American Literature 6

1

Separating John Updike

1975

THE DAY a a . B a . A a J a a Ma a

misery with solid sunlight golden shafts and cascades of green in which their conversations had

wormed unseeing, their sad murmuring selves the only stain in Nature. Usually by this time of the

a a a a ; a a a

year in England they were almost as pale as she, though Judith was too dazzled by the sunny

opulent jumble of her native land to notice. They did not spoil her homecoming by telling her

immediately. Wait a few days, let her recover from jet lag, had been one of their formulations, in

that string of gray dialogues over coffee, over cocktails, over Cointreau that had shaped the

strategy of their dissolution, while the earth performed its annual stunt of renewal unnoticed

beyond their closed windows. Richard had thought to leave at Easter; Joan had insisted they wait

until the four children were at last assembled, with all exams passed and ceremonies attended,

and the bauble of summer to console them. So he had drudged away, in love, in dread, repairing

screens, getting the mowers sharpened, rolling and patching their new tennis court.

The court, clay, had come through its first winter pitted and windswept bare of redcoat. Years

ago the Maples had observed how often, among their friends, divorce followed a dramatic home

improvement, as if the marriage were making one last effort to live; their own previous worst crisis

had come amid the plaster dust and exposed plumbing of a kitchen renovation. Yet, a summer

ago, as canary-yellow bulldozers churned a grassy, daisy-dotted knoll into a muddy plateau, and

a crew of pigtailed young men raked and tamped clay into a plane, this transformation did not

strike them as ominous, but festive in its impudence; their marriage could rend the earth for fun.

The next spring, waking each day at dawn to a sliding sensation as if the bed were being tipped,

Richard found the barren tennis court its net and tapes still rolled in the barn an environment

congruous with his mood of purposeful desolation, and the crumbling of handfuls of clay into

cracks and holes (dogs had frolicked on the court in a thaw; rivulets had eroded trenches) an

activity suitably elemental and interminable. In his sealed heart he hoped the day would never

come.

Now it was here. A Friday. Judith was reacclimated; all four children were assembled, before

jobs and camps and visits again scattered them. Joan thought they should be told one by one.

R a a a a a a a . S a , I a a

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announcement is a cop- . T a a a a a a .

T a a , , a a .

O.K., O.K. I a . J a a a a . T a , J a a

welcome-home dinner, of lobster and champagne. Then, the party over, they, the two of them,

who nineteen years before would push her in a baby carriage along Fifth Avenue to Washington

Square, were to walk her out of the house, to the bridge across the salt creek, and tell her, swearing

her to secrecy. Then Richard Jr, who was going directly from work to a rock concert in Boston,

would be told, either late, when he had returned on the train, or early Saturday morning, before

he went off to his job; he was seventeen and employed as one of a golf-course maintenance crew.

Then the two younger children, John and Margaret, could, as the morning wore on, be informed.

M , a , R a a .

D a a a ? T a a Sa a a a ,

a , a a a .

N , a , aning he had no better plan, and agreed to hers, though to him it showed an

a , a a , J a -lists and financial

accountings and, in the days when he first knew her, her overly-copious lecture notes. Her plan

turned one hurdle for him into four four knife-sharp walls, each with a sheer blind drop on the

other side.

All spring he had moved through a world of insides and outsides, of barriers and partitions.

He and Joan stood as a thin barrier between the children and the truth. Each moment was a

partition, with the past on one side and the future on the other, a future containing this

unthinkable now. Beyond four knifelike walls a new life for him waited vaguely. His skull cupped

a secret, a white face, a face both frightened and soothing, both strange and known, that he wanted

to shield from tears, which he felt all about him, solid as the sunlight. So haunted, he had become

obsessed with battening down the house against his absence, replacing screens and sash cords,

hinges and latches a Houdini making things snug before his escape.

The lock. He had still to replace a lock on one of the doors of the screened porch. The task, like

most such, proved more difficult than he had imagined. The old lock, aluminum frozen by

corrosion, had been deliberately rendered obsolete by manufacturers. Three hardware stores had

nothing that even approximately matched the mortised hole that its removal (surprisingly easy)

left. Another hole had to be gouged, with bits too small and saws too big, and the old hole fitted

3

with a block of wood thechisels dull, the saw rusty, his fingers thick with lack of sleep. The sun

poured down, beyond the porch, on a world of neglect. The bushes already needed pruning, the

windward side of the house was shedding flakes of paint, rain would get in when he was gone.

Insects, rot, death. His family, the family he was about to lose, filtered through the edges of his

awareness as he struggled with screw holes, splinters, opaque instructions, minutiae of metal.

Judith sat on the porch, a princess returned from exile. She regaled them with stories of fuel

shortages, of bomb scares in the Underground, of Pakistani workmen loudly lusting after her as

she walked past on her way to dance school. Joan came and went,in and out of the house, calmer

than she should have been, praising his struggles withthe lock as if this were one more and not the

last of their long succession of shared chores. The younger of his sons, John, now at fifteen

suddenly, unwittingly handsome, for a few minutes held the rickety screen door while his father

a a , a a R a a . H

daughter, having been at a slumber party the night before, slept on the porch hammock through

all the noise heavy and pink, trusting and forsaken. Time, like the sunlight, continued

relentlessly; the sunlight slowly slanted. To day was one of the longest days, but not long

enough. The lock clicked, worked. He was through. He had a drink; he drank it on the porch,

a . I a , a a , , a

a a a . T a a . F

papers, things sounded so much worse here people shooting people in gas lines, and everybody

.

R a a , D a E a ? F : ,

a reality upon him, pressed and scratched at the back of his throat.

N , J , ing her oval face to him, its eyes still childishly far apart, but the

a a a a . I a a . I a

A a . S a a a . T a a ; a J a a a ,

alone of the four. The others had still some raising left in them. Yet it was the thought of telling

Judith the image of her, their first baby, walking between them arm in arm to the bridge that

broke him.

The partition between his face and tears broke. Richard sat down to the celebratory meal

with the back of his throat aching; the champagne, the lobster seemed phases of sunshine; he saw

them and tasted them through tears. He blinked, swallowed, croakily joked about hay fever. The

tears would not stop leaking through; they came not through a hole that could be plugged but

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through a permeable spot in amembrane, steadily, purely, endlessly, fruitfully. They became, his

tears, a shield for himself against these others their faces, the fact of their assembly, a last time

as innocents, at a table where he sat the last time as head. Tears dropped from his nose as he broke

a ; a a a a a ; a a the back of his

throat was delicious. He could not help himself.

His children tried to ignore his tears. Judith, on his right, lit a cigarette, gazed upward in the

direction of her too-energetic, too-sophisticated exhalation; on her other side, John earnestly bent

his face to the extraction of the last morsels legs, tail segments from the scarlet corpse. Joan,

at the opposite end of the table, glanced at him surprised, her reproach displaced by a quick

grimace, of forgiveness, or of salute tohis superior gift of strategy. Between them, Margaret, no

longer called Bean, thirteen and large for her age, gazed from the other side of his pane of tears as

if into a shopwindow at something she coveted at her father, a crystalline heap of splintersand

memories. It was not she, however, but John who, in the kitchen, as they cleared the plates and

a a a a a , a J a : W Da ?

R a a a . T a B a , O , -

! the faintly dramatized exclamation of one who hadlong expected it.

John returned to the table carrying a bowl of salad. He nodded tersely at his father and his lips

a a a S .

T a ? R a a a , a .

The a a a a a

a . H a , T a a .

Joan and Margaret ; , R a ,

size, and relieved, relieved to have had the bogeyman at last proved real. He called out to her the

distances at the table had grown immense Y , a a , a

back of his throat prevented him from making sense of it. From afar he heard Joan talking, levelly,

sensibly, reciting what they had prepared: it was a separation for the summer, an experiment. She

and Daddy both agreed it would be good for them; they needed space and time to think; they liked

each other but did not make each other happy enough, somehow.

J , a a a , - , , a , I

. Y .

5

R a , a a a a a a , a ;

was overtopped by another tumult, for John, who had been so reserved, now grew larger and

larger at a . P a . W

? a , a a . Y a

a .

Richard was startled into attempting to force words through his tears.

W a , a , T a a

other was the rest of the sent ; .

J a , . A a a , a , .

J a . W a a a ? . W

a . H a a a , a a a : Ha a

a. R a a J a a a a a , J

a a . F a , J a a J

pack, poked it into his mouth, let it hang from his lower lip, and squinted like a gangster.

Y a , R a a . Y . B

. O a .

The boy was lighting matches. Instead of holding them to his cigarette (for they had never

; a a a a ),

a , a , . H er a hiss and then a

, a a a . T a , R a tears, filled his vision; he

a . H a Ma a a , O , , a a

John, in response, break the cigarette in two and put the halves entirely into his mouth and chew,

sticking out his tongue to display the shreds to his sister.

Joan talked to him, reasoning a a a , . Ta a a

Da a I a A , a

a paper napkin into the leaves of his salad, fashioned a ball ofpaper and lettuce, and popped it into

his mouth, looking around the table a . N a . J a , B

a , a issed a plume of smoke.

6

Richard got up from this stifling table and led the boy outside. Though the house was in

twilight, the outdoors still brimmed with light, the lovely waste light of high summer. Both

a , J ttuce and paper and tobacco into the

pachysandra. He took him by the hand a a a , a a . Y

held on. They ran together up into the field, past the tennis court. The raw banking left by the

bulldozers was dotted with daisies. Past the court and a flat stretch where they used to play family

baseball stood a soft green rise glorious in the sun, each weed and species of grass as distinct

as illumination a . I , , R a . Y the only one who ever

a a a a .

S , a a a a a , J a , I not just the

a a , a , I a a , a a a , history

a a .

They sat on the crest of the rise, shaking and warm from their tears but easier in their voices,

a R a a a the weekdays long with homework,

the weekends spent in his room with model airplanes, while his parents murmured down below,

nursing their separation. How selfish, how blind, Richard thought; his eyes felt scoured. He told

, W a a . L a .

They had said what they could, but did not want the moment to heal shut, and talked on,

about the school, about the tennis court, whether it would ever again be as good as it had been that

first summer. They walked to inspect it and pressed a few more tapes more firmly down. A little

stiltedly, perhaps trying now to make too much of the moment, Richard led the boy to the spot in

the field where the view was best, of the metallic blue river, the emerald marsh, the scattered

islands velvety with shadow in the low light, the white a a a a . S , a . I

a . I .

I , J answered, impatiently. The moment had closed.

Back in the house, the others had opened some white wine, the champagne being drunk, and

still sat at the table, the three females, gossiping. Where Joan sat had become the head. She

, a a a , a a , A ?

W , a , , , a a .

7

In bed she explained, I I a I a . I a a

a . I a, a a a I a .

I , a . I . I a .

Y a . Y . You were having your way, making a general

a .

I a , a . G , a . S a a . J ,

returned to the house, had settled to a model airplane in his room, and kept shouting down to

, I O.K. N a .

A a , R a , , a a .

N a . N J .

T a a , J a a .

He ga a . Y a . V a . Thank you. G ,

realized he did not feel separated.

Y a D , . T a a a

the darkness; its cold breath, its near weight affected his chest. Of the four children, his elder son

a . J a a , T a I

.

I . I . Y .

Within minutes, her breathing slowed, became oblivious and deep. It was quarter tomidnight.

D a a -fourteen. Richard set the alarm for one. He

had slept atrociously for weeks. But whenever he closed his lids some glimpse of the last hours

scorched them J a a a a , B a a ,

sunstruck growth in the field where he and John had rested. The mountain before him moved

closer, moved within him; he was huge, momentous. The ache at the back of his throat felt stale.

His wife slept as if slain beside him. When, exasperated by his hot lids, his crowded heart, he rose

a , a . H , J a , if I couldundo it

a , I .

8

W ? a . T a a . G a , a a a

giving him courage. He put on shoes without socks in the dark. The children were breathing in

their rooms, the downstairs was hollow. In their confusion they had left lights burning. He turned

a , a . T a a . H a . H

moonlight on the road; it seemed a diaphanous companion, flickering in the leaves along the

roadside, haunting his rear-view mirror like a pursuer, melting under his headlights. The center of

town, not quite deserted, was eerie at this hour. A young cop in uniform kept company with a gang

of T-shirted kids on the steps of the bank. Across from the railroad station, several bars kept

open. Customers, mostly yo , a a a , a .

Vo ices shouted from cars as they passed; an immense conversation seemed in progress. Richard

parked and in his weariness put his head on the passenger seat, out of the commotion and wheeling

lights. It was as when, in the movies, an assassin grimly carries his mission through the jostle of a

carnival except the movies cannot show the precipitous, palpable slope you cling to within. You

cannot climb back down; you can only fall. The synthetic fabric of the car seat, warmed by his cheek,

confided to him an ancient, distant scent of vanilla.

A train whistle caused him to lift his head. It was on time; he had hoped it would be late. The

slender drawgates descended. The bell of approach tingled happily. The great metal body,

horizontally fluted, rocked to a stop, and sleepy teen-agers disembarked, his son among them.

Dickie did not show surprise that his father was meeting him at this terrible hour. He sauntered

to the car with two friends, b a a . H a H a a a

seat with an exhausted promptness that expressed gratitude. The friends got in the back, and

R a a a ; a .

H a , H a ?

G , a the back seat.

I , a .

I a O.K., D a , a a , a a a

unreason of the world had given him headaches, stomach aches, nausea. When the second friend

a a a , , Da , a a

! I a a a a !

D a ?

9

T a a .

T . R a a U-turn on the empty street. The drive home took a few

. T a a , a . R a , a , a , a

, a , I t to make your life easier. I

a a a I a , a a a a a

a . I a .

T a O.K. T a a a , , a a a .

Richard a a a a a , a

a a , a a a . I a , a ,

at least for you. It should have no practical effect on your life, thou a a

a . Y a , a go back to school in September. Your mother and I

a a a a ; a a a a a .

Y a , a , a of his breath, holding himself up. They turned the

corner; the church they erratically attended loomed like a gutted fort. The home of the woman

Richard hoped to marry stood across the green. Her bedroom light burned.

Y a I, a , a cided to separate. For the summer. Nothing legal, no

. W a . F a , a

a , a a a a a . Ha a ?

N , a . I a a honest, unemotional answer: true or false in a quiz.

Glad for the factual basis, Richard pursued, even garrulously, the details. His apartment

across town, his utter accessibility, the split vacation arrangements, the advantages to the

children, the added a a . D , a . D

?

Y .

H a ?

T a . J ; a a a a a a a a a

out of his napkin and told us how much he hate .

10

H . H ?

Y a . T a a M a . H

a .

H ? T a a a .

Y . Dickie, I want to tell you something. This last hour, waiting for your train to get in, has

been about the worst of my life. I hate this. Hate it. My father would have died before doing it to

. H , a . H a ountain on the boy. They were

home. Moving swiftly as a shadow, Dickie was out of the car, through the bright kitchen. Richard

a a , Wa a glass of milk a ?

N a .

Wa call the a a ?

N , a a . T a a a , a ; R a

for the slam that went with a tantrum. The door closed normally, gently. The sound was sickening.

Joan had sunk into that first deep trough of sleep and was slow to awake. Richard had to

a , I .

W a a ?

N . C a ? P a .

She left their room, without putting on a bathrobe. He sluggishly changed back into his

pajamas and walked down the hall. Dickie was already in bed, Joan was sitting beside him, and the

a a . W , a a the

moon? outlined her body through the nightie. Richard sat on the warm place she had indented

a mattress. H a , D a a a ?

I a a .

D a a ? I .

N .

11

A ?

Y a .

G . S a get up and go ? Y a a .

I a . T .

Away at school this winter he had learned for the first time that you can go short of sleep and

live. As an infant he had slept with an immobile, sweating intensity that had alarmed his baby-

sitters. In adolescence he had often been the first of the four children to go to bed. Even now, he

would go slack in the middle of a television show, a a a . O.K. G

boy. Dickie, listen. I love you so much, I never knew how much until now. No matter how this

wo , I a a . R a .

Richard bent to kiss an averted face but his son, sinewy, turned and with wet cheeks

a a a a , , a a a a a . I a a

moaned one word, the crucial, int : W ?

Why. It was a whistle of wind in a crack, a knife thrust, a window thrown open on emptiness.

The waiting white face was gone, the darkness was featureless. Richard had forgotten why.