Seek My Face by John Updike Page A

new millennium has to have a private bottle of water. There do seem to be fewer and fewer public drinking fountains, they used to be everywhere, that had been one of the great things about America, you could always get a free drink of water. Behind her grandfather’s house, near the giant droopy-limbed hemlock, down some slippery boards, there had been an open spring lined with mossy stones, and a tin dipper for anyone to use, even someone off the street if they cared to venture in on the brick walk alongside the house. Strangers might be angels, was the old superstition.
    The way to the kitchen leads around a table with an old-fashioned black dial phone on it and beside it a cane-seated ladderback chair in case the conversation is so long and important Hope needs to sit down, which ever fewer of them are, and down a short hall past the narrow and steepback stairs on one side and on the other the back door and its storm door. Through the double glass—nine six-by-nine panes, both doors, though they don’t quite line up—the outdoors calls to her, bright and bleak and still wintry, pieces of snow visible in the woods like scattered laundry, the side lawn beneath the feeder gray with sunflower husks the birds or the squirrels have spilled. The beech tree from whose lowest limb the feeder hangs seems, at a quick glance that flashes through her eyes upon a brain still displaced by its effort to remember the past, a photograph of a silvery explosion, monstrous, multiform, spraying outward like a Richard Lippold construction, the beech’s narrow white-tipped leaf buds still tightly sheathed but taking on a ruddy, sappy tan. And the woods beyond have a russet tinge where the maples cluster, and the bleached lawn shows in bare spots, a dark gleam of thawing earth though mud season is not quite here, in this part of Vermont. The lawn still looks hard enough to walk on. Hope imagines it rocky and crunching beneath her feet. Where patches of snow linger in the shadows of the woods they look, she has often noticed on her walks, like smoke; so do, oddly, distant mountains and a lake and even a blue house, seen through branches: to a painter’s open eye the world abounds in optical illusions. The other day, by the dining-room window, she was transfixed by what seemed to be a piece of translucent paper, wax paper, caught in the brush at the edge of the lawn and trembling in the breeze, and she wondered what impudent litterer had flung it here, then realized it was a gray squirrel, clinging to an alder shoot thick enough to half-hide the little animal body but so slender it kept swaying.
    This is burning season. If the girl would only go soon, Hope could spend an hour outside picking up dead sticks—the beeches and hickories drop them endlessly—for thebrush fire Jason Warren would light when he came this Saturday, if the wind wasn’t high. Though he is one of those men to whom women are always in the way, strange two-legged incessantly talking animals found now even on the mountainsides, Hope likes to stand with him, adding to his blaze with garden stakes and dry stalks and feeling the heat on her face, enough to singe her eyebrows if her eyebrows hadn’t faded to wisps ages ago. Until she turned seventy she did almost all her own yardwork, Zack, much as she maligns him, having shown her what a person can do on their own; they had been too poor to think of hiring many workmen there on the Flats. Zack knocked out partitions and replaced shingles and porch supports and moved the barn uphill, out of the center of their view of the marsh and the distant strip of saltwater that was really a small harbor. Zack got neighbors—Andy Silcox, Glenn Urquhart—to help push the barn on rollers, it moved five inches each time they leveraged it up, less as the uphill pitch increased, they finally had to get a fisherman with a seine-hauling winch on the back of his truck to pull the big dilapidated thing onto the cement foundation Zack had laid