by John Updike
The New Year’s right after Fred had moved out, I remember walking Evelyn home from the Langhornes’ up Salem Street just before morning, an inch of new snow on the sidewalk and everything silent except for her voice, going on and on about Fred. There had been Stingers, and she could hardly walk, and I wasn’t much better. The housefronts along Salem calm as ghosts, and the new snow like mica reflecting the streetlights. We climbed her porch steps, and that living room, with its wide floorboards, her tree still up, and a pine wreath hung on an oak peg in the fireplace lintel, hit me as if we had walked smack into an old-fashioned children’s book. The smell of a pine indoors or a certain glaze on wrapping paper will do that to me, or frost in the corner of a window-pane: spell Christmas. We sat together on the scratchy D.R. sofa so she could finish her tale about Fred and I could warm up for the long walk back. Day was breaking and suddenly Evelyn looked haggard; I was led to try to comfort her and right then, with Evelyn’s long hair all over our faces, and her strong eyebrows right under my eyes, we heard from on high Mary Jo beginning to cough. We froze, the big old fireplace full of cold ashes sending out a little draft on our ankles and, from above, this coughing and coughing, scoopy and dry. Mary Jo, about fifteen she must have been then, and weakened by the anorexia, had caught a cold that had turned into walking pneumonia. Evelyn blamed Fred’s leaving her for that, too—the pneumonia. Coughing and coughing, the child, and her mother in my arms smelling of brandy and tears and Christmas. She blamed Fred but I would have blamed him less than the environment; those old wooden houses are drafty.
Thinking of upstairs and downstairs, I think of Betsey Clay at the head of her stairs, no longer in a white nightie seeing the moon but in frilly lemon-colored pajamas, looking down at some party too loud for her to sleep through. We had come in from the patio and put on some old Twist records and there was no quiet way to play them. I was sitting on the floor somehow, with somebody, so the angle of my vision was low, and like a lesson in perspective the steps diminished up to her naked feet, too big to leave rabbit tracks now. For what seemed the longest time we looked at each other—she had her mother’s hollow-eyed fragile look—until the woman I was with, and I don’t think it was Maureen, felt my distraction and herself turned to look up the stairs, and Betsey scampered back toward her room.
Her room would have been like my daughter’s in those years: Beatles posters, or maybe of the Monkees, and prize ribbons for horsemanship in local shows. And dolls and Steiff animals that hadn’t been put away yet sharing the shelves with Signet editions of Melville and Hard Times and Camus assigned at day school. We were all so young, parents and children, learning it all together—how to grow up, how to deal with time—is what you realize now.
Those were the days when Harry Langhorne had got himself a motorcycle and would roar around and around the green on a Saturday night until the police came and stopped him, more or less politely. And the Wilcombes had put a hot tub on their second-story porch and had to run a steel column up for support lest we all go tumbling down naked some summer night. In winter, there was a lot of weekend skiing for the sake of the kids, and we would take over a whole lodge in New Hampshire: heaps of snowy boots and wet parkas in the corner under the moose head, over past the beat-up player piano, and rosy cheeks at dinner at the long tables, where ham with raisin sauce was always the main dish. Suddenly the girls, long-legged in their stretch pants, hair whipping around their faces as they skimmed to a stop at the lift lines, were women. At night, after the boys had crumped out or settled to Ping-Pong in the basement, the girls stayed up with us, playing Crazy Eights or Spit with the tattered decks the lodge kept on hand, taking sips from our cans of beer, until at last the weight of all that day’s fresh air toppled everyone up toward bed, in reluctant bunches. The little rooms had dotted-swiss curtains and thick frost ferns on the windowpanes. The radiators dripped and sang. There was a dormitory feeling through the thin partitions, and shuffling and giggling in the hall on the way to the bathrooms, one for girls and one for boys. One big family. It was the children, really, growing unenthusiastic and resistant, who stopped the trips. That, and the divorces as they began to add up. Margaret and I are about the last marriage left; she says maybe we missed the boat, but can’t mean it.
The beach picnics, and touch football, and the softball games in that big field the Wilcombes had. Such a lot of good times, and the kids growing up through them like weeds in sunshine; and now, when the daughters of people we hardly knew at all are married to stockbrokers or off in Oregon being nurses or in Mexico teaching agronomy, our daughters haunt the town as if searching for something they missed, taking classes in macramé or aerobic dancing, living with their mothers, wearing no makeup, walking up beside the rocks with books in their arms like a race of little nuns.
You can see their mothers in them—beautiful women, full of life. I saw Annie Langhorne at the train station the other morning and we had to talk for some minutes, mostly about the antique store Mary Jo wants to open up with Betsey, and apropos of the hopelessness of this venture she gave me a smile exactly like her mother’s one of the times Louise and I said goodbye or faced the fact that we just weren’t going to make it, she and I—pushing up the lower lip so her chin crinkled, that nice wide mouth of hers humorous but down-turned at the corners as if to buckle back tears. Lou’s exact same smile on little Annie, and it was like being in love again, when all the world is a hunt and the sight of the woman’s car parked at a gas station or in the Stop & Shop lot makes your Saturday, makes your blood race and your palms go numb, the heart touching base.
But these girls. What are they hanging back for? What are they afraid of?
Unstuck
IN HIS DREAM, Mark was mixing and mixing on an oval palette a muddy shade of gray he could not get quite right, and this shade of gray was both, in that absurd but deadpan way of dreams, his marriage and the doctrinal position of the local Congregational church, which was resisting the nationwide merger with the Evangelical and Reformed denominations. He was glad to wake up, though his wife’s body, asleep, silently rebuked his. They had made love last night and again she had failed to have her climax.
As the webs of gray paint lifted and the oppressive need to get the exact precise shade dawned upon him as unreal, a color from childhood infiltrated his eyes. The air of his bedroom was tinted blue. The ceiling looked waxy. The very sheen on the wallpaper declared: snow. He remembered that it had begun to spit late yesterday afternoon and was streaming in glittering parallels through the streetlamp halo when, an hour earlier than usual, they went to bed.
A car passed, its chains chunking. Farther away, a stuck tire whined. The bedside clock, whose glassy face gleamed as if polished by the excitement in the air, said six-fifty-five. The windowpanes were decorated with those concave little dunes that Mark had often counterfeited in cotton. By profession he was a window decorator, a display man, for a department store in a city fifteen miles away. He eased from the bed and saw that the storm was over: a few final dry flakes, shaken loose by an afterthought in the top twigs of the elm, drifted zigzag down to add their particles to the white weight that had transformed the town—bewigged roofs, bearded clapboards, Christmas-card evergreens, a Stop sign like a frosted lollipop—into one huge display.
The steeple of the Congregational church, painted white, looked spotlit against the heavy grayness that was fading northward into New Hampshire, having done its work here. Over a foot, he guessed. On the street below their windows the plows had been busy; perhaps it had been their all-night struggle that had made his dreams so grating. Scraped streaks of asphalt showed through, and elsewhere the crust had been rutted and beaten into a gloss by the early traffic. So the roads were all right; he could get to work if he could get the car out of the driveway.
Now, at seven, the town fire horn blew the five spaced blasts that signalled the cancellation of school for the day—a noise that blanketed the air for miles around. Mark’s wife opened her eyes in alarm, and then rel
axed. They had not been married long and had no children. “What fun,” she said. “A real storm. I’ll make waffles.”
“Don’t be too ambitious,” he said, sounding more sour than he had meant to.
“I want to,” she insisted. “Anyway, the bacon’s been in the fridge for weeks and we ought to use it up.”
She wanted to make a holiday of it. And she wanted, he thought, to bury the aftertaste of last night. He showered and dressed and went out to rescue his car, which was new. Last evening, after watching the forecast on television, he had prudently reparked it closer to the road, its nose pointed outward. No garage had come with this big old house they had recently bought. Their driveway curved in from Hillcrest Road at the back of the yard. The plows had heaped a ridge of already dirty, lumpy snow between his bumper and the cleared street. The ridge came up to his hips, but he imagined that, with the momentum his rear tires could gather on the bare patch beneath the car body, he could push through. Snow is, after all, next to nothing; Mark pictured those airy six-sided crystals so commonly employed as a decorative motif in his trade.
But, getting in behind the steering wheel, he found himself in a tomb. All the windows were sealed by snow. The motor turned over readily and this was a relief. As the motor idled, he staggered around the automobile, clearing the windows with the combination brush and scraper the car dealer had given him. When he cleared the windshield, the wipers shocked him by springing to life and happily flapping. He had left them turned on last night. He got back in behind the wheel and turned them off. Through the cleared windshield, the sky above his neighbor’s rooftop was enamelled a solid blue. The chimney smoked a paler blue, and a host of small brown birds scuffled and settled for warmth in the dark bare patch in its lee. His neighbor herself, a woman wearing a checkered apron, came out of the front door and began banging a broom around on her porch. She saw Mark through the windshield and waved; he grudgingly waved back. She was middle-aged, lacked a husband, wore her lipstick too thick, and seemed a bit too willing to be friendly to this young couple new in the neighborhood.
Mark put the car into first gear. Snow had blown in beneath the sides of the automobile, so the momentum he had hoped to achieve was sluggish in coming. Though his front tires broke through the ridge, the underside dragged and the back tires slithered to a stop in the shallow gutter that ran down the side of Hillcrest Road. He tried reverse. The rear of the car lifted a fraction and then sagged sideways, the wheels spinning in a void. He returned to first gear, and touched the accelerator lightly, and gained for his tact only a little more of that sickening sideways slipping. He tried reverse again and this time there was no motion at all; it was as if he were trying to turn a doorknob with soapy hands. An outraged sense of injustice, of being asked to do too much, swept over him. “Fuck,” he said. He had messed up again. He tried to push open the door, discovered that snow blocked it, shoved savagely, and opened a gap he could worm through backwards. Stepping out, he took an icy shock of snow into his loose galosh.
His neighbor across the street called, “Good morning!” The sound, it seemed, made a strip of snow fall from a telephone wire.
“Isn’t it lovely?” were her next words.
“Sure is,” was his answer. His voice sounded high, with a croak in it.
Her painted lips moved, but the words “If you’re young” came to him faint and late, as if, because of some warping aftereffect of the storm, sound crossed the street from her side against the grain.
Mark slogged down through his back yard, treading in his own footsteps to minimize his desecration of the virgin snow. The bushes were bowed and splayed like bridesmaids overwhelmed by flowers. Chickadee feet had crosshatched the snow under the feeder. The kitchen air struck his face with its warmth and the smells of simmering bacon and burning waffle mix. He told his wife, “I got the damn thing stuck. Get out of your nightie and come help.”
She looked querulous and sallow in her drooping bathrobe. “Can’t we eat breakfast first? You’re going to be late anyway. Shouldn’t you be calling the store? Maybe it won’t be open today.”
“It’ll be open, and anyway even if it isn’t I should be there. Easter won’t wait.” The precise shade of gray he had been mixing in his dream perhaps belonged to some beaverboard cutouts of flowering trees he was preparing for windows of the new spring fashions.
“The schools are closed,” she pointed out.
“Well, let’s eat,” he conceded, but ate in his parka, to hurry her. As he swallowed the orange juice, the snow in his galosh slipped deeper down his ankle. Mark said, “If we’d bought that ranch house you were too damn sophisticated for, we’d have a garage and this wouldn’t happen. It takes years off the life of a car, to leave it parked in the open.”
“It’s smoking! Turn the little thing! On the left, the left!” She told him, “I don’t know why I bother to try to make you waffles; that iron your mother gave us has never worked. Never, never.”
“Well, it should. It’s not cheap.”
“It sticks. It’s awful. I hate it.”
“It was the best one she could find. It’s supposed to be self-greasing, or some damn thing, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t understand it. I never have. I was trying to make them to be nice to you.”
“Don’t get so upset. The waffles are terrific, actually.” But he ate them without tasting them, he was so anxious to return to the car and erase his error. If a plow were to come along, his car would be jutting into its path, evidence of ineptitude. Young husbands, young car-owners. He wondered if the woman across the street had been laughing at him, getting it stuck. Just that little ridge to push through. He had been so sure he could do it. “I don’t suppose,” he said, “this will cancel the damn church thing tonight.”
“Let’s not go,” she said, scraping the last batch into the garbage, poking the crusts from the waffle grid with a fork. “Why do we have to go?”
“Because,” Mark stated firmly. “These Reformeds, you know, are high-powered stuff. They’re very strict about things like the divinity of Christ.”
“Well, who isn’t? I mean, you either believe it or you don’t, I would think.”
He winced, feeling himself to blame. If he had given her a climax, she wouldn’t be so irreligious. “This is a wonderful breakfast,” he said. “How do you make the bacon so crisp?”
“You put it on a paper bag for a minute,” she said. “Did you really get the car stuck? Maybe you should call the man at the garage.”
“It just needs a little push,” he promised. “Come on, bundle up. It’ll be fun. Old Mrs. Whatsername across the street is out there with the birds, sweeping her porch. It’s beautiful.”
“I know it is,” she said. “I used to love snowstorms.”
“But not now, huh?” He stood and asked her, “Where’s the fucking shovel?”
She went upstairs, the belt of her sad bathrobe trailing, and he found the snow shovel in the basement. The furnace, whirring and stinking to itself, reminded him pleasantly that snow on the roof reduced the fuel bill. The old house needed insulation. Everything needed something. On his way out through the kitchen he noticed a steaming cup of coffee she had poured for him, like one of those little caches one explorer leaves behind for another. To appease her, he took two scalding swallows before heading out into the wilderness of his brilliant back yard.
By the time Mark’s wife joined him, looking childish and fat and merry in her hood and mittens and ski leggings and fur-topped boots, he had shovelled away as much of the snow underneath and around the car as he could reach. The woman across the street had gone back into her house, the birds on her roof had flown away, and a yellow town truck had come down Hillcrest Road scattering sand. He had leaned on the shovel and waved at the men on the back as if they were all comrades battling together in a cheerful war.
She asked, “Do you want me to steer?”
“No, you push. It’ll just take a tiny push now. I’ll drive, b
ecause I know how to rock it.” He stationed her at the rear right corner of the car, where there happened to be a drift that came up over her knees. He felt her make the silent effort of not complaining. “The thing is,” he told her, “to keep it from sloughing sideways.”
“Sluing,” she said.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “keep it from doing that.”
But slue was just what it did; though he rammed the gearshift back and forth between first and reverse, the effect of all that rocking was—he could feel it—to work the right rear tire deeper into the little slippery socket on the downhill side. He assumed she was pushing, but he couldn’t see her in the mirror and he couldn’t feel her.
His stomach ached, with frustration and maple syrup. He got out of the car. His wife’s face was pink, exhilarated. Her hood was back and her hair had come undone. “You’re closer than you think,” she said. “Where’s the shovel?” She dabbled with it around the stuck tire, doing no good that he could see.
“It’s that damn little gutter,” he said, impotently itching to grab the shovel from her. “In the summer you’re not even conscious of its being there.”
She thrust the shovel into a mound so it stood upright and told him, “Sweetheart, now you push. You’re stronger than I am.”
Grudgingly, he felt flattered. “All right. We’ll try it. Now, with the accelerator—don’t gun it. You just dig yourself deeper with the spinning tires.”
“That’s what you were doing.”
“That’s because you weren’t pushing hard enough. And steer for the middle of the street, and rock it back and forth gently, back and forth; and don’t panic.”
As she listened to these instructions, a dimple beside the corner of her mouth kept appearing and disappearing. She got into the driver’s seat. A little shower of snow, loosened by the climbing sun, fell rustling through a nearby tree, and the woman across the street came onto her porch without the broom, plainly intending to watch. Her lipstick at this distance was like one of those identifying spots of color on birds.