Couples by John Updike Page B

Such a sad broad face, growing old without wisdom, alert and strained.
    “Oh, he would have come anyway. You don’t think he’d sit around all Sunday afternoon with just me .”
    “Why not?” Piet said, and Foxy imagined hostility in his eyes as he gazed at her. “Don’t you want to go inside and see how he is?”
    “He’s all right,” she said. “Isn’t Angela with him? Let them alone. He’s happy.”
    Janet and Harold were conferring urgently, in whispers. Their conversation seemed logistical, involving schedules and placement of cars and children. When the Appleby infant seized a cat on the lawn and tried to lift it by its hindquarters, as if spilling a bag of candy out, it was little-Smith who went and pried it loose, while Janet held her face in this idle moment up to the sun. The cat, calico, with a mildewed eye, ran off and hid in the lilac hedge. Foxy asked Hanema, “Is that yours?”
    “The cat or the child?” he asked, as if also aware that the child’s parentage seemed in flux.
    “The calico cat. We have a cat called Cotton.”
    “ Do bring Cotton to the next basketball game,” Georgene Thorne said. She added, throwing an athletic arm toward the woods, “I can’t see the children for the trees,” as if this explained the rudeness of her first remark, with its implied indignation at Foxy’s being here at all.
    Hanema explained, “She belongs to the dairy down the road but the children sometimes feed it. They let the damn thing into the house full of fleas and now I have them.”
    Freddy Thorne came out of the house. His little finger was bandaged to a green plastic picnic spoon. The pad of his fingertip rested prettily in the bowl and the curve of the handle made a very dainty fit. That Angela had improvised this strengthened Foxy’s sense of illicit affection between these two. Freddy was plainly proud.
    “Oh Freddy,” Janet said, “it’s just gorgeous.” She was wearing white slacks so snug they had horizontally wrinkled along her pelvis. The nap of her turquoise velour jersey changed tint as it rounded the curve of her breasts; as she moved her front was an electric shimmer of shadow. The neck was cut to reveal a slash of mauve skin. Her lips had been painted to be a valentine but her chalky face needed sleep. Like her son she was thin-skinned and still being formed.
    Freddy said, “The kid did it.”
    Constantine’s young neighbor explained, “At camp last summer we had to take First Aid.” His voice emerged reedy and shallow from manhood’s form: a mouse on a plinth.
    Eddie Constantine said, “He comes over to the house and massages Carol’s back.”
    Freddy asked, “Oh. She has a bad back?”
    “Only when I’ve been home too long.”
    Ken and Gallagher stopped playing and joined the grown-ups.
    The sixpacks were broken open and beer cans were passed around. “I despise these new tabs,” little-Smith said, yanking. “Everybody I know has cut thumbs. It’s the new stigmata.” Foxy felt him grope for the French for “stigmata.”
    Janet said, “I can’t do it, I’m too weak and hung. Could you ?” She handed her can to—Ken!
    All eyes noticed. Harold little-Smith’s nose tipped up and his voice rose nervously. “Freddy Thorne,” he taunted. “Spoonfinger. The man with the plastic digit. Le doigt plastique .”
    “Freddy, honestly, what a nuisance,” Georgene said, and Foxy felt hidden in this an attempt to commiserate.
    “No kidding,” Constantine said, “how will you get in there? Those little crevices between their teeth?” He was frankly curious and his eyes, which Foxy for a moment saw full on, echoed, in the absence of intelligence, aluminum and the gray of wind and the pearly width low in the sky at high altitudes. He had been there, in the metallic vastness above the boiling clouds, and was curious how Freddy would get to where he had to go.
    “With a laser beam,” Thorne said, and the green spoon became a death ray that he pointed, saying zizz