Updike John - Of the Farm

“She doesn’t seem so old.”

“She does to me. I knew her when she was just like your mother.”

“In what way?”

“In being young. When we lived in another house, in a town, she used to run to catch the trolley car. Once I had a balsa-wood airplane get stuck in a tree and she climbed the tree for me. She used to be very athletic. In college she was on the hockey varsity.”

“My mother is worthless at sports. My father couldn’t stand to play tennis with her.”

I seemed to be in bed, and a tall girl stood above me, and her hair came loose from her shoulder and fell forward with a swift liquid motion, and hung there, as a wing edged with light, and enclosed me in a kind of tent as she bent lower to deliver her good-night kiss. It was to this that my trying to remember my mother as young and slim had brought me. There was a sense of, beyond my tall window, a vacant lot where the older children of the neighborhood were still playing. I said to Richard, “Let’s brush your teeth.”

I watched him brush, admiring his brisk method, thinking of all the small tasks whose mastery goes into making an adult. He spat in the basin, rinsed his brush with fascinating thoroughness, and turned, showing me a minty grimace that became, as a joke, a lion’s snarl. Nothing is more surprising in children than the way, less out of an ignorance of danger than by virtue of their simple animal freshness, they give us the courage we need to defend them. The black and murmuring window behind him mirrored the back of his head as if a hairy monster were peering in. The entire warm wet night seemed a siege of our lit position. As I stood guard, he urinated solemnly, his pelvis thrust forward to enlarge the margin for error, his long-lashed eyes ritually attending the mixing of waters. This, too, I realized, remembering a little bench I had built for Charlie so he could stand up to the bowl like a man, is a skill that must be mastered.

I offered to read Richard a story. He seemed amused. “I can read faster to myself.”

“I know. I thought you might find it soothing. I guess I miss having children I can read to.”

“O.K. You can read to me. Shall I go down and get the flower book?”

“I think that would make terrible reading aloud.”

“There’s the science-fiction anthology.”

“Your mother doesn’t think those are good bedtime stories.”

“She’s full of needless anxieties.”

“I’ll tell you what. Let me tell you a story.”

“Can you?”

“I used to tell one every night. The children were”—I was going to say “mine”—“smaller; so you’ll have to pardon me if the age-level seems wrong.”

“That’s O.K. I enjoy childish things.”

I wondered if he realized he was echoing the Bible. His mother now and then used the word “know” in the, I had thought, obsolete Biblical sense. I didn’t know a man until I was nineteen. Of course, Joey, it’s always better for the woman after she knows the man. Their unthinking non-Christianity sometimes worried me, and I blamed myself for having never gathered the nerve to teach Richard a good-night prayer, as I had done with my own children. I closed my eyes, and felt him, as one star feels the tug of another in the blindness of space, close his also.

“Once,” I began, “there was a frog in the rain. The rain beat”—I groped outward through my senses for an image—“on his warty skin like on a roof, and he was very pleased to have such a watertight skin.”

“All skin is watertight.”

I opened my eyes, saw that his were staring at my face with that gleam of impudence or wariness I remembered on the face of his father, and doubted that he had ever closed them.

“His,” I said, “felt especially so, because he was so small inside it.”

“How do you mean? That doesn’t make sense.”

“He was like a tiny king inside his castle inside his body. When he gave a command, huge legs catapulted him from one lily pad to the next, and when he gave another command a tongue like a crossbow on a string flew through the air and speared a poor fly.” How many times had I heard lately the phrase “poor Joan”? “This frog,” I said, “felt his mouth to be as great as a drawgate, and his eyes were on the tip-top of his head like turrets, and he had heard rumors of a wonderful treasure stored deep in the dungeon of his guts, where he had never been.”

“Guts.” Richard laughed.

Downstairs, Peggy and my mother began to talk. I could not make out the words. I hastened to complete my story.

“Well,” I said, “one day, when the rain had stopped and leaves were falling, and things were turning brown, the frog got bored and decided to go and find this wonderful treasure that someone, he didn’t know who, had told him was there. So he went down a circular staircase out of his head—”

Richard laughed; I wondered if braces would be required by the gap between his teeth and decided that Peggy and the dentist must have discussed it.

“—down through the great barrel of his throat, the curving ladder of his ribs, through a gloomy vaulted room where his footsteps echoed—”

“This is like Doctor Seuss,” Richard said.

“I mean it to be like Dante,” I said. “You’ve heard of Dante?”

“He sounds French.”

“Close. Down and down, into stranger and darker rooms, and the lower he went, the smaller he got, until finally, just when he was sure he had reached the dungeon where the treasure was, he disappeared!”

The boy’s eyes widened in the silence, so I could observe, dissected in the lamplight, the layers of color—granular, radial, delicately torn-looking—held within his brown irises. The voices of the women under us were rising; I listened in vain for laughter.

“Is that the end?” Richard asked. “He died?”

“Who said he died? He just became so small he couldn’t find himself. He was hibernating.”

“Oh. That’s right. You said the leaves were falling.”

“You really think death is disappearing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Good. I don’t either. Anyway, after a while, in the spring, the frog woke up, looked around in the darkness, ran up through the rooms, up the circular stairs, to his eyes, threw open the lids, and looked out. And the sky was blue. End of story.”

“I like the idea of throwing open the lids.”

“Thank you. You were very good to listen.”

“Will you ever tell me another?”

“Probably not. You’re too old.”

“How old is Charlie now?”

“Charlie?”

“Your real son.”

“He’s seven now. Eight in October.”

“That’s not too young for me to play with.”

“You don’t think so? We’ll have to arrange it. He’ll be back in New York pretty soon.”

“I know.” Peggy had told him. I felt Peggy behind his polite interest. Unlike her, I was not yet able to picture an uncatastrophic state of things, when the stepchildren could play together as if divorce were a mode of cousinage.

“Shall I get you a book now to read yourself? Which, the flowers or science fiction?”

“Skip it, I’m pretty pooped. I think I’ll just lie here and listen to the rain. Last night I heard an owl hoot.”

“So did I. I’ll turn this lamp off but leave the light in the bathroom on.”

“You don’t have to. I’m not afraid of the dark.”

“I don’t want you to wake up and not know where you are.” Bending to switch off the light, I continued the motion and attempted to kiss him. Though it was unusual, he expected it, and turned his head in the rigid wriggly way boys have, whether toward me or away was unclear in the dark. My lips fell on the creased space of skin just beside one corner of his mouth.