The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,43

He had a vision, of right angles, clean clapboards, unclouded windows, level and transparent spaces from which the organic – the impudent, importunate, unceasingly encroaching organic – had been finally scoured.

‘Daddy’s upset about something else, not about your hair,’ Joan explained to Dickie and John at dinner. As the pact wore on, the family gathered more closely about her; even the cats, he noticed, hesitated to take scraps from his hand.

‘What about, then?’ Judith asked, looking up from her omelette. She was sixteen and Richard’s only ally.

Joan answered, ‘Something grown-up.’ Her older daughter studied her for a moment, alertly, and Richard held his breath, thinking she might see. Female to female. The truth. The translucent vista of scoured space that was in Joan like a crystal tunnel.

But the girl was too young and, sensing an enemy, attacked her reliable old target, Dickie. ‘You,’ she said. ‘I don’t ever see you trying to help Daddy, all you do is make Mommy drive you to golf courses and ski mountains.’

‘Yeah? What about you,’ he responded weakly, beaten before he started, ‘making Mommy cook two meals all the time because you’re too pure to sully your lips with animal matter.’

‘At least when I’m here I try to help; I don’t just sit around reading books about dumb Billy Caster.’

‘Casper,’ Richard and Dickie said in unison.

Judith rose to her well-filled height; her bell-bottom hip-hugging Levi’s dropped an inch lower and exposed a mingled strip of silken underpants and pearly belly. ‘I think it’s atrocious for some people like us to have too many bushes and people in the ghetto don’t even have a weed to look at, they have to go up on their rooftops to breathe. It’s true, Dickie; don’t make that face!’

Dickie was squinting in pain; he found his sister’s body painful. ‘The young sociologist,’ he said, ‘flaunting her charms.’

‘You don’t even know what a sociologist is,’ she told him, tossing her head. Waves of fleshly agitation rippled down toward her toes. ‘You are a very spoiled and selfish and limited person.’

‘Puh puh, big mature,’ was all he could say, poor little boy overwhelmed by this blind blooming.

Judith had become an optical illusion in which they all saw different things: Dickie saw a threat, Joan saw herself of twenty-five years ago, Bean saw another large warmth-source that, unlike horses, could read her a bedtime story. John, bless him, saw nothing, or, dimly, an old pal receding. Richard couldn’t look. In the evening, when Joan was putting the others to bed, Judith would roll around on the sofa while he tried to read in the chair opposite. ‘Look, Dad. See my stretch exercises.’ He was reading My Million-Dollar Shots, by Billy Casper. The body must be coiled, tension should be felt in the back muscles and along the left leg at top of backswing. Illustrations, with arrows. The body on the sofa was twisting into lithe knots; Judith was double-jointed and her prowess at yoga may have been why Joan stopped doing it, outshone. Richard glanced up and saw his daughter arched like a staple, her hands gripping her ankles; a glossy bulge of supple belly held a navel at its acme. At the top of the backswing, forearm and back of the left hand should form a straight line. He tried it; it felt awkward. He was a born wrist-collapser. Judith watched him pondering his own wrist and giggled; then she kept giggling, insistently, flirting, trying it out. ‘Daddy’s a narcissist.’ In the edge of his vision she seemed to be tickling herself and flicking her hair in circles.

‘Judith!’ He had not spoken to her so sharply since, as a toddler, she had spilled sugar all over the kitchen floor. In apology he added, ‘You are driving me crazy.’

* * *

The fourth week, he went to New York, on business. When he returned, Joan told him during their kitchen drink, ‘This afternoon, everybody was being so cranky; you off, the weather lousy, I piled them all into the car, everybody except Judith; she’s spending the night at Margaret Merino’s –’

‘You let her? With that little tart and her druggy crowd? Are there going to be boys there?’

‘I didn’t ask. I hope so.’

‘Live vicariously, huh?’

He wondered if he could punch her in the face and at the same time grab the glass in her hand so it wouldn’t break. It was from a honeymoon set of turquoise Mexican glass of which only three were left. With their shared eye she saw his calculations