by John Updike
“I heard Harry was a big scorer,” Ronnie’s wife Thelma says softly. She has a narrow forgettable face and still wears that quaint old-fashioned kind of one-piece bathing suit with a little pleated skirt. Often she has a towel across her shoulders or around her ankles as if to protect her skin from the sun; except for her sunburnt nose she is the same sallow color all over. Her wavy mousy hair is going gray strand by strand. Rabbit can never look at her without wondering what she must do to keep Harrison happy. He senses intelligence in her but intelligence in women has never much interested him.
“I set the B-league county scoring record in 1951,” he says, to defend himself, and to defend himself further adds, “Big deal.”
“It’s been broken long since,” Ronnie feels he has to explain. “By blacks.”
“Every record has,” Webb Murkett interposes, being tactful. “I don’t know, it seems like the miles these kids run now have shrunk. In swimming they can’t keep the record books up to date.” Webb is the oldest man of their regular foursome, fifty and then some - a lean thoughtful gentleman in roofing and siding contracting and supply with a canning gravel voice, his long face broken into longitudinal strips by creases and his hazel eyes almost lost under an amber tangle of eyebrows. He is the steadiest golfer, too. The one unsteady thing about him, he is on his third wife; this is Cindy, a plump brown-backed honey still smelling of high school, though they have two little ones, a boy and a girl, ages five and three. Her hair is cut short and lies wet in one direction, as if surfacing from a dive, and when she smiles her teeth look unnaturally even and white in her tan face, with pink spots of peeling on the roundest part of her cheeks; she has an exciting sexually neutral look, though her boobs slosh and shiver in the triangular little hammocks of her bra. The suit is one of those minimal black ones with only a string or two between the nape of her neck and where her ass begins to divide, a cleft more or less visible depending on the sag of her black diaper. Harry admires Webb. Webb always swings within himself, and gets good roll.
“Better nutrition, don’t you think that’s it?” Buddy Inglefinger’s girl pipes up, in a little-girl reedy voice that doesn’t go with her pushed-in face. She is some kind of physical therapist, though her own shape isn’t too great. The girls Buddy brings around are a good lesson to Harry in the limits of being single -hard little secretaries and restaurant hostesses, witchy-looking former flower children with grizzled ponytails and flat chests full of Navajo jewelry, overweight assistant heads of personnel in one of those grim new windowless office buildings a block back from Weiser where they spend all day putting computer print-outs in the wastebasket. Women pickled in limbo, their legs chalky and their faces slightly twisted, as if they had been knocked into their thirties by a sideways blow. They remind Harry somehow ofpirates, jaunty and maimed, though without the eye patches. What the hell was this one’s name? She had been introduced around not a half hour ago, but when everybody was still drunk on golf.
Buddy brought her, so he can’t let her two cents hang up there while the silence gets painful. He fills in, “My guess is it’s mostly in the training. Coaches at even the secondary level have all these techniques that in the old days only the outstanding athlete would discover, you know, pragmatically. Nowadays the outstanding isn’t that outstanding, there’s a dozen right behind him. Or her.” He glances at each of the women in a kind of dutiful tag. Feminism won’t catch him off guard, he’s traded jabs in too many singles bars. “And in countries like East Germany or China they’re pumping these athletes full of steroids, like beef cattle, they’re hardly human.” Buddy wears steel-rimmed glasses of a style that only lathe operators used to employ, to keep shavings out of their eyes. Buddy does something with electronics and has a mind like that, too precise. He goes on, to bring it home, “Even golf. Palmer and now Nicklaus have been trampled out of sight by these kids nobody has heard of, the colleges down south clone ‘em, you can’t keep their names straight from one tournament to the next.”
Harry always tries to take an overview. “The records fall because they’re there,” he says. “Aaron shouldn’t have been playing, they kept him in there just so he could break Ruth’s record. -I can remember when a five-minute mile in high school was a miracle. Now girls are doing it.”
“It is amazing,” Buddy’s girl puts in, this being her conversation, “what the human body can do. Any one of us women here could go out now and pick up a car by the front bumper, if we were motivated. If say there was a child of ours under the tires. You read about incidents like that all the time, and at the hospital where I trained the doctors could lay the statistics of it right out on paper. We don’t use half the muscle-power we have.”
Webb Murkett kids, “Hear that, Cin? Gas stations all closed down, you can carry the Audi home. Seriously, though. I’ve always marvelled at these men who know a dozen languages. If the brain is a computer think of all the gray cells this entails. There seems to be lots more room in there, though.”
His young wife silently lifts her hands to twist some water from her hair, that is almost too short to grab. This action gently lifts her tits in their sopping black small slings and reveals the shape of each erect nipple. A white towel is laid across her lap as if to relieve Harry from having to think about her crotch. What turns him off about Buddy’s girl, he realizes, is not only does she have pimples on her chin and forehead but on her thighs, high on the inside, like something venereal. Georgene? Geraldine? She is going on in that reedy too-eager voice, “Or the way these yogas can lift themselves off the ground or go back in time for thousands of years. Edgar Cayce has example after example. It’s nothing supernatural, I can’t believe in God, there’s too much suffering, they’re just using human powers we all have and never develop. You should all read the Tibetan Book of the Dead.”
“Really?” Thelma Harrison says dryly. “Who’s the author?”
Now silence does invade their group. A greenish reflective wobble from the pool washes ghostly and uneasy across their faces and a child gasping as he swims can be heard. Then Webb kindly says, “Closer to home now, we’ve had a spooky experience lately. I bought one of these Polaroid SX-70 Land Cameras as kind of a novelty, to give the kids a charge, and all of us can’t stop being fascinated, it is supernatural, to watch that image develop right under your eyes.”
“The kind,” Cindy says, “that spits it out at you like this.” She makes a cross-eyed face and thrusts out her tongue with a thrrupping noise. All the men laugh, and laugh.
“Consumer Reports had something on it,” Harry says.
“It’s magical,” Cindy tells them. “Webb gets really turned on.” When she grins her teeth look stubby, the healthy gums come so babyishly low.
“Why is my glass empty?” Janice asks.
“Losers buy,” Harry virtually shouts. Such loudness years ago would have been special to male groups but now both sexes have watched enough beer commercials on television to know that this is how to act, jolly and loud, on weekends, in the bar, beside the barbecue grill, on beaches and sundecks and mountainsides. “Winners bought the first round,” he calls needlessly, as if among strangers or men without memories, while several arms flail for the waitress.
Harry’s team lost the Nassau, but he feels it was his partner’s fault. Buddy is such a flub artist, even when he hits two good shots he skulls the chip and takes three putts to get down. Whereas Harry as he has said hit the ball well, if not always straight: arms like ropes, start down slow, and look at the ball until it seems to swell. He ended with a birdie, on the long par-five that winds in around the brook with its watercress and sandy orange bottom almost to the clubhouse lawn; and that triumph - the wooden gobbling sound the cup makes when a long putt falls! - eclipses many double bogeys and suffuses with a limpid certainty of his own omnipotence and immortality the sight of the scintillating chlorinated water, the sunstruck faces and torsos of his companions, and the undulant shadow-pitted flank of Mt. Pemaquid where its forest begins above the shaven
bright stripes of the fairways. He feels brother to this mountain in the day’s declining sunlight. Mt. Pemaquid has only been recently tamed; for the two centuries while Mt. Judge presided above the metropolitan burgeoning of Brewer, the mountain nearby yet remained if not quite a wilderness a strange and forbidding place, where resort hotels failed and burned down and only hikers and lovers and escaping criminals ventured. The developers of the Flying Eagle (its name plucked from a bird, probably a sparrow hawk, the first surveyor spotted and took as an omen) bought three hundred acres of the lower slopes cheap; as the bulldozers ground the second-growth ash, poplar, hickory, and dogwood into muddy troughs that would become fairways and terraced tennis courts, people said the club would fail, the county already had the Brewer Country Club south of the city for the doctors and the Jews and ten miles north the Tulpehocken Club behind its fieldstone walls and tall wrought-iron fencing for the old mill-owning families and their lawyers and for the peasantry several nine-hole public courses tucked around in the farmland. But there was a class of the young middle-aged that had arisen in the retail businesses and service industries and software end of the new technology and that did not expect liveried barmen and secluded cardrooms, that did not mind the pre-fab clubhouse and sweep-it-yourself tennis courts of the Flying Eagle; to them the polyester wall-to-wall carpeting of the locker rooms seemed a luxury, and a Coke machine in a cement corridor a friendly sight. They were happy to play winter rules all summer long on the immature, patchy fairways and to pay for all their privileges the five hundred, now risen to six-fifty, in annual dues, plus a small fortune in chits. Fred Springer for years had angled for admission to the Brewer C.C. - the Tulpehocken was as out of reach as the College of Cardinals, he knew that - and had failed; now his daughter Janice wears whites and signs chits just like the heiresses of Sunflower Beer and Frankhauser Steel. Just like a du Pont. At the Flying Eagle Harry feels exercised, cleansed, cherished; the biggest man at the table, he lifts his hand and a girl in the restaurant uniform of solid green blouse and checked skirt of white and green comes and takes his order for more drinks on this Sunday of widespread gas dearth. She doesn’t ask his name; the people here know it. Her own name is stitched Sandra on her blouse pocket; she has milky skin like his daughter but is shorter, and the weary woman she will be is already moving into her face.
“Do you believe in astrology?” Buddy’s girl abruptly asks Cindy Murkett. Maybe she’s a Lesbian, is why Harry can’t remember her name. It was a name soft around the edges, not Gertrude.
“I don’t know,” Cindy says, the widened eyes of her surprise showing very white in her mask of tan. “I look at the horoscope in the papers sometimes. Some of the things they say ring so true, but isn’t there a trick to that?”
“It’s no trick, it’s ancient science. It’s the most ancient science there is.”
This assault on Cindy’s repose agitates Harry so he turns to Webb and asks if he watched the Phillies game last night.
“The Phillies are dead,” Ronnie Harrison butts in.
Buddy comes up with the statistic that they’ve lost twentythree of their last thirty-four games.
“I was brought up a Catholic,” Cindy is saying to Buddy’s girl in a voice so lowered Harry has to strain to hear. “And the priests said such things are the work of the Devil.” She fingers as she confides this the small crucifix she wears about her throat on a chain so fine it has left no trace in her tan.
“Bowa’s being out has hurt them quite a lot,” Webb says judiciously, and pokes another cigarette into his creased face, lifting his rubbery upper lip automatically like a camel. He shot an 84 this afternoon, with a number of three-putt greens.
Janice is asking Thelma where she bought that lovely bathing suit. She must be drunk. “You can’t find that kind at all in Kroll’s anymore,” Rabbit hears her say. Janice is wearing an old sort of Op-pattern blue two-piece, with a white cardigan bought to go with her tennis whites hung capelike over her shoulders. She holds a cigarette in her hand and Webb Murkett leans over to light it with his turquoise propane lighter. She’s not so bad, Harry thinks, remembering how he fucked her in her sleep. Or was it, for she seemed to moan and stop snoring afterwards. Compared to Thelma’s passive sallow body Janice’s figure has energy, edge, the bones of the knees pressing their shape against the skin as she leans forward to accept his light. She does this with a certain accustomed grace. Webb respects her, as Fred Springer’s daughter.
Harry wonders where his own daughter is this afternoon, out in the country. Doing some supper chore, having come back from feeding chickens or whatever. Sundays in the sticks aren’t so different, animals don’t know about holidays. Would she have gone to church this morning? Ruth had no use for that. He can’t picture Ruth in the country at all. For him, she was city, those solid red brick rows of Brewer that take what comes. The drinks come. -Grateful cries, like on the beer commercials, and Cindy Murkett decides to earn hers by going for another swim. When she stands, the backs of her thighs are printed in squares and her skimpy black bathing suit bottom, still soaked, clings in two thin arcs well below two dimples symmetrically set in her fat like little whirlpools; the sight dizzies Harry. Didn’t he used to take Ruth to the public pool in West Brewer? Memorial Day. There was the smell of grass pressed under your damp towel spread out in the shade of the trees away from the tile pool. Now you sit in chairs of enamelled wire that unless you have a cushion print a waffle pattern on the backs of your thighs. The mountain is drawing closer. Sun reddening beyond the city dusts with gold the tips of trees high like a mane on the crest of Pemaquid and deepens the pockets of dark between each tree in the undulating forest that covers like deep-piled carpet the acreage between crest and course. Along the far eleventh fairway men are still picking their way, insect-sized. As his eyes are given to these distances Cindy flat-dives and a few drops of the splash prick Harry’s naked chest, that feels broad as the basking mountain. He frames in his mind the words, 1 heard a funny story on the radio yesterday driving home ….
… if I had your nice legs,” Ronnie’s plain wife is concluding to Janice.
“Oh but you still have a waist. Creeping middle-itis, that’s what I’ve got. Harry says I’m shaped like a pickle.” Giggle. First she giggles, then she begins to lurch.
“He looks asleep.”
He opens his eyes and announces to the air, “I heard a funny story on the radio yesterday driving home.”
“Fire Ozark,” Ronnie is insisting loudly. “He’s lost their respect, he’s demoralizing. Until they can Ozark and trade Rose away, the Phillies are D, E, A, D, dead.”
“I’m listening,” Buddy’s awful girlfriend tells Harry, so he has to go on.
“Oh just some doctor down in Baltimore, the radio announcer said he was hauled into court for killing a goose on the course with a golf club.”
“Course on the golf with a goose club,” Janice giggles. Some day what would give him great pleasure would be to take a large round rock and crush her skull in with it.
“Where’d you hear this, Harry?” Webb Murkett asks him, coming in late but politely tilting his long head, one eye shut against the smoke of his cigarette.
“On the radio yesterday, driving home,” Harry answers, sorry he has begun.
“Speaking of yesterday,” Buddy has to interrupt, “I saw a gas line five blocks long. That Sunoco at the corner of Ash and Fourth, it went down Fourth to Buttonwood, Buttonwood to Fifth, Fifth back to Ash, and then a new line beginning the other side of Ash. They had guys directing and everything. I couldn’t believe it, and cars were still getting into it. Five fucking blocks long.”
“Big heating-oil dealer who’s one of our clients,” Ronnie says, “says they have plenty of crude, it’s just they’ve decided to put the squeeze on gasoline and make more heating oil out of it. The crude. In their books winter’s already here. I asked the guy what was going to happen to the average motorist and he looked at me funny and said, `He can go screw himself instead of dr
iving every weekend to the Jersey Shore.”’
“Ronnie, Harry’s trying to tell a story,” Thelma says.
“It hardly seems worth it,” he says, enjoying now the prolonged focus on him, the comedy of delay. Sunshine on the mountain. The second gin is percolating through his system and elevating his spirits. He loves this crowd, his crowd, and the crowds at the other tables too, that are free to send delegates over and mingle with theirs, everybody knowing everybody else, and the kids in the pool, that somebody would save even if that caramel-colored lifeguard-girl popping bubble gum weren’t on duty, and loves the fact that this is all on credit, the club not taking its bite until the tenth of every month.
Now they coax him. “Come on, Harry, don’t be a prick,” Buddy’s girl says. She’s using his name now, he has to find hers. Gretchen. Ginger. Maybe those aren’t actually pimples on her thighs, just a rash from chocolate or poison oak. She looks allergic, that pushed-in face, like she’d have trouble breathing. Defects come in clumps.
