Updike John - Of the Farm

INSIDE THE HOUSE it smelled of Peggy’s wet hair. My mother had laid and lit a fire of cherry logs in the fireplace and here my wife, out of her bikini and in a slip whose bosom and hem were lace, sat crosslegged, a blue towel across her shoulders, drying her hair. The fire seemed to saturate dangerously the veil of her hair; her head was thrown forward and her own fingers blindly massaged her scalp. The logs crackled, settling. Richard was reading a book; one leg was slung over the arm of the wing chair and swung like a pendulum. The rain breathed on the sides of the house, swept with an imperious gesture across the panes facing the barn, and lived sparkling amid the green and shuffling surfaces of the grape arbor outside the southern, meadow-facing windows. My mother in the kitchen was setting out plates. “Would they mind eating early?” she asked me softly as I went toward the stairwell.

“Ask them ,” I said. I felt that my mother in the garden had put Peggy in the wrong, had succeeded in illuminating her weaker side, and this triumph had shortened my patience with her. I would not have her feigning a conspiracy against these two strangers. Her games had cloyed.

Yet in the stairwell, hearing my mother’s voice ask a question and Peggy’s cheerfully answer, both with words I could not quite make out, I felt excluded and chilled. Upstairs I took off my wet clothes and walked naked through a glade of ghosts. The spot on the floor where my grandmother, trying to rise from her bed, had fallen and died shrouded its history in an inscrutable appearance of worn wood. The window still gave on the lawn, the barn, and the road as if my grandfather’s eyes still watched for the mailman—the “snailman,” he called him. A pine chest still hoarded his defunct stocks and his diaries, slim red booklets in which, year after year, he inscribed laconic notations of the weather and almost nothing else. On the day of my mother’s birth, a day that almost killed his wife, he had only written, Baby born. As I draped them on the bathroom door to dry, my father’s dungarees dripped icy water on my contracted loins. Joan still stared upward, a star of moisture frozen on her lower lip, the germ of a baby held forever in her belly. I did not use a towel; I love evaporation, not only the sensation but the idea of it, of moisture leaping freely into immateriality, of a topography in the elements whereby water slides downhill into air. Moving in air, I feel even dust, which makes me sneeze, as the sofa’s angel, and pollen as immanent flowers. Dry, smooth, huge, immersed in the wide unfocused eyes of my childish self gazing from the wall, I put on underclothes, creased slacks slithery to the touch, socks Peggy had neatly balled in pairs, loafers, and a clean white shirt that seemed the wrappings of the rectangle of gray cardboard stiffening it.

Downstairs, my mother greeted my costume with, “There’s my city slicker!”

At the supermarket she had bought a cellophane bag of peas she was now shelling. Each podful bounced musically in the colander. I sat down on the other side of the table and helped her shell. It was a peace gesture. Her shoulders were hunched over her task and she seemed for a time not to notice me. I finished the first heap I had taken and stood to reach into the bag for another. “Tell me,” she said then, “how are they doing?”

“How is who doing?”

“Why, your children. Have you forgotten them so quickly? Ann and Charlie and Martha.”

The little spheres, waxy green, pressed by their own fat fullness toward the shape of cubes in the pod, let go serially under my thumb and tumbled as a crowd into my palm. I made the colander chime and tried to answer. “All right,” I said. “They always liked it in Canada and seemed pleased to be going there.”

“Even without you.”

“Well, I couldn’t very well go with them. I was about to get married.”

“Don’t raise your voice like that. I have many afflictions, but I have not gone deaf.”

“Good.”

“I find myself,” she went on, “remembering Charlie more clearly than the girls. He was such a vivid little man.”

“Was?”

“Was for me. I don’t expect ever to see him again.”

“Sure you will.”

“I thought he was going to be a farmer. He had just the right build, you know, those little wiry limbs and a barrel chest.”

“He’s surprisingly strong for being undersized.”

“Oh, I know. To pick him up—almost the first time you brought him here, he was sitting daydreaming in Grampy’s chair and I thought, ‘Why, here’s a cuddly little bundle,’ and when I picked him up, he was a solid knot of muscles, hard as nails, and not pleased !”

I laughed. “Was this before or after you hit him with the yardstick?”

“He hit me, you mean. I think before, it may have been the same visit; but I doubt it. He gave me a very cold eye, I remember that. ‘What do you mean, you big old lady, intruding on my repose?’”

“Funny the way he would daydream. One of Joan’s aunts thought he was feeble-minded because he could sit still for so long.”

“Why, he sat still because he had something worth thinking about. I never saw a little fella who was so deep.” The word “fella” seemed to issue straight from my grandfather’s mouth.

“Not even me?”

My mother considered. “No, you weren’t meditative. You were sens itive. The first clear day in August you’d start sneezing and wouldn’t stop until frost. Your eyes would run till they were pasted shut, it used to break my heart. Charlie had more of Joan’s temperament—that frightening inwardness, that Puritan strength.”

“She was strong. Always passively, though; she never initiated action.”

My mother, sensing the presence of a complaint, curtly moved her hand, refusing to follow where I would have led. I was guilty of a hunger to become the center of this discourse. “Now Charlie,” she said, “I could just imagine him, with that wonderful capacity for repose, waiting for the crops to ripen, and then rushing out with his hard little muscles and round chest to gather them in. He had what my mother called bustle. If you don’t have it, like my dad didn’t, you should get off a farm. Which is what he did, sensibly enough. I don’t know why I could never forgive him for it.”

“I’m scared for Charlie,” I said. “He seemed to take it harder than the girls.”

“They took it just as hard,” my mother said, “but were better at concealing it from you. That’s an idea you have, that women like to suffer. I don’t know where you got it, not from me; they don’t. But they get less sympathy than men because they have babies, and whenever a woman screams there’s the thought, even in her own mind, that she’s going to have a baby, so it’s all right. Why a baby should make it all right I have no idea.”

“Of the three,” I said, “Ann in a way seemed most like me.” Her face, Ann’s face, its unpretty width and beautiful candor, her long straight legs and the way her mouth flared open in joy when she ran, recurred to me across what seemed a long anesthetic blankness, though I had never forgotten her name or her birthday or her existence. Charlie suddenly looked up at me. Was he eating an ice-cream cone? There was something silvery in the fineness of his straight brown boy’s hair. Ann called him the Muskrat. His gray eyes were watchful, crinkled wisely at the corners almost like a man’s, and his curved lips seemed ready to yield to a joke, though from his expression I was scolding him, or had puzzled him, by affirming something incredible; he was always ready, my son, to believe the best, to treat all grief—cut knees, his sister’s teasing, my absences—as momentary nicks in a smooth extent of order. He was a tidy boy; much more than Ann did he fold and consider his clothes. And Martha, my baby: I not so much saw her as felt her loose weight when I would lift her, steeped in sleep, from her new blue bed, her tangled nightie, its cotton smooth as silk from contact with her flesh, swirling around her waist and exposing her genitals, paler than the moon with their dim cleft. I would lift her and carry her, her flushed head lolling, to the toilet and set her above the oval water and wait, sitting myself on the edge of the tub and letting her rest her head on my knee, for the hiss and modest splash. “Poor Martha,” I said.