by John Updike
He continues hiking, alone on the sloping sidewalk, up into the block where he and Janice lived when they were first married. Built all at once in the Thirties, a row of frame semi-detached climbs the hill like a staircase. Like the fire hydrant, they have become brighter, painted in fanciful storybook colors, pale purple and canary yellow, aqua and orange, colors that no respectable Pennsylvania householder would have applied when Harry was young. Life was not only bigger but more solemn then. Colors were bruise and dung, in gritty sidings that rubbed off on your fingers and were tar underneath.
His own house, the seventh in the row, number 447, had tired wooden steps that have been replaced with concrete inset with irregular multicolored pieces of broken tile and covered with a central runner of green outdoor carpeting; the house door into the vestibule has been painted a high-gloss ochre on its panels and maroon on its stiles, so a bold double cross is figured forth, ornamented by a brass knocker in the shape of a fox’s head. Camaros and BMWs are parked out front; glass curtains and splashy abstract prints dress the windows. This row, a kind of slum when Harry and Janice and two-year-old Nelson lived here, has been spruced up: festive yuppie money has taken it over. These apartments are fashionable, high above the town as they are. Back then, thirty years ago, from the third floor, the view across the asphalted rooftops to the peaked houses and parked cars lower down just seemed an enlargement of their discontent, their defeat, a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs. There had been, being here makes him remember, those cheap sliding screens at the windows, and a rusty furnace odor in the vestibule, and a plastic clown some kid had left in the dirt under the front-porch steps, now concrete carpeted green like those traffic islands down at Valhalla Village.
This row used to end Wilbur Street; development had stopped at a gravel turnaround, and an abandoned gravel quarry made the transition to the mountain’s shaggy back side. Now a double row, not quite new, of shingled condominiums, with strangely exaggerated chimneys and gables like houses in a child’s storybook, occupies still higher ground. The windows and doors and trim boards of these condos are tinted in pale and playful colors. The plantings and little lawns are still tenuous; last night’s downpour washed from the deforested acres of the mountain reddish mud that has drifted, hardening, all along the fresh curbs and overflowed onto the street’s blue-black asphalt. We’re using it all up, Harry thinks. The world.
He turns and walks downhill. On Potter Avenue he continues past Joseph and goes into a Turkey Hill Minit Market and to suppress his melancholy buys a ninety-nine-cent bag of Corn Chips. NET WT. 6%4 oz. 177 grams. Manufactured by Keystone Food Prod., Inc., Easton, Pa. 18042 U.S.A. Ingredients: Corn, vegetable oil (contains one or more of the following oils: peanut, cottonseed, corn, partially hydrogenated soybean), salt. Doesn’t sound so bad. KEEP ON KRUNCHIN’, the crinkly pumpkin-colored bag advises him. He loves the salty ghost of Indian corn and the way each thick flake, an inch or so square, solider than a potato chip and flatter than a Frito and less burny to the tongue than a triangular red-peppered Dorito, sits edgy in his mouth and then shatters and dissolves between his teeth. There are certain things you love putting into your mouth - Nibs, Good & Plentys, dry-roasted peanuts, lima beans cooked not too soft - and the rest is more or less disagreeable mush, or meat that gives the teeth too tough a fight and if you think about it almost makes you gag. Ever since childhood, Rabbit has had mixed feelings about eating, especially the creatures that not too long ago were living just like you. Sometimes he imagines he can taste the terror of the ax in the slice of turkey or chicken and the happy snorting and wallowing in pork and the stupid monotony of a cow’s life in beef, and in lamb a hint of urine like that whiff from Thelma’s face in the hospital. Her dialysis now and their night in that tropical hut, bodily fluids, but there were limits to what bodies can do, and limits of involvement what with Janice and Ron and the kids and fussy living rooms all over Diamond County, and some limitation within him really, a failure or refusal to love any substance but his own. And she too, she did tend afterwards to be curiously severe with him, as though he had become disgusting now that she had eaten, his sour-milk smell tainting her satisfied mouth. His meat having been eaten by her and now she being eaten by all that microscopic chewing from within. Lupus means wolf, she had told him, one of the autoimmune diseases in which the body attacks itself, antibodies attack your own tissue, self-hatred of a sort. Thinking of Thelma, Harry feels helpless and in his helplessness hard-hearted. The Corn Chips as he walks along the pavement begin to accumulate in his gut into a knotted muchness, a little ball of acid, and yet he cannot resist putting just one more into his mouth, to feel its warped salty edges, its virgin crunchiness, on his tongue, between his teeth, among these salivating membranes. By the time he gets back to 89 Joseph behind its wall of sticky leafed-out Norway maples he has consumed the full bag, even the fragments of salt and corn small enough for an ant to carry back to his brown queen bloated in her maze beneath the sidewalk; he has wrapped himself around all 6%a ounces of sheer poison, pure sludge in his arteries, an oily aftertaste in his throat and between his teeth. He hates himself, with a certain relish.
Janice is working at the dining-room table, making lists for herself to memorize. When she looks up, her eyes have a rubbed frowning look and her mouth is open a dark slot. He hates to see it, hates to see her struggling so hard not to be dumb. His long walk has left him so tired he goes upstairs and takes off his slacks to keep the crease and lies down on Ma Springer’s bed, on top of the covers but under the Amish quilt, a patchwork quilt that releases to his nostrils a memory of how Ma smelled toward the end, with a musty far odor of fleshly corners gone unwashed.
He finds himself suddenly scared to be out of the hospital whiteness, the antisepsis, the halls of softly clattering concern focused upon him … sick him.
He must have fallen asleep, for when he opens his eyes the day has a different tone through the room’s single window: a cooler, shadowed menace. The rain coming closer. The clouds and treetops merging. From the sounds downstairs, Pru and both children are home, and footsteps move about in the hall outside much as years ago he would hear Melanie and Nelson sneak back and forth at night. It is not night, it is late afternoon. The children, home from school, have been instructed to be quiet because Grandpa is sleeping; but they are unable to resist the spurts of squalling and of glee that come over them. Life is noise. Rabbit’s stomach hurts, he forgets why.
After they hear him make a trip down the hall to the bathroom, they come and visit him, the poor little semi-orphans. Their four eyes, two green, two brown, feast on him from the bed’s edge. Judy’s face seems longer and graver than it was in Florida. She will have an Angstrom leanness, a hunted look. Her dress is lilaccolored, with white smocking. Does he imagine a touch of extra redness to her lips? Does Pru allow that? Certainly the child’s hair has been given an artificial wave, a carrot-colored crimp. She asks, “Grandpa, did it hurt in the hospital?”
“Not much, Judy. It hurt my feelings, mostly, to be there at all.”
“Did they fix that thing inside you?”
“Oh, yes. Don’t you worry about that. My doctors says I’m better than ever.”
“How come you’re in bed, then?”
“Because Grandma was studying for her quiz and I didn’t want to bother her.”
“She says you’re going to sleep over.”
“Looks that way, doesn’t it? A pajama party. Before you were born, Judy, Grandma and I lived here for years and years, with your great-grandmother Springer. You remember her?”
The child’s eyes stare, their green intensified by the maple trees at the window. “A little bit. She had fat legs and wore thick orange stockings.”
“That’s right.” But can Ma be no more than that in this child’s memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?
“I used to hate her stockings,” Judy goes on, as if sensing his need for more and trying t
o meet it.
“Those were Sup-Hose,” Harry explains.
“And she wore funny little round glasses she never took off: She’d let me play with the case. It snapped.”
Roy, bored to hear all this about a woman he never met, begins to talk. His round face strains upward as if he’s trying to swallow something rough, and his arched eyebrows pull his dark shiny eyes painfully open. “Daddy - Daddy won’t -” or perhaps he said “went”; he seems unable to wrestle his thoughts into shape and begins again with the strained word “Daddy.”
Impatiently Judy gives him a push; he falls against a bedpost, there in the narrow space between the mattress edge and the beaded wainscoting. “Shut up if you can’t talk,” she tells him. “Daddy’s in a rehab place getting better.”
The child has hit his head; he stares at his grandfather as if waiting to be told what to do. “Ouch,” Harry says for him, and, sitting up against Ma Springer’s old brown headboard, opens his arms to the child. Roy dives against his chest and lets himself bawl, about his hurt head. His hair, when Harry rubs it, is stickily fine, like Janice’s yesterday, when she cried. Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They’ve got you where they want you.
Judy talks right through Roy’s aggrieved noise. “Grandpa, want to watch one of my videos with me? I have Dumbo and The Sound of Music and Dirty Dancing.”
“I’d love to see Dirty Dancing sometime, I’ve seen the other two, but shouldn’t you be doing your homework before dinner?”
The child smiles. “That’s what Daddy always says. He never wants to watch a video with me.” She looks at Roy being cradled and pulls at her brother’s arm. “Come on, stupid. Don’t lean on Grandpa’s chest, you’ll hurt him.”
They go away. A ghostly moment as Judy stood by the bed reminded him of Jill, another of the many dead people he knows. The numbers are growing. Life is like a game they used to play on the elementary-school playground, Fox-in-the-Morning. You all lined up on one side of the asphalt area marked out for games. One person was “it,” and that one would call out “Fox in the morning,” and you would all run to the other side, and “it” would grab one victim from the running throng and drag him or her into the circle painted on the asphalt, and then there would be two “it”s, and these would capture a few more on the next massed gallop from safety to safety, and these four would become eight, and soon a whole mob would be roving the center; the proportions were reversed. The last person left uncaught became “it” for the next game.
Sparse specks of rain have appeared on the panes. His eyelids feel heavy again; a fog within is rising up to swallow his brain. When you are sleepy an inner world smaller than a seed in sunlight expands and becomes irresistible, breaking the shell of consciousness. It is so strange; there must be some other way of being alive than all this eating and sleeping, this burning and freezing, this sun and moon. Day and night blend into each other but still are nothing the same.
The call to dinner comes from far away, through many thicknesses of lath and plaster and hollow air, and from its sharp tone is being repeated. He can’t believe he’s been asleep; no time has passed, just a thought or two took a strange elastic shape as it went around a corner. His mouth feels furry. The specks of rain on the window are still few, few enough to be counted. He recalls remembering today the window screens they had in the Wilbur Street apartment, the kind you used to buy in hardware stores before combination storms made them obsolete. They never precisely fit, leaving splinters of light through which the mosquitoes and midges could crawl, but that wasn’t the something tragic about them. Tragedy lay in a certain filtered summer breath they admitted, the glint of sun along segments of the mesh, an overlooked fervor in their details - the bent screening, the sliding adjustable frame stamped with the manufacturer’s name, the motionless molding of the window itself, like the bricks that all through Brewer loyally hold their pattern though the masons that laid them long ago are dead. Something tragic in matter itself, the way it keeps watch no matter how great our misery. He went back to the apartment that day after Becky died and nothing was changed. The water in the tub, the chops in the skillet. The call to dinner repeats again, closer, in Janice’s sharp voice, at the foot of the stairs: “Harry. Dinner.”
“Coming, for Chrissake,” he says.
Janice called but the meal was cooked by Pru; it is light, delicious, healthful. Baked sole garnished with parsley and chives and flavored with pepper and lemon, asparagus served steaming in a rectangular microwave dish, and in a big wooden bowl a salad including celery and carrot slices and dates and green grapes. The salad bowl and microwave equipment are new since Ma Springer died.
Everybody eats but nobody has much to say except Janice, who chatters on bravely about her quiz, her class, the people in it, some of them women like herself developing midlife careers and others young people that seem much the way we were in the Fifties, running scared, economically, and playing everything safe. She mentions her teacher, Mr. Lister, and Judy laughs out loud at the name, repeating it, the rhyme of it. “Don’t laugh, Judy, he has such a sad face,” Janice says.
Judy tells some involved story about what a boy at school did today: he accidentally spilled paint for a poster they were making all over the floor and when the teacher bawled him out took the spilled jar and shook it at her so some got on her dress. Meanwhile there is this one black boy in the class, his family has just moved to Mt. Judge from Baltimore, and he was painting his face all over with these designs that have a secret meaning, he said. Her talk is a little like her excited channel-flipping and it occurs to Harry that she is making it up or confusing her own classroom with classroom shows she has seen on television.
Pru asks Harry how he is feeling. He says fine; his breathing does feel freer since the operation - “the procedure, the doctors like to call it” - and his memory for that matter better. He wonders how soft in the head he was getting before without realizing it. Really, he says, apologizing to her for her trouble, thanking her for the good healthy meal that he has managed to get down on top of the fermenting lump of Corn Chips, saying he could perfectly well have been left alone in his own house tonight.
Janice says she knows it is probably foolish but she could never forgive herself if he took a bad turn while she was in class and how could she concentrate on liens and curtilage and lex loci thinking he was back in the house drowning?
The other adults at the table hold their breaths at this slip; Harry gently says, when the silence gets unbearable, “You don’t mean drowning,” and Janice asks, “Did I say drowning?,” knowing now in her ear’s recall that she did. Harry sees that she only seems to have forgotten Rebecca, that in her own mind she is always and will always be the woman who drowned her own baby. It was this time of year, late spring, they are approaching the anniversary, in June. Janice rises, flustered, blushing, shamed.
“Who wants coffee besides me?” she asks, all eyes upon her, like an actress who must come up with some line.
“And there’s some butter-pecan ice cream for dessert if anybody wants,” Pru says, her flat Ohio voice having fallen over the years into the local locutions, that considerate Pennsylvania way of speaking as if to make things clear in a stupefying haze. She has taken off the cardigan and folded back the cuffs of her mannish khaki shirt so that half her downy freckled forearms show, there at the kitchen table, under the faceted-glass light fixture overhead.
“My favorite flavor,” Harry says, pitying his wife, wanting to help her out of the brightly lit center of the stage; even little Roy with his inky eyes is staring at Janice, sensing something strange, a curse nobody mentions.
“Harry, that’s the worst possible thing for you,” Janice says, grateful for this opportunity he has given her for a quarrel, a scene. “Ice cream and nuts both.”
Pru says, “I got some frozen yogurt with Harry in mind. Peach and banana I think are the flavors.”
“It’s not the same,” Harry says, clowning to keep
the attention of both women. “I want butter-pecan. With something. How about some good old-fashioned apple strudel, with all that sort of wallpaper paste inside? Or some sticky buns? Or shoo-fly pie? Yum: huh, Roy?”
“Oh, Harry, you’re going to kill yourself!” Janice cries, excessively, her grief centered elsewhere.
“There’s something called ice milk,” Pru is saying, and he feels that her heart too is elsewhere, that throughout the meal she has been maneuvering around the covered-up hole of Nelson’s absence, which no one has mentioned, not even the wide-eyed children.
“Shoo-fly pie,” Roy says, in an oddly deep and mannish voice, and when they explain to him that there isn’t really any, that it was just a joke of Grandpa’s, he feels he has made a mistake, and in his weariness at learning all day to be more independent he begins to whimper.
“Makes your eyes light up,” Rabbit sings to him, “and your tummy say `howdy.”’
Pru takes Roy upstairs while Janice serves Judy butter-pecan ice cream and stacks the dishes into the dishwasher. Harry kept his spoon and digs into Judy’s dish while Janice’s back is turned. He loves that second when the tongue flattens the ice cream against the roof of the mouth and the fragments of pecan emerge like stars at evening. “Oh Grandpa, you shouldn’t,” Judy says, looking at him with genuine fright, though her lips want to smile.