Authors: John Updike
So now you can see how I have this fear of being locked out by you two. I am in disgrace, I have flubbed my rôle. You have been so admirably the daughter—lisping your first words (“Dada,” “Mama,” and then “coogie” from the Cookie Monster on “Sesame Street”), mastering toilet-training and small-muscle motor control just when Dr. Spock thought you should, pitching for that mixed-sex softball team that went all the way to the semifinals in Danvers when you were thirteen, growing flaxen-haired and just the right amount of buxom and getting into Yale so smartly when Harvard couldn’t accept any more legacies and now for your junior year abroad pondering the Metaphysicals (your grandfather would be so proud!—he doted on them, and Milton and Spenser and Marvell) in some fogey old don’s musty digs with its electric fire (this is more my imagining of it than anything you’ve written in your I must say very few letters) and lighting up High Street and Carfax with your wide-eyed long-haired easy-striding American beauty and on weekends having champagne and strawberries with the sons of the nobility just as in “Brideshead Revisited,” which you will remember we enjoyed so much, you and I together, you staying up to watch it even though it was school the next day, not so very long ago. (Am I wrong to date your passion for things English from those shows?) You have played and are playing so splendidly the rôle of Daughter and your father impeccably assumed the part of Dada but I seem to have forgotten my lines and wandered offstage. Will you forgive me? (Your father’s forgiveness, oddly, doesn’t interest me at all.)
Twenty is an age when your parents still think of you as a child and if you were to die or get married one would sadly say “only twenty” but as I recall that age there is little “only” about it and I must appeal to you as another woman to understand
me, to simply
know
. And having so appealed I realize, or seem to realize, in this rather terrifying motel room where the air-conditioner rattles as if mounted off-center and people seem to keep bumping against the door as they go by in the hall to the ice machine, that of course there is no question of condemnation, that you and I will continue to love each other as we did that first minute, when you gripped my finger with this little violet baby hand the texture of a wilted flower, because we are aspects of the same large person, that even in that first minute all your eggs (this is an incredible physiological fact I recently read in
The New England Journal of Medicine
which your father gets) were tiny and perfect in you and you were
my
egg, tiny and perfect. I am crying as I write this and perhaps make insufficient sense in the fashion of maudlin people but do beg you to believe that I am your mother still.
Study well, my sweetheart. When I try to picture you to myself I see a shining blond head bent over a book. Your love of books, from Babar to Tolkien and romances with those embossed titles in lurid colors to Austen and Dickens on up to these unpleasant modern writers who try to make us all feel shabby was so intense your father and I used to whisper what had we done wrong, what parental failing of ours was to blame. When you were in your early teens, after your softball craze but before “Brideshead” caught your fancy, I would sit and watch television—these very stupid well-intentioned shows with minority families cavorting around or police stations or high schools and the canned laughter heaving away—hoping you would be tempted to join me in that cozy corner room upstairs, with the heavy drapes and your father’s old medical books and my father’s priceless editions, because I imagined this was what normal American children should
be watching. But no, my dear elf-child, you stayed in your room wrapped in lovely contortions around a book, while I of course got hooked and had to watch these idiotic stories to the end. Of course I used to worry at your snubbing television and me together but now I see that the children we have are just miracles like any other, like geysers or glass skyscrapers or mountains of maple trees in fall in Vermont, and that we have nothing to do with creating them—our job is to stand and wonder. Our job is to marvel and love.
Study well, and never be tempted by drugs.
People
(which I see only in the dentist’s office, but must say I do devour eagerly there) and the
National Enquirer
(which Irving my yoga instructor is devoted to for its spiritual dimensions, its ESP and UFO news) are so full of these young English nobility and their dangerous drug habits that they pick up in imitation of the rock stars, out of class guilt and a subconscious Marxist wish to destroy themselves I suppose. But there’s no reason for an American girl to get involved in any of that. Your mother’s not a churchgoer as you know but I do believe firmly that our body as God made it, with no additives, not only lasts longest but is most
fun
. And along the same lines don’t get too infatuated with male homosexuals. I know they must seem, especially with those English accents and marvellous high rosy complexions, very amusing and charming and unthreatening but remember, dearest, they don’t really
like
women. They think women are strange, too strange to deal with, and competitors furthermore. Normal men think women are strange too but they don’t try to steal other men from us and at least up to your mother’s generation had developed a certain delusional system around our strangeness that could be quite touching—they treated us like handicapped persons, opening doors and explaining our needs to waiters as
though we couldn’t talk. Well that may be gone but I’m sure that enough of something similar remains for you to concentrate on nice normal boys if you can find any in that dear decadent old country.
I must be tired all my commas are dropping away. About an hour ago there was a strange kind of rodeo in the parking lot—low-slung cars covered with glittery paint prowling in noisy circles, and then there was a quarrel just outside my door in an appalling language I realized was Japanese! In fact in the coffee shop I was surprised at how many Japanese there were, as if I had gone farther west than I wanted. Tomorrow I must head east again, driving into the desert in my rented car—not a dreadfully perilous adventure perhaps but enough to make a middle-aged lady’s heart rise in her throat. I must end, darling. I must let you and me go to bed. I began by feeling quite prickly and apologetic and defensive toward you but now feel quite close. I feel you are with me. Part of you, of course, with part of me. Write me at this address: c/o Ashram Arhat, Forrest, AZ 85077. Doesn’t it sound like the end of the world? Do try to be a more conscientious correspondent than you have been—I am so alone now. And
don’t give the address to your father
.
Much
much
love,
Mother
April 23
Dear Dr. Podhoretz—
I am sorry, but I am going to miss my cleaning appointment next Tuesday the 29th and don’t know when I can make another. As you can see from the postmark I am a long way
from Swampscott. But I promise to keep flossing and using the rubber tip on my gums. I certainly don’t want to undo your good work and go through all that oral surgery again! Once was enough!!
Cordially,
Sarah Worth (Mrs. Charles)
April 23
Dear Shirlee—
I’m afraid I’m going to miss my hair appointment next week after all, after all the trouble we went to to find an ideal time when I wouldn’t get caught in either rush hour. My husband and I are taking a quite unexpected vacation in the romantic Far West. We’re about in fact to get into the car and drive hundreds of miles, right past Palm Springs where Bob Hope and President Ford have their fabulous homes! I’ll phone you when I get back—by that time my hair may be down to my waist! Your rinse should be kept up and I’ll pick up some Clairol at a drugstore—Darkest Brown I think is better for me than the Natural Black, which tends as we know to kill the gleam. I do hope things begin to work out better with Martin and his new probation officer, and that Eldridge’s dyslexia therapy continues to work wonders. He is such a cute boy—the day he came into the beauty parlor and asked each woman in a chair if her boyfriend lived with her or just came around! As we agreed last time, it would probably be less unsettling for him if his father didn’t come around at all—but then life is so complex, isn’t it? It’s so hard to know how totally we’re supposed to live for others, and what we may do for ourselves.
Say hello for me to Marcus and Foster and Annette. Not
to mention the meter maid on Newbury Street who always seemed to be there
the very moment
my meter ran out!
Your customer and friend,
Sally Worth
April 23, 24
Dear Mother—
I’m
exhausted
from driving in the desert for hours but wanted to drop you a note to counterbalance whatever alarming stories Charles is pouring into your ears. It is true I’ve left him but for ten years more or less it’s felt every morning and midnight as if
he’s
left
me
. Ever since my second miscarriage and our realizing that Pearl was the only child we would ever have there’s been this coldness and tension between us that you surely have noticed on your visits, though perhaps you haven’t—Charles always seemed, frankly, more your kind of man than mine. You and he did use to get together with your martinis and purr, over exactly what piece of catnip I could never decide, and then decided it was
me
—me as some kind of possibly lovable but certainly messy and very likely untrainable discipline problem. You two shared a curious dry ability to without exactly saying anything make me feel
dirty
—my hair untidy, my feet too big, my skin too swarthy, I didn’t know, people don’t ever know what’s wrong with them, they’ll believe any bad thing. Whereas Daddy, as you remember, never
did
warm to him, though he tried, with that wonderful gentlemanly nature of his, but after Charles kept questioning his calls those Sundays when they played singles on the grass courts at Longwood he really stopped trying. Also, Charles was so humorless and whatever Daddy’s other faults he was
just the opposite, always so sly and wry, such a tease though I’m not sure you always knew when he was teasing, as I did.
At any rate I’m not writing to justify myself—my God, I’m forty-two!—but to let you know on the wing as it were that I’m physically well and you’re not to worry. There’s no other man, not really, not the way you think, but I did feel my entire flight out here the day before yesterday taking place in an upholding atmosphere of
love
—love streaming against my face and chest like the sunset light in that clipper ship we had framed above the big carved mantel in Dedham. I used to look at the picture as a little girl until I felt myself to be a mermaid in the waves, looking up at this artifact of men from another world—the masts, the riggings, the portholes, the wooden woman on the prow. All the details of that picture—the froth, the clouds, their little dabbed-on crests of sunset red—seemed magical to me, a piece of a Heaven I would some day enter. Think of me as still that little girl. Think of this episode now as my continuing my education. In fact it is like that, back to school, but school where my real innermost self, my
atman
, will be taught to free itself from
maya
and
karma
, from all the trappings of
prakriti
. Trapped among trappings—isn’t that what we all are? Women, especially. I loved the way you lightened yourself so drastically after Daddy died and you went to Florida, but when I was there in December you seemed to have accumulated so many glass-and-wrought-iron tables and splashy pink mildew-proof sofas and driftwood sculpture and shadowboxed paintings on black felt I felt claustrophobic again, just like back in Dedham with all of Daddy’s collections and your nice things from the Prices and the dark walnut furniture, the lancet-window breakfront and Gothic sideboard, from Great-granddaddy Perkins’s Medford place.
Speaking of which, I had such a strange hallucination today, while driving through the desert. There
is
this shimmer, you
do
see mirages, they become very common—lakes with not just water but what look like beachfront cottages and I could have sworn sailboats and (this is the point) at one point a big rambling Victorian brown-shingled structure being reflected in the water just like that lodge in Maine we went to once or twice when I was very little to visit Great-granddaddy Perkins in the summer—this impossibly ancient man with a beard smelling of mentholated cough drops who took me by the hand to the edge of the porch to show me where the red-squirrel family lived in the hickory tree. He said the red were smaller but fiercer than the gray and drove them out. He seemed to think their being red squirrels would greatly interest me but I didn’t know they were rarer than the gray and expected all squirrels to wear little trousers like in Beatrix Potter. How stupid children are.
What I want to say is,
Don’t let Charles con you
. To him I was another piece of furniture and unless I got coffee spilled on me or squeaked like a rusty door he never gave me a glance. You and he have always tended to gang up on me and as Pearl would say I’m through with guilt trips.
Through
, Mother.
Next morning. The words were beginning to blur before my eyes and I could hardly hold my head up. Also there seemed to be a wolf snuffling and scratching just outside my window, trying to get some lid off something, though maybe it was a raccoon or if they don’t have those out here a gopher. And what I think must be coyotes off in the distance, yipping and yowling, saying something to each other all night and being somehow ventriloquists so their voices came from all sides of
me and seemed right in the room. There was a full moon last night. I shouldn’t have broken off in the middle of my letter for my dreams all night were of
you
, you when much younger, moving around the Dedham place with a kind of angelic swiftness and telling me to sit up straight and
never
rest my left hand on the table while eating. I was setting the dinner table and couldn’t for the life of me remember what side of the plate the fork went on—I have this problem with left-right sometimes when driving and people are giving me rapid directions, and though I know you always deny it I
still
have this feeling I was meant to be left-handed and you and Mrs. Resnick in Miss Grandison’s Day School’s first grade
forced
me to be right-handed; they say you’re cross-wired for life if that happens. Anyway, tired as I was, I hardly slept. Dawn out here comes with a kind of snap, like those metal shutters being rolled up in Italy, and by nine-thirty it’s already hot. But dry—I had that usual New England April cold when I left and after less than forty-eight hours my head feels clear. I do hope your back is better now that Boca Raton is beginning to swelter again. What you’ve always called rheumatism the doctors and the television commercials seem to think is
osteoporosis
, bone loss due to improper diet. You never drank milk and all that frantic dieting to keep getting yourself into your same dresses all those years must have taken its nutritional toll. It’s not too late—you can buy these calcium supplements at any drug- or health-food store, and if you don’t rush the dose at first, there’s no constipation. Also, you
must
wear number 15—Total Protection—sun screen when you go to the beach; the buildup of actinic damage over the years is cumulative and at your age the circulation doesn’t carry away the damaged DNA like it used to. In fact, at your age you shouldn’t be going to the beach at all—when Charles and I were down at
Christmas I was
shocked
to see how brown you were. You looked dyed, frankly, and with your tinted hair the effect was honestly bizarre. It’s not as if you have naturally tanning skin, the way Daddy did and I do. Use lotions with PABA and take vitamin A, 500 mg. twice a day. Super stuff, A. Good for skin, eyes, insomnia, and cancer.