John Updike: S

Twenty is an age when your parents still think of you as a child and if you were to die or get married one would sadly say "only twenty" but as I recall that age there is little "only" about it and I must appeal to you as another woman to understand me, to simply know. And having so appealed I realize, or seem to realize, in this rather terrifying motel room where the air-conditioner rattles as if mounted off-center and people seem to keep bumping against the door as they go by in the hall to the ice machine, that of course there is no question of condemnation, that you and I will continue to love each other as we did that first minute, when you gripped my finger with this little violet baby hand the texture of a wilted flower, because we are aspects of the same large person, that even in that first minute all your eggs (this is an incredible physiological fact I recently read in The New England Journal of Medicine which your father gets) were tiny and perfect in you and you were my egg, tiny and perfect. I am crying as I write this and perhaps make insufficient sense in the fashion of maudlin people but do beg you to believe that I am your mother still.

Study well, my sweetheart. When I try to picture you to myself I see a shining blond head bent over a book. Your love of books, from Babar to Tolkien and romances with those embossed titles in lurid colors to Austen and Dickens on up to these unpleasant modern writers who try to make us all feel shabby was so intense your father and I used to whisper what had we done wrong, what parental failing of ours was to blame. When you were in your early teens, after your softball craze but before "Brideshead" caught your fancy, I would sit and watch television-these very stupid well-intentioned shows with minority families cavorting around or police stations or high schools and the canned laughter heaving away-hoping you would be tempted to join me in that cozy corner room upstairs, with the heavy drapes and your father's old medical books and my father's priceless editions, because I imagined this was what normal American children should be watching. But no, my dear elf-child, you stayed in your room wrapped in lovely contortions around a book, while I of course got hooked and had to watch these idiotic stories to the end. Of course I used to worry at your snubbing television and me together but now I see that the children we have are just miracles like any other, like geysers or glass skyscrapers or mountains of maple trees in fall in Vermont, and that we have nothing to do with creating them-our job is to stand and wonder. Our job is to marvel and love.

Study well, and never be tempted by drugs. People (which I see only in the dentist's office, but must say I do devour eagerly there) and the National Enquirer (which Irving my yoga instructor is devoted to for its spiritual dimensions, its ESP and UFO news) are so full of these young English nobility and their dangerous drug habits that they pick up in imitation of the rock stars, out of class guilt and a subconscious Marxist wish to destroy themselves I suppose. But there's no reason for an American girl to get involved in any of that. Your mother's not a churchgoer as you know but I do believe firmly that our body as God made it, with no additives, not only lasts longest but is most fun. And along the same lines don't get too infatuated with male homosexuals. I know they must seem, especially with those English accents and marvellous high rosy complexions, very amusing and charming and unthreatening but remember, dearest, they don't really like women. They think women are strange, too strange to deal with, and competitors furthermore. Normal men think women are strange too but they don't try to steal other men from us and at least up to your mother's generation had developed a certain delusional system around our strangeness that could be quite touching-they treated us like handicapped persons, opening doors and explaining our needs to waiters as though we couldn't talk. Well that may be gone but I'm sure that enough of something similar remains for you to concentrate on nice normal boys if you can find any in that dear decadent old country.

I must be tired all my commas are dropping away. About an hour ago there was a strange kind of rodeo in the parking lot-low-slung cars covered with glittery paint prowling in noisy circles, and then there was a quarrel just outside my door in an appalling language I realized was Japanese! In'fact in the coffee shop I was surprised at how many Japanese there were, as if I had gone farther west than I wanted. Tomorrow I must head east again, driving into the desert in my rented car-not a dreadfully perilous adventure perhaps but enough to make a middle-aged lady's heart rise in her " throat. I must end, darling. I must let you and me go to bed. I began by feeling quite prickly and apologetic and defensive toward you but now feel quite close. I feel you are with me. Part of you, of course, with part of me. Write me at this address: c/o Ashram Arhat, Forrest, AZ 85077. Doesn't it sound like the end of the world? Do try to be a more conscientious correspondent than you have been-I am so alone now. And don't give the address to your father.

Much much love,

Mother

Dear Dr. Podhoretz-

I am sorry, but I am going to miss my cleaning appointment next Tuesday the 29th and don't know when I can make another. As you can see from the postmark I am a long way from Swampscott. But I promise to keep flossing and using the rubber tip on my gums. I certainly don't want to undo your good work and go through all that oral surgery again! Once was enough!!

Cordially,

Sarah Worth (Mrs. Charles)

Dear Shirlee-

I'm afraid I'm going to miss my hair appointment next week after all, after all the trouble we went to to find an ideal time when I wouldn't get caught in either rush hour. My husband and I are taking a quite unexpected vacation in tlie romantic Far West. We're about in fact to get into the car and drive hundreds of miles, right past Palm Springs where Bob Hope and President Ford have their fabulous homes! I'll phone you when I get back-by that time my hair may be down to my waist! Your rinse should be kept up and I'll pick up some Clairol at a drugstore-Darkest Brown I think is better for me than the Natural Black, which tends as we know to kill the gleam. I do hope things begin to work out better with Martin and his new probation officer, and that Eldridge's dyslexia therapy continues to work wonders. He is such a cute boy-the day he came into the beauty parlor and asked each woman in a chair if her boyfriend lived with her or just came around! As we agreed last time, it would probably be less unsettling for him if his father didn't come around at all-but then life is so complex, isn't it?.It's so hard to know how totally we're supposed to live for others, and what we may do for ourselves.

Say hello for me to Marcus and Foster and Annette. Not to mention the meter maid on Newbury Street who always seemed to be there the very moment my meter ran out!

Your customer and friend,

Sally Worth

Dear Mother-

I'm exhausted from driving in the desert for hours but wanted to drop you a note to counterbalance whatever alarming stories Charles is pouring into your ears. It is true I've left him but for ten years more or less it's felt every morning and midnight as if he's left me. Ever since my second miscarriage and our realizing that Pearl was the only child we would ever have there's been this coldness and tension between us that you surely have noticed on your visits, though perhaps you haven't-Charles always seemed, frankly, more your kind of man than mine. You and he did use to get together with your martinis and purr, over exactly what piece of catnip I could never decide, and then decided it was me -me as some kind of possibly lovable but certainly messy and very likely untrainable discipline problem. You two shared a curious dry ability to without-exactly saying anything make me feel dirty -my hair untidy, my feet too big, my skin too swarthy, I didn't know, people don't ever know what's wrong with them, they'll believe any bad thing. Whereas Daddy, as you remember, never did warm to him, though he tried, with that wonderful gentlemanly nature of his, but after Charles kept questioning his calls those Sundays when they played singles on the grass courts at Longwood he really stopped trying. Also, Charles was so humorless and whatever Daddy's other faults he was just the opposite, always so sly and wry, such a tease though I'm not sure you always knew when he was teasing, as I did.