The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,38

deep, like dinosaur footprints.

Did my children sense the frivolity of our Easter priesthoods? The youngest used to lie in her bed in the smallest of the upstairs rooms and suck her thumb and stare past me at something in the dark. Our house, in her, did surely possess the dimension of dread that imprints every surface on the memory, that makes each scar on the paint a clue to some terrible depth. She was the only child who would talk about death. Tomorrow was her birthday. ‘I don’t want to have a birthday. I don’t want to be nine.’

‘But you must grow. Everybody grows. The trees grow. ’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Don’t you want to be a big girl like Judith?’

‘No.’

‘Then you can wear lipstick, and a bra, and ride your bicycle even on Central Street.’

‘I don’t want to ride on Central Street.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because then I will get to be an old old lady and die.’

And her tears well up, and the man with her is dumb, as all the men ever with her will be on this point dumb, in this little room where nothing remains of us but scuffmarks and a half-scraped Snoopy decal on the window frame. If we still lived here, it would be time to put the screens in the windows.

Crocuses are up at the old house; daffodils bloom at the new. The children who had lived in the new house before us left Superballs under the radiators for us to find. In the days of appraisal and purchase, we used to glimpse these children skulking around their house, behind bushes and banisters, gazing at us, the usurpers of their future. In the days after they moved out but before our furniture moved in, we played hilarious games in the empty rooms – huge comic ricochets and bounces. Soon the balls became lost again. The rooms became crowded. We had moved in.

Tenderly, musingly, the plumber shows me a sawed-off section of the pipe that leads from the well to our pressure tank. The inside diameter of the pipe is reduced to the size of his finger by mineral accretions – a circle of stony layers thin as rolled-up paper. It suggests a book seen endwise, but one of those books not meant to be opened, that priests wisely kept locked. ‘See,’ he says, ‘this has built up over forty, fifty years. I remember my dad and me putting in the pump, but this pipe was here then. Nothing you can do about it, minerals in the water. Nothing you can do about it but dig it up and replace it with inch-and-a-quarter, inch-and-a-half new.’

I imagine my lawn torn up, the great golden backhoe trampling my daffodils, my dollars flooding away. Ineffectually, I protest.

The plumber sighs, as poets do, with an eye on the audience. ‘See, keep on with it like this, you’ll burn out your new pump. It has to work too hard to draw the water. Replace it now, you’ll never have to worry with it again. It’ll outlast your time here.’

My time, his time. His eyes open wide in the unspeaking presences of corrosion and flow. We push out through the bulkhead; a blinding piece of sky slides into place above us, fitted with temporary, timeless clouds. All around us, we are outlasted.

THE RED-HERRING THEORY

THE PARTY WAS OVER. Their friends had come, shuffled themselves, been reshuffled, worn thin with the evening and then, papery post-midnight presences, had conjured themselves out the door. The Maples were left with each other and a profusion of cigarette butts and emptyish glasses. The dishes were stacked dirty in the kitchen, the children slept in innocence upstairs. Still, the couple, with the hysterical after-energy of duty done, refused to go to bed but instead sat in a living room grown suddenly hollow and huge.

‘What messy people,’ Joan said, perched upright in a director’s chair of natural wood and green canvas. ‘Grinding Fritos into a shag rug. They’re so sloppy.’ Richard saw that she was in a judgmental mood; her pronouncements, when she was in this mood, fascinated him.

‘Isn’t that how we act,’ he asked, sprawled on the off-white sofa, its pillows battered by a succcession of bodies, ‘when we go out?’ The seats they had chosen placed Joan higher, and displayed to his view the admirable clean line of her jaw.

‘Not at all,’ she said positively. ‘We clean up what we spill. We always leave together, too.’

‘That was odd,’ Richard agreed. ‘Do you think Jim was sick, or mad?’

‘Maybe