blades, he discovers standing to his height in the air. All three of them straighten slowly. The sun is still bright but horsetails high in the sky cast doubt upon the weather for tomorrow’s golf game after all. “Good driving,” he says to Jamie, having given up on any sale. “Come back in for a minute and I’ll give you some literature.” Inside the showroom the sun strikes the paper banner and makes the letters TI TOD EW show through. Stavros is nowhere to be seen. Harry hands the boy his CHIEF card and asks him to sign the customer register.
“Like I said-‘the boy begins.
Harry has lost patience with this escapade. “It doesn’t commit you to a blessed thing,” he says. “Toyota’ll send you a Christmas card is all it means. I’ll do it for you. First name James -?”
“Nunemacher,” the boy says warily, and spells it. “R. D. number two, Galilee.”
Harry’s handwriting has deteriorated over the years, gained a twitch at the end of his long arm, which yet is not long enough for him to see clearly what he writes. He owns reading glasses but it is his vanity never to wear them in public. “Done,” he says, and all too casually turns to the girl. “O.K. young lady, how about you? Same name?”
“No way,” she says, and giggles. “You don’t want me.”
A boldness sparks in the cool flat eyes. In that way of women she has gone all circles, silly, elusive. When her gaze levels there is something sexy in the fit of her lower lids, and the shadow of insufficient sleep below them. Her nose is slightly snub. “Jamie’s our neighbor, I just came along for the ride. I was going to look for a sundress at Kroll’s if there was time.”
Something buried far back glints toward the light. Today’s slant of sun has reached the shelf where the trophies Springer Motors sponsors wait to be awarded; oval embossments on their weightless white-metal surfaces shine. Keep your
name, you little cunt, it’s still a free country. But he has given her his. She has taken his card from Jamie’s broad red hand and her eyes, childishly alight, slip from its lettering to his face to the section of far wall where his old headlines hang yellowing, toasted brown by time. She asks him, “Were you ever a famous basketball player?”
The question is not so easy to answer, it was so long ago. He tells her, “In the dark ages. Why do you ask, you’ve heard the name?”
“Oh no,” this visitant from lost time gaily lies. “You just have that look.”
When they have gone, the Country Squire swaying off on its soupy shocks, Harry uses the toilet down past Mildred Kroust’s door along the corridor half of frosted glass and meets Charlie coming back from locking up. Still, there is pilferage, mysterious discrepancies eating into the percentages. Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip. “Whajja think of the girl?” Harry asks the other man, back in the showroom.
“With these eyes, I don’t see the girls anymore. If I saw ‘em, with my condition I couldn’t do anything about it. She looked big and dumb. A lot of leg.”
“Not so dumb as that hick she was with,” Harry says. “God when you see what some girls are getting into it makes you want to cry.”
Stavros’s dark dabs of eyebrows lift. “Yeah? Some could say it was the other way around.” He sits down to business at his desk. “Manny get to talk to you about that Torino you took on trade?”
Manny is head of Service, a short stooping man with black pores on his nose, as if with that nose he burrows through each day’s dirty work. Of course he resents Harry, who thanks to his marriage to Springer’s daughter skates around in the sun of the showroom and accepts clunky Torinos on trade-in. “He told me the front end’s out of alignment.”
“Now he thinks in good conscience it should have a valve job. He also thinks the owner turned back the odometer.”
“What could I do, the guy had the book right in his hand, I couldn’t give him less than book value. If I don’t give ‘em book value Diefendorfer or Pike Porsche sure as hell will.”
“You should have let Manny check it out, he could have told at a glance it had been in a collision. And if he spotted the odometer monkey business put the jerk on the defensive.”
“Can’t he weight the front wheels enough to hide the shimmy?”
Stavros squares his hands patiently on the olive-green top of his desk. “It’s a question of good will. The customer you unload that Torino on will never be back, I promise you.”
“Then what’s your advice?”
Charlie says, “Discount it over to Ford in Pottsville. You had a cushion of nine hundred on that sale and can afford to give away two rather than get Manny’s back up. He has to mark up his parts to protect his own department and when they’re Ford parts you’re carrying a mark-up already. Pottsville’ll put a coat of wax on it and make some kid happy for the summer.”
“Sounds good.” Rabbit wants to be outdoors, moving through the evening air, dreaming of his daughter. “If I had my way,” he tells Charlie, “we’d wholesale the American makes out of here as fast as they come in. Nobody wants ‘em except the blacks and the spics, and even they got to wake up some day.”
Charlie doesn’t agree. “You can still do well in used, ifyou pick your spots. Fred used to say every car has a buyer somewhere, but you shouldn’t allow more on any trade-in than you’d pay cash for that car. It is cash, you know. Numbers are cash, even if you don’t handle any lettuce.” He tips back his chair, letting his palms screech with friction on the desktop. “When I first went to work for Fred Springer in ‘63 we sold nothing but second-hand American models, you never saw a foreign car this far in from the coast. The cars would come in off the street and we’d paint ‘em and give ‘em a tune-up and no manufacturer told us what price to attach, we’d put the price on the windshield in shaving cream and wipe it off and try another if it didn’t move inside a week. No import duty, no currency devaluation; it was good clean dog eat dog.”
Reminiscence. Sad to see it rotting Charlie’s brain. Harry waits respectfully for the mood to subside, then asks as if out of the blue, “Charlie, if I had a daughter, what d’you think she’d look like?”
“Ugly,” Stavros says. “She’d look like Bugs Bunny.”
“It’d be fun to have a daughter, wouldn’t it?”
“Doubt it.” Charlie lifts his palms so the legs of his chair slap to the floor. “What d’you hear from Nelson?”
Harry turns vehement. “Nothing much, thank God,” he says. “The kid never writes. Last we heard he was spending the summer out in Colorado with this girl he’s picked up.” Nelson attends college at Kent State, in Ohio, off and on, and has a year’s worth of credits still to go before he graduates, though the boy was twentytwo last October.
“What kind of girl?”
“Lordy knows, I can’t keep track. Each one is weirder than the last. One had been a teen-age alcoholic. Another told fortunes from playing cards. I think that same one was a vegetarian, but it may have been somebody else. I think he picks ‘em to frustrate ‘me.”
“Don’t give up on the kid. He’s all you’ve got.”
“Jesus, what a thought.”
“You just go ahead. I want to finish up here. I’ll lock up.”
“O.K., I’ll go see what Janice has burned for supper. Want to come take pot luck? She’d be tickled to see you.”
“Thanks, but Manna mou expects me.” His mother, getting decrepit herself, lives with Charlie now, in his place on Eisenhower Avenue, and this is another bond between them, since Harry lives with his mother-in-law.
“O.K. Take care, Charlie. See you in Monday’s wash.”
“Take care, champ.”
The day is still golden outside, old gold now in Harry’s lengthening life. He has seen summer come and go until its fading is one in his heart with its coming, though he cannot yet name the weeds that flower each in its turn through the season, or the insects that also in ordained sequence appear, eat, and perish. He knows that in June school ends and the playgrounds open, and the grass needs cutting again and again if one is a man, and if one is a child games can be played outdoors while the supper dishes tinkle in the mellow parental kitchens, and the moon is discovered looking over your shoulder out of a sky still blue, and a silver blob of milkweed spittle has appeared mysteriously on your knee. Good luck. Car sales peak in June: for a three-hundred-car-a-year dealer like Harry this means upwards of twenty-five units, with twenty-one accounted for already and six selling days to go. Average eight hundred gross profit times twenty-five equals twenty grand minus the twenty-five per cent they estimate for salesmen’s compensation both salary and incentives leaves fifteen grand minus between eight and ten for other salaries those cute little cunts come and go in billing one called Cissy a Polack a few years ago they got as far as rubbing fannies easing by in that corridor and the rent that Springer Motors pays itself old man Springer didn’t believe in owning anything the banks could own but even he had to pay off the mortgage eventually boy the rates now must kill anybody starting up and the financing double-digit interest Brewer Trust been doing it for years and against the twelve per cent you got to figure the two or three per cent that comes back as loss reserves nobody likes to call it kick-back and the IRS calls it taxable earnings and the upkeep the electricity that Sun 2001 Diagnostic Computer Manny wants would use a lot ofjuice and the power tools they can’t even turn a nut on a wheel anymore it has to be pneumatic rrrrrrt and the heat thank God a few months’ reprieve from that the fucking Arabs are killing us and the men won’t wear sweaters under the coveralls the young mechanics are the worst they say they lose feeling in their fingertips and health insurance there’s another killer up and up the hospitals keeping people alive that are really dead like some game they’re playing at Medicaid’s expense and the advertising he often wonders how much good it does a rule of thumb he read somewhere is one and a half per cent of gross sales b
ut if you look at the Auto Sales page of the Sunday paper you never saw such a jumble just the quiet listing of the prices and the shadow of the dealer like old man Springer said the man he gets known to be at Rotary and in the downtown restaurants and the country club really he should be allowed to take all that off as business expenses the four seventy-five a week he pays himself doesn’t take into account the suits to make himself presentable he has to buy three or four a year and not at Kroll’s anymore he doesn’t like that salesman who measured his fat waist Webb Murkett knows of a little shop on Pine Street that’s as good as hand tailoring and then the property taxes and the kids keep throwing stones or shooting BBs at the glass signs outside we ought to go back to wood grouted wood but national Toyota has its specifications, where was he, let’s say nine total monthly expenses variable and invariable that leaves four net profit and deduct another thousand from that for inflation and pilferage and the unpredictable that’s always there you still have three, fifteen hundred for Ma Springer and fifteen hundred for Janice and him plus the two thousand salary when his poor dead dad used to go off to the print shop at quarter after seven every morning for forty dollars a week and that wasn’t considered bad money then. Harry wonders what his father would think if he could only see him now, rich.