All Water Is Holy

from the story "My Father's Tears" by John Updike. Better in context.


We are surrounded by holy water; all water, our chemical mother, is holy. Flying from Boston to New York, my habit is to take a seat on the right-hand side of the plane, but the other day I sat on the left, and was rewarded, at that hour of midmorning, by the sun’s reflections on the waters of Connecticut—not just the rivers and the Sound but little ponds and pools and glittering threads of water that for a few seconds hurled silver light skyward into my eyes. My father’s tears for a moment had caught the light; that is how I saw them. When he was dead, Deb and I divorced. Why? It’s hard to say. We boil at different degrees, Emerson said, and a woman came along who had my boiling point. The snapshots I took of Deb naked, interestingly, she claimed as part of her just settlement. It seemed to me they were mine—I’d taken them. But she said her body was hers.

After our divorce, my mother told me, of my father, “He worried about you two from the first time you brought her home. He didn’t think she was feminine enough for you.”

“He was big on femininity,” I said, not knowing whether to believe her or not. The dead are so easy to misquote.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/02/27/060227fi_fiction?currentPage=1