by John Updike
All this ran counter to the mood Essie had brought out of the movie house, and rather than hear more she began to skip, partly in the excitement of being out in the misty rain without her rubbers and her stiff slicker that smelled so funny and rubbery, and partly in exaggeration of her mother’s limp. She skipped ahead of her and then back on the other side, as if encircling some clumsy animal caught in a lasso. Baby voice. She’d show her. “I’m going to go to the movies all alone all the time from now on. I loved it without you and Daddy there.”
“Oh my,” Mother said, slowing and seeming to exaggerate her limp herself. “Such ambition. Such pep.”
In reconciliation Essie took her mother’s hand, pretty and white and perfect and moist, and stopped skipping. There was no car in sight either way but she had been told to be careful crossing Locust Street and always was. Daddy was still out in the yard, finishing up, carrying a wheelbarrow-load of weeds and dead peony stalks away to the heap next to the fence, behind the wire trash cage where he burnt newspapers and Ritz-cracker boxes and envelopes that had been slit open. His little red fire was smoking blue in the rain. The kitchen lights were on, and Ama’s hunched shape flitted past, on her way to the stove holding a pot, taking tiny hurried steps because it was hot. The set-back gray house, with her father in the yard and her grandmother in the kitchen, and Mr. Bear upstairs waiting on her bed, where the day’s light was leaking away above the spines of the radiator with their secret pattern of twisting ivy, struck Essie suddenly as sad, and insubstantial, a ghost house, seen by the light of the silvery movie world whose beautiful smooth people rattled all those words at each other and moved through their enormous ceilingless rooms with such swiftness and electric purpose. The day was still Saturday, every day lasted and lasted, and tonight if she begged she could stay up to eight and hear Professor Quiz, though sometimes Daddy wanted to hear Ed Wynn at the same time. He made him laugh, he said, and forget the world’s misery, and this seemed sad, too, and shabby, like the places at the corners where the kitchen tablecloth was wearing through so the shiny checked pattern flaked away to reveal the tan burlappy cloth under the shiny layer. Black came off on your finger when you touched the oil-stove grates, and the wooden icebox held a great crazed whitish block sweatily melting in its belly, getting smaller and smaller on the metal slats. Essie saw her home by a light as if from above the clouds and realized that at some incredible time in the future she would leave it here on Locust Street like a seventeen-year-locust husk she found this summer still clinging with no bug inside it to the trunk of a little crabapple tree she was thinking of climbing.
The war was horrible, all those young soldiers being killed and babies being bombed and the Nazis murdering a whole village at Lidice and everything, but wonderful, too, happening so far away, in so many of what they called “theatres,” and making all the movie stars go about selling bonds and putting on shows for the troops with the USO. The war gave everybody something to do. Because Lyle Dresham, the young sorting clerk at the post office, was drafted, and old Wes Freeman had retired and then died of a bad liver all by himself in his shack out by the marsh, and Mr. Horley himself was of retirement age but agreed to stay on “for the duration,” Daddy worked longer hours than ever but only did one delivery a day instead of two. To the rural outskirts, including Beaver Road, he drove a khaki Jeep the Army had lent the post office so the blue-star mothers of Basingstoke would get their V-mail. In town he parked at the corners near the green collection boxes and walked a piece of his walking route and then went back for the Jeep. When he gave Essie a ride in the Jeep it was fun because it bounced at every bump and she felt what it was like to be a soldier. The bottle-cap factory was converted to making bullet casings and Momma got a job there, working through the night when she was on the dead man’s shift. Coming into the house with a blurred happy face with her hair upswept according to factory regulations and wearing brown pants and a blue working shirt like a man, she would kiss Essie as the child was heading out the door to school. At the age of thirteen Essie was in the seventh grade and that meant walking the opposite way from the elementary school on East Rodney Street. It meant walking west to the combination junior-high–senior-high building built on the edge of the old poor farm in 1923, with the football field inside the cinder track and just beyond the bleachers fields of the new crop called soybeans, since there were fewer hogs now in the countryside to feed field corn to.
The high school had been built of bricks the color of throw-up, rude kids said. Separate from the big building stood a wooden shed roofed in tarpaper where the groundskeepers kept their lawn mowers and the athletic department kept the girls’ hockey sticks and the square stuffed baseball bases and five-sided home plates. There were two baseball diamonds, one for softball not far from the storage shed, so that a good long foul ball pulled over third base might hit the wall or its one window covered in rat wire, and another beyond it, with a grass infield, for hardball—high-school varsity and also the town league. Beyond this second diamond the town playground offered an open pavilion with a smaller equipment shed and tables for checkers and braiding gimp, a basketball backboard on two pipes stuck in cement, two metal slides kept slippery and shiny by rubbing with the wax paper that sandwiches were wrapped in, a swing set with four big troughs worn where feet kicked, a smaller set of three for babies with chairs that had a bar across in front, and a jungle gym whose iron pipes were dewy and cold in the morning on the backs of your knees when you skinned the cat. Nobody could skin the cat like Essie at the age of ten; she liked the feeling of the world turning upside-down and the blood rushing to her head and her dress falling down over her underpants for a second. By the time she was thirteen she would never do such a thing, boys might see her hair there, at the edge of the cotton crotch. Much of the playground apparatus had become babyish but still she liked to linger, as spring lengthened the days, in the barren area between the shack near the high school and the pavilion on the edge of the old poorhouse peach orchards, a stretch that included the bleachers for the two baseball diamonds. The space held a flavor of after-school release, of a wide horizon, of not hurrying to get home. Extending her range to this space was a step, she knew, in her life’s adventure. It was lazy and dirty and expectant, the atmosphere of it, the dirt full of stamped-in cigarette butts and drinking straws and used bottle caps, the back of the pavilion shed scratched with drawings and words not all of which she as yet understood.
She liked the kids who hung out here, though they were from the wrong side of town. As they lounged on the bleachers the air felt like rain clouds, hanging low and fuzzy over their heads, making them momentarily safe from possible bombers in the sky. The Du Pont plants and the Canal might be enemy targets, everybody said. Battles were raging in every direction over the horizon, in Libya and Burma, at Guadalcanal and Stalingrad, names in big black headlines and breathless radio bulletins introduced by the stutter of a telegraph key. In the movie newsreels, tanks plowed through the desert, making sandstorms, and Allied planes dropped hundreds of slowly twirling finned bombs on German cities, making firestorms. Smoke billowing, planes diving, battleships listing and sinking, parachutes multiplying in the sky over Yugoslavia like lilies in water, the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto starving and fighting guns with stones, frozen Nazi soldiers’ bodies lying all over Russia: the voice of God behind the movie newsreels boomed and scolded, swollen graver and greater than ever in this feast of horror yet enclosing the audience in the ultimate security of an unfaltering American baritone. Essie did not doubt that the Germans and Japanese would be rolled back and crushed like evil bugs. Just their names, Huns and Japs, were buglike. The Italians were already surrendering, a forest of arms in the air, all of these wops looking so scruffy, unshaven, scared. Hitler was ridiculous and chewed carpets when he got mad and Hirohito was a tiny yellow man in a bulky big white uniform with a foolish big sword. Mr. Phillips said in Sunday school it was like Armageddon in Revelation in the Bible, all these beasts up from the bottomless
pit, led by the one who spake like a dragon and put a mark on everybody’s forehead or hand, whose name was the number 666, which worked out exactly to be code for HITLER, he said. Essie was impressed but not worried; Roosevelt and God and Churchill and Stalin were encircling and protecting her with millions of brave young men, GI Joes. She was to be confirmed into the church this June, and Ama was busy working on the dress, with overlapping tulle skirts below and a breathtaking bodice of a fabric full of little eyelets up above.
Yet all the houses along the Delaware shore were blacked out and at night when the firehouse siren blew you were supposed to turn off all your lights and huddle on the stairs just as if that fat Goering’s Luftwaffe bombers might be rumbling overhead. One night some planes did go over and Essie’s heart nearly stopped, but for Ama giving her a hug and Daddy breathing the one word, “Ours.” Ama sewed and knit things for the troops overseas and was always collecting canned food and old clothes for the children of Britain. To buy canned food now, along with sugar and coffee, you needed coupons, and got little round red rationing buttons in change, as well as the real change in pennies and nickels and dimes, at Hubie Drew’s grocery store. Shoes were that way too, which Essie didn’t mind because she loved to go barefoot from April to October; the soles of her feet got so tough and thick she could stick safety pins through them and horrify Danny, who couldn’t stand to see it. Lucky Strike green had gone to war and Daddy paid her a penny a cigarette for rolling them out of tobacco and ZigZag paper in a little machine that you flipped back and forth once. The war sucked everything out of their peaceful world: butter and meat, sliced bread and Christmas cards, sneakers and gasoline. Daddy could get gasoline for his Jeep only because he was special as a mailman. Danny was the one who really loved the war, always making that “r-r-r-r-r-r” divebombing noise with his little lead P-38s and B-29s and Spitfires and collecting the insignia of all the Army divisions and jumping with a Geronimo shout on tin cans to flatten them for the scrap drives at school. He was in the fourth grade, and got sergeant’s stripes for bringing in so many pounds and such a big ball of tinfoil. At night she could hear him in his room fantasizing or maybe even dreaming in his sleep making that “k-k-k-k-k” noise of a machine gun. He was always telling her ridiculous stories he picked up at school about how the Marines in the Pacific would take the little Japanese by the heels and drop them from the backs of battleships one by one into the churning propellers, and how Hitler had only one ball and was turning all the Jews in Europe into soap and smoke. She would tell him, “Cool down, little man; you’re overheating your gaskets,” which was an expression she had picked up from the gang she hung out with out near the playground. They were not considered “nice” but they seemed nice to Essie, nice in that they were letting her in on things she couldn’t learn at home. They were a little tough but these were tough times, with everybody’s parents distracted by the war.
They all lived closer to the ballfields, by a few blocks, than Essie did—Eddie Bacheller and Loretta Whaley and her twin brother Benjy and Junie Mulholland and Fats Lowe, who was a year older but had been held back, and some others from their end of town, up on the tannery side instead of east toward the old fishery wharf. They smoked cigarettes, Wings and Kools, they had stolen from their parents and complained about how all the teachers were jerks. Essie secretly didn’t think that; she thought Mr. Langford, who taught beginning algebra, was rather handsome, with black eyebrows that nearly met in the middle like Tyrone Power’s, and Miss Fenn was almost glamorous, if she wouldn’t pull her hair back so old-maidishly but let it fall to her shoulders like Veronica Lake and straightened her spine, so she didn’t seem always to be peering out at her class through some kind of keyhole. She could have taken a posture lesson from Mr. Josephs, who had left town because of the war; there were job opportunities, and his tap-dance class had gotten down to just five girls anyway. Sometimes when Miss Fenn was one of the teacher chaperones at the junior-high lunch-hour sock hops, she would step out and dance with a ninth-grade girl, and really knew the steps. That was one of Essie’s personal goals: to become the best jitterbugger in her class. Others were (1) to stop being so skinny and (2) to stop blushing when she stood up to recite in class and (3) to never stutter, even for a tiny second on the words beginning with “d” or “l.” Her singing teacher, Mrs. Loring up in New Castle, taught her how to breathe from the diaphragm and let the sounds come out at the top of a continuous column of air—“Breathe with your belly—your belly, Essie!”—but when she got excited or felt in the wrong she forgot about her belly. What she saw when she looked in the mirror was a face too fat and round on top of a body too skinny, with a nose a little too broad at the nostrils and a bump at the bridge like Momma had and shapeless big red hands dangling at the ends of her arms. She was one of the taller girls in the seventh grade now, and had inherited the Wilmot ranginess, though she didn’t swing her arms and wisecrack like Aunt Esther. She was always studying her face, frightened but fascinated as if the mirror were a deep hollow-smelling well, tilting her head this way or that, trying to catch the best angle, the perfect angle with shadows and light like the movie stars’ autographed pictures she had been collecting since she was ten. You sent away with a polite letter saying how she was your absolute favorite and enclosed a three-cent stamp, and after months went by Daddy in his mailman’s uniform would bring it to the door; so as not to bend the big envelopes from Hollywood he would open the door and toss them in on the hall carpet. Marlene Dietrich was the first one ever, back before the war, to send a photo, of herself, holding a cigarette holder and top hat and one leg up on a little white box, and then Ginger Rogers, with her eyes warm and starry just like when she danced. Recently Essie had collected Linda Darnell, Dorothy Lamour, Alice Faye, Carmen Miranda, Loretta Young, Laraine Day, Osa Massen, Jane Greer, Ann Sheridan, and Rita Hayworth. The stars had big loopy signatures, full of ease and pride. Some used purple ink, and Alice Faye wrote in green, Thanks for your lovely letter Esther. Carmen Miranda wore her big fruit hat and frilly South American dress as you might expect but Dorothy Lamour was not in a sarong with a flower behind her ear but wearing a sensible sort of well-fitting suit, the sort she went around selling war bonds in. Rita Hayworth was wearing her Gay Nineties Strawberry Blonde outfit but her signature looked like it was printed on, and so did Betty Grable’s. Linda Darnell appeared a little sad the way she always did, her lower lip heavy and her eye sockets full of shadow, and her inscription was the saddest: For a dear girl, she had written—May your dreams come true. All these were pinned around the walls of Essie’s room; she had over fifty now, counting a few from men stars she especially cared about—Ronald Colman, Joel McCrea, Errol Flynn, and George Sanders. George Sanders never got to be the main hero except in the Saint movies, but Essie loved him even when he had one of his nasty roles, like in Nurse Edith Cavell and Rebecca; she loved his above-it-all attitude, and the way he spoke everything so beautifully. When she practiced acting and talking smoothly to herself in her room she was most often Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn but sometimes George Sanders, slightly drawling, and killing people in the Saint movies so calmly, with a sleepy little blink and a pursing of his elegant English lips. When Danny got really frantic with her teasing and her lording it over him he threatened to come in and rip up her movie-star collection and spatter ink all over them but she knew he would never dare commit such a sacrilege: she would never speak to him, her own brother, again.
She didn’t like her own face but had to love it because it was hers. She thought it might be too broad but then Myrna Loy’s and Greer Garson’s faces were broad. Her skin had Momma’s glow and the only acne so far was in the creases where the nostrils met the face and where the chin came out under the lower lip—there was a little not exactly crease but depression there. Her eyes were big and clear like Momma’s yet instead of being a cornflower-blue like hers or a quiet milk-chocolate like Daddy’s were a brown lighter than his, lighter even than Ama’s, closest to Grandma Sifford�
�s mysterious Moorish flecked honey-brown, but often changing, depending on what kind of day it was and what she was looking at; in the studio photographs Mr. Purinton took on his second-floor studio on Rodney Street last winter there was a little pinhole gleam right next to each pupil, white and black, fascinatingly, the white bouncing back from a light and the black going in and down as far as you could go. In black-and-white photographs her thick hair could look black but in the summer sun bleached almost to blond. Like Ama’s hair it was very thick and began straight across the forehead, without a widow’s peak. Essie wished it was the color of Rita Hayworth’s in The Strawberry Blonde, with James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland. Olivia de Havilland was Joan Fontaine’s sister and neither of them, nor Vivien Leigh either, had responded to Essie’s request for a photograph; perhaps because they were over there in England under the bombs or because Essie hadn’t put enough postage on to get her request across the ocean. Aunt Esther had very fine pale hair, like cornsilk to the touch. But she had almost no eyebrows whereas Essie’s were long and sharp, right on the edge of the two arches of bone that ended her forehead; she loved their shape, every hair of them, and the way at the outside of the arches they went slightly up and over the edge, like Vincent Price’s when he had evil thoughts. Momma said one time it made her look more mature than thirteen, she had the eyebrows of a grown woman, and Essie treasured all such remarks that helped her to see herself from the outside, as others saw her.
Aunt Esther since the war started had stopped getting her hair cut and permanent-waved but let it grow long and made of it a pigtail she wrapped around her head, as if just to get it out of the way now that she was the mother of three—all boys, all noisy and awful: Peter Junior, Jefferson, and Ira. Their father, Peter, was going bald and off in Washington all the time working for some wartime agency; he couldn’t explain what for fear of giving away war secrets. The war had done Uncle Jared out in Colorado good, too. Back after the Crash that had started the Depression he had been given a piece of a mountain with a played-out copper mine in it, to keep him quiet, by his wife’s father, who was a crook, Daddy and Momma told her one night when Ama wasn’t listening. Now the need for copper was so great the government had paid him lots of money to get the mine working again. “That Jared,” Daddy had said, and laughed a little—he never laughed a lot. “My brother will always land on his feet. It might take him years, but he’ll land on his feet.” Essie loved it when Daddy let slip his sense of the Wilmots’ being somehow special, with a destiny that stretched above and beyond Basingstoke. Instead of being fine and shimmery like Aunt Esther’s, Essie’s hair was thick and unruly, so when she came in from running home from the baseball fields or working in the hot damp greenhouse it would be out from her head like a madwoman’s, Momma said, sending her straight to her room to comb and brush. Essie would experiment in front of the mirror with putting her hair up like Rita Hayworth’s in My Gal Sal or Bette Davis’s in The Little Foxes and Now, Voyager, or looser like Greta Garbo’s in Two-Faced Woman or Ingrid Bergman’s in Casablanca, more like real hair that hadn’t been shellacked or frozen in ripples like Irene Dunne’s. Her face as she pondered it in the mirror was like a pie somehow in the middle: the nose a bit blobby and the lips not curving in and out as the stars’ did but straight across, a slash in the dough, not cushiony and pushy-out like Betty Grable’s or even Momma’s when she was listening to the dance bands on the radio in the kitchen. Essie’s lips were thin and careful like Daddy’s and not pink and flirty like Alice Gordy’s. When she experimented with Momma’s lipstick and rouge it felt as if she was painting the middle of a pie. Though she began to have periods last July she had no breasts, either, though Loretta Whaley had quite nice pointy ones that pulled at her blouses and even Junie Mulholland, you could see where they were starting when she wore a sweater.