Updike John - Of the Farm

“I’ll be careful with it.”

“What plant in particular interests you?”

“Oh, none in particular. I thought I could begin in the beginning and read through. I’m a fast reader. Then I’ll know them all.”

My mother smiled. “I’m not sure that will work,” she said. “You don’t know the plants until you see them really, and most of them in the book you’ll never see at all, unless you become a botanist. Or a hobo.”

“Along the lake where I went camping once there were oodles of a bright purple thing.”

“I don’t know what that was,” my mother said. “I’ve never lived near the water. The purplest thing around here is joepye weed. We can look him up and see if he has any relatives. Come to think of it, the book had a color index.”

They went into the living room. I went upstairs to Peggy. The bedrooms were empty. I called, and she rapped within the bathroom. When she came out, she was annoyed at having been disturbed. In one hand she held a small object wrapped around with toilet paper through which blood was seeping. “What do I do with this?” she asked, and frowned. Her sunburned eye sockets and cheekbones looked rouged, like those of an oriental actress.

“I’ll take it,” I said, extending my hand, “and treasure it religiously.”

“No.” She was not amused and refused to look directly at me; her eyes examined the corners of the room. “There’s no wastebasket anywhere.”

“There’s one downstairs.”

“Your mother will see it.”

“And use it for voodoo. God, I’m sorry.”

“For what now?”

“For that scene.”

“It wasn’t so bad. I thought both she and I were trying to keep from laughing.”

I laughed. “I don’t know what goes on in her mind.”

“It’s very clear. She wants a man to be on this farm and thinks she’s lost you.”

“But she never had me. I never liked the farm.”

“Oh, I think you do like it. You like it the same way you like me. It’s something big you can show off.”

I was touched by this humble conception of herself, so disillusioned and so nearly true. “It’s your fault,” I said, “for being worth showing off.” She crossed to our bureau and put the used Tampax in her pocketbook. “You’re angry,” I said.

“Please get out of my way. I’m going downstairs.”

“Don’t smash anything.”

“I’m going to do just what you told me. I’m going to be myself.”

“Wait. Peggy. Thanks for not leaving.”

“I wouldn’t possibly leave you here.”

“I would have gone with you.”

“I wouldn’t do that to your mother. Why don’t you try to think of what it’s like for her in her position instead of taking every move she makes as a threat?”

“The threat is to you.”

At last she looked directly at me; one hand smoothed back her hair. “Why are you hostile?” She answered herself. “You wanted me to go.”

“God, no; don’t leave me, woman!” My plaint was comic.

Peggy smiled and said, “The cute thing about you, Joey, is you’re really sort of a bastard.” She passed me dismissingly as the overhead light at the head of the stairs struck her skin. Of her skin: my wife’s skin blanches when she is angry, grows very smooth in making love, and takes a tan briefly, as if the atoms composing it dance with especial rapidity. Her forearms are freckled and downy in a way that coltishly prolongs their length; her heels are yellow and tough from the bite of fashionable shoes; her belly is so white the bluish stretch-marks seem to vein marble. Where her skin redly shows wear and age I yearn to lean and lift with kisses the burden of use endured, I somehow imagine, since her birth for my sake. There is a tone that is for me the tone of life and it lies on her skin, or closely under it, as a diffused light. As she passed beneath the overhead light a parabolic shadow leaped down from her brows and her profile told sharply against the white-washed plaster of the outer stair wall. I followed her down.

My mother and Richard were on the sofa beside the dogs, bent above a weather-beaten little book with wavy pages. “Bindweed,” my mother was saying, “more commonly around here called morning glory. A field full of morning glories makes farmers very sad. It shows tired soil.”

“It says here convo—convolulus.”

“The Latin names are wonderful.” She turned the page and read, “Phlox pilosa. Phlox divaricata. Phlox subulata. Some people call phlox pinks.”

“I’ve often wondered why flowers are never green. Except around Saint Patrick’s Day when they have these green carnations.”

“They wouldn’t be noticed. The bees couldn’t see them in the leaves. The whole point of flowers is to attract the bees. Flowers are bright for the same reason your mother wears such pretty clothes.” Only by this remark did she acknowledge that we had come into the room. I returned to the Wodehouse and Peggy picked up the Parcheesi pieces. The fire was comfortably low. The rain had settled into a drumming steadiness. The two bigger dogs begged to go out. My mother and Richard took them with a pan of dogfood to the pen and when they came in with wet shoulders from the dark Peggy told the boy it was time for him to go to bed. She asked me to take him up, though I had reached a section of the novel, involving the theft of a prize pig, that seemed genuinely funny. But I obeyed.

Once Richard had been shy about my seeing him undressed. Now he thoughtlessly removed under my eyes his T-shirt saying YALE, the tattered sneakers he wore without socks, the khaki shorts Peggy had thriftily cut from worn-out suntans, his elastic underpants. His taut buttocks had a pearly pallor; his thin-edged shoulders were nut-brown. Naked, he seemed a faun, incongruous in this low-ceilinged room of rigidly repeated flowers. He showed me, on his legs and belly, where he had been scratched when Grammy showed him where the blackberries were.

“Grammy?”

“Your mother. That’s what she told me to call her.”

“Good idea. Your pajamas are under the pillow.”

“I should have brought up the flower book to read.”

“Brush your teeth first.”

“Oh, I couldn’t forget to do that , that would be sacrilegious. Mother would have a fit.”

“You’ll be grateful. I’ve had terrible teeth, and it’s been a big nuisance.”

“Didn’t you brush them?”

“When I thought of it. The real problem was, I ate too much shoo-fly pie.” I had turned away, to look again at the photograph of Joan. She seemed engaged in some vigil, her eyes uplifted, her arm glowing; and it seemed unlikely that her hope, whatever it was, would be rewarded here in this old lonely farmhouse.

“Hey.” Richard still had no name for me.

“Yes, my lad?” I was conscious of courting him.

“Why did your mother smash those plates?”

“I guess she thought they had outlived their usefulness, I don’t know.”

“No, really. Was she mad at my mother for wearing her bathing suit?”

He was eleven. I tried to remember how much I knew at eleven. At about that age I came home from a birthday party where we had played Spin-the-bottle, and my mother, perhaps with an irony I didn’t grasp, had behaved as if I had been ravished, assaulted—as if the lipstick on my mouth were blood. “I don’t think she would be mad about that. Why should she mind your mother’s being a flower?”

“The odd fact is, a bee did almost sting her.”

“Your mother?”

“Up in the field. I told her to stand very still and, sure enough, eventually it flew away.”

“You’re a good protector of your mother.” He was listening but heard no irony. I went on, “I think the reason my mother smashed the dishes was to remind us that she was there. She’s afraid we’ll forget her. It’s a fear people have when they’re her age.”