by John Updike
“The zipper!” Judy shrieks, as if she has decided, since this day with her grandparents looks as though it will never end, to be amused.
“Yeah, it’s really very intricate,” Harry tells her, “all those little slopes and curves, the way they fit. It’s on the principle of a wedge, an inclined plane, the same way the Pyramids were built.” Feeling he may have wandered rather far, venturing into the terrible empty space where the Pyramids were built, he announces, “Also, Edison had backing. Look at who his friends were down there. Ford. Firestone. The giant fat cats. He got his ideas to sell them to them. All this talk about his love for mankind, I had to laugh.”
“Oh yes,” Janice says, “I liked the old car with daffodil-rubber tires.”
“Goldenrod,” Harry corrects. “Not daffodil.”
“I meant goldenrod.”
“I like daffodil better,” Judy says from the back seat. “Grandpa, how did you like our tour lady, the awful way she talked, making that mouth like she had a sourball in it?”
“I thought she was very kind of sexy,” Harry says.
“Sexy!” little Judy shrieks.
“I’m hungry,” Roy says.
“Me too, Roy,” says Janice. “Thank you for saying that.”
They eat at a McDonald’s where, for some legal reason - fear of lawsuits, the unapologetic cashier thinks when they ask her about it - the door is locked out to the playground, with its spiral slide an,’ its enticing plastic man with a head, even bigger than Edison’s, shaped like a hamburger. Roy throws a fit at the locked door and all through lunch has these big liquid googies of grief to snuffle back up into his nose. He likes to pour salt out of the shaker until he has a heap and then rub the French fries in it, one by one. The French fries and about a pound of salt are all the kid eats; Harry finishes his Big Mac for him, even though he doesn’t much care for all the Technicolor glop McDonald’s puts on everything - pure chemicals. Whatever happened to the old-fashioned plain hamburger? Gone wherever the Chiclet went. A little Bingo game is proceeding in a corner; you have to walk right through it on your way to the bathrooms, these old people in booths bent over their cards while a young black girl in a McDonald’s brown uniform gravely reads off the numbers with a twang. “Twainty-sevvn … Fohty-wuhunn …”
Back in the hot car, Harry sneaks a look at his watch. Just noon. He can’t believe it, it feels like four in the afternoon. His bones ache, deep inside his flesh. “Well now,” he announces, “we have some choices.” He unfolds a map he carries in the glove compartment. Figure out where you’re going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago. “Up toward Sarasota there’s the Ringling Museum but it’s closed, something called Bellm’s Cars of Yesterday but maybe we did enough old cars back at Edison’s, and this jungle Gardens which a guy I play golf with really swears by.”
Judy groans and little Roy, taking his cue from her, begins his trembly-lower-lip routine. “Please, Grandpa,” she says, sounding almost maternal, “not caterpillar trees again!”
“It’s not just plants, the plants are the least of it, they have leopards and these crazy birds. Real leopards, Roy, that’d claw your eyes out if you let ‘em, and flamingos that fall asleep standing on one leg - Bernie, this friend of mine, can’t get over it, the way they can sleep standing on this one skinny leg!” He holds up a single finger to convey the wonder of it. How ugly and strange a single finger is - its knuckle-wrinkles, its whorly print, its pretty useless nail. Both the children in the back seat look flushed, the way Nelson used to when he’d be coming down with a cold - a smothery frantic look in the eyes. “Or,” Rabbit says, consulting the map, “here’s something called Braden Castle Ruins. How do you two sports like ruins?” He knows the answer, and cinches his point with, “Or we could all go back to the condo and take a nap.” He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn’t want, to make what he half-wants look better. He peeks over at Janice, a bit miffed by her air of detachment. Why is she making this all his show? She’s a grandparent too.
She rouses and says, “We can’t go back so soon - they may be still resting.”
“Or whatever,” he says. Brawling. Fucking. There is something hot and disastrous about Nelson and Pru that scares the rest of them. Young couples give off this heat; they’re still at the heart of the world’s‘ business, making babies. Old couples like him and Janice give off the musty smell of dead flower stalks, rotting in the vase.
Judy suggests, “Let’s go to a movie.”
“Yeah. Movie,” Roy says, for these two words doing quite a good accidental imitation of a grown-up voice, as if they’ve taken on a hitchhiker in the back seat.
“Let’s make a deal,” Harry proposes. “We’ll drive up and nip into jungle Gardens, and if there’s a guided tour or you think it’ll depress you we’ll nip right out again, the hell with ‘em. Otherwise we’ll go through and see the flamingos and then buy a Sarasota paper and see what’s at the movies. Roy, you big enough to sit through a whole movie?” He starts the engine and gets into gear.
Judy says, “He cried so hard during Dumbo Mommy had to take him out.”
“Dumbo’s mommy …” Roy begins to explain, then starts to cry.
“Yeah,” Harry says, turning onto 41 again, casting back his voice, rolling along. “That’s a tough one, out there in that little prison car. The business with their trunks, remember? But it all works out. Roy, you should have stayed to the end. If you don’t stay to the end the sadness sticks with you.”
“He becomes a star,” Judy tells her brother spitefully. “He shoots peanuts at all the bad clowns. You missed all that.”
“That Disney,” Harry says, half to Janice, half for their little audience. “He packed a punch. You had to have been raised in the Depression to take it. Even Nelson, your daddy, couldn’t stand Snow White when it came around in rerun.”
“Daddy doesn’t like anything,” Judy confides. “Just his dumb friends.”
“What friends?” Rabbit asks her.
“Oh, I don’t know their names. Slim and like that. Mommy hates them and won’t go out any more.”
“She won’t, huh?”
“She says she’s scared.”
“Scared! Scared of what?”
“Harry, ” Janice mutters beside him. “Don’t pump the children.”
“Scared of Slim,” Roy says, trying it out for sound.
Judy thumps him. “No, Daddy is not scared of Slim, you dumbo, he’s scared of those other men.”
“What other men?” Harry asks.
“Harry,” Janice says.
“Forget I asked,” he calls back, his words lost in the squall as Roy grabs Judy’s hair and won’t let go. In reaching back to pull them apart Janice rips a seam of her blouse; he can hear the threads break even though at that moment he is being passed by an eighteen-wheeler whose shuddering white sides say MAYFLOWER MEANS MOVING and create an aerodynamic condition that sucks him sideways so he has to fight the Camry’s wheel. The Japanese don’t build for the full range of American conditions. Like Nelson said about the van, the wind pushing him all over 422. Still, you got to sell something in life. You can’t just sit there and crab. We can’t all sell Lamborghinis.
Jungle Gardens works out better than anyone dared hope. A big shop full of shells and corny artifacts like that stuff of Janice’s back on the condo shelves opens into a miniature outdoors. You can go one way to the Reptile Show and the Gardens of Christ and the other to the Bird Show. They all turn toward the Bird Show, and watch tattered, disgruntled-looking parrots ride bicycles and see saws and hop through hoops. Then a curving cement path, jungle Trail, leads them along: you shuffle obediently past mossy roots and trickling rocks and at each turn confront some fresh mild wonder - a trio of spider monkeys with long hairy arms and little worried faces, then a cageful of finches whirring up and down, roost to roost, like the tireless works of a complicated clock, then a bo-tree such as Buddha was illuminated under. Rabbit wonders how t
he Dalai Lama is doing, after all that exile. Do you still believe in God, if people keep telling you you are God?
The four Angstroms come to Mirror Lake, where mute swans float, and Flamingo Lagoon, where, as Bernie Drechsel promised, flocks of flamingos, colored that unreal orange-pink color, sleep while standing up, like big feathery lollypops, each body a ball, the idle leg and the neck and head somehow knitted in, balanced on one pencil-thin leg and wide weird leathern foot. Others, almost as marvellous, are awake and stirring, tenderly treading. “Look how they drink,” Harry tells his grandchildren, lowering his voice as if in the presence of something sacred. “Upside down. Their bills are scoops that work upside down.” And they stand marvelling, the four human beings, as ifthe space between farflung planets has been abolished, so different do these living things loom from themselves. The Earth is many planets, that intersect only at moments. Even among themselves, slices of difference interpose, speaking the same language though they do, and lacking feathers, and all drinking right side up.
After the flamingos, the path takes them to a snack bar in a pavilion, and a shell-and-butterfly exhibit, and a goldfish pond, and a cage of black leopards just as Harry had promised Roy. The black-eyed child stares at the animals’ noiseless pacing as if into the heart of a whirlpool that might suck him down. A small machine such as those that in Harry’s youth supplied a handful of peanuts or pistachio nuts in almost every gas station and grocery store is fixed to a pavilion post near an area where peacocks restlessly drag their extravagant feathers across the dust. Here he makes his historic blunder. As his three kin move ahead he fishes in his pocket for a dime, inserts it, receives a handful of brown dry objects, and begins to eat them. They are not exactly peanuts, but perhaps some Florida delicacy, and taste so dry and stale as to be bitter; but who knows how long these machines wait for customers? When he offers some to Judy, though, she looks at them, smells them, and stares up into his face with pure wonderment. “Grandpa!” she cries. “That’s to feed the birds! Grandma! He’s been eating birdfood! Little brown things like rabbit turds!”
Janice and Roy gather around to see, and Harry holds open his hand to display the shaming evidence. “I didn’t know,” he weakly says. “There’s no sign or anything.” He is suffused with a curious sensation; he feels faintly numb and sick but beyond that, beyond the warm volume enclosed by his skin, the air is swept by a universal devaluation; for one flash he sees his life as a silly thing it will be a relief to discard.
Only Judy actually laughs, a laughter that turns forced, out of her fine-featured little face with its perfect teeth; Janice and Roy just look sad, and a bit puzzled.
Judy says, “Grandpa, that’s the dumbest thing I ever saw anybody do!”
He smiles and nods at his inflated height above her; he feels short of breath and tight bands of pain pulse across his chest. In his mouth an acid taste intensifies. He turns his hand, his puffy keratotic hand, long-fingered enough to hold a basketball from above, and scatters the pellets where the peacocks can eat them. A dirty white one dragging its filmy tail through the dust eyes the turdlike food but doesn’t peck. Maybe it was human food after all. Still, his day has taken a blow, and as they move along the path only Judy is gleeful; her prattle eclipses a sudden anguished crying, the noise peacocks make, behind them.
Wearying of Jungle Gardens, they move along a path that pas-ses yet another piece of this same all-purpose lake, and a cage where a lonely ocelot dozes, and cactus gardens, and a black pool advertising a water monitor but where they see nothing, perhaps because they don’t know what a water monitor is, and cages of parrots and macaws whose brilliant plumage and ornate bills seem to weigh them down. It’s hell, to be a creature. You are trapped in yourself, the genetic instructions, more strictly than in a cage. At the last cage a scraggly tall emu and a rhea are snapping at the wires of the fencing with a doleful soft leathery clack of their bills. Their long-lashed great eyes stare through the diagonal wire squares. Clip. Tap. Clip, say their sad persistent bills, to no avail. Are they catching insects human beings cannot see? Are they delirious, like old rummies?
Harry retastes the acid pellets and the yellow-and-red glop McDonald’s puts on hamburgers, with the little limp green pickle, and wishes to God he could stop eating. Janice comes to his side and touches the back of his hanging hand with the back of hers. “It was a natural mistake,” she says.
“That’s the kind I make,” he says. “Natural ones.”
“Harry, don’t be so down.”
“Am I? “
“You keep thinking about Nelson,” she tells him. So that’s what has been preoccupying her. Her, not him.
“I was thinking about emus,” he confesses.
Janice says, “Let’s go see if the kids want anything in the souvenir shop and then go buy a paper. I’m dying to be somewhere air-conditioned.” In the souvenir shop they buy Judy a lovely glossy top shell and Roy a strikingly black-and-white murex, with rough prongs that he instantly begins to scrape along smooth surfaces - the painted rail leading back to the parking lot, and the Camry itself if Harry hadn’t reached down and grabbed the little slob by his boneless little arm. Harry hates shells. Whenever he sees them he can’t help thinking of the blobby hungry sluggy creatures who inhabit them, with hearts and mouths and anuses and feelers and feeble eyes, underneath the sea, a murky cold world halfway to death. He really can’t stand the thought of underwater, the things haunting it, eating each other, drilling through shells, sucking each other’s stringy guts out.
The interior of the car has grown broiling hot in their absence. The Florida sun has burned away those thin clouds like aging jet trails and left only a waste of pure blue above the palms and the Spanish tiles. The heat and the pressure of family life have stupefied the kids; they hardly beg for a treat when he stops at a joy Food and Gas and buys a Sarasota Sentinel. The movie they all decide upon is Working Girl at two-forty-five at some “park” that turns out to be miles away, shimmering flat Florida miles full of big white soupy power-steered American cars being driven by old people so shrunken they can hardly see over the hood. Any time you get somewhere down here without a head-on collision is a tribute to the geriatric medicine in this part of the world, the pep pills and vitamin injections and blood thinners.
Though Judy swears Roy has been to the movies before, he doesn’t seem to understand you can’t just talk up as in your own living room. He keeps asking why, with a plaintive inflection: “Why she take off her clothes?” “Why she so mad at that man?” Harry likes it, in the movie, when you see that Melanie Griffith in her whorehouse underwear has a bit of honest fat to her, not like most of these Hollywood anorectics, and when she bursts in upon her boyfriend with the totally naked girl, like herself supposed to be Italian but not like her aspiring to be a Wall Street wheeler-dealer, riding the guy in the astride position, her long bare side sleek as the skin of a top shell and her dark-nippled boobs right on screen for a good five seconds. But the plot, and the farce of the hero and heroine worming their way into the upper-crust wedding, he feels he saw some forty years ago with Cary Grant or Gary Cooper and Irene Dunne or jean Arthur. When Roy loudly asks, “Why don’t we go now?” he is willing to go out into the lobby with him, so Janice and Judy can see the picture to the end in peace.
He and Roy split a box of popcorn and try a video game called Annihilation. Though he always thought of himself as pretty good on eye-hand coordination, Harry can’t hit a single space monster as it twitches and wiggles past in computer graphics. Roy, so small he has to be held up to the control panel until his twitching, wiggling weight gives Harry a pain across his shoulders, isn’t any better. “Well, Roy,” he sums up, when he gets his breath back, “if it was all up to us, the world would be taken over by space monsters.” The boy, more accustomed to his grandfather now, stands close, and his breath smells buttery from the popcorn, making Harry slightly queasy: this thin unconscious stream of childish breath reminds him of the overhead vent in an airplane.
When the crowd comes out of Cinema 3, Janice announces, “I think I need a job. Wouldn’t you like me better, Harry, if I was a working girl?”
“Which state would you work in?”
“Pennsylvania, obviously. Florida is for vacations.”
He doesn’t like the idea. It has something fishy and uncomfortable about it, like that batch of November stats from Springer Motors. “What work would you do?”
“I don’t know. Not work at the lot, Nelson hates us to get in his way. Sell something, maybe. My father was one and my son is one so why shouldn’t I be one? A salesperson.”
Rabbit doesn’t know what to answer. After all these years of his grudgingly sticking with her, he can’t imagine him begging her to stick with him, though this is his impulse. He changes conversational partners. “Judy. How did the movie come out?”
