by John Updike
Other games are introduced, other feats are performed. Andy Tyler, it turns out, slim and flexible as he is, can hold a broom in both hands and jump over it without letting go. He can then, the broom now held behind him, reverse the trick, hopping up like a handkerchief pulled through a ring. Others try, and kick the broom to the floor with a smack, or else themselves fall to the floor like misfired cannon balls. Ralph Tremayne demonstrates his ability to set a coin on his uplifted elbow and with the same hand grab it in midair. He can even do it with a small stack of quarters. Now coins are flying all over the room, and scatter into the corners. Ralph, encouraged, revives an old drill from his college football years; you squat, he eagerly explains, and fall backwards, and push off with your hands at your shoulders so that you land back on your feet. Every time he tries it, Marge’s collection of stippled milk glass on the mantel trembles, and Ralph, after a tantalizing, teetering moment of near-success, drops with a plaster-cracking thud onto his back. Others also fail. Josh, amid much noisy skepticism, gets up off the sofa and succeeds at his first try. He startles himself, too. He used to be good at gym, a talent he had thought unusable in real life. In the aftermath of his exertion the roomful of people lurches slightly, like the first hesitant movement of a carrousel when all the rides are sold.
Linda Tyler introduces a contest whereby a box of matches is set on the floor a forearm’s length from the kneeling person’s knees. She demonstrates. Then, her hands clasped behind her, she explains that she will attempt to knock the matchbox over with her nose. She does this easily. But when Bill Maloney tries, he falls forward onto his thin-skinned moonface. Even Lee’s stubborn determination fails; his nose, grimace though he will, comes up a millimeter short. Bernadette, however, performs the trick without effort, and Deborah also. There is something affecting in the position of abasement the women assume on the floor, their hair falling forward, their hands behind them like a manacled slave’s, their hips broad and round in the crouching position, their feet—bare or in little ballerina slippers—soles up beneath their hips. It’s all in the hips, Linda explains, patting her nicely convex own: weight distribution. Almost no man can knock the matchbox over, and almost every woman can. Even Ruth, long and lanky as she is, condescending to try it, illustrates this sexist truth: though there is a precarious moment of balance striven for, the matchbox falls. Everybody cheers, and Dorothea, put to sleep in Marge’s bedroom, cries at the sudden loud noise.
And then there is leg wrestling, man against man and man against woman, if the woman is wearing slacks. How strangely sweet and clarifying it is to be lying hip to hip, face to feet, with someone of the opposite sex while the circle of excited faces above counts, “One! Two! Three!” On the count of three, the inside legs, lifted on each count, are joined and a brief struggle ensues, brief as the mating of animals, and ends with a moment’s exhausted repose side by side. And then there are ways in which a woman can lift a man, by standing back to back and hooking arms at the elbows, and ways in which two people, holding tight to each other’s ankles, can somersault the length of a carpet. There seems no end to what bodies can do, but at last Bill Maloney complains that if he has another drink he will fall down and why the hell isn’t there any food?
The Englehardts remember the beef casserole they were going to heat. Milly Tremayne, fortunately, with the help of Fritz Tyler, Becky Neusner, Betsey Englehardt, and Mark Maloney, has got the meal started in the oven and fed the younger, ravenous children on baloney sandwiches, chili, and tuna salad left over from other meals. The television set has been rescued from the living room and plugged in upstairs, its rabbit ears augmented with Reynolds Wrap that the Neusner twins, who are clever about such things, took from a kitchen drawer. The children also have fed the three dogs and two cats, even though, unbeknownst to all except the animals (who didn’t tell), Marge had fed them earlier. She disappeared into her bedroom when little Dorothea began to cry and never, come to think of it, returned. Worn out with their drinking and wrestling, the grownups in sudden spurts of familial conscience now scold the children for being so addicted to television (some dreadful car-chase thing, totally unsuitable) and pack them into their bunk beds and cots and sleeping bags.
Dinner, served at ten o’clock, feels anticlimactic; angels of awkward silence keep passing overhead, and Linda Tyler, quite prettily, keeps yawning, showing the velvety red lining of her mouth, her tense tongue, the horseshoe arc of her lower teeth. Deborah Neusner is sure she has broken her toe; she reinjured it when the corduroy armchair tipped over while she was trying to do a headstand on it. Ruth Englehardt says, “There’s a hospital in Barre,” which might mean that they should drive her to it, or that it is too far to drive anyone to, or that Deborah is being ridiculous to think she has a broken toe. Ruth has not been blind to the frequency with which, in the night’s tumbling, Deborah and Lee bumped or rubbed against each other. Bernadette Maloney says she just can’t keep her eyes open another minute; it must be the Vermont air.
Only one table for bridge can be mustered. Bill and Lee are keen to play, and it seems Ruth might be willing but that something during the evening has offended her—perhaps being the last woman invited to knock the matchbox over, perhaps Marge’s somehow taking over little Dorothea, perhaps feeling that as the mother of a child much younger than anyone else’s she is not as free as they, as frivolous—and she says no, she thinks she’ll put a load of dishes into the washer and then go to bed. Bernadette and Linda help her. Even Andy Tyler makes a move for the kitchen, his slim hands lifted as if to pat something agreeably yielding, but the other men coarsely, in voices that grind together like gears and gravel, insist he play bridge with them. Ralph, who at the dinner table, without warning, while plucking at his mustache, seemed to turn green and wiggly like the elephant king in Babar, has disappeared into the dismal room, beyond the kitchen, where he slept last night. Ruth’s helpers at the dishwasher have taken from her the cue that the time has come in the weekend to say no, and they, at first coquettishly and then quite firmly, resist the men’s importunities to make the fourth. This leaves Deborah, who has been sitting on the living-room floor sorrowfully inspecting her bare foot. Her feet and legs have a certain chunkiness, a bit like that of children; the mismatch of her doughy, low-waisted figure with the fineness of her face—the tapering long chin, the moist brown eyes, the pensive dents at the corners of her mouth, a hint of haughtiness in the high bridge of her nose—forms the secret of her charm, her vulnerability. She says that with the pain in her toe she wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway, so why not? The men cheer. She turns and explains to someone behind her, rolling her eyes so the whites seem to leap from a Biblical tableau, “Sweetie, these men are crazy to have me play bridge with them!”
But Josh is no longer standing there, solicitously. He has crept upstairs. Fleeing the scene of last night’s horror, so bone-weary he seems to be floating, he crosses the hall in his pajamas and looks into the girls’ dormitory, where Deborah had said there was an extra bunk. All four beds are empty; he tries to imagine which one his wife sleeps in and, silent and light as last night’s cat, climbs into the bunk above it. A low-watt lightbulb under a brown shade patterned in pinholes is burning across the room; he pulls the covers over his head and wishes himself invisible and very small. There is a soft sound around him, distinct from the conversation and scraping of chairs downstairs. A sound with its own life, with subtle pauses and renewals and changes of mind. Of course. Rain. Those huge clouds this afternoon.
He is not conscious of falling asleep. He is awakened by some small noise, a delicate alteration, in the room. He opens one eye, frightened that if he opens two he will be ousted from this haven. Linda Tyler has entered, in a white nightgown. Her shadowy nipples tap the cloth from within. Her entire slender body appears angelic, lifted at all its points by a lightness that leaves her preoccupied face behind, sullen and even ugly, unaware of being watched. This impassive sad face looms close to his eye, and vanishes. She has put herself into t
he bunk beneath him. The lamp with its bright pinholes has been switched off. Josh can just barely make out across the room, by the hall light that slides itself like a huge yellow letter under the door, that Bernadette Maloney, with her splash of black hair, is asleep in the lower bunk and some other woman, unseeable, in the top. The rain continues its purring, its caressing of the roof shingles, its leisurely debate with itself, drowning out the gentle breathing of the women. This is lovely. This is bliss.
When Monday morning arrives, everyone is irritable, though the rain has stopped. Only Josh, it would seem, slept well. Evidently, Marge emerged from her bedroom when Ruth, after kibitzing at bridge for an hour, went in, to transfer Dorothea to the living room, and Marge suggested to Deborah that she switch beds with her, so the other women wouldn’t be disturbed when the bridge at last was over. Also, there was something mysterious about her not being there in case Ralph “got ideas.” So Marge herself must have been the unseeable woman in the other top bunk. The bridge had lasted until three. Deborah has taken so much aspirin her stomach burns and she got hardly an hour’s worth of sleep, in Marge’s bed, but this morning she does doubt that the toe is actually broken. If it was broken, she couldn’t take a step; she demonstrates, on the kitchen floor, some limping strides, and Josh thinks of how lightly Linda moved into his vision last night, her breasts uplifted behind their veil, and how he slept all night with her beneath him, awakening once or twice with an erection but listening to the rain intermingled with the women’s gentle breathing and sinking with his steely burden deep into sweet sleep again.
He volunteers, so full of energy, to go out and split some more wood. Ralph, who looks only half sick today, but with a curious pinkness around his eyes as if he were wearing his old rosy ski goggles, says one of the boys broke off the maul, up at the neck, by swinging and missing the wedge. The boy, unnamed, is Matthew Maloney, and Mark and Mary were leaders in this morning’s plot to make French toast for the children’s breakfast, which has left everything in the kitchen sticky with syrup. So the Maloneys as a family are in bad odor, and Bill and Bernadette go out on the porch to fight about something—his staying up till three, perhaps, or her failure to supervise the making of the French toast.
She has been gossiping, actually, over coffee in the living room with Andy Tyler. As the weekend wears on the sex distinctions wear down, as limestone statues turn androgynous in the weather. Bill’s drinking, Bernadette confided to Andy, really has passed well beyond the social stage, and she is afraid it’s beginning to hurt him at work. As for herself, as soon as Teresa hits kindergarten, she’s going back to nursing and complete her R.N.; once you have your cap, you’re ready for anything. A woman has to think that way these days, no matter what the Church says—these ridiculous old men, who have never known love or had families, telling us how to behave. Seeing her wince as she moved her head for emphasis, Andy offered to massage her neck, and she let him, not stretching out on the sofa—that would have been too much, at least at this stage—but perching on the edge of the corduroy armchair so he could get at her shoulder muscles with his thumbs. She groaned, “That feels so good. It’s sleeping with a strange pillow does me in every time. My doctor says I have a very delicate cervical area. Up top, of course.”
Perhaps this massage is what she and Bill were fighting about. It hasn’t been a very good weekend for Bernadette, what with Deborah and Ruth between them getting such a lock on Lee. The Maloneys, at any rate, are the first to pack up and leave, though it takes them all morning. They have all sorts of yard work at home to do, and they want to beat that terrible rush, it happens every Columbus Day, on 89 and 93, especially at the Hooksett tollbooth. The Neusners wave goodbye from the porch and wonder if they, too, shouldn’t be thinking about going. They are tender with each other, each having endured a night without sleep, and each having fallen more deeply in love with a person outside the marriage—with Lee, with Linda. Also, the twins have a Cub Scout party in Newton they had hoped to get to. The father of one of the pack leaders knows a linebacker for the Patriots and he’s supposed to come and give the kids an inspirational message.
As for Marge and Ralph, they seem pleased to have gotten through the weekend with no more showing than did. They beg the Englehardts and Tylers not to go. The six of them, the hard core, sit around in the living room lunching on leftovers and finishing a bottle of red wine found at the back of the refrigerator. There are few leftovers, and the supply of wood also appears to have been exhausted, for what is in the fireplace smokes and fails to catch, in spite of repeated kindlings by muttering, grunting Ralph. Even the cigar in the center of his face has gone out. Every motion he makes, up or down, seems to give him pain: old football injuries. “Y-you young fellas, w-w-wait till you get to be my age,” he says to Andy and Lee, though he is only a year or two older.
They are sleepily at ease, these six, the two other couples gone. They sit sprawled in a kind of spiritual deshabille, open to inspection, their dismissive remarks about the Maloneys and Neusners desultory and not unfond, their inventory of one another’s failings and wounds mostly silent, an unspoken ticking-off. “I asked Bill how Mass had been,” Lee complains, “and he nearly bit my head off.” Andy contributes, “Bernadette gave me quite an earful, how she hates the Church. I think she’s fixing to bust out of the whole shmeer.” “And oh my goodness, I don’t mean to be the complaining type,” Ruth says, “but wasn’t our little Debbie absolutely insufferable, a cat in with the catnip with all that bridge?” “They’re very quick learners,” Lee says, leaving who “they” are up in the air, and trusting Andy to keep silent about how little time he, Lee, spent in the boys’ dormitory last night. His mild big blue eyes are still a baby’s beneath his bald dome; Ruth’s frizzy crown of honey-blond hair seems avid, as do her sharp nose and flexible quick mouth and the pockets of emaciated shadow beneath her cheekbones. She and Andy do most of the talking, Lee and Marge most of the appreciative laughing. Marge’s good humor is striking; as the pressure of being a hostess lifts, she expands, and in her loose-hanging man’s shirt distinctly shows middle-aged spread, the fleshly generosity of a beauty who has fulfilled her duties and knows herself to be, whatever shape the future will bring, basically beautiful. Her headband today is turquoise. Ralph squints at her and appears both puzzled and wise, a bloodshot old owl who can still swoop down from a branch and carry off in his claws a piping, furry treasure.
After an hour and a half of this, this complacent torpor, Linda can’t stand it. She jumps up and announces she is going on another leaf walk. Do any of the littles want to go with her? Surprisingly, a few do, again all girls—Christine, Audrey, and Betsey. Also, Wolf comes; he misses Ginger and Toby. They file diagonally across the trampled softball field, leaving the barn behind them on the right, into the long strip of woods along the creek, which has grown up thick since the remote days when all this difficult land was cleared for farming. Bits of old stone wall and tumbled-in cellar holes hide in the woods. The sound of the cars on the road can barely be heard.
Linda gestures up and around her. “The bright colors we’ve all come all the way up here to admire are, above all, the turning leaves of the maple tree, especially the sugar maple, from which we get—?”
“Maple syrup,” says Christine Tremayne, who knows she is homely, but will make up for it in life by being dutiful.
“But all the trees contribute, from the stately beech, which you can recognize by its smooth gray bark, and the birch family, of which you especially know the white, or paper, birch, from which the Indians used to make—?”
“Canoes,” says Betsey Englehardt. She misses the Neusner twins, even though Zebulon did take the rope quoits and throw them down the well so nobody could play the game anymore. When she cried about it, her father explained to her at length why Jewish children are spoiled.
“The last trees to let go of their leaves are the oaks,” Linda tells the children. She picks up an oak leaf and holds it out to impress upon them its lobed, d
eeply indented shape. “Even in the winter snows, the oak will cling to its old brown leaves. The first tree to let go tends to be another giant of the forest—the ash. Its leaves, the only opposite feather-compound leaves in the American forest, turn an unusual purplish-blue color, unlike anything else, and then suddenly, one day, are gone. Girls, look up and around you. Those who went walking with me Saturday, do you notice any difference?”
“More sky,” says Audrey, her own daughter, who knows what answer she wants.
“That’s right,” Linda says, intensely grateful. “And yet, standing here, who can see a leaf fall?”
No one speaks. A minute passes. No leaf falls.
“Oh, if we stood here long enough,” Linda concedes, “or if there were a wind, or a hard rain like we had last night; but normally it happens unobserved, the moment when the root of the stem, where the bud once was, decides the time has come to let go. But it happens.” She looks upward and lifts her arms. The widened light falls upon her face and palms, and the little girls grow still, feeling threatened by something within the woman that she is pulling from the air, from the reds and golds trembling around them. “Nobody sees it happen, but it does. For suddenly, it seems, the woods are bare.”