In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike
Essie sighed, leaning her weight backward on her elbows on the splintery bleacher board above the one she was sitting on. Something needed to rescue her but in the meantime the flat land that had been the poorhouse fields receded hypnotically under a soft April sky that looked like a piece of wet paper somebody had been brushing with gray in stripes. The smells of new grass and softening earth and peach blossoms from the sea of creamy pink beyond the playground were soaking into her brain, so she could hardly move, though it was getting late. Loretta and Junie had gone on home, cradling their books against their lucky breasts, and Eddie and Fats and a couple younger boys from this tannery end of town were playing basketball around the playground backboard. The ball had a slow leak and whenever anybody tried to dribble the bounce got less and less, so that everybody laughed and somebody would kick the ball away. The only other person on the bleachers with her, three boards down, was Benjy Whaley, who was reading a Captain Marvel comic book and yet was aware of her, she could tell. She uncrossed her ankles in their white socks and recrossed them, stretching her legs out so tight she felt the muscles squeak. At least she had nice long legs. Already she was as tall as Momma, and even though Ama was still taller a lot of it was her hair, piled up that way she had, like a big gray doughnut on top of her head. Essie sighed again, so loud she almost had to say something. “How’s the comic book, Benjy? I don’t hear you laugh.”
He didn’t turn to speak to her, a sure sign he had been really aware of her. “It’s not supposed to be funny.”
“Sometimes it is, though,” she said. “Some of the villains. And the way he says ‘Shazam.’ ”
Benjy said, “Shazam!” in a big voice, meaning to be funny but showing he was too nervous to think of what to say.
“You can’t tell me those men who draw that strip don’t think it’s funny,” she said. “I bet they sit there laughing at dopes like you who take it seriously.”
“Without dopes like me spending their dimes,” he said, “they’d be out of a living.” Now he did look at her, leaning back and staring with his face upside down, a pointy chin where the top of his head should be and his eyelids blinking the wrong way, with the red on top instead of underneath. It was terrible like a creature from Mars, or a crab when you thought where its eyes and mouth were. He actually had a nice round pointy chin, like a girl’s, more feminine than her own, which was a little bit too squared-off. She wished she had his chin. Benjy had always noticed her, pushing her and pulling at the ribbon in the back of her dress, but in the junior high he was milder, somehow, and more subdued, as though with the addition of the new students that had been in elementary schools over near St. Georges and that now came by bus, swelling the classes, he had discovered something about himself, maybe that he would never amount to much more than his father, who worked in Shorty Sturgis’s Garage and ran a one-man gun shop on the side and in the evenings. In Delaware men loved to shoot ducks; they would get up early in the mornings and go crouch in the reeds. Benjy needed to be teased a little. She retracted her long legs in their scuffed saddle shoes and red kilt skirt and moved down to sit on the board beside him. Looking down to be careful and not fall and break a leg, which could happen on these old bleachers, she saw all the papers and bottles that had collected on the grass underneath. The grass was trying to grow, but because of the shade from the bleacher boards was coming in yellow.
“L-let’s see,” she said, leaning slightly against his arm. Captain Marvel was fighting some bald scientist who was within a whisker of having the secret that would permit him to rule the universe, along with the Axis powers. One panel showed him talking to Hitler over the phone, with electric zigzags leaping around the curve of the earth. “That’s so dumb,” she said. Benjy said nothing, just turned the page. She couldn’t believe he read so slowly. “D-did you listen to Jack Benny the other night?” she asked. “I love it when he visits his money in the vault, all that creaking and slamming—even my father gets to laughing hard. We all sit listening Sunday nights right from Jack Benny through Phil Harris and Alice Faye, and he starts to snore in the middle of Charlie McCarthy.”
“I forget,” Benjy said, lowering the comic book and looking toward the horizon. “Sometimes we listen. My father says they’re all Jewish.”
“I don’t think Edgar Bergen is Jewish, he’s Swedish,” Essie said. “Anyway, what does it matter?”
Benjy had a very interesting mouth in profile, fitted together so precisely, and a little angrily, like Vivien Leigh’s in Gone With the Wind. That had been such a tremendous movie, though she didn’t like it when the little girl fell off the horse and died, and preferred The Wizard of Oz, where nobody got hurt except the witches. Dorothy had breasts, you could see, even though she’s supposed to be a little girl. “We’re fighting this war,” Benjy said, “because the Jews got us into it.”
“Really? I thought we were fighting it because of Pearl Harbor.”
“The Jews could have stopped Pearl Harbor. They wanted the war because it’s good for the banks.”
She was sorry she had moved down to sit next to him. She could feel from far away her mother beginning to worry. The wet brush strokes in the sky were getting thicker and darker. It always made her excited when it rained, as if God was touching her somehow. Essie thought of her little room’s walls covered with stars’ faces and stars’ signatures and a taste came into her mouth of such coppery happiness that she wanted to punch and pinch thick-witted Benjy.
He kept staring toward the blurred horizon of low blue hills way beyond the hardball diamond. There was a round green water tank like a visiting spaceship from Mars, and the underside of the clouds trailed dark travelling wisps. Unexpectedly Benjy said, “In a couple more years I’ll have to go fight in it and get killed, probably.”
“Oh, Benjy,” she said, sounding a bit in her own ears like Bette Davis being Southern, “of course you won’t. It’ll be all over by that time! Already this year the Germans are surrendering all over the place—Russia, Africa.”
“Yeah, but then there’s the Japanese. They fight to the death, every one. They’re crazy little monkeys.”
“Didn’t MacArthur just k-kick them out of Guadalcanal?”
“MacArthur gives me a pain in the ass. He’s a show-off.”
“Why, Benjy, a person would think you weren’t American!” But still she didn’t move away and begin to walk the nine blocks home. He had folded up the comic book in a brutal way, doubling it like a newspaper, and his thumb against the bright paper looked sallow and strong, delicately carved and grubby in the knuckle. Car grease was in his blood. It was so funny, his being a twin with Loretta, who didn’t look at all like him, and who was much more mature. Benjy’s skull was narrow and his hair, so blond it was almost white, like an albino’s, had been cut close in a crew cut, so she could see the interesting ridge of bone behind his ear. His ear fitted close to his head, as if the top part had been glued. One of the things she didn’t like about herself was her ears—they didn’t stick out, exactly, but they didn’t exactly lie flat, either.
“I’m American enough,” Benjy said. “I’ll go if they call me. I’ll do my duty.”
She giggled at such a grim thought, here at the still center of a landscape so peaceful, so idle. It revealed in him a solitary brooding akin to her own private dreams. She blew lightly on his nice flat ear. “Is that what you do, Benjy—what other people tell you to do?” She saw him for all his delicate physical beauty as defeated, stuck forever in this town with its stupid prejudices and boring jobs.
He turned with a fury whitening his face, pulling back his lips from his teeth, and said, “Fuck you, Essie Wilmot.”
She was not shocked. The phrase was chalked and gouged into the playground pavilion, and the shed near the school. She had once heard a bunch of soldiers on the trolley car saying it over and over, loud. “I didn’t mean anything mean,” she said.
“Yeah, what do you do,” he asked, “except what you’re told to do?”
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“Oh, I do things like this,” Essie said, and edged closer with a tilted head. She pictured Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, the scene where she pulls a gun on him, in the room above Rick’s with the Venetian blinds, and he says in his beautiful white tuxedo jacket, Go ahead and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favor, and she can’t, and their profiles merge, her tearstained cheeks shining, her hair rimmed with light and slightly out of focus, her lips numb and thick and a little bit open, as she desperately surrenders herself in a war-torn world. Essie had kissed boys before, but in childish play, post office at parties and in school cloakrooms while wriggling in protest and whacking them on the ear afterwards. Benjy’s lips were still childish, hard and pressing on hers too hard, so there was a danger of their teeth clicking together, but she liked the strange big feeling of it, this other body pushing at hers and hers pushing back through these two vulnerable moist spots, Benjy’s existence impinging on hers like an invasion from one planet of another. He had a taste, of the Philip Morris he had been smoking and the licorice he had been eating, and behind that of something bland and faintly salty she supposed was simply flesh, or the taste of another soul rising up through his throat. She pictured his lips, how they fitted together, and tried to spread that fit to her own lips, to their lips mixed together. But he was quickly uncomfortable, even though the boys playing basketball weren’t watching, and backed off with a frightened stare, like a white-eyed mechanic sliding out from under a car. There was nothing to say, what had happened had been so strange. But from the hangdog look in his eyes now she knew he would be back for more, and a kind of ashamed churning in her own insides said she would want more. Even now, she wanted a little more; the gray house on Locust Street was calling, but this was more important. She could see, though, that for all the shy beauty in the bones of his skull and thumb Benjy was only a beginning. She began to collect, instead of signed photographs of stars, boys. Each would have a slightly different taste, a different push. They were what the middle of her face needed. God understood. He made us, after all.
Really, it was pathetic and more than a little irritating, how excited Momma was to go down to Dover for the agricultural fair. They held the fair in the center of the state the fourth week of every September. Momma had been a girl here, south of the Canal, in Sussex County, not Kent, but it was all pretty much the same—big open fields, sleepy rivers, houses way back from the road with pillared verandas and a look of faded old stage sets. Momma used to come up to the Dover Fair with her parents and remembered how grand and gala it had looked to her as a girl. She couldn’t see, what Essie easily could, how wheezy and battered the rides were, how scummy some of the sideshows, and how mournful and repulsive the animals—the poultry, the dairy cattle, the sheep and pigs—brought in from the farms all around to be judged. Essie herself was there to be judged, in the competition for Miss Delaware Peach of 1947. An announcement had come to the school for senior girls and was read in assembly and everybody tittered and looked around for who would be so “stuck-up” and such a “show-off” as to sign up. Just four girls signed up and filled out the questionnaire and did the little essay “What Delaware Offers Her Citizens,” and she was chosen, Essie felt, not so much for her looks or her essay but for having the most enthusiastic mother. Daddy let them have their new parsley-green Studebaker coupe for three days and Grandpa Sifford gave them seventy-five dollars of spending money—a frightening amount that made Momma keep clamping and unclamping her chubby brown pocketbook and hanging on to it everywhere, even taking it with her into the bathroom in case a maid or boy came into the hotel room and snatched it from the bureau while Essie wasn’t looking. The hotel was a six-story old brick cube right in the middle of Dover, called The Duke of York; the lobby still had brass spittoons in corners and its big central carpet had been woven with an image, now threadbare, of the state-capitol building. All thirty-eight contestants were put up here with their escorts and Essie tried hard not to be embarrassed by her mother, who since returning to housework after the war had put on so much weight that her limp seemed to be from the effort of carrying it all. Catching an unintended glimpse of her naked mother in the bath of the hotel room, and watching her waddle about in her underwear, Essie was amazed and in some moralistic portion of herself offended that the human frame could allow itself to get so loaded with shapeless, wobbly flesh. Emily sensed her daughter’s disapproving gaze upon her; she fluttered her puffy hands on their creased wrists and explained, “It’s those tempting pies your grandmother keeps baking. I wish I could get her out of the kitchen and put us all on a sensible modern diet.”
“Well, Momma, you don’t have to take a second helping all the time.”
“I want to show my appreciation,” she said, with a down-home lilt that Essie didn’t hear when they were back in the house on Locust Street. “She’s wonderful at her age to keep so active in the kitchen—though to be honest if she’d let me do more my weight might come down. Oh,” she went on, seeing Essie still unconvinced, “it’s a weakness, I know, and I hope you never inherit it. You and your father don’t exactly eat like birds, and yet you never show it and he actually has lost weight since I first knew him. His father was a thin man.”
“Momma, did you ever know my Wilmot grandfather?”
“Oh no—he was dead and gone when your daddy’s family came to Basingstoke. Handsome and bright, by all accounts, but he didn’t get much pleasure out of it. A poor soul, really, to hear your father talk. I sometimes wonder if when he died he didn’t take a lot of your father’s heart with him.” Having said this, and thus stumbled into a sore area, she judged it necessary to go on, clarifying: “I mean, I wonder how much his death left your dad able to love anybody else, ever. Except of course his children.”
“Why, Momma—what a thing to say! He loves you.” And even more, Essie thought to herself, he loves me.
“Well,” her mother conceded, without yielding her main point, or the serious look on her face, of considered disappointment, “He needed me, for a time—he needed a woman, and I was the least threatening he could find. I daresay he doesn’t dislike me, still. But he’s a careful man, your dad. It’s as if after whatever it was that happened he just wants to get through this vale of tears with—what did they used to call it during the war?—minimal damage. It’s as if he won’t give God any satisfaction. Ama and I would talk about it, years ago, trying to puzzle it through, but by now she’s changed Clarence all around in her mind, into a kind of saint, without a blemish or a sorrow.”
In another two hours, at seven this evening, the girls must report to the stadium for the bathing-suit part of the competition, and Essie should be resting, to look fresh. But the whole six-story hotel, from lobby to penthouse suite, was buzzing with the vibrations of excited young women away from home and anxious to prove themselves. It stirred Essie to be rooming with her mother and to hear her talking like a roommate, animated and frank, even seductive. Essie didn’t think of her parents as having any secrets, the way that she, since taking up with boys, had secrets. But Momma was implying the past had mysterious chambers—old passions and failures that still played their part in an ongoing story.