by John Updike
I put on my blinker to turn left on Prospect and discovered, what I had not noticed on foot, that the street was one-way. I had to pass a block beyond, downhill, toward the end of the bridge that crossed the river; here, beneath its half-painted iron girders, there was a tangle of traffic islands, and in trying to turn left I found myself headed away from the city on a numbered state highway, and in turning off this rattling, shuddering route I found myself between brick factory walls, their tall windows mute with plywood or else erratically shattered, random panes replaced by rusted tin. It took me what seemed many impatience-stretched minutes to work my way back to Prospect, through rows of narrow houses whose porches were six steps up from the pavement and whose front windows and doors bore pathetic coarse touches of seasonal decoration. At the project, a cursory wreath with plastic ribbon hung on the scarred metal portal of each entryway. I parked, with a crunching of already pulverized glass, beneath the sign that in two languages warned off unauthorized vehicles. While I was locking the doors a small black boy, surely not yet ten years old, came up to me and asked, “You there, mister: watch you car?”
The child was wearing a dirty rugby shirt—broad green and yellow stripes, and a white collar. It was warm for December, but not that warm. “Does it need watching?”
He blinked, unaccustomed to irony. Then he said earnestly, “You ain’t suppose to park round here but if I watch it it’ll be O.K.”
“You must know the mayor.”
He blinked again, beginning to worry, but not ceasing to stare up at me. “I don’t know him any but I know guys that know him, that’s for sure.”
“In that case, here’s a hard-earned dollar,” I said, figuring that with just his bare hands and a sharp rock the child could do a thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the Audi’s perfect off-gray skin. I held the bill on high, out of his reach; I was getting into the swing of this encounter and warming up for the next. “How come,” I asked him, “you’re not in school?”
He still couldn’t figure how seriously to take me. But I still had the dollar, so he answered: “They don’t teach you none of the shit you need to know.”
This seemed so acute and sad an analysis I lost heart for the game and gave him his protection money. “You’re going to catch cold, you should wear a sweater,” I told him for a final lesson, but here I went too far. The child stared me down in solemn, dumbfounded silence and, bested, I headed with my heavy schoolbook up to Verna’s apartment. In the stairwell, the slogans involving Tex and Marjorie had been painted over, with a pinkish latex applied by roller.
I knocked on Verna’s blank door.
“Nunc?” Her voice seemed to quaver, so that I imagined her terrified or, for some reason, in tears.
“Yes.”
But when, with a rattling of the safety-lock chain, she opened to me, she was dry-eyed and, like the black girls glimpsed on the avenue, jaunty. Warned of my coming, she wore not that seductive short bathrobe but a denim skirt and a snug white long-sleeved jersey and—an odd, comic, debonair touch—a silk paisley kerchief tied around her neck. Its effect was not to diminish but to sharpen my awareness of the naked skin above the rather low neckline of the jersey, a bareness now sandwiched between strips of cloth like that bare pale belly which women’s underwear, in the old days when panties and bras were substantial garments, used to frame so invitingly. There was an apache flavor to this neckcloth, a rakish vulnerability. A bow or knot carries with it the idea of being unknotted. The bumps of her nipples were conspicuous, but she might be, instead of braless, merely wearing a very elastic bra. Instead of being, as on my previous visit, barefoot, Verna had completed her costume with little oval ballet slippers, too fragile for wearing outdoors in winter but in here announcing that she was primly dressed for study, and ready for avuncular instruction.
“Did you get the application forms? I’d like to see them,” I said, removing the sheepskin car coat I had put on over my tweed jacket. It was boiling hot in the project. I took off my jacket as well.
“Well I went over there, and they wanted to see a birth certificate. You see, if I’m less than eighteen, they don’t want me graduating ahead of what would have been my high-school class.”
“Couldn’t you show them your driver’s license?”
“Yeah, I did; but since it’s an out-of-state they can’t accept it. The lady was terribly nice and all, but she said they just aren’t allowed to, they don’t know how other states verify or something, so she really needs a birth certificate. As if everybody has theirs just lying around. Mine’s back there in my mom’s safe-deposit box, if she hasn’t lost it from the last time she took it out. I thought everything was on these computers down in Washington now; they just punched your Social Security number in and out came your fingerprints and blood type and who all you’ve slept with and everything.”
“We haven’t quite come to that yet. It’s still only 1984. Have you called or written Edna yet?” Saying Edna’s name, framing it in my mouth, was for me a kind of exposed skin, a distinct small dangerous pleasure.
“Not yet, Nunc,” Verna said. This teasing and not quite friendly nickname was perhaps her way of registering an intuition that her mother’s name excited me. “I found dealing with the bureaucracy just too depressing. I came home and took a bath and I must admit kind of forgot about it until you called this morning.” She saw the disappointment on my face and explained in mitigation, “I had thought the place where you went would be just down the street, in those creepy old brick civic buildings across from the Domino—you know, the bar that had the fire—but it turns out I had to hike, pushing Poopsie here all the way in this clunky stroller with a bent wheel somebody on the floor below sold me for fifteen dollars, I should have paid five, up to some city high school I never knew existed, a humongous big thing with pillars, you wouldn’t believe it, way up past ball fields and funeral parlors and adult bookshops for the pimple-faced kids, I guess, and junky used-car lots; it looks just like some incredibly hideous and pretentious jail, except it’s up on a hill and doesn’t have barbed wire on top of the fences. At least none that I could see. The lady in the office, actually, like I said, was nice enough; she said really anybody who could read could probably pass, but she advised not to take all the tests on the same day.”
“Well, shall we see if you can read? I brought this anthology of American lit.”
“For me? Nunc, you’re too sweet. What’s up with you anyway?”
Her apartment was tidier than when I had been here before. The apples and bananas in the salad bowl on her card table looked fresh, sharp-edged, as if waiting to be painted as a still life. Her television set was off, and the cassette player, too. In the silence one could hear conversations, or televised conversations, from other apartments in the project. I asked, “Where’s Paula?”
“Shh. Don’t say her name so loud. The little fucker flopped off into a nap finally. She woke me up at five-thirty this morning, I could have killed her. Nunc, this book weighs an absolute ton!”
“You don’t have to read it all. As I remember high school, American literature consists of ‘Thanatopsis,’ by William Cullen Bryant, ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ by Edgar Allan Poe, and ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp,’ by Bret Harte. Let’s begin with ‘Thanatopsis.’ It’s the shortest.”
Verna sat herself in the rickety bamboo basket chair, and something in the summery noises of its creaking beneath her weight, or in the shadows that clung at this dwindling hour of the gray day to the walls of her corner apartment and that crept down into the front of her jersey, which my gaze explored as I stood behind her, evoked confused echoes of a day or days with Edna in Ohio, summer days, when I was spending my obligatory month with my father, and we children sought shelter from the sun and insects and boredom in attic games. There were a number of us, not just Edna and myself, but others from the neighborhood, thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, and we had dared one another to play strip poker, there under the slanted roof, among cobwebbed trunks and
cardboard boxes, on a rag rug we had unrolled to put over the dusty bare boards, and Edna’s luck ran poorly, and she shed one by one her shoes and socks, and argued that barrettes could be counted and added two of those to her pile. Then, with a solemn look, her long curly hair having fallen loose, she reached into the neck of her summer-weight sweater to undo her dickey, a strange starchy butterfly pulled into the dim and secretive attic light. Dust in swirling formations moved through the thick shafts of sun from the little windows. Edna was down to her indispensable clothes, and began to argue and, it seemed to me from something choked in her voice, to cry, and we had a vote, whether to continue with the game or not, and since there were three boys and two girls the vote should have gone to continue, but I voted no, with the girls, and Edna gave me a little impulsive kiss of gratitude. But was it gratitude, I wondered all the rest of that summer, or somehow surprise and even pity? I had voted with the girls.
And of another summer, or was it the same?—we seem in my memory to be the same size, though I of course was a year older, but slow to grow, and never tall—I was tussling with her in a field, the two of us smelling of sweat in a sea of the lazy scratchy scent of grass drying out and going to seed, and as if pronounced the stronger by an invisible referee she stood up lording it over me and I was too lazy or breathless to stand, and looked up her legs as now I looked down the front of Verna’s low bodice, and saw into Edna’s shorts up to her underpants, which had been tugged in our struggles slightly askew, to one side, revealing dark hair, what seemed a lot of it. I had begun to have pubic hair also but I was older, she was hairier than I, she was right to lord it over me, this mysterious sweat-smelling powerful playmate and enemy who lived with my father while I didn’t. While I couldn’t.
Over Verna’s shoulder I read silently,
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware.
I could feel her eyes and mind moving along the same smooth, faintly resonant passageways of language. “He wrote this,” I told her, “when he was younger than you.”
“Yeah, Nunc—I read the little note at the beginning, too.”
I was offended: I had not read the note and had been drawing upon my general erudition. “What do you make of the opening lines?”
“They seem flaky. ‘Gayer hours.’ ”
“The word has changed meaning these last years. Just tell me in your own words what Bryant is saying here.”
“When you’re down, Nature seems down; when you’re up, up.”
“Good enough.” My quickened sense of Verna’s intelligence affected my skin; sexiness is a nervous condition, like hives, to which the intelligent are most susceptible. “Look,” I directed, “at the ends of the second set of three lines. What can you notice about them?”
“They almost rhyme,” she said.
“Do you know what that’s called?”
“Almost rhyming?”
“Assonance. Assonance. If it’s something like ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,’ it’s called consonance; the consonants do it. In assonance, the vowels.”
“You think I’ll have to know junk like that for the equivalency test?”
“It never hurts to know something,” I said, struck as I said it by how untrue it was. “Read me these lines, from here on.” I pointed, and the book in her lap yielded to my forefinger’s pressure, and then bounced back. The skin of her chest as it sloped down and away from my eyes whitened in the shadows.
“ ‘Yet a few days,’ ” she read, “ ‘and thee The all-beholding sun shall see no more In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground, Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears, Nor in the embrace of ocean shall exist Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolv’d to earth again; And, lost each human trace, surrend’ring up Thine individual being, shalt thou go To mix forever with the elements, To be a brother to th’ insensible rock And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share, and treads upon.’ ” Her voice, rather croaky in normal conversation, rose to a certain treble thrillingness under the stress of the lines, with me her only audience.
“Any words there give you trouble?” I asked. “ ‘Insensible’?”
“Out of it.”
“Good. ‘Share’?”
She guessed, “Plowshare.”
“Terrific. And how do you feel about it, what you just read?”
“Not bad. Kind of bored. How do you feel, Nunc?”
“Horrible. I don’t want to be ‘brother to the insensible rock.’ I don’t want to surrender up my ‘individual being.’ The trouble with the poem is that its language lets you slide away from its very subject: death, thanatos. The title is Greek, ‘view of death.’ ”
“Yeah, that’s what it says in the little note.”
“It’s all too cool. The boy-poet sees the problem, but he doesn’t feel it. The terror, the really quite radically insupportable terror. A few lines above, there”—the open book bounced again, in her cushiony lap, as I pointed to the place—“ ‘the stern agony, and shroud, and pall, And breathless darkness, and the narrow house’: that really says it. ‘Breathless darkness, and the narrow house.’ Bryant was so young, you see, he could say it; an older poet’s hand would have frozen with terror trying to write those lines. But then what does the kid do? He talks about these ancient kings and hoary seers who have already died and will keep us company, and tells us that ‘All that breathe will share thy destiny’ as if that’s some kind of consolation, and without any benefit of religious avowal leaps to the conclusion that dying will be like lying down ‘to pleasant dreams.’ What evidence does he give that it will be like pleasant dreams? None,” I told Verna. “The pattern here is the absolute pattern of every high-school valedictory address: big questions melting into fatuous, wishful answers.”
The girl was studying. Her head, seen from above, was a depth of partly brown, partly blond curls, circle upon perfect circle like what cyclotrons reveal of matter’s deep collisions. An aroma of shampoo arose from these deeps, and a faint tang more purely animal, the powdery warmth of her scalp. “He doesn’t exactly say, Nunc, it will be like pleasant dreams; he says we should die as if it would be; we should go to our graves not ‘like the quarry-slave’ ‘scourged to his dungeon’ but ‘sustain’d and sooth’d by an unfaltering trust.’ ”
“Unfaltering trust in what?” I asked. “In the utterly unconsoling fact that the ‘matron, and maid, And the sweet babe, and the gray-headed man’ shall all die also?” I stabbed at the place on the page I was quoting from, but this time she was holding the book firm, and it did not bounce. “Speaking of ‘gay,’ ” I went on, trying to soften my approach, “isn’t that rather terrific, just above: ‘The gay will laugh When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care Plod on, and each one as before will chase His favourite phantom’?”
“Yeah, I guess it’s all rather terrific,” she said, letting the book relax in her lap so its speckled pages reflected the light and became twin blank sheets. “You shouldn’t take it so hard, Nunc. We all gotta die, like Bryan, whatever his name is, Bryant says. If you don’t want to die, you should talk to Dale. He says nobody does, it just seems that way. Anyways I thought this faith stuff was your business.”
“Maybe it shouldn’t be a business,” I said, and the thought was enough of a Damascene revelation that I slightly swooned, lowering my face so that its skin and my pursed lips tingled with immersion in the clean explosive circles of Verna’s hair.
She jumped like a cat at the touch, perching far forward on the bamboo chair and twisting to face me with amber eyes more widely spaced than, it seemed, a moment before. “So wh
at’s next?” she asked. “ ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp,’ or are we going to fuck?”
“Fuck?” The word seemed an open portal, a superb sudden alteration in my house of narrow possibilities, of breathless darkness.
Her voice in the constriction of anger and fear had become reedier, more childishly lacking in timbre, than ever. “I know you have the hots for me,” she said, “but is it the hots for me really or for my mom? I know about you and her. You wanted to screw her and never brought it off, though a lot of other guys did.”
I took a breath and said reasonably, “I’m not sure she was exactly screwable then. It was a different world, Verna. Pre-Pill, pre-everything. We were children, and didn’t much like each other.”
In the years after our attic poker game, Edna had become more closed, ever less accessible to me in the coils of her own life, as we both matured in our different sections of greater Cleveland. From the age of fifteen on, she had boy friends, and sometimes, yes, I now remembered, she would tell me about them, would suddenly fling her secrets out at me, in those increasingly stilted, shorter and shorter stretches of summer when I would go stay with my father and Veronica, my corpulent and sugary-sweet stepmother—she, the trim vamp who had stolen him while I was asleep in my mother’s womb, had been quite swallowed now by a middle-aged simpleton big into church work and canasta. As if our blood tie had neutered me, had indeed put me into the skirt and sweater and bobby socks of another teen-aged girl, Edna would on a whim share her love life aloud, while we drove back sweaty from a tennis game at the club or sat with a pitcher of lemonade and a pack of furtive Camels on the long side porch in Chagrin Falls: she would tell me how far she let each boy friend go, what items of clothing the various ones were entitled to remove, where they could caress and for how long, all as if the male sex were one big many-armed and -fingered machine for the administration of an elaborate massage, a kind of carwash from which her American body was to emerge a woman’s, with polished bumpers and cavernous trunk, a virgin vehicle fit for marriage and the legal propagation of the race. Edna was certainly a virgin when she married, as was I.