by John Updike
The growing families visited back and forth; there was something concordant about the homes, though one was white clapboard set primly on watered, terraced lawn, and the other was redwood wedged into a hillside where fat little cactuses intricate as snowflakes flourished among studiously arranged rocks. Both houses were cheerful for children, offering back stairs and odd nooks and a certain sportive airiness. The Arnolds had a long sunroom with a Ping-Pong table and, above it on the second floor, a sleeping porch with a hammock. As soon as they could afford it, they crowded a composition tennis court into the space between the garage and the line fence, where the lawn had always been scruffy anyway and the vegetable garden had gone to weeds every July. The Herreras’ La Jolla house, which overlooked the fifteenth fairway of a golf course, shuffled the indoors and the outdoors with its sliding glass panels and cantilevered deck and its family-sized hot tub out on the deck.
Hank first saw his sister-in-law naked one warm evening in Christmas vacation when Susan let fall a large white towel behind her and slid her silent silhouette into this hot tub. Hank and his wife were already in, coping with the slithering, giggling bodies of their small children; so the moment passed almost unnoticed amid the family tumble. Almost. Susan was distinctly not Priscilla; their skins had aged differently on the two different coasts. Priscilla’s was dead pale this time of year, its summer tan long faded, whereas there was something thickened and delicately crinkled and permanently golden about Susan’s. With an accustomed motion she had eased her weight from her buttocks into the steaming wide circle of water. Her expression looked solemn, dented by shadow. Hank remembered the same resolute, unfocussed expression on Priscilla’s face in the days when she would grant him her little “parade” in the shadows of his narrow college room. Both sisters had brown eyes in deep sockets and noses that looked upturned, with long nostrils and sharp central dents in their upper lips. Both were wearing bangs that winter. Their heads and shoulders floated side by side. Susan’s breasts seemed the whiter for the contrast with her year-round bathing-suit tan.
“How much do you do this sort of thing?” Priscilla asked her twin, a touch nervously, glancing toward Hank.
“Oh, now and then, with people you know, usually. You get used to it—it’s a local custom. You sort of let yourself dissolve.”
Yet she, too, gave Hank an alert glance. He had already passed into dissolution, his vapor of double love one with the heat, the steam, the abundant dinner wine, the scent of the eucalyptus trees towering above the deck, the stars beyond them, the strangeness of this all being a few days before Christmas. Immersed, their bodies had become foreshortened stumps of flesh, comical blobs of mercury. Jeb appeared on the deck holding a naked baby—little Lucas—in one crooked arm and a fresh half-gallon of Gallo Chablis in the other. Early in his thirties, Jeb had a pendulous belly. He descended to them like a hairy Neptune; the tub overflowed. When the water calmed, his penis drifted under Hank’s eyes like a lead-colored fish swimming nowhere.
The families stopped travelling back and forth in complete units as the maturing children developed local attachments and summer jobs. The two oldest cousins, Karen and Rose, had been fast friends from the start, though there was no mistaking them for twins: Karen had become as washed-out and mild-faced a blonde as Hank’s mother (now dead), and Rose was so dark that boys on the street catcalled to her in Spanish. The two older boys, Henry and Gabriel, made a more awkward matchup, the one burdened with Hank’s allergies and a drowsy shyness all his own, and the other a macho little athlete with a wedge-shaped back and the unthinking cruelty of those whose bodies are perfectly connected to their wills. The girl and the boy that completed the sets, Jennifer and Lucas, claimed to detest each other, and, indeed, did squabble tediously, perhaps in defense against any notion that they would some day marry. The bigger the children became, the harder they pulled apart, and the more frayed the lines between their parents became. Once little Lucas became too big to hold in one arm and strike a pose with, Jeb’s interest began to wander away from families and family get-togethers. There were late-night long-distance calls between the sisters, and secrets kept from the children.
Susan suddenly had more gray hair than Priscilla. Hank felt touched by her, and drawn to her in a new fashion, when she would visit them for a few weeks in the summer without Jeb, with perhaps an inscrutable Rose and a resentful Lucas in tow. More than once, Hank met the L.A. red-eye at LaGuardia and was kissed at the gate as if he were Susan’s savior; there had been drunks on the plane, college kids, nobody could sleep, Lucas had insisted on watching a ghastly Jerry Lewis movie, Rose threw up over Nebraska somewhere, they had gone way north around some thunderheads, an old lech in an admiral’s uniform kept trying to buy her drinks at three in the morning, my God, never again. As Hank gently swung the car up the lush green curves of the Merritt Parkway, Susan nodded into sleep, and seemed his wife. Priscilla’s skin, too, now sagged in those defenseless puckers when she slept.
As a guest in their home, Susan slept on the upstairs porch. The swish of cars headed toward the railroad station, and the birds—so much more aggressive, she said, than those on the West Coast—awakened her too early; and then at night the Arnolds took her to too many parties. “How do you stand it?” she would ask her twin.
“Oh, it gets to be a habit. Try taking a nap in the afternoon. That’s what I do.”
“Jeb and I hardly go out at all anymore. We decided other people weren’t helping our marriage.” This was a clue, and far from the only one. There was a hungry boniness to her figure now. Like a sick person willing to try any cure, Susan drank only herbal tea—no caffeine, no alcohol—and ate as little meat as she politely could. Whereas Priscilla, who had once appeared so distinctly a centimeter smaller, now was relatively hefty. Broad of shoulder and hip, she moved through parties with a certain roll, a practiced cruiser who knew where the ports were—the confiding women and the unhappy men and the bar table in the corner. Sometimes after midnight Hank watched her undress in their bedroom and thought of all the Martinis and Manhattans, the cream-cheesed celery sticks and bacon-wrapped chicken livers that had gone into those impressive haunches and upper arms.
“Other people don’t help it,” was Priscilla’s answer to Susan. “But they might do something for you. You, a woman. Aren’t you a woman, or are you only a part of a marriage?” She had never forgiven him, Hank feared, for that unideal wedding night.
Poor Susan seemed a vision of chastity whom they would discover each morning at the breakfast table, frazzled after another night’s poor sleep, her hair drooping onto the lapels of a borrowed bathrobe, her ascetic breakfast of grapefruit and granola long eaten, the Times scattered about her in pieces read with a desperate thoroughness. Hank wanted to urge eggs and waffles upon her, and to make up good news to counteract the bad news that had been turning her hair gray. Priscilla knew what it was, but was no good at explaining. “Jeb’s a bastard,” she would say simply in their bedroom. “He always was. My parents knew it, but what could they do? She had to get married, once I did. And all men are bastards, more or less.”
“My, you’ve gotten tough. He was always very dear with the kids, I thought. At least when they were little. And he builds those nice shingled rental villages, with solar panels and wading pools.”
“Not so much anymore he doesn’t,” she said. As she pivoted on their plush carpet, yellow calluses showed at her heels.
“What do you mean?”
“Ask her, if you’re so interested.”
But he never could. He could no more have asked Susan to confide her private life than he could have tiptoed onto the sleeping porch and looked down at—what he held so clearly in his mind—his wife’s very face, transposed into another, chastened existence, fragilely asleep in this alien house, this alien climate and time zone. So magical a stranger might awake under the pressure of his regard. He would have trespassed. He would have spoiled something he was saving.
The little 1975 recession gave
Jeb’s tottering, overextended business the last push it needed; everything coming undone at once, the Herreras began to divorce amid the liquidation. When Susan visited Hank and Priscilla in the bicentennial year, it was as a single woman, her thinness now whittled toward a point, a renewed availability. But not, of course, available to Hank; the collapse of one twin’s marriage made the other doubly precious.
As in other summers, Hank was touched by Susan’s zeal with the children, ushering as many as could be captured onto the train and into the city for a visit to the Museum of Natural History or to see the tall ships that beautiful hazy July day. Rose was not with her; the girl had drawn closer to her father in his distress, and was waitressing in a taco joint in downtown San Diego. And Karen, now stunning with her flaxen hair and pale moonface and lithe dancer’s body, was above everything except boys and ballet. One Saturday, while Priscilla stayed home, having contracted for a lunch at the club with one of those boozy women she called “girl friends,” Hank accompanied Susan on an excursion she had cooked up for the just barely willing Jennifer and Lucas, all the way to New Haven to see the Beinecke Library, with its translucent marble and the three marvellously simple Noguchis in their sunken well. Hank had not seen these wonders himself; they had come to Yale after his time. And he rather enjoyed these excursions with his sister-in-law; all that old tumble of family life had fallen to them to perpetuate. He let her drive his Mercedes and sat beside her, taking secret inventory of all the minute ways in which she differed from Priscilla—the slight extra sharpness to the thrust of her upper lip, the sea scallop of shallow wrinkles the sun had engraved at the corner of her eye, the hair or two more of bulk or wildness to her eyebrow on its crest of bone. The hair of her head, once shorter, then grayer, was now dyed too even a dark brown, with unnatural reddish lights. She turned to him for a second on a long straightaway. “You’ve never asked about me and Jeb,” she said.
“What was to ask? Things speak for themselves.”
“I loved that about you,” Susan pronounced. Her verb alarmed him; “love” was a word he associated with the embarrassing sermons of his youth. “It’s been a nightmare for years,” she went on, and he realized that she was offering to present herself in a new way to him, as more than a strange ghost behind a familiar mask. She was opening herself. But he, after nearly two decades of playing the good husband, had discovered affairs, and had fallen in love locally. The image of his mistress—she was one of Priscilla’s “girl friends”—rose up, her head tipped back, her lipstick smeared, and deafened him to the woman he was with; without hearing the words, he saw Susan’s mouth, that distinctive complicated mouth the sisters shared, making a pursy, careful expression, like a schoolteacher emphasizing a crucial point.
Lucas, in the back seat, was listening, and cried out, “Mom, stop bitching about Dad to Uncle Hank—you do it to everybody!”
Jennifer said, “Oh, listen to big man here, protecting his awful daddy,” and there was a thump, and the girl sobbed in spite of her scorn.
“You make me barf, you know that?” Lucas told her, his own voice shakily full of tears. “You’ve always been the most god-awful germ, no kidding.”
“Daddy,” Jennifer said, with something of womanly aloofness. “This little spic just broke my arm.”
The adult conversation was not resumed. A few days later, Priscilla drove her sister back to LaGuardia, to begin a new life. Susan was planning to take her half of what money was left when the La Jolla house was sold and move with the two younger children to the Bay area and study ceramics at Berkeley.
“I told her she’s crazy,” Priscilla said to Hank. “There’s nothing but gays in San Francisco.”
“Maybe she’s not as needful of male consolation as some.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You’re not above a little consolation yourself, from what I’ve been hearing.”
“Easy, easy. The kids are upstairs.”
“Karen isn’t upstairs; she’s in New York, letting that cradle robber she met at the club take her to the Alvin Ailey. Wake up. You know what your trouble has always been? You’re an only child. You never loved me, you just loved the idea of sneaking into a family. You loved my family, the idea of there being so many of us, rich and Episcopalian and all that.”
“I didn’t need the Episcopalian so much. I thought I was going to sneeze all through the wedding. Incense, I couldn’t believe it.”
“You poor little Baptist boy. You know what my father said at the time? I’ve never told you this.”
“Then don’t.”
“He said, ‘He’ll never fit in. He’s a redneck, Prissy.’ ”
“Wow. Did he really say ‘redneck’? And fit into what—the Saint Paul Order of the Moose? Gee, I always rather liked him, too. Especially early in the mornings, when you could catch him sober.”
“He despised you. But then Suzie picked Jeb, and he was so much worse.”
“That was lucky.”
“He made you look good, it’s a crazy fact.”
“Yes, and you make Suzie look good, so it evens out. Come on, let’s save this for midnight. Here comes Henry.”
But the boy, six feet tall suddenly, was wearing earphones plugged into a satchel-sized radio; on his way to the sunroom he gave his parents a glassy oblivious smile.
Any smugness the Arnolds may have felt in relation to the Herreras’ disasters lasted less than a year. An ingenious tax shelter that Hank had directed a number of clients into was ruled invalid by the IRS, and these clients suddenly owed the government hundreds of thousands of dollars, including tens of thousands in penalties. Though they had been duly cautioned and no criminal offense was charged, the firm could not keep him; his divorce soon followed. One of the men Priscilla had been seeing had freed himself from his own wife and was prepared to take her on; Hank wondered what Priscilla did now, all hundred and fifty pounds of her, that was worth the trouble. To think that he had started her off on the sexual road with those formalized, chaste “parades.”
She resettled with the children in Cos Cob. Having fouled his professional nest in the East, Hank accepted with gratitude the offer of a former colleague to join a firm in Los Angeles, as less than a junior partner. He had always been happy on their family visits to southern California and, though a one-bedroom condo in Westwood wasn’t a redwood house overlooking a fairway in La Jolla, old Mr. Hunter had been right: he fitted in better here. Southern California had a Baptist flavor that helped him heal. The people mostly came from small Midwestern towns, and there was a naïveté in even the sin—the naked acts in the bars and the painted little-girl hookers in jogging shorts along Hollywood Boulevard. The great stucco movie theatres of the Thirties had been given over to X-rated films; freckle-faced young couples watched while holding hands and eating popcorn. In this city where sex was a kind of official currency, Hank made up for the fun he had missed while catching the train and raising the children in Greenwich, and evened the score with his former wife. Los Angeles was like that earlier immersion, at the age of religious decision, which coincided with puberty; that bullying big hand had shoved him under and he had come up feeling, as well as breathless and indignant, cleansed and born-again.
One day downtown on the escalator from Figueroa Street up to the Bonaventure, he found himself riding behind a vivid black-haired girl whom he slowly recognized as his niece, Rose. He touched her bare shoulder and bought her a drink in the lobby lounge, amid all the noisy, curving pools. She was twenty-four years old now; he could hardly believe it, though Karen was the same age. She told him her father had a job as foreman for another builder and had bought himself a stinkpot and kept taking weekend runs into Mexico; his dope-snorting friends that kept putting a move on her drove her crazy, so she had split a while ago. Now she worked as a salesgirl in a failing imported-leather-goods shop in the underground Arco Plaza while her chances of becoming an actress became geometrically smaller with each passing year. These days, she explained, if you haven’t got your
face somewhere by the time you’re nineteen you’re finito. And indeed, Hank thought, her face was unsubtle for a career of pretense; framed by a poodle cut of tight black curls, it had too much of Jeb’s raw hopefulness, a shiny candor somehow coarse. Hank was excited by this disappointed young beauty, but women her age, with their round breasts and enormous pure eye whites, rather frightened him, like machines that are too new and expensive. He asked about her mother, and was given Susan’s address. “She’s doing real well,” Rose warned him.
An exchange of letters followed. Susan’s handwriting was a touch rounder than Priscilla’s, but with the same “g”s that looked like “s”s and “t”s that had lost their crossings, like hats blown off by the wind. One autumn Saturday, Hank flew up to the Bay area. Three hundred miles of coast were cloudless and the hills had put on their inflammable tawny summer coats, that golden color the Californian loves as a New Englander loves the scarlet of turning maples. Berkeley looked surprisingly like Cambridge, once you ascended out of Oakland’s slough: big homes built by a species of the middle class that had migrated elsewhere, and Xeroxed protest posters in many colors pasted to mailboxes and tacked to trees. Susan lived in the second-floor-back of a great yellow house that, but for its flaking paint and improvised outside stairways, reminded him of her ancestral home in Saint Paul. She had been watching for him, and they kissed, awkwardly, halfway up her access stairs.
The apartment was dominated by old photos of her children and by examples of her own ceramics—crusty, oddly lovely things, with a preponderance of turquoise and muddy orange in the glazes. She was even selling a few, at a shop a friend of hers ran in Sausalito. A female friend. And she taught part-time at a private elementary school. And still took classes—the other students called her Granny, but she loved them; their notions of what mattered were so utterly different from what ours were at that age. All this came out in a rapid voice, with a diffident stabbing of hands and a way of pushing her hair back from her ears as if to improve her hearing. Her manner implied that this was a slightly tiresome duty he had invented for them. He was an ex-relative, a page from the past. She was thinner than ever and had let her hair go back to gray, no longer just streaked but solidly gray, hanging down past the shoulders of a russet wool turtleneck sweater such as men wear in ads for Scotch whiskey. Hank had never seen Priscilla look anything like this. In tight, spattered jeans, and bony bare feet, Susan’s skinniness was exciting; he wanted to seize her before she dwindled away entirely.