by John Updike
As the classmates began to shuffle, in a kind of panicked unison, toward the door and whatever fate the next five years would bring, Elizanne came up to David, resting a hand on his forearm and speaking with a firm, lilting urgency, as if she were speaking to herself. “David,” she said, in this running murmur, “there’s something I’ve been wanting for years to say to you. You were very important to me. You were the first boy who ever walked me home and—and kissed me.”
In this dimmed function room, her eyes, their stern glare softened and widened by the act of confession, sought his, causing her lids with their starry wealth of black lashes to lift. Her eyebrows were released from their frown. Her face, so close and foreshortened, seemed arrived from a great distance. She might have had a drink or two—Fiorvante’s had its bar just outside the function room—but she was sober enough, and now so was he, to be shocked, amid the reunion’s loud adult courtesies, by this remembrance of their young selves, their true, fumbling, vanished selves.
“I remember that walk,” he said. But did he?
Elizanne laughed, a bit coarsely—a modern suburban woman’s knowing laugh. “It got me started, I must tell you, on a lot of—whatever. Kissing, let’s say.” This innocent generation had aged into the sexual revolution, and had hurried to catch up.
David tried to ignore the experienced, sardonic woman she had become. The forgotten walk was coming back to him. The shy, leisurely passage, in dying light, through Olinger, and the standing close, still talking, at the door of her parents’ house, and then his lunge into the kiss, and her equally clumsy yet fervid acceptance of the kiss. He had loved her, for a season. When? Why had the season been so short? Had they kicked fallen leaves as they walked through town, along the Alton Pike with its gleaming trolley tracks, into the rectilinear streets of brick row houses, and then on to Elmdale, the section where the streets curved, and the houses stood alone on their lawns, the lawns weedless and the houses half-timbered and slate-roofed and expensive, to the house where Elizanne lived? Had it been spring, shot through with sudden green and yellow, or summer, when bugs swarmed and girls wore shorts, or winter, when your cheeks stung? He was stricken to have her imply, with a knowledgeable laugh, that she had gone on to kiss others. She had added something he didn’t quite catch, in the noise of reunion farewells or in his growing deafness, about “what you all wanted”—a sadly cheap and standard sneer, he felt, about male sexuality, which in that place and era had been a massive, underpublicized impetus that most boys dealt with alone. But the sneer itself dated her, and took them back.
“You were so,” he breathed, groping for the word, “dewy.” This he did remember, amid so much he had forgotten—her dewiness, a quiet, fuzzy moisture about her skin, her near presence. “I’m glad,” he added, going into dry adult mode, “it was a successful initiation.”
Darkly her eyes held his for a second, then flicked away, searching for her husband in the dispersing crowd. She realized that David couldn’t express what was there to express, and gave his forearm a squeeze through his coat sleeve and removed her hand. Good-bye, for fifty more years. “I just wanted you to know,” she said.
Wait, he thought, but instead said, quite inanely, “Thank you, Elizanne. What a sweet thing to remember. Hey, you look great. Unlike a lot of us.”
That night, twisting with the reunion’s excitement next to Andrea in their bed at the Alton Marriott, and for days following, he tried to recapture that walk which had ended in a kiss. Elizanne’s house and neighborhood had been more expensive than his, and that had intimidated him. She was not for him. Before too long he got his first real girlfriend, from the class below theirs, who let him hold her breasts, and partially undress her, slick as a fish in the parked car. How old would they have been, he and Elizanne? Sixteen, perhaps fifteen. Had it been after a football game, or a school dance? He had not really been very sociable, nor, after they moved to the country when he was fourteen, was he free to drift around Olinger as he pleased, though he continued at Olinger High, riding back and forth with his father.
She was in the marching band, he remembered. He could see her in her uniform, her hair bundled up under her cap and her female body encased, somehow excitingly, in the gold-striped maroon pants and jacket. The baton twirlers in their high white boots and short flippy skirts were followed by a maroon unisex mass, and Elizanne was in that phalanx. What did she play? He thought clarinet, but this might have been an echo of her coloring; unlike the other class brunettes, with their highlighted waves of brown, she had truly black hair, with lashes and eyebrows to match. The skin of her face had been luminously white in contrast. A fuzz on her upper lip made two little smudges.
Remembering the dark fuzz, most noticeable in the downward view, brought him another piece of memory: dancing with her, holding her close as they shuffled, her corsage and strapless taffeta bodice and the taffeta small of her back with its little ridges and his feet and armpits and shoulder blades in the rented summer tux all melting into one continuum of sweat while the streamers overhead drooped and the mirror ball flung its reflections frictionlessly across the floor and the band, its muted trombones sobbing, finished its rendition of “Stardust” or “Goodnight Irene.” His and Elizanne’s cheeks felt pasted together, and yet when the music stopped he didn’t want to let go; he continued, pantingly, to drink her in, her foreshortened demure face with its smudged upper lip and dewy expanse of décolletage, the white edges of her strapless bra outlining her gentle bosom.
How often had they danced like that? Why hadn’t more come of it? As long as he could remember, the other sex had been sending out formidable scouts in his direction—mothers and grandmothers and teachers, and Barbara and Linda stealing his cap on the way to school, and fellow classroom goody-goodies like Mamie and Sarah Beth wanting to compare their homework with his. Then the surface of femininity, that towering mystery in whose presence his life must be lived, had yielded to a slight pressure. Without a word, a word that he could remember, Elizanne had submitted to his inept attentions, and indicated a demure curiosity in what he might do for her.
The walk: for days after the reunion his mind could not let go of the walk that she reminded him they had taken. In the distorting lens of old age it loomed as one of the most momentous acts of his life. The geography of Olinger had been woven into him, into the muscles that pushed his bicycle and pulled his sled. His parents took walks on Sunday afternoons, and he had tagged behind them until his legs balked. One way turned left, down the alley by their hedge and into the new streets, in regular blocks, across the main thoroughfare, the Alton Pike, with its gleaming trolley tracks. The town was older south of the Pike, where David’s house sat in a ragged neighborhood of mixed architecture and vacant lots, some of them planted in corn. He preferred the tightly built blocks north of the Pike; identical brick semi-detached houses, with square-pillared porches and terraced front lawns, had been put up, street after street, during the Twenties. Friends like Mamie lived in these cozy neat blocks, where grocery stores or hobby shops or an ice-cream parlor or a barber shop were tucked into the front rooms of homes. He loved the houses’ tightness, their uniformity, which seemed a pledge of order and shared intention missing from his own patchy neighborhood.
Beyond this section, where a harness-racing track had once tied up sixty acres, contractors in the years before the war had positioned handsome limestone and clinker-brick single houses on streets curving up the side of Shale Hill. David’s walk with Elizanne must have taken him from the high school or its grounds along the Pike through the blocks of semi-detached houses, which above their porches held picture windows where seasonal decorations—orange-paper pumpkins and black-paper bats for Halloween, Christmas tinsel, Easter baskets—announced the residents’ fealty to the Christian calendar. The trees along the streets changed from horse chestnuts in the old section where he lived to dense lines of Norway maples on the solidly built-up rectilinear streets to drooping, feathery elms and blotchy-barked sycamores, loca
lly called buttonwoods, on the streets that curved. These trees were higher, airier; there was more space and light in the section where Elizanne lived, as if you were ascending a hill, as indeed you were, but a gently sloping hill of money, of airy privilege. And yet she had let him kiss her, there by her thick-panelled front door, with its two-tone chime doorbell, and had remembered that kiss for more than fifty years, and spoke of it as her admission ticket to the wonderland of sex.
If Mamie was right and we live forever, David thought, he could imagine no better way to spend eternity than taking that walk with Elizanne over and over, until what they said, how they touched, whether or not he dared hold her hand in his, and each hair of the fine black down on her forearms all came as clear as letters deep-cut in marble. There would be time to ask her all the questions he had been too slow-witted to ask at their fiftieth. Was this her first husband, or the last of a series? Had she had affairs, in that suburb of her choosing? Had there been a lot of necking, as he had heard there was, on the band bus back from the football games? Was it in the bus where she went on with her kissing, the groping that comes with kissing, the flush and hard breathing that come with groping? Whose girlfriend had she been in her junior and senior years? He dimly remembered her being linked with Lennie Lesher, the track star, the five-minute miler with his sunken acne-scarred cheeks and tight ridges of hair soaked in Vitalis. How could she have betrayed him, David, that way? Or was it with those faceless members of the band? Why had they, David and she, drifted apart after walking through Olinger into the region of more light? Or had it been night, after a dance or a basketball game, her white face with its strong eyebrows and quick smile a nocturnal blur?
Elizanne, he wanted to ask her, what does it mean, this enormity of our having been children and now being old, living next door to death? He had been the age then that his grandsons were now. As he had lived, he had come to see that for a man there is no antidote to death but a woman; yet from where, he wanted now to ask Elizanne, does a woman draw this antidote, her cosmic balm? And does it work for her as well?
For days he could not let her afterimage go, but in time he would, he knew. He could not write or call her, even if Mamie or Sarah Beth provided him with her address and number, for there were spouses, accumulated realities, limits. At the time, obviously, there had been limits in their situation. He had had little to offer her but his future of going places, and that was vague and distant. The questions he was burning to ask would receive banal answers. It was an adolescent flirtation that had come, like most, to nothing.
“Well, here we are,” she announced. The streetlights had just come on.
“So soon!” he exclaimed. “You have a n-n-nifty-looking house.”
“Mother’s never liked the kitchen. She says it’s gloomy, all those dark-stained cabinets. She wants us to move to West Alton.”
“Oh, no! Don’t move, Elizanne.”
“I don’t want to, Heaven knows. She thinks they have better schools in West Alton. A better class of student.”
“My m-mother made us move to the country and I hate it.”
“You can’t stay in Olinger forever, David.”
“Why not? Some do.”
“That won’t be you.”
Her gaze clung to his in her seriousness. Her eyebrows frowned, slightly. He expected her to turn away and go through the heavy door into her house, but she didn’t. He explained, “I ought to get back to the school, my p-poor father’s p-p-probably looking for me. It must be past five.” The light died earlier each day. It was October; the sycamore leaves were turning, slowly, brown creeping into their edges.
“Tell me honestly,” she said, as if to herself, rapidly. “Did I talk too much? Just now, walking.”
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t at all.”
“That’s what I do when I let myself relax with someone. I chatter. I go on too much.”
“You didn’t. It was like you were singing to me.”
Her face had not exactly come closer to his, but its not turning and moving away made it feel closer. Cautiously he bent his face into hers, a little sideways, and kissed her. Elizanne’s lips took the fit snugly, warmly; she pressed slightly into the kiss, from underneath, looking for something in it. David felt caught up in a stream flowing counter to the current of everyday events, and began to run out of breath. He broke the contact and backed off. They stared at one another, her black eyes button-bright in the sodium streetlight, amid the restless faint shadows of the half-brown big sycamore leaves. Then he kissed her again, entering that warm still point around which the universe wheeled, its load of stars not yet visible, the sky still blue above the streetlights. This time it was she who backed off. A car went by, with a staring face in the passenger window, maybe someone they knew—a spy, a gossip. “And there was even more,” she said, giggling to show that she was poking fun at herself now, “that I wanted to say.”
“You will,” he promised, breathlessly. His cheeks were hot, as if after gym class. He was worried about his father waiting for him; his stomach anxiously stirred. David felt as he had when, his one weekend at the Jersey Shore the past summer, a wave carrying his surfing body broke too early and was about to throw him forward, down into the hard sand. “I want to hear it all,” he told Elizanne. “We have t-tons of time.”
The Guardians
LITTLE LEE’S SOFT BRAIN swam into self-consciousness in a household of four adults, with carpets that smelled of shoe soles, and a coal furnace that chuffed in the cellar, and dusty front windows that gave onto the back side of a privet hedge and a street where horse-drawn wagons sometimes clip-clopped along among the swishing automobiles. Lee heard them early in the morning: farmers going to market. On the opposite side of the street, asphalt-shingled row houses stood above concrete retaining walls, looking down at Lee’s house like the choirs of angels in the songs at Christmas. Christmas was a time when an expectant cold light invaded the house and made the people within it very clear: Grampop, Granny, Daddy, and Lee’s mother, who was, as it were, too important to have a name.
Grampop was amazingly old, even when Lee was a baby. He would sit on the cane-backed sofa and hold stately discourse there with a visitor equally old, crossing and recrossing his legs, exposing a length of hairless white shin and the high black top of a buttoned shoe. Sometimes above the shoe Lee saw not white skin but the white of long cotton underwear, which only very old-fashioned country people wore. Unlike Daddy, Grampop wore a hat—gray, with a sweat-darkened band inside and two big dimples on the crown where he pinched it. When he entered the house, he would take the hat off and hold it pinched delicately between his thumb and forefinger; he would softly gesture with the hat in his hand as if it were a precious extension of himself, like his voice or his money. Once, Lee learned early, Grampop had had a great deal more money than he did now. These were hard times, depressed times, though the house was big and long, in its long hedged lawn: flowering shrubs in front and on the sides, and a grass terrace behind, a lawn broken by cherry trees and an English-walnut tree, and then a vegetable garden, a pear tree, a burning barrel, and a chicken house. Grampop had the chicken house built when he moved here. He smoked cigars, but his daughter, Lee’s mother, couldn’t stand the smell in the house, so he smoked outdoors, sitting in a lawn chair, or standing under a tree in a sweater, one elbow cupped in the hand of the other arm, surveying the world around him, a world on which his grip had faltered.
Granny, too, had lost her grip; her hands were bent as if holding something invisible, and waggled, with a disease that she had. Yet still she kept busy, cooking the meals and weeding and hoeing in the garden and watching out for Lee’s welfare. When he, growing inch by inch, finally managed to climb up onto the lowest branch of the walnut tree, she stood directly below him and told him to get down. She wore glasses that sat cockeyed on her little hook nose, and these glinted in the afternoon light, tilted up toward Lee while he wondered if he should tell her that, though he had discovered he could get u
p, he hadn’t yet learned how to get down. She looked very far beneath him. Her white hair flew out from her sharp small face like an exploding milkweed.
It was she who beheaded the chickens, on a log that stood upright in the chicken yard. When Lee once, on a sudden unstoppable bidding from within, while he hurried up the alley behind his backyard, went to the bathroom in his shorts, it was she who cleaned the yellow mess off his legs and told him it wasn’t worth crying so hard about. It was she who pointed out that certain of the neighborhood children—the Halloran brother and sister, especially—were not suitable playmates. Granny, Lee’s mother let him know, hadn’t always been enfeebled: she had run Grampop’s tobacco farm for him in their country days and had been one of the first women in the county to get a driver’s license.