For those of us who live on the North Shore of Massachusetts and shared a county (Essex) with John Updike we feel a particular loss in the sudden passing of our legendary neighbor. He seemed to write of our lives, our roads, our homes, our marriages, our children, our joys, and our losses.  Everyone knew someone who had spotted him at a bookstore, a local restaurant, or just out walking.

While his novels were celebrated the world over, I preferred and adored his short stories. They were some of the best ever written, perhaps because he was a visual artist as well as a writer. One of my favorites is simply titled, A&P, based on the old A&P grocery store in Ipswich, MA where Updike lived for a time before settling down the coast a bit in Beverly Farms….

“She had on a kind of dirty-pink—beige maybe, I don’t know – bathing suit with little nubble all over it, and what got me, the straps were down.  They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn’t been there you wouldn’t have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.

She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unraveling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A&P with your straps down, I suppose it’s the only kind of face you can have.  She held her back so high her neck, coming out of those white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn’t mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was.” *

Requiescat in pace John Updike

*(PIGEON FEATHERS and OTHER STORIES, Alfred A. Knopf, 1962 – A&P originally appeared in The New Yorker)