The Early Stories

by John Updike

  “Roger …” Jo squeezed her eyes shut and smiled to be thinking she was thinking. Her eyes opened, her mother’s blue. “Skunk,” she said firmly.

  A new animal; they must talk about skunks at nursery school. Having a fresh hero momentarily stirred Jack to creative enthusiasm. “All right,” he said. “Once upon a time, in the deep dark woods, there was a tiny little creature name of Roger Skunk. And he smelled very bad—”

  “Yes,” Jo said.

  “He smelled so bad none of the other little woodland creatures would play with him.” Jo looked at him solemnly; she hadn’t foreseen this. “Whenever he would go out to play,” Jack continued with zest, remembering certain trials of his own childhood, “all of the other tiny animals would cry, ‘Uh-oh, here comes Roger Stinky Skunk,’ and they would run away, and Roger Skunk would stand there all alone, and two little round tears would fall from his eyes.” The corners of Jo’s mouth drooped down and her lower lip bent forward as Jack traced with a forefinger along the side of her nose the course of one of Roger Skunk’s tears.

  “Won’t he see the owl?” she asked in a high and faintly roughened voice.

  Sitting on the bed beside her, Jack felt the covers tug as her legs switched tensely. He was pleased with this moment—he was telling her something true, something she must know—and had no wish to hurry on. But downstairs a chair scraped, and he realized he must get down to help Claire paint the living-room woodwork.

  “Well, he walked along very sadly and came to a very big tree, and in the tiptop of the tree was an enormous wise old owl.”

  “Good.”

  “ ‘Mr. Owl,’ Roger Skunk said, ‘all the other little animals run away from me because I smell so bad.’ ‘So you do,’ the owl said. ‘Very, very bad.’ ‘What can I do?’ Roger Skunk said, and he cried very hard.”

  “The wizard, the wizard,” Jo shouted, and sat right up, and a Little Golden Book spilled from the bed.

  “Now, Jo. Daddy’s telling the story. Do you want to tell Daddy the story?”

  “No. You me.”

  “Then lie down and be sleepy.”

  Her head relapsed onto the pillow and she said, “Out of your head.”

  “Well. The owl thought and thought. At last he said, ‘Why don’t you go see the wizard?’ ”

  “Daddy?”

  “What?”

  “Are magic spells real?” This was a new phase, just this last month, a reality phase. When he told her that spiders eat bugs, she turned to her mother and asked, “Do they really?” and when Claire told her that God was in the sky and all around them, she turned to her father and insisted, with a sly yet eager smile, “Is He really?”

  “They’re real in stories,” Jack answered curtly. She had made him miss a beat in the narrative. “The owl said, ‘Go through the dark woods, under the apple trees, into the swamp, over the crick—’ ”

  “What’s a crick?”

  “A little river. ‘Over the crick, and there will be the wizard’s house.’ And that’s the way Roger Skunk went, and pretty soon he came to a little white house, and he rapped on the door.” Jack rapped on the windowsill, and under the covers Jo’s long body clenched in babyish delight. “And then,” Jack went on, “a tiny little old man came out, with a long white beard and a pointed blue hat, and said, ‘Eh? Whatzis? Whatcher want? You smell awful.’ ” The wizard’s voice was one of Jack’s own favorite effects; he did it by scrunching up his face and somehow whining through his eyes, which felt for the interval rheumy. He felt being an old man suited him.

  “ ‘I know it,’ Roger Skunk said, ‘and all the little animals run away from me. The enormous wise owl said you could help me.’

  “ ‘Eh? Well, maybe. Come on in. Don’t git too close.’ Now, inside, Jo, there were all these magic things, all jumbled together in a big dusty heap, because the wizard did not have any cleaning lady.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because he was a wizard, and a very old man.”

  “Will he die?”

  “No. Wizards don’t die. They just get more and more cranky. Well, he rummaged around and found an old stick called a magic wand and asked Roger Skunk what he wanted to smell like. Roger thought and thought and said, ‘Roses.’ ”

  “Yes. Good,” Jo said smugly.

  Jack fixed her with a trancelike gaze and chanted in the wizard’s elderly irritable voice:

  “ ‘Abracadabry, hocus-poo,

  Roger Skunk, how do you do,

  Roses, boses, pull an ear,

  Roger Skunk, you never fear:

  Bingo!’ ”

  He paused as a rapt expression widened out from his daughter’s nostril wings, forcing her eyebrows up and her lower lip down in an expression of mute exclamation, an expression in which Jack was startled to recognize his wife feigning pleasure at cocktail parties. “And all of a sudden,” he whispered, “the whole inside of the wizard’s house was full of the smell of—roses! ‘Roses!’ Roger Fish cried. And the wizard said, very cranky, ‘That’ll be seven pennies.’ ”

  “Daddy.”

  “What?”

  “Roger Skunk. You said Roger Fish.”

  “Yes. Skunk.”

  “You said Roger Fish. Wasn’t that silly?”

  “Very silly of your stupid old daddy. Where was I? Well, you know about the pennies.”

  “Say it.”

  “O.K. Roger Skunk said, ‘But all I have is four pennies,’ and he began to cry.” Jo made her crying face again, but insincerely, as a piece of acting. This annoyed Jack. Downstairs some more furniture rumbled. Claire shouldn’t move heavy things; she was six months pregnant. It would be their third.

  “So the wizard said, ‘Oh, very well. Go to the end of the lane and turn around three times and look down the magic well and there you will find three pennies. Hurry up.’ So Roger Skunk went to the end of the lane and turned around three times and there in the magic well were three pennies! So he took them back to the wizard and was very happy and ran out into the woods and all the other little animals gathered around him because he smelled so good. And they played tag, baseball, football, basketball, lacrosse, hockey, soccer, and pick-up-sticks.”

  “What’s pick-up-sticks?”

  “It’s a game you play with sticks.”

  “Like the wizard’s magic wand?”

  “Kind of. And they played games and laughed all afternoon and then it began to get dark and they all ran home to their mommies.”

  Jo was starting to fuss with her hands and look out of the window, at the crack of daylight that showed under the shade. She thought the story was all over. Jack didn’t like women when they took anything for granted; he liked them apprehensive, hanging on his words. “Now, Jo, are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because this is very interesting. Roger Skunk’s mommy said, ‘What’s that awful smell?’ ”

  “Wha-a-at?” He had surprised her.

  He went on, “And Roger Skunk said, ‘It’s me, Mommy. I smell like roses now.’ And she said, ‘Who made you smell like that?’ And he said, ‘The wizard,’ and she said, ‘Well, of all the nerve. You come with me and we’re going right back to that very awful wizard.’ ”

  Jo sat up, her hands dabbling in the air with genuine fright. “But, Daddy, then he said about the other little animals run away!” Her hands skittered off, into the imaginary underbrush.

  “All right. He said, ‘But, Mommy, all the other little animals run away.’ She said, ‘I don’t care. You smelled the way a little skunk should have and I’m going to take you right back to that wizard,’ and she took an umbrella and went back with Roger Skunk and hit that wizard right over the head.”

  “No,” Jo said, and put her hand out to touch his lips, yet even in her agitation did not quite dare to stop the source of the narrative. Inspiration came to her. “Then the wizard hit her on the head and did not change that little skunk back.”

  “No,” he said. “The wizard said ‘O.K., maybe you’re right,’
and Roger Skunk did not smell of roses any more. He smelled very bad again.”

  “But the other little amum—oh!—amumals—”

  “Joanne. It’s Daddy’s story. Shall Daddy not tell you any more stories?” Her broad face looked at him through sifted light, astounded. “This is what happened, then. Roger Skunk and his mommy went home and they heard Woo-oo, woooo-oo, and it was the choo-choo train bringing Daddy Skunk home from Boston. And they had lima beans, pork chops, celery, liver, mashed potatoes, and Pie-Oh-My for dessert. And when Roger Skunk was in bed, Mommy Skunk came up and hugged him and said he smelled like her little baby skunk again and she loved him very much. And that’s the end of the story.”

  “But Daddy.”

  “What?”

  “Then did the other little ani-mals run away?”

  “No, because eventually they got used to the way he was and did not mind it at all. Or did not mind it very much.”

  “What’s evenshiladee?”

  “In a little while.”

  “That was a stupid mommy.”

  “It was not,” he said with rare emphasis, and believed, from her expression, that she realized he was defending his own mother to her, or something as odd. “Now I want you to put your big heavy head in the pillow and have a good long nap.” He adjusted the shade so not even a crack of day showed, and tiptoed to the door, in the pretense that she was already asleep. But when he turned, she was crouching on top of the covers and staring at him. “Hey. Get under the covers and fall faaast asleep. Bobby’s asleep.”

  She stood up and bounced gingerly on the springs. “Daddy.”

  “What?”

  “Tomorrow, I want you to tell me the story that that wizard took that magic wand and hit that mommy”—her plump arms chopped fiercely—“right over the head.”

  “No. That’s not the story. The point is that the little skunk loved his mommy more than he loved aaalll the other little animals and she knew what was right.”

  “No. Tomorrow you say he hit that mommy. Do it.” She kicked her legs up and sat down on the bed with a great heave and complaint of springs, as she had done hundreds of times before, except that this time she did not laugh. “Say it, Daddy.”

  “Well, we’ll see. Now, at least have a rest. Stay on the bed. You’re a good girl. A wonderful girl.”

  He closed the door and went downstairs. Claire had spread the newspapers and opened the paint can and, wearing an old shirt of his on top of her maternity smock, was stroking the chair rail with a dipped brush. Above him footsteps vibrated and he called, “Joanne. Shall I come up there and spank you?” The footsteps hesitated.

  “That was a long story,” Claire said.

  “The poor kid,” he answered, and with utter weariness watched his wife labor. The woodwork, a cage of moldings and rails and baseboards all around them, was half old tan and half new ivory and he felt caught in an ugly middle position, and though he as well felt his wife’s presence in the cage with him, he did not want to speak with her, work with her, touch her, anything.

  Wife-Wooing

  Oh my love. Yes. Here we sit, on warm broad floorboards, before a fire, the children between us, in a crescent, eating. The girl and I share one half-pint of French-fried potatoes; you and the boy share another; and in the center, sharing nothing, making simple reflections within himself like a jewel, the baby, mounted in an Easybaby, sucks at his bottle with frowning mastery, his selfish, contemplative eyes stealing glitter from the center of the flames. And you. You. You allow your skirt, the same black skirt in which this morning you with woman’s soft bravery mounted a bicycle and sallied forth to play hymns in difficult keys on the Sunday school’s old piano—you allow this black skirt to slide off your raised knees down your thighs, slide up your thighs in your body’s absolute geography, so the parallel whiteness of their undersides is exposed to the fire’s warmth and to my sight. Oh. There is a line of Joyce. I try to recover it from the legendary, imperfectly explored grottoes of Ulysses: a garter snapped, to please Blazes Boylan, in a deep Dublin den. What? Smackwarm. That was the crucial word. Smacked smackwarm on her smackable warm woman’s thigh. Something like that. A splendid man, to feel that. Smackwarm woman’s. Splendid also to feel the curious and potent, inexplicable and irrefutably magical life language leads within itself. What soul took thought and knew that adding wo to man would make a woman? The difference exactly. The wide w, the receptive o. Womb. In our crescent the children for all their size seem to come out of you toward me, wet fingers and eyes, tinted bronze. Three children, five persons, seven years. Seven years since I wed wide warm woman, white-thighed. Wooed and wed. Wife. A knife of a word that for all its final bite did not end the wooing. To my wonderment.

  We eat meat, meat I wrested warm from the raw hands of the hamburger girl in the diner a mile away, a ferocious place, slick with grease, sleek with chrome; young predators snarling dirty jokes menaced me, old men reached for me with coffee-dark paws; I wielded my wallet, and won my way back. The fat brown bag of buns was warm beside me in the cold car; the smaller bag holding the two cartons of French fries emitted an even more urgent heat. Back through the black winter air to the fire, the intimate cave, where halloos and hurrahs greeted me, the deer, mouth agape and its cotton throat gushing, stretched dead across my shoulders. And now you, beside the white O of the plate upon which the children discarded with squeals of disgust the rings of translucent onion that came squeezed in the hamburgers—you push your toes an inch closer to the blaze, and the ashy white of your thigh’s inner side is lazily laid bare, and the eternally elastic garter snaps smackwarm against my hidden heart.

  Who would have thought, wide wife, back there in the white tremble of the ceremony (in the corner of my eye I held, despite the distracting hail of ominous vows, the vibration of the cluster of stephanotis clutched against your waist), that seven years would bring us no distance, through all those warm beds, to the same trembling point, of beginning? The cells change every seven years, and down in the atom, apparently, there is a strange discontinuity; it is as if God wills the universe anew every instant. (Ah God, dear God, tall friend of my childhood, I will never forget you, though they say dreadful things. They say rose windows in cathedrals are vaginal symbols.) Your legs, exposed as fully as by a bathing suit, yearn deeper into the amber wash of heat. Well: begin. A green jet of flame spits out sideways from a pocket of resin in a log, crying, and the orange shadows on the ceiling sway with fresh life. Begin.

  “Remember, on our honeymoon, how the top of the kerosene heater made a great big rose window on the ceiling?”

  “Vnn.” Your chin goes to your knees, your shins draw in, all is retracted. Not much to remember, perhaps, for you: blood badly spilled, clumsiness of all sorts. “It was cold for June.”

  “Mommy, what was cold? What did you say?” the girl asks, enunciating angrily, determined not to let language slip on her tongue and tumble her so that we laugh.

  “A house where Daddy and I stayed one time.”

  “I don’t like dat,” the boy says, and throws a half-bun painted with chartreuse mustard onto the floor.

  You pick it up and with beautiful somber musing ask, “Isn’t that funny? Did any of the others have mustard on them?”

  “I hate dat,” the boy insists; he is two. Language is to him thick vague handles swirling by; he grabs what he can.

  “Here. He can have mine. Give me his.” I pass my hamburger over, you take it, he takes it from you, there is nowhere a ripple of gratitude. There is no more praise of my heroism in fetching Sunday supper, saving you labor. Cunning, you sense, and sense that I sense your knowledge, that I had hoped to hoard your energy toward a more primal spending. We sense everything between us, every ripple, existent and nonexistent; it is tiring. Courting a wife takes tenfold the strength of winning an ignorant girl. The fire shifts, shattering fragments of newspaper that carry in lighter gray the ghost of the ink of their message. You huddle your legs and bring the skirt back over them. With a si
zzling noise like the sighs of the exhausted logs, the baby sucks the last from his bottle, drops it to the floor with its distasteful hoax of vacant suds, and begins to cry. His egotist’s mouth opens; the delicate membrane of his satisfaction tears. You pick him up and stand. You love the baby more than me.

  Who would have thought, blood once spilled, that no barrier would be broken, that you would be each time healed into a virgin again? Tall, fair, obscure, remote, and courteous.

  We put the children to bed, one by one, in reverse order of birth. I am limitlessly patient, paternal, good. Yet you know. We watch the paper bags and cartons ignite on the breathing pillow of embers; we read, watch television, eat crackers, it does not matter. Eleven comes. For a tingling moment you stand on the bedroom rug in your underpants, untangling your nightie; oh, fat white sweet fat fatness. In bed you read. About Richard Nixon. He fascinates you; you hate him. You know how he defeated Jerry Voorhis, martyred Mrs. Douglas, how he played poker in the Navy despite being a Quaker, every fiendish trick, every low adaptation. Oh my Lord, let’s let the poor man go to bed. We’re none of us perfect. “Hey, let’s turn out the light.”

  “Wait. He’s just about to get Hiss convicted. It’s very strange. It says he acted honorably.”

  “I’m sure he did.” I reach for the switch.

  “No. Wait. Just till I finish this chapter. I’m sure there’ll be something at the end.”

  “Honey, Hiss was guilty. We’re all guilty. Conceived in concupiscence, we die unrepentant.” Once my ornate words wooed you.

  I lie against your filmy convex back. You read sideways, a sleepy trick. I see the page through the fringe of your hair, sharp and white as a wedge of crystal. Suddenly it slips. The book has slipped from your hand. You are asleep. Oh, cunning trick, cunning. In the darkness I consider. Cunning. The headlights of cars accidentally slide fanning slits of light around our walls and ceiling. The great rose window was projected upward through the petal-shaped perforations in the top of the black kerosene stove, which we stood in the center of the floor. As the flame on the circular wick flickered, the wide soft star of interlocked penumbrae moved and waved as if it were printed on a silk cloth being gently tugged or slowly blown. Its color soft blurred blood. We pay dear in blood for our peaceful homes.