Authors: John Updike
“T-too much grape juice, Mother,” Ralph says.
They are trying to make up. We all feel better, bolder. Josh Neusner describes his terrible night, quite comically as he relives his mental negotiations with the mysterious cat, but Lee Englehardt, having come in from wood-splitting to care for Dorothea, without smiling states, “Jews make poor campers.” We are shocked. It is the sort of thing that can be said only among intimate friends or confirmed enemies. And why would they be enemies?
Josh, remembering Lee’s aggressive unconscious arpeggios, and his position at the card table next to Deborah, chooses to accept the remark as a piece of ethnology, arrived at innocently: Lee is an insurance salesman whose father was a professor of history, and as if in compensation for a lesser career he collects such small pedantic conclusions as that Jews make poor campers. Lee’s charm really rests on his insecurity. Josh chooses to keep playing the clown. He covers his forehead with one hand and moans, “I can’t sleep without a woman. Men are
hid
eous.”
Deborah, a little later, when they meet on the stair landing, says, “Baby, I’m sorry you had such a poor night; you should have played bridge.”
“I wasn’t asked.”
“You didn’t want to be asked. I would have given you my seat. Andy Tyler kept wanting to kill me, I could tell.”
“The only person I like here is Linda,” Josh petulantly volunteers. “And Dorothea,” he adds, to soften it.
This reminds her: “Ruth didn’t sleep in the girls’ dormitory last night. Marge set her up in the living room with the baby after everybody else had gone to bed, in case Dorothea yelled. So the bunk above me is empty if you really want it. Linda and Bernadette wouldn’t care.”
“It would make me look like a sissy.” He goes on, “And then yesterday I kept nearly cutting off my foot splitting their idiotic wood.”
“Come on, honey, try to get into the spirit of things.”
“It’s all barbaric,” he says, so light-headed with lack of sleep that every perception has a translucent, revelatory quality. Suddenly, he is having a very good time. He goes down and has some more coffee and bacon and discusses Boston-area private schools with Linda and Lee, who are disenchanted with highly touted Brookline High.
The Maloneys return laden with the Sunday New York
Times
, the Boston
Globe
, and the Burlington
Free Press
. The children fight over the funnies, the men over the sports and financial pages. The day proceeds with that unreality peculiar to Sunday; one hour seems as long as two, and the next goes by in ten minutes. A great deal of the conversation concerns where various other people are. Marge is in the car, with her son, Skip, and her dog, Wolf, performing some errands having
to do with quantities of natural fleece—uncarded, greasy-wet with lanolin—to be found at a farm fifteen miles away. It turns out that Andy Tyler has gone along for the ride. Bernadette Maloney is in Marge’s garden salvaging tomatoes and zucchini from last night’s frost; Mark and Mary and Teddy are helping her, by holding the paper bags with bored expressions and then by throwing the rotten vegetables at one another. Linda Tyler, having been told that her husband has disappeared with Marge, announces that she will go on a mushrooming walk in the woods; her daughter, Audrey, and Betsey Englehardt and the two Neusner girls come with her, like a procession of little witches in training. Christine Tremayne—who has inherited Marge’s dull complexion and Ralph’s stocky build, unfortunately—is showing Teresa Maloney the barn, and the Neusner twins tag along. The interior is awesome; some high small windows and the gaps between the slats admit shafts of light as if in a cathedral. They have all seen slides of cathedrals at school. The light reveals an atmosphere glittering with dust, dust from the hay still stacked in staircases of bales at one end, a dust that thickens the air, that makes light visible while lessening it. The children feel deep in the sea of time. Elements of old farm machinery rust in corners here and there, with pieces of lumber, ten-gallon milk cans, strawberry boxes, and glass eggs. They find an old rope-quoit set, and the four of them play until a dispute between Seth and Zebulon makes it no fun.
Milly Tremayne and Fritz Tyler—who knows where they have gone to? Mary Maloney, having left the garden party in tearful disgust when Mark caught her right on the mouth with a rotten zucchini, has come into the house; the television set gets only one channel, and that one full of ghosts from the hills and valleys between here and the station, but she is happily
watching some man with big eyebrows and a Southern accent give a sermon, and a lot of fat ladies in glitzy dresses sing hymns, until her father comes and tells her she should be outdoors in the sunshine.
What sunshine? A cloud has just passed across the sun, not a little cloud but a large dark one, with a wide leaden center and agitated, straggling edges—a cloud it seems the surrounding mountains have given birth to.
Bill Maloney and Lee Englehardt find a shovel and refresh the holes that take the posts for the volleyball net. Nature fills in the holes from one leaf season to the next. Then they find and unwind the two-by-fours and the net and the guy ropes and pegs where they have reposed all wound and tangled up in the barn since last October. As they move slowly, in the quickly moving cloud shadows, through the tedious ritual of setting up the net, Lee asks Bill, “How was Mass?”
Bill, who has a moonface and delicate pink Irish skin, looks at Lee cockeyed and says, “Like it always is. That’s the beauty of it, Mr. Eng.”
Lee makes a rueful nod, concluding to himself that this is the essence of male companionship: cards close to the chest.
Inside the kitchen, Bernadette and Deborah are making lunch—a cauldron of clam chowder Bernadette has lugged up from Boston; and a tuna salad Deborah is whipping up out of four cans plus chopped celery, scallions, mayonnaise, lemon juice, and a head of lettuce; and a tinned ham for those who, like most of the children, hate fish. As the two women slide and bump past each other between Marge’s old-fashioned black soapstone sink and the wooden countertops on either side, they quietly talk about the situation between Marge and Ralph, which seems far gone, and that between Andy and Linda, which seems to be heading for trouble.
Ruth Englehardt comes into the kitchen with her curly-headed toddler propped on her hip and a cigarette tilting at an opposite angle out of her mouth. “So the Queen of Sheba has eloped with the handyman,” she says, “the Queen of Sheba” referring to Marge and “the handyman” to Andy, not just because of his name but because of his tendency, well known to all the women, to reach out under the table and touch. “If you two were about to discuss Lee and me, I’ll leave,” she adds; then she begins to cough, and one eye cries from the smoke. She sets down the heavy child and watches her stagger across the worn linoleum to one of the low old mahogany counters, where Dorothea quicker than thought reaches up and flips a sharp knife down past her own ear. Ruth deftly retrieves the knife and her daughter; the little girl, as she feels herself being lifted, reflexively spreads her legs to sit astride her mother’s hip. The three women talk, touching their friends with their tongues not to harm them but to give themselves pleasure; little new can be offered, mere pinches or slivers added to the salad, tiny, almost meaningless remarks or glimpses that yet do enhance the flavor. The conversation, too, serves a purpose of location, of locating the others on a continuum of happiness or its opposite, of satisfying the speakers that the others are within hailing distance in this our dark passage through life, with its mating and birthing, its getting and spending, its gathering and scattering. Some, indeed, are even closer than hailing distance, for from underneath the floor there comes a sudden grumbling and scraping: their host wrapping more insulation.
Lunch is served, then volleyball. Let’s not do the volleyball. Let’s just say that once there were five on a side and now
the children have grown so that three eight-person teams must be fielded, and some of the boys lunge and swagger and swat as lustily as their fathers. More lustily, since these powers are new to them. Matthew Maloney knocks Audrey Tyler flat on her back, and Fritz Tyler comes down from a spike right on Deborah Neusner’s toe, so that she thinks it might be broken. She thinks she heard it snap, at the still center of the swelling red cloud of pain. She hops off the court. “This hasn’t been their weekend,” Ruth Englehardt says
sotto voce
to Marge, who has returned from her drive to buy the wool.
“I just can’t get excited about any of it,” Marge confides to Ruth, under the net, while Bill Maloney, with much drolly elaborate ceremony, is winding up to serve. For all of his elaboration, the ball flies too high and sails out. The other side hoots. The sight of such a throng, in suburban shorts and halters and stencilled sweatshirts, is so unusual here in Vermont this time of year that cars and pickup trucks slow down on the little quiet unnumbered road. One truck (passing, everybody later agrees, for about the fourth time) fails to brake when the ball, hit wild by Eve Neusner, bounces under his chassis and, with a sound as sickening as that of a box turtle being crushed beneath the wheels, bursts. Then the truck brakes. Ralph slightly knows the driver, and a pleasant and apologetic palaver takes place by the fence, though the red-bearded, red-hatted face of the truck driver doesn’t look apologetic. Mark Maloney has brought his soccer ball, and that is substituted, though it is enough heavier that a number of the females complain of stinging hands and sprained wrists.
So we have done the volleyball after all. The sun, momentarily appearing between the ridge of a mountain and the edge of another great cloud, throws the shadows of the poles right to the edge of the road. The smallest children—Teddy
and Teri Maloney, Seth and Zebulon Neusner, even little Dorothea Englehardt, the knees of whose bib overalls are filthy and whose lips drool from sucking on a milkweed pod—scrimmage in the trampled grass and try to heave the heavy soccer ball, cunningly stitched together of pentagons, over the sagging net. The clouds have thickened and darkened so as to form a continuous ragged canopy. A cool wind blows as if through a hole in a tent.
The exercise has left the adults feeling contentious, vigorous, and thirsty. They rush to the bottles. They go upstairs one by one to take showers in the only bathroom on the second floor. Josh Neusner by now is feeling quite delirious with fatigue and is experiencing small, flashlike epiphanies of love for each of his friends as they move in and out of the living room, up the stairs, out of doors, and back in. They all look very tall to him, even the children, from where he lies on the plaid couch, fighting off the sleep that refused to come last night. He shuts his eyes a moment and when he opens them, Bill Maloney, his oldest son, Matthew, Lee Englehardt, and Josh’s own wife, Deborah, are over by the far wall, where the wallpaper has been scorched and curled by the pipes of an old woodstove that was taken away when Ralph installed the new heating system whose pipes he has been so desperately, patiently insulating. The four people over there are engaged in a contest of endurance—seeing how long each can sit against the wall, posed as if on a chair that is not there, before the muscle pain in their thighs forces them to surrender and stand. Bill Maloney times each contestant with a watch; his own son seems to be winning, until Lee Englehardt, exposing that something fanatic and needy he keeps hidden behind his mild eyes, continues to hold the pose—straight back flat on the wall, thighs at a ninety-degree angle—for the number of
seconds needed to win. Bill counts off the seconds. Lee’s bald head fills with blood like the bulb of a thermometer. Deborah is visibly impressed, even moved, by Lee’s macho effort. Her long jaw has dropped as if she might swoon. In women, Josh thinks, admiration and pity are faces of one emotion.
Other games are introduced, other feats are performed. Andy Tyler, it turns out, slim and flexible as he is, can hold a broom in both hands and jump over it without letting go. He can then, the broom now held behind him, reverse the trick, hopping up like a handkerchief pulled through a ring. Others try, and kick the broom to the floor with a smack, or else themselves fall to the floor like misfired cannon balls. Ralph Tremayne demonstrates his ability to set a coin on his uplifted elbow and with the same hand grab it in midair. He can even do it with a small stack of quarters. Now coins are flying all over the room, and scatter into the corners. Ralph, encouraged, revives an old drill from his college football years; you squat, he eagerly explains, and fall backwards, and push off with your hands at your shoulders so that you land back on your feet. Every time he tries it, Marge’s collection of stippled milk glass on the mantel trembles, and Ralph, after a tantalizing, teetering moment of near-success, drops with a plaster-cracking thud onto his back. Others also fail. Josh, amid much noisy skepticism, gets up off the sofa and succeeds at his first try. He startles himself, too. He used to be good at gym, a talent he had thought unusable in real life. In the aftermath of his exertion the roomful of people lurches slightly, like the first hesitant movement of a carrousel when all the rides are sold.
Linda Tyler introduces a contest whereby a box of matches is set on the floor a forearm’s length from the kneeling person’s knees. She demonstrates. Then, her hands clasped behind
her, she explains that she will attempt to knock the matchbox over with her nose. She does this easily. But when Bill Maloney tries, he falls forward onto his thin-skinned moonface. Even Lee’s stubborn determination fails; his nose, grimace though he will, comes up a millimeter short. Bernadette, however, performs the trick without effort, and Deborah also. There is something affecting in the position of abasement the women assume on the floor, their hair falling forward, their hands behind them like a manacled slave’s, their hips broad and round in the crouching position, their feet—bare or in little ballerina slippers—soles up beneath their hips. It’s all in the hips, Linda explains, patting her nicely convex own: weight distribution. Almost no man can knock the matchbox over, and almost every woman can. Even Ruth, long and lanky as she is, condescending to try it, illustrates this sexist truth: though there is a precarious moment of balance striven for, the matchbox falls. Everybody cheers, and Dorothea, put to sleep in Marge’s bedroom, cries at the sudden loud noise.