by John Updike
Harry and Janice reach Gate A5. People get off of airplanes in clots, one self-important fusspot with three bags or some doddery old dame with a cane bunching those behind them. You wonder if we haven’t gone overboard in catering to cripples. “There they are,” Janice pronounces at last, adding under her breath to Harry quickly, “Nelson looks exhausted.”
Not so much exhausted, Rabbit thinks, as shifty. His son is carrying his own son on his left arm, and Nelson’s right eye squints, the lid seeming to quiver, as if a blow might come from that unprotected side. Roy must have fallen asleep on the flight, for his head leans against his father’s neck seeking a pillow there, his eyes open with that liquid childish darkness but his plump mouth mute, gleaming with saliva, in shock. Harry goes forward as soon as the ropes allow to lift the burden from his son, but Nelson seems reluctant to let go, as if the child’s own grandfather is a kidnapper; Roy, too, clings. With a shrug of exasperation Harry gives up and leans in close and kisses Roy’s velvety cheek, finer than velvet, still feverish with sleep, and shakes his own son’s small and clammy hand. In recent years Nelson has grown a mustache, a tufty brown smudge not much wider than his nose. His delicate lips underneath it never seem to smile. Harry looks in vain into this fearful brown-eyed face for a trace of his blue-eyed own. Nelson has inherited Janice’s tense neatness of feature, with her blur of evasion or confusion in the eyes; the puzzled look sits better on a woman than a man. Worse, Janice’s high forehead and skimpy fine hair have become in Nelson a distinctly growing baldness. His receding temples have between them a transparent triangle of remaining hair soon to become an island, a patch, and at the back of his head, when he turns to kiss his mother, a swath of skin is expanding. He has chosen to wear a worn blue denim jacket down on the plane, over a crisp dressy shirt, though, pink stripes with white collar and cuffs, so he seems half cocked, like a married rock star or a weekend gangster. One earlobe bears a tiny gold earring.
“Mmmm-wah!”Janice says to cap her hello kiss; she has learned to make such noises down here, among the overexpressive Jewish women.
Harry carefully greets Judith and Pru. Going to be nine in less than a month, the skinny girl is a sketch of a woman, less than lifesize and not filled in. A redhead like her mother. Lovely complexion, cheeks rosy under the freckles, and the details of her face lashes, eyebrows, ears, nostril-wings, lips quick to lift up on her teeth - frighteningly perfect, as if too easy to smash. When he bends to kiss her he sees in front ofher ear the sheen of childhood’s invisible down. She has Pru’s clear green eyes and carrot-colored hair but nothing as yet in her frail straight frame and longish calm face of the twist that life at some point gave Pru, making her beauty even when she was twenty-four slightly awkward, limping as it were, a look that has become more wry and cumbersome with the nine years of marriage to Nelson. She likes Harry and he likes her though they have never found a way around all these others to express it. “What a pair of beauties,” he says now, of the mother and daughter.
Little Judy wrinkles her nose and says, “Grandpa’s been eating candy again, for shame on him. I could smell it, something with peanuts in it, I can tell. He even has some little pieces stuck between his teeth. For shame.”
He had to laugh at this attack, at the accuracy of it, and the Pennsylvania-Dutch way the little girl said, “for shame.” Local accents are dying out, but slowly, children so precisely imitate their elders. Judy must have overheard in her house Nelson and Pru and maybe Janice talking about his weight problem and rotten diet. If they were talking, his health problems might be worse than he knows. He must look bad.
“Shit,” he says, in some embarrassment. “I can’t get away with anything any more. Pru, how’s the world treating you?”
His daughter-in-law surprises him by, as he bends dutifully forward to kiss her cheek, kissing him flush on the mouth. Her lips have a wry regretful shy downward twist but are warm, warm and soft and big as cushions in the kiss’s aftermath within him. Since he first met her in the shadows of Ma Springer’s house that longago summer - a slender slouching shape thrust into the midst of their lives, Nelson’s pregnant Roman Catholic girlfriend from Ohio, a Kent State University secretary named Teresa Lubell, suddenly become the carrier of Harry’s genes into eternity - Pru has broadened without growing heavy in that suety Pennsylvania way. As if invisible pry bars have slightly spread her bones and new calcium been wedged in and the flesh gently stretched to fit, she now presents more front. Her face, once narrow like Judy’s, at moments looks like a flattened mask. Always tall, she has in the years of becoming a hardened wife and matron allowed her long straight hair to be cut and teased out into bushy wings a little like the hairdo of the Sphinx. Her hips and shoulders too have widened, beneath the busy pattern - brown and white and black squares and diamond-shapes arranged to look three-dimensional of the checked suit she put on for the airplane, a lightweight suit wrinkled by the three hours of sitting and babysitting. A stuffed blue shoulder bag is slung across one shoulder and her arms and hands clutch a gray wool topcoat, two children’s jackets, several slippery children’s books based on morning television shows, a Cabbage Patch doll with its bunchy beige face, and an inflated plastic dinosaur. She has big hands, with pink, cracked knuckles. Harry’s mother had hands like that, from washing clothes and dishes. How did Pru get them, in this age of appliances? He stands gazing at her in a half-second’s post-kiss daze. Having a wife and children soon palled for him, but he never fails to be excited by having, in the flesh, a daughter-in-law.
She says, slangily, to mask the initial awkwardness when they meet, “You’re lookin’ good, Harry. The sunny South agrees with you.”
What did that frontal kiss mean? Its slight urgency. Some sad message there. She and Nelson never did quite fit.
“Nobody else thinks so,” he says, and grabs at her shoulder bag. “Lemme help you carry some of this stuff I’ll take the bag.” He begins to pull it off.
Pru shifts the coat and toys to extend her arm to let him take it but at the same time asks him, “Should you?”
Harry asks, “Why does everybody treat me like some Goddamn kind of invalid?” but he is asking the air; Pru and Janice are hugging with brisk false enthusiasm and Nelson is plodding ahead down the long gray corridor with Roy back to sleep on his shoulder. Harry is irritated to see that though Nelson has a careful haircut that looks only a few days old the barber left one of those tails, like a rat’s tail, uncut and hanging down over the boy’s collar, under the spreading bald spot. How old does he think he is, seventeen? Little Judy trails her father but Nelson is not waiting or looking back. The girl is just old enough to sense that in her nice proper airplane outfit she should not sacrifice all dignity and run to catch up. She wears a navy-blue winter coat over a pink summer dress; its pink hem shows below the coat, and then her bare legs, which look long, longer than when he saw her last in early November. But it is the back of her head that kills him, her shiny carrot-colored hair braided into a pigtail caught into a showy stiff white ribbon. Something of her mother’s Catholic upbringing in that ribbon, decking out the Virgin or the baby Jesus or Whoever to go on parade, to go on a ride in the sky. The sleek back of Judy’s head, the pigtail bouncing as she tries not to run, so docilely, so unthinkingly wears the showy ribbon her mother put there that Harry smiles. Hurrying his stride, he catches up and reaches down and says, “Hey there, good-lookin’,” and takes the hand she with a child’s reflex lifts to be taken. Her hand is as surprisingly moist as her mother’s lips were warm. Her head with its bone-white parting is higher than his waist. She complains to her mother, Harry has heard from Janice, about being the tallest girl in her section of the third grade. The mean boys tease her.
“How’s school going?” he asks.
“I hate it,”Judy tells him. “There are all these kids think they’re big shots. The girls are the absolute worst.”
“Do you ever think you’re a big shot?”
She ponders this. “Some boys are always
getting after me but I tell them to fuck off.”
He clucks his tongue. “That’s pretty rough language for the third grade.”
“Not really,” she says. “Even the teacher says `damn’ sometimes when we get her going.”
“How do you get her going?”
Judy smiles upward, her mother’s quick wide-mouthed smile without the crimp. “Sometimes we all hum so she can’t see our mouths move. A couple weeks ago when she tried to make us all sing Christmas carols one of these big-shot boys I told you about said it was against his parents’ religion and his father was a lawyer and would sue everybody.”
“He sounds like a pain in the ass,” Rabbit says.
“Grandpa. Don’t talk dirty.”
“That’s not dirty, that’s just saying where it hurts. If you say somebody’s a pain in the bottom it sounds dirtier. Hey. Here’s the place I bought that peanut candy you smelled. Want some?”
“You better ask Mom first.”
Harry turns and lets the two mothers, walking hip to hip and heads bowed in consultation, catch up. “Pru,” he says, “will it rot any teeth if I buy Judy a candy bar?”
She looks up, distracted, but remembers to smile at him. “I guess it won’t kill her this once, though Nelson and I try to discourage junk in their diet.”
“Whatever you get her, Harry,” Janice adds, “you ought to get Roy.”
“But Roy’s asleep and half her size.”
“He’ll know, though,” Pru says, “ifyou play favorites. He’s just now coming out from under her shadow.”
Little Judy, casting a shadow? Did he cast a shadow over Mim? Mim certainly got far enough away from Diamond County, if that was a statement. Got into the fast lane in Las Vegas and stayed.
“Don’t be forever,” Janice tells Harry. “Or else give me the keys so we can get into the car. They have two more bags they made them check in Newark. Nelson’s probably down there already.”
“Yeah, what’s his idea, rushing on ahead like that? Who’s he sore at?”
“Probably me,” Pru says. “I’ve given up trying to figure out why.”
Harry digs into one pocket of his plaid golf slacks, comes up with only a few tees and a plastic ball marker with two blue Vs on it, for Valhalla Village, and then into the other to find the knobbly notched bunch of keys on the ring. Saying “Heads up,” he tosses them toward Janice. Her hands jump together in a womanly panic and the keys sail past them and hit her in the stomach. Just this little effort, the search and the toss, leaves him weary, as if the arm he lifted was soggy wash. The spontaneity and fun have been taken out of buying his granddaughter a treat. She chooses not a Planter’s Peanut Bar as he had envisioned but a Sky Bar, which he thinks might be truly bad for her teeth, those five different gooey fillings in the five humped segments of pure chocolate. He digs into the hip pocket of his pants, so old their plaid is sun-faded and the hem of each pocket is darkened by the sweat off his hands over the years, and pulls out his wallet and hangs for a while over the candy rack, uncertain whether or not to get himself another sugary rectangle of stuck-together nuts, wondering if this time he would be lucky enough to get one not broken in the wrapper, deciding against it because he eats too much, too much junk as Pru said, Pru and his doctor down here, old Dr. Morris, and then at the last possible split-second, with the black woman at the counter within the octagonal shop already counting out his change from a dollar for the Sky Bar, deciding to buy the peanut brittle after all. It is not so much the swallowing and ingesting he loves as the gritty-edgy feeling of the first corner in his mouth, the first right-angled fragment, slowly dissolving. To his surprise and indignation not only does he now receive no change from the dollar but owes the black woman - a severe matte undiluted color you rarely see in the U.S., dull as slate, must be a Haitian or Dominican, Florida is full of these boat people - a nickel more, for the state tax. Airport prices, they nail you where there’s no competition. Without competition, you get socialism and everybody free-loading and economies like they have in Cuba and Haiti. He pauses to glance at the magazines on the rack. The top row holds the skin mags, sealed in plastic, pieces of printed paper hiding details of the open-mouthed girls, open-mouthed as if perpetually astonished by their own tangible assets, Hustler, Gallery, Club, Penthouse, Oui, Live, Fox. He imagines himself buying one, braving the Haitian woman’s disapproval - all these Caribbean types are evangelical fundamentalists, tin-roofed churches where they shout for the world to end now - and sneaking the magazine home and while Janice is asleep or cooking or out with one of her groups studying to satiety the spread shots and pink labia and boosted tits and buttocks tipped up from behind so the shaved cunt shows, with its sad little anatomy like some oyster, and sadly foreseeing that he will not be enough aroused, boredom will become his main feeling, and embarrassment at the expenditure. Four dollars twenty-five they are asking these days, promising Sexy Sirens in the Sauna and Cara Lott Gets Hot and Oral Sex: A Gourmet’s Guide. How disgusting we are, when you think about it - disposable meat, but hell-bent on gratification.
“Come on, Grandpa - what’s taking so long?”
They hurry after the others, who have vanished. Judy’s shiny beribboned head makes him nervous, popping up first on one side of him and then the other, like the car keys he was a little slow to find, Janice calls him doddery when she can’t even catch, the clumsy mutt. If their granddaughter gets kidnapped from his side she’ll really call him doddery. “Easy does it,” he tells Judy at the top of the escalator, “pick a step and stay on it. Don’t get on a crack,” and at the bottom, “O.K., step off, but not too soon, don’t panic, it’ll happen, O.K., good.”
“I go on escalators all the time at the malls,” she tells him, making up at him a little pinched rebuking mouth with beads of melted chocolate at the corners.
“Where the hell is everybody?” he asks her, for amid all the tan loud presences that throng the lower, higher-ceilinged floor of the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, less ductlike and cryptlike but still echoing with a muffled steely doom that worries at his stomach, there is nobody he knows, strangers as total as if he has descended into Hell.
“Are we lost, Grandpa?”
“We can’t be,” he tells her.
In their sudden small plight he is newly aware of her preciousness, the jewel-cut of her eyes and eyelashes, the downy glaze in front of her ears and the gleam of each filament of her luxuriant hair, pulled taut into a thick pigtail adomed with an unreal stiff white ribbon. For the first time he sees she is also wearing symmetrical white barrettes, shaped like butterflies. Judy looks up toward his face and fights crying at the vagueness she sees there. “This coat is too hot,” she complains.
“I’ll carry it,” he says. He folds its cloth weight over his arm and she is like a butterfly herself now, in her pink dress. Her green eyes have gone wide in this gray airport’s bustling limbo, under reddish-brown eyebrows one of which near the flat bulge of her little freckled nose has a little cowlick fanning the hairs the wrong way; Nelson has that cowlick, and inherited it from Harry, who used to lick his middle finger and try to slick it down in the highschool boys’ lavatory mirror. Amazing, that a thing so tiny could pass on. Maybe the only immortality we get, a little genetic quirk going on and on like a computerized number in your monthly bank statement. Ghostly empty shapes, people he doesn’t know, push and stream past the two of them. They are an island surrounded by jokes and noisy news and embraces; people tanned that deep settled mahogany that comes only from months and months of Florida embrace newcomers the color of wallpaper paste. Harry says, so Judy will hear her grandfather say something and not just stand there numbly, “They must be over at the baggage.”
He looks up and sees above their heads the sign saying BAGGAGE and takes her moist little hand and tugs her toward the crowd around the baggage belt, which is already moving. But neither Pru nor Janice nor Nelson nor Roy is there, as far as they can see. Face after face refuses to cohere into a known face. His eyes
, always good, trouble him now in artificially lit places. The blue shoulder bag Pru let him carry for her is heavier than he would have thought; she must have packed bricks. His shoulder and eyes burn.
“I guess,” he ventures, though it seems unlikely, “they’re already at the car.” He taps his pocket for the lump of keys, doesn’t feel it, begins to panic, then remembers how he tossed them to Janice. Of course. Confidently now he approaches the brown glass exit doors, but the wrong one pops its seal and slides open when his body trips the electric eye. The wrong one as far as he is concerned; Judy was pulling him in the right direction, where a slice of hot outdoor air swiftly widens. Sun has broken through the milky stratocirrus. It bounces off the waxy leaves of the nameless tropical plants flourishing near his knees. It winks blindingly from a mass of moving cars, a brutal river of them rushing along the access strip just beyond the curb. He holds Judy’s hand tighter, in case she decides to jump off the curb, we’re all full of crazy impulses. They cross to a lake of shimmering cars, the lot where he parked. Where, exactly? He finds he’s forgotten. He is utterly empty of the car’s location.