The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,42
as the week wore on, the cabbage withered; the crisp planar wound of each slice by the next day had browned and loosened. Stubbornly loyal, Richard cut and nibbled his slow way to the heart, which burned on his tongue so sharply that his taste buds even in their adult dullness were not disappointed; he remembered how it had been, the oilcloth-covered table where his grandmother used to ‘snitz’ cabbage into strings for sauerkraut and give him the leftover raw hearts for a snack. How they used to burn his tender mouth! His eyes would water with the delicious pain.
He did not buy another cabbage, once the first was eaten; analogously, he never returned to a mistress, once Joan had discovered and mocked her. Their eyes, that is, had married and merged to three, and in the middle, shared one, her dry female-to-female clarity would always oust his romantic mists.
Her lovers, on the other hand, he never discovered while she had them. Months or even years later she would present an affair to him complete, self-packaged as nicely as a cabbage, the man remarried or moved to Seattle, her own wounds licked in secrecy and long healed. So he knew, coming home one evening and detecting a roseate afterglow in her face, that he would discover only some new layer of innocence. Nevertheless he asked, ‘What have you been up to today?’
‘Same old grind. After school I drove Judith to her dance lesson, Bean to the riding stable, Dickie to the driving range.’
‘Where was John?’
‘He stayed home with me and said it was boring. I told him to go build something, so he’s building a guillotine in the cellar; he says the sixth grade is studying revolution this term.’
‘What’s he using for a blade?’
‘He flattened an old snow shovel he says he can get sharp enough.’
Richard could hear the child banging and whistling below him. ‘Jesus, he better not lose a finger.’ His thoughts flicked from the finger to himself to his wife’s even white teeth to the fact that two weeks had passed since they gave up sex.
Casually she unfolded her secret. ‘One fun thing, though.’
‘You’re taking up yoga again.’
‘Don’t be silly; I was never anything to him. No. There’s an automatic car wash opened up downtown, behind the pizza place. You put three quarters in and stay in the car and it just happens. It’s hilarious.’
‘What happens?’
‘Oh, you know. Soap, huge brushes that come whirling around. It really does quite a good job. Afterwards, there’s a little hose you can put a dime in to vacuum the inside.’
‘I think this is very sinister. The people who are always washing their cars are the same people who are against abortion. Furthermore, it’s bad for it. The dirt protects the paint.’
‘It needed it. We’re living in the mud now.’
Last fall, they had moved to an old farmhouse surrounded by vegetation that had been allowed to grow wild. This spring, they attacked the tangle of Nature around them with ominously different styles. Joan raked away dead twigs beneath bushes and pruned timidly, as if she were giving her boys a haircut. Richard scorned such pampering and attacked the problem at the root, or near the root. He wrestled vines from the barn roof, shingles popping and flying; he clipped the barberries down to yellow stubble; he began to prune some overweening yews by the front door and was unable to stop until each branch became a stump. The yews, a rare Japanese variety, had pink soft wood maddeningly like flesh. For days thereafter, the stumps bled amber.
The entire family was shocked, especially the two boys, who had improvised a fort in the cavity under the yews. Richard defended himself: ‘It was them or me. I couldn’t get in my own front door.’
‘They’ll never grow again, Dad,’ Dickie told him. ‘You didn’t leave any green. There can’t be any photosynthesis.’ The boy’s own eyes were green; he kept brushing back his hair from them, with that nervous lady-like gesture of his long-haired generation.
‘Good,’ Richard stated. He lifted his pruning clippers, which had an elbow hinge for extra strength, and asked, ‘How about a haircut?’
Dickie’s eyes rounded with fright and he backed closer to his brother, who, though younger, had even longer hair. They looked like two chunky girls, blocking the front door. ‘Or why don’t you both go down to the cellar and stick your heads in the guillotine?’ Richard suggested. In a few powerful motions he mutilated a flowering trumpet vine.