Updike John - Of the Farm

“I like listening. I like it here.” He glanced at Peggy and turned, and the screen door slammed a second time, behind him.

Peggy, beginning to clear the dishes, asked me, “What shall I do?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what shall I do , do this afternoon. Do to get through this horrible visit.”

“Do what you want to do. Read a book. Take a sunbath.” A break in a coalition of cloud had released a flood of sunshine on the bits of greenery I could see through the back door pane—some orchard grass, some lawn grown tufty around two stepping-stones, an overhanging walnut-tree limb, a sallow hydrangea bush months past bloom.

“I don’t know,” she said, brushing back her hair from her face, “it all seems too complicated.”

I said, “Too complicated for what ? Just try a little tact.” I could not account for the anger in my voice.

Richard’s face appeared at the screen door, calling in, “Mother, I’m going to hoe with Mrs. Robinson. She’s going to teach me how to tell weeds. We’ll be in the garden above the orchard.”

“Don’t get sunstroke,” Peggy said.

My mother’s face appeared in the screen door above Richard’s. Behind the mesh her face was almost featureless, the head of a goddess recovered from the sea. “Don’t mind me, Peggy,” she called in. “You’re quite right about the concentration camp. That’s my Teutonic sense of order. Just stack the dishes, I’ll do them later.” Their footsteps scuffed off the porch.

As Peggy reached across me for a plate, I stroked her breast, pushed toward me by her stretching, and said, “Alone at last. Let’s fuck.”

“You smell like hay,” she said. “You’d make me sneeze.” I felt in her body a repellent tension and so left her to go mow among the clouds.

The idyll of mowing grew weary with the day, which moved slowly. When mid-afternoon seemed reached, I went down to the porch for a drink of water, and discovered, in the empty house, that the electric clock said only ten past two. The dishes were washed and put away. Behind the house, in the side yard, where the grass was always soft and easiest to mow, Peggy lay in her bikini on the Indian blanket, sleeping.

“Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“Are you happy?”

“So-so.”

“Where’s my mother and your son?”

“Aren’t they hoeing?”

“I didn’t see them in the patch.”

“They must be somewhere.”

“Haven’t you gone and talked to them all this time?”

“I just came out here a half-hour ago. I’ve been doing the dishes and cleaning. There are cobwebs in every corner. Does she ever sweep?”

“ Her mother used to be very energetic so I guess she never got into the habit.”

“Why are you always making excuses for her?”

“It’s not an excuse. It’s a rational explanation, as Richard would say.”

My wife, who had been lying on her front, her hair thrown upward off her back as if she were falling through space, rolled over, so her belly went incandescent in the sun, and she flung a downy forearm across her eyes. Her lips parted under the thrust of the sun on her skin. I said, “I love you.”

Her thighs were enough spread to reveal stray circlets of amber pubic hair. Her fair body, its nakedness barely broken by the knotted bits of polka-dot mauve, twitched like the body of a fretful child who has been touched. I did not dare touch her. She spoke without taking her forearm from her eyes. “Well you don’t make me feel it here. You’re so—how shall I say?— busy. I feel you’re emotionally fussing at us all the time and making everything worse.”

“I didn’t know things were bad.”

“Of course they’re bad, you expected them to be.”

“Richard seems to be having a good time.”

“She’s playing up to him as a way of getting at me somehow. Anyway, I need cigarettes and I’m getting the curse.”

“Do you have Tampax?”

“No, I need that too. I’m early and didn’t bring any.”

“Maybe my mother has some.”

“I don’t think she’s that much of a marvel, sweetie.”

I blushed, having forgotten that it was many years since my mother had filled the house with the secret rage of her menstruation. As a child in Olinger I was once rebuked for playing by the wastebasket with these white toy telescopes. Standing there foolish, in my father’s baggy pants, I nevertheless experienced a regal desire to give Peggy a baby and thus stanch her bleeding. I said, “I’ll tell her we have to organize a shopping expedition.”

“I thought we passed a little store about a mile before your lane.”

“That was Hartz’s. It’s run by some Mennonites and they don’t sell cigarettes. The nearest cigarettes are five miles toward Alton, at Potteiger’s in Galilee.”

“Galilee?”

“That’s its name. You’re in Bible country here.”

So it seemed: I looked up from her body toward the meadow and saw the intervening trees (a young locust, a black walnut, a blue spruce that had once been no taller than I) and the grass of the lawn drenched in a glistening stillness, an absolute visual silence like a full-measure rest in the flow of circumstance, each waxen leaf and silvered blade receiving the hazed August sunlight so precisely my heart beat double, as if split. Then my vision was gently eroded by awareness of the insect and bird song that form a constant undercurrent to country silence.

The sun went in. Peggy kept her arm across her eyes. The mailman’s car drove up the road, spinning a cloud of pink dust. I ran out to the mailbox and there was nothing in it, nothing except a junk circular for Boxholder and a windowed envelope to my mother from Dr. I. A. Graaf. My mother and Richard were coming down through the far end of the orchard; they had been in the upper end of the strip of woods between our land and the torn fields waiting for ranch houses. I cut through the lower orchard to hand her the mail and to discuss the need to shop.

“We just saw some fox droppings,” Richard announced. “They’re darker and thinner than the woodchuck’s.”

“The foxes are getting plentiful again,” my mother said. “They go in cycles with the pheasants, and we’re in a fox phase now. Five years ago the pheasants would come right to the back door.” She squinted toward the side of the house, where Peggy lay. “I hope Sammy Schoelkopf doesn’t have his binoculars out,” she said.

I said, “I told her to take a sunbath. She did all the dishes and dusted the living room.”

“Fine,” my mother said, laughing lightly and rocking backwards from my sharp tone, “fine. I’m all for Nature, the more of it the better.”

“We need cigarettes.”

“I thought you stopped smoking.”

“I have. Peggy needs them.”

“You should tell her, tobacco makes the teeth brown.”

“Mother doesn’t inhale,” Richard said. “My father laughs at the way she smokes.”

“When does he see her to laugh at?” I asked.

“When he comes for me and brings me back.”

“Peggy also needs,” I told my mother, “a female thing.”

“Oh?”

“So somebody ought to shop. How much do you still like to drive?”

“No more than I have to. Since June I’m afraid of a spell. I don’t mind myself going out with a bang, but it seems unkind to be a menace to the other cars.”

“O.K., I’ll drive. Do we need any food?”

“Probably. Let me look in the icebox and talk with Peggy.”

Her saying “icebox,” though it was a refrigerator, took me again back to Olinger, a child’s world where the simplest expeditions were exciting and Tampaxes were toys. I told her, “You organize an expedition. Everybody can come if they want. I’ll go mow until you’re ready.”