by John Updike
Little pigtailed Paula, having slumped to sleep in her high chair, half woke, and began, not to cry, but to make that mechanical noise of childish discontent, of air jouncing up and down the trachea, which is even more irritating.
Esther said, “Poor thing, falling to sleep in that awkward position, I bet she has a cramp.”
“Do you, Poops? Or just think it’s time to give Mom a hard time?” Verna pushed her face within an inch of her child’s, merrily, mockingly, displaying to my angle of vision the delicious dimple in her round cheek, deepening.
Startled, challenged, Paula stared, hiccupped, and began in earnest to cry.
“In brief, Verna,” I answered in an overriding voice, “he was a heretic because he was a Puritan, a purist, called a Montanist in those days; after doing battle against paganism, Marcionism, Gnosticism, and Judaism, he found the Church itself impossibly worldly and corrupt. He was too good for this world.”
“Just like you, dear,” Esther said, and urged Verna, “Give her to me.”
“There you go, Poops,” Verna said, in the strength of her youth hoisting the child, tantrum and all, through the air on extended bare arms, into Esther’s lap with an impact that visibly jarred my small-boned wife.
“You’ll be interested, Esther,” I called to her, “to know that one of Tertullian’s works, Ad uxorem, is addressed to his wife and tells her that after his death she must remain a widow. Then he thought about it and wrote another tract saying that if she must remarry, it should be to a Christian. Then he thought still some more and in De exhortatione castitatis exhorted her to remain chaste, not to remarry, even to a Christian. Also, he thought that women, whether married or unmarried, should remain veiled.”
“Don’t you just hate men?” Esther asked Verna.
“I’ll swap you Little Miss Nasty for a ciggyboo,” Verna was saying to her.
“Also, he thought Christians should fast more and never serve in the Roman army. See, Dale, nobody’s listening. My heretics lay an egg every time.”
“I’d love one, too,” Esther responded. “But I don’t have my pack with me, it must be in the kitchen.”
“I know where there’re some.”
“Not with me,” Dale said to me, adding to Esther, “I love these boiled baby onions. My mother used to make them, mixed with sugar peas.”
“Oh those old things, they’re so dry, they’ve been there forever,” Esther called, seeing Verna leave the table and go into the living room, through the archway with its spindlework header, toward the glass table and the silver cigarette case that Esther’s father had given us nine years ago.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked Richie, exasperated by his sulk. “Eat those thin slices you’re so fussy about.”
“You didn’t have to swear,” he said, near tears, his face bowed to his plate. That touching shaggy top of a young male’s head again. A beast without eyes, butting through life.
“Our specialty,” Esther rather operatically called over little Paula’s wispy, frizzy head, as Verna returned with a handful of tinted cigarettes, “is cleaning up the messes men make. First they make a mess in us, then they make one around us.” The wine was getting to her, too. When a middle-aged woman becomes overanimated, her throat turns stringy, a harp she herself plays. Esther’s stringiness would lessen if she’d let up on that compulsive diet. It’s as if she’s denying me more than an ounce of woman over the marital quota.
“Maybe they can’t help it,” Verna said, slinging back into her chair with a soft and graphically unprogrammable multiple shift of volumes that, so vividly conveying the fluid heft of her body, made the inside of my mouth go dry. She lit a mint-green oval with a candle from the table.
“Christ, don’t sulk,” I muttered sideways to Richie.
“Leave the boy alone,” Esther called, again in a clarion tone, as if the toddler’s body in her lap formed a shield behind which she could launch spears at me. The tint of the cigarette pinched between her fingers was a high-toned pearl gray. “You’ve hurt his feelings.”
“It’s not me who’s hurt his feelings, it’s Thanksgiving depresses him; it depresses everybody.”
“And don’t tell us any more about that dreadful old bigot of yours; now he really is depressing. It’s sheer perversity drove you, Roger, to specialize in those awful people, these antique fanatics not even skin and bones now, just dust, if that.” She added in a tone slightly more conciliatory, “If nobody wants any more, you could clear, dear.” She was pinned down by Paula, whose tint was milky brown.
“I’ll help,” Verna said, rising into her own smoke, so it swirled down her scalloped neckline into her bosom.
In the kitchen, we managed to bump bottoms, without acknowledgment, but twice.
“Scrape into the little middle sink, it has the Disposall,” I told her, as if muttering a dirty secret. Reaching past her to get the dessert plates where Esther had stacked them, I brushed with my tweed sleeve the warm bareness of her forearm, that had lifted her child with Amazonian ease. Only my half-sister’s daughter, I calculated: our shared blood had been divided and subdivided.
“I’ll take the dishes in; if you could bring one of the pies warming in the oven …”
“Ooh,” she exclaimed, “pumpkin! I love pumpkin, Nunc. Ever since I was a baby, I guess because it was so mooshy. I’ve always had this terrible weakness for things you don’t have to chew, like custard and tapioca.”
“That’s why I like meatloaf,” I said. Setting the glass plates before Esther to serve on, I told her, “And then in De monogamia he concluded that marrying a second time was as bad as adultery.”
Ignoring me, she was saying to Dale, “Just the little I overheard made it clearer to me than anything I’ve read or seen on television. You’d make a wonderful teacher.”
“Well, actually, I did teach a section of introductory calc two terms ago, but for some reason the university …”
I went back to the kitchen and took the apple pie from the oven: apple, the favorite treat of my somber boyhood, soaked with cinnamon and the crust marked by “bird’s feet.” Yet I was served it, as I remembered, very rarely, though there were orchards all around us in Ohio. My mother was always withholding things, not because they couldn’t have been provided but in illustration of some life principle that she had painfully learned and was selflessly imparting. Since I had been weighing her belly down when my father decamped, I felt partially to blame for her life of “doing without,” and accepted without protest my share of privation.
In the kitchen, Verna, before bringing the pumpkin, was pouring a neat shot of vodka into her empty Bloody Mary glass. The dregs tinted it pink. “You don’t have to chew that either, do you?” I said.
She tittered and tossed it down. Her face was rosy, her slant eyes bright. “G’wan,” she said, in a Cyndi Lauperish voice, and this time did deliberately swing her ample wool-clad rump into mine.
“Let’s not drop anything,” I warned.
Esther, with Paula still on her lap, was explaining to Dale, “And then in the summer we do try to get away for a few weeks, but the idea of owning a whole other set of knives and forks, and two toasters, and double sets of bed linen, and kitchen chairs, and worrying about whichever house you’re not in being broken into just strikes me as a nightmare, I don’t know how everybody we know does it. Dale dear: would you like pumpkin or apple or both?”
“A little bit of both, please.”
“A little bit. Not enough to make a byte?”
He smiled; these flashes of suavity annoyed me almost more than anything about him. “No, that wouldn’t leave any for anybody else. A byte is usually eight bits.”
“One of each.” She handed him his plate. “Does that make an OR, or an AND?”
That pleasant smile again, deeper on one side than the other. “If one of them wasn’t there, and that made the one next to it disappear, that would be an AND.”
“I see. Richie, dear? You look so vexed with all of us
. Forgive me, Verna, I’ll get to you when it’s ladies’ turn. Let’s serve the mighty gentlemen first.”
Seeing before her eyes the knife and pie server flashing in Esther’s narrow deft hands, the little honey-colored girl began to laugh. She reached for her own share. Her fingers sank deep into the point of a triangle of pumpkin. “I’ll take that one,” Verna said quickly, and rose to lift the child from the hostess’s lap. “Damn you, Poops! You’re a greedy bitch,” she said.
Roughly restored by her mother to the high chair, Paula began to make again that dreadful grinding noise, of inner slippage; Verna ingeniously suppressed it by seizing the child’s pumpkin-smeared hand and pushing it into her aggrieved, down-curling mouth. Grudgingly, then happily, Paula sucked.
“I said I’d look into high-school equivalency tests,” I reminded Verna quietly, when Paula’s fuss seemed subsided.
“Roger darling,” Esther called. “We’ve forgotten you. Just apple?”
“Let me try a little pumpkin, too.”
“Oh. I thought you hated pumpkin.”
“I forget if I do, it’s been so long since I had any. Please.”
“Well. Aren’t we being adventurous in our old age?” Her green eyes narrowed and shuttled, deducing some relation between the girl beside me and pumpkin pie. It was not my wife’s methodical nature to let things pass, to let them lie undeveloped; otherwise, she might have slept with me on a few guilt-enhanced occasions and called it quits, and Lillian and I would still be entertaining the orphans of the parish at a long and childless table. Dear Lillian: I could not believe anybody could be happy so many months in Florida. Whenever I tried to picture her, she seemed an overexposed photograph.
“And apparently,” I continued to Verna, under the clatter of dessert forks, “there’s something called a GED, a General Educational Development Test, that’s given once a month in any sizable city, and if you pass it they give you the high-school equivalency certificate. It’s in five parts—English grammar, English literature, social studies, science, and mathematics—and each test is up to two hours long.”
Esther was explaining to Dale in a carrying voice, “Of course, if you have anything of a garden, you really can’t leave for more than a few days at a time at any time up until August; it’s silly, I know, to be an absolute slave to these flowers, but I honestly believe, and I know you’ll think me absurd, that plants have to be talked to. They have to be loved.” With the hand not holding the dessert fork, she kept tucking back pieces of stray hair. As she did this her slender hand visibly trembled. I was seeing her, while not forgetting Verna at my side, through Dale’s eyes: the effect was of sudden living color, of a tuning adjustment on the UHF channel. She was dazzling and fetching, her green velvet shimmering in the dying holiday window-light, her gingery hair glistening in a multitude of bright points, her intelligent rounded forehead glowing, her prominent eyes processing irony and flirtation with electronic rapidity, and her wry lips lipsticked today a millimeter beyond their edges, to lend her puckish, almost miniature face a suggestion of the smeary, of the amusingly mussed. The aura of boredom had been tuned out.
Verna pensively ate, scarcely chewing. “Sounds kind of rinky-dink,” she said. “Maybe it’s not worth it.”
“It is worth it,” I insisted. “It gets secondary school out of the way and then you can start thinking about college. Or secretarial school. Or modelling school, or whatever you want to do. You’re only nineteen, you have a world of possibilities.” The old counsellor in me, revived, was breathing hard.
“I don’t know shit about social studies,” she said.
“You know about the checks and balances and the constitution and what you read in the newspapers.”
“No, I don’t. And I don’t read the newspapers.”
“You listen to the radio. There’s news on the radio.”
“Not the stations I listen to,” she said. “They’re all music.”
“… they’re such a comfort to me,” Esther said at the other end of the table, “flowers,” and turned her head, and I saw her close up, through Dale’s eyes, the smeared edge of lipstick and the translucent filaments of whisker on her upper lip, this pensive upper lip’s little reposeful ins and outs of muscle, and I felt a sexual stir in my lap, a blip of stiffening there, with his instinctive recognition, religious and information-saturated as he was, that this woman, in bed, once she had decided to be there, would do anything. The lightness of her, the provocative flexible smallness of Esther’s frame, and the hungry green of her eyes with their gentle hyperthyroid bulge, all told him that. Anything.
“I don’t know beans, Nunc,” Verna whined.
“You know more than you think you do,” I said, impatiently. I felt I had become an unwelcome voice on an all-music station.
Esther called down, “What’s he trying to do to you, Verna? What’s this test you’re talking about?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” the younger woman said miserably. “It’s too embarrassing.”
“The high-school equivalency test,” Dale said. “I’ve been bugging her about it for a year. That’s great you’re going to do it.”
“I’m not. We were just talking about it.”
“It’ll be easy,” Richie said, coming out of his sulk. “It’ll be a lot easier than going to Pilgrim Day every day.”
“Professor Lambert can help you with the literature and grammar,” Dale said, “and I can refresh you on the math and science.”
“Oh no,” Esther said to him. She laid her long narrow hand on his big knobby and red-knuckled one. “You’ve been signed up to tutor Richie.”
Richie cried, straining for the right tone, “Go for it, Verna!”
“Everybody fuck off,” Verna begged. “Why are you all on my case?”
There was a pause, during which Paula burped and tried to suck her other hand, which had no mushed pumpkin on it. Esther at last announced, “Why, my dear, because we’re all fond of you.”
In the kitchen, as we together cleared the plates and prepared the coffee to have by the fire (which had, thanks to Richie’s ministrations, gone out), my wife said to me dryly, “We both seem to be getting into the education business.”
“I’m always in it,” I said, displeased that she appeared to be pushing (like those togaed old men, garrulous dust, who were my bread and butter) to have things better left ambiguous rigorously spelled out.
“I guess we all are,” Esther conceded, with a sigh, lifting a distracted hand to her loosening hair and a wistful cloud passing over her puffy lips in a way that made her look rather mad and quite enchanting.
iii
All that December the weather held warm, as if the skies were bestowing their benediction upon our national choice, our reelection. God shone through the President, it seemed to many, and to the rest he was a force of nature it was idle to resist. Many who voted for his opponent were secretly pleased that he won; he asked so little, and promised so much. No, that is not quite true, for the promises, when examined, were ever sparser and vaguer: he was relieving the electorate of even the burden of expectation, and in this was perfecting his imitation of that Heavenly Presider whose inactivity has held our loyalty for two millennia (and indeed, if, contra Marcion, we consider the Jewish God and the Christian God to be one, for twice again as many millennia as that (assuming that Archbishop Ussher’s date for Creation, 4004 B.C., also dates the commencement of active, sub-angelic worship and praise (though there is a sense, of course, in which even vacant space praises Him; and a holy fool like Dale might argue that the immutable and eternal laws of mathematics are precisely the form of this highly hypothetical praise))). Follow, you who can.
Esther had some years ago acquired a small, scarcely paying part-time job in a day-care center twenty blocks from our home, from seven-thirty to two-thirty four days a week. To save parking difficulties and the possibility, real enough, of vandalization of our invitingly marless new Audi, which had been described in the brochure
as gray but had proved upon delivery to be a subtle swarthy Germanic color for which no word exists in English, she had lately taken to the bus and left the car available at the front curb or, less usually, in our small garage, which was crowded with gardening equipment and trash barrels and an obsolete swing set; and so I, on a non-seminar day, had no trouble walking back from my morning lecture and (after a glass of milk and a piece of last Sunday’s quiche consumed standing in the chilly emptiness of the kitchen, as I spied on Sue Kriegman typing with fretful face in her upstairs study and ineffectually deliberated turning up the thermostat from Esther’s stingy setting) getting into the car and heading for my niece’s project. I had warned her by phone that I was coming, and had armed myself with a slippery big blue anthology of American literature that, in the befuddling stacked muchness of our university bookstore, had seemed possibly secondary-school level.
Driving along Sumner Boulevard, where I had walked a month before, I was struck by the loss of majesty. The sky no longer hovered tumultuous with wind-tormented clouds; instead, a fuzzy yellowish half-rainy wool merged with the blur of the now leafless trees and swallowed the tops of the skyscrapers at the distant center of the city. The stores that at a walker’s pace had levelled a certain gritty merchandising spell appeared in the longer, swifter perspective from an auto to be hopeless makeshift tenants of tin-and-tar-garnished boxes scarcely more enduring than the cityscapes I would once fashion, on rainy Saturday afternoons in South Euclid, out of cereal boxes and egg cartons, Scotch tape and crayons. The people on the street, caught between the darkening time of year and the unseasonably tepid weather, appeared bewildered about how to dress, and showed everything from parkas to jogging shorts. Two young black women in long Medusa braids and Day-Glo miniskirts flitted along like negatived Alices who had passed through a besmirched looking-glass, their jaunty and girlish innocence a sign, somehow, of its very opposite. Poverty and flash jostled along the avenue, and I was tempted to sing, heading out of my accustomed neighborhood into one where possibilities were in squalor reborn. Indifferent Christmas tinsel spiralled up lamp standards and the windows of even the lock shops and the fishing-tackle store held the compulsory flecks of cotton snow and red cardboard.