Updike John - Of the Farm

“His father,” Peggy said, “is an academic.”

“You mean a scholar?” My mother didn’t wait to be answered, continuing firmly, “Richard shows scholarly tastes. He reminds me of myself at his age, except that I read all the time because reality seemed too painful—that’s not how it is with you, is it, Richard?”

“Not painful so much as boring,” he said.

“Well I don’t wonder,” my mother said, “living in that airconditioned city where the seasons are all the same. Here on my farm every week is different, every day is a surprise. New faces in the fields, the birds say different things, and nothing repeats. Nature never repeats; this August evening has never been before and it will never be again.”

She was indulging herself in sadness, so I cut in with what was in some sense a joke. I asked her, “Do you think Richard should be a poet?”

She said, “No, I’ve thought that about one boy and I try not to repeat myself. The world is so different now. There are so few jobs that seem to do anything.”

“I could be a selenographer,” the boy said.

“What’s that?” my mother asked, moving her hands carefully around her food, too aware of the possibility that she was being ridiculed.

“A moon-geographer,” Richard explained. “They’re going to need people on the moon who can make maps.”

“You can specialize in the dark side,” I said.

“That’s where they’re going to put a great telescope,” he told us. “You know why?”

“Why?” Peggy asked, after a pause.

“Because on the side toward us there will be too much earthshine. Earthshine,” he told my mother, “is like moonshine only the other way around. It’s blue.”

She did not respond, and I knew, knew on my prickling skin, that she had clouded, having felt, in our digression away from her earth, a personal affront.

I asked, “Isn’t that side too cold?”

Richard said, “Not if you dig down below the surface. Fifty feet down or so the moon is a uniform temperature, about ten degrees centigrade.”

My mother was actually taking his interest in the moon as a personal desertion. She hunched motionless above her plate, the wings of her nostrils white, her breathing frozen.

Peggy felt the strangeness and said, to be polite, “Do you think Richard should be a farmer?”

My mother lifted her large head. Her forehead was mottled. “I think it would take more imagination, Peggy, than you’ll permit him to have.”

Shocked, I interceded, “Why, I think she lets him have lots of imagination. He’s America’s youngest m-moon-mapper.” In my haste my tongue had jammed and I stuttered.

Peggy’s hands pressed back her hair tight against her small skull. “I can’t imagine what you mean.” Her voice was fluting and thrilling and phony—a model’s voice. Off and on since her divorce, she had modelled for fashion showings, but never for photographs; her figure was too wide, and her bony fighter’s face showed up on film as asymmetric.

“I’m sorry, Peggy, you’re trying hard but so are we all. You should not be jealous of me and this boy.”

“Jealous? You’re fantastic.”

My mother turned to me, as if to her historian, and said, “She takes my grandchildren from me, she turns my son into a gray-haired namby-pamby, and now she won’t let me show this poor worried child a little affection, which he badly needs.”

“He receives lots of affection,” Peggy said.

“Oh, I’m sure you do what the doctor tells you. I mean something less mechanical.”

“I’ve kept him sound for five years without a father.”

“Well, why did he lack a father in the first place?”

“I could explain it to you, but you wouldn’t listen.”

My mother shrugged. “You’d be surprised, the things I’ve listened to.” She was calm, I realized, unclouded; her outburst had cleared her.

I became afraid for Peggy, afraid she would misjudge, trip and fall. Her speed, the speed of her youth, was her safety; this quarrel still had a surface, upon which she must skim. “As to Joey and me,” she said, “I’m the first woman he’s ever met who was willing to let him be a man.” This was her secret song, the justification with which she had led me into divorce.

“Maybe,” my mother said, “we mean different things by the word ‘man.’”

“I’m sure we do, if what you did to your husband is an example of what you mean.”

My mother turned to me and said, “Poor Joan had ideas as to how I should do my wash, but at least she never offered to revise my marriage for me.”

“You ask for it, Mother,” I told her, angry because Peggy had suddenly lost momentum and sunk. Her eyes sank into tears and her face sank into her hands; her fingers blindly clasped her temples and her hair fell forward as if before the fire.

Again she was displayed; again, as last night, my mother’s gaze touched her and returned to me offended. “What do I ask for?”

“You ask for advice, for pity. You carry yourself as if you’ve made a terrible mistake. You pretend you emasculated Daddy and when some innocent soul offers to agree with you you’re hurt.”

Richard asked, “What’s emasculated?” He had taken upon himself my dinner-table chore of jesting, of using his voice in the hope of breaking a grim rhythm.

“It’s what mules are,” I told him.

My mother laughed. “He was mulish,” she said, and her sodden bent frame lightened, as if this animal analogy had solved one of the last remaining riddles of her life.

Peggy lifted her face, soft and shy in its blurred veil of tears. “How can you laugh?”

My mother said, “How can you cry? All I was asking you was why your son couldn’t touch my tractor.”

“Mother, he did touch it.”

“There are four forward gears,” he said, “and one pedal engages the clutch, and the other engages the shaft that makes the cutter blade whirl around.”

“Peggy,” my mother said, “I can see we’ll have to have a talk about our husbands. But later. I’m afraid we’ll ruin Richard’s appetite.”

“Is there any more,” he asked, “of that molasses pie?”

“Shoo-fly,” I said.

“You didn’t like it last night,” my mother told him.

Peggy sniffled, and said, “I thought it was butterfly pie,” and insniffed prolongedly, a pleased comedienne, as we all laughed, loving her. Or so I imagined: I have always had difficulty believing that anyone could look at Peggy and not love her, which has made my calculations concerning her inexact. It is possible that I could have retained her, as mistress, as long as her beauty lasted, while remaining married to Joan. But I was prey to jealous fantasies and felt the world to be full of resolute men who, if they once glimpsed her long legs groping with half-bared thighs from a taxicab, would carry her off forever.

The air of the house had taken a wound. Though the rain beat sweetly around us, urging us to unite at the fire that had dwindled to the purity of its embers, there were distances that did not close, an atmospheric soreness that pressed on my ears with a fine high ringing. The lurching of the tractor had settled into my muscles so that my bones seemed encrusted with stale motion and gave me, as I sat reading an old Wodehouse novel that was lifeless, an illusion of swaying.

“Joey, the fire is hungry. Could you possibly run down into the cellar?”

These were the first words my mother had spoken since dinner. She did the dishes while Peggy and Richard played Parcheesi on the living-room rug. They had found an old warped board in a cupboard, and an imperfect set of counters they pieced out with buttons and pennies. While reading, I wanted to hush the rattle of the dice and the click of the counters and their excited yips and groans; my mother’s sullen clattering in the kitchen seemed a monologue I must listen to instead. It was a relief to hear her speak.