by John Updike
Verna’s face was too wide, her skin too sallow, her light brown eyes too slanted, and the skin surrounding them too puffy-looking for her to be a beauty; but she had something, something that was trapped and spoiling here. She had curly, stringy hair, chestnut color with locks of induced platinum, and was wearing only a terrycloth bathrobe. The skin of her throat and upper chest looked pink and damp. “I should have called,” I said, in recognition of the obvious fact that she had been taking a bath. “But this was rather on an impulse,” I lied. “I found myself walking this way.”
“Sure,” she said. “Come in. Don’t mind the mess.”
The room was pathetically furnished, with a hideous purple shag carpet that must have come with the place, but it did have a view toward the center of the city: in order of recession, an opposite corner of the project, some asbestos-shingled three-deckers with many television aerials, a billboard advertising suntan lotion, a dome of the university’s riverside campus, the summit of a skyscraper with its glassed-in observation deck and rotating skyview restaurant, and the day’s hurrying clouds, their leaden centers and luminous unravelling edges. Beneath this view, on a plastic milk crate, a television set performed silently, the distressed actors of a daytime soap opera reduced to mime. Elsewhere, a few mismatched chairs stood around a card table: here someone, to judge from the many colors of stain on its cardboardy dark surface, painted.
“I was in the tub having a toke,” the girl was saying in her small, rather endearingly reedy voice, “and I thought you were probably somebody else.” This to explain the immodesty of her robe, which came only to the center of her thighs. Her legs, from which any summer tan had faded, seemed shapelier than I remembered Edna’s as being, with smaller, pinker feet and tighter ankles. “Shut up, Poops,” she said indolently to her little girl, who was pointing at me and crowing an almost-word that was “Baa” or “Daa.” The child was topless, dressed in paper diapers. The apartment felt overheated, the radiators sizzling with steam. Perhaps the gentle stench of wasting food came from the room behind a drab maroon curtain hung with big plastic rings from a mock-gold bar. I was fastidiously conscious of my gray suede gloves, my Harris-tweed coat with leather-patched elbows, my gray cashmere muffler.
“As I say,” I said, and had to clear my throat again, “somewhat on an impulse, I thought I’d drop by and rather belatedly, I confess, see how my little niece is doing.”
Music, turned up loud, came from the other room: “She bop—he bop—a—we bop.”
“Cyndi Lauper,” I said.
This impressed her. “How’djou know?”
“My son. He’s twelve, and just plugging into pop culture. I would think, at your age, Verna, you’d be unplugging.”
She saw me looking around the dismal room and made an affecting little shapeless gesture, her small pink hands lifting out as if to smooth, like a sheet on a bed, her environment. “Maybe so. If I didn’t have Bozo here, I could get out and maybe get a job or an education or something. As it is, here is where I do my non-thing, except when we get our snowsuits on and go out and trade food stamps for all this carcinogenic garbage and stuff.”
Like the young generally now, she had a vocabulary that already incorporates and neutralizes all possible discipline. When Esther found a copy of Club, borrowed from a classmate at Pilgrim, under Richie’s bed, he told her disarmingly, “Mom, it’s just a phase.”
“Da. Da-da.” The tiny girl was plump, and a pretty color even paler than mocha or milky coffee, a honey tint. Her face was destined to be the site of a delicate war between Negroid and Caucasian features; at the moment, one was most struck by the great inky eyes, not brown as one might expect but a deep navy blue—fathomless life, pure globules of a dark distillate. Their shine showed she had been crying not long ago. Tear-trails darkened the skin of her cheeks.
“What is the baby’s name? I should know but can’t remember.”
“Paula. My crummy dad’s name is Paul and when the old fart kicked me out I called the baby after him to serve him right.” Her cold-blooded father, I remembered, would hold forth at length, once he had gone from being an engineer to an executive, about his efforts to streamline and de-obsoletize the plant’s operations; but it never occurred to him, as an efficiency move, to resign his job and return his bloated salary to the dying steel industry’s coffers.
“I can’t believe,” I said, “he kicked you out quite as brutally as it would seem.” I said this, of course, merely to hear his brutality confirmed.
Verna said, “Oh, he lets Mom sneak a check to me now and then, but he’s not kidding about never seeing me and Poopsie as long as we both shalt live. My worker thinks his trouble besides the racism they all have out there is his religion. You know when I was little he had this cancer scare with his prostate or one of those things men have and got involved with this sect that advertises on the radio and television and the funny thing was it worked, I mean, the cancer went away. It really was a miracle I guess you’d have to admit. So, boy, he’s really rigid about what’s good and bad as he and the people who run this sect see it; they all had false teeth was the funny thing I noticed. And the men had these humongous big belt buckles. We even had to say little graces over cookies and milk at home, it turned me off the whole Jesus thing growing up and I could see it was doing the same to Mom but she couldn’t say anything. She’s really a coward, did you know that?” Verna tipped her head back and looked at me as if I’d be especially interested. “It’s sad, since the way she comes on is as if she has a lot of spunk. Anyway, maybe I shouldn’t blame his religion since you’re kind of in the religion business yourself.”
“Another end of it,” I said, removing one glove. “Not distribution. You might call it quality control. You said your worker?”
“My social worker. She’s big and black and very smart and stuffy. You’d like her. She thinks I’m artistic and should be going to the Museum School at the university. You could sit down if you wanted.”
“I bop—you bop—a—they bop!”
“So money isn’t what you think you need so much as education. I might be of some help with that.”
“Yeah, my poor buddy Dale told me what a big non-help you were with this grant he wanted to help him find God on the computer. You sent him back down to the front office where they gave him these bullshit forms to fill out. I don’t know much, Nunc, but this last year and a half I’ve gotten to fill out a lot of forms and I kid you not, those were bullshit forms. I told him to throw them out the window but I doubt if he did, he’s such a wimpy nerd, poor guy. He means well, though. He wants to save us all from worrying about when we’re dead. It’s what happens when I’m alive that worries me.”
I pulled off the other glove, finger by finger. In my field of vision beyond the stitched glove tips lay her blurred white legs. Someone, perhaps that social worker, had encouraged her to talk about herself. The new, garrulous poor. “We left it, I thought,” I told her, “that I was not unenthusiastic, but the young man had to begin the process by proceeding through channels. I have no power over disbursements at the Divinity School, I’m just an employee, like your father at the steel plant,” I added, trusting that a reference to her father would annoy her.
“Da? Eeya Da?” little Paula was asking, her sweet rounded arm, with its accessory crease between wrist and elbow, extended in pointing at me. Verna grabbed this small plump arm furiously; she lifted the child off the floor and shook her back and forth as if mixing chemicals in a container.
“I told you you shut up you little fucker!” she shouted down into the tiny crumpling face. “That’s not Da!” And she let go of the infant’s arm with a push that dumped Paula down on her diapered bottom, hard. The breath knocked out of her, she struggled for air with which to cry, her bare chest with its tiny nipples sucking in and out like a beached fish’s gills.
In bending over to this maternal exertion, Verna had loosened her bathrobe and an entire breast had swung suddenly, luminously free. Without hurr
y she tucked it back behind a lapel and tightened her bathrobe belt. “She gets on my nerves,” she explained. “My nerves aren’t my best thing these days. My worker says one-and-a-half is hard, when they turn two you can talk to them and it’s delightful. I loved it, in the hospital, when they showed her to me all wet and like lavender in color, I had no idea what color she was going to be, but it’s been kind of downhill ever since. I mean, they’re always there, right next to you. Kids.”
“Be bop—be bop—a lu—she bop” issued jubilantly from the other room. The bed and the bathroom were behind this curtain, I had deduced; Verna had been lying in the tub doping herself while this juvenile music blasted into her soggy consciousness. I was groping my way into her reality and was ready to sit down; the best chair available seemed to be a porch chair of a type fashionable a decade ago, a straw basket on thin black metal pipe legs.
“Isn’t that awesome?” Verna asked me, her strangely slanted, almost lashless eyes half closing in musical appreciation. “Lemme turn the tape, the next band’s kind of soppy, even if it is number one on the stupid charts.”
Now Paula had found her lungs and began to bawl. Taking a plunge, I placed my gloves on a rickety drop-leaf end table that may have cost all of ten dollars at the Salvation Army and sat down in the straw basket chair and reached and took the screaming infant into my lap. She was heavier than I had expected, more saturated, and furthermore made resistance, writhing in my arms and stretching her hands, their creased wrists and fat tapered backwards-bending fingers, toward her mother. She twisted, she squawked; I had the impulse to shake punitively this little tawny container of mixed bloods. Instead I jogged her up and down on my knees, saying, “There, there, Paula.” I remembered a routine that used to distract Richie when he was an infant. “This is the way the ladies ride,” I said. “Pace. Pace. Pace.”
Verna brought her cassette player, a big dove-gray Hitachi with non-detachable speakers, out of the bathroom, set it on the end table on top of my gloves, punched the eject button, and reversed the tape.
“This is the way the gentlemen ride,” I said in my deepest pedagogic voice. “Trot. Trot. Trot.” The trick with an audience of students is to get a certain menace established in your tone at the outset. “And this,” I urged into the tiny ear, compact and intricate and very flat to her skull, “is the way the faaarmers ride.” Babies’ skins run a fine little fever, so inviting I kissed her ear. Its complex softness shocked me.
“Here we go,” Verna announced and, jiggling in her towel-like robe, lightly swung in place to the calypsoish rhythm of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”
Seeing this sign of benign life in her mother, the baby strained in my arms, her body still hiccupping sobs.
“Gallop, gallop, gallop,” I hastily finished up.
The singer’s voice was young, prematurely hardened, and lifted into some realm exhilaratingly above emotion. “But girls they want to have fun, oh girls just want to have—” The voice was cut off by electronic warbling, the inhuman proficient happiness of a synthesizer, like rapidly popping bubbles.
Verna accepted Paula into her arms and the two of them comically, softly bounced to the music. Verna’s left cheek wore its dimple. The child’s upturned eyes brimmed with dark blueness.
Sitting there, witnessing, I had a sensation of being Dale Kohler, earnest and awkward and himself needy, on one of his charitable visits. This moment of glee, of apparent rapport between mother and daughter, did a flipflop within me; I felt desolate. My gaze flickered away into depressed contemplation of the walls, which Verna had tried to animate with cheap Impressionist prints and awkward untutored watercolors of her own, of fruity still lifes assembled on the table at my elbow and of the view through the window, with its many bits of building crowned by the distant towers; their glitter now leaned toward the golden end of the spectrum, in the sun that lowered earlier every day. Daylight Saving Time would soon be withdrawn from our national firmament. The television set had left off its torpid daily drama, and was silently engaged in the greater animation, the more violent flickering of a commercial. For Preparation H: brow-wrinkling grimaces of anal discomfort, followed by bright-faced dramatization of soothing relief, proclaimed to an actor-druggist.
What was this desolation in Dale’s heart, I thought, but the longing for God—that longing which is, when all is said and done, our only evidence of His existence?
“I want to be the one to walk in the sun,” Verna sang along with the music, while the half-black baby gleefully gurgled in her arms.
Why do we feel such loss, but that there was Something to lose?
The song ended, having at last exhausted its chorus; Verna sat Paula down on the purple shag carpet and asked me, “How about something, Nunc? A cup of tea? A glass of milk? I had a little bring-your-own party the other night and they might have left a little whisky.”
“Nothing, thanks. I must get back to my own home, we’re going out tonight to be, as they say, entertained. Tell me, though, Verna: how much do you see of this Dale?” I wanted to know if they slept together. In the movements of her dance, as electric and stylized and untouchable as the television commercial, the white inner side of one thigh had kept flashing out from the different-textured whiteness of her nubbly robe.
“Oh, enough,” she said. “He comes around to see if I haven’t shot myself or murdered the baby or anything. He asks me to pray with him.”
I chuckled in surprise. “He does?” Preparation J, for the soothing relief of an afterlife.
She went on the defensive for him; her pouty smear of a mouth went smaller and her little round chin adorably stiffened, as Edna’s would when, in our childhoods, I would try to control her thinking. “Whatever turns you on, Nunc,” she said. “It’s cheaper than smack. Dale’s a sweet guy.”
“He told me he met you at a church meeting.”
“Oh yeah, one of these Isn’t-This-Dreadful things. That’s not really his bag, though. Dale thinks things are going to turn out gloriously, on Judgment Day if not before.”
“How seriously does he take all this?”
“Oh, plenty. He doesn’t talk that much to me about the numbers part of it, or what he does over at the Cube, just shows up once or twice a week to see how I’m doing, and sits there like you were doing playing with Poopsie.”
“Do you—would you call it a serious relationship?”
“You mean, do we fuck? That’s for you to ask and me to know, Nunc. No, actually, I could probably be talked into it, anything to kill the time, but I don’t turn him on, funnily enough. He’s like my worker, he sees me as a case. I guess the whole fucking world sees me as a case.”
We do resent being typed. I have sometimes thought that the secret of Christianity’s rampage through the Empire in those first centuries was Roman weariness with being typed: soldier, slave, senator, scortum. There is more to being a person than serving a function. But what is it? I asked. “What can we do to get you a high-school diploma and a job?”
“See—now you sound like Dale. I’m always having to tell him, Don’t push me. I can’t stand being pushed, it really bugs me. Mom and Dad, they were always pushing. Pushing and pushing. For what? So I’d be one more little married dolly in double-strand pearls wiggling my ass at cocktail parties over in Shaker Heights.”
“We don’t want that, necessarily. But, Verna—”
“I don’t like the way you say ‘Verna.’ You’re not my boss. You’re not my mom and dad either.”
She had a low boiling point. It was exciting, like an overpowered car that can kill you or shake itself to death. “True,” I had to admit.
Her strange pale-lashed slanted eyes narrowed. “Has my mom been in touch with you?”
I inadvertently laughed, out of pity for her exaggerated notion of her mother’s caring. For all this toughness, she was such a child she thought her mother was like God in the sky, always tenderly watching.
“No,” I told her truthfully, and had to suppress my laugh refl
ex, since she so obviously would believe I was lying, and anticipating her belief made my reply ring like a lie in my own ears. I studied my thumbnail; I had cut too deeply with the curved face of the clippers, creating a notch where threads tended to catch. There was a virtually microscopic wiggle of thread caught there now. I tried to free it.
“I know all about you and her,” the girl was going on, in the dead determined tone of the trapped. She had read my thoughts; she sensed that I had caught her out in naïveté.
“Oh?” The tiny thread in the notch seemed to be purple, though my coat and scarf were gray.
“She used to tell me a lot, some nights in the kitchen, waiting for Daddy to come home. She and you used to have some hot times, Nunc.”
“We did?” I remembered nothing of the sort and wondered who was fantasizing, Edna or Verna.
“So don’t come around here with your big-deal professor act, I don’t want it. I don’t need it.”
“You need to get out,” I mildly told her. My years of parish counselling were coming back to me; I was not afraid of this child, however much she blustered. You need to say little, just appear to listen, and the whole spool of grief will unreel in front of you. The whole twirled prayer wheel of standard human lamentation: Nature’s purpose for us is not our purpose for ourselves.
“Yeah, how?”
“How do other single mothers do it?”
“They have friends.”
“You must make friends.”
“Yeah sure, you try it. This project is half old dagos and half black dudes you say ‘Hi’ to in the hall they think you want to get screwed. These guys, they can smell when you’ve been nicked, even without seeing Paula. Then they want to put you out on the street; their idea of a great success in life is pimping for a string of white girls. It really is.” Her slant eyes went watery. “My parents were right, I guess; I’ve backed myself into this horrible corner. I’m lonely, I’m lonely all the time, you can’t just talk to anybody like a man can, it gets to be a negotiation. And last night ‘Dynasty’ was on so I don’t even have that to look forward to for a week.” She tried through the tears to laugh at herself, her grief, her life already wasted.