Seek My Face by John Updike

tall clear lozenge-pane windows, one side blocked from the light by an adjacent building, like Sainte-Chapelle, and high above the altar a circular stained-glass window of Jesus with a lamb. Jesus in a grape-colored cloak and an ecru lamb. Oh my, my mouth is dry and my head feels light from too much talking.
Much
too much. I
am
going to make a cup of tea now. Please, could I make one for you too?”
    Kathryn leans forward to frown at her tape recorder and reluctantly switches it off. “I’d prefer coffee if you had it,” she says, perhaps she doesn’t realize how ungraciously.
    “Coffee. I gave it up so long ago—they said doing that would lower my blood pressure and prolong my life, and I suppose it has—that I have no coffeepot. Or grounds. There may be some instant in one of the cabinets, if you could look for me in the upper shelves; you’re taller than I.”
    But when the two women stand together Kathryn even in her boots seems not incommensurately taller; her eyes come to the top of Hope’s head. She surrenders: “Tea would be fine. I’ve never been a fan of instant. These percolatorsthey have now with clocks you can set for the next morning spoil you, I guess.”
    “It’s Taster’s Choice,” offers Hope, feeling sorry for the little red-labelled jar gathering dust somewhere at the back of a shelf that she hasn’t gotten out the kitchen stool to look into for years. Her hand remembers how the jar had a subtle, friendly waist, to make holding and tipping it easier.
    “No, really, tea would be nice. My mother used to give me tea, half milk and half tea, when I was sick.”
    “Good,” Hope says, “if you mean that.” She pushes up from the rocker and takes her first steps carefully, in case her knees have stiffened or a foot has fallen asleep. The rag rug has tripped her more than once, hurrying to answer the front doorbell, which nobody who knows her or the house ever uses, or getting to her feet after losing herself in a book in the plaid chair, a good sleepy-making mystery or international thriller written by the child of some old friend; imagine being young and believing the world is such a conspiracy. On one occasion not so many years ago she sprawled right onto the floor, its black-red sheen swimming under her eyes as she mentally checked her body for the signal, first dull and then frantically pulsing, of a broken bone. She knew the sensations because she had broken her tibia skiing in the Poconos when she was sixteen, the bindings had scarcely any release then, the tows were merely rope tows and single metal chairs, icy-cold right through the ski pants and the woolen long johns, it was all very uncomfortable but boys did it and so you had to.
    “I’ll heat up water in a pot, since there are two of us. When I’m by myself I just microwave a mug, though the heat in the water for some reason doesn’t last as long. The way it agitates the molecules, I suppose.” One of the reasonsHope doesn’t like talking to young people is her fear of being stupid about all the new technology that has come along—not since she was a girl, but since about 1980. The VCR was a dividing line; until then, it was
her
technology, and she could handle it, but she never has been able to program a VCR, even with reading glasses on.
    Now that she is standing upright, her voice sounds as if it originates, crackling and indistinct, some distance from her head, like one of those little radios that used to be everywhere, playing daytime serials in shops and dentists’ offices and front desks at dry cleaners, before people had cell phones and television sets to make themselves feel connected. When she goes into Montpelier now, she is astonished by how everybody has cell phones, even the schoolchildren walking along with their knapsacks on their backs, and in summer there are all these earnest girl hikers in very short shorts clutching in one hand a cell phone and in the other a bottle of water, suddenly everybody in the