Free Trust Me by John Updike Page A

blue, and a host of small brown birds scuffled and settled for warmth in the dark bare patch in its lee. His neighbor herself, a woman wearing a checkered apron, came out of the front door and began banging a broom around on her porch. She saw Mark through the windshield and waved; he grudgingly waved back. She was middle-aged, lacked a husband, wore her lipstick too thick,and seemed a bit too willing to be friendly to this young couple new in the neighborhood.
    Mark put the car into first gear. Snow had blown in beneath the sides of the automobile, so the momentum he had hoped to achieve was sluggish in coming. Though his front tires broke through the ridge, the underside dragged and the back tires slithered to a stop in the shallow gutter that ran down the side of Hillcrest Road. He tried reverse. The rear of the car lifted a fraction and then sagged sideways, the wheels spinning in a void. He returned to first gear, and touched the accelerator lightly, and gained for his tact only a little more of that sickening sideways slipping. He tried reverse again and this time there was no motion at all; it was as if he were trying to turn a doorknob with soapy hands. An outraged sense of injustice, of being asked to do too much, swept over him. “Fuck,” he said. He had messed up again. He tried to push open the door, discovered that snow blocked it, shoved savagely, and opened a gap he could worm through backwards. Stepping out, he took an icy shock of snow into his loose galosh.
    His neighbor across the street called, “Good morning!” The sound, it seemed, made a strip of snow fall from a telephone wire.
    “Isn’t it lovely?” were her next words.
    “Sure is,” was his answer. His voice sounded high, with a croak in it.
    Her painted lips moved, but the words “If you’re young” came to him faint and late, as if, because of some warping aftereffect of the storm, sound crossed the street from her side against the grain.
    Mark slogged down through his back yard, treading in his own footsteps to minimize his desecration of the virgin snow.The bushes were bowed and splayed like bridesmaids overwhelmed by flowers. Chickadee feet had crosshatched the snow under the feeder. The kitchen air struck his face with its warmth and the smells of simmering bacon and burning waffle mix. He told his wife, “I got the damn thing stuck. Get out of your nightie and come help.”
    She looked querulous and sallow in her drooping bathrobe. “Can’t we eat breakfast first? You’re going to be late anyway. Shouldn’t you be calling the store? Maybe it won’t be open today.”
    “It’ll be open, and anyway even if it isn’t I should be there. Easter won’t wait.” The precise shade of gray he had been mixing in his dream perhaps belonged to some beaverboard cutouts of flowering trees he was preparing for windows of the new spring fashions.
    “The
schools
are closed,” she pointed out.
    “Well, let’s eat,” he conceded, but ate in his parka, to hurry her. As he swallowed the orange juice, the snow in his galosh slipped deeper down his ankle. Mark said, “If we’d bought that ranch house you were too damn sophisticated for, we’d have a garage and this wouldn’t happen. It takes years off the life of a car, to leave it parked in the open.”
    “It’s smoking! Turn the little thing! On the left, the left!” She told him, “I don’t know
why
I bother to try to make you waffles; that iron your mother gave us has never worked. Never, never.”
    “Well, it should. It’s not cheap.”
    “It sticks. It’s awful. I hate it.”
    “It was the best one she could find. It’s supposed to be self-greasing, or some damn thing, isn’t it?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t understand it. I never have. I was trying to make them to be nice to
you
.”
    “Don’t get so upset. The waffles are terrific, actually.” Buthe ate them without tasting them, he was so anxious to return to the car and erase his error. If a plow were to come