Of the Farm by John Updike

Author:John Updike
Language: eng
Format: epub

Inside the house it smelled of Peggy's wet hair. My mother had laid and lit a fire of cherry logs in the fireplace and here my wife, out of her bikini and in a slip whose bosom and hem were lace, sat crosslegged, a blue towel across her shoulders, drying her hair. The fire seemed to saturate dangerously the veil of her hair; her head was thrown forward and her own fingers blindly massaged her scalp. The logs crackled, settling. Richard was reading a book; one leg was slung over the arm of the wing chair and swung like a pendulum. The rain breathed on the sides of the house, swept with an imperious gesture across the panes facing the barn, and lived sparkling amid the green and shuffling surfaces of the grape arbor outside the southern, meadow-facing windows. My mother in the kitchen was setting out plates. "Would they mind eating early?" she asked me softy as I went toward the stairwell.

"Ask them" I said. I felt that my mother in the garden had put Peggy in the wrong, had succeeded in illuminating her weaker side, and this triumph had shortened my patience with her. I would not have her feigning a conspiracy against these two strangers. Her games had cloyed.

Yet in the stairwell, hearing my mother's voice ask a question and Peggy's cheerfully answer, both with words I could not quite make out, I felt excluded and chilled. Upstairs I took off my wet clothes and walked naked through a glade of ghosts. The spot on the floor where my grandmother, trying to rise from her bed, had fallen and died shrouded its history in an inscrutable appearance of worn wood. The window still gave on the lawn, the barn, and the road as if my grandfather's eyes still watched for the mailman—the "snailman," he called him. A pine chest still hoarded his defunct stocks and his diaries, slim red booklets in which, year after year, he inscribed laconic notations of the weather and almost nothing else. On the day of my mother's birth, a day that almost killed his wife, he had only written, Baby born. As I draped them on the bathroom door to dry, my father's dungarees dripped icy water on my contracted loins. Joan still stared upward, a star of moisture frozen on her lower lip, the germ of a baby held forever in her belly. I did not use a towel; I love evaporation, not only the sensation but the idea of it, of moisture leaping freely into immateriality, of a topography in the elements whereby water slides downhill into air. Moving in air, I feel even dust, which makes me sneeze, as the sofa's angel, and pollen as immanent flowers. Dry, smooth, huge, immersed in the wide unfocused eyes of my childish self gazing from the wall, I put on underclothes, creased slacks slithery to the touch, socks Peggy had neatly balled in pairs, loafers, and a clean white shirt that seemed the wrappings of the rectangle of gray cardboard stiffening it.

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