by John Updike
“I’ll ask Howard, but as I say I doubt it. He does say that electricity is a funny devil—it surprises you sometimes.”
“My friend isn’t the most trustworthy—she’s full of strange sensations these days. You know her—Jane. She approached you about the rental. You called her a game old gal. Jane learned her witch lessons rather too well, I’m sometimes afraid.”
“Mother, I don’t find that joke very funny. What men used to do to those poor women was horrible. And they did it to thousands.”
“Who’s joking? Girls your age just can’t realize how few opportunities there were for women when I was young. Our job was to make babies and buy American consumer goods. If we fell off the marriage bandwagon, there was nothing much left for us but to ride a broomstick and cook up spells. Don’t look so shocked, it was power. Everybody needs power. Otherwise the world eats you up.”
“What about children? Isn’t having them and loving them power enough for most women?”
“ ‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,’ ” Alexandra quoted, the quotation being fresh in her memory, “ ‘and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.’ Isn’t that utterly disgusting?”
“Not to me, so much,” Marcy admitted. “There’s truth to it.” She set her feet in their dirty gardening sneakers solidly on the already soiled white carpet (why do these children buy white carpet and then not take care of it?) and stood up on her thick legs. Why are children so disappointing? They take your genes and run them right into the ground. Marcy asked pathetically, “Would you like to help me weed?”
“Do I look dressed for it? That bad? Darling, it’s a lovely invitation, but at my age once you bend down there’s no guarantee you’ll get back up.”
The child acknowledged that this overture was another failure, swinging her heavy red hands in a hopeless way. “I used to love it when you’d get into our garden on Orchard Road, with the zinnias and tomato plants. You seemed more my mother then.”
“More than other times? It’s strange, my dear, but part of your assignment as a parent is to forget you are one. You’re no good to your children if you’re just a homemaking ninny who doesn’t give them any room to grow in. You mentioned Nature. It’s a funny devil, as Howard says of electricity. I used to think I loved it, but now that it’s chewing me to death, I realize I hate it and fear it. In Canada I had the experience of there being too much Nature, and only at the end did I get on top of it. I had a religious experience, I think. But the trouble with such experiences is that the other thing, the other side, whatever it is, the place you get to, isn’t very clear—it just is, for a minute. Then it’s over. Gone.”
While pronouncing all this she had slowly pushed her creaky body up from the fat easy chair she had taken, with its faint sour tang of young malehood, and straightened up to confront her daughter. Alexandra was two inches taller, thirty pounds heavier, and twenty-three years older.
Marcy, looking alarmed, asked her, “How is it doing the chewing?”
She meant her mother’s death, which she couldn’t face even to the extent of phrasing it unambiguously. Alexandra smiled at the sad fact of mattering without any trying on her part, just existing as a shield, an intervening layer, between her child and the grave. “Oh,” she said, with an unfeigned diffidence, “the usual aches and pains and a sense of growing incoherence. And there are spells of the incontinence problem they keep advertising on television—before television and indoor plumbing, I suppose, people just dribbled. Really, Nature asks women’s insides to do too much. On the other hand, since being east my skin is much less dry and itchy. I’m terrified of cancer, of course, but my doctors tell me it’s all in my mind. Keep it there, I tell them. For seventy-four, I’m doing well. Don’t you worry, honey. My Grandma Sorensen lived to be eighty-eight. The last time I saw her she was up on her own roof, having crawled out a dormer window to hammer down the chimney flashing.”
“Ever since Howie’s mother passed,” Marcy said in her worried, nagging way, “you’re the boys’ only grandmother. You’re very important to them. Do come see them when they’re back from camp in August. They want to love you.”
“Oh, dear,” Alexandra said, pleased nevertheless. “I’m not sure at my age I can stand up to too much love. I’m not used to it.”
“I—”
“Don’t say it. Same here.”
“I’ll have you to dinner when the boys are back. Why not bring the others?”
“They’d like that. Eastwick hasn’t been as welcoming as they expected. A little family fun might keep us out of mischief.”
Sukie spotted Tommy Gorton, in a gray sweatshirt, at the far end of Dock Street, and he had spotted her a minute before; day after day they had been hoping for the other to appear. The first, purely accidental encounter had been under a postcard-clear sky, but today, by mid-morning, a glowering cloud mass had slanted in from the northeast, and they needed to find shelter as the first drops of rain began to dot the sidewalk. Nemo’s Diner seemed a safe place; it had not yet been sold to Dunkin’ Donuts. A long aluminum box with rounded corners and a broad red stripe along its sides, the diner in thirty years had gone from being a casual relic of Fifties modern to being a self-consciously retro curiosity, a souvenir of younger days for old-timers while trendier places like the Bakery Coffee Nook and the fish restaurant, the Friendly Grouper, located out on the rebuilt dock, attracted the arrivistes in town. Nemo’s still had a counter and wooden booths, with little vanilla-colored jukeboxes that, for a quarter, would still play golden oldies by Frankie Laine and Patti Page and Fats Domino and the Chantelles and (the latest hits) the Beatles. Customers rarely spared the quarter; the booths at the back tended to be taken over by the old-timers, who treasured silence and nursed mugs of coffee and old political grievances that could still be warmed, in trios and quartets, into loud indignation. Sukie and Tom, after one glance at the filled back booths, gravitated in unison toward the little round tables up in front, near the picture window that overlooked Dock Street. Raindrops flecked the big pane and accumulated into rivulets that staggered and then streamed downward. It had been to one of these tables, Sukie remembered, that she had brought Jennifer Gabriel one bitter winter day not many days after the girl’s father had committed suicide, having murdered her mother in a drunken rage. Against the cold, Sukie remembered, the orphan wore a dirty parka patched with rectangles of iron-on vinyl, and a long purple scarf of an unsuitably loose-woven wool. Rebecca, the slatternly Antiguan with an awry spine, must have been behind the counter then, but the black woman had long ago disappeared from the town.
Sukie glanced across the tabletop, its varnish worn away over the years by repeated place settings, to look again at Tommy’s bad hand, but he had already hidden it in his lap, while signalling with the good hand for the waitress. Where wicked Rebecca used to appear, now a round-faced girl with broad silver rings on both thumbs was summoned. Sukie remembered her from somewhere. Where? The concert, handing out programs. Could she be a Neff granddaughter? It was unsettling to think that the town had been taken over by grandchildren, and her own generation had sunk into a subsurface of DNA.
“Two coffees,” Sukie told the girl. “Right, Tom?” As always with him, she found herself in charge. He bleakly nodded, gazing into his lap. “And, oh yes,” Sukie suddenly said, remembering, “an order of johnnycakes. We’ll split it.”
“Johnnycakes?” the girl asked, blushing as if she were being teased.
“You know,” Sukie told her. “You have to know—they’re a Rhode Island specialty. Balls of baked dough, all crumbly and buttery. Delicious.”
The girl’s puzzled blush persisted. “We have bagels, and croissants”—every consonant pronounced—“and I’ll look if any doughnuts are still left in the case.”
“No,” Sukie said, convinced that this thin-skinned, thickheaded girl was a Neff descendant. “Never mind. They’re not the same. I’ll keep my figure.” She added this last sentence to be pleasant, b
ut the girl blushed more deeply, imagining an allusion to her own full, succulent figure.
“Things never are,” Tommy said, rather sulkily, when the girl was gone. “The same.”
Sukie felt he was trying to tell her something disagreeable, and she went defensive in turn. “This is news you think you’re telling me?”
“Well,” he allowed, “you seemed to come back as if everything would be still here waiting for you.”
“I never thought that. And a lot of it still is. This town could use a makeover.”
Slumped back in his fragile bentwood chair, he shrugged. “It gets it, bit by bit. New folks move in. Young folks, with their own ideas. The Bronze Barrel—you know, on the road over to Coddington Junction—”
“I know where it is. Though we didn’t use to go there much. We were more into private parties.”
“—it’s become what they call a sports bar. They have three big screens playing different sports events every hour of the day and night they’re open. I don’t see how anybody can stand the ruckus, but the young people all take to it. They have to have the noise. And where your old newspaper used to be, you probably noticed, there’s a health center now. Exercise machines and so on.”
“Yes, I looked in the windows and there were all these people on treadmills staring back at me. With headphones on, like a row of zombies. It was frightening.”
Tommy informed her, slouching as if his information served as a poor substitute for what he really wanted to say, “The old presses and Linotypes had to sit on a reinforced cement floor, so the conversion was easy enough. They moved the equipment right in, in one night. People don’t use it in summers the way they do in winter. You should see it then. Old ladies, too, hugging and puffing away. Everybody these days wants to live forever.”
Old ladies, too. Was he trying to warn her off—to put her in her place? Let him. Let him have his precious Eastwick, summer, winter, fall, and spring. “Do people,” she asked, “miss having the Word? We used to flatter ourselves it gave the town more of an identity, even a weekly, where people could see their names in print.”
“Well,” Tom said, wincing as if words were painful, “print doesn’t mean to people what it used to, it may be. A considerable number get what news they need off the Internet. They don’t need much. Sports, celebrities. For self-advertisement there’s all this blogging. It’s amazing to me anybody has the time to read such crap, but I guess they do. Some woman pretty new in town tried to get up a Xeroxed local newsletter when the syndicate that had bought up the Word closed it down, but people didn’t take to it enough for it to pay. Also, you know, pardon my getting personal, what happened concerning the Word when you were still around spooked people a little—gave it a bad name.”
How personally was she to take this? “Well, la-di-da,” she said, a response that was both combative and lame.
The round-faced waitress, with her cruelly pierced eyebrow, brought the coffees, served in tall Starbucks-style brown mugs instead of the old-fashioned thick china, with handles and saucers, that Sukie remembered in Nemo’s. “Is that girl a Neff?” she asked Tommy when the waitress had retreated.
He shook his head curtly. “A Jessup. Remember Mavis, used to run the Yapping Fox?”
“She doesn’t look anything like Mavis.”
“Well—they say Hank before their divorce got around.” He tried to take a sip of his coffee, but it was too hot. He set it down with a grimace, wiping his lips, half-lost in his beard, with his paper napkin.
“Tommy,” she asked him, “are you uncomfortable?”
“Well, since you mention it, it’s not entirely comfortable, sitting here next to this plate-glass window with my wife working at the bank in the next block. People in Eastwick still talk—that hasn’t changed.”
“But I’m an old lady. Surely Jean wouldn’t mind.”
Uncomfortably he shifted his weight in the fragile bent-wood black-shellacked chair. “She knows about you and me. I told her before we got married. I figured I should tell her the works. You weren’t my only, you know.”
“Of course not. You were a very attractive young man. And you knew it, thanks in part to me. As you say, people talk. Ex-lovers talk. They don’t mean to betray the old one; they just want to come clean with the new one. It’s recycling. It’s even an inverted form of loyalty, I suppose. Talking keeps it alive—the former romance.”
Tommy perceived the challenge: to render a reckoning. He lowered his voice, so the two had to sit forward and lean toward each other above the little round table. “You gave me your all, in a certain line. I’ve never seen the beat of it. But Jean’s my meal ticket. Without her, I’m on welfare.”
That he was risking his meal ticket was an idea, Sukie judged, exciting to his vanity—he was back out at sea, hauling in nets that might break with their live weight. “If you say so,” Sukie said softly back. “You have to eat. But just now, seeing you way up in the next block, I felt we’d been looking for each other. I was sure of it.”
“Sure,” he said, his voice a bit louder, as if the other townspeople around them were welcome to hear. “Why not? You were a luxury, the deluxe platter, served up for no reason. I was an ignorant local yokel, and you, my God, you used to look smashing, parading up and down Dock Street in those suede-colored outfits with your orange hair and a bright scarf at your throat. I used to see you and think, In a couple of hours, a couple of days, I’m going to be tugging that skirt down and undoing her bra snaps and fucking her right up to her ribs.”
“Shh.” She had to touch his hand on the tabletop to quiet him, and it was the wrong hand, the bad hand, the ruined hand, which he had unthinkingly brought up from his lap. He quickly pulled it back out of sight. The early-lunch people were drifting into Nemo’s, glancing their way, so she leaned her face closer to his with a growing urgency, her damp hair falling forward. “That’s what I wanted to hear,” she whispered. “What I meant to you. Was I just a silly piece of ass, an older woman who had no sense and no shame? Did you despise me even as we screwed? Some men do, you know, and still women open themselves to them, we’re that desperate. How desperate did I seem to you? How ugly?”
“Why, not at all,” he said, with instant clear-eyed conviction. His hushed voice grew husky with sincerity: “You were beautiful. And desperate. You seemed like somebody searching, and I was where you were searching that summer. And not just me; I had heard about you and Toby Bergman. It didn’t matter.”
“Toby,” Sukie repeated, as if she had never heard the name before. “He was nothing, compared with you, Tommy.”
His coffee was cool enough to drink now; he took rapid gulps, finishing up. “You don’t have to say that. Look. It’s all biology. We were both in our biological primes. You were—what?—thirty-three. It takes women years to get into sex. Guys are turned on at fifteen. You see it all the time now on television news, these schoolteacher women in their thirties who fall in love with a teen-age student. Everybody’s horrified—the kid’s parents, the school board, the sheriff’s office, the whole community. Outraged. But it’s biology. You and I were there, as they say, for each other.”
As Tom swiftly, gulpingly talked, too knowingly, Sukie resented being generalized into an instance of a widespread phenomenon. As he had relaxed into a lecture, he had smiled, and let his missing tooth show. It occurred to her that the stinginess of his smiles was an attempt to conceal his dental embarrassment. She told him, not caring if she was overheard since she knew now that this encounter would not be repeated, “To me, Tommy, you were like something coming out of the fog, with your shoulder tasting of salt. Women get foggy, they have to, it’s too upsetting otherwise. It’s too tragic—the parting part of it, the way it gets over, whether you stay together or not. The intensity, I mean. You were gentle, is what I wanted to say. Thank you. Men don’t have to be, especially young men, to whom it’s all just come true—the dirty joke isn’t a joke. Women want it. They really want it. You didn’t take advantage and get sad
istic, even though you could have. I would have let you. You were sweet.”
“Hey,” Tommy said, ready to stand up, impatient to put distance between them. “I was just human. An easy lay is an easy lay. And you blew, too. That was an extra, back then.”
Her eyes teared up as if she had been slapped. When he said “You blew” in that casual hard-hearted way his pale lips from within his nest of facial hair leaped in her vision like that circled portion of a documentary film doctored to focus attention on an overlookable detail: the human mouth, versatile and perverse. “You go,” she said, putting on a casual smile in case any of the old-timers in the back booths glanced their way. “I’ll stay and pay. Be nice to Jean. I know you will.”
As if this had been a threat, Tommy darted a frightened look down at her from his regained height; the protruding bulk of his middle-aged belly swelled his dirty sweatshirt. He smoothed his unkempt mustache back from the dent in the middle of his upper lip and a look she had forgotten, a spoiled boyish pout, came over his face as he tried to decide if there was anything more to say. He decided there wasn’t and left her there staring out the picture window, which had become semi-opaque as the morning’s rain settled in. She saw his ponytail hurry by in the smear.
“Well, I was just dumped,” she told Alexandra, who was sitting in her favorite chair in the condo, the one comfortable one, a broad plaid recliner, puzzling over a segment of last Sunday’s New York Times. This was Tuesday. The Times was a slow, filling meal.
“Dumped?”
“Given the gate. Put out to pasture. I ran into Tommy Gorton, the gorgeous young harbormaster I knew toward the end of when we lived here. He reminded me rather firmly that he has a wife he’s very dependent on. And scared of, I gathered.”
Alexandra, who had been enjoying her solitude luxuriating in the sound of New England rain drumming on the roof, put down the Travel section to give her disturbed friend her full attention. “Did you need to be reminded? You expected something different?”
