by John Updike
But, as with dying, there is a moment that must be pushed through, a slice of time more transparent than plate glass; it is in front of him and he takes the step, drawing heart from that loving void Thelma had confided to him. In his sheepskin coat and silly small elf hat and three-piece suit of pinstriped wool bought just this November at that tailor of Webb’s on Pine Street, he walks across the earth where silted-over flat sandstones once formed a walk. It is cold, a day that might bring snow, a day that feels hollow. Though it is near noon no sun shows through, not even a silver patch betrays its place in the sky, one long ribbed underbelly of low gray clouds. A drab tall thatch of winter woods rears up on his right. In the other direction, beyond the horizon, a chain saw sounds stuck. Even before, removing one glove, he raps with a bare hand on the door, where paint a poisonous green is coming loose in long curving flakes, the dog inside the house hears his footsteps scrape stone and sets up a commotion of barking.
Harry hopes the dog is alone, its owner out. There is no car or pick-up truck in the open, but one might be parked in the barn or the newish garage of cement blocks with a roof of corrugated overlapped Fiberglas. Inside the house no light burns that he can see, but then it is near noon, though the day is dull and growing darker. He peers in the door and sees himself reflected with his pale hat in another door, much like this one, with two tall panes of glass, the thickness of a stone wall away. Beyond the old panes a hallway with a tattered striped runner recedes into unlit depths. As his eyes strain to see deeper his nose and ungloved hand sting with the cold. He is about to turn away and return to the warm car when a shape materializes within the house and rushes, puffed up with rage, toward him. The black-haired collie leaps and leaps again against the inner door, frantic, trying to bite the glass, those ugly little front teeth a dog has, inhuman, and the split black lip and lavender gums, unclean. Harry is paralyzed with fascination; he does not see the great shape materialize behind Fritzie until a hand clatters on the inner door latch.
The fat woman’s other hand holds the dog by the collar; Harry helps by opening the green outer door himself. Fritzie recognizes his scent and stops barking. And Rabbit recognizes, buried under the wrinkles and fat but with those known eyes blazing out alive, Ruth. So amid a tumult of wagging and the whimpers of that desperate doggy need to reclaim a friend, the two old lovers confront one another. Twenty years ago he had lived with this woman, March to June. He saw her for a minute in Kroll’s eight years later, and she had spared him a few bitter words, and now a dozen years have poured across them both, doing their damage. Her hair that used to be a kind of dirty fiery gingery color is flattened now to an, iron gray and pulled back in a bun like the Mennonites wear. She wears wide denim dungarees and a man’s red lumberjack shirt beneath a black sweater with unravelled elbows and dog hairs and wood chips caught in the greasy weave. Yet this is Ruth. Her upper lip still pushes out a little, as if with an incipient blister, and her flat blue eyes in their square sockets still gaze at him with a hostility that tickles him. “What do you want?” she asks. Her voice sounds thickened, as by a cold.
“I’m Harry Angstrom.”
“I can see that. What do you want here?”
“I was wondering, could we talk a little? There’s something I need to ask you.”
“No, we can’t talk a little. Go away.”
But she has released the dog’s collar, and Fritzie sniffs at his ankles and his crotch and writhes in her urge to jump up, to impart the scarcely bearable joy locked in her narrow skull, behind her bulging eyes. Her bad eye still looks sore. “Good Fritzie,” Harry says. “Down. Down.”
Ruth has to laugh, that quick ringing laugh of hers, like change tossed onto a counter. “Rabbit, you’re cute. Where’d you learn her name?”
“I heard you all calling her once. A couple times I’ve been here, up behind those trees, but I couldn’t get up my nerve to come any closer. Stupid, huh?”
She laughs again, a touch less ringingly, as if she is truly amused. Though her voice has roughened and her bulk has doubled and there is a down including a few dark hairs along her cheeks and above the comers of her mouth, this is really Ruth, a cloud his life had passed through, solid again. She is still tall, compared to Janice, compared to any of the women of his life but Mim and his mother. She always had a weight about her; she joked the first night when he lifted her that this would put him out of action, a weight that pushed him off, along with something that held him fast, an air of being willing to play, in the little space they had, and though the time they had was short. “So you were scared of us,” she says. She bends slightly, to address the dog. “Fritzie, shall we let him in for a minute?” The dog’s liking him, a dim spark of dog memory setting her tail wagging, has tipped the balance.
The hall inside smells decidedly of the past, the way these old farm houses do. Apples in the cellar, cinnamon in the cooking, a melding of the old plaster and wallpaper paste, he doesn’t know. Muddy boots stand in a corner of the hall, on newspapers spread there, and he notices that Ruth is in stocking feet - thick gray men’s work socks, but sexy nonetheless, the silence of her steps, though she is huge. She leads him to the right, into a small front parlor with an oval rug of braided rags on the floor and a folding wooden lawn chair mixed in with the other furniture. The only modem piece is the television set, its overbearing rectangular eye dead for the moment. A small wood fire smolders in a sandstone fireplace. Harry checks his shoes before stepping onto the rag rug, to make sure he is not tracking in dirt. He removes his fancy tittle sheepskin hat.
As if regretting this already, Ruth sits on the very edge of her chair, a cane-bottomed rocker, tipping it forward so her knees nearly touch the floor and her arm can reach down easily to scratch Fritzie’s neck and keep her calm. Harry guesses he is supposed to sit opposite, on a cracked black leather settee beneath two depressing sepia studio portraits, a century old at least they must be, in matching carved frames, of a bearded type and his buttoned-up wife, both long turned to dust in their coffins. But before sitting down he sees across the room, by the light of a window whose deep sill teems with potted African violets and those broad-leafed plants people give for Mother’s Days, a more contemporary set of photographs, color snapshots that line one shelf of a bookcase holding rows of the paperback mysteries and romances Ruth used to read and apparently still does. That used to hurt him about her in those months, how she would withdraw into one of those trashy thrillers set in England or Los Angeles though he was right there, in the flesh, a living lover. He crosses to the bookcase and sees her, younger but already stout, standing before a comer of this house within the arm of a man older, taller, and stouter than she: this must have been Byer. A big sheepish farmer in awkward Sunday clothes, squinting against the sunlight with an expression like that of the large old portraits, his mouth wistful in its attempt to satisfy the camera. Ruth looks amused, her hair up in a bouffant do and still gingery, amused that for this sheltering man she is a prize. Rabbit feels, for an instant as short and bright as the click of a shutter, jealous of these lives that others led: this stout plain country couple posing by a chipped corner of brown stucco, on earth that from the greening state of the grass suggests March or April. Nature’s old tricks. There are other photographs, color prints of combed and smiling adolescents, in those cardboard frames high-school pictures come in. Before he can examine them, Ruth says sharply, “Who said you could look at those? Stop it.”
“It’s your family.”
“You bet it is. Mine and not yours.”
But he cannot tear himself away from the images in flashlit color of these children. They gaze not at him but past his right ear, each posed identically by the photographer as he worked his school circuit May after May. A boy and the girl at about the same age - the senior photo - and then in smaller format a younger boy with darker hair, cut longer and parted on the other side of his head from his brother. All have blue eyes. “Two boys and a girl,” Harry says. “Who’s the oldest?”
> “What the hell do you care? God, I’d forgotten what a pushy obnoxious bastard you are. Stuck on yourself from cradle to grave.”
“My guess is, the girl is the oldest. When did you have her, and when did you marry this old guy? How can you stand it, by the way, out here in the boondocks?”
“I stand it fine. It’s more than anybody else ever offered me.”
“I didn’t have much to offer anybody in those days.”
“But you’ve done fine since. You’re dressed up like a pansy.”
“And you’re dressed up like a ditchdigger.”
“I’ve been cutting wood.”
“You operate one of those chain saws? Jesus, aren’t you afraid you’ll cut off a finger?”
“No, I’m not. The car you sold Jamie works fine, if that’s what you came to ask.”
“How long have you known I’ve been at Springer Motors?”
“Oh, always. And then it was in the papers when Springer died.”
“Was that you drove past in the old station wagon the day Nelson got married?”
“It might have been,” Ruth says, sitting back in her rocking chair, so it tips the other way. Fritzie has stretched out to sleep. The wood fire spits. “We pass through Mt. Judge from time to time. It’s a free country still, isn’t it?”
“Why would you do a crazy thing like that?” She loves him.
“I’m not saying I did anything. How would I know Nelson was getting married at that moment?”
“You saw it in the papers.” He sees she means to torment him. “Ruth, the girl. She’s mine. She’s the baby you said you couldn’t stand to have the abortion for. So you had it and then found this old chump of a farmer who was glad to get a piece of young ass and had these other two kids by him before he kicked the bucket.”
“Don’t talk so rude. You’re not proving anything to me except what a sad case I must have been ever to take you in. You are Mr. ‘Bad News, honest to God. You’re nothing but me, me and gimme, gimme. When I had something to give you I gave it even though I knew I’d never get anything back. Now thank God I have nothing to give.” She limply gestures to indicate the raggedly furnished little room. Her voice in these years has gained that country slowness, that stubborn calm with which the country withholds what the city wants.
“Tell me the truth,” he begs.
“I just did.”
“About the girl.”
“She’s younger than the older boy. Scott, Annabelle, and then Morris in ‘66. He was the afterthought. June 6, 1966. Four sixes.”
“Don’t stall, Ruth, I got to get back to Brewer. And don’t lie. Your eyes get all watery when you lie.”
“My eyes are watery because they can’t stand looking at you. A regular Brewer sharpie. A dealer. The kind of person you used to hate, remember? And fat. At least when I knew you you had a body.”
He laughs, enjoying the push of this; his night with Thelma has made his body harder to insult. “You,” he says, “are calling me fat?”
“I am. And how did you get so red in the face?”
“That’s my tan. We just got back from the islands.”
“Oh Christ, the islands. I thought you were about to have a stroke.”
“When did your old guy pack it in? Whajja do, screw him to death?”
She stares at him a time. “You better go.”
“Soon,” he promises.
“Frank passed away in August of ‘76, of cancer. Of the colon. He hadn’t even reached retirement age. When I met him he was younger than we are now.”
“O.K., sorry. Listen, stop making me be such a prick. Tell me about our girl.”
“She’s not our girl, Harry. I did have the abortion. My parents arranged it with a doctor in Pottsville. He did it right in his office and about a year later a girl died afterwards of complications and they put him in jail. Now the girls just walk into the hospital.”
“And expect the taxpayer to pay,” Harry says.
“Then I got a job as the day cook in a restaurant over toward Stogey’s Quarry to the east of here and Frank’s cousin was the hostess for that time and one thing led to another pretty fast. We had Scott in late 1960, he just turned nineteen last month, one of these Christmas babies that always get cheated on presents.”
“Then the girl when? Annabelle.”
“The next year. He was in a hurry for a family. His mother had never let him marry while she was alive, or anyway he blamed her.”
“You’re lying. I’ve seen the girl; she’s older than you say.”
“She’s eighteen. Do you want to see birth certificates?”
This must be a bluff. But he says, “No.”
Her voice softens. “Why’re you so hepped on the girl anyway? Why don’t you pretend the boy’s yours?”
“I have one boy. He’s enough” - the phrase just comes - “bad news.” He asks, brusquely, “And where are they? Your boys.”
“What’s it to you?”
“Nothing much. I was just wondering how come they’re not around, helping you with this place.”
“Morris is at school, he gets home on the bus after three. Scott has a job in Maryland, working in a plant nursery. I told both him and Annie, Get out. This was a good place for me to come to and hide, but there’s nothing here for young people. When she and Jamie Nunemacher got this scheme of going and living together in Brewer, I couldn’t say No, though his people were dead set against it. We had a big conference, I told them that’s how young people do now, they live together, and aren’t they smart? They know I’m an old whore anyway, I don’t give a fuck what they think. The neighbors always let us alone and we let them alone. Frank and old Blankenbiller hadn’t talked for fifteen years, since he began to take me out.” She sees she has wandered, and says, “Annabelle won’t be with the boy forever. He’s nice enough, but…”
“I agree,” Rabbit says, as if consulted. Ruth is lonely, he sees, and willing to talk, and this makes him uneasy. He shifts his weight on the old black sofa. Its springs creak. A shift in the air outside has created a downdraft that sends smoke from the damp fire curling into the room.
She glances to the dead couple in their frames like carved coffins above his head and confides, “Even when Frank was healthy, he had to have the buses to make ends meet. Now I rent the big fields and just try to keep the bushes down. The bushes and the oil bills.” And it is true, this room is so cold he has not thought of taking his heavy coat off.
“Yes well,” he sighs. “It’s hard.” Fritzie, wakened by some turn in the dream that had been twitching the ends of her paws, stands and skulks over to him as if to bark, and instead drops down to the rug again, coiling herself trustfully at his feet. With his long arm Harry reaches to the bookcase and lifts out the photograph of the daughter. Ruth does not protest. He studies the pale illumined face in its frame of maroon cardboard: backed by a strange background of streaked blue like an imitation sky, the girl gazes beyond him. Round and polished like a fruit by the slick silk finish of the print, the head, instead of revealing its secret, becomes more enigmatic, a shape as strange as those forms of sea life spotlit beneath the casino boardwalk. The mouth is Ruth’s, that upper lip he noticed at the lot. And around the eyes, that squared-off look, though her brow is rounder than Ruth’s and her hair, brushed to a photogenic gloss, less stubborn. He looks at the ear, for a nick in the edge like Nelson has; her hair would have to be lifted. Her nose is so delicate and small, the nostrils displayed by a slight upturn of the tip, that the lower half of her face seems heavy, still babyish. There is a candor to her skin and a frosty light to the eyes that could go back to those Swedes in their world of snow; he glimpsed it in the Murketts’ bathroom mirror. His blood. Harry finds himself reliving with Annabelle that moment when her turn came in the unruly school line to enter the curtained corner of the gym and, suddenly blinded, to pose for posterity, for the yearbook, for boyfriend and mother, for time itself as it wheels on unheeding by: the opportunity come to press your face up
against blankness and, by thinking right thoughts, to become a star. “She looks like me.”
Ruth laughs now. “You’re seeing things.”
“No kidding. When she came to the lot that first time, something hit me -her legs, maybe, I don’t know. Those aren’t your legs.” Which had been thick, twisting like white flame as she moved naked about their room.
