The Centaur by John Updike

rump wagged so wildly the magazines began to slide to the floor. We were all churned into motion; my father rose to the rescue but before he could reach the sofa my grandfather lifted himself to his feet. We all three, while the dog swirled underfoot, pressed into the kitchen.
    To my mother we must have looked like an accusing posse; she shouted at us, “I let her in because I couldn’t stand to hear her bark.” She seemed nearly in tears; I was amazed. My own anxiety for the dog had been pretended. I hadn’t heard her continue barking. A glance at my mother’s mottled throat told me that she was angry. Suddenly I wanted to get out; she had injected into the confusion a shrill heat that made everything cling. I rarely knew exactly why she was mad; it would come and go like weather. Was it really that my father and grandfather absurdly debating sounded to her like murder? Was it something I had done, my arrogant slowness? Anxious to exempt myself from her rage, I sat down in my stiff pea jacket and tried the coffee again. It was still too hot. A sip seared my sense of taste away.
    “Jesus kid,” my father said. “It’s ten to. I’ll lose my job if we don’t move.”
    “That’s
your
clock, George,” my mother said. Since she wasdefending me, I could not be the cause of her anger. “Our clock says you have seventeen minutes.”
    “Your clock’s wrong,” he told her. “Zimmerman’s after my hide.”
    “Coming, coming,” I said, and stood up. The first bell rang at eight-twenty. It took twenty minutes to drive to Olinger. I felt squeezed in the dwindling time. My stomach ground its empty sides together.
    My grandfather worked his way over to the refrigerator and from its top took the gaudy loaf of Maier’s Bread. He moved with a pronounced and elaborate air of being inconspicuous that made us all watch him. He unfolded the wax paper and removed a slice of white bread, which he then folded once and tidily tucked entire into his mouth. His mouth’s elasticity was a marvel; a toothless chasm appeared under his ash-colored mustache to receive the bread in one bite. The calm cannibalism of this trick always infuriated my mother. “Pop,” she said, “can’t you wait until they’re out of the house before you start tormenting the bread?”
    I took a last sip of the scalding coffee and pushed toward the door. We were all jammed into the little area of linoleum bounded by the door, the wall where the clocks ticked and hummed, the refrigerator, and the sink. The congestion was intense. My mother struggled to get past her father to the stove. He drew himself in and his dark husk seemed impaled on the refrigerator door. My father stood fast, by far the tallest of us, and over our heads announced to his invisible audience, “Off to the slaughterhouse. Those damn kids have put their hate right into my bowels.”
    “He rattles at that bread all day until I think I have rats in my brain,” my mother protested, and, the psoriatic rim of her hairline flaring red, she squeezed past Grampop and presseda cold piece of toast and a banana at me. I had to shift my books to take them into my hands. “My poor unfed boy,” she said. “My poor only jewel.”
    “Off to the hate-factory,” my father called, to goad me on. Bewildered, anxious to please my mother, I had paused to tear a bite from the cold toast.
    “If there’s anything
I
hate,” my mother said, half to me, half to the ceiling, while my father bent forward and touched her cheek with one of his rare kisses, “it’s a man who hates sex.”
    My grandfather lifted his hands in his squeezed space and in a voice muffled by bread pronounced, “Blessings on thee.” He never failed to say it, just as, in the early evening, when he climbed “the wooden hill,” he would call down to us, “Pleasant dreams.” His hands were daintily lifted in benediction, a gesture also of surrender and, as if tiny angels had been clutched in them, release. His hands were what I