by John Updike
For some odd reason there are no boys near his age in the neighborhood, this side of the street, which he is not allowed to cross by himself. A kind of tough boy, Warren Frye, in Wilma’s grade at school, lives in the other direction, down the alley, where it turns along the school grounds and becomes a street, with a row of houses on one side. He comes up to Toby’s yard from the lower end, past the chicken house beside the vegetable garden. Grandmother doesn’t like him. She doesn’t care for his “people.” She has known the Fryes since she herself was a child, way before Toby was born. He doesn’t like to think about that strange deep empty period of time.
One day when Warren and Toby were wrestling on the linoleum kitchen floor—fighting because Warren had been treating Toby’s toys too roughly and then teasing Toby for being too fussy about it, as if the toys had feelings, which they don’t and which he said was sissy to imagine—Toby sneakily tripped him so his head went into the radiator spines and bled through his hair as if he might die. Toby was terrified. Grandmother made a nice tidy bandage for Warren out of a dust rag and sent him home still bleeding, and though Warren came back the next day already pretty much healed, he never did return the dust rag. To hear Grandmother tell it there had never been a dust rag like it for excellence. By not dying, Warren had cheated her.
Grandmother doesn’t like Wilma’s people either. What she doesn’t like has something to do with how many brothers and sisters Wilma has and with money, though from what Toby overhears in the house Grandfather doesn’t have his money any more; it was eaten up in the stock-market crash. What money they live on Daddy earns being a schoolteacher and is kept in a little red-and-white tin box saying Recipes on top of the icebox. The grown-ups dip into it when they go off shopping, Grandfather to Hen Geiger’s little front-room grocery store a few houses up from Wilma’s house, with floorboards so worn the nail heads shine, and Mother and Grandmother up the hill two blocks to Pep Sheaffer’s bigger store, which has more kinds of ice cream and meat so fresh it oozes blood onto the butcher block, all crisscrossed with marks of the cleaver. Pep has a refrigerator he walks into without bending over and comes out of breathing the smoke your breath makes in January. When Toby got big enough to move a kitchen chair to the icebox and stand on it he was allowed to dip into the Recipe box too and take out a nickel for a Tastykake or a jelly-filled doughnut at Hen Geiger’s on his way back to school after lunch. He loves eating while he is walking along instead of sitting down and being told to have good manners. Because there are five of them he sits at the corner of the little kitchen table and it pokes him in the stomach.
There is the alley, the street, and the avenue, where the trolley cars run and the elementary-school building stands on its asphalt lake. As he walks down the street toward the avenue the houses he passes get smaller, their porches lower to the ground, without railings. Grandmother complains about “people” but it seems to Toby that these are the people his family lives among and they should make do with them. These are the people of his life.
The side yard is too crowded with bushes and flower beds to play in, except for hide-and-seek. But the back yard stretches all the way to the chicken house and the garage for the green Model A Ford in the days when Grandfather had a car. Toby remembers the car before they sold it, sitting squeezed in the back seat between his parents. His mother was somehow angry, giving off heat. Near the fenced-in chicken yard is the burning barrel where he is allowed to hold a match to the previous day’s newspaper and the other paper trash, including magazines that won’t burn up unless you poke them, separating the pages. The barrel has flaps cut near the bottom, because fire needs oxygen. Table scraps don’t burn, and go to the chickens.
Above the burning barrel, nearer the house, is the vegetable garden. Grandfather spades it in the spring, and all summer the rows that come up must be hoed and weeded. Daddy is exempted from such farmers’ labor, but not Toby. The weeds between the rows of lima beans and beets and carrots and kohlrabi have to be pulled and carefully laid flat, otherwise they will take root again. Until it dries, the hoed earth is the same dark damp color it is when Grandfather turns the soil in the spring. In the fall Mother and Grandmother put up tomatoes and sliced peaches and rhubarb in Mason jars, filling the kitchen with clouds of steam. The jars are sealed with red rubber rings that are good to play indoor quoits with. Each ring has a little tab that just fits your finger to impart spin.
The way the weeds lie helpless in the sun and then shrivel seems cruel to Toby, but, then, he didn’t ask them to grow there. There is a plan and a purpose to things. At school Miss Kendall, who teaches third grade, told the class that grass was green because green was the most soothing color for the eyes. God designed it that way. If everything was red or yellow, she explained, people would go crazy with there being too much of it. The same with the sky being blue, though even so sometimes when Toby looks straight up his eyes wince as if overwhelmed out of all that incandescent blue, and if he catches the sun in his glance a circular ghost stays throbbing in his vision for minutes. God made the world for Mankind, Miss Kendall says.
The back yard slopes from the brick walk along the porch and the wooden cellar door down to the vegetable gardens through a breadth of grass where Daddy, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up past his elbows, pushes the lawnmower on Saturdays. After dinner they move porch chairs out to the top of the yard and sit as the fireflies come out, Grandfather smoking his cigar and Mother not complaining. It keeps the mosquitoes away, her father explains to her. He speaks to her in a rumbling, friendly way. She is his daughter. “Lois,” he calls her. It is a strange name, two syllables, like “Toby,” and the same number of letters, and enough like it so that it seems his came out of hers, as he is supposed to have come out of her. And as she came out of Grandmother, whose name is Elizabeth, which in a way has Lois in it. Picturing all this makes Toby sleepy.
After school Wilma and Warren Frye, before he stopped coming, and some others from the neighborhood, mostly girls, sometimes come to play in the back yard, climbing the trees or swinging on the swing Grandfather once hung on a low branch of the English-walnut tree for Toby when he was smaller. The swing gets quickly boring, the ropes being babyishly short for him now, but there are many trees—the peach trees with their long pointy deeply creased leaves, and the leaning cherry trees with their ringed bark like stacks of black coins, and the maples whose winged seeds you can split and stick on your nose, and the English walnut whose lowest branch is shiny from being climbed on. From tree to tree the children race, squealing in their versions of baseball and dodge ball, where when the person who has the ball yells “Freeze” everybody must stop, even off-balance in mid-step.
In his element, proud, Toby leads them to the stone birdbath that rocks a little on its pedestal, spilling some water onto the girls’ shoes, and to the Japanese-beetle traps on their grape arbor, loudly buzzing with the beetles’ angry dying, and the broad lilies-of-the-valley bed where it is against the rules to look for a lost ball, though what else can they do, treading on tiptoe to minimize the damage to flowers that they flatten as they search?
This lilies-of-the-valley bed is dizzyingly fragrant when the little white bells on their arched stems are in bloom. Once Toby stood on its edge persistently worrying at a loose front tooth with his tongue and fingers until finally it came out, with a fleck of blood at its rubbery root. He carried the tooth back into the house to win praise from the grown-ups, for growing. He wants to cheer them up. They give off a scent of having lived so long they are stuck where they are for good, as if with a disease he doesn’t want to catch. His mother is not pleased by the tooth, worrying that because he forced it out the next one will come in crooked. She had told him that what he had were baby teeth and that stronger, bigger teeth would come in when they fell out. This knowledge hung over him as he stood there worrying at the tooth, adding to the pressure that hangs invisibly over the town, especially over the vacant lot next door.
The grown-up sadness he feels
around him is thickest in the smaller side yard, the neglected one toward the Eichelbergers’. The houses cast a constant shadow between them, and green moss grows in the gloom beneath the hydrangea bushes. These bushes produce blossoms as big as a person’s head but are almost the only flowering things here, as opposed to the other, sunny side. There is on this shadowy side (its lawn faintly spongy underfoot) the stillness of things Toby doesn’t like to think about—church, and deep woods, and cemeteries where a single potted plant has been left in memory of someone but, itself forgotten, has long dried out and died. The Eichelbergers’ house looms close, and the child has the fear that Mr. will somehow pounce, though in fact the stooped stout old man, in his baggy gray sweater with gray pearl buttons down the front, slightly smiles on the rare occasions when his and Toby’s eyes meet across the property line.
All by himself on this side of the house, Toby becomes more frightened than when alone elsewhere in the yard. The house has fewer windows on this side, so there is less chance of Mother or Grandmother glancing out and seeing him to check on his safety. He might almost be on the moon. Though there is a long clear space here for a game of catch, he and Wilma never stay at it long. If the ball gets loose and goes into the Eichelbergers’ peonies next to their house, the pair of them—Mr. in his greasy gray hat and then Mrs. with the apron she always wears and her horrible goiter—might come out and catch him retrieving the ball and, after giving him a good shaking, pen him into their cellar, among the cobwebby shelves of sealed fruit staring out and the skeletons of other caught children. Already the Eichelbergers, he has overheard, have complained to Grandfather about children making noise when they are trying to nap.
And yet, safe inside his own house, his grandfather’s house, Toby looks out one of the few windows in that direction and feels sorry for the side yard, it looks so unused and unvisited. It is as still as the toadless terrarium at elementary school. It brims with the adult sadness he feels at his back, in his family.
What is the sadness about? Money, Toby guesses. They never spend any without Daddy worrying. When the coal truck comes and backs up over the curb on thick wooden triangles carried along for just that purpose and the long chutes, polished bright by sliding anthracite, telescope out of the truck’s body into the little cellar window under the front porch, and the whole house trembles and fills with the racket of coal roaring into the bin, Toby feels the wonder of all the world’s arrangements for his happiness, where Daddy feels money sliding away. He is usually at work, teaching unruly students, but when he is at home he looks worried, wringing his hands in a way Mother calls “womanish.” They are a man’s hands, square and freckled with raised warts on the backs, but they do perform a scrubbing, wringing motion like women’s housework as Daddy tries to rub away the worry inside him. He sometimes says of himself that he has “the jitters” and “the blues.” He calls Toby “Young America” and, when Toby is bored or complaining, announces to an unseen audience, “The kid has the wim-wams.”
The sadness accumulates toward the back of the house, in the kitchen, farthest from the street and its daily traffic. The linoleum floor with its design worn off where feet walk most, and the old slate sink smelling like well-water, and the long-nosed copper faucets turning green, and the oilcloth that covers the little table where the corner pokes him in the stomach and they eat with bone-handled knives and forks—it all looks tired and old-fashioned, compared to the kitchens some of his playmates have. Not Wilma Dobrinski’s people, but the Nagel twins three doors up from there, and some of the houses across the street, which sit higher than the houses on this side, above retaining walls and flights of cement stairs so long the mailman takes a shortcut along the porches by stepping over the low hedges—these ordinary houses have purring electric refrigerators instead of iceboxes dripping water into a tin tray, and toasters that plug in and pop up the toast instead of simply sitting on a smelly old gas stove, above the dirty burner with its little purple flames like dog teats.
And at Christmas, other front parlors, where people passing on the sidewalk can look in and see, hold in their windows, like illustrations in a magazine, long-needled evergreens drenched in tinsel’s silver rain and bearing as thick as holly berries thin-skinned hollow ornaments sprinkled with glitter. Mother favors keeping the tree natural, and her ornaments, as simple as the glass eggs that trick a chicken into laying, emerge from a few boxes in the attic, where each is thriftily nested in tissue, in its own little cardboard square. The Nagel twins say their uncle in Alton buys new ornaments every year, all blue or red or on a “theme,” like a department store. Toby doesn’t want that; he just wants to be ordinary, and to have an ordinary amount of money.
Toby is not always good. He is timid and obeys rules but harbors dark things inside. His grandparents’ house reaches around him with cobwebby corners and left-over spaces and even entire locked rooms where things not of this world, monsters and ghosts, have room to lurk and breathe. The five human lives in the house are not enough to crowd out these menaces, to oust the terrors in the coal-dark cellar and in the attic with its aromas of mothballs and cedar chests. Deep under the eaves the attic holds folded old carpets and fancy dishes with piecrust edges and kerosene lamps and knobby trunks that will never travel again and cloth-covered albums full of his grandparents’ “people,” ancestors long dead but with button-bright eyes staring right at him when he opens an album’s thick gilt-edged pages. The men have mustaches and hair parted in the middle. The women have hair pulled tight back and layered stiff clothes of different shades of black. Throughout the house Toby is aware of little-used closets and creepy spaces under the bed. He avoids a back stairs whose doors are never unlatched, as if a mummy or a maniac is locked in there.
He rarely goes into his grandparents’ room, and when he does there is a smell, an old people’s smell, parched and sweet. Right at the heart of the house a certain space frightens him: the front stairs climb to a landing from which little sets of two steps lead one way to his grandparents’ room and, in the opposite way, to his parents’ room, and then a third way into the upstairs bathroom. When he does toidy in the bathroom, he is frightened by the door that closes behind him; something might be waiting for him behind the door when he comes out, so he makes Grandmother wait there, sitting on the little steps, to protect him. It is her duty because like Toby she is aware of the ghosts in the house. He has caught his belief in them from her.
One time when he came out of the bathroom she had fallen asleep on the steps, her wire-rimmed glasses tipped on her sharp small nose and her false teeth slipping down in a frightening way, and Toby was furious to find she wasn’t awake protecting him. He leaped up and pounded on her hunched bony back as she tried to stand. She softly grunted as his fists hit. Her long gray hair seemed to fly out in every direction from her head. He knew he was being bad but knew she wouldn’t tell Mother, and even if she did Mother would understand his being upset. Her mother annoyed her too.
The worst thing he does is torture his toys. His teddy bear, pale woolly Bruno, once lost one glass eye, the tempting brown of a horehound drop, to Toby’s infant fingers, in the time before he can remember. The baby he once was had pulled it out on its wire stem and then forgot where it went. Now that he is older he likes to pull out the remaining eye, and gloat at Bruno for being blind, and then have mercy and kiss the woolly blank place and stick the eye back in. If he loses this eye they will have to throw Bruno away, to where he will lie in total darkness not seeing anything.
By saving pennies and begging for presents Toby has collected rubber dolls of Disney characters—a black-limbed Mickey with a hollow head that comes off, leaving a neck with a rim like the top of a bottle, and a Donald with a solid fat white bottom that weighs pleasantly in Toby’s hand, and a Pinocchio who isn’t as satisfactory, with his knobby knees and goody-goody, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed boy’s face without the long nose you get by telling lies. In the stretch of bare floor beside the dining-room carpet he lines them up and bow
ls them down like tenpins, with a dirty softball. The hardest to knock over is a chocolate-brown Ferdinand the Bull, dense and short-legged. When he is playing this game just by himself, not with Wilma, as he sets them up again he threatens them with what he will do to them if they don’t obey him and fall down.
Once, Toby got carried away with a single-edged Treet razor blade he used for cutting cardboard into shapes, holding the edge against Donald’s long white throat to get him to confess, and to show he was serious went deeper than he had meant to, so that now when he bends Donald’s head back a second mouth opens in his throat, below the yellow beak. This evidence of his own cruelty shames Toby to see—each time he tips Donald’s head back, the cut widens by a few molecules—but, then, he doesn’t step on ants like a lot of boys and even girls do, showing off for boys, or go fishing out by the dam and put worms and grasshoppers on hooks. He doesn’t see how people can do it, torture like that.
After Pearl Harbor, the United States is at war and violence has taken over the world. There are mock air raids in town. They have to turn off all the lights and sit, he and Mother and Grandfather and Grandmother, in the windowless landing that has always slightly frightened him anyway. Daddy is out in the dark with a flashlight, being an air-raid warden. While they are sitting there on the steps trying not to breathe, an airplane goes over, high above their roof. Toby knows that it will drop a bomb and they will all be obliterated. That is a new word in the paper, “obliterated,” along with “Blitzkrieg” and “unconditional surrender.” Incredibly, in England and in China children are among the obliterated. The saw-toothed drone of the airplane slowly recedes. Toby’s life goes on. Elsewhere, millions die.