Couples by John Updike Page A

farewell.

Next Sunday, a little past noon, when Foxy had just returned from church and with a sigh had dropped her veiled hat onto the gate-legged table where the telephone sat, it impudently rang. She knew the voice: Piet Hanema. She had been thinking of calling him all week and therefore was prepared, though they had never really spoken, to recognize his voice, more hesitant and respectful than that of the other local men, with a flattish blurred midwestern intonation. He asked to speak to Ken. She went into the kitchen and deliberately didn’t listen, because she wanted to.
    All week she had been unable against Ken’s silent resistance to call the contractor, and now her hands trembled as if guiltily. She poured herself a glass of dry vermouth. Really, church was getting to be, as the weather grew finer, a sacrifice. Magnolia buds swollen by heat leaned in the space of air revealed by the tilted ventilation pane of commemorative stained glass, birds sang in the little late-Victorian cemetery between thechurch and the river, the sermon dragged, the pews cracked restlessly. Ken came back from the phone saying, “He asked me to play basketball at two o’clock at his place.”
    Basketball was the one sport Ken had ever cared about; he had played for Exeter and for his Harvard house, which he had told her as a confession, it had been so unfashionable to do. Foxy said, “How funny.”
    “Apparently he has a basket on his barn wall, with a little asphalt court. He said in the spring, between skiing and tennis, some of the men like to play. They need me to make six, for three on a side.”
    “Did you say you would?”
    “I thought you wanted to go for a walk on the beach.”
    “We can do that any time. I could walk by myself.”
    “Don’t be a martyr. What is that, dry vermouth?”
    “Yes. I developed a taste for it at the Guerins’.”
    “And then don’t forget we have Ned and Gretchen tonight.”
    “They won’t get here until after eight, you know how arrogant Cambridge people are. Call him back and tell him you’ll play, it’ll do you good.”
    Ken confessed, “Well, I left it that I might show up.”
    Foxy laughed, delighted at having been deceived. “Well if you told him yes why are you being so sneaky about it?”
    “I shouldn’t leave you here alone all afternoon.”
    Because you’re pregnant, the implication was. His oppressive concern betrayed him. They had gone childless too long; he feared this change and added weight. Foxy made herself light, showed herself gay. “Can’t I come along and watch? I thought this was a wives’ town.”
    Foxy was the only wife who came to basketball, and Angela Hanema came out of the house to keep her company. The day was agreeable for being outdoors; nothing in the other woman’s manner asked for an apology. The two together carried a bench, a weathered moist settee with a spindle-rung back, from beside the barn to a spot on the gravel driveway where simultaneously they could see the men play, have the sun on their faces, and keep an eye on the many children running and hiding in the big square yard and the lacy screen of budding woods beyond.
    Foxy asked, “Whose children are all these?”
    “Two are ours, two girls. You can see one of them standing by the birdbath sucking her thumb. That’s Nancy.”
    “Is thumb-sucking bad?” It was a question probably naïve, another mother wouldn’t have asked it, but Foxy was curious and felt she could hardly embarrass herself with Angela, who seemed so graceful and serenely humorous.
    “It’s not aesthetic,” she said. “She didn’t do it as an infant, it just started last winter. She’s worried about death. I don’t know where she gets it from. Piet insists on taking them to Sunday school and maybe they talk about it there.”
    “I suppose they feel they should.”
    “I suppose. The other children you see—the happy loud ones belong to our neighbors who run the dairy farm and the rest came with their