by John Updike
“O.K., O.K.,” Nelson says. “I treated myself to a bender tonight, I admit it. It’s been a helluva week at the lot. California wants to have this nationwide Toyotathon to go with a TVcommercial blitz and they expect to see a twenty-per-cent increase of new sales to go with the discounts they’re offering. They let me know they haven’t been liking our figures lately.”
“Them and who else?” Harry says. “Did your buddy Lyle tell ya I was over there the other day?”
“Snooping around last week, yeah, he sure did. He hasn’t come to work since. Thanks a bunch. You put Elvira into a snit, too, with all your sexist flirtatious stuff:”
“I wasn’t sexist, I wasn’t flirtatious. I was just surprised to see a woman selling cars and asked her how it was going. The cunt, I was just as pleasant as I could be.”
“She didn’t think so.”
“Well screw her, then. From my look at her she can take care of herself. What’s your big huff for - you boffing her?”
“Dad, when are you going to get your mind off boffing? You’re what, fifty-seven? -“
“Fifty-six.”
“- and you’re so damn adolescent. There’s more things in the world than who’s boffing who.”
“Tell me about it. Tell me about how the me generation has a bender. You can’t keep snorting this stuff every half-hour to keep high, your nose’d burn out. Yours looks sort of shot already. What do you do with crack? How do you take it in? It’s just little crystals, isn’t it? Do you need all that fancy burning stuff and tubes they show on TV? Where do you do it, then? You can’t just haul all that paraphernalia into the Laid-Back or whatever they call it now, or can you?”
“Harry, please,” Janice says.
Judy contributes, bright-eyed at three in the morning, “Daddy has lots of funny little pipes.”
“Shut up honey, would you mind?” Nelson says. “Go find Mommy and she’ll put you to bed.”
Harry turns on Janice. “Let me ask him. Why should we all go around on tiptoe forever pretending the kid’s not a hophead? Face it, Nellie, you’re a mess. You’re a mess and you’re a menace. You need help.”
Self-pity focuses the boy’s features for a second. “People keep telling me I need help but they’re no help is what I notice. A wife who doesn’t give me shit, a father who’s no kind of father at all and never was, a mother…” He trails off, not daring offend his one ally.
“A mother,” Harry finishes for him, “who’s letting you rob her blind.”
This gets to him a little, burns through the jittery buzz in his eyes. “I’m not robbing anybody,” he says, numbly, as though a voice in his head told him to say it. “Everything’s been worked out. Hey, I feel sick. I think I have to throw up.”
Harry raises his hand in lofty blessing. “Go to it. You know where the bathroom is.”
The bathroom door is to the right of the dresser with the color snapshots of the kids at various stages of growing and the tinted one of Harry and Janice looking embalmed, mistily staring at the same point in space. Looking in, Harry sees all sorts of litter on the floor. Prell, Crest, pills. Luckily most things come in plastic containers these days so there isn’t much breakage. The door closes.
Janice tells him, “Harry, you’re coming on too strong.”
“Well, hell, nobody else is coming on at all. You expect it to go away by itself. It won’t. The kid is hooked.”
“Let’s just not talk about the money,” she begs.
“Why not? Just what is so fucking sacred about money, that everybody’s scared to talk about it?”
The tip of her tongue peeks from between her worried lips. “With money you get into legal things.”
Judy is still with them and has been listening: her clear young eyes with their bluish whites, her reddish-blonde eyebrows with their little cowlick, her little face pale as a clock’s face and as precise pluck at Harry’s anger, undermine his necessary indignation. Retching noises from behind the bathroom door now frighten her. Harry explains, “It’ll make your daddy feel better. He’s getting rid of poison.” But the thought of Nelson being sick upsets him too, and those bands of constriction around his chest, the playful malevolent singeing deep within, reassert their threat. He fishes in his pants pocket for the precious brown vial. Thank God he remembered to bring it. He unscrews the top and shakes out a small white Nitrostat and places it, as debonairly as he used to light a cigarette, beneath his tongue.
Judy smiles upward. “Those pills fix that bad heart I gave you.”
“You didn’t give me my bad heart, honey, I wish you’d get that out of your mind.” He is bothered by Janice’s remark about money and legal things and the implication that they are getting in over their heads. ANGSTROM, SON INCARCERATED. Joint Scam Sinks Family Concern. The lights in the neighbor’s upstairs windows have gone off and that relieves some pressure. He could feel Ma Springer turning in her grave at the possibility that her old house has become a bother to the neighborhood. Nelson comes out of the bathroom looking shaken, wide-eyed. The poor kid has seen some terrible things in his day: Jill’s body carried from the burned-out house in a rubber bag, his mother hugging the little dead body of his baby sister. You can’t really blame him for anything. He has washed his face and combed his hair so his pallor has this gleam. He lets a shudder run from his head down into his body, like a dog shaking itself dry after running in a ditch.
For all his merciful thoughts Harry goes back on the attack. “Yeah,” he says, even as the kid is closing the bathroom door, “and another new development over there I wasn’t crazy about is this fat Italian you’ve hired. What are you letting the Mafia into the lot for?”
“Dad, you are incredibly prejudiced.”
“I don’t have prejudices, just facts. The Mafia is a fact. It’s being scared out of the drug trade, too violent, and is getting into more and more legitimate businesses. It was all on 60 Minutes.”
“Mom, get him off me.”
Janice gets up her courage and says, “Nelson, your father’s right. You need some help.”
“I’m fine,” he whines. “I need some sleep, is what I need. You have any idea what time it is? - it’s after three. Judy, you should go back to bed.”
“I’m too wired,” the child says, smiling, showing her perfect oval teeth.
Harry asks her, “Where’d you learn that word?”
“I’m too jazzed,” she says. “Kids at school say that.”
Harry asks Nelson, “And who’re these guys keep calling our house at all hours asking for money?”
“They think I owe them money,” Nelson answers. “Maybe I do. It’s temporary, Dad. It’ll all work out. Come, Judy. I’ll put you to bed.”
“Not so fast,” Harry says. “How much do you owe, and how’re you going to pay ‘em?”
“Like I said, I’ll work it out. They shouldn’t be calling your number, but they’re crude guys. They don’t understand term financing. Go back to Florida if you don’t like your phone ringing. Change your number, that’s what I did.”
“Nelson, when will it end?” Janice asks, tears making her voice crack, just from looking at him. In his white shirt with his electric movements Nelson has the frailty and doomed alertness of a cornered animal. “You must get off this stuff”
“I am, Mom. I am off. Starting_tonight.”
“Ha,” Harry says.
Nelson insists to her, “I can handle it. I’m no addict. I’m a recreational user.”
“Yeah,” Harry says, “like Hitler was a recreational killer.” It must be the mustache made him think of Hitler. If the kid would just shave it off, and chuck the earring, he maybe could feel some compassion, and they could make a fresh start.
But, then, Harry thinks, how many fresh starts for him are left? This room, where he spent ten years sleeping beside Janice, listening to her snore, smelling her nice little womanly sweat, her unconscious releases of gas, making some great love sometimes, that time with the Krugerrands, and other times disgustedl
y watching her stumble in tipsy from a night downstairs sipping sherry or Campan, this room with the copper beech outside the window leafing in and changing the light and then losing its leaves and giving the light back and the beech nuts popping like little firecrackers and Ma Springer’s television mumbling on and making the bedside lamp vibrate when a certain pitch was reached on the program-ending surge of music, Ma sound asleep and never hearing it, this room soaked in his life, how many more times will he see it? He hadn’t expected to see it tonight. Now all at once, as happens at his age, fatigue like an inner overflowing makes him feel soggy, dirty, distracted. Little sparks are going off and on in the corners of his eyes. Avoid aggravation. He’d better sit down. Janice has sat down on the bed, their old bed, and Nelson has pulled up the padded stool patterned with yellow roses Pru must use to perch on in her underwear when she sits putting on makeup at her dresser mirror before going out with him to the LaidBack or some yuppie buddies’ party in northeast Brewer. How sorry is he supposed to feel for his son when the kid has a big tall hippy dish like that to boff?
Nelson has changed his tune. He leans toward his mother, his fingers intertwined to still their shaking, his lips tensed to bite back his nausea, his dark eyes full of an overflowing confusion like her own. He is pleadingly, disjointedly, explaining himself. “… the only time I feel human, like other people I guess feel all the time. But when I went after Pru that way tonight it was like a monster or something had taken over my body and I was standing outside watching and felt no connection with myself. Like it was all on television. You’re right, I got to ease off. I mean, it’s getting so I can’t start the day without … a hit … and all day all I think about … That’s not human either.”
“You poor baby,” she says. “I know. I know just what you’re saying. It’s lack of self-esteem. I had it for years. Remember, Harry, how I used to drink when we were young?”
Trying to pull him into it, make him a parent too. He won’t have it, yet. He won’t buy in. “When we were young? How about when we were middle-aged, like now even? Hey look, what’s this supposed to be, a therapy session? This kid just clobbered his wife and is conning the pants off us and you’re letting him!”
Judy, lying diagonally on the bed behind her grandmother, and studying them all with upside-down eyes, joins in, observing, “When Grandpa gets mad his upper lip goes all stiff just like Mommy’s does.”
Nelson comes out of his fog of self-pity enough to say to her, “Honey, I’m not sure you should be hearing all this.”
“Let me put her back to bed,” Janice offers, not moving though.
Harry doesn’t want to be left alone with Nelson. He says, “No, I’ll do it. You two keep talking. Hash it out. I’ve had my say to this jailbait.”
Judy laughs shrilly, her head still upside down on the bed, her reversed eyelids monstrous. “That’s a funny word,” her mouth says, the teeth all wrong, big on bottom and little on top. ” Jailbait.’ You mean jailbird.’ “
“No, Judy,” Harry tells her, taking her hand and trying to pull her upright. “first you’re jailbait, then you’re a jailbird. When you’re in jail, you’re a jailbird.”
“Where the holy fuck is her mother?” Nelson asks the air in front of his face. “That damn Pru, she’s always telling me what a jerk I am, then she’s out to lunch half the time herself. Notice how broad in the beam she’s getting? That’s alcohol. The kids come home from school and find her sound asleep.” He says this to Janice, placating her, badmouthing his wife to his mother, then suddenly turns to Harry.
“Dad,” he says. “Want to split a beer?”
“You must be crazy.”
“It’ll help bring us down,” the boy wheedles. “It’ll help us to sleep.”
“I’m fighting sleep; Jesus. It’s not me who’s wired or whatever you call it. Come on, Judy. Don’t give Grandpa a hard time. He hurts all over.” The child’s hand seems damp and sticky in his, and she makes a game of his pulling her off the bed, resisting to the point that he feels a squeeze in his chest. And when he gets her upright beside the bed, she goes limp and tries to collapse onto the rug. He holds on and resists the impulse to slap her. To Janice he says sharply, “Ten more minutes. You and the kid talk. Don’t let him con you. Set up some kind of plan. We got to get some order going in this crazy family.”
As he pulls the bedroom door halfway shut, he hears Nelson say, “Mom, how about you? Wouldn’t half a beer be good? We have Mick, and Miller’s.”
Judy’s room, wherein Ma Springer used to doze and pretend to watch television, and from whose front windows you can see patches of Joseph Street, deserted like tundra, blanched by the streetlights, through the sticky Norway maples, is crowded with stuffed toys, teddy bears and giraffes and Garfields; but Harry feels they are all old toys, that nobody has brought this child a present for some time. Her childhood is wearing out before she is done with it. She turned nine in January and who noticed? Janice sent her a Dr. Seuss book and a flowered bathing cap from Florida. Judy crawls without hesitation or any more stalling into her bed, under a tattered red puff covered with Peanuts characters. He asks her if she doesn’t need to go pee-pee first. She shakes her head and stares up at him from the pillow as if amused by how little he knows about her insides. Slant slices of streetlight enter around the window shades and he asks her if she would like him to draw the curtains. Judy says No, she doesn’t like it totally dark. He asks her if the cars going by bother her and she says No, only the big trucks that shake the house sometimes and there’s a law that says they shouldn’t come this way but the police are too lazy to enforce it. “Or too busy,” he points out, always one to defend the authorities. Strange that he should have this instinct, since in his life he hasn’t
been especially dutiful. Jailbait himself on a couple of occasions. But the authorities these days seem so helpless, so unarmed. He asks Judy if she wants to say a prayer. She says No thanks. She is clutching some stuffed animal that looks shapeless to him, without arms or legs. Monstrous. He asks her about it and she shows him that it is a stuffed toy dolphin, with gray back and white belly. He pats its polyester fur and tucks it back under the covers with her. Her chin rests on the white profile of Snoopy wearing his aviator glasses. Linus clutches his blanket; Pigpen has little stars of dirt around his head; Charlie Brown is on his pitcher’s mound, and then is knocked head over heels by a rocketing ball. Sitting on the edge of the bed, wondering if Judy expects a bedtime story, Harry sighs so abjectly, so wearily, that both are surprised, and nervously laugh. She suddenly asks him if everything will be all right.
“How do you mean, honey?”
“With Mommy and Daddy.”
“Sure. They love you and Roy, and they love each other.”
“They say they don’t. They fight.”
“A lot of married people fight.”
“My friends’ parents don’t.”
“I bet they do, but you don’t see it. They’re being good because you’re in the house.”
“When people fight a lot, they get divorced.”
“Yes, that happens. But only after a lot of fighting. Has your daddy ever hit your mommy before, like tonight?”
“Sometimes she hits him. She says he’s wasting all our money.”
Harry has no ready answer to that. “It’ll work out,” he says, just as Nelson has. “Things work out, usually. It doesn’t always seem that way, but they usually do.”
“Like you that time you fell on the sand and couldn’t get up.”
“Wasn’t that a funny way to act? Yes, and see, here I am, as good as new. It worked out.”
Her face broadens in the dark; she is smiling. Her hair is spread in dark rays across the glowing pillow. “You were so funny in the water. I teased you.”
“You teased me how?”
“By hiding under the sail.”
He casts his weary mind back and tells her, “You weren’t teasing, honey. You were all blue and gaspy when I got you out. I saved your li
fe. Then you saved mine.”
She says nothing. The dark pits of her eyes absorb his version, his adult memory. He leans down and kisses her warm dry forehead. “Don’t you worry about anything, Judy. Grandma and I will take good care of your daddy and all of you.”
“I know,” she says after a pause, letting go. We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.