EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

Years ago, John Updike had a short story in The New Yorker about the death of a tall and salty woman who anyone familiar with his work could tell was his mother.

I knew it was his mom. I also knew he lived not 30 miles from me because my oldest girl’s Ninth Grade English teacher told the class as much. Her husband played cards with him and she had these kids reading some of his stories and I guess she just mentioned the town.

As soon as I heard it I got right on the phone to Directory Assistance and there he was, street number and all, so I wrote him a condolence note, enclosing with it something I had published about my own mom cracking jokes at her birthday party one minute and dead the next. It also had in it a small black cat and a woman playing the cello; a white slab of pastry marble set into the wooden counter top of our 1890s pantry and the even more stunning death by heart failure of a much-loved youth in front of 20 pals at the close of a church retreat.

Mr. Updike answered immediately, on the first of three postcards I have had from him over the years. He said his mom had ‘keeled over’ in the kitchen and the neighbors had found her body. He thanked me for my thoughts and then made a remark so wonderful about my writing that when I was preparing to bring out my first book I wrote again to ask if I could print it on the cover. Again came an immediate postcard: “OK on the quote. Good luck with the book,” it said and this one act of generosity is what has kept me going ever since.

I am not writing this to thank him for making me famous. I am not famous. I’m just a newspaper columnist looking to catch people at their best, or quirkiest or most outrageous. I am writing to thank him for showing me what joy you can feel if you let yourself see everything as connected, which Physics teaches us it surely is.

Look at this short passage from “The Full Glass,” one of his most recent New Yorker stories and see if you don’t think it simply shines. In it his narrator and alter-ego is remembering a long-ago barn dance to which he invited a pretty and popular girl he had loved since kindergarten but rarely spoke to, a girl he never thought would say yes.

“I had been to barn dances before with my country cousins and knew the calls. Bow to your partner. Bow to your corner, All hands left. Women like all that, it occurs to me this late in life – connections and combinations, contact… As she got the hang of it, her trim waist swung into my hand with the smart impact of a drum- beat, a football catch, a lay-up off the reverberating backboard. I felt her moist sides and the soft insides beneath her rib cage, all taut in the spirit of the dance…”

Connection, combinations, contact. The drumbeat, the lay-up, the catch.

Who wrote about sports the way John Updike did? Or art for that matter? Or books? Or even love? It seems to me that in everything he wrote there are these surprising and wonderful revelations: that the sexual IS the spiritual, that all math is really music, and that friction brings heat and sometimes, if we’re lucky, babies.

“Never stop!” I earnestly wrote in my final letter to him last June, “and don’t even think about leaving the party early!”

He did though; he left it much too early and I see now that when he wrote this piece he probably knew there was a taxi outside waiting for him.

I hope that his ride in it was easy and that he is safe now in the shining world he could all but feel lying just beyond this world. And I know that strangers though we were, I will miss him for the rest of my days.

John Updike died today.

I know where his house is and just how it sits on his lot.I know the route I could drive to get to it. I know all this because I loved him. I read Rabbit Run in the summer of ‘62 as an 8th grade girl. Three times in my adult years I wrote him and all three times he answered me in his courteous way: with typed postcards, hand-signed in the same blue ink he used to correct the mistakes and always with his own true street address, just as if he weren’t a great man and the best writer of our time who influenced so many of us, writers and non-writers alike.

He honored the whole created world just by describing it so exactly and anyone could see his talent. Once I was crossing the street in downtown Boston when a letter carrier coming the other way saw a copy of his Self Consciousness tucked under my arm. “John Updike’s memoir, I read that!” he gaily called. “The guy can even make psoriasis interesting!”

I want to say more tomorrow but for now all I can think to do is worry if I ever really told him how much I loved his work – for the way it helped me to see, and feel, and accept my own bumbling humanity and the humanity of others.

“Thank you, Ms. Marotta, for your ever so encouraging letter,” he graciously wrote me last June.

“Never stop writing,” I had written to him three days before.

He seems to have stopped now and some would say for good, but ah, here’s the magic of all art: in his more-than-50 books he is talking to us still.

For over 20 years Liz Walker was a new anchor with WBZ-TV Channel 4 Boston. Last week I wrote about what great things she said as the keynoter at the recent Girl Scouts Leading Women Awards Breakfast, which you will see at the top here under “This Week’s Column.” It’s worth looking I think for the way it so exactly matches the spirit of the times.

These days she does amazing things in the world, both close at hand – as an ordained minister on staff at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church – and far away in her work with the many innocent people in Dafur and the Sudan who are daily asked to suffer on a scale you and I can scarce imagine.

I first met Liz back in 1986 when she came to my living room with a Channel 4 cameraman to ask me what it felt like to be the only print journalist in New England to get to the finals in the NASA-sponsored competition to send one of us up in the Shuttle. Earlier that day another network had also sent a news team.

“Have the children cling to her skirts!” said the producer. “She LOOKS a little like Christa McAuliffe!” said cameraman. This was just four months after the Challenger blew and it was pretty clear they were setting this up as another Mother of Young Children Dies For NASA Story.

With the camera rolling, the reporter placed her big microphone before the small face of my Fifth Grade daughter. “Would YOU like to go up in space one day?” she asked her. “No WAY!” said the child.

“And how about you dear?” she then asked, lowering the mic to the height of our Second Gradeer – who pushed her hair quick behind her ears, took a step forward like one about to recite an ode and in a calm ‘teaching’ voice said, “No – because when I get big I’m going to be a mother and I don’t think a mother should leave her children.”

Thirty minutes later the news went out over AP wire: “Children of New England Space Finalist Oppose Her Going.” A news veteran pal was on the line to me within 60 seconds. “Don’t let them NEAR your kids!” she said – and so when Liz came to my living room that evening they were safely upstairs with their dad.

She asked me intelligent questions and I answered them and there was only kindness and thoughtfulness in the exchange. I still have the videotape of that interview somewhere and maybe I’ll dig it out and put it up here too. I wasn’t used to talking on TV back then so I seem really stiff and robotic, like a person who’d just had Novocain in both jaws and three or four Botox shots to the face but you’ll see Liz Walker just as she still is today, natural and curious and lovely.

Right now I’m watching the sun rise over the snowy rooftops and trying to line up all the work I have to do day. I don’t know what Liz has lined up for today but it’s a good bet it’s work on the side of the angels. You can see what she’s up to right now by going to her blog  On the Road.

“I got this PAIN doc.” Bet that’s what our man Obama heard  from 20 different places the second he walked into the Oval Office today and boy don’t we ALL have pain.

I have a steady pain in my neck that requires me to see a specialist in ghost-buster gear at the world-renowned Mass. General Hospital. He puts me on my side like a horse, covers my face with a cloth like I’m dead, then takes a lethal-injection needle left over from the Dead Man Walkin’ wing at Alcatraz and slides it THREE TIMES into the wee facet joints of my neck, the teeniest places imaginable where the delicate shell-like bones of the cervical vertebrae touch together – tap! – like the baby teeth of the littlest children.

The needle has in it this super-steroid called astroglide, no analog, no no wait I know, kenalog that’s what it is and the first time he gave it to me in the fall I nearly threw up on his shoes. Two weeks later when he asked how it felt I had to give it to him straight. “How did it FEEL? It felt like gray death entering my body! Tell me, Doctor, has anyway ever done this to YOU!?”and he blinked a second, not really getting it, the joke of it, a doctor having a taste of his own medicine, but then burst out laughing: “NO no one has ever done this me! I’m about the only guy who knows how to do it!”

So off I went today to have this second injection because I was desperate. My man was desperate. Even my cats were desperate because no one wants to be around a person with neck pain.

The Doctor finally admitted today he could give me a couple of little pills ahead of time to take the edge off, like what people take before that big Roto-Rooter Exam everyone over 50 has to have and as I swallowed them I thought of our shiny new friend walking into the Oval Office for the first time today to see 300 million patients just like me lined up at the door.

“I have this PAIN Doc, I lost my house, my kid is both fat AND anemic and I’m out of work…”

If we had a cloth over our eyes for a while during the last eight years it is sure enough gone today, and we can finally SEE how bad things are….. So now here comes your medicine; just open your mouth and say Ahhh!

This is my Inauguration Day column from eight years ago. Ah the benefit of hindsight!

“I hope you had fun watching the Inauguration yesterday. I know I did. I always watch Inaugurations, partly because I love seeing people in hats: Nancy Reagan in her signature reda; Jacquie way back, in her poofy pillbox. Hilary in ’93, in that deep-blue number that matched the coat. I was sorry Laura chose to go hatless, but I understand. We’d be lying if we didn’t admit that Hillary looked a lot like Smurfette in that deep-blue hat-and-coat ensemble, and a little like QE 2 as well, not meaning the luxury liner, of course, but the Queen herself, whose curse it is to live in a country where the female regent is just EXPECTED to wear a matching hat for every coat, and a matching purse to boot.

“Anyway, I loveall  Inaugurations, mostly for the surprises they furnish us. I think of that blizzard that blew in January 19 of 1960, wrought havoc and blew back out again, blinding poor Robert Frost, who couldn’t see to read his poem, and ended up reciting a diffferent one, from memory. I think of the sight, eight years ago, of Emotional Bill, leaking tears like some Miss Congeniality all during the prayer service he attended the morning he took office.

“Of course there were small surprises this time too, the way Laura looked in her hatlessness being just one example. There was also:

” The way Hillary looked, in what seemed to be a black Johnny Cash-style leather coat, with hair slicked back like Johnny Cash’s too. (Wait! Is Hillary actually turning into Johnny Cash? Is she becoming… TRANSGENDERED, as a final poke in the eye to Cheating Bill?

“The way the new president gamely if quietly sang the words to the National Anthem, when that giant soldier-boy belted it out in his plummy voice.

“The way his Vice President Dick Cheney DIDN’T sing along but looked somberly straight ahead.

“All this time after catching such glimpses, I still look back at them, parsing them for the insights they might provide into the nature of the regime, and its new boss especially.

“Because we wonder: will this man be open, affable and good-natured, or will he tend more toward caution and calculation? Will he hold grudges and fence himself about with them, a man in a stockade, or can he let go of grievance, seeing people as he sees himself, filled to the brim with every sort of impulse, from high to low?

“Someone said his success will depend on whether or not he enjoys wielding all the power inherent in the office. After all, power on that scale and the nation looking to YOU day and night have been known to turn men from spring-in-their-step bright-eyed warriors to haggard and scooped-out shells (see Jimmy Carter, Franklin Roosevelt, Dave Letterman.)

“I HOPE Bush enjoys it. God knows he’s better at communicating joy than poor Al Gore, his opponent in this recent sorry election, and I admit here hat I voted for Gore.

“I wish the guy the best, as he and his wife Laura take up residence in that satin-pillowed jail, as former Bush and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan once described the White House, and she ought to know since she worked there for three years.

“I wish him luck, and I liked my Inauguration Day surprises, but still, I have to wonder: Why DIDN’T Cheney sing along?

It’s been so cold here the flashers are describing themselves, ha-ha old joke but man it’s been cold. 17 below zero at the lake yesterday where we foolishly went thinking ‘Oh we’ll just take a spin up to our summer place and check on things.’ FLED IN FEAR 24 hours later, not just because of the cold but because of this brand new snowstorm bearing down on us. Packed up the cats and the cooler and drove home fast as we could last night, the storm’s wet breath cold upon our necks.

When I was a high school teacher on study hall duty, a kid taking Latin sat right in front of my big desk and I’d look at his book sometimes – to see how much I remembered of that knuckly old language and admire the prints of Roman statues with their noses all rubbed off.

Once though, he came in with a book called Voyage to the Top of the World or some such name about this dogsled bunch up by the North Pole trying to carry on in all that cold. It was kind of a babyish book but I loved it,  especially the parts where they’d pee into the air, and their pee would freeze into sticks which they’d then use to repair broken parts of the sleds.

Just kinda gets you thinkin’ huh? Weatherman gives ya lemons, make lemonade. Or at least some novelty swizzle sticks to serve in the drinks of your enemies.

It’s snowing again and everyone’s sick. This time it seems to be the Green Death as we call it in our family. In one friend’s household a college-age child fell ill last Sunday and within 36 hours all four of his family members were also clenching and writhing – drivin’ the porcelain bus as they say.

My friend’s body must’ve thought it would be funny to add fainting to the mix too. Anyway, it shut the lights out inside his head just as he was making his midnight way toward the john so that THERE HE WAS in a heap on the floor trying to regain consciousness when one of the other kids, en route to the bathroom himself, stepped right on him. Then they BOTH screamed, which made me picture that scene when the very young Drew Barrymore comes upon ET in her brother’s closet. Aaaaaah! AAAAAHHH!

The January I was in 6^th grade a whole shelf-full of books fell on my head in the school library. Then the next day I broke out in cold sores, my specialty that year as my school picture eternally attests. The day after that we had to go to my cousin’s in Brockton and on the ride back I got so sick, so truly limp-as-a-skinned-bunny-sick I couldn’t even put my legs down on the ground once home. My mom carried me up the stairs and put me in my new red pajamas and I knew I looked small and scared and skinny-necked – a lot like ET in the closet myself, come to think of it.

I knew I wouldn’t be going to school the next day either but would have one, maybe two days in bed with hourly Room Service and a little bell to ring if I thought I might throw up.

My bed was right up against the window and I turned on my side to look out it at the old elm tree I looked at every night of those little girl years and felt empty…. lucky….safe. And it was snowing then too.

(the tree died the next year – The men who took it down said it dated back to Revolutionary days. I still see it in my mind.)

My most recent newspaper piece is David’s Uncle Ed – you’ll find it right up at the top where it says “This Week’s column” – and it occurred to me that maybe people would like to see what he looks like. Here he is on his honeymoon, pretending to be exhausted by his husbandly demands. He was 33 when Auntie Fran set her sights on him and she was 40 and a real ‘looker’ as they used to say.

Here she is seeming to point in merry fashion at the bed in the little New Hampshire cabin where they had their honeymoon:

Two people on their honeymoon have only each other to take pictures of so here’s Ed with the drinks at sundown and then savoring one of his first breakfasts as a married man.

They had 45 years together though for the last ten of them Fran was like a bird trapped in a cage: perplexed, sometimes cross and finally so resigned to the her state that she stopped talking altogether – even let the food you put in her mouth dribble right on out again the second you looked away.

Fran isn’t even a mile down the road now, over in Oak Grove, in the lot which was bought for David’s young dad, dead so tragically at just 45 and now also holding David’s mom his wife Ruthie so that Ruth and Francis Payne sleep together as they slept as children in the little house in Manchester, New Hampshire, two girls born when the century was in its teens.

Ed was born in 1920. He wrote poems in the War – also profiles essays and funny songs, all while stationed in the jungles of the South Pacific with the bodies rotting on the beach. Then he came home and took care of everyone: his darling Fran, his mom til she died in the bathtub, a heavy old lady weary with the years. He takes care of me now. though he thinks it’s the other way around.

Here he is two springs ago holding our newest family member. Not your wispy old man with a jawbone thin tin as an axe-blade. He’s as substantial as they come in every way. He will leave a very large void when at last he goes to join the Payne girls over in Oak Grove not even a mile down the road.

Happy New Year! I’m going up to the attic to pound the treadmill, make up the crib for our baby and the bed for our pre-schooler, both coming here to sleep and eat and tear the place apart next weekend while their parents do the same in New Orleans.

Right now Old Dave is putting away Christmas and there’s the upside in having a control freak for a husband:I don’t have to so much as place one ornament into a box because I could do it wrong and then what? - so little elderly Charlotte the cat and I are sitting on our plump pin-cushion bottoms, she licking her paws and I writing to you.

Sad to say, my boy Mike was no happier about the picture of him on our Christmas card when he finally saw it than he thought he might be. (See last post.) He read it silently a few times, then put it down on my desk and said only one word – “Shame” – which for an old recovery girl like me lit up about six danger signals in my brain and caused me shortness of breath for over an hour….. Luckily, it turned out he wasn’t THAT mad – said later “I shamed you and now I’m past it” – after which we all played Celebrity, a ridiculously fun game involving fast-paced charades, which I rock at since I have no dignity.

New Years Eve is the birthday of our oldest girl Carrie so the night before last we celebrated by going to the wee house-in-the-woods she keeps with her own true love Chris and the above-mentioned little ones. We were all there, and also our girl Annie’s tall, much-muscled firefighter/paramedic boyfriend who manhandled the pre-schooler and dragged him around the floor inside a silken sack, much to the child’s delight. The rest of us sucked down a special rice the girls made using an actual Japanese fan, along with pot stickers, baby scallops and FINE wines and vodkas and sat by the fire.

I’ve been keeping a diary for 50 years and last year I wrote in it only about 40% of the time. This of course is because I had you talk to. Though this ephemeral medium might not last as long as paper and ink, still it was worth it:You kept me company in my lonely writer’s job for which I say thanks; thanks for clicking through every time and may this day and all your future days be as lively and full for you as they have been for us!