by John Updike
“Jesus kid,” my father said. “It’s ten to. I’ll lose my job if we don’t move.”
“That’s your clock, George,” my mother said. Since she was defending me, I could not be the cause of her anger. “Our clock says you have seventeen minutes.”
“Your clock’s wrong,” he told her. “Zimmerman’s after my hide.”
“Coming, coming,” I said, and stood up. The first bell rang at eight-twenty. It took twenty minutes to drive to Olinger. I felt squeezed in the dwindling time. My stomach ground its empty sides together.
My grandfather worked his way over to the refrigerator and from its top took the gaudy loaf of Maier’s Bread. He moved with a pronounced and elaborate air of being in conspicuous that made us all watch him. He unfolded the wax paper and removed a slice of white bread, which he then folded once and tidily tucked entire into his mouth. His mouth’s elasticity was a marvel; a toothless chasm appeared under his ash-colored mustache to receive the bread in one bite. The calm cannibalism of this trick always infuriated my mother. “Pop,” she said, “can’t you wait until they’re out of the house before you start tormenting the bread?”
I took a last sip of the scalding coffee and pushed toward the door. We were all jammed into the little area of linoleum bounded by the door, the wall where the clocks ticked and hummed, the refrigerator, and the sink. The congestion was intense. My mother struggled to get past her father to the stove. He drew himself in and his dark husk seemed impaled on the refrigerator door. My father stood fast, by far the tallest of us, and over our heads announced to his invisible audience, “Off to the slaughterhouse. Those damn kids have put their hate right into my bowels.”
“He rattles at that bread all day until I think I have rats in my brain,” my mother protested, and, the psoriatic rim of her hairline flaring red, she squeezed past Grampop and pressed a cold piece of toast and a banana at me. I had to shift my books to take them into my hands. “My poor unfed boy,” she said. “My poor only jewel.”
“Off to the hate-factory,” my father called, to goad me on.
Bewildered, anxious to please my mother, I had paused to eat a bite from the cold toast.
“If there’s anything I hate,” my mother said, half to me, half to the ceiling, while my father bent forward and touched her cheek with one of his rare kisses, “it’s a man who hates sex.”
My grandfather lifted his hands in his squeezed space and in a voice muffled by bread pronounced, “Blessings on thee.”
He never failed to say it, just as, in the early evening, when he climbed “the wooden hill,” he would call down to us, “Pleasant dreams.” His hands were daintily lifted in benediction, a gesture also of surrender and, as if tiny angels had been clutched in them, release. His hands were what I knew best of him, for, the one in the family with the youngest eyes, it was my job to remove with my mother’s tweezers the microscopic brown thorns that on his weed-pulling walks around our farm would gather in the dry, sensitive, translucently mottled skin of his palms.
“Thanks, Pop, we’ll need ‘em,” my father said, wrenching the door open with a quick undercurrent of splintering. He never turned the knob quite enough, so the catch always resisted. “My goose is cooked,” he said, glancing at his clock. My mother’s cheek brushed mine as I followed him.
“And if there’s anything I hate in my house” she called after my father, “it’s cheap red clocks”
Safe on the porch, my father striding around the corner, I looked back, which was a mistake. The toast in my mouth turned salty at the sight. My mother, in the momentum of her last cry, went to the wall and, silent through the glass, tore the electric clock from its nail on the wall and made as if to dash it to the floor but then, instead, hugged it with its trailing cord like a baby to her bosom, her cheeks wetly shining. Helplessly her eyes widened, confronting mine. She had been a beautiful young woman and her eyes had not aged. Each day her plight seemed to startle her afresh. Behind her, her father, his head bowed obsequiously, his elastic jaws munching, shuffled across the floor back to his place in the living-room. I wanted to move my face into some expression of consolation or humorous communication but felt it frozen with fear. Fear for her and of her.
And yet, love, do not think that our life together, for all its mutual frustration, was not good. It was good. We moved, somehow, on a firm stage, resonant with metaphor. When my grandmother lay dying in Olinger, and I was a child, I heard her ask in a feeble voice, “Will I be a little debil?” Then she took a sip of wine and in the morning she was dead. Yes. We lived in God’s sight.
My father was striding across the sandpaper lawn. I chased him. The little tummocks raised by moles in warm weather made it buckle in spots. The barn wall was full in the sun, a high dappled pentagon. “Mother almost smashed the clock,” I told him when I caught up. I meant this to shame him. “She’s in a funny mood,” he said. “Your mother’s a real femme, Peter. If I’d been any kind of man I would have put her on the burlesque stage when she was young.”
“She thinks you tease Grampop.”
“Huh? Does she? I’m wild about Pop Kramer. He’s the nicest man I ever knew. I worship that man.”
Words seemed whittled and diminished by the still blue volumes of cold air that clove our cheeks. Our black Buick, a ‘36 four-door, waited by the barn, facing downhill. That car had had a beautiful swanky grille; my father, unexpectedly-for material things meant little to him-had taken childish pride in those slim parallels of chrome. Last fall, Ray Deifendorfs muddy old Chewy had stalled on the high school lot and my father with his usual impulsive Christianity had volunteered to push him and, just when they had reached a good speed, Deifendorf through some stupidity braked, and our car’s grille smashed on Deifendorfs bumper. I wasn’t there. Deifendorf himself told me, laughing, how my father had rushed around to the front and gathered up all the bits of broken metal, muttering to himself, “Maybe they can weld it together, maybe Hummel can weld it together.” This hopelessly shattered grille. The way Deifendorf told it I had to laugh too.
The bright fragments still rode around in the trunk, and our car’s face had jagged front teeth. It was a long, heavy car, and the cylinders needed to be rebored. Also it needed a new battery. My father and I got in and he pulled out the choke and switched on the ignition and listened, head cocked, to the starter churn the stiff motor. There was frost on the windshield that made the interior dim. The resurrection felt impossible. We listened so intently that a common picture seemed crystallized between our heads, of the dutiful brown rod straining forward in its mysterious brown cavern, skid ding past the zenith of its revolution, and retreating, rejected. There was not even a ghost of a spark. I closed my eyes to make a quick prayer and heard my father say, “Jesus kid, we’re in trouble.” He got out and frantically scraped at the windshield frost with his fingernails until he had cleared a patch for the driver’s vision. I got out on my side and, heaving together on opposite doorframes, we pushed. Once. Twice. An immense third time.
With a faint rending noise the tires came loose from the frozen earth of the barn ramp. The resistance of the car’s weight diminished; sluggishly we were gliding downhill. We both hopped in, the doors slammed, and the car picked up speed on the gravel road that turned and dipped sharply around the barn. The stones crackled like slowly breaking ice under our tires. With a dignified acceleration the car swallowed the steepest part of the incline, my father let the clutch in, the chassis jerked, the motor coughed, caught, caught, and we were aloft, winging along the pink straight away between a pale green meadow and a fallow flat field. Our road was so little travelled that in the center it had a mane of weeds. My father’s grim lips half-relaxed. He poured shivering gasoline into the hungry motor. If we stalled now, we would be out of luck, for we were on the level and there would be no more coasting. He pushed the choke halfway in. Our motor purred in a higher key. Through the clear margins of the sheet of frost on our windshield I could see forward; we were approaching the edge of our la
nd. Our meadow ended where the land lifted. Our gallant black hood sailed into the sharp little rise of road, gulped it down, stones and all, and spat it out behind us. On our right, Silas Schoelkopf’s mailbox saluted us with a stiff red flag. We had escaped our land. I looked back: our home was a little set of buildings lodged on the fading side of the valley. The barn overhang and the chicken house were gentle red. The stuccoed cube where we had slept released like a last scrap of dreaming a twist of smoke that told blue against the purple woods. The road dipped again, our farm disappeared, and we were unpursued. Schoelkopf had a pond, and ducks the color of old piano keys were walking on the ice. On our left, Jesse Flagler’s high whitewashed barn seemed to toss a mouthful of hay in our direction. I glimpsed the round brown eye of a breathing cow.
The dirt road came up to Route 122 at a treacherous grade where it was easy to stall. Here there was a row of mailboxes like a street of birdhouses, a stop sign riddled with rusty bullet-holes, and a lop-limbed apple tree. My father glanced down the highway and guessed it was empty; without touching the brake he bounced us over the final hurdle of rutted dirt. We were high and safe on firm macadam. He went back into second gear, made the motor roar, shifted to third, and the Buick exulted. It was eleven miles to Olinger. From this point on, the journey felt downhill. I ate half of the toast. The cold crumbs got all over my books and lap. I peeled the banana and ate it all, more to please my mother than to satisfy any hunger, and rolled down the window enough to slip the peel and the rest of the toast into the skimming countryside.
Round and rectangular and octagonal advertisements spoke from the edges of. the farmland. One weathered barn’s whole side said pony cut plug. The fields where in summer Amish families in bonnets and black hats harvested tomatoes and where fat men on narrow-nosed scarlet tractors swayed through acres of barley seemed, shorn of crops, painfully exposed; they begged the sky to blanket them with snow. At a curve a two-pump gasoline shack wrapped in tattered soft-drink posters limped into our path and fell away wheeling, reappearing in the rear-view mirror ludicrously shrunk, its splotched flying horse sign illegible and dwindling. A dip in the highway made the door of the glove compartment tingle. We passed through Firetown. The village proper was four sandstone houses; here the old squirearchy of Fire Town ship had lived. One of these houses for fifty years had been the Ten Mile Inn, and there was still a hitching rail by the porch. The windows were boarded. Beyond this kernel, the village thinned into more recent developments: a cinder-block store where they sold beer by the case; two new houses with high foundations and no front steps, though families lived in both; a rambling hunting hut well back from the road, where on weekends parties of many men and sometimes a few women came and made the lights burn; some pre-war com position-shingled houses, built tall as if in a city and filled, my grandfather maintained, with illegitimate children dying of malnutrition. We passed an orange school bus waddling in the opposite direction, toward the township school. I lived now in this school’s district, but my father’s teaching at Olinger High saved me from going there. I was frightened of the children in the land around us. My mother had made me join the 4-H Club. My fellow members had slanting oval eyes and smooth dun skins. The dull innocence of some and the viciously detailed knowingness of others struck me as equally savage and remote from my highly civilized aspirations. We met in the church basement, and after an hour of slides illuminating cattle diseases and corn pests, I would sweat with claustrophobia, and swim into the cold air and plunge at home into my book of Vermeer reproductions like a close-to-drowned man clinging to the beach.
The cemetery appeared on our right; tablet-shaped tomb stones rode at various tilts the settling tummocks. Then the stout sandstone steeple of the Firetown Lutheran Church leaped higher than the trees and dipped its new cross an instant into the sun. My grandfather had helped build that steeple; he had pushed the great stones in a wheelbarrow up a narrow path of bending planks. He had often described to us, with exquisite indications of his fingers, how those planks had bent beneath his weight.
My father and I began going down Fire Hill, the longer, and less steep, of the two hills on the road to Olinger and Alton. About halfway down, the embankment foliage fell away, and a wonderful view opened up. I saw across a little valley like the background of a Durer. Lording it over a few acres of knolls and undulations draped with gray fences and dotted with rocks like brown sheep, there was a small house that seemed to have grown from the land. This little house presented to the view from the highway a broad bottle-shaped chimney built up one wall from field stones and newly whitewashed. And out of this broad chimney, very white, its rough bulk linking the flat wall to the curving land, the thinnest trace of smoke declared that someone lived here. I supposed that all this country looked this way when my grandfather helped raise the steeple.
My father pushed the choke all the way in. The needle of the temperature gauge seemed stuck in its bed on the left side of the dial; the heater refused to declare itself. His hands as they controlled the car moved with a pained quickness across the metal and hard rubber. “Where are your gloves?” I asked him.
“In the back, aren’t they?”
I turned and looked; on the back seat the leather gloves I had bought him for Christmas lay curled palms up between a rumpled road map and a snarl of baling rope. I had paid nearly nine dollars for them. The money came from a little “art school” account I had started that summer with money earned from my 4-H project, a patch of strawberries. I had spent so much for these gloves I only bought my mother a book and my grandfather a handkerchief; I so wanted my father to care about his clothes and his comfort, like the fathers of my friends. And the gloves had fit. He wore them the first day, and then they rested in the front seat, and then when one day three people crowded into the front seat, they were tossed into the back. “Why don’t you ever wear them?” I asked him. My voice with him was almost always accusing.
“They’re too good,” he said. “They’re wonderful gloves, Peter. I know good leather. You must have paid a fortune for ‘em.”
“Not that much, but aren’t your hands cold?”
“Yeah. Boy, this is a bitter day. We’re in Old Man Winter’s belly.”
“Well don’t you want to put the gloves on?”
Roadside scruff in a scratchy stream poured past my father’s profile. He emerged from thought to tell me, “When I was a kid, if anybody had given me gloves like that, I would have cried real tears.”
These words hurt my stomach, weighted as they were by what I had overheard while awaking. I had gathered only that there was something in him, and this thing, which I thought might be the same thing that made him resist wearing my gloves, I hoped I could elicit; though I did suspect that he was too old and too big for me to purge or change completely, even for my mother’s sake. I leaned closer and studied the edges of white flesh where his fists gripped the steering-wheel. The wrinkles in his skin seemed fissures; the hairs, bits of captured black grass. The backs of his hands were dappled with dull brown warts. “Doesn’t the steering wheel feel like ice?” I asked. My voice sounded like my mother’s, when she had said, “You can’t feel such things.”
“To tell the truth, Peter, my tooth hurts so much I don’t notice it.”
I was surprised and relieved: a toothache was new; per haps this mere thing was what was in him. I asked, “Where?”
“In the back.” He sucked; his cheek, cut in shaving this morning, wrinkled. The blood of his cut seemed very dark.
“You ought to have it looked at. That’s simple.”
“I don’t know which one it is. All of ‘em probably. I ought to have.every tooth in my head yanked. Slap a plate in there. Go to one of these butchers in Alton that pulls ‘em out and puts ‘em in the same day. They push ‘em right into your bloody gums.”
“Is that really what they do?”
“Sure. They’re sadists, Peter. Mongoloid sadists.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said.
The heater, thawed by our run down the hill, came on; brown air baked by rusty pipes breathed onto my ankles. Each morning, this event had the tone of a rescue. Now that a margin of comfort had been promised, I turned on the radio. The little dial, thermometer-shaped, glowed wan orange. When the tubes warmed, cracked and jagged nighttime voices sang in the bright blue morning. My scalp tingled and tightened; the voices, negroid and hillbilly, seemed to pick their way along the tune over obstacles that made their voices skip, lift, and stagger; and this jagged terrain seemed my country. It was the U.S.A. the songs conveyed: mountains of pine, oceans of cotton, tan western immensities haunted by disembodied voices cracked by love invaded the Buick’s stale space. A commercial delivered with an unctuous irony spoke soothingly of the cities, where I hoped my life would take me, and then a song came like a choo-choo, clicking, irresistible, carrying the singer like a hobo on top of its momentum, and my father and I seemed ourselves irresistible, rolling up and down through the irregularities of our suffering land, warm in the midst of much cold. In those days the radio carried me into my future, where I was strong: my closets were full of beautiful clothes and my skin as smooth as milk as I painted, to the tune of great wealth and fame, pictures heavenly and cool, like those of Vermeer. That Vermeer himself had been obscure and poor I knew. But I reasoned that he had lived in backward times. That my own times were not backward I knew from reading magazines. True, in all of Alton County only my mother and I seemed to know about Vermeer; but in the great cities there must be thousands who knew, all of them rich. Vases and burnished furniture stood upright around me. On a stiff tablecloth a loaf of sugary bread lay sequined with pointillist dabs of light. Beyond the parapet of my balcony a high city of constant sun named New York glimmered in its million windows. My white walls accepted a soft breeze scented with chalk and whole cloves. In the doorway a woman stood, shadow-mirrored by the polished tiles, and watched me; her lower lip was slightly heavy and slack, like the lower lip of the girl in the blue turban in The Hague. Among these images which the radio songs rapidly brushed in for me the one blank space was the canvas I was so beautifully, debonairly, and preciously covering. I could not visualize my work; but its featureless radiance made the center of everything as I carried my father in the tail of a comet through the expectant space of our singing nation.