Roger's Version by John Updike

with which to cry, her bare chest with its tiny nipples sucking in and out like a beached fish’s gills.
    In bending over to this maternal exertion, Verna had loosenedher bathrobe and an entire breast had swung suddenly, luminously free. Without hurry she tucked it back behind a lapel and tightened her bathrobe belt. “She gets on my nerves,” she explained. “My nerves aren’t my best thing these days. My worker says one-and-a-half is hard, when they turn two you can talk to them and it’s delightful. I loved it, in the hospital, when they showed her to me all wet and like lavender in color, I had no idea what color she was going to be, but it’s been kind of downhill ever since. I mean, they’re always there , right next to you. Kids.”
    “ Be bop—be bop—a lu—she bop ” issued jubilantly from the other room. The bed and the bathroom were behind this curtain, I had deduced; Verna had been lying in the tub doping herself while this juvenile music blasted into her soggy consciousness. I was groping my way into her reality and was ready to sit down; the best chair available seemed to be a porch chair of a type fashionable a decade ago, a straw basket on thin black metal pipe legs.
    “Isn’t that awesome?” Verna asked me, her strangely slanted, almost lashless eyes half closing in musical appreciation. “Lemme turn the tape, the next band’s kind of soppy, even if it is number one on the stupid charts.”
    Now Paula had found her lungs and began to bawl. Taking a plunge, I placed my gloves on a rickety drop-leaf end table that may have cost all of ten dollars at the Salvation Army and sat down in the straw basket chair and reached and took the screaming infant into my lap. She was heavier than I had expected, more saturated, and furthermore made resistance, writhing in my arms and stretching her hands, their creased wrists and fat tapered backwards-bending fingers, toward her mother. She twisted, she squawked; I had the impulse to shake punitively this little tawny container of mixed bloods. InsteadI jogged her up and down on my knees, saying, “There, there, Paula.” I remembered a routine that used to distract Richie when he was an infant. “This is the way the ladies ride,” I said. “Pace. Pace. Pace.”
    Verna brought her cassette player, a big dove-gray Hitachi with non-detachable speakers, out of the bathroom, set it on the end table on top of my gloves, punched the eject button, and reversed the tape.
    “This is the way the gentlemen ride,” I said in my deepest pedagogic voice. “Trot. Trot. Trot.” The trick with an audience of students is to get a certain menace established in your tone at the outset. “And this ,” I urged into the tiny ear, compact and intricate and very flat to her skull, “is the way the faaarmers ride.” Babies’ skins run a fine little fever, so inviting I kissed her ear. Its complex softness shocked me.
    “Here we go,” Verna announced and, jiggling in her towel-like robe, lightly swung in place to the calypsoish rhythm of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”
    Seeing this sign of benign life in her mother, the baby strained in my arms, her body still hiccupping sobs.
    “Gallop, gallop, gallop,” I hastily finished up.
    The singer’s voice was young, prematurely hardened, and lifted into some realm exhilaratingly above emotion. “But girls they want to have fun, oh girls just want to have—” The voice was cut off by electronic warbling, the inhuman proficient happiness of a synthesizer, like rapidly popping bubbles.
    Verna accepted Paula into her arms and the two of them comically, softly bounced to the music. Verna’s left cheek wore its dimple. The child’s upturned eyes brimmed with dark blueness.
    Sitting there, witnessing, I had a sensation of being DaleKohler, earnest and awkward and himself needy, on one of his charitable visits. This moment of glee, of apparent rapport between mother and daughter, did a flipflop within me; I felt desolate. My