by John Updike
"Well," he complains, "while you were having such a great time, I ate Christmas dinner alone and had a young client over at the Center commit suicide."
"Oh, Nelson, no! How terrible! Was he one of yours?"
"We don't divide them up that way, but I had counselled him. I thought he was getting better-more engaged, and reporting no auditory hallucinations. Shows how little I know."
"Well, you shouldn't blame yourself," Annabelle went on in her practical, kind, slightly out-of-focus voice. "We're caregivers, not miracle workers. Just before I went away Mr. Potteiger died. He was eighty-six and terribly frail, with hardly any use of his legs, but such a sharp, frisky mind. He used to flirt! One morning I showed up at his rooms, he was in elderly housing over toward Oriole, and a little Post-it note on the door said he'd passed away. Just those words. 'Passed Away.'"
"It's not exactly the same," Nelson begins to explain, but she cuts him short.
"How's your lovely family? Did they arrive?"
"Yeah, sort of."
"Sort of?"
"Judy didn't come. She wanted to stay with her boyfriend in his apartment, the roommate is off for the holidays skiing in Colorado, and then go with him, the boyfriend, to this big millennial blast in formal clothes in some fancy home the boyfriend knows the son of up in Silver Lake, old rubber money. The guy sounds like a real sponge."
"I knew you'd say 'sponge'!"
"She and Pru had a big fight about it and finally Pru gave up. After all the kid will be twenty next month, and she didn't ask to go to Akron, she's just trying to make the best of the situation her messed-up parents handed her. She drove all the way herself, Pru, just with Roy; she was beat when she arrived, about nine o'clock Monday night, they had kept stopping at what used to be Howard Johnson'ses." It makes him weary just to think about his aging, uncontrollable family.
"Where are they staying?"
"What's with all these questions? At Mom's. It's too small and crummy here, and the morning traffic out on Eisenhower shakes the place." He does not tell her that last night, Tuesday night, he went over after work for a dinner Pru had made in Mom's kitchen and stayed the night in his old room at the back of the house, while Pru took Judy's old room in front and Roy the little room with the computer, on a cot. They all just fell into place, except that he wanted to be in bed with Pru, or at least see her in her underwear, and had tossed and turned. There were too many people in his head, like that Christmas plaque Jo Foote had made him. Among other things he was afraid if he fell asleep he would see that man practicing chip shots in the back yard again.
"That's sad, Nelson," his sister was saying. "Roy at least should be over with you."
"Yeah, but I have to work, the Center is shorthanded this week, the suicide has driven the clients crazier. And Roy and Ronnie get along oddly great. They talk about megabytes and RAMs and sit up there at the computer all day, cruising the Internet for God knows what. Filth, probably. Last night Ron took him to a high-school basketball game. I guess there's this holiday tournament on in the county, a big deal, girls' and boys' teams both."
"And how do you feel about your daughter's not coming to visit? Are you hurt?"
"Relieved, in a way. She's gotten to be a handful. She's a redhead, like her mother."
"But she needs to see her father."
"Pru told her that, and Judy said if he doesn't care enough about me to come out here why should I go there and miss an event that only comes once every thousand years? She doesn't seem to think it'll happen in Brewer, only in Akron."
"Well," Annabelle says primly, "it doesn't sound very satisfactory. When am I going to meet Pru, and my dear little nephew?"
"That's what we need to talk about. What are you doing Friday night?"
"That's the-"
"I know. The last of the last."
"I was just going to go to bed and let it all wash over me."
"Yeah, me too, but Pru is as bad as her daughter. She wants to do something. I didn't want you to come to Mom's house ever again, not after Thanksgiving, but maybe we could swing by that evening and pick up Pru and say hello to Roy and go out to a meal and a movie. I don't want to go to any dance or anything."
"You with two women? That's weird, Nelson."
"No kidding. I agree. But there's this guy I used to play with as a kid, my best friend you could say, now he's a dentist who does Swedish implants, who called me up for lunch the other week and really seems a kind of lost soul. He was married twice but isn't now. Suppose he joined us? His name is Billy Fosnacht."
"It still sounds weird. Two people I never met, and you."
"Listen, do you trust your brother or not? You'll have no problem with Pru, everybody likes her, she used to be beautiful, and Billy's a kind of loser-my father used to call him a goon-but it's not like it's a date, he'll just be along. He makes great money, by the way. You have any better plans? Like with that girlfriend and her husband? Or have they seen enough of you lately?" This is cruel, perhaps.
She doesn't say yes or no. She says, "They say there may be terrorist attacks."
"In Brewer? On what, the pretzel factories?"
"The mayor of Seattle cancelled their celebration today."
"He has the Space Needle to worry about."
"Nelson, I hope you know what you're doing." This is Annabelle's way of agreeing.
"No," he says, feeling cheerful for the first time this terminal week, "I don't, frankly."
"And this is my son, Roy."
Annabelle says in auntly fashion, "What a tall boy! It's wonderful to meet you, Roy."
They are all, including Billy Fosnacht, bunched awkwardly in the living room, crowded in the insufficient space between the cut-plush sofa and cobbler's-bench coffee table on one side and the Christmas tree and the Zenith television with its jumbly crown of knickknacks on the other. Pru and Annabelle have shaken hands like two big cats brushing whiskers, and Ronnie and Mom have been excessively friendly to this round-faced girl who first appeared at the door in September. Annabelle is wearing a short red dress with a high collar and a diagonal zipper across the bosom, and dark net stockings on her prominent legs-all a little whorish, Nelson thought when he picked her up in his Corolla on East Muriel Street. Maybe Ronnie sensed something. Pru has found a dove-colored shot-silk dress with a boxy jacket that makes her hips look not too wide and sends out zigzags of shimmer; the gray goes from silver to a kind of purple when she moves. She has thickened in the waist and jaw and has crow's feet and tiny creases on her cheeks and even chin that come and go when she smiles her crooked, dissatisfied smile. Nelson can't remember if her nose was always so hooked, with so sharp a point. The long-limbed, green-eyed beauty he and his father had both desired is cobwebbed over with a certain gauze of age and disappointment yet those who remember can see through it; he thinks for forty-four she is holding up pretty well. Her hair, once lank and long and carrot-colored, wears a tint now that looks suspiciously even and shiny next to Annabelle's many-colored shaggy do, which she is letting grow out, making her solid white neck look less naked. Pru sees Billy as one of the gang who nearly ruined Nelson back in the Laid-Back days and greets him coolly, though in fact Billy was never a big user; his parents had crumped out early and he had had to take care of himself. Mom in her nervousness and maybe boosted by some tipple before dinner squeals "Billy Fosnacht!" and embraces him almost in tears, blurting, "I loved your dear mother so!"
Roy is taller than his grandmother and about the same height as Nelson and Ronnie and Pru and Annabelle, but he will get taller; at fifteen his growth spurt has years to go. The dark Springer genes have overruled the Angstrom pallor in the boy's hair and brows and the long curved eyelashes, like his father's but without the deepset wary look. His upper lip is fuzzy and his ears stick out and his eyes are bright; the new century is his. He puts his knuckly hand in Annabelle's competent soft one and tells her, "My sister is sorry not to meet you this time. She had a message I was to give you: your father was a doll."
> "A doll?" Annabelle smiles.
"A neat guy, I think she meant. He died when she was eight so she has a lot more memories of him than I do."
Nelson interposes, "She remembers Dad's saving her life once in Florida, in a Sailfish that capsized. Another way to frame it would be that he nearly killed her."
"Nelson," Pru says in half-hearted wifely rebuke.
Roy volunteers, "I remember going to visit him in the hospital once, the high white bed and all these tubes going in and out of him. Also how when there was any candy or nuts around you had to compete with him for them-he'd steal a candy bar right out from under your nose."
This is a success; everyone laughs. Roy gives his mother's slightly lopsided grin, and Annabelle says, "Thank you so much, Roy. You've helped make him real to me."
"We'll have to have you over for dinner in the new year," Ronnie tells her, in a rehearsed voice, not quite looking at her. "I got a ton of Rabbit stories even Janice hasn't heard."
"We have a reservation at the Lookout," Nelson intervenes. To his elders he explains, "That's the fancy new restaurant in the old Pinnacle Hotel. When I called at first they said they were full up. But Billy got us into the first sitting, at seven."
"The maître d's upper-right bicuspid is all mine," Billy explains. "We had to go back in; the first didn't take. Some people burst into tears when that happens."
"Oh, how beautiful you all look!" Janice exclaims, as something in the occasion, the sudden clumping here of strands going back deep into her time on earth, brims over for her. "You all go and have a gorgeous time!" The teariness conjured by remembering Peggy Fosnacht, earnest wall-eyed clumsy Peggy, who had been Peggy Gring when Janice and she were young, blurs her survey of the four adult children, her son among them, and the mother of her grandchildren, all so touching, dressed up to greet this particular calendrical doom, with Harry and Fred and Mother and little Becky all squeezed inside them somehow, the DNA. "Just think," she says, "the next time we see each other, the year will have all those zeros in it! I can't stand it!"
"O.K., Mom," Nelson says nervously.
Ronnie says, husbandly-expansive, covering for her tears, pompously proud of them, "Young Bill Gates here and I are going to have a great time making hotdogs and popcorn and watching the boob tube, watching the future roll our way. It's been 2000 for hours in Fiji and Japan-no Y2K problems in Sydney or Tokyo as far as they can tell. Paris was spectacular a half-hour ago and at seven it's going to hit London, Blair and the Queen and their dumb Dome. For most of the world, midnight is already history! Time is relative, as Einstein pointed out. Isn't that right, Roy?"
"Sort of like that," the boy says, embarrassed by so crudely approximate a truth.
"It stretches," Ronnie obnoxiously insists. "Like a condom." Go to church all he wants, this guy is never going to get his brains out of his pants.
They are de-inhibiting together. Billy announces, "I keep thinking of all those that didn't quite make it. JFK Junior, Payne Stewart, and the other day the Lone Ranger, poor guy."
"God bless you, Billy!" Janice exclaims, burbling out of some chaotic reserve of sorrow that Nelson, dry-eyed, sees into as into a dark well at whose bottom his own head in silhouette glimmers in a disk of reflected sky. Under the pressure of the momentous impalpable event almost upon them they all kiss, Nelson Roy and Janice Pru and Billy Mrs. Angstrom (as he still thinks of her) and Ronnie Annabelle, who tries to deflect him to a cheek but is nailed on the mouth-the same cushiony kind of lips, he cannot but remember, that Ruth once sucked him off with, down in a shack on the Jersey Shore, salt air making everything sticky, the odors of sex tossed everywhere like their clothes, she going at it as if leisurely reducing a Popsicle, stopping and starting and giving him the eye up across his bare belly with its sheen of golden hairs. They all kiss, kiss there by the door, the door with its rasping, failing bell and oval brass knob burnished by uncountable hands, by uncountable comings and goings in the twentieth century, at 89 Joseph Street. The house across the street, Nelson sees, is ablaze as if for a party; in the upper front room the young woman of the house passes preoccupied in a glitzy blouse, her mouth moving with urgent words he cannot hear.
Hurry, they mustn't be late, the maître d' will give their table away; they scramble in an exclamatory tumble into Nelson's off-white Corolla parked at the curb, as excited as teen-agers to be out and off. The plan is the meal and then a movie, not one of the four at the tired mall on the way into Brewer, though as they pass Billy says wistfully in the back seat, "I'd love to see Galaxy Quest. One of my hygienists says there's a great sex scene where one of the humans makes out with an extraterrestrial female who turns back into, like, an octopus when she gets excited."
"Nice," says Annabelle, in the back seat with him.
He goes on, "The most heartbreaking death at the end of this year to my mind, though, was that woman up in a nursing home in Allentown yesterday who was the world's oldest person, it turns out. A hundred nineteen. If she'd hung on just two more days she would have lived in three different centuries."
"I guess that'd be worth doing," Pru says dryly, not quite accepting of Billy yet. She is intent beside Nelson, silently helping him drive. She senses he is stressed. He is thinking of Michael DiLorenzo, another who didn't quite make it into the third millennium.
"Did any of you know," Billy asks, "that the world's oldest person was a Pennsylvanian?"
Annabelle waits for Pru or Nelson to say something rude, and when they don't allows, "I'm not surprised. Old people love this state. Only Florida has more, proportionally."
The movie Nelson wants them to see is American Beauty, cited the year's best by a number of big-city critics, but assailed by several of Pennsylvania's defenders of decency, and now playing at a second-run, cut-price theatre called Instant Classics, out beyond the old fairgrounds. And they do see it, getting back into Nelson's car at twenty past eleven in a state of some coziness after five hours together, sitting through the movie and before that making polite talk at the restaurant, thinking up topics, steering the two men away from childhood reminiscences, the women talking about their career dissatisfactions, each of the four in private scared of the millennial moment, trying to absorb its significance from the air, the tepid snow-free air. The view during the meal, up on Mt., one table back from the windows but nevertheless grand, displayed on reality's wide screen Brewer's grid stretching beneath them to the black swerve of the river and the few great holding tanks still not dismantled and the suburbs receding with an everdimmer radiance toward lights that show scattered on wooded indigo hills, the home lights of Diamond County.
Back in the Corolla, the movie uneasily digesting on top of the dinner with its wine and smoked oysters, Pru says, "Well, I didn't think that was so great. Could you believe that ending? I couldn't. Stars at night from a field, his grandmother's hands-that guy never acted like a man who had ever noticed his grandmother's hands or anything except his own selfish itches and threatened ego."
From the back seat Billy contributes, "I must say it made me feel better about death. Didn't Kevin Spacey look happy, dead?"
"He looked spacy," Nelson says. "He looked like a freeze-frame. That's what death is, a freeze-frame. Hey, where do you want to go now? I've run out of ideas. We have half an hour. There's stuff downtown, I know. They've put a heated tent for a Christian-rock concert in the big hole on Weiser above Sixth, where the housing project has stalled. We could go and mill about."
"Ugh," Billy says.
The parking lot at Instant Classics is tricky to get out of, five rows of cars feeding into one exit lane, and Nelson is never very sure of himself on this side of Brewer. They have put in some new bypass highways and mall-access roads that confuse him. He somehow thought they would spontaneously know where to go. Why does everything always fall on him? He says, "I wonder if we could get into the Laid-Back."
Pru says, "That old druggie hangout of yours?"
"It's all clean," Billy pipes up. "It's changed
owners, after the last set got busted and put in jail. No drugs now. No smoking of any sort."
"Do I turn right or left up here to get back on 222?" Nelson asks.
Annabelle hears him but can only say, "I used to work out this way at a nursing home but everything's changed."
"Try right, it's easier," Billy says.
As Nelson follows this directive he hears behind him Annabelle ask in a soft sympathetic searching voice she has never used with her brother, "Billy, do you think a lot about death?"
"All the time, how did you know?"
"The way you kept flinching in the movie."
"I thought that neurotic kid with the videocam was going to kill somebody, maybe the girl he was spying on."
"Wasn't she a hard-hearted horror?" Nelson chimes in. '"Kill my father. Do it.'" He remembers Michael DiLorenzo confessing that he wanted to kill his parents, and that Michael killed himself, maybe so he wouldn't do it. Nelson tastes the dead iron at the core of even green planets. No fresh start, no mercy. The headlights are picking up flecks, sparks like mayflies; it can't be snow, so it must be flying dirt.
"I didn't like her," Annabelle announces. "I identified more with the other one, the pretty one who acted like a tramp but then turned out to be a virgin."
"And the whole gay business made me upset," says Billy.
"I thought it was very overdone and unconvincing," Pru states, her profile almost haggard in the strokes of oncoming headlights, as the tangled traffic burns above asphalt hard to see, the arrows and lines obscure.
"Boy," Billy rattles on, "they sure gave you enough blood on the wall when he got shot."
Annabelle chimes in, "I loved the routine the cheerleaders did with the bowler hats."
"Pure Fosse," says Billy. "I was afraid somebody's house was going to get burned down, either the hero's or the military man's next to it."
"It was a picture, really, when you think about it," Pru persists, "of cheap shots at everybody. Advertising, the military, blah blah. Oh come on."