by John Updike
Alexandra’s life felt so insubstantial and precarious to her that she did not press the other for an explanation but silently turned away, a rejected lover hoping with silence to wound in turn.
Tonight something suddenly came up—a call on Sukie’s cell phone and a return call, both unexplained—that Sukie needed the BMW for, so she dropped Alexandra off at the Littlefields’ on its seedy stretch of Cocumscussoc Way, peremptorily telling her to apologize on her behalf and to have one of “them” drive her home to the condo. When, considerably embarrassed, Alexandra phoned her daughter to say that Sukie was at the last minute unable to accept the Littlefields’ hospitality, Marcy said firmly, “Good. Better. We’ll have you all to ourselves.”
The boys pried themselves up out of the well-worn, food-stained armchairs, gave their grandmother limp hugs, and let her try to kiss them. Roger turned his face in sharp aversion, but little Howard, the sunnier and younger of the two, held still for a peck on the cheek. Roger had conspicuously grown, along his father’s stringy lines, and seemed to have a shadow on his upper lip, a faint dark echo of the excessive brown hair drooping from his scalp and covering his ears. “How old are you now?” Alexandra asked him.
He looked at her with some surprise. “Thirteen,” he answered.
Marcy intervened. “He just had his first birthday as a teenager.”
Alexandra felt a cold stab of guilt. “Oh, dear—when? I fear I missed it.”
“You did,” Roger told her calmly. His eyes, a surprisingly dark brown, were nearly at the level of hers.
Marcy said, in a tender, forgiving tone, “The day before yesterday, Mother.”
“I’m appalled at myself. I quite forgot that anything at all wonderful happened in August.”
“That’s O.K., Grandma,” the boy gallantly allowed, confronted with the discomfiting sight of an adult in the wrong.
“Now, you mustn’t let me go,” Alexandra pleaded, taking up the feeble role, that of a coy penitent, left to her, “without whispering in my ear what you’d like for a present.” The boy’s expression didn’t show a spark, so she thought to add, “Perhaps you’d prefer, rather than think of a present, a little gift of cash. Though, really, little is what it would be.”
Her sense of what a dollar, or ten dollars, would buy, had frozen somewhere in the Sixties, while standards of expenditure had risen, and billionaires had replaced millionaires as epitomes of good fortune. “You think about it,” she concluded, a bit sharply, and turned to the younger grandson. Howard Junior was fairer and more finely tuned than his brother, and at nine years old his round face, with its gappy front teeth, showed a properly cheerful avidity. Alexandra tried to remember back to when she had the energy to want something wholeheartedly. She had wanted white figure skates like Sonja Henie’s when she was six, and when she was twelve she had wanted to get her ears pierced and fitted with rhinestone studs in the jewelry department of the Denver Dry Goods Company, and when she was seventeen she had wanted a bronze-colored taffeta strapless dress to wear to the junior prom and her father’s permission (her mother was dead by then) to stay out until two with her date, the school’s rangy second-string quarterback. Decades later her desires had settled on the magic word “out”—she had desperately wanted out of her marriage to Oz, dear obliging, well-intentioned Oz, though what her reasons were had become a fading puzzle, a revulsion less against this particular average man, perhaps, than against the deadly limits of a woman’s life.
“How did you like camp?” she asked the smaller boy.
The older one answered for him: “It was O.K.,” he said, dragging the syllables to imply that it hadn’t been. A sullen puzzled shadow passed across his face as if cast by his floppy overabundance of dark-brown hair.
“It was great,” Howard Junior piped up; the gaps between his teeth seemed a kind of reverse sparkle in his sunny face. “A boy in my tent broke his arm falling off the monkey swing!”
“Tell Granny what all you learned at camp,” Marcy prompted.
“How to feather your paddle when you canoe,” the smaller boy brightly supplied.
“To braid gimp,” his brother said. “It was stupid. The counsellors were stupid. They were these teen-agers who just wanted to make out with each other in the woods.”
“And now you’re a teen-ager yourself,” Alexandra reminded him—a reminder that was not, on second thought, very helpful or grandmotherly. Alas, it was her métier to make mischief, even with her humorless daughter tensely listening.
But Marcy was not in her most disapproving mood, and her husband’s returning from a day’s work lightened the atmosphere within the split-level ranch house, with its awkward mix of shabbiness and newness, soiled white carpet and oversize hi-def television. There’s something about a man. Howard was the same lanky, loose-jointed type as Jim Far-lander, confident with his hands; Alexandra and her daughter had a kindred taste in mates. In his clean gray workshirt and trousers, he brought to the household its center of gravity. He ruffled Howard Junior’s summer-blond hair as the boy embraced his father’s legs, and held up a flat palm for his older son to high-five; he startled Marcy with a kiss warmer, Alexandra saw, than she had expected, and even flirted with his mother-in-law, having touched her cheek with his and squeezed her waist at the same time. “You look great, Grandma,” he told her, having scarcely looked.
“Don’t lie to me,” Alexandra said. “When I showed up at the door, your wife looked horrified. I’m old, Howard.” Time treats men so gently, she thought; he could have belonged to either of them, mother or daughter.
“How’s those electric shocks coming?”
“I still get them, but they may be my imagination. They aren’t the worst thing in my life.”
“Oh? What is?”
He paused in his circuit of the domestic bases, having glanced toward the jocular evening-news team on the big flat plasma screen, and stooped to scratch the head of the family familiar, an overweight golden retriever thumping its heavy tail against a chair leg. “The worst thing,” he prompted. He had an unusually wide and flexible mouth for a man, and a prominent nose that looked tweaked sideways, as in a drawing slightly out of perspective. When he smiled in anticipation of her answer, his ragged teeth encouraged exposure of her own imperfections.
“It’s hard to put words to,” she told him and his listening family. “A feeling of discouragement. A sense,” she clarified, “that the cells of my body are getting impatient with me. They’re bored with housing my spirit.”
“Mother!” Marcy cried, in what seemed genuine alarm. “Do you have any pain? Have you seen a local doctor?”
“Jane saw Doc Pat a few weeks ago, and I think it helped kill her. She was the one getting shocked when I asked for your opinion; now I’m the one.”
Marcy, more alert than usual, asked, “What about Mrs. Rougemont, whatever her name is now? How’s her health?”
“Mitchell. Fair. She hasn’t reached my stage of aging yet. She’s younger, by six years. And always was more proactive. You know me, darling—I’ve always been afraid of”—she couldn’t bring herself to name the disease—“Nature. The way it kills you when things inside get just a little bit off. Don’t mind me—I’m an old lady. I should be getting used to dying, it’s very immature not to. But, please, let’s not discuss this any more in front of the boys. Right, boys?”
Roger smiled, with a lopsided tug of his lips like his father’s smile, but the effect was not reassuring. “It’s like the song says, Grandma,” he said. “Life sucks, and then you die. Kurt Cobain wasn’t afraid to die. He wanted to do it. It’s no big deal, the way they do it now. These bombers in Iraq, they commit suicide all the time.” Like the talking head on the too-wide, too-vivid screen, he was just giving the news.
“Hush, baby,” Marcy said.
“Yes,” Alexandra agreed. “I’ve sometimes wondered if there aren’t so many people in the world now—I can’t tell you how many billions, it used to be two when I was a girl—so many peopl
e now that young people, more sensitive and less selfish than I can ever be, haven’t taken up a kind of global death-wish. Not just school shootings and these Islamic martyrs, it’s the drug overdoses and car fatalities in the papers every day, teen-agers driving themselves at ninety miles an hour into trees, and then their friends and neighbors telling the television camera what beautiful cheerful perfectly normal girls and boys they were.”
“Mother, please. Don’t encourage him. Even as one of your jokes.”
“Who’s joking? Forgive me, dear. I know how you feel; I didn’t want to see my parents die, either. You don’t even have to like them. Their death makes your own life mean less. They’ve stopped watching.”
Little Howard Junior, following the conversation above his head with round blue eyes, blurted, “We all like you, Grandma.”
“Thank you, Howard. And I like you.”
The older Howard said, paternally levelling with her, “There’s other doctors in town than Doc Pat, Alexandra. He keeps his shingle out just to feed patients up to his son in Providence. A bright young doc from Sloan-Kettering in New York City has opened up two doors down from me on Dock Street, beyond the P.O. He’s young—up on all the latest bells and whistles. But he told me he doesn’t want to spend his whole life scraping by in the Big Apple, paying triple taxes and those tremendous rents. Small-town life—the green space, nobody locking their doors at night—suits him just fine. A fine little family, too. Two girls, cute as buttons. He wants to keep them in the public schools until the ninth grade and the hormones kick in. He’d be somebody for you to see. I could put in a word and get you an appointment before Labor Day.”
Marcy intervened: “Howie, I think Mother needs less Eastwick, not more. She and her friends thought returning here would make them younger, but of course it hasn’t. Is that unfair to say, Mother? You’re disappointed. The magic you thought would happen hasn’t. Am I being too psychological?”
That pink wart on the side of her nose, Alexandra thought. Why doesn’t she have it removed? Warts become cancerous. A month ago, she would have been dismissive of her daughter’s attempt at analysis, but today she felt worn down and only said, submissively, “No, it’s not unfair to say. I’m not sure it’s true. I don’t know exactly why we came. Perhaps it was to face what we did here. To make it right, or less wrong, before we—”
“Die!” little Howard piped up, showing his gappy teeth in a gleeful grin. He must be a joy to his teachers.
“Howard!” Marcy scolded. She called her child Howard and her husband Howie.
But in the child’s saying the unsayable Alexandra saw that right here, in front of her, was one answer to death—her genes living on. The tussle of family life, the clumsy accommodations and forgivingness of it, the comedy of membership in a club that has to take you in at the moment of birth. As they shuffled to seat themselves around the table, moving into the warmth of the meal that Marcy—dear, lumpy, modest Marcy—had prepared, Alexandra pictured levels and layers of inheritance and affinity invisibly ramifying, cards dealt out to absent and dead and yet-to-be-born players. Everybody gets a hand. They seated themselves, husband Howard and mother Marcy at opposite ends of the dining table and the grandmother facing the boys from the sides like a third child, with a child’s potential for misbehavior. The chair beside hers had been left there, though the place setting for Sukie had been taken away.
The table, a rather heavy-footed old mahogany, seemed faintly but profoundly familiar. Had it come from the Denver household, as part of Alexandra’s inheritance, and been left with Marcy when her mother abandoned Eastwick for the West? Alexandra couldn’t quite tell, with an embroidered tablecloth covering it, and a healthy, calorie-light meal being served upon it: chicken with bow-tie pasta in a thin sour-cream sauce, broccoli with raisins and diced carrots, and a tomato-rich salad from their own garden. She thought of her other children—Linda a willowy imitation Southern belle in Atlanta, Ben bullish and Republican in Montclair, and Eric, her baby, a graying hippie making do in Seattle at a murky intersection of music and electronics, managing a store called Good Vibes. Eric had repaid his being her favorite by becoming most like her, cultivating a slight talent within a bohemian enclave located where America thinned out into Never-Never land. He had pacified his brain with drugs while she had been wantonly seeking self-fulfillment in witchcraft. Nature, behind her back, in spite of her, had been bringing to ripeness her true self-fulfillment, her offspring and their offspring, those who amid the globe’s billions owed her their being, as she owed them her genetic perpetuation. Families were stupid, but less stupid and selfish than individuals. Still, in the midst of her kin, she missed the friend, the peer in wickedness and unconventionality, who was to have been seated beside her.
. . .
“Do you like this?”
“I do,” he said, his sometimes boyish voice under some tension.
“Can you tell it’s a woman and not another man doing it?”
“Not really. Sort of.”
“Is it a bad difference?”
She couldn’t tell from his silence if he was concentrating on what to answer or letting his mind drift somewhere else. She hoped not the latter, though in fact it is a familiar female problem, your attention wandering just as the other person is getting interested. What you think about gets so interesting it drops your body and its sensations away. She was having no such problem now; her attention was fully engaged by the intellectual, psychological-somatic problem before her, there in the motel darkness dimly lit by the moon, which had been new and now was swelling toward full again. Outside, in the salt air, they had noticed the moon before opening the door to their numbered room there in the decaying motel beyond the shuttered-up pizza shack, its tipped oval face hanging sad and stark above the pillar of its reflection in the still Bay, beyond the crescent of pallor where East Beach, two miles from the broad public section in the view from the Lenox mansion, became pebbly and narrow. Earlier in this tryst, before it became so interesting to her, she had knelt on the bed and tugged back the rough curtain, as coarse as burlap, and peeked. Shadows of young people could be made out against the moonlit stripes of the shallow breakers cresting. Young, heedless voices could be heard, rising above the rhythmic whisper of crests collapsing, when the curtain closed. Its weave was coarse enough to let through pinpricks of the radiant air outside, from which they were as sealed off as if underground. She had begun by kissing, even sucking, his beautiful, purely ornamental male nipples, with their tickly haloes of hair. The sensations had made him laugh, but they were not funny to her.
“No,” he said, after thought. “Not bad. Nice. Your perfume reminds me of my mother’s.” Her head had slipped to the base of his torso; a sweet fragrance had floated across his chest to his nose. “Maybe it’s just your shampoo. She didn’t use perfume, at least by the time I knew her. It wasn’t natural, she thought it wasted the environment.”
“Don’t think about your mother. It distracts you.”
“You can tell.”
“Oh, yes. It tells me.”
“Do you want me to come?”
“I wouldn’t mind. But I don’t want to waste it. If you do, can you come again?”
“How soon? How long do we have?”
“We both should get back, eventually.”
“Does she—?”
“Care? Yes. She loves me. Not like this, but loves me. And I her.”
“Did you ever—?”
“Touch? Yes. We may have brought each other off once in a while.”
“You don’t remember?”
“We were high. And sleepy from the hot tub. It was like we were all mixed up with each other.”
“I should have come out and joined you.”
“You were too young. It would have made it entirely different.”
Both realized they were drifting away, and they concentrated for a minute. “Can you—?”
“What? Ask me.”
“Get down a little farther?”
“My God! I’ll gag.”
“Get down as far as the freckle.”
“What freckle?”
“I thought you were nearsighted. That freckle.” His indicating finger seemed the nose of a fish, nudging a stalk of coral.
“How did you get a freckle there?”
“Sunbathing. On Long Island.”
“And the guys you were with could do the freckle without gagging?”
He was silent, offended at her invasion of his privacy. She watched to see if he would wilt and begin to tilt. He did not. She flicked with her tongue, enjoying the perversity, competing with all those guys from the beaches of youth.
He read her mind, there in the filtered moonlight. “Is that how you think of your own lovers, as a mob of ‘guys’? There weren’t that many. There’s a jealousy factor, and you had to be careful, once AIDS was out in the open. I’m HIV negative, you should know. I got the rep of being chicken. But Darryl set the example. He was very careful, that way.”
“I know. With us, too. He didn’t like losing control.”
“And you do.”
“I’m not afraid of it. It’s like dreaming. You can come out the other side, still being you. Hey. You’re ready. Yummy. Let me drink at the fountain of youth.” She tightened all over, knees and feet together, going into a purposeful crouch there on the dank bed.
