Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike

the shimmering white road, and came back along the beach to cool our feet, and came to a cemetery that was being nibbled away by the sea. There were no signs of an attempt to halt the gentle erosion; one tombstone was teetering, another had fallen upside down, and fragments of a third were being washed and ground into sand. We went up into the cemetery, and there, amid the French
colons
and the tessellated patterns suggestive of voodoo and the conch-shell borders and the paper flowers and the real flowers that looked like paper,my wife, starved and weary, sat on a crypt and dried her feet with her bandana and put on her shoes. I took her picture; I have the slide.
    Years before, when we were at college, a girl whose major was biology and whose hobby was fungi used to make me bicycle with her to ancient burying-grounds in Cambridge and Concord. There, on the tipping old Puritan slate tombstones half sunk in the earth and sometimes wearing artfully shaped weatherproof hats of lead, she would show me lichen, in a surprising variety of colors, each round specimen, scarcely thicker than a stain, somehow an individual creature or, rather, two creatures—a fungus living symbiotically with an alga. Whitish, brownish, bluish, the lichens enforced their circles upon the incised, uniquely graceful Puritan lettering and the winged skulls which, as the 17th century softened into the 19th, became mere angels, with human faces. She was, perhaps because she majored in biology, wonderful at sex—talk of oral love!—and the lichen, the winged skulls, the sweaty ache in my calves from bicycling, and her plump cleavage as she bent low for a determined inspection and scraping all merged in a confused lazy anticipation of our return and my reward, her round mouth. Cemeteries, where women make themselves at home, are in one sense dormitories, rows of beds.
    “But the
view
is so lovely,” my mother said to me. We were standing on the family burial plot, in Pennsylvania. Around us, and sloping down the hill, were the red sandstone markers of planted farmers, named and dated in the innocent rectangular lettering that used to be on patent-medicine labels. My grandfather’s stone, rough-hewn granite with the family name carved in the form of bent branches, did not seem very much like him. My grandmother’s Christian name, cut below his, was longer and, characteristically, dominated while taking the subservient position. Elsewhere on the plot were his parents, and great-aunts and uncles I had met only at spicy-smelling funerals in my remotest childhood. My mother paced off two yards, saying, “Here’s Daddy and me. See how much room is left?”
    “But she”—I didn’t have to name my wife—“has never
lived
here.” I was again a child at one of those dreaded family gatherings on dark holiday afternoons—awkward and stuffed and suffocating under the constant need for tact. Only in Pennsylvania, among my kin, am I pressured into such difficult dance-steps of evasion and placation. Every buried coffin was a potential hurt feeling. I tried a perky sideways jig, hopefullyhumorous, and added, “And the children would feel crowded and keep everybody awake.”
    She turned her face and gazed downward at the view—a lush valley, a whitewashed farmhouse, a straggling orchard, and curved sections of the highway leading to the city whose glistening tip, a television relay, could just be glimpsed five ridges in the distance. She had expected my evasion—she could hardly have expected me to pace off my six feet greedily and plant stakes—but had needed to bring me to it, to breast my refusal and the consequence that, upon receiving her and my father, the plot would be closed, would cease to be a working piece of land. Why is it that nothing that happens to me is as real as these dramas that my mother arranges around herself, like Titania calling Peaseblossom and Mustardseed from the air? Why is it that everyone else lacks the sanguine, corporeal,