The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,41
I’m even a little bit alive?’
‘A live for other people, but not for me.’
‘You sounded just like Ruth, saying that. You’ve even caught her self-pity. Come on. Help me clean up this mess.’
‘A mess it is,’ he admitted. But clearing it away, arranging all these receptacles in the racks of the dishwasher and then shepherding them back, spotless, to their allotted spaces in the cupboard, felt like another layer of confusion, a cover-up. Richard stayed on the sofa, trying to see through the tangle to the light. Joan was on to Ruth; that space was gone. There remained one area of opportunity, one way to beat the system; its simplicity made him smile. Sleep with your red herring.
SUBLIMATING
THE MAPLES AGREED that, since sex was the only sore point in their marriage, they should give it up: sex, not the marriage, which was eighteen years old and stretched back to a horizon where even their birth pangs, with a pang, seemed to merge. A week went by. On Saturday, Richard brought home in a little paper bag a large raw round cabbage. Joan asked, ‘What is that?’
‘It’s just a cabbage.’
‘What am I supposed to do with it?’ Her irritability gratified him.
‘You don’t have to do anything with it. I saw Mack Dennis go into the A & P and went in to talk to him about the new environment commission, whether they weren’t muscling in on the conservation committee, and then I had to buy something to get out through the checkout counter, so I bought this cabbage. It was an impulse. You know what an impulse is.’ Rubbing it in. ‘When I was a kid,’ he went on, ‘we always used to have a head of cabbage around; you could cut a piece off to nibble instead of a candy. The hearts were best. They really burned your mouth.’
‘O.K., O.K.’ Joan turned her back and resumed washing dishes. ‘Well, I don’t know where you’re going to put it; since Judith turned vegetarian the refrigerator’s already so full of vegetables I could cry’
Her turning her back aroused him; it usually did. He went closer and thrust the cabbage between her face and the sink. ‘Look at it, darley. Isn’t it beautiful? It’s so perfect.’ He was only partly teasing; he had found himself, in the A & P, ravished by the glory of the pyramided cabbages, the mute and glossy beauty that had waited ages for him to rediscover it. Not since preadolescence had his senses opened so innocently wide: the pure sphericity, the shy cellar odor, the cannonball heft. He chose, not the largest cabbage, but the roundest, the most ideal, and carried it naked in his hand to the checkout counter, where the girl, with a flicker of surprise, dressed it in a paper bag and charged him thirty-three cents. As he drove the mile home, the secret sphere beside him in the seat seemed a hole he had drilled back into reality. And now, cutting a slice from one pale cheek, he marvelled across the years at the miracle of the wound, at the tender compaction of the leaves, each tuned to its curve as tightly as a guitar string. The taste was blander than his childhood memory of it, but the texture was delicious in his mouth.
Bean, their baby, ten, came into the kitchen. ‘What is Daddy eating?’ she asked, looking into the empty bag for cookies. She knew Daddy as a snack-sneaker.
‘Daddy bought himself a cabbage,’ Joan told her.
The child looked at her father with eyes in which amusement had been prepared. There was a serious warmth that Mommy and animals, especially horses, gave off, and everything else had the coolness of comedy. ‘That was silly,’ she said.
‘Nothing silly about it,’ Richard said. ‘Have a bite.’ He offered her the cabbage as if it were an apple. He envisioned inside her round head leaves and leaves of female psychology, packed so snugly the wrinkles dovetailed.
Bean made a spitting face and harshly laughed. ‘That’s nasty,’ she said. Bolder, brighter-eyed, flirting: ‘You’re nasty.’ Trying it out.
Hurt, Richard said to her, ‘I don’t like you either. I just like my cabbage.’ And he kissed the cool pale dense vegetable once, twice, on the cheek; Bean gurgled in astonishment.
Her back still turned, Joan continued from the sink, ‘If you had to buy something, I wish you’d remembered Calgonite. I’ve been doing the dishes by hand for days.’
‘Remember it yourself,’ he said airily. ‘Where’s the Saran Wrap for my cabbage?’ But