by John Updike
What was it in the next twenty-four hours that slowly flooded me, that makes me want to get the day on some kind of film? I don’t know exactly, so I must put everything in, however underexposed.
Linda and Cora were still awake when headlights boomed in the driveway—we’re a city block from the nearest house, and a half-mile from the road—and the Pingrees came by. Ian works for an ad agency I’ve photographed some nudes shampooing in the shower for, and on vacation he lives in boatneck shirts and cherry-red Bermudas and blue sunglasses, and grows a salt-and-pepper beard—a Verichrome fathead, and nearsighted at that. But his wife, Jenny, is nifty. Low forehead, like a fox. Freckles. Thick red sun-dulled hair ironed flat down her back. Hips. And an angle about her legs, the way they’re put together, slightly bowed but with the something big and bland and smooth and unimpeachable about the thighs that you usually find only in the fenders of new cars. Though she’s very serious and liberal and agitated these days, I could look at her forever, she’s such fun for the eyes. Which isn’t the same as being photogenic. The few shots I’ve taken of her show a staring woman with baby fat, whereas some skinny snit who isn’t even a name to me comes over in the magazines as my personal version of Eros. The camera does lie, all the time. It has to.
Margaret doesn’t mind the Pingrees, which isn’t the same as liking them, but in recent years she doesn’t much admit to liking anybody; so it was midnight when they left, all of us giddy with drink and talk under the stars, which seem so presiding and reproachful when you’re drunk, shouting goodbye in the driveway, and agreeing on tennis tomorrow. I remembered the rabbit. Deirdre, Linda, and Cora were asleep, Linda with the light still on and the mystery rising and falling on her chest, Cora floating above her, in the upper bunk bed. The rabbit was in the shoebox under a protective lean-to of cookout grills, in case the cat came back. We moved a grill aside and lit a match, expecting the rabbit to be dead. Photograph by sulphur-glow: undertakers at work. But though the rabbit wasn’t hopping, the whiskers were moving, back and forth no more than a millimeter or two at the tips, but enough to signify breathing—life, hope, what else? Eternal solicitude brooding above us, also holding a match, and burning Its fingers. Our detection of life, magnified by liquor, emboldened us to make love for the first time in, oh, days beyond counting. She’s always tired, and says the Pill depresses her, and a kind of arms race of avoidance has grown up around her complaints. Moonlight muted by window screens. Her eyeless eyesockets beneath me, looking up. To the shack smells of mist and cedar and salt we added musk. Margaret slipped into sleep quick as a fish afterward, but for an uncertain length of time—the hours after midnight lose their numbers, if you don’t remind them with a luminous dial—I lay there, the thought of the rabbit swollen huge and oppressive, blanketing all of us, a clenching of the nerves snatching me back from sleep by a whisker, the breathing and rustling all around me precarious, the rumbling and swaying of a ship that at any moment, the next or then the next, might hit an iceberg.
Morning. The rabbit took some milk, and his isinglass eye slightly widened. The children triumphantly crowed. Jubilant sun-sparkle on the sea beyond the sand beyond the pond. We rowed across, six in the rowboat and two in the kayak. The tides had been high in the night, delivering debris dropped between here and Portugal. Jimmy walked far down the beach, collecting lightbulbs jettisoned from ships—they are sealed vacuums and will float forever, if you let them. I had put the 135mm telephoto on the Nikon and loaded in a roll of Plus-X and took some shots of the children (Cora’s face, horrified and ecstatic, caught in the translucent wall of a breaker about to submerge her; Godfrey, his close-cut blond hair shiny as a helmet, a Tritonesque strand of kelp slung across his shoulders) but most of grass and sand and shadows, close-up, using the ultraviolet filter, trying to get, what may be ungettable, the way the shadow edges stagger from grain to grain on the sand, and the way some bent-over grass blades draw circles around themselves.
Jimmy brought the bulbs back and arranged them in order of size, and before I could get to him had methodically smashed two. All I could see was bleeding feet but I didn’t mean to grab him so hard. The marks of my hand were still red on his arm a half hour later. Our fight depressed Henrietta; like a seismograph, she feels all violence as hers. God said he was hungry and Deirdre began to worry about the rabbit: there is this puffy look children’s faces get that I associate with guilt but that can also signal grief. Deirdre and Jimmy took the kayak, to be there first, and Linda, who maybe thinks the exercise will improve her bosom, rowed the rest of us to our dock. We walked to the house, heads down. Our path is full of poison ivy, our scorched lawn full of flat thistles. In our absence, the rabbit, still lying on its side, had created a tidy little heap of pelletlike feces. The children were ecstatic; they had a dirty joke and a miracle all in one. The rabbit’s recovery was assured. But the eye looked cloudier to me, and the arc of the whisker tips even more fractional.
Lunch: soup and sandwiches. In the sky, the clouding over from the west that often arrives around noon. The level of light moved down, and the hands of the year swept forward a month. It was autumn, every blade of grass shining. August has this tinny, shifty quality, the only month without a holiday to pin it down. Our tennis date was at two. You can picture for yourself Jenny Pingree in tennis whites: those rounded guileless thighs, and the bobbing, flying hair tied behind with a kerchief of blue gauze, and that humorless, utterly intent clumsiness—especially when catching the balls tossed to her as server—that we love in children, trained animals, and women who are normally graceful. She and I, thanks to my predatory net play, took Ian and Margaret, 6–3, and the next set was called at 4–4, when our hour on the court ran out. A moral triumph for Margaret, who played like the swinger of fifteen years ago, and passed me in the alley half a dozen times. Dazzling with sweat, she took the car and went shopping with the four children who had come along to the courts; Linda had stayed in the shack with another book, and Jimmy had walked to a neighboring house, where there was a boy his age. The Pingrees dropped me off at our mailbox. Since they were going back to the city Sunday, we had agreed on a beach picnic tonight. The mail consisted of forwarded bills, pencil-printed letters to the children from their friends on other islands or beside lakes, and Life. While walking down our dirt road, I flicked through an overgorgeous photographic essay on Afghanistan. Hurrying blurred women in peacock-colored saris, mud palaces, rose dust, silver rivers high in the Hindu Kush. An entire valley—misted, forested earth—filled the center page spread. The lenses those people have! Nothing expensive on earth is as selfless as a beautiful lens.
Entering the shack, I shouted out to Linda, “It’s just me,” thinking she would be afraid of rapists. I went into her room and looked in the shoebox. The eye was lustreless and the whiskers had stopped moving, even infinitesimally.
“I think the bunny’s had it,” I said.
“Don’t make me look,” she said, propped up in the lower bunk, keeping her eyes deep in a paperback titled A Stitch in Time Kills Nine. The cover showed a dressmaker’s dummy pierced by a stiletto, and bleeding. “I couldn’t stand it,” she said.
“What should I do?” I asked her.
“Bury it.” She might have been reading from the book. Her profile, I noticed, was becoming a cameo, with a lovely gentle bulge to the forehead, high like Margaret’s. I hoped being intelligent wouldn’t cramp her life.
“Deirdre will want to see it,” I argued. “It’s her baby.”
“It will only make her sad,” Linda said. “And disgust me. Already it must be full of vermin.”
Nothing goads me to courage like some woman’s taking a high tone. Afraid to touch the rabbit’s body while life was haunting it, I touched it now, and found it tepid, and lifted it from the box. The body, far from stiff, felt unhinged; its back or neck must have been broken since the moment the cat pounced. Blood had dried in the ear—an intricate tunnel leading brainwards, velvety at the tip, oddly muscular at the root. The eye not
of isinglass was an opaque black bead. Linda was right: there was no need for Deirdre to see. I took the rabbit out beyond the prickly yard, into the field, and laid it under the least stunted swamp oak, where any child who wanted to be sure that I hadn’t buried it alive could come and find it. I put a marsh marigold by its nose, in case it was resurrected and needed to eat, and paused above the composition—fur, flower, the arty shape of fallen oak leaves—with a self-congratulatory sensation that must have carried on my face back to the shack, for Margaret, in the kitchen loading the refrigerator, looked up at me and said, “Say. I don’t mind your being partners with Jenny, but you don’t have to toss the balls to her in that cute, confiding way.”
“The poor bitch can’t catch them otherwise. You saw that.”
“I saw more than I wanted to. I nearly threw up.”
“That second set,” I said, “your backhand was terrific. The Maggie-O of old.”
Deirdre came down the hall from the bedrooms. Her eyes seemed enormous; I went to her and knelt to hold her around the waist, and began, “Sweetie, I have some sad news.”
“Linda told me,” she said, and walked by me into the kitchen. “Mommy, can I make the cocoa?”
“You did everything you could,” I called after her. “You were a wonderful nurse and made the bunny’s last day very happy.”
“I know,” she called in answer. “Mommy, I promise I won’t let the milk boil over this time.”
Of the children, only Henrietta and Godfrey let me lead them to where the rabbit rested. Henrietta skittishly hung back, and never came closer than ten yards. God marched close, gazed down sternly, and said, “Get up.” Nothing happened, except the ordinary motions of the day: the gulls and stately geese beating home above the pond, the traffic roaring invisible along the highway. He squatted down, and I prevented him from picking up the rabbit, before I saw it was the flower he was after.
Jimmy, then, was the only one who cried. He came home a half-hour after we had meant to set out rowing across the pond to the beach picnic, and rushed into the field toward the tree with the tallest silhouette and came back carrying on his cheeks stains he tried to hide by thumping God. “If you hadn’t dropped him,” he said. “You baby.”
“It was nobody’s fault,” Margaret told him, impatiently cradling her basket of hot dogs and raw hamburger.
“I’m going to kill that cat,” Jimmy said. He added, cleverly, an old grievance: “Other kids my age have BB guns.”
“Oh, our big man,” Cora said. He flew at her in a flurry of fists and sobs, and ran away and hid. At the dock I let Linda and Cora take the kayak, and the rest of us waited a good ten minutes with the rowboat before Jimmy ran down the path in the dusk, himself a silhouette, like the stunted trees and the dark bar of dunes between the sunset and its reflection in the pond. Ever notice how sunsets upside down look like stairs?
“Somehow,” Margaret said to me, as we waited, “you’ve deliberately dramatized this.” But nothing could fleck the happiness widening within me, to capture the dying light.
The Pingrees had brought swordfish and another, older couple—the man was perhaps an advertising client. Though he was tanned like a tobacco leaf and wore the smartest summer playclothes, a pleading uncertainty in his manner seemed to crave the support of advertisement. His wife had once been beautiful and held herself lightly, lithely at attention—a soldier in the war of self-preservation. With them came two teen-age boys clad in jeans and buttonless vests and hair so long their summer complexions had remained sallow. One was their son, the other his friend. We all collected driftwood—a wandering, lonely, prehistoric task that frightens me. Darkness descended too soon, as it does in the tropics, where the warmth leads us to expect an endless June evening from childhood. We made a game of popping champagne corks, the kids trying to catch them on the fly. Startling, how high they soared, in the open air. The two boys gathered around Linda, and I protectively eavesdropped, and was shamed by the innocence and long childish pauses of what I overheard: “Philadelphia … just been in the airport, on our way to my uncle’s, he lives in Virginia … wonderful horses, super … it’s not actually blue, just bluey-green, blue only I guess by comparison … was in France once, and went to the races … never been … I want to go.” Margaret and Jenny, kneeling in the sand to cook, setting out paper plates on tables that were merely wide pieces of driftwood, seemed sisters. The woman of the strange couple tried to flirt with me, talking of foreign places: “Paris is so dead, suddenly … the girls fly over to London to buy their clothes, and then their mothers won’t let them wear them … Malta … Istanbul … life … sincerity … the people … the poor Greeks … a friend absolutely assures me, the CIA engineered … apparently used the NATO contingency plan.” Another champagne cork sailed in the air, hesitated, and drifted down, Jimmy diving but missing, having misjudged. A remote light, a lightship, or the promontory of an unmapped continent hidden in daylight, materialized on the horizon, beyond the shushing of the surf. Margaret and Jenny served us. Hamburgers and swordfish full of woodsmoke. Celery and sand. God, sticky with things he had spilled upon himself, sucked his thumb and rubbed against Margaret’s legs. Jimmy came to me, furious because the big boys wouldn’t Indian-wrestle with him, only with Linda and Cora: “Showing off for their boyfriends … whacked me for no reason … just because I said ‘sex bomb.’ ”
We sat in a ring around the fire, the heart of a collapsing star, fed anew by paper plates. The man of the older couple, in whose breath the champagne had undergone an acrid chemical transformation, told me about his money—how as a youth just out of business school, in the depths of the Depression, he had made a million dollars in some deal involving Stalin and surplus wheat. He had liked Stalin, and Stalin had liked him. “The thing we must realize about your Communist is that he’s just another kind of businessman.” Across the fire I watched his wife, spurned by me, ardently gesturing with the teen-age boy who was not her son, and wondered how I would take their picture. Tri-X, wide open, at 1/60; but the shadows would be lost, the subtle events within them, and the highlights would be vapid blobs. There is no adjustment, no darkroom trickery, equal to the elastic tolerance of our eyes as they scan.
As my new friend murmured on and on about his money, and the champagne warming in my hand released carbon dioxide to the air, exposures flickered in and out around the fire: glances, inklings, angels. Margaret gazing, the nick of a frown erect between her brows. Henrietta’s face vertically compressing above an ear of corn she was devouring. The well-preserved woman’s face a mask of bronze with cunningly welded seams, but her hand an exclamatory flash as it touched her son’s friend’s arm in some conversational urgency lost in the crackle of driftwood. The halo of hair around Ian’s knees, innocent as babies’ pates. Jenny’s hair an elongated flurry as she turned to speak to the older couple’s son; his bearded face was a blur in the shadows, melancholy, the eyes seeming closed, like the Jesus on a faded, drooping veronica. I heard Jenny say, “… must destroy the system! We’ve forgotten how to love!” Deirdre’s glasses, catching the light, leaped like moth wings toward the fire, escaping perspective. Beside me, the old man’s face went silent, and suffered a deflation wherein nothing held firm but the reflected glitter of firelight on a tooth his grimace had absent-mindedly left exposed. Beyond him, on the edge of the light, Cora and Linda were revealed sitting together, their legs stretched out long before them, warming, their faces in darkness, sexless and solemn, as if attentive to the sensations of the revolution of the earth beneath them. Godfrey was asleep, his head pillowed on Margaret’s thigh, his body suddenly wrenched by a dream sob, and a heavy succeeding sigh.
It was strange, after these fragmentary illuminations, to stumble through the unseen sand and grass, with our blankets and belongings, to the boats on the shore of the pond. Margaret and five children took the rowboat; I nominated Jimmy to come with me in the kayak. The night was starless. The pond, between the retreating campfire and the slowly nearing lights of
our neighbors’ houses, was black. I could scarcely see his silhouette as it struggled for the rhythm of the stroke: left, a little turn with the wrists, right, the little turn reversed, left. Our paddles occasionally clashed, or snagged on the weeds that clog this pond. But the kayak sits lightly, and soon we put the confused conversation of the rowers, and their wildly careening flashlight beam, behind. Silence widened around us. Steering the rudder with the foot pedals, I let Jimmy paddle alone, and stared upward until I had produced, in the hazed sky overhead, a single, unsteady star. It winked out. I returned to paddling and received an astonishing impression of phosphorescence: every stroke, right and left, called into visibility a rich arc of sparks, animalcula hailing our passage with bright shouts. The pond was more populous than China. My son and I were afloat on a firmament warmer than the heavens.
“Hey, Dad.”
His voice broke the silence carefully; my benevolence engulfed him, my fellow-wanderer, my leader, my gentle, secretive future. “What, Jimmy?”
“I think we’re about to hit something.”
We stopped paddling, and a mass, gray etched on gray, higher than a man, glided swiftly toward us and struck the prow of the kayak. With this bump, and my awakening laugh, the day of the dying rabbit ended. Exulting in homogenous glory, I had steered us into the bank. We pushed off, and by the lights of our neighbors’ houses navigated to the dock, and waited some minutes for the rowboat with its tangle of voices and picnic equipment to arrive. The days since have been merely happy days. This day was singular in its, let’s say, tone—its silver-bromide clarity. Between the cat’s generous intentions and my son’s lovingly calm warning, the dying rabbit sank like film in the developing pan, and preserved us all.
