Free Pigeon Feathers by John Updike

words for the yearbook about a null girl in the Secretarial Course I had never spoken a wordto, I heard my grandfather begin coughing upstairs with a sound like dry membrane tearing, and I panicked. I called up the stairs, “Mother! I must go out.”
    “It’s nine o’clock.”
    “I know, but I have to. I’m going crazy.”
    Without waiting to hear her answer or to find a coat, I left the house and backed our old car out of the garage. The weekend before, I had broken up with Molly again. All week I hadn’t spoken to her, though I had seen her once in Faber’s, with a boy in her class, averting her face while I, hanging by the side of the pinball machine, made rude wisecracks in her direction. I didn’t dare go up to her door and knock so late at night; I just parked across the street and watched the lit windows of her house. Through their living-room window I could see one of Mrs. Bingaman’s vases of hothouse iris standing on a white mantel, and my open car window admitted the spring air, which delicately smelled of wet ashes. Molly was probably out on a date with that moron in her class. But then the Bingamans’ door opened, and her figure appeared in the rectangle of light. Her back was toward me, a coat was on her arm, and her mother seemed to be shouting. Molly closed the door and ran down off the porch and across the street and quickly got into the car, her eyes downcast.
She came
. When I have finally forgotten everything else—her powdery fragrance, her lucid cool skin, the way her lower lip was like a curved pillow of two cloths, the dusty red outer and wet pink inner—I’ll still be grieved by this about Molly, that she came to me.
    After I returned her to her house—she told me not to worry, her mother enjoyed shouting—I went to the all-night diner just beyond the Olinger town line and ate three hamburgers, ordering them one at a time, and drank two glassesof milk. It was after one o’clock when I got home, but my mother was still awake. She lay on the sofa in the dark, with the radio sitting on the floor murmuring Dixieland piped up from New Orleans by way of Philadelphia. Radio music was a steady feature of her insomniac life; not only did it help drown out the noise of her father upstairs but she seemed to enjoy it in itself. She would resist my father’s pleas to come to bed by saying that the New Orleans program was not over yet. The radio was an old Philco we had always had; I had once drawn a fish on the orange disc of its celluloid dial, which had looked to my eyes like a fishbowl.
    Her loneliness caught at me; I went into the living room and sat on a chair with my back to the window. For a long time she looked at me tensely out of the darkness. “Well,” she said at last, “how was little hotpants?” The vulgarity this affair had brought out in her language appalled me.
    “I made her cry,” I told her.
    “Why do you torment the girl?”
    “To please you.”
    “It doesn’t please me.”
    “Well, then, stop nagging me.”
    “I’ll stop nagging you if you’ll solemnly tell me you’re willing to marry her.”
    I said nothing to this, and after waiting she went on in a different voice, “Isn’t it funny, that you should show this weakness?”
    “Weakness is a funny way to put it when it’s the only thing that gives me strength.”
    “Does it really, Allen? Well. It may be. I forget, you were born here.”
    Upstairs, close to our heads, my grandfather, in a voice frail but still melodious, began to sing: “There is a happy land, far,far away, where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day.” We listened, and his voice broke into coughing, a terrible rending cough growing in fury, struggling to escape, and loud with fear he called my mother’s name. She didn’t stir. His voice grew enormous, a bully’s voice, as he repeated, “Lillian! Lillian!” and I saw my mother’s shape quiver with the force coming down the stairs into her; she was like a dam; and then the