by John Updike
“How do you know,” Teddy asked Sister Esther, “Pulsifer’ll hold to his promise and go through with the divorce?” Always, he felt how dangerous adult life was, how fraught with gambles that could go sour.
“Well,” she said, and squinted through a plume of smoke from her new brand, Chesterfields, “if he doesn’t, I’ll have some new information. I can’t stay another day in that office; Frank Bundy keeps looking daggers at me, as if I’m the one who weaseled out. The sap. He had his chance.”
“But what will you do in New York?”
“I don’t know—go to shows and museums. Sit in Washington Square and write po-ems. Jared says they’ll take me to all their favorite dives. He and Lucille have an apartment right on Fifth Avenue with four bedrooms—I can stay as long as I like. I need a dose of them bright white lights, Tedsy. Hey—I never said I’d stay down here forever. You’re pretty well settled in, isn’t that so? I got you through the transition, right?”
“Right,” he said bravely. “It’s just—Mother and Aunt Esther are getting old. You were the only live wire around here. You were the only one I could talk to.”
“Find someone else, then. It’s not so hard. Hell, you’re twenty-two going on eighty-two—what’s happened to your glands?”
She had a way of making him blush. “Nothing’s happened, but to the proper girls around here, I’m just the soda jerk. And if I got a serious girl, wouldn’t it upset Mom?”
“Au contraire, kid. What do you think, everybody in Missouri was an immaculate conception? She wants family. Loosen up. Start going to church socials, or something.”
“Church doesn’t agree with me. You know that.”
She hesitated a second, without a ready answer for once. “Church is where the action is, in a one-horse burg like this. Lick ’em or join ’em’s the way I see it.” She shrugged. “Suit yourself. I got enough mess living my own life. Maybe you’re right—sit tight and wait for the undertaker.” And with these breezy words she leaned forward, there in Aunt Esther’s gloomy kitchen, with its ceiling of brown-painted pressed tin, and gave her younger brother a hard little kiss on his broad forehead, with her thin painted lips.
It did seem the world was turning sexier. In the movies, the Mack Sennett girls showed more and more leg in their bathing suits, and there were “vamps” played by foreign actresses with names like Pola Negri. In the real world the young women were called “flappers” wearing just little slips for dresses and doing a wild dance called the Charleston. Some guys in the drug store the other day had gone up to Philadelphia to see a burlesque star called Carrie Finnel, who twirled tassels from her breasts and buttocks. Only they didn’t call them breasts and buttocks. The country’s tough, “fast” currents were picked up by the young set around Basingstoke—the girls in their tubular little dresses and rolled stockings, the guys in their white wide-bottomed ducks. Teddy marvelled that even the children of people working at the bottle-cap factory were able to buy the clothes that imitated the rich youth of Long Island and Chicago and Grosse Pointe. Hung-over on bathtub gin, Basingstoke’s young blades would come in in the morning for bicarbs and Pepto-Bismol at the counter, and the young women, desperately conferring with Mrs. Addison over by the perfumes, looking to erase the possibility of a pregnancy contracted in a drunken daze. Working in the drug store was like standing on the corner of Rodney and Elm watching the town’s woes go by. Tremulous and breathing hard and blue around the edges, the old came in and took away digitalis for their hearts. The young mothers came in and purchased milk of magnesia to speed up their kids’ bowels and paregoric to slow them down. The middle-aged bought iron and liver extract for pep and bromides and barbiturates to settle their nerves. Morphine and aspirin eased pain. Cough syrup loosened catarrh and soothed sore throat. Ipecac got you to vomit. Colchicum cured or at least discouraged gout, iodine goiter, insulin diabetes, quinine malaria, Salvarsan syphilis, and vitamin C scurvy. But the last three were rare in Basingstoke. Belladonna, sassafras bark, sarsaparilla root, cascara, mentholatum, antiphlogistene, Seidlitz powders, Rochelle salts, vegetable simples by the dozen—it was hard to say if any of it really worked. The purpose was to make people feel attention was being paid and something was being tried. Aunt Esther’s Doc Hedger had a standard prescription he had made a rubber stamp for—Elixir of I, Q, and S, which consisted of minute amounts of iron, quinine, and strychnine dissolved in an alcohol solution about as strong as bourbon whiskey. It was the alcohol that probably did the good. Life basically had to be endured. Nature fought for you until it turned against you.
Among the chronic customers Teddy began to notice, in the damp, late-arriving spring of 1926, a newcomer to town, a lame girl who generally appeared in the drug store under her father’s protection. He was a tobacco farmer who had sold his acres near Lewes and moved to Basingstoke to buy the old Culver greenhouse two blocks along on Fishery Way, with half its windows broken from all the years when Jake Culver was drinking himself to death after his boys declined to come back to Delaware after serving in the Army overseas. Teddy had lived in Basingstoke five years now and knew most of what happened in town, from conversations at the post office or at the soda-fountain counter. It was a pretty sight to see the new panes of glass filling in the greenhouse’s rusty iron ribs, though everybody agreed the town never could and never would support a flower business. The answer to that was that Daniel Sifford didn’t need the money; he had made a killing selling to a real-estate speculator seeing a great future, comparable to the southern-Jersey resorts, for the area around Rehoboth Beach. Sifford wanted the greenhouse, and the two acres and 1880 farmhouse that went with it, as a hobby, to keep his hand in the dirt. He was a big-boned shambling man whose clothes hung on him like bib overalls; his face was so creased it looked to be in overlapping pieces, as in some breeds of dog. There was a wife, but she never came into the drug store, and was hardly seen out of the house at all—just sometimes hanging out wash in the yard and scuttering away if anybody looked like they might try to talk to her. For children there were only the lame girl, and a much older boy who had gone west somewhere, Indiana or Nebraska, where the farmland was sold six hundred forty acres at a time.
The girl dressed in a slightly off-key way, by Basingstoke standards—a little too fancily for everyday some days, her hair done up behind in an old-fashioned ribbon, and then on other days too plain, with potting soil besmirching her gingham dress and her stockings speckled with bits of mulching hay. She had to order a new leg brace and orthopedic shoe, a high-top with built-up sole, through the drug store, and it had to be sent back to an address in Camden several times before it fit well enough to satisfy Doc Hedger. She had fallen into his hands, and the prescriptions of his that she brought in—APC, morphine sulfate, rubbing alcohol, pain-easing liniments—told a sad story of discomfort that her lovely clear eyes and cheerful factual manner concealed. Her eyes had bigger whites than those of ordinary girls: they were like the eyes of the movie stars Gloria Swanson or Lillian Gish on posters outside the Roxie, an every-day-but-Sunday, specially built movie theatre, with long blank brick sides and a triangular marquee, that had replaced the Bijou upstairs at the Oddfellows’ Hall. Her figure was countryish and plump but her skin had an unblemished satin luster, as if all the suffering and embarrassment of her deformed right foot had made her spirit glow just as preachers say suffering does. Having studied the exact measurements of her brace and special shoe on their way back and forth to Camden gave Teddy a curious intimacy with her that he was surprised she didn’t feel reciprocally. He knew her name, from the drug-store records: Emily Jeanette Sifford. She was very shy but had a soft spot for ice-cream sodas with a scoop of butter-pecan ice cream. When she was sitting at the counter with her plump white forearms and pink elbows dimly reflected in the veined green marble, one of her hard-working little hands, the fingernails outlined in dark dirt from helping her father in the greenhouse, would brush back a strand of her fine brown hair—hair so fine the individual hairs straying fr
om her ribbon seemed colorless—away from her face as her puckered lips pushed forward around the straw, slightly greedy, sucking with a subdued gurgle the last bit of soda before digging at the ice cream with the long silver spoon. She wore no makeup. She had pretty well discounted herself as a courtable female. Her manner was short on airs and graces. When she finished the soda she would wipe her knuckle across her lips and stare out with a blank, almost burpy look of satisfaction and he would see that indeed, compared with the shimmery hard women dancing across the movie screen and the Wilmington society pages, she was plain and bland. A high forehead, and a bit of a double chin, young as she was. But then her eyes might light on him, sensing his staring; their blue was not milky or icy like that of Wilmot eyes but velvety, a somehow flowering, layered blue, taking green from the countertop and sparkle from the scintillating fixtures and products and advertisements that cluttered the soda fountain. There was a mirror behind him which reflected the customers, wherein she could see herself and the back of his head. “That was right good,” she said one day, when there was no one else at the counter.
“What was?” he responded, startled, though he had overheard her slow, careful, down-home voice before, in conference with Mr. Addison and her father. It might have been the slowness that made everything she said sound musical.
“The soda. You cook up a good ice-cream soda.”
“Well, I been at it a while,” he said, feeling clumsy, in his soiled white jacket imitating that of a real druggist. Mr. Addison wanted him to wear it because the white outfit made people feel they were in a clean, germ-free place; but then he was too cheap to get it laundered often enough, so it looked toward the end of the week like Teddy was wearing a wiping rag. “There’s no big trick to it,” he said. More seemed required. “The banana split, now, that takes something, and even a chocolate sundae, so it looks like the pictures they give you.” With a jerk of his head he indicated the stand-up cardboard advertisements behind him, propped up in front of the mirror, supplied by the ice-cream company, in full and tempting color, of the structures—boats, mock-mountains, snowman-shapes—that could be made with ice cream and whipped cream and crushed nuts and chocolate and caramel syrups. “You should try a banana split sometime,” Teddy said, beginning to blush as he felt his topic dwindle under him.
She felt it too, and reverted to his first statement. “How long a while?”
This was 1926. The year he quit going up to Wilmington to business school, President Harding died; then the next summer President Coolidge’s sixteen-year-old, Calvin Coolidge, Jr., died, so the whole nation was supposed to mourn; and the third summer Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution and fined a hundred dollars but the famous witness and speechifier against him, William Jennings Bryan, right away upped and died. So much for defending the Lord’s Word. “Three years,” Teddy admitted. She was looking at him so curiously that he joked nervously, “It beats making bottle caps.” This was a local saying, invoked whenever any dubious activity was questioned.
Surprisingly, this lame girl from below the canal stiffened a bit on her stool and pronounced in a voice faintly pugnacious, “Well, it’s not for me to say, but I would think a nice clever good-looking man like you could find something more challenging to your talents than making banana splits that look like the pictures on cardboard.”
Clever? Good-looking? Man? But all he said, stung, was, “Oh, yeah?” He went on, “That may be right, but who says it’s for you to say? I don’t see you doing much, except poking in your old man’s greenhouse dirt.”
As if conjured up, her father in his saggy gray clothes appeared at the entry door between the magazines and the cigar case; she slid from the stool with an offended face and tried to glide, suppressing her limp, out the door, leaving two dimes behind on the green-marble counter.
That was probably that. She didn’t come in for days, but he didn’t see how she could escape seeing him forever, the town being so small, and the greenhouse just two blocks away. Several times he walked home to Willow Street by way of the greenhouse, and failed to see her. As casually as possible he asked his mother at supper, “You know that man Sifford, who bought the Culver greenhouse?”
“Why, no, Teddy dear, I don’t believe I do. My steps don’t often take me up Fishery Way.”
“I thought maybe from church, or something.…”
“He hasn’t shown his face in the Presbyterian church, of that I am sure. What is it you were wanting to know, darling?”
“Oh, nothing.”
There was a pause while she tapped out, without asking, another spoonful of mashed sweet potatoes onto his plate. “Perhaps your Aunt Esther would know what you want to know. When you take her chocolate pudding up, you can ask her.”
Aunt Esther spent much of her day in bed. Doc Hedger couldn’t put a name to her illness, but its stubbornness made his bald head shake to itself as he would come down the stairs. His cheeks wobbled, his watch chain swung across the belly-swag of his dark-blue vest, and the shiny black shoes on his feet seemed to have more creases than anyone else’s shoes. Aunt Esther’s room was getting to smell like the back shelves of the drug store, of camphor and crystallizing old syrups, mixed with a sorrowful musty human scent that was her body. But she had recently installed an upstairs telephone, in the most modern black Bakelite style, and there it sat on her bedside table, next to her boxes of Blaud’s Pills and Eskay’s Neurophosphates for Nerves, like a thick flower, a black daffodil, its bell to talk into facing her thin yellow head, which was propped up close by on three pillows. “Methodists,” she said. “Those Siffords go over to the Methodist church. He goes alone, never brings his wife. The older boy headed west, and then there’s the unfortunate girl. They’re not what you’d call jolly people.”
He asked her his question, and like his mother she looked sharp and asked him, “Now why would you want to know?”
“No reason. I see her hobbling into the store with her dad, getting her medicine and braces. I guess I feel sorry for her.”
“Don’t feel too sorry. Her dad got a pretty penny for his land, nobody knows just how much.” The invalid thinned her lips and answered his question: “Some say it happened in the womb, but others say the mother is a tippler and dropped her as an infant. The mother is certainly strange, keeping to her yard and staying upstairs when anybody comes to the door. Whatever happened to the girl, it happened a while ago, and I suppose she’s resigned.”
When Emily came into the drug store next, she didn’t look so resigned. She sat up to the counter and without a word of hello said, “In response to your rude remark, about digging in my father’s dirt, our cases are not parallel. You’re a man, I’m a woman. A man has to go out into the world. A woman doesn’t have to do anything, except what men tell her to do.”
A woman. Innocent and unkempt as she looked, she had men and women on the mind. He perceived that one way she had developed to cope with her lame leg was to say provoking things that showed she didn’t care for your opinion. He was not as taken aback as he might have been with somebody else, figuring this was her style. He said, “Being a woman is that bad, huh? Anyway, I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. You poke around in whatever dirt you want.”
“That’s rude, too.”
“Well, Jeez. You’re not so easy to talk to, it turns out.”
This made her smile—a quick dimpling in the softness next to the corner of her mouth, a slight pinching shut of her lids over her eyes with their vivid whites. “Did you think I would be?”
“I guess I did. Foolish me. I must have been dreaming.” Another customer sat down at the counter, taking his attention, and then a third, and by the time he returned to her the tulip dish that had held her pistachio ice cream held nothing but a pale-green stain at the bottom and she was gone. A dime on the counter dismissed him. After a week of her not appearing he wondered if the Siffords were using the other drug store in town, the Liggett’s across the street and one block up toward the tannery ruin. Ligg
ett’s shaved a penny or two off most items but the floorspace was half that Addison’s had, with nothing like the selection of cigars and magazines. Addison’s stocked the newest magazines—Time and Reader’s Digest and even The American Mercury, which was said to be radical and God-mocking. People were always sneakily turning it in the rack so you couldn’t see the cover, but Teddy would turn the copies right side out. He liked Mencken, as the closest thing America had to Shaw and Wells.
One of the days when he got off work at five-thirty he walked home to Willow Street by way of Fishery Way, along the alley past its garages built of concrete blocks imitating real stone with the same rock-rough shape out of a mold, over and over, and its gun shop emitting the sound of grinding and the smell of hot metal. It was fall in Delaware, with a harder drier sparkle on the blue tidal stretches of the Avon and the marsh grass turning the color of an orange tomcat and the trees overhead yielding up chlorophyll. Parched leaves littered the lawns, which except where watered by a fanatic householder or directly over a septic tank had given up growing, becoming as flat and dry as dusty carpet—a matted look that merged in Ted’s mind with the chirring of cicadas, a song that crept upon the later summer as the sound of peepers crept upon the spring. All the panes of glass in the rusty greenhouse frames had been replaced, and spattered inside with a kind of whitewash, so it was not easy to look in. Hanging across the alley by one of those fake-stone garages, near an oil drum that had been punctured to be somebody’s burning barrel, Teddy studied the flickers of activity behind the spattered panes, and decided that the dark flickers were the father and two hired Negro helpers. The pale pieces of cloth that came and went with surprising nimbleness were Emily. Emily Jeanette. Her name in his mouth, even when he didn’t speak it, was like one of those mentholated cough-drop lozenges that fill your mouth with an almost painful fullness of taste. Yet she was two unfortunate things: she was a cripple and a rube.