Roger's Version by John Updike

giants. One received an impression of overpopulation, of random human energy too fierce to contain in any structure. Slowly the playgrounds, originally equipped with relatively fragile seesaws and roundabouts, had evolved into wastelands of the indestructible, their chief features now old rubber truck tires and concrete drain pipes assembled into a semblance of jungle gyms. A glittering sleet of broken glass fringed the asphalt curbs, the cement foundations. SE PROHIBE ESTACIONAR . Another sign warned that Owners of A BANDONED OR U NREGISTERED A UTOMOBILES Will Be Prosecuted . No one seemed to be about, at this hour of mid-afternoon. As if under an enchantment I passed unobserved into the entryway whose number, 606, correspondedto Verna’s address in the telephone book. Inside the building, locks had been smashed or disassembled and replaced by padlocked chains threaded through the holes. The stairwells ascended through a complex cave odor of urine and damp cement and rubber-based paint, paint repeatedly applied and repeatedly defaced. TEX GIVES BEST HEAD , one fresh spray-can motto ran, signed with flourishes, MARJORIE . On the next landing, the same spray can, in an identical style of script, boasted MARJORIE SUCKS , signed TEX , with an elaborate X that somehow bespoke the signer’s brave hopes for his future.
    I had seen the name Ekelof pencilled on slot 311 inside the door down below, beside the tarnished mailboxes. On the third floor I walked down a long corridor. It was bare, though holes and irregularities in the walls remembered where things—decorations, amenities—had once been fastened to it. First I went the wrong way; the numbers mounted in even increments. I reversed myself and came to a door where the numbers 311 existed as faint ghosts, pierced by old nail-holes, in the celery-green paint. My hand was lifted to knock when on the other side of the door a small child babbled, babbled on the gleeful moist verge of language. My hand froze, then descended, not too solidly. Also from within I could hear music, a piping, brassy female singer. She sang rapidly, indignantly. I knocked again.
    Something scraped, there was a slap, the babbling stopped, and I could feel eyes looking at me through the tiny peephole. It had been a number of years since I had seen little Verna. “Who is it?” Her voice was croaky and tense and faintly honking, as if a metal tube were involved in its production.
    I cleared my own throat and announced, “Roger Lambert. Your uncle.”
    The door’s smooth painted surface had a look of holding much evidence, were homicide detectives to come and dust it for fingerprints. Verna opened the door, and the draft of warmair this released carried a scent with it, a musty odor as of peanuts or stale spice, a sullen, familiar, Midwestern smell. I was stunned. This was my sister, Edna, when we were both young.
    But no, Verna was an inch or so shorter than Edna, and had a coarse shapeless nose inherited from her blond fool of a father. Edna’s had been rather fine, with sculpted nostril-wings that flared when she was being provocative and that sunburned all summer long. I sensed in Verna a dangerous edge that in my half-sister had been sheathed by middle-class caution. Edna had talked a tough and naughty game but ended by obeying the rules. This girl had been pushed beyond the rules. Her eyes looked lashless and had a curious slant. She stared at me for a long glazed second, and then quite disarmingly smiled. Her smile was childish, showing many small round teeth and bringing up a dimple in one pale cheek. “Hi, Nunc,” she said, very slowly, as if my long-awaited arrival were obscurely delicious.
    Verna’s face was too wide, her skin too sallow, her light brown eyes too slanted, and the skin surrounding them too puffy-looking for her to be a beauty; but she had something, something that was trapped and spoiling here. She had curly, stringy hair, chestnut color with locks of induced platinum, and