John Updike - Terrorist

"Hello!" she responds, making an exclamatory occasion of it, and lightly touching his forearm, as if to re-establish die burgeoning intimacy of their last encounter. She tells him, breathlessly grabbing the first words that come to her, "You must have a wonderful summer ahead of you!"

The thought takes him aback. "Oh-same old same old," he tells her. "We don't do much. Beth has only a few weeks off from the library. I try to pick up some pin money tutoring. We have a son in New Mexico and we visit him for a week in usually August; it's hot but not muggy the way it is here. Beth has a sister in Washington, but that's even muggier, so she used to come up to us and we'd go for a week or so to the mountains somewhere, one side or otlier of the Delaware Water Gap. But now she's so damn busy, always some emergency or other, that this summer…" Shut up, Levy. Don't talk it to death. Maybe it was good that the "we" slipped out, reminding this woman he has a wife. He thinks of them, actually, as being on the same continuum, with their fair skins and tendency to plumpness, but Beth twenty years farther along. "What about you? You and Ahmad."

Her outfit is staid enough-eggshell-colored linen suit over a white chemise-yet colorful touches suggest a free spirit, an artist as well as a mother. Clunky turquoise rings weigh down those short-nailed, firm-fleshed hands of hers, and her arms, showing haloes of fuzz candescent in the sunlight, hold a clicking horde of gold and coral bracelets. Most surprisingly, a large silk scarf, patterned in angular abstract shapes and staring circles, is knotted beneath her chin and covers the hair of her head but for the blurred edge, witb a few stray reddish filaments, where it meets the Irish-white bulge of her brow. Watching Levy's eyes with her own, and seeing them fix on her jauntily demure head scarf, she laughs and explains, "He wanted me to wear it. He said if there was one thing he wanted for his graduation it was his mother not looking like a whore."

"My goodness. But, anyway, it's oddly becoming. And the orchid was his idea too?"

"Not really. The other boys do it for their mothers, and he would have been embarrassed not to. He has this conformist streak."

Her face with its protuberant green eyes, pale as beach glass, seems in the scarf to look at him around a corner; its covering poses a provocation, implying a dazzling ultimate nakedness. Her head scarf speaks of submission, which stirs him. He moves closer in the press of the crowd, as if taking her under his protection. She tells him, "I spotted some other scarved mothers, Black Muslims quite dramatic in all their white, and some of the graduating daughters of the Turks-as a girl we called them 'Turks,' die dark men at the mills, but of course they all weren't. I was thinking, / bet I have the reddest hair underneath. The nuns would be thrilled. They said I flaunted my charms. At the time I wondered what charms were, and how you could flaunt them. They were just there, it seemed to me. My so-called charms."

She shares his tendency to babble, here in this excited crowd. He says quietly, meaning it, "You were a good mom, to humor Ahmad."

Her face loses its gleam of mischief. "He's asked so little, really, over the years, and now he's leaving. He's always seemed so alone. He did this Allah thing all by himself, with no help from me. Less than help, really-I resented that he cared so much about a father who didn't do squat for him. For us. But I guess a boy needs a father, and if he doesn't have one he'll invent one. How's that for cut-rate Freud?"

Does she know she is doing this to him, making him want her? Beth would never think to bring in Freud. Freud, who encouraged a century to keep on screwing. Levy says, "Ahmad looked handsome up there, in his robe. I'm sorry I began too late to get to know your son. I feel a fondness for him, though I suspect it's not reciprocated."

"You're wrong, Jack-he appreciates your wanting to raise his sights. Maybe he'll do it himself later. For now he's barreling ahead on the trucker's license. He passed the written exam and in two weeks takes the physical exam. For Passaic County it's over in Wayne. They need to make sure you're not color-blind and have enough peripheral vision. Ahmad has beautiful eyes, I've always thought. Inky. His father had lighter eyes, oddly, sort of gingerbread color. I say 'oddly' because you'd think Omar's would be the darker, with my pale ones in there."

"I see a shadow of your green in Ahmad's." She ignores this flirtation and goes on, "But they're not twenty-twenty. Ahmad's. More like twenty-thirty- astigmatism-but he was always too vain to wear glasses. You'd think with all this piety he wouldn't be vain, but he is. Maybe it's not vanity, it's more that he thinks Allah would give you glasses if He wanted you to wear them. He had trouble seeing the ball in baseball; that was one of die reasons he took up track as his spring sport."

This tumble of sudden specifics about a boy not too different in Jack Levy's mind from the hundreds he deals with every year, intensifies his suspicion that this woman wants to see him again. He says to her, "I guess he won't be needing those college catalogues I dropped off a month ago."

"I hope he can still find them: his room is a mess except for the corner where he prays. He should have returned them to you, Jack."

'Wo pfoblema, senor-a." He notices around tJiem, in the jostling, jubilant, but already dwindling crowd, other people glancing in their direction and giving them a little room, sensing that sometliing is cooking here. He feels himself incriminated by Terry's overanimation as he tenaciously tries to match his smile to tiiat on her round, bright, freckle-starred face.

The shadow of a big dark-hearted cloud sweeps the sunshine away and casts dullness upon the scene-the lake of rubble, the street from which traffic is barred, the bravely, brightly clad mob of parents and relatives, the civic facade of Central High School, its portals pillared and its windows barred, the height of it like the backdrop of an opera set dwarfing the singers of a duet.

"That was rude of Ahmad," his mother says, "not to return them to you at the school. Now it's too late."

"Like I said, no problem. Why don't I come by sometime and pick 'em up?" he asks. "I'll give a call ahead to make sure you're there."

As a kid, living over on Totowa Road when it was still pretty rural but for the new ranch houses, walking to school in the winter, Jack would sometimes venture out, to test his nerve, onto the ice of a marshy pond, long since built over, that he passed on the way. The water was not deep enough to drown in-cattails and grassy hummocks betrayed its shallow depth-but if he broke through, his good leather school shoes would be soaked and muddied and maybe even ruined, and in a family whose finances were as pinched as his family's, that would have been a disaster. At the silver edge of the cloud, sunshine breaks through, scintillating on Terry's silk head scarf, and he listens with trepidation for the ice to crack.

THE PHONE RINGS. Beth Levy struggles to extricate herself from her favorite chair, a rocker recliner called a La-Z-Boy, covered in a dull-brown vinyl imitating creased cowhide and equipped with a lever-operated padded leg rest, in which she has been sitting eating a plate of oatmeal-raisin cookies-low in calories compared with chocolate-chip or sandwich creams-while watching All My Children on WABC before switching channels to As the World Turns, on at two. She has often thought of putting a longer cord into the jack so she can carry the phone over to her chair and rest it on the floor for this part of her day, the days when she doesn't go into the Clifton Library, but she never remembers to ask Jack to buy the longer cord at the telephone store, which is way off in the mall on Route 23. When she was a girl you just called AT amp;T and they sent a man in a gray (or was it green?) uniform and black shoes who fixed everything for a few dollars. It was a monopoly, and she knows this was a bad thing-calling long-distance, you were charged for every minute, and now she can talk to Markie or Herm for hours and it costs next to nothing-but also now there is no fixing phones. You throw them out, just like old computers and yesterday's paper.