Seek My Face by John Updike Page B

by himself, spraining his shoulder in the process, spreading the hardening concrete. The Flats had been a frontier to them, though English sailors and their inbred descendants had been farming and fishing here since 1640. Neighbor helped neighbor, Zack paid back his labor-debt with labor on their places—rebuilding the Urquharts’ porch, helping harvest the Silcox potatoes. “It was the end of the world,” Hope says aloud. “Just the elements.”

“What was?” Kathryn asks, behind her. Too close behind her, Hope feels, wary of having the heel of the Birkenstocks stepped on and a strap ripped. Birkenstocks are harder and harder to find to buy, the real ones, not imitations that stretch and loosen up right away.
    “The Flats. Sorry. I was thinking aloud. One does that, living alone. Here is the kitchen, but there’s a bathroom to the left, under the stairs, if you need it.”
    “No thank you, Hope. I don’t need it yet.”
    Hope, is it? How the young do presume—all these letters one gets without a Mrs. or a Ms., Hope McCoy as if there hadn’t been two husbands since or she didn’t sign her work “H. Ouderkirk.” And flaunting their superior bladder control. She really shouldn’t let them in, they take your day and send you to bed dizzy and then write what they had determined to write before they came. She had sat some years ago with a nice young man till near midnight, a professor of fine arts somewhere in the Midwest doing his first book, an expansion of his thesis, and when it came out all she had told him was reduced to a footnote contradicting somebody else. But it had been a while since anyone had asked, not only was Zack fading from what people in art talked about but Guy, too, which she would have thought would never happen, his ideas were so youthful and gay in the old sense, so impudent and fresh and tireless, he was an art movement by himself, until carrying it all began to weigh on him. Zack had felt weight only for a little while, and had got out from under. “When we moved, right after the war, most of the houses in the Flats still had outdoor privies. When we’d try to get to ours that first terrible winter, we’d be blown nearly off our feet, into that big silver maple, and when you were in there the wind would howl from underneath, quite alarmingly.”
    They enter the kitchen, and Hope worries that the girl will think she was talking about this house, which she and Jerry had acquired in another era, another marriage. They ripped out—they paid workmen to rip out—the linoleum floor and low stone sinks and leaky old Frigidaire and put ineverything new, but that was a generation ago, and the fashions in stoves and sinks and ovens and countertops have moved on. The suspended cabinets, spray-painted a cream as smooth as a car finish, show loose handles and grubby patches where her fingers touch most often, and the ivory Formica on the long counter below the cabinets has split where the woodwork underneath has settled and shrunk. The black prongs of the burner she uses most often have chipped, and the big Andersen windows that provide a wide view of the old apple orchard staggering up the slope to the north don’t easily crank open and closed any more, rain and snowmelt have dripped down through the casing to swell the frame. It is an expensive airy kitchen turning shabby. Only the green serpentine top to the island holding the gas burners has proved impervious to time, its veins preserving the eddies and ripples and mica flecks of metamorphic flow molten in a moment inconceivably remote, millions and millions of years, time enough for the human species to go extinct a hundred times—metamorphic rock older than these Green Mountains eroding around her but at this moment cool and sleek to her touch as with the other hand she sets the spouted round kettle on the chipped prongs of her favorite burner. Her hand stretches grotesquely in the kettle’s mirroring aluminum; her face is a distant pale