by John Updike
The girl’s mussed skirt was up around her waist. She was bent face down over the desk and Deifendorf’s hooves shuffled in agitation in the narrow aisle. From his sleepy careful grin he was covering her; the whole room smelled like a stable: Caldwell saw red. He picked the shining arrow-shaft from the top of his desk, strode forward through the sickening confusion of books being slammed shut, and once, twice, whipped, whipped the bastard beast’s bare back. You broke my grille. Two white stripes glowed across the meat of Deifendorfs shoulders. As Caldwell in horror watched, these stripes slowly blushed. There would be welts. The couple fell apart like a broken blossom. Deifendorf looked up with small brown eyes shelled in tears; the girl with pointed composure refluffed her hair. Zimmerman’s hand scribbled furiously in the corner of Caldwell’s eye. The teacher, stunned, returned to the front of the class. Jesus, he hadn’t meant to hit the kid so hard. He placed the steel shaft in the chalk trough. He turned, and closed his eyes, and the pain unfolded its wet wings in the red darkness. He opened his mouth; his very blood loathed the story he had told. “One minute ago, flint-chipping, fire-kindling, death-foreseeing, a tragic animal appeared-” The buzzer rasped; halls rumbled throughout the vast building; faintness swooped at Caldwell but he held himself upright, having vowed to finish.”-called Man.”
II
MY FATHER and my mother were talking. I wake now often to silence, beside you, with a pang of fear, after dreams that leave a sour wash of atheism in my stomach (last night I dreamt that Hitler, a white-haired crazy man with a protruding tongue, was found alive in Argentina). But in those days I always awoke to the sound of my parents talking, voices which even in agreement were contentious and full of life. I had been dreaming of a tree, and through the sound of their words I seemed to twist from an upright trunk into a boy lying in bed. I was fifteen and it was 1947. This morning their subject seemed to be new; I could not make out its form, only feel within myself, as if in my sleep I had swallowed something living that now woke within me, its restless weight of dread. “Don’t feel bad, Cassie,” my father said. His voice had a shy sound, as if he had turned his back. “I’ve been lucky to live this long.”
“George, if you’re just trying to frighten me, it’s not funny,” my mother answered. Her voice was so often expressive of what I wanted to hear that my own brain sometimes thought in her voice; indeed, as I grow older, now and then, usually in instances of exclamation, I hear her voice issue from my mouth.
I seemed now to know the subject: my father thought he was ill.
“Cassie,” he said, “don’t be frightened. I don’t want you to be frightened. I’m not frightened.” His voice blanched in repetition.
“You are frightened,” she said. “I wondered why you kept getting out of bed.” Her voice was white too. “I can feel the damn thing,” he said. “I can feel it in me like a clot of poison. I can’t pass it.”
This detail seemed to balk her. “You can’t feel such things,” she said at last, in a voice abruptly small, like a chastened little girl’s.
His voice gathered size. “I can feel it in me like a poison snake wrapped around my bowels. Brooo!l”
Lying in bed, I pictured my father making this noise- his head shaken so abruptly his jowls wagged, his lips a vehement blur. The picture was so vivid I smiled. Their con versation, as if they knew I had awakened, was closing up; the tone of their voices darkened. The little pale piteous bit, like a snowflake at the center of their marriage, which I had glimpsed, still half a tree, in first light, retreated behind the familiar opacities of clownish quarreling. I turned my head, as sleep’s heaviness lifted from it, and looked through the window. A few frost-ferns had sprouted from the lower corners of the upper panes. The early sun lay tan on the stubble of the big field beyond the dirt road. The road was pink. The bare trees took white on their sun side; a curious ruddiness was caught in their twigs. Everything looked frozen; the two strands of telephone wire looked locked into place in the sky’s blue ice. It was January and Monday. I began to understand. After every weekend, my father had to gather his nerve to go back to teaching. Dur ing the Christmas vacation he became slack and in a fury of screw-turning had to retighten himself. “The long haul,” he called the stretch between Christmas and Easter. Last week, the first week of the new year, something had happened that had frightened him. He had struck a boy with Zimmerman in the room: he had told us that much.
“Don’t be dramatic, George,” my mother said. “What does it feel like?”
“I know where I got it.” He had a way of not speaking to her, but performing in front of her, as if there were an invisible audience at her side. “The damn kids. I’ve caught their damn hate and I feel it like a spider in my big intestine.”
“It’s not hate, George,” she said, “it’s love.”
‘ “It’s hate, Cassie. I face it every day.”
“It’s love,” she insisted. “They want to love each other and you’re in their way. Nobody hates you. You’re the ideal man.”
“They hate my guts. They’d kill me, and now they’re doing it. Biff, bang. I’m through. Haul away the garbage.”
“George, if you feel this seriously,” my mother said, “I’d waste no time seeing Doc Appleton.”
Whenever my father received the sympathy he sought, he became brusque and antic. “I don’t want to see the bastard. He’ll tell me the truth.”
My mother must have turned away, because it was my grandfather who spoke. “Truth is ev-er a comfort,” he said. “Only the Devil loves lies.” His voice, interposed between the two others, seemed vaster but fainter than theirs, as if he were a giant calling from a distance.
“The Devil and me, Pop,” my father said. “I love lies, I tell ‘em all day. I’m paid to tell ‘em.”
Footsteps sounded on the uncarpeted kitchen floor. My mother was crossing to the bottom of the stairs, at the corner of the house diagonally opposite my bed. “Peter!” she called. “Are you awake?”
I closed my eyes and relaxed into my warm groove. The blankets my body had heated became soft chains dragging me down; my mouth held a stale ambrosia lulling me to sleep again. The lemon-yellow wallpaper, whose small dark medallions peered out from the pattern with faces like frowning cats, remained printed, negatively in red, on my eyelids. The dream I had been dreaming returned to me.
Penny and I had been beside a tree. The top buttons of her blouse were undone, pearl buttons, undone as they had been weeks ago, before Christmas vacation, in the dark Buick on the school parking lot, the heater ticking by our knees. But this was broad day, in a woods of slim trees pierced by light.
A blue jay, vivid in every feather, hung in the air motionless, like a hummingbird, but his wings stiffly at his sides, his eye alert like a bead of black glass. When he moved, it was like a stuffed bird being twitched on a string; but he was definitely alive.
“Peter, time to get u-up!”
Her wrist was in my lap, I was stroking the inside of her forearm. Stroking and stroking with a patience drawn thinner and thinner. Her silk sleeve was pushed up from the green-veined skin. The rest of the class seemed gathered about us in the woods, watching; though there was no sense of faces. She leaned forward, my Penny, my little dumb, worried Penny. Suddenly, thickly, I loved her. A wonderful honey gathered in my groin. Her flecked green irises were perfect circles with worry; an inner bit of her lower lip, glimmering with moisture, glittered nervously: the aura was like that when, a month ago in that dark car, I found my hand between her warm thighs which were pressed together; it seemed to dawn on her slowly that my hand was there, for a minute passed before she begged, “Don’t,” and when I withdrew my hand, she looked at me like that. Only that was in shadow and this was in brilliant light. The pores of her nose showed. She was unnaturally still; something was going wrong.
The back of my left hand felt hot and moist as it had when it was pulled from between her thighs; sap flowed from my extremities toward the fork of my body. I seemed delicately distend
ed in the midst of several processes. When from downstairs a loud bumble came crashing, signaling that my father was going to look at the kitchen clock, I wanted to cry, No, wait-
“Hey Cassie, tell the kid it’s seven-seventeen. I left a whole mess of papers to correct, I got to be there at eight. Zimmerman’ll have my neck.”
That was it, yes; and in the dream it didn’t even seem strange. She became the tree. I was leaning my face against the tree trunk, certain it was her. The last thing I dreamed was the bark of the tree: the crusty ridges and in the black cracks between them tiny green flecks of lichen. Her. My Lord, it was her: help me. Give her back to me.
“Peter! Are you trying to torment your father?”
“No! I’m up. For Heaven’s sake.”
“Well then get up. Get up. I mean it, young man. Now.”
I stretched and my body widened into the cool margins of the bed. The sap ebbed. The touching thing was, in the dream, she had known the change was overtaking her, she had felt her fingers turning to leaves, had wanted to tell me (her irises so round) but had not, had protected me, had gone under to wood without a word. And there was that in Penny, which now the dream made vivid to me, what I had hardly felt before, a sheltering love, young as she was, recent as our touching was, little as I gave her; she would sacrifice for me. And I exulted through my length even as I wondered why. This was a fresh patch of paint in my life.
“Rise and shine, my little sunbeam!”
My mother had reverted to a cozy approach. I knew the shiny gray paint of my windowsill would be cold as ice if I reached out my hand and touched it. The sun had fraction ally climbed higher. The dirt road had become a band of glowing salmon. On this side of the road, our side lawn was a sheet of old sandpaper that had rubbed green paint. It had not snowed yet this winter. Maybe this would be the winter when it would not snow. Was there ever such a one?
“Peter!”
My mother’s voice had the true tiger in it, and without thinking I leaped from bed. Careful to keep my skin from touching anything hard, using my fingertips to pull the glass bureau knobs like faceted crystals of frozen ammonia, I set about dressing. The house was a half-improved farmhouse. The upstairs was unheated. I stripped out of my pajamas and stood a moment relishing my martyrdom of nakedness: it seemed a smarting criticism of our moving to this primitive place. It had been my mother’s idea. She loved Nature. I stood naked, as if exposing her folly to the world.
Had the world been watching, it would have been startled, for my belly, as if pecked by a great bird, was dotted with red scabs the size of coins. Psoriasis. The very name of the allergy, so foreign, so twisty in the mouth, so apt to prompt stammering, intensified the humiliation. “Humiliation,”
“allergy”-I never knew what to call it. It was not a disease, because I generated it out of myself. As an allergy, it was sensitive to almost everything: chocolate, potato chips, starch, sugar, frying grease, nervous excitement, dryness, darkness, pressure, enclosure, the temperate climate-allergic, in fact, to life itself. My mother, from whom I had inherited it, sometimes called it a “handicap.” I found this insulting. After all, it was her fault; only females transmitted it to their children. Had my father, whose tall body sagged in folds of pure white, been my mother, my skin would have been blame less. “Handicap” savored of subtraction, and this was an addition, something extra added to me. I enjoyed at this age a strange innocence about suffering; I believed it was necessary to men. It seemed to be all about me and there was something menacing in my apparent exception. I had never broken a bone, I was bright, my parents openly loved me. In my conceit I believed myself to be wickedly lucky. So I had come to this conclusion about my psoriasis: it was a curse. God, to make me a man, had blessed me with a rhythmic curse that breathed in and out with His seasons. The summer sun melted my scabs; by September my chest and legs were clear but for a very faint dappling, invisibly pale seeds which the long dry shadow of the fall and winter would bring again to bloom. The curse reached its climax of flower in the spring; but then the strengthening sun promised cure. January was a hopeless time. My elbows and knees, pressure areas of skin, were capped with crust; on my ankles, where the embrace of my socks encouraged the scabs, they angrily ran together in a kind of pink bark. My forearms were mottled enough so that I could not turn my shirt cuffs back, in two natty folds, like other boys. Otherwise, when I was in clothes, my disguise as a normal human being was good. On my face, God had relented; except for traces along the hairline which I let my hair fall forward to cover, my face was clear. Also my hands, except for an unnoticeable stippling of the fingernails. Whereas some of my mother’s fingernails were eaten down to the quick by what looked like yellow rot.
Flames of cold flickered across my skin; the little proofs of my sex were contracted into a tense cluster. Whatever in me was normally animal reassured me; I loved the pubic hairs that had at last appeared. Reddish-black, metallic, they curled, too few to make a bush, tight as springs in the lemon-tinted cold. I hated being hairless; I felt defenseless in the locker room when, scurrying to hide my mantle of spots, I saw that my classmates had already donned an armor of fur.
Goosebumps stiffened the backs of my arms; I rubbed them briskly, and then like a miser luxuriously counting his coins I ran my palms across my abdomen. For the innermost secret, the final turn of my shame was that the texture of my psoriasis-delicately raised islands making the surrounding smoothness silver, constellations of roughness whose un even spacing on my body seemed living intervals of pause and motion-privately pleased me. The delight of feeling a large flake yield and part from the body under the insistence of a fingernail must be experienced to be forgiven.. Only the medallions watched. I went to the bureau and found a pair of Jockey shorts that still had life in the elastic. I put on a T shirt backwards. “You’ll outlive me, Pop,” my father downstairs said loudly. “I’m carrying death in my bowels.” His saying this so bluntly affected my own innards, made them feel slippery and urgent.
“The boy’s up, George,” my mother said. “You can stop the performance any time.” Her voice had left the bottom of the stairs.
“Huh? You think I’ll upset the kid?”
My father had turned fifty just before Christmas; he had always said he would never live to be fifty. Breaking the barrier had unbridled his tongue, as if, being in mathematical fact dead, nothing he said mattered. His ghostly freedom at times did frighten me.
I stood before the closet deliberating. Perhaps I foresaw that I would be wearing for a long time the clothes I chose. Perhaps the weight of the coming ordeal made me slow. Scolding my hesitation, a sneeze gathered in the bridge of my nose and itched. My bladder ached sweetly. I took from their hanger the gray flannel slacks, though their crease was poor. I had three pairs of slacks; the brown were at the cleaners and the blue were disgraced by a faint pallor at the bottom of the fly. It was a mystery to me, and I always felt unfairly condemned when they came back from the cleaners with an insulting printed slip about No Responsibility For Ineradicable Spots.
As for shirts, today the red seemed the one. I rarely wore it because its bright shoulders pointed up the white specks that showered from my scalp like a snow of dandruff. It was not dandruff, I wanted to tell everybody, as if this exonerated me. But I would be safe if I remembered not to scratch my head, and anyway a generous impulse brushed the risk aside. I would carry to my classmates on this bitter day a gift of scarlet, a giant spark, a two-pocketed emblem of heat. Its wool sleeves felt grateful sliding onto my arms. It was an eight-dollar shirt; my mother couldn’t understand why I never wore it. She rarely seemed conscious of my “handicap,” and when she was, it was with a too-bold solicitude, as if it were a piece of her. Her own case, except for her fingernails and scalp, hardly existed in comparison with mine. I did not resent this; she suffered in other ways.
My father was saying, “No, Cassie, Pop should outlive me. He’s led a good life. Pop Kramer deserves to live forever.”
Without li
stening for her reply, I knew how my mother would take this-as a jab at her father for living so long, for continuing, year after year, to be a dependent burden. She believed that my father was deliberately trying to heckle the old man into his grave. Was she right? Though many things fitted her theories, I never believed them. They were too neat and too grim.
I knew from the noise at the sink below me that she had turned away without answering. I could picture her, her neck mottled with anger, the wings of her nose white and the skin above them pulsing. I seemed to ride the waves of emotion below me. As I sat on the edge of my bed to put on my socks, the old wooden floor lifted under my foot.
My grandfather said, “We never know when we will be called. The world never knows who is needed above.”
“Well I know sure as hell they don’t need me,” my father said. “If there’s anything God doesn’t need, it’s my ugly face to look at.”
“He knows how much we need you, George.”
“You don’t need me, Cassie. You’d be better off with me on the dump. My father died at forty-nine and it was the best thing he ever did for us.”
“Your father was a disappointed man” my mother told him. “Why should you be disappointed? You have a wonderful son, a beautiful farm, an adoring wife-”
“Once the old man was in his grave,” my father continued, “my mother really cut loose. Those were the happiest years of her life. She was a super-woman, Pop.”
“I think it’s so sad,” my mother said, “that they don’t al low men to marry their mothers.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Cassie. My mother made life a hell on earth for him. She ate that man raw.”
One sock had a hole which I tucked deep into the heel of the loafer. This was Monday, and in my sock drawer there was nothing but orphans and a heavy English wool pair my Aunt Alma had sent me this Christmas from Troy, New York. She was a children’s clothes buyer for a department store there. I guessed that these socks she had sent were ex pensive, but when I put them on they were so bulky they made my toenails feel ingrown, so I never wore them. It was a vanity of mine to have my loafers small, size 10 ½ instead of 11, which would have been proper. I hated to have big feet; I wanted to have a dancer’s quick and subtle hooves.