by John Updike
Though his pains continue underwater he can speak. “Hey,” he says. “Wow. What happened, exactly?”
“I don’t know, Grandpa,” Judy says politely. Getting these words out sends her into another spasm of coughing. “I came up and there was this thing over me and when I tried to swim nothing happened, I couldn’t get out from under.”
He realizes that her fright has its limits; she thinks that even out here nothing more drastic than discomfort can befall her. She has a child’s sense of immortality and he is its guardian.
“Well, it worked out,” he pants. “No harm done.” Besides the pain, that will not let go and is reaching up the arm that clings to the mast, there is a bottom to his breathing, and from lower down a color of nausea, of seasickness it may be, and enclosing that a feebleness, a deep need to rest. “The wind changed on us,” he explains to Judy. “These things tip over too damn easy.”
Now the grand strangeness of where they are, hundreds of yards from shore and hundreds of feet above sea bottom, begins to grab her. Her eyes with their perfectly spaced lashes widen and her carefully fitted thin lips begin to loosen and blur. Her voice has a quaver. “How do we get it back up?”
“Easy,” he tells her. “I’ll show you a trick.” Did he remember how? Cindy had done it so quickly, diving right under the boat, in those glassy Caribbean waters. A line, she had to have pulled on a line. “Stay close to me but don’t hang on me any more, honey. Your life vest will hold you up.”
“It didn’t before.”
“Sure it did. You were just under the sail.”
Their voices sound diminished out here in the Gulf, flying off into space without lingering in the air the way words spoken in rooms do. Treading water takes all of his breath. He mustn’t black out. He must hold the sunlit day from dropping its shutter on its head. He thinks if he ever gets out of this he will lie down on a firm dry stretch of grass - he can picture it, the green blades, the thatchy gaps of rubbed earth like at the old Mt. Judge playground -and never move. Gently he lets go of the mast and with careful paddling motions, trying not to jar whatever is disturbed in his chest, takes the two nylon lines floating loose and, with an effort that by recoil action pushes his face under, tosses them over to the other side. The waves are rough enough that Judy clings to his shoulder though he asked her not to. He explains to her, “O.K. Now we’re going to doggie-paddle around the boat.”
“Maybe that man who liked Mom will come out in his launch.”
“Maybe. But wouldn’t that be embarrassing, being rescued with Roy watching?”
Judy is too worried to laugh or respond. They make their way past the tiller, the ugly wooden thing that scraped his face. The tern has left the sky but floating bits of brown seaweed, like paper mops or wigs for clowns, offer proofs of other life. The slime-stained white hull lying sideways in the water seems a corpse he can never revive. “Back off a little,” he tells the clinging child. “I’m not sure how this will go.”
As long as he is in the water, at least he doesn’t weigh much; but when, taking hold of the line threaded through the top of the aluminum mast, he struggles to place his weight on the centerboard, at first with his arms and then with his feet, he feels crushed by his own limp load of slack muscle and fat and guts. The pain in his chest gathers to such a red internal blaze that he squeezes his eyes shut to blot it out, and blindly then he feels with a suck of release the sail lift free of the water and the centerboard under him plunge toward vertical. The boat knocks him backward as it comes upright, and the loose wet sail swings its boom back and forth in a whipping tangle of line. He has no breath left and has an urge to give himself to the water, the water that hates him yet wants him.
But the child with him cheers. “Yaay! You did it! Grandpa, you O.K.?”
“I’m great. Can you get on first, honey? I’ll hold the boat steady.”
After several failed leaps out of the water Judy plops her belly on the curving deck, her blue-black bottom gleaming in two arcs, and scrambles to a crouching position by the mast.
“Now,” he announces, “here comes the whale,” and, lifting his mind clear of the striated, pulsing squeezing within his rib cage, rises up enough out of the water to seize the tipping hull with his abdomen. He grabs a cleat. The fake grain of the Fiberglas presses its fine net against his cheekbone. The hungry water still sucks at his legs and feet but he kicks it away and shakily arranges himself in his position at the tiller again. He tells Judy, “We’re getting there, young lady.”
“You O.K., Grandpa? You’re talking kind of funny.”
“Can’t breathe too well. For some reason. I might throw up. Let me rest a minute. And think. We don’t want to. Tip this fucker over again.” The pain now is down both axis and up into his jaw. Once Rabbit told someone, a prying clergyman, somewhere behind all this there’s something that wants me to find it. Whatever it is, it now has found him, and is working him over.
“Do you hurt?”
“Sure. My ear where you pulled it. My leg where I scraped it.” He wants to make her smile but her starry-eyed study of him is unremittingly solemn. How strange, Rabbit thinks, his thoughts weirdly illumined by his agony, children are, shaped like us, torso and legs and ears and all, yet on a scale all their own - subcompact people made for a better but also a smaller planet. Judy looks at him uncertain of how seriously to take him, like yesterday when he ate the false peanuts.
“Stay just where you are,” he tells her. “Don’t rock the boat. As they say.”
The tiller feels oddly large in his hands, the nylon rope unreally rough and thick. He must manage these. Untended, the boat has drifted dead into the wind. What was Cindy’s phrase for that? In irons. He is in irons. He waggles the tiller, hard one way and gently the other, to get an angle on the wind, and timidly pulls in sail, fearing the giant hand will push them over again. Surprisingly, there are other Sunfish out in the bay, and two boys on jet skis, brutally jumping the waves, at such a distance that their yells and the slaps of impact arrive in his ears delayed. The sun has moved past noon, onto the faces of the tall hotels. The windows glint now, their comblike balconies stand out, the crowd on the beach twinkles, another kite flyer has joined the first. The sheet of water between here and shore is dented over and over by downward blows of light that throw sparks. Rabbit feels chilled in his drying skin. He feels full of a gray unrest that wants to ooze poison out through his pores. He stretches his legs straight in front of him and leans back on an elbow in an awkward approximation of lying down. Sinking into sleep would be a good idea if he weren’t where he was, with this child to deliver back to the world unharmed.
He speaks rapidly, between twinges, and clearly, not wanting to repeat. “Judy. What we’re going to do is as quietly as we can take two big tacks and get to shore. It may not be exactly where your mother is but we want to get to land. I feel very tired and achey and if I fall asleep you wake me up.”
“Wake you up?”
“Don’t look so worried. This is a fun adventure. In fact, I have a fun job for you.”
“What’s that?” Her voice has sharpened; she senses now that this isn’t fun.
“Sing to me.” When he pulls the sail tighter, it’s as if he’s tightening something within himself pain shoots up the soft inner side of that arm to his elbow.
“Sing? I don’t know any songs, Grandpa.”
“Everybody knows some songs. How about `Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ to start off with?”
He closes his eyes intermittently, in obedience to the animal instinct to crawl into a cave with your pain, and her little voice above the slipslop of the waves and resistant creaking of the mast picks its wavery way through the words of the round, which he used to sing in the second grade back in the days of corduroy knickers and Margaret Schoelkopf’s pigtails and high-buttoned shoes. -His mind joins in, but can’t spare the effort to activate his voice box, Gently down the stream, Merrily, merrily, merrily … “Life is but a dream,” Judy ends.
&nbs
p; “Nice,” he says. “How about `Mary Had a Little Lamb’? Do they still teach you that at school? What the hell do they teach you at school these days?” Being laid so low has loosened his language, his primal need to curse and his latent political indignation. He goes on, thinking it will make him seem less alarming to his grandchild, and humorously alive, “I know we’re sucking hind titty in science education, the papers keep telling us that. Thank God for the Orientals. Without these Chinese and Vietnam refugees we’d be a nation of total idiots.”
Judy does know “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and “Three Blind Mice,” and the verses of “Farmer in the Dell” up to the wife takes a cow, but then they both lose track. “Let’s do `Three Blind Mice’ again,” he orders her. “See how they run. The mice ran after the farmer’s wife …”
She does not take up the verse and his voice dies away. Their tack is taking them far out toward the north, toward Sarasota and Tampa and the rich men’s islands where the pirates once were, but the people on the beach do look a little less like gray string, the colors of their bathing suits twinkle a bit closer, and he can make out the darting tormented flight of a volleyball. A pressure in the center of his chest has intensified and to his nausea has been added an urgent desire to take a crap. In trying to picture his real life, the life of simple comforts and modest challenges that he abandoned when his foot left the sand, he now envisions foremost the rosecolored porcelain toilet bowl in the condo, with matching padded seat, and the little stack of Consumer Reports and Times that waited on the bottom shelf of the white-painted bamboo table Janice kept her cosmetics on top of, next to the rose-tinted bathroom basin. It seems to have been a seat in paradise.
“Grandpa, I can’t think of any more songs.” The child’s green eyes, greener than Pru’s, have a watery touch of panic.
“Don’t stop,” he grunts, trying to keep everything in. “You’re making the boat go.”
“No I’m not.” She manages a blurred smile. “The wind makes it go.”
“In the wrong fucking direction,” he says.
“Is it wrong?” she asks with the quickness of fear.
“No, I’m just kidding.” It was like that sadistic squeeze he gave her hand yesterday. Must stop that stuff. When you get children growing under you, you try to rise to the occasion. “We’re fine,” he tells her. “Let’s come about. Ready? Duck your head, honey.” No more sailor talk. He yanks the tiller, the boat swings, sail sags, sun shines down through the gap of silence, hammering the water into sparks. The bow drifts across a certain imaginary line, the sail hesitantly and then decisively fills, and they tug off in another direction, south, toward the remotest glass hotel and Naples and the other set of rich men’s islands. The small effort and anxiety of the maneuver wring such pain from his chest that tears have sprung into his own eyes. Yet he feels good, down deep. There is a satisfaction in his skyey enemy’s having at last found him. The sense of doom hovering over him these past days has condensed into reality, as clouds condense into needed rain. There is a lightness, a lightening, that comes along with misery: vast portions of your life are shorn off, suddenly ignorable. You become simply a piece of physical luggage to be delivered into the hands of others. Stretched out on the Fiberglas deck he is pinned flat to the floor of reality. The sensation of pressure, of unbearable fullness, within him now has developed a rhythm, an eccentric thrust as if a flywheel has come unconnected from its piston. Pain you can lift your head above, for a little; he minds more the breathing, the sensation that his access to the air has been narrowed to a slot that a fleck of mucus would clog, and worse even than the breathing, which if you can forget it seems to ease, is the involvement of his guts, the greasy gray churning and the desire to vomit and shit and yet not to, and the clammy sweating, which chills him in the wind and the sun’s quick drying.
“Splish, splash, I was takin’ a bath,” Judy’s faint voice sings, little feathers of music that fly away, “along about Saturday night …” She has moved from nursery rhymes to television commercials, the first few lines of them until she forgets. “The good times, great taste, of McDonald’s…” “I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener. That is what I’d truly like to be. ‘Cause if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener, everyone would be in love with me.” And the one the toilet paper sings, and the “Stand by Me” imitation by those California raisins, and the “Mack the Knife” by Ray Charles as the man in the moon, and the reassurance that if you want it, we’ve got it, “Toy-o-to … Who could ask for anything more?” It is like switching channels back and forth, her little voice lifting and blowing back into his face, his eyes closed while his mind pays furtive visits in the dark to the grinding, galloping, lopsided maladjustment in his chest and then open again, to check their bearings and the tension in the sail, to test the illusion of blue sky and his fixed belief that her voice is powering the Sunfish toward the shore. “Coke is it,”Judy sings, “the most refreshing taste around, Coke is it, the one that never lets you down, Coke is it, the biggest taste you ever found!”
He has to tack twice more, and by then his granddaughter has discovered within herself the treasure of songs from videos she has watched many times, of children’s classics Rabbit saw when they were new, the first time in those old movie theaters with Arabian decors and plush curtains that pulled back and giant mirrors in the lobby, songs of departure, “We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz” and “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go,” and sad songs of something in the sky to distract us from the Depression, “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” and “When You Wish upon a Star,” little Jiminy Cricket out there with his top hat and furled umbrella on that moon-bathed windowsill. That Disney, he really packed a punch.
“Nice, Judy,” Rabbit grunts. “Terrific. You were really getting into it.”
“It was fun, like you said. Look, there’s Mommy!”
Harry lets the sheet and tiller go. The Sunfish bobs in the breaking waves of shallow water, and Judy pulls up the centerboard and jumps off into water up to her shiny hips and pulls the boat like a barge through the last yards before the bow scrapes sand. “We tipped over and Grandpa got sick!” she shouts.
Not just Pru and Roy but Gregg Silvers have come to meet them, about a good six-iron shot up the beach from where they set out. Gregg’s too-tan face gives a twitch, seeing the way Harry keeps stretched out beside the useless tiller, and seeing something Harry can’t, perhaps the color of his face. How bad is he? He looks at his palms; they are mottled with yellow and blue. Swiftly Gregg takes the painter from Judy and asks Harry, “Want to stay where you are?”
Harry waits until a push of pain passes and says, “I’m getting off this fucking tub if it kills me.”
But the action of standing and easing off the tipping Sunfish and wading a few feet does bad things to his slipped insides. He feels himself wade even through air, on the packed sand, against pronounced resistance. He lies down on the sand at Pru’s feet, her long bare feet with chipped scarlet nails and their pink toe joints like his mother’s knuckles from doing the dishes too many times. He lies face up, looking up at her white spandex crotch. Little Roy, thinking Harry’s posture playful, toddles over and stands above his grandfather’s head, shedding grains of sand down into Rabbit’s ears, his clenched mouth, his open eyes; his eyes squeeze shut.
The sky is a blank redness out of which Pru’s factual Ohio voice falls with a concerned intonation. “We saw you go over but Gregg says it happens all the time. Then it seemed to take so long he was just about to come out in the launch.”
The redness pulses with a pain spaced like ribs, stripes of pain with intervals of merciful nothingness between them. Very high up, slowly, an airplane goes over, dragging its noise behind it. “Judy got under the sail,” he hears his own voice say. “Scared me.” He lies there like a jellyfish washed up, bulging, tremblingly full of a desire for its lost element. Another complicated warmish thing, with fingers, is touching his wrist, feeling his pulse. First-aid training must be par
t of Gregg’s job. To assist him in his diagnosis Harry volunteers, “Sorry to be such a crump. Out there I had this terrific desire to lie down.”
“You keep lying there, Mr. Angstrom,” Gregg says, sounding suddenly loud and crisp and a touch too authoritative, like his father adding up the golf scores. “We’re going to get you to the hospital.”
In his red blind world this news is such a relief he opens his eyes. He sees Judy standing huge and sun-haloed above him, fragments of rainbows confused with her tangled drying hair. Rabbit tries to smile comfortingly and tells her, “It must have been that birdfood I ate.”
Nelson was still sleeping at eleven, but Janice was in no hurry for the confrontation. She sat out on the balcony for a while after Harry and Pru and the children went, coming back twice for things they forgot and forgetting two flippers and a bottle of sun lotion anyway, and she discovered there is a place, one step to the left of where the Norfolk pine gets in the way, from which you can see a patch, a little squarish sparkling patch between an ornamental condo turret and a Spanish-tile roof, of blue-green water, of Gulf. But of course there was no hope of seeing their sail; from this distance it would take a yacht like the one they raced off San Diego this September, the Americans outwitting with a catamaran the New Zealanders in their giant beautiful hopeless boat. Looking from their balcony always a little saddens her, reviving something buried within her, the view they had from their windows in the apartment on Wilbur Street, of all the town, Mt. Judge’s slanting streets busy and innocent below. Then as now, Harry had gone off, and she was alone with Nelson.