Free The Maples Stories by John Updike

city was always putting out bond issues. I began to feel sorry for the mayor, I thought they were going bankrupt. Looking back at myself, I was so
good
, so wrapped up in the children and the house, always on the phone to the contractor or the plumber or the gas company trying to get the new kitchen done in time for Thanksgiving, when his silly,
silly
mother was coming to visit. About once a day I’d sharpen the carving knife. Thank God that phase of my life is over. I went to his mother – for sympathy, I suppose – and very indignantly she asked me, what had I done to her boy? The children and I had tunafish sandwiches by ourselves and it was the first Thanksgiving I’ve ever enjoyed, frankly.’
    ‘I always have trouble,’ Richard told her, ‘finding the second joint.’
    Joan said, ‘Darley, you know you’re coming to that terrible curve?’
    ‘You should see my father-in-law carve. Snick, snap, snap, snick. Your blood runs cold.’
    ‘On my birthday, my
birthday
,’ Eleanor said, accidentally kicking the heater, ‘the bastard was with his little dolly in a restaurant, and he told me, he solemnly told me – men are incredible – he told me he ordered cake for dessert. That was his tribute to me. The night he confessed all this, it was the end of the world, but I had to laugh. I asked him if he’d had the restaurant put a candle on the cake. He told me he’d thought of it but hadn’t had the guts.’
    Richard’s responsive laugh was held in suspense as the car skidded on the curve. A dark upright shape had appeared in the center of the windshield, and he tried to remove it, but the automobile proved impervious to the steering wheel and instead drew closer, as if magnetized, to a telephone pole that rigidly insisted on its position in the center of the windshield. The pole enlarged. The little splinters pricked by the linemen’s cleats leaped forward in the headlights, and there was a flat whack surprisingly unambiguous, considering how casually it had happened. Richard felt the sudden refusal of motion, the
No
, and knew, though his mind was deeply cushioned in a cottony indifference, that an event had occurred which in another incarnation he would regret.
    ‘You jerk,’ Joan said. Her voice was against his ear. ‘Your pretty new car.’ She asked, ‘Eleanor, are you all right?’ With a rising inflection she repeated, ‘Are you all right?’ It sounded like scolding.
    Eleanor giggled softly, embarrassed. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, ‘except that I can’t seem to move my legs.’ The windshield near her head had become a web of light, an exploded star.
    Either the radio had been on or had turned itself on, for mellow, meditating music flowed from a realm behind time.Richard identified it as one of Handel’s oboe sonatas. He noticed that his knees distantly hurt. Eleanor had slid forward and seemed unable to uncross her legs. Shockingly, she whimpered. Joan asked, ‘Sweetheart, didn’t you know you were going too fast?’
    ‘I am very stupid,’ he said. Music and snow poured down upon them, and he imagined that, if only the oboe sonata were played backwards, they would leap backwards from the telephone pole and be on their way home again. The little distances to their houses, once measured in minutes, had frozen and become immense, like those in galaxies.
    Using her hands, Eleanor uncrossed her legs and brought herself upright in her seat. She lit a cigarette. Richard, his knees creaking, got out of the car and tried to push it free. He told Joan to come out of the back seat and get behind the wheel. Their motions were clumsy, wriggling in and out of darkness. The headlights still burned, but the beams were bent inward, toward each other. The Corvair had a hollow head, its engine being in the rear. Its face, an unimpassioned insect’s face, was inextricably curved around the pole; the bumper had become locked mandibles. When Richard pushed and Joan fed gas, the wheels whined in a vacuum. The