Seek My Face by John Updike

snorts, so vigorously that a liquid snuffle emerges in follow-up from the long white nose. Kathryn peers down and fishes in her black pocketbook, almost as big as a tote bag, which sits gaping at the side of the plaid chair, for a Kleenex. Hope likes her the better for this embarrassment. Snot is human, one of our secretions. She likes Kathryn less for being too ready to laugh, for finding this old lady being interviewed too amusing, a husk of a person in which any rustle of sauciness or pert phrasing is a comic surprise. Such readiness to laugh betrays a nervous jealousy. Hope had been alive in a naïve, blunt, fruitful way this young woman is being denied; Hope had loved herself, having been raised in the illusion of a loving God; she had found the facts of her body amazing, as they emerged from beneath the quilts and the Quaker silence concerning such matters. She would stroke her own naked, silken skin, leaving yellowish ovals of fingertip impression on her freckled pink surface, standing fresh-bathed before the cloudy spotted mirrors of the apartment on Jones Street she shared with Cindy Jasinski, the roach-ridden, cramped bathroom floored in tiny hexagonal tiles, its narrow window left open an inch or two like a mouth breathing the Village’s air with its morning smells of coffee and emptied garbage cans and its night sounds of jazz and taxis honking. Each new day, she wondered what marvel might befall her. Kathryn’s world is marvel-proof, pre-processed, all emotions andimpulses analyzed and denigrated before they can blossom, chopped up into how-to books and television, everything reduced to electronic impulses, bits, information, information increasingly meaningless as brains shrink too small to gather it in, the processing all done outside the mind, the heart, by cool and noiseless machines. Kathryn’s nostrils do look a little pink as she pokes the balled handkerchief back into her big black purse. She has the sickliness of the city: the subways, the elevators, other people’s breaths, forever running tired, New York people have colds all winter long, Hope did too, when the children were bringing home germs from school, but, living alone in Vermont, in the antiseptic crackling cold, the mountain air rich in ultraviolet rays, she almost never has so much as a sniffle, her old system a hoard of antibodies on the far side of fertility and its chemical storms. Kathryn has brought into this chaste parlor the stains, the imbalance, of fecundity—the monthly egg flushed away, the hysteria of entanglement with males. It is good, Hope tells herself, to be beyond all that.
    It is that time of morning, toward eleven, when the sun in its overhead slant outside triggers a thought of relief, of enough momentarily done, and her custom is to make herself a second cup of tea, with the used bag, carefully saved in the stainless-steel sink, sitting upright like a tiny black-brown handbag beside the round drain. Her first run of concentration would have slowed down and blurred since breakfast, and the re-used bag would fuel a second go, an attempt to squeeze some further good out of herself before noon joined her with humanity in the gross chores of daily maintenance, of shopping and tidying and tugging by telephone on the few threads left in her life, many of them tied to medical specialists. Her dentist keeps telling her her teeth, the few front ones still lacking root canals andcrowns, would be much brighter without that daily drenching in tea, but always there is, each morning, a hump of anxiety for the first cup to lift her over, and then, with the paler second an hour or two later, she can contemplate her still-wet work with the dazed self-adoration that so strangely alternates with her certainty that nothing she does is good enough or amounts, really, to anything. She is often seized by a dread that she has wasted her life up to now, a dread, at bottom, that she has displeased God, who is not there, or is there only in the