John Updike - Terrorist

The men-boys who receive these burning vows are usually slow to answer. There is an eerie, full quality to the silence in the gap of non-conversation. Beth often fears they have forgotten their lines, but then they say the next thing, after such a long pause. To a degree not true of evening programs-cop shows, comedies, news hours with their bantering desk of four (one male and one female newscaster, a peppy sports reporter, and, the butt of their humor and good-natured grousing, the slightly goofy weatherman)- the daytime soap operas take place against a background of thick, teeming silence, a silence that all the erotic declarations, tense confessions, false assurances, and seething animosities cannot blot out, nor can the otherworldly chiming music and the sudden intervention of the lame pop song that does for a closing theme. A terrifying silence is the ground that holds them all there, like magnets on a refrigerator door, the cast in its echoing three-sided rooms and Beth in her extra-wide armchair, vexed with herself because she did not bring quite enough oatmeal cookies on her plate and now the phone won't stop ringing so she must abandon her La-Z-Boy island of perfect padded comfort even as David, the impossibly handsome cardiologist ominously uttering charged words to Maria, the gorgeous brain surgeon whose husband, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edmund, was murdered in an earlier episode Beth unfortunately missed.

She rises in stages, first pulling the lever to lower the foot-rest and, fighting the rocker motion, transferring her feet to the floor and gripping the left arm of the chair with both hands to tug herself almost up, and finally, with an audible exclamation, heaving her weight onto her braced knees, which slowly, excruciatingly straighten, while she catches her breath. At the start of the process, she thought to place the empty plate on the chair arm safely onto the side table, but she forgot the television remote in her lap, and it falls to the floor. She sees it there, the numbered buttons of its little rectangular panel down with the spots of coffee and spilled food that have accumulated over time on the pale-green carpet. Jack warned her that the carpet would show dirt, but pale wall-to-wall was in that year, the carpet salesman said. "It gives a cool, contemporary look," he assured her. "It expands the space." Everybody knows Orientals are best for spots blending in, but when could she and Jack ever afford an Oriental? There's a place on Reagan Boulevard where you can get them secondhand at a bargain price, but she and Jack never go that way together, it's where mostly blacks shop. Anyway, used, you don't know what the previous people have spilled that's hidden in the fibers, and the idea is distasteful, like carpets in hotel rooms. Beth can't bear to think of turning her body around and bending over to pick up the remote-her sense of balance is getting worse with age-and there must be some urgent reason why the person on the phone doesn't hang up. For a while they had an answering machine attached, but there were so many crank calls from parents whose children didn't get into the colleges Jack advised that they had the machine taken out. "If I'm there, I'll cope," he said. "People aren't so damn nasty when they get an actual voice on the other end."

Beth takes another step, leaving the people on television to stew in their own abundant juices, and totters to the table by the wall and plucks up the telephone. The new style of telephone stands upright in its cradle, and a little panel below the perforations to listen at supposedly gives you the name and number calling. It says out of area, so it's either Markie or her sister in Washington or some telemarketer calling from wherever they call from-it can be as far away as India. "Hello?" The perforations at the other end of the receiver don't come to her mouth the way the old phones did, the hefty simple ones of honest black Bakelite that rested face-down in a cradle, and Beth tends to raise her voice because she doesn't trust it.

"Beth, it's Hermione." Herm always sounds ostentatiously brisk, busy, as if to shame her younger, indolent, self-pampered sister. "What took you so long? I was about to hang up."

"Well, I wish you had."

"That's not very nice to say."

"I'm not like you, Herm. I'm not still fast on my feet."

"Who's that talking in the background? Is somebody there?" Her words jump on things, one after another. Yet her bluntness, almost rude, is a welcome leftover from the Pennsylvania-Dutch manner of their girlhood. It reminds Beth of home, of northwest Philadelphia with all its humid greenery and trolley cars and corner grocery stores stacked with Maier's and Freihofer's bread.

"It's the television. I was looking for the clicker to turn it off"-she doesn't want to admit she was too lazy and unwieldy to bend over and pick it up-"and couldn't find the gosh-darn tiling."

"Well, go find it. It can't be far. I can wait. We can't talk with all that babbling. What were you watching anyway, in the middle of the day?"

Beth puts the receiver down without answering. She sounds like Mother, she thinks, plodding over to where the remote-curiously similar to the telephone in look and feel, matte black and packed with circuitry: a pair of mismatched sisters-lies on its back on the pale-green wall-to-wall. The salesman called it celadon. With a groan of effort, gripping the chair arm with one hand and reaching down with die other in an exertion that reawakens in her little-used muscles the sensation of an exercise, an arabesque penchee, learned in ballet lessons when she was eight or nine, at Miss Dimi-trova's Studio, above a cafeteria downtown on Broad Street, she retrieves the thing and points it at the television screen, where As the World Turns is winding up on Channel Seven, under a cloud of tingling, ominous music. Beth recognizes Craig and Jennifer, in heated conference, and wonders what they are saying even as she clicks them off. They turn into a little star that lingers less than a second.

In ballet class she had been the more lithe and promising sister; Hermione, Miss Dimitrova would say in her scornful White Russian way, lacked ballon. "Light, light," she would shout, the ligaments jumping in her scrawny throat. "Vous avez besoin de legerete! Conceive that you are des oiseauxl You are the creatures of air!" Hermione, gawkily tall for her age and already, it was clear, destined to be plain, was the heavy-footed plodder then, and Beth the one who felt, enfaisant des pointes, birdlike, whirling with her skinny arms extended.

"You're panting," Hermione accuses her when Beth returns to the phone and drops her body with a grunt onto the little hard chair that came in from the kitchen table when Mark was no longer around to eat with his parents. A maple reproduction Shaker, the chair has such a narrow seat that she has to aim her bottom at it; a few years ago she half missed and the chair tipped and dumped her onto the floor. She could have broken her pelvis if she weren't so well upholstered, Jack said. But he wasn't amused at first. He rushed over to her horrified and, when she made clear she wasn't injured, looked disappointed. Hermione asks sharply, "You weren't watching some special announcement, were you?"

"On the television? No-is there one?"

"No, but"-her hesitation is fraught, like the pauses in soap operas-"there are leaks. Things get out before they should."

"What's getting out?" Beth asks, knowing that bland ignorance was the way to open up Hermione, with her itch to lord it over her sister.

"Nothing, darling. I of course can't say." But, unable to bear Beth's silence, she goes on, "Internet chatter is up. We think something's brewing."

"Oh, dear," Beth says docilely. "How's the Secretary taking it?"