Roger's Version by John Updike Page B

cold-blooded father, I remembered, would hold forth at length, once he had gone from being an engineer to an executive, about his efforts to streamline and de-obsoletize the plant’s operations; but it never occurred to him, as an efficiency move, to resign his job and return his bloated salary to the dying steel industry’s coffers.
    “I can’t believe,” I said, “he kicked you out quite as brutallyas it would seem.” I said this, of course, merely to hear his brutality confirmed.
    Verna said, “Oh, he lets Mom sneak a check to me now and then, but he’s not kidding about never seeing me and Poopsie as long as we both shalt live. My worker thinks his trouble besides the racism they all have out there is his religion. You know when I was little he had this cancer scare with his prostate or one of those things men have and got involved with this sect that advertises on the radio and television and the funny thing was it worked , I mean, the cancer went away. It really was a miracle I guess you’d have to admit. So, boy, he’s really rigid about what’s good and bad as he and the people who run this sect see it; they all had false teeth was the funny thing I noticed. And the men had these humongous big belt buckles. We even had to say little graces over cookies and milk at home, it turned me off the whole Jesus thing growing up and I could see it was doing the same to Mom but she couldn’t say anything. She’s really a coward, did you know that?” Verna tipped her head back and looked at me as if I’d be especially interested. “It’s sad, since the way she comes on is as if she has a lot of spunk. Anyway, maybe I shouldn’t blame his religion since you’re kind of in the religion business yourself.”
    “Another end of it,” I said, removing one glove. “Not distribution. You might call it quality control. You said your worker?”
    “My social worker. She’s big and black and very smart and stuffy. You’d like her. She thinks I’m artistic and should be going to the Museum School at the university. You could sit down if you wanted.”
    “ I bop—you bop—a—they bop! ”
    “So money isn’t what you think you need so much as education. I might be of some help with that.”
    “Yeah, my poor buddy Dale told me what a big non-help you were with this grant he wanted to help him find God on the computer. You sent him back down to the front office where they gave him these bullshit forms to fill out. I don’t know much, Nunc, but this last year and a half I’ve gotten to fill out a lot of forms and I kid you not, those were bullshit forms. I told him to throw them out the window but I doubt if he did, he’s such a wimpy nerd, poor guy. He means well, though. He wants to save us all from worrying about when we’re dead. It’s what happens when I’m alive that worries me.”
    I pulled off the other glove, finger by finger. In my field of vision beyond the stitched glove tips lay her blurred white legs. Someone, perhaps that social worker, had encouraged her to talk about herself. The new, garrulous poor. “We left it, I thought,” I told her, “that I was not unenthusiastic, but the young man had to begin the process by proceeding through channels. I have no power over disbursements at the Divinity School, I’m just an employee, like your father at the steel plant,” I added, trusting that a reference to her father would annoy her.
    “Da? Eeya Da?” little Paula was asking, her sweet rounded arm, with its accessory crease between wrist and elbow, extended in pointing at me. Verna grabbed this small plump arm furiously; she lifted the child off the floor and shook her back and forth as if mixing chemicals in a container.
    “I told you you shut up you little fucker!” she shouted down into the tiny crumpling face. “That’s not Da!” And she let go of the infant’s arm with a push that dumped Paula down on her diapered bottom, hard. The breath knocked out of her, she struggled for air