Authors: John Updike
Katie was a tall woman with a high glossy forehead that made her seem somewhat brittle and prim. Yet her figure was good, and her spirit unsatisfied. She had married Nick when
she was only twenty, not finishing college, and two children, a boy and a girl, had arrived rapidly, exhausting her breeding instinct. Now that both children were in school, her days stretched long; she had taken to doing household tasks better suited to an elderly spinster. Nick’s parents had died rather prematurely, leaving the young couple a great deal of handsome antique furniture, including a mahogany double-pedestal-base dining table and six Chippendale dining chairs whose old crewelwork seats had over the years become threadbare and stained. Katie picked six harmonizing but not identical floral needlepoint patterns and set about the long task of executing them—as if she needed some endless chore to fill the time between now and the grave. Nick had found such a chore for himself: he was paving the old cellar, mixing a few bags of sand and cement at a time, often descending after dinner and coming up, begrimed and blinking, well after Katie, wearied by the nightly rituals of putting the children to bed, had herself fallen asleep. The needlepointing hurt her eyes after an hour, but at her tender age she was resisting getting close-distance glasses.
The children made possible the first step, on the beach. Katie’s confidence was enhanced in a bathing suit; furthermore, there was a kind of emboldening democracy at the beach, so sunstruck and broad and murmurous. The tame tumult of its surf merged in the ear with the hum of bathers, the hundreds of exclamations and conversations all testifying to some central treasure, some hidden honey. Her eight-year-old, Chris, had joined another boy in building a sand castle; this boy, when the castle was undermined by a lunge of the tide, joined a group of children and mothers that included
Felicia Matthews and Joan Ledyard. Chris followed his new friend into their midst, and Katie hesitantly trailed after him, in case he was being a nuisance. “Not at all,” the elegantly brown Matthews woman told her, staring upwards with eyes scrunched small as diamonds in the sun.
There were several young mothers Katie didn’t know by sight, and she felt ungainly, standing. She was putting the others in her shadow. “Sit down if you’d like,” the Ledyard woman said, after a pause in which, Katie imagined, a silent debate had been held in the air. Katie sat inelegantly on the damp sand and listened as the other women chattered. Chris soon got bored; the boy whose castle he had helped build ignored him in favor of the more familiar playmates who clustered in this nest of beach chairs and reclining women. When Chris rejoined his sister, on a distant blanket, his mother had to follow. Katie tried to express in her goodbyes how grateful she was for these ten minutes of shared company; the responding farewells sounded faint and perfunctory, like wind chimes.
But a step had been made. She described, that evening, the encounter to Nick. “They seemed just terribly nice, and quite funny, really, their way of putting things.”
“For example.”
“Oh, I don’t know, it’s hard to remember. A lot of it has to do with the tone of voice. The way Felicia called her husband ‘the old man,’ and spoke of her children as ‘the littles.’ It doesn’t sound so funny when I say it, but in the context …”
“O.K.,” Nick said, anxious to get to his basement. Though fearful of rats, she had more than once gone down the cellar steps with him and tried to share his delight and sense of gradual triumph, each day’s gobs hardened by next day into an adamant gray chunk of floor. It was like an army—his army
of particles, consolidating, spreading to all the dark, cobwebbed corners. The foundation of the house had been made of fieldstones, laid up without mortar, and after the floor was finished Nick intended to cement and point all these stones, fixing them in place rigidly.
Now at the beach Katie sometimes dared sit with one or two of the wives of the set, if there were not too many. A group bigger than three she declined to join, imagining that she was winning points with her tact. Even when there were just two or three, she was aware of worlds of allusion that her presence was suppressing, allusions to scandals brewing or brewed, to gatherings that had taken place or would take place. The set in season played tennis and paddle tennis, went sailing and skiing and picnicking. In the late spring, Katie had gathered, there was an annual canoe trip down the river as far as the factory and the falls, and on Sundays in the autumn, the men played touch football in somebody’s field. “Oh, Nick played football in high school!” she volunteered one August day, when the subject had slipped into conversation; over these summer weeks Felicia and Tory and Joan had become a bit careless of their gossip in her presence. Katie had once regaled them with a word-picture of Nick and his basement and, since a comic husband seemed to be a ticket to acceptance by these women, she offered it again. “He played a floating end, or whatever they call those people who aren’t very strong and can’t throw the ball, either.”
There was a silence, washed across by the desultory sounds of the dying summer—the waves becalmed, the crowds thinned. “They may not be doing it this year,” Joan Ledyard at last said. “They’re all a year older.”
“But if they do and need somebody,” Katie persisted, blushing at her own shamelessness, “they should call Nick; it would be so
good
for him.”
When, a month later, the call did come, Katie was startled, even frightened, by the gravelly, barking man’s voice at the other end of the line. He didn’t identify himself and asked for Nick; she called her husband up from the cellar. Nick spoke to the man in grudging monosyllables. “Who on earth was it?” Katie asked when he had hung up.
His eyes, she thought, looked fishy behind the plastic goggles he wore to protect them from cement dust. “Some guy called Trevor Riddle. He’d heard I’d like to play touch football. I don’t know where he got that idea; I hate the damn game. I nearly got my neck broken playing football in high school.”
“You didn’t say no!”
“You heard me talking. I thanked him and said I’d keep it in mind. That’s as good as saying no.”
Katie was determined not to cry, though she felt as if a door had been slammed in her face. Nick lifted his goggles to see her better; she flounced away. That night, she dressed for bed not in the sheer persimmon-colored shortie that he liked and that was something of a Saturday-night tradition for them, but in the long-sleeved flannel nightgown he said made her look like an old lady.
The next day turned out to be an invitingly brisk September Sunday, with the smell of apples and hay in the air. After lunch, though he had promised the children a bicycle ride, Nick put on some old corduroys and a sweatshirt and his jogging shoes, and went off to play touch football. When he came back, he was limping; he had sprained his ankle. Also, his speech was slightly loud and slurred. There had been drinks, afterwards, at someone’s house. Again, Katie resisted tears; she had not been invited. He explained, “Only some of the wives came, and others weren’t there; I couldn’t figure out the system, and figured I’d have a quick sip and be right home.
Then I got to talking to some guy called Leadman, Leadbelly …”
“Ken Ledyard.”
“Right. About siding. He says they have a new Fiberglas clapboard now that breathes just like wood.”
“Nick, you’re drunk, and you’re not going to ruin this lovely old house with Fiberglas siding! It’s bad enough what you’ve done in the basement, smothering all the nice old dirt!” She dashed from the room as if to hide tears; but in truth she had remembered that she had turned down the lamb in the oven when Nick was so late coming home. It needed to be turned up again. And Katie needed to be alone with her new information, and to contemplate her next step.
“You should offer to have drinks here,” she told Nick one Sunday after he had hobbled home with grassy knees and glazed eyes. The post-football drinks rotated from house to house, he reported; he had been playing for six weeks, and it was nearly November. “I don’t know,” he said. “It might seem pushy.”
“Why wouldn’t it just seem courteous?”
“They seem pretty happy with things the way they are.”
“It’s all very well for you to say—you see them every week.”
“They’re not so great, actually. Kind of noisy and silly, really, and can’t talk about anything except each other. Why don’t you just come over sometime, toward the end of the game, and watch, and then tag along? A lot of the wives do that. I made a terrific catch today, you should have seen it—over the shoulder, running full tilt.”
“I wouldn’t
dream
of going anywhere where I wasn’t invited.”
“They don’t really in
vite
, you know. It’s just who’s there, and what develops.”
“Oh, you’re so
in
it’s killing. You could invite them next Sunday for the following.”
“Well … it’s awkward.”
“Exactly. Awkward is just how I find it, too,” Katie said, feeling her angry blush rise from her cheeks, through her forehead to her hairline.
The next Sunday he reported, “Brick Matthews said it sounded nice, but he wasn’t sure there’d still be touch football. It depends on the frost. They don’t like to play once there’s frost in the ground; it gets too slippery.”
“It sounds to me,” Katie said, “that it’s Brick Matthews who’s slippery. There’s plenty of lovely weather left, right through Thanksgiving. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want them to come. They’re
your
friends—you go take them all to the bar at the Amvets.”
The next Sunday afternoon, however, just in case, she tidied up the downstairs and prettily improvised a bar in the shell cupboard, with newly bought bottles and plastic glasses and paper cocktail napkins. The needlepoint was beginning to sting her eyes in the dusk, when the porch resounded with many heavy footsteps. The house trembled. Then there was a clamorous rapping of the door knocker, insistent and rude; but she opened the door smilingly. Nick, pale-faced and standing on one leg, was being supported between two large, muddy, red-faced men. “He’s sprained it again,” she said, before any of them could speak. More cars were drawing up to the curb, releasing men in sneakers and wives in quilted parkas and wool slacks. November had turned cold; there had been frost for several nights. This crowd stood on the sidewalk, staring up at the house—its many-mullioned shiny new
windows, its freshly painted and gilded blue-and-gold eagle plaque above the formal Georgian doorway—while the party on the porch negotiated.
“It may be worse than that,” one of the men supporting Nick told her, with a sheepish air of collusion. His was the rough voice that had alarmed Katie over the phone: Trevor Riddle.
“I heard something snap,” Nick said in that irritating whine he put on when he had a cold or a bad day at work. “Turned to make a catch and some clumsy bastard plowed right into me.”
“That was me,” the other supporting man explained. Katie recognized him, belatedly, as Brick Matthews; she had only seen him before at the historical society, in a three-piece gray business suit. Now he was wearing a dirty yellow cable-knit sweater and his hair stood out all around his head in stiff cedar-colored curls. “I tried to cut back, and slipped on the mud. The frost, you know, gets into the ground, and then it melts on the top.”
“I’m sure it’s just that same sprain,” Katie said. “Why don’t you all come in for a drink?”
Entering the house, the men seemed enormous, scarcely a one under six feet and all exuding animal warmth and a confident tang of sweat. The women, too, out of their bathing suits and into sweaters, bulked larger than Katie remembered. They moved toward the bar in a herd. While she rushed into the kitchen to replenish the ice, Tory Riddle and a dark-haired woman she didn’t know fussed over Nick, setting him up in the bargello wing chair and easing under his wounded ankle the silk-covered Newport footstool with the cabriole legs. Inherited
furniture that, because of its desiccated delicacy, Nick and Katie rarely used was suddenly thrust this way and that under a surge of friendly bodies. Two canework side chairs were brought forward from their basically ornamental position flanking the veneered card table that stood with half of its round folding top leaning silhouetted against the wall. The dark japanned chest that rested beneath one window, and off of whose golden, ghostly scene of men with bows and arrows hunting a maneless lion Katie was always clearing newspapers that Nick carelessly left there, now offered a perch for Joan Ledyard, who was using the little Minton porcelain basket as an ashtray. Neither Nick nor Katie smoked; suddenly there was a widespread need for ashtrays. Some of the men even puffed big cigars. On her way to the kitchen to look for suitable receptacles, she saw that the party had spilled over into the dining room, and that several wet rings were already whitening the table’s mahogany surface while Felicia Matthews and some tall man whose name Katie didn’t know were huddled close in conversation. As she was hurrying back down the hall with a paper towel, a tablecloth, and some saucers for ashtrays, Brick Matthews locked his furry hand around her forearm. “Why don’t you have a drink and relax?” he asked.
Something about him made her leap into
non sequiturs
. “I’m so worried about Nick,” she said. “Suppose his ankle is broken, like he said?”
“Suppose it is; another hour won’t make any difference. He’s on his second drink and feeling no pain. What about you?”
“Me?” Her thought was still aimed at wiping those rings before they sank into the finish.
“All summer my wife’s been raving to me about what a terrific figure this woman has down at the beach.”
“If you’re looking for your wife, she’s in the dining room talking to somebody.”
“Don’t I know it. What can I get you, Katie?”
“Get me?” He was one of those men whose chest hair comes up very high; above the neck of his sweatshirt there was a froth the color of pencil shavings.
“G-and-t, whiskey, Bloody Mary …”
“Just a white-wine spritzer,” she said. “Very weak.”
“I might have guessed,” he said, with cheerful disgust, and did not follow her into the dining room. Felicia’s conversation in there had deepened; averting her face as the tall, sulky-looking man poured words into her ear, she was plucking petals from the bowl of chrysanthemums Katie had arranged as a centerpiece and was rolling them into thin tubes she dropped one by one on the tabletop. Katie quickly, apologetically spread the cloth over the mess and retreated to the living room.