Updike John - Of the Farm

Richard and my mother dawdled, and the checkout lines were long, and when the bags were in the car I said that Peggy this evening might like a gin-and-tonic. The liquor store, state-owned, was on the other side of the parking lot. The tar in softening had tugged the painted lines this way and that. Richard and my mother went into a Sun Ray drugstore to buy him sunglasses. Our absence lengthened maddeningly. By the time we got home we would have been gone over an hour. Speeding back on the broad white road whose magic already seemed obsolete, I remembered my wife in poses of suffering. I recalled that long period, which I preferred to forget, when for two years my indecision had subjected her to a series of disappointments and humiliations. I saw her again on the pale Sunday morning in early March when, after the exhausting Saturday night of my confession to Joan, I met Peggy in the Park. Richard wobbled up and down the path on the Christmas bicycle that in thrift she had bought too big. I told her I had promised Joan to wait half a year before any decision, six months in which, if the bargain was to have any meaning, we must not meet. Peggy had nodded, nodded, kept nodding in agreement as if it could not be otherwise and she were commending my judgment, my mercy toward Joan, my self-denial, so that I was stunned when she hurled her face against my shoulder and shouted into the cloth of my overcoat Go, just go, Joey and her storm of tears on the side of my neck had the heat of an assault and I realized that she had not been applauding my victory over my love for her but was herself that love, knew herself now in my love for her and saw herself abolished, saw us not meeting forever in a dwindling eternal width, which I then realized that I had not (the gray path, the few churchgoers black against the slush, the trees beginning to blur with buds, the Caribbean nursemaids in transparent galoshes) envisioned. And I remembered her naked, propping herself up in bed so her shoulders and slender neck were silhouetted against the loose hair translucent to the city glow from the window whose upper panes were blue, and her voice, suddenly thin, blurting, Will you forget me? And was it the following morning when I awoke, supposedly in Atlanta, and found it snowing in New York? At the height of her windows across the street each seed-ball clinging to the leafless sycamores wore a crescent of white. While dressing (in synchronization with my faithful double in Atlanta, who would be hurrying to catch a 9:40 plane), I put on the phonograph a record I had given her last night but that the emergency of love had not permitted us to play. It was Bach sung by a scat chorus: Vo de oh oo oo, la la lalala. As the bell-like voices poured hastening through the baroque score the wet snow hurried slantwise by the wind seemed to keep the same delicate pell-mell tempo, and Peggy made contraceptive ablutions in the bathroom, and I was transfixed, in trousers and a clean white shirt given a curious airy dampness by its supposed presence in a southern city; standing barefoot in the center of the soft Bolivian rug where we had lain, enraptured by the city beyond the windowsill where Peggy had scattered seed for sparrows, I felt my heart pinned at the point where the snow and Bach and her bathing intersected. I have never been so conscious of happiness, and so aware of the weakness of that condition, which partakes of delirium. When I left, in my business suit (my monogamous double was winging north), she abruptly begged, Don’t come again. I’m getting worse at saying goodbye. I’m sorry, I’m no good at this, I wanted to be a nice simple mistress for you but I’m not big enough. I’m too possessive. Go, go back and be nice to Joan. I’ve messed us all up by falling in love. And when I first—prematurely—offered to leave Joan for her, she cried, Oh no! Your children! I could never make it up to you! Images recurred to me refracted, as if I had viewed her through thick glass. Meeting Joan at parties, her face had been brittle with fright and then defiance, and parting from me it had pinkly crumbled into weeping, and reuniting with me it had been pale with fatigue, and repeatedly she had taken me into her bed and her body as she might have taken an unavoidable sword; and I wondered, remembering, why I had made her suffer so much or, rather, by what right I had improvised our expiation. I pictured her helpless now, alone and raped, when her quota of grief had been fulfilled; I knew that the God who creates ironically would not scruple to impose this. My mother screamed. In a dream of rescue I had been driving too fast. My mother was skittish in cars; it was grotesque, how much she loved her life.

The broad white road, with one of those sweeping cloverleafs that seem histrionic, surrendered up the old black highway, and I turned onto the gray whirring surface of the township road, and then down our dirt road, and saw Peggy, and laughed, for she was on the garden ridge hoeing in her bikini.

The determination of her stance, the inexpert vigor of her blows at the ground, accented the width of her hips, which tapered to ankles that seemed to vanish in the earth. We stopped the car beneath the pear tree whose surviving limbs disproportionately put forth the full tree’s burden of fruit. We got out of the car. The top of my head felt taut and ached. “What’s so funny?” Peggy asked.

“You look lovely, Peggy,” my mother said. “Don’t let these men kid you. They want women to do their work for them and when you do it they laugh at you.”

Richard had laughed loudest. “Mother, I don’t think your costume is quite appropriate,” he said.

My mother said, “Just be careful not to hoe up the beans, they have shallow roots.”

“I tried to make my section look like yours,” Peggy said, and with a dirty hand brushed back hair from her face. The sight of her bare feet, the toenails painted, flat on the earth and caked to the ankles like the feet of a child or a gypsy moved me; desire must have emanated from me as an odor or a wave of heat, for she cringed, embarrassed, and I realized I had exposed her, intensified the vulnerability of her costume.

“The top of my head hurts,” I said, to distract my mother. “Are there any old hats of Daddy’s I could wear?”

“You’re getting sunstroke,” she told me. “Don’t mow any more.”

“It has to be done.”

“It should, but enough is enough. Don’t punish me with it. You’ll knock yourself out and then your wife will blame me.”

“Mother, the sun has gone in. It’s four o’clock.”

“Peggy, do you think he should keep at it? His father would be stubborn about a job like this and then vomit all night. As if that was a treat for everybody.”

“It can’t be put off,” I said. “Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“What’s happening Sunday?” Peggy asked, slapping at the gnats that scented blood between her thighs.

“My mother won’t let anybody work on Sundays,” I said.

“That’s right,” she said, “—poke fun of an old woman’s superstitions.”

Peggy asked her, “Do you really mind people working on Sunday?”

Now it was my mother I felt I had exposed. She said, “Around here it’s considered a rather ‘shidepoke’ thing to do. But I suppose an old fool’s weedy fields are like an ass in the ditch.”

“Like a what?” Richard asked.

“It’s in the Bible,” Peggy told him.

My mother said to me, “It’s up to you, Joey. I think you’ve mowed enough. Sammy can come over, or you can come back next weekend if you’re determined to finish.”

“But how silly ,” Peggy said, alarmed by the possibility of our returning so soon.

My mother turned on her. “Silly or not, when my boy looks like that it’s time for him to quit.”