The Early Stories

by John Updike

  Alice snapped the safety bar, and they were bracketed together. It was degrading for both of them. Up ahead, neither Norman nor Timmy deigned to glance back. From the rear, hooded and armed with spears, they were two of a kind, Timmy at twelve only slightly smaller than his father; and this, too, she felt as a desertion, a flight from her body. While she was dragged through the air, rudely joggled at each pier, the whiteness of the snow pressed on the underside of her consciousness with the gathering insistence of a headache. Her ski boots weighed; her feet felt captive. Rigid with irritation and a desire not to sway, she smoked her next-to-last cigarette, which was cheated of taste by the cold, and tried to decide if the woman beside her were sleeping with Norman or not.

  This morning, as they drove north into New Hampshire, there had been in the automobile an excessive ease, as if the four of them knew each other better than Caroline remembered reason for. There had been, between Alice Smith and Norman, a lack of flirtation a shade too resolute, while on sleepy, innocent Timmy the woman had inflicted a curiously fervent playfulness, as if warm messages for the father were being forwarded through the son, or as if Alice were seeking to establish herself as a sexual nonentity, a brotherly sister. Caroline felt an ominous tug in this trip. Had she merely imagined, during their fumbling breakfast at Howard Johnson, a poignance in the pauses, and a stir of something, like toes touching, under the table? And was she paranoid to have suspected a deliberate design in the pattern of alternation that had her and her son floundering up the T-bar together as the other two expertly skimmed down the slope and waited, side by side, laughing vapor, at the end of the long and devious line? Caroline was not reassured, when they all rejoined at lunch, by Alice’s smile, faintly flavored with a sweetness unspecified in the recipe.

  Alice had been her friend first. She had moved to their neighborhood a year ago, a touching little divorcée with pre-school twins, utterly lost. Her only interest seemed to be sports, and her marital grief had given her an awkward hardness, as if from too much exercise. Norman had called her pathetic and sexless. Yet a winter later he had rescued his skis from a decade in the attic, enrolled Timmy in local lessons, and somehow guided his wife in the same dangerous direction, as irresistibly as this cable was pulling them skyward.

  They were giddily lifted above the tops of the pines. Caroline, to brace her voice against her rising fear, spoke aloud: “This is ridiculous. At my age women in Tahiti are grandmothers.”

  Alice said seriously, “I think you do terribly well. You’re a natural dancer, and it shows.”

  Caroline could not hate her. She was as helpless as herself, and there was some timid loyalty, perhaps, in Norman’s betraying her with a woman she had befriended. She felt, indeed, less betrayed than diluted, and, turning with her cigarette cupped against the wind, she squinted at the other woman as if into an unkind mirror. Alice was small-boned yet coarse; muscularity, reaching upward through the prominent tendons of her throat, gave her face, even through the flush of windburn, a taut, sallow tinge. Her hair, secured by a scarlet ear warmer, was abundant but mousy, and her eyes were close-set, hazel, and vaguely, stubbornly inward. But between her insignificant nose and receding chin there lay, as if in ambush, a large, complicated, and (Caroline supposed) passionate mouth. This, she realized, as the chair swayed sickeningly, was exactly what Norman would want: a mouse with a mouth.

  Disgust, disgust and anger, swung through her. How greedy men were! How conceited and brutish! The sky enlarged around her, as if to receive so immense a condemnation. With deft haste Alice undid the safety bar; Caroline involuntarily transposed the action into an undoing of Norman’s clothes. Icy with contempt for her situation, she floated onto the unloading platform and discovered, slipping down the alarming little ramp, that her knees were trembling and had forgotten how to bend.

  Of course, they were abandoned. The males had heedlessly gone ahead, and beckoned, tiny and black, from the end of a tunnel tigerishly striped with the shadows of birches. On whispering skis held effortlessly parallel, Alice led, while Caroline followed, struggling clumsily against the impulse to stem. They arrived where the men had been and found them gone again. In their place was a post with two signs. One pointed right to GREASED LIGHTNING (EXPERT). The other pointed left to THE LIGHTNING BUG (INTERMEDIATE-NOVICE).

  “I see them,” Alice said, and lightly poled off to the right.

  “Wait,” Caroline begged.

  Alice christied to a stop. A long lavender shadow from a mass of pines covered her and for a painful instant, as her lithe body inquisitively straightened, she seemed beautiful.

  “How expert is it?” The Harrises had never been to this mountain before; Alice had been several times.

  “There’s one mogully piece you can sideslip,” Alice said. “The Bug will take you around the other side of the mountain. You’ll never catch the men.”

  “Why don’t you follow them and I’ll go down the novice trail? I don’t trust this mountain yet.” It was a strange mountain, one of the lesser Presidentials, rather recently developed, with an unvarnished cafeteria and very young boys patrolling the trails in rawly bright jackets chevron-striped in yellow and green. At lunch, Norman said he twice had seen members of the ski patrol take spills. His harsh laugh, remembered at this bare altitude, frightened her. The trembling in her knees would not subside, and her fingertips were stinging in their mittens.

  Alice crisply sidestepped back up to her. “Let’s both go down the Bug,” she said. “You shouldn’t ski alone.”

  “I don’t want to be a sissy,” Caroline said, and these careless words apparently triggered some inward chain of reflection in the other woman, for Alice’s face clouded, and it appeared certain that she was sleeping with Norman. Everything, every tilt of circumstance, every smothered swell and deliberate contraindication, confirmed it, even the girl’s name, Smith—a nothing-name, a demimondaine’s alias. Her hazel eyes, careful in the glare of the snow, flickeringly searched Caroline’s and her expressive mouth froze on the verge of a crucial question.

  “Track! Track!”

  The voice was behind them, shrill and young. A teen-age girl, wearing a polka-dot purple parka, and her mother, a woman almost elderly, who seemed to have rouged the tip of her nose, turned beside them and casually plunged over the lip of Greased Lightning.

  Caroline, shamed, said, “The hell with it. The worst I can do is get killed.” Murderously stabbing the snow next to Alice’s noncommital buckle-boots, she pushed off to the right, her weight flung wildly back, her uphill ski snagging, her whole body burning with the confirmation of her suspicions. She would leave Norman. Unsteady as a flame she flickered down the height, wavering in her own wind. Alice carefully passed her and, taking long traverses and diagrammatically deliberate turns, seemed to be inviting her not to destroy herself. Submitting to the sight, permitting her eyes to infect her body with Alice’s rhythm, she found the snow yielding to her as if under the pressure of reason; and, swooping in complementary zigzags, the two women descended a long white waterfall linked as if by love.

  Then there was a lazy flat run in the shadow of reddish rocks bearded with icicles, then another descent, through cataracts of moguls, into a wider, elbow-shaped slope overlooking, from the height of a mile, a toy lodge, a tessellated parking lot, and, vast and dim as a foreign nation, a frozen lake mottled with cloud shadows and islands of evergreen. Tensely sideslipping, Caroline saw, on the edge of this slope, at one side of the track, some trouble, a heap of dark cloth. In her haste to be with the men, Alice would have swept by, but Caroline snowplowed to a halt. With a dancing waggle Alice swerved and pulled even. The heap of cloth was the woman with the red-tipped nose, who lay on her back, her head downhill. Her daughter knelt beside her. The woman’s throat was curved as if she were gargling, and her hood was submerged in snow, so that her face showed like a face in a casket.

  Efficiently, Alice bent, released her bindings, and walked to the accident, making crisp boot prints. “Is she consc
ious?” she asked.

  “It’s the left,” the casket face said, not altering its rapt relation with the sky. The dab of red was the only color not drained from it. Tears trickled from the corner of one eye into a fringe of sandy permed hair.

  “Do you think it’s broken?”

  There was no answer, and the girl impatiently prompted, “Mother, does it feel broken?”

  “I can’t feel a thing. Take off the boot.”

  “I don’t think we should take off the boot,” Alice said. She surveyed the woman’s legs with a physical forthrightness that struck Caroline as unpleasant. “We might disturb the alignment. It might be a spiral. Did you feel anything give?” The impact of the spill had popped both safety bindings, so the woman’s skis were attached to her feet only by the breakaway straps. Alice stooped and unclipped these, and stood the skis upright in the snow, as a signal. She said, “We should get help.”

  The daughter looked up hopefully. The face inside her polka-dot parka was round and young, its final form not quite declared. “If you’re willing to stay,” she said, “I’ll go. I know some of the boys in the patrol.”

  “We’ll be happy to stay,” Caroline said firmly. She was conscious, as she said this, of frustrating Alice and of declaring, in the necessary war between them, her weapons to be compassion and patience. She wished she could remove her skis, for their presence on her feet held her a little aloof; but she was not sure she could put them back on at this slant, in the middle of nowhere. The snow here had the eerie unvisited air of grass beside a highway. The young daughter, without a backward glance, snapped herself into her skis and whipped away, down the hill. Seeing how easy it had been, Caroline dared unfasten hers and discovered her own boot-prints also to be crisp intaglios. Alice tugged back her parka sleeve and frowned at her wristwatch. The third woman moaned.

  Caroline asked, “Are you warm enough? Would you like to be wrapped in something?” The lack of a denial left them no choice but to remove their parkas and wrap her in them. Her body felt like an oversized doll sadly in need of stuffing. Caroline, bending close, satisfied herself that what looked like paint was a little pinnacle of sunburn.

  The woman murmured her thanks. “My second day here, I’ve ruined it for everybody—my daughter, my son …”

  Alice asked, “Where is your son?”

  “Who knows? I bring him here and don’t see him from morning to night. He says he’s skiing, but I ski every trail and never see him.”

  “Where is your husband?” Caroline asked; her voice sounded lost in the acoustic depth of the freezing air.

  The woman sighed. “Not here.”

  Silence followed, a silence in which wisps of wind began to decorate the snow-laden branches of pines with outflowing feathers of powder. The dense shadow thrown by the forest edging the trail was growing heavy, and cold pressed through the chinks of Caroline’s sweater. Alice’s thin neck strained as she gazed up at the vacant ridge for help. The woman in the snow began, tricklingly, to sob, and Caroline asked, “Would you like a cigarette?”

  The response was prompt. “I’d adore a weed.” The woman sat up, pulled off her mitten, and hungrily twiddled her fingers. Her nails were painted. She did not seem to notice, in taking the cigarette, that the pack became empty. Gesturing with stabbing exhalations of smoke, she waxed chatty. “I say to my son, ‘What’s the point of coming to these beautiful mountains if all you do is rush, rush, rush, up the tow and down, and never stop to enjoy the scenery?’ I say to him, ‘I’d rather be old-fashioned and come down the mountain in one piece than have my neck broken at the age of fourteen.’ If he saw me now, he’d have a fit laughing. There’s a patch of ice up there and my skis crossed. When I went over, I could feel my left side pull from my shoulders to my toes. It reminded me of having a baby.”

  “Where are you from?” Alice asked.

  “Melrose.” The name of her town seemed to make the woman morose. Her eyes focused on her inert boot.

  To distract her, Caroline asked, “And your husband’s working?”

  “We’re divorced. I know if I could loosen the laces it would be a world of relief. My ankle wants to swell and it can’t.”

  “I wouldn’t trust it,” Alice said.

  “Let me at least undo the knot,” Caroline offered, and dropped to her knees, as if to weep. She did not as a rule like complaining women, but here in this one she seemed to confront a voluntary dramatization of her own possibilities. She freed the knots of both the outer and inner laces—the boot was a new Nordica, and stiff. “Does that feel better?”

  “I honestly can’t say. I have no feeling below my knees whatsoever.”

  “Shock,” Alice said. “Nature’s anesthetic.”

  “My brother will be furious. He’ll have to hire a nurse for me.”

  “You’ll have your daughter,” Caroline said.

  “At her age, it’s all boys, boys on the brain.”

  This seemed to sum up their universe of misfortune. In silence, as dark as widows against the tilted acres of white, they waited for rescue. The trail here was so wide skiers could easily pass on the far side. A few swooped close, then veered away, as if sensing a curse. One man, a merry ogre wearing steel-framed spectacles and a raccoon coat, smoking a cigar, and plowing down the fall line with a shameless sprawling stem, shouted to them in what seemed a foreign language. But the pattern of the afternoon—the sun had shifted away from the trail—yielded few skiers. Empty minutes slid by. The bitter air had found every loose stitch in Caroline’s sweater and now was concentrating on the metal bits of brassiere that touched her skin. “Could I bum another coffin nail?” the injured woman asked.

  “I’m sorry, that was my last.”

  “Oh dear. Isn’t that the limit?”

  Alice, so sallow now she seemed Oriental, tucked her hands into her armpits and jiggled up and down. She asked, “Won’t the men worry?”

  Caroline took satisfaction in telling her, “I doubt it.” Looking outward, she saw only white, a tilted rippled wealth of colorlessness, the forsaken penumbra of the world. Her private desolation she now felt in communion with the other two women; they were all three abandoned, cut off, wounded, unwarmed, too impotent even to whimper. A vein of haze in the sky passingly dimmed the sunlight. When it brightened again, a tiny upright figure, male, in green and yellow chevron stripes, stood at the top of the cataracts of moguls.

  “That took eighteen minutes,” Alice said, consulting her wristwatch again. Caroline suddenly doubted that Norman, whose pajama bottoms rarely matched his tops, could fall for anyone so finicking.

  The woman in the snow asked, “Does my hair look awful?”

  Down, down the tiny figure came, enlarging, dipping from crest to crest, dragging a sled, a bit clumsily, between its legs. Then, hitting perhaps the same unfortunate patch of ice, the figure tipped, tripped, and became a dark star, spread-eagled, a cloud of powder from which protruded, with electric rapidity, fragments of ski, sled, and arm. This explosive somersault continued to the base of the steep section, where the fragments reassembled and lay still.

  The women had watched with held breaths. The woman from Melrose moaned, “Oh dear God.” Caroline discovered herself yearning, yearning with her numb belly, for their rescuer to stand. He did. The boy (he was close enough to be a boy, with lanky legs in his tight racing pants) scissored his skis above his head (miraculously, they had not popped off), hopped to his feet, jerkily sidestepped a few yards uphill to retrieve his hat (an Alpine of green felt, with ornamental breast feathers), and skated toward them, drenched with snow, dragging the sled and grinning.

  “That was a real eggbeater,” Alice told him, like one boy to another.

  “Who’s hurt?” he asked. His red ears protruded and his face swirled with freckles; he was so plainly delighted to be himself, so clearly somebody’s cherished son, that Caroline had to smile.

  And as if this clown had introduced into vacuity a fertilizing principle, more members of the ski patrol
sprang from the snow, bearing blankets and bandages and brandy, so that Caroline and Alice were pushed aside from the position of rescuers. They retrieved their parkas, refastened their skis, and tamely completed their run to the foot of the mountain. There, Timmy and Norman, looking worried and guilty, were waiting beside the lift shed. Her momentum failing, Caroline Harris actually skated—what she had never managed to do before, lifted her skis in the smooth alternation of skating—in her haste to assure her husband of his innocence.

  Plumbing

  The old plumber bends forward tenderly, in the dusk of the cellar of my newly acquired house, to show me a precious, antique joint. “They haven’t done them like this for thirty years,” he tells me. His thin voice is like a trickle squeezed through rust. “Thirty, forty years. When I began with my father, we did them like this. It’s an old lead joint. You wiped it on. You poured it hot with a ladle and held a wet rag in the other hand. There were sixteen motions you had to make before it cooled. Sixteen distinct motions. Otherwise you lost it and ruined the joint. You had to chip it away and begin again. That’s how we had to do it when I started out. A boy of maybe fifteen, sixteen. This joint here could be fifty years old.”

  He knows my plumbing; I merely own it. He has known it through many owners. We think we are what we think and see when in truth we are upright bags of tripe. We think we have bought living space and a view when in truth we have bought a maze, a history, an archaeology of pipes and cut-ins and traps and valves. The plumber shows me some stout dark pipe that follows a diagonal course into the foundation wall. “See that line along the bottom there?” A line of white, a whisper of frosting on the dark pipe’s underside—pallid oxidation. “Don’t touch it. It’ll start to bleed. See, they cast this old soil pipe in two halves. They were supposed to mount them so the seams were on the sides. But sometimes they got careless and mounted them so the seam is on the bottom.” He demonstrates with cupped hands; his hands part so the crack between them widens. I strain to see between his dark palms and become by his metaphor water seeking the light. “Eventually, see, it leaks.”