by John Updike
Janice's brow wrinkles. "I don't quite see it, Nelson, as being anything but forced and awkward. Just because this dead slut wished this girl on us-"
"Mom, she's my sister. Listen. If she can't be a guest in this household, maybe the time has come for me to move out. Pru always said I should anyway, for my self-respect."
"She did? Pru said that?" Janice had imagined that she and her daughter-in-law had shared the house pretty well, all those years after Harry died and they agreed to sell the Penn Park house Harry had loved. She had been off most of the day doing real estate, and Teresa had had to be home with the children and naturally had cooked the meals and did housework and some light outdoor work. It was only right, instead of paying rent. After Ronnie came into the household, it was never so easy. There were currents. Ronnie had his own ideas about how things should be done, in the kitchen and everywhere else. The way Thelma had always taken care of him, he was particular. Thelma spoiled men: it was a kind of malice, and lasted after her.
Poor Nelson. He has this bee in his bonnet-doing something for this girl nobody knows. It clutches at Janice's heart, to think that he always wanted more of a family than they could give him-a bigger, happier one. He had loved her parents because from them descended this sense he craved of a clan operating in the world, this big stucco house a fort of sorts. The boy had wanted her and Harry's happiness so. When they quarrelled even without much meaning it his little face would go white with worry like a bubble trying not to burst. And all this healing he still wants for everybody, it makes her heart gripe to think of how they must have hurt him.
"I don't know, Nelson." Janice yields. "Maybe at Thanksgiving. She'd get lost in the crowd."
"Mom, that's forever away."
"Close enough for us to get used to the idea. I'll have to approach Ronnie. I know he'll be dead set against it."
But when, that night or the next, in their bedroom, she describes to her husband Nelson's silly sad desire, and puts forth her Thanksgiving suggestion expecting it to be knocked aside, Ronnie says, his voice dragged into a more youthful, thuggish register, "Well, I guess it wouldn't kill us. I'd be interested to see how Ruth Leonard's daughter turned out."
He pronounces her name, which Janice always has trouble remembering, so easily; it brings home to her that Ronnie and this slut had been lovers, some weekend down at the Jersey Shore, back before Harry got to know her himself, which had always galled him, though Janice could never see that he had the right to mind. But Harry had been like that: he thought he had a lot of rights, just by being his wonderful self.
Chapter 3
From: Roy Angstrom [[email protected]]Sent: Friday, October 22, 1999 8:04 PMTo: [email protected]: Happy birthday jokes
Dad have a great party with whoever!!! Heres an oldie but new to me and it struck me as pretty droll. President Clinton was visiting Oklahoma City after the may 3rd tornado and a man whose house was demolished put up a sign: HEY BILL HOWS THIS FOR A BLOW JOB? The Secret Service made the man take it away. I guess this is a true story what do you think?
Nelson, sitting in the little upstairs front room staring at the computer screen, shifts in his swivel chair, pained. If this is the only way his son can communicate, it's better than nothing, but he wonders how much the kid knows about blow jobs. Though after this Lewinsky business even kindergarten kids know about it, it's right at the top of the news hour. Pru used to do it to him at first, especially before they got married, but as the marriage went on did it less and less, even when both were high on something or when he went down on her, her fuzzy little redhead's pussy, skimpy compared to, say, curly-haired Melanie's. One such time he got into position for her to reciprocate and she confessed outright that she hated the smell. What smell? he had said, feeling himself beginning to wilt. I wash.
You can't help it, she had said. It's a smell that won't wash off. It's kind of acidy. Anyway, I'm afraid you'll come in my mouth.
Why, honey? Why are you afraid? That's so nice, once in a while For you it is.
You used to like it.
I don't remember that. I just said it because I knew you wanted me to.
You lied to me?
People can get AIDS, you know, that way.
Well my God. If I have AIDS you'll get it anyway. How could I have AIDS? I haven't been with anybody but you for ages.
So you say. What about those coke whores, before you got clean?
Coke whores, there are no coke whores. There are just women who aren't as uptight as others, is all. It was true, back before he was clean, when he was a regular at the Laid-Back, the girls who hung around there looking for drugs and action liked to give blow jobs because it was a quick way to bring a guy off and less fuss and muss for them. They didn't even have to take off their pantyhose in the car. Their mouths did smell afterwards and when he was stoned he liked to kiss them even though they resisted and said he was sick, basically queer. Those girls for all their being whorish had very little imagination, very narrow parameters. If I was going to get AIDS it would have showed up by now.
Not necessarily. I read where the virus can be dormant for fifteen years. It hides around the base of the spine.
Well my God. And this is supposed to be a marriage.
You can fuck me though.
Now there's a rational woman for you. What about AIDS?
Nelson, I said you can fuck me. Take it or leave it.
I'll leave it. I've lost interest.
So you have. What a baby.
And it was lovely to have a woman's head down there, all that hair under your hands, the tips of her ears and back of her neck, you can't see her face but her shoulders tense up when you come, and some have said it excited them too, but according to Pru they were lying because they wanted something else. Women lie the way blacks lie. If you're a slave face telling the truth gets you very little. They forget how. He sees that all the time at the Center. Only for the powers that be does knowing things pay off. Only they can afford to know the truth. He doesn't like Roy knowing what a blow job is. The boy is fourteen, masturbation should be enough. The lightness of it, the newness, the feeling of leaning up against a tall white closed door, the sensation Nelson used to get of standing on his head for a second, the tiny muscles going into spasm: the sensation moves you into another world, up and out, chilly like ice cream, private like thought, a metallic taste in the mouth afterwards, the taste of having been somewhere different. But he wants the images in the boy's head to be innocent, bridal, the girl who sits next to him in an Ohio classroom lying under him all lace and crushed flowers in his mind as he comes in his bed's safety. Not this juvenile filth off the Internet. Who would have thought the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?
And Dad heres another one. A guys wife on there honeymoon begs off making love and she- goes to sleep and gets up at 3am to get a glass of water and sees hes still awake and asks why. He says his dick is so hard their isnt enough skin left to close his eyes with.
This is more like it, Nelson supposes. Straight married sex, at least. Judy has gone off the deep end with boys, he doesn't know when she lost her virginity, it must have been in Pennsylvania, when they all still lived in this house, Judy in the front bedroom, there were some pretty late dates, he remembers, coming in that sticky front door, whose pop woke him up, footsteps slithering up the stairs, when she was just sixteen, seventeen, and still had her freckles. Pru would know. Pru would't talk about it with him. Well why not? she asked back one time. Your Aunt Mim's a tart, all you Angstroms are like rabbits.
And she herself, with Dad, in this very room he sat in now, his face lit by a computer screen. He could never quite wrap his mind around it. Which was healthy. There is such a thing as healthy denial. Children use it to keep the image of the caregiver benign despite abuse. Pru when he got after her about it would say she didn't understand it either. It just happened, Nelson. Things just happen. Not everyth
ing happens for some deep reason, like you were taught at social work school.
Oh, is that what I was taught?
Yes, and to keep asking questions, instead of trying to give answers.
I should have answers? What's your question?
Why do you keep bugging me about what happened once between me and your father, when we were both half out of our minds, me with your druggy stunts and him with his poor beat-up heart? He's dead, Nelson, your father is dead, he and I won't do anything again even if we wanted to. Which we don't. Didn't.
Nelson looks out across Joseph Street at the neighbor's second-story windows, hoping to see the woman of the house undressed. There are three windows, the middle one holding a plastic pumpkin with a light bulb in it, the two flanking it dim-lit, the one on the right probably a hall landing but the others giving on the bedroom, which he guesses is a child's bedroom. That semidetached house for years was occupied by an elderly couple who lived toward the back of it, in the kitchen and TV den, but this young couple with their two little children have different living arrangements and once in a while you see the wife moving around in her bathrobe or underwear, black bikini pants and two beige cups as snug as skin, the kind of bra advertised in the Brewer Standard illustrated by models, names like Secret Shaper, Seamless Charmer, Lace 'n Smooth, Nearly Nude. Pru used to wear bikini underpants but as her bottom broadened she went in for old-lady white cotton panties with enough fabric for a truck-driver's T-shirt. You can fuck me, though. He needs a woman. Doing a job and coming back to his mother and stepfather and TV comedies made for twentysomethings in New York City isn't a life. He sleeps badly: not enough skin left to close his eyes. But at his age as of today forty-three he would feel silly in single bars or the party circuit, if he could find it. The action that used to exist at the Laid-Back up at Ninth and Weiser was ages ago-other lifestyles, other drugs in fashion. Cold War worries, Japan worries. With the century ending all this is sinking into the history books. And he's afraid getting back into circulation might get him back into coke, or Ecstasy if that's the thing, or the ever-cheaper heroin; it's so easy to slip back when you don't feel you have much to lose. Talking to the substance abusers at Fresh Start, he can't much argue when they argue for it. Happiness is feeling happy. Maybe it shortens your life but when you're dead what's the diff? Living to the next hit, the next scrounged blow-out, gives their lives a point. Being clean exposes you to life's having no point.
Things are pretty cool here Dad. 10th grade is organised not much differnt than the 9th except that you are a sophmore and get more respect then lowley freshmen. There are a lot of American African students at North High but you can get along if you mind your own busness and don't make slurs and the courses are pretty easy. First quarter I got four As and a B in biology but the biology teacher Mr. Pedersen says he knows I can do even better.
Judy is driving mom crazy out most nights and some mornings her bed not even slept in but she is thinking of signing up for training to become a flight attendent for USAirways, there hub is in Pittsburg. Mom is working longer hours for this lawyer Mr Gekoppolos (spelling close) downtown on Buchtel Ave but says to tell you we still need your check and its late.
Thats pretty much it for now Dad I want to play one game of TOMB RAIDERS and then study hard for a biology quizz. TTFN (ta ta for now) luv u:-) ROY.
Nelson's eyes sting, reading this in the tiny print the Windows 98 gives you. Even the print and tiny icons are made for very young eyes. The boy is smart, if the grown-ups over him don't fuck up his head. And Judy, maybe she knows what she's doing. She has evidently no fear of flying, though doesn't like the idea of his daughter in the sky all the time. Dad used to be nervous about flying too.
From: Dad [[email protected]]Sent: Sunday, October 24, 1999 9:31 PMTo: [email protected]: paternal affection
Roy-Great grades, congratulations. Keep it up. Great jokes, though don't they ever have any clean ones? Sex can be funny but it's also damn serious, about the most serious thing we do. It's good Judy is meeting lots of people but tell your sister not to cheapen herself. Other people tend to take us at the valuation we put on ourselves and a woman is always more vulnerable to a bad opinion. I'm glad she is thinking of a vocation even if it's not the one I would have chosen for her. Our family has been pretty earthbound up to now. Tell your mother I will get the check off but Ronnie thinks I should be contributing more to the household expenses since he is retired and on his pension plan and Social Security, meanwhile the cost of everything including real estate taxes goes up.
The big news here, in my mind at least, is that you have an aunt none of us knew about-a girl your grandfather had by another woman when I was a tiny child. Her name is Annabelle Byer. Nobody knew about her until she showed up some weeks ago and told her story to your grandmother. I took her out to lunch last month and we got along very well. We talked as if we had known each other all our lives. She is a nurse just like I work in mental health-how's that for a coincidence? Grandma is going to have her here for Thanksgiving and maybe you can meet her when your mother brings you east for Christmas. I can hardly wait to see you all. August in the Poconos was nice but it was too long ago.
Everybody's health here is good. The drought this summer has been washed away by a lot of rain this fall but it's too late for the farmers. The only thing close to a joke that I've heard is from one of the black clients at the Center, who has a lot of "Yo momma's so fat" jokes. The only ones I can remember are: She can sell shade, she puts mayonnaise on aspirin, and when she goes to the movies she sits next to everybody. We have a very fat lady at the Center and he never tells these jokes around her.
I am very proud of you, Roy, and love you very much. Dad.
P.S.: Notice how when I use a contraction, I put in an apostrophe. Haven't they taught you that yet at school? Also, "there" is a location and "their" is a possessive pronoun.
He pushes the SEND key without rereading it. He sounds like the kind of prissy father he never had but didn't especially want, either. His father used to say, Whenever anybody tells me what to do, my instinct is to do the exact opposite. But order and organization must be kept in the world. Ties of affection must be expressed, or nothing holds. Nelson shuts down the computer, gingerly. Sometimes the machine for no reason freezes, with a rebuking message: This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. The only glow from across the street now is the electric pumpkin grin. The time he did see the woman across the street in her underwear, her stomach looked stark white, and wonderfully long, dented by its belly button, deep like the doctors do them now.
"Aunt Mim? It's Nelson. Your nephew."
"I know you're my nephew, doll-how many others you think I got? Sweetie, what's up? How's life in the old country?"
Her voice is dry and crackled, parched by cigarettes like the desert from the sun, but nice, with family warmth rushing into its old veins at what she takes to be an emergency. Otherwise, why would he be calling? She is six years younger than Dad so she would be sixty now, not old for some professions but in hers ancient, long out of it, even with face-lifts and ass-tucks and the marvels of modern dentistry. Nelson wonders when she turned her last trick. You get the occasional sex-worker at the Center and some of them keep on with a few old customers almost like a marriage. Now, without her brother or her parents to link her to the region, Aunt Mim never comes back. The last time was Dad's funeral. There wasn't a body, just a square, lidded urn made of a composition substance like pressed bran flakes. Mom had him cremated down in Florida because it was easiest transportationwise. She and Nelson, taking turns at the wheel, brought him back north in the slate-gray Celica in which he had made his last run. Pru had flown down with the kids the day after he and Mom had caught a night flight from Philly but by the time she landed Dad was already gone. Gone and his body, six foot three and two hundred fifty-five pounds, whipped from the hospital to the crematorium. Pru was in disgrace because of having confessed, having been ra
ised as a Catholic to confess everything, that she and Dad had committed- what would you call it?-double-barrelled adultery. Incest of a sort, one night only. She and the kids were scrunched into the two-door sports car's inadequate back seat, and the thick composition box, like a Styrofoam cooler but smaller and dense with its distilled contents, rode in the trunk among all their suitcases. It had been a tough tight packing job to get everything in and Nelson had not been especially gracious when little Judy, who was nine then, burst into tears, their first night's stop at a motel outside Savannah, because she couldn't bear to think of Grandpa all alone out there in the cold dark trunk. The two motel rooms didn't have too many high safe surfaces for such a sacred and ominous thing- surprisingly light, baked bone flakes, Harold C. Angstrom concentrate-so they settled on the top of the mock-wood cabinet holding the television set that slid in and out. Mom and the kids slept in that room, and she had to keep talking them out of climbing up and opening the box and looking inside. He and Pru were so upset with each other they couldn't sleep and finally fucked in an effort to get relaxed, which made them both madder and sadder than ever. The next night, in a Comfort Inn beyond Raleigh, Mom and Pru took one room and he and the kids the other. They fell asleep before he did, they were watching Roseanne on television, but in the morning he was still groggy, and after he and Pru had some words at breakfast that left everybody feeling they were tiptoeing on broken glass they all drove off leaving the ashes in their big square bran-colored cookie jar on the spare-blankets shelf of a Comfort Inn closet.