Thirty-Six Year Old – Peggy Fosnacht (nee Gring)
‘Anyway, it’s nice about you and Ollie, if it works out. A little sad, too.’
‘Why sad?’
‘Sad for me. I mean, I guess I blew my chance, to – ’
‘To what?’
‘To cash you in.’
Bad phrase, too harsh, though it had been an apology. He has lived with Skeeter too long. But her blankness, the blankness of her silhouette as Peggy stands in her habitual pose against the windows, suggested it. A blank check. A woman is blank until you fuck her. Everything is blank until you fuck it. Us and Vietnam, fucking and being fucked, blood is wisdom. Must be some better way but it’s not in nature. His silence is leaden with regret. She remains blank some seconds, says nothing. Then she moves into the space around him, turns on lamps, lifts a pillow into place, plumps it, stoops and straightens, turns, takes light upon her sides, is rounded into shape. A lumpy big woman but not a fat one, clumsy but not gross, sad with evening, with Ollie or not Ollie, with being thirty-six and knowing nothing. He and Peggy Gring sat in the same classroom since first grade; she had seen him when he was good, had sat in those hot bleachers screaming, when he was a hero, naked and swift and lean. She has seen him come to nothing. She plumps down in the chair beside his, brushes at the ghost of the hairdo she no longer has, and says, ‘I’ve been cashed in a lot lately.’
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I’m assuming this is the end of what some now call the ‘starter marriage’, accepting the inevitability of the break. But it hurt more back then. When it was supposed to last for ever. Updike: vivid and virtuosic, without showing off or talking down to his audience. What more could you need?