Couples by John Updike Page A

Smearily smiling, his claret shirt muddy, Thorne sat up and showed them a trembling hand whose whitened little fingerstuck out askew. “Dislocated,” he said in a voice from which pain had squeezed all elasticity.
    Hanema, kneeling, blurted, “Jesus Freddy, I’m sorry. This is terrible. Sue me.”
    “It’s happened before,” Thorne said. He took the injured hand in his good one and grimaced and pulled. A snap softer than a twig breaking, more like a pod popping, shocked the silent circle. Freddy rose and held his hand, the little finger now aligned, before his chest as something tender and disgraced that must not be touched. He asked Angela, “Do you have surgical tape and anything for a splint—a tongue depressor, a popsicle stick? Even a spoon would do.”
    Rising with him, Hanema asked, “Freddy, will you be able to work?”
    Thorne smirked down at the other’s anxious face. He was feeling his edge enlarge, Foxy felt; she thought only women used their own pain as a weapon. “Oh,” he said, “after a month or so. I can’t go into somebody’s mouth wearing a plaster cast, can I?”
    “Sue me,” Hanema said. His face was a strange stretched mixture of freckles and pallor, of the heat of battle and contrition. The other players had divided equally into two sympathizing rings. Freddy Thorne, holding his hand before him, led Angela and Constantine and the neighbor boy and Saltz into the house, in triumph. Yet Foxy’s impression remained that he had been, in the minute before exploitation set in, instinctively stoical.
    “You didn’t do it on purpose,” little-Smith told Hanema. Foxy wondered why he, Thorne’s friend, had stayed outdoors, with the guilty. The patterns of union were many.
    “But I did ,” Piet said. “I deliberately tripped the poor jerk. The way he bumps with his belly gets me mad.”
    Gallagher said, “He doesn’t understand the game.” Gallagher would have been handsome but for something narrowed about the mouth, something predetermined and closed expressed by the bracketlike creases emphasizing the corners: prim tucks. Amid the whiskery Sunday chins his jaws were smooth-shaved; he had been to mass.
    She said, “I think you’re all awfully rough with each other.”
    “ C’est la guerre ,” little-Smith told her.
    Ken, in the lull, was practicing shots, perfecting himself. Foxy felt herself submerged in shadows and cross-currents while he was on high, willfully ignorant, hollow and afloat. His dribbling and the quivering rattle of the rim irritated her like any monologue.
    Hanema was beside her. Surprisingly, he said, “I hate being a shit and that’s how it keeps turning out. I beg him to come play and then I cripple him.”
    It was part confession, part brag. Foxy was troubled that he would bring her this, as if laying his head in her lap. She shied, speechless, angered that, having felt from an unexpected angle his rumored force, his orphan’s needful openness, she had proved timid, like Angela.
    The gravel driveway splashed again. An old maroon coupe pulled in, its windshield aswarm with reflected branches and patches of cloud. Janet Appleby got out on the driver’s side. She carried two sixpacks of beer. Georgene Thorne pushed from the other door holding in her arms a child of a cumbersome age, so wadded with clothes its legs were spread like the stalks of an H. By the scorched redness of its cheeks the child was an Appleby.
    Little-Smith and Hanema quickly went to greet them. Gallagher joined Ken at shooting baskets. Not wishing to eavesdrop, yet believing her sex entitled her to join the women,Foxy walked slowly down the drive to them as little-Smith caperingly described Freddy’s unfortunate finger—“le doigt disloqué .”
    Georgene said, “Well, I’ve told him not to try sports when he’s potted.” Her upper lids were pink, as if she had been lying in the sun.
    Piet Hanema told her, “But I asked him especially to come, so we could have four on a side.”