Free Museums and Women by John Updike

when four or five, she thought she saw the robed shadow of Jesus moving in its branches, and prayed that the end of the world be not yet come.
    The people on the corner do not know each other very well. It is the houses who know each other, whose windows watch. Mrs. Billy Hannaford goes to the Episcopal church whenever Communion is offered; she dresses in purple and walks with a cane, her cheeks painted salmon, her hair rinsed blue. Some weekend nights, cars belonging to the Blandys’ friends are parked in front of their house until hours after midnight. The young couple’s baby cries. The man who lives in the dark house is off in his car from seven to seven, and hiswife is indistinguishable among the two or three ginger-haired women who come and go. The Latroys have beautiful blonde daughters, and much of the hot-rodding on the corner is for their benefit. This is what the houses know of each other’s inner lives, what their windows can verify.
    Rain made Ray Blandy romantic and he had hoped to romance his wife, but June Blandy had fallen asleep in the middle of an embrace, and he had risen from the bed in bad temper. It was Saturday midnight. He stood by the window, wanting to be loved by the rain. There was a nearing roar of motors and a braking slither, and he saw (this is what he thought he saw) a speeding VW bus pursued by a black sedan. The bus disappeared behind the edge of the dark house. The sedan skidded on the smooth patch where just that April some frost-heaves had been retarred; its weight swung from side to side, like an accelerated dance step. Out of control, the car went up with one pair of tires onto the sidewalk, and also disappeared. Then there was a thump, not deafening but definite, and deeply satisfying; and a silence. Then the high-pitched gear whine of a prolonged backing up. The VW bus appeared, backward, from behind the dark house. Shouting voices dropped to a mutter. Mr. Latroy, wearing his auxiliary-policeman’s badge, appeared in front of his house. The Van der Bijns’ lights went on.
    June Blandy sat up in bed. “What was that?”
    “You mean you weren’t asleep, you were just faking?”
    “I was sound asleep, but something thumped.”
    “Sonic boom,” he told her. She missed the allusion. He told her, “A car lost control going around the corner and hit something up the street. I can’t see what.”
    “Why are you just standing there? Let’s go.” Last year, when a dog had been hit on the corner and their neighborsfrom the curb idly watched it yelp and writhe, June had spontaneously run into the street and taken the broken animal into her arms. Now she put on her bathrobe and was past him, and down the stairs, and out of the door. He looked in two closets for a bathrobe or a raincoat to put over his pajamas and finally, afraid of missing everything, followed her into the drizzle in a short yellow slicker that barely covered his fly.
    The corner had cracked open like a piñata, spilling absurdly dressed people. Mr. Van der Bijn wore a long nightcap, with a tassel—who would have imagined it? Mrs., her daytime braids undone, had gray hair down to her waist. The young mother, baby on hip, wore bell-bottom pants of crimson crushed velvet: her normal at-home costume? Why were so many people up and dressed after midnight? Mrs. Latroy wore a blue print dress, and her husband black trousers and his pin-striped Tarbox Dairy shirt, with a cream-colored logo. Did he never sleep? His milk route began at four. From the dark house emerged two middle-aged women, ginger-haired and flirtatious, in house slippers. “That’s a cute costume,” one of them said to Ray. A tense, slight man with a rash of pimples on his forehead, he looked down and adjusted his pajama fly.
    June, who had reached the street earlier than he, told him, “About six people got out of the car into the bus and drove away. Shouldn’t somebody have stopped them, or done
some
thing?” She had turned from him to address a