Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

  Why doesn’t Dad just die? People that age get diseases. Then he and Mom. He knows he can manage Mom.

  He’s not that young, he’s turned twenty-three, and what makes him feel foolish among these people, he’s married. Nobody else here looks married. There is sure nobody else pregnant, that it shows. It makes him feel put on display, as a guy who didn’t know better. To be fair to her Pru didn’t want to come out, she was willing to sit over there like one of these green plants basking in the light of the television set, watching The Love Boat and then Fantasy Island with poor old Mom-mom, she’s been fading lately, Dad and Mom used to sit home with her but now like tonight they’re out somewhere with that Flying Eagle crowd, incredible how irresponsible grownups so-called get when they think they’re ahead of the game, Mom has told him all about their crazy gold, maybe he should have offered to stay home, him and Pru with Mom-mom, she’s the one with all the cards after all, but by that time Pru had gotten herself dolled up thinking she owed Nelson a little social life because he was working so hard and always housebound with her -families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other’s way, what a tangle. Then once Pru got here and got a buzz on, the madwoman of Akron took over, she decided to play to the hilt the token pregnant woman, throwing her weight around, dancing in shoes she really shouldn’t even be walking in, thick-soled wedgy platforms held on. by thin green plastic strapping like that gimp the playground supervisors at the Mt. Judge Rec Field used to have you braid lanyards for a whistle out of, there was even he remembers a way of weaving called butterflies, you could make a keyholder this way as if kids ever had keys to hold. Maybe she’s doing it out of spite. But he has undergone an abandonment of his own and enjoys watching her from a distance of his own, through the -smoke. She has flash, Pru, flash and glitter in this electric-green beltless dress she bought herself at a new shop over on Locust where the old retired people are being forced out by gentrification, the middle class returning to the cities. Sleeves wide as wings lift when she whirls and that cannonball of a stomach sticks out tugging up her dress in front to show more of the orange elastic stockings the doctor told her to wear to save her young veins. Her shiny platforms can barely shuffle on the shag carpeting but she leaves them on, showing she can do it, more spite at him; her body as if skewered through a spot between her shoulder blades writhes to the music while her arms lift shimmery green and her fantastic long hair snaps in a circle, again and again.

  Nelson cannot dance, which is to say he will not, for all dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you, which takes more faith than he’s got. He doesn’t want to appear a fool. Now Dad, Dad would do it if he were here, just like when Jill was there he gave himself to Skeeter and never looked back even when all the worst had happened, such a fool he really believes there is a God he is the apple of the eye of. The dots on the ceiling don’t let Nelson take this glimpse higher than this and he returns his eyes to Pru, painfully bright in the dazzle dress, its flow like a jewel turned liquid, her face asleep in the music above her belly, which is solid and not hers alone but also his, so he is dancing too. He hates for a second that in himself which cannot do it; just as he could not join in the flickering mind play of computer science and college generally and could not be the floating easy athlete his father had been. The dark second passes, dissolved by the certainty that some day he will have his revenge on them all.

  Pru’s partner for some of the dancing has been one of the sassy Brewer blacks, the bigger one, in bib overalls and cowboy boots, and then Slim comes out of a twirl over by the potted plants with Lyle and swings into orbit with Pru, who keeps at it whether or not anybody is there, up and down, little flips of her hands, and a head toss. Her face does look asleep. That hooked nose of hers sharp in profile. People keep touching her belly, as if for luck: in spinning and snapping their fingers their loose fingers trail across the sacred bulge where something that belongs to him too is lodged. But how to fend off their touches, how to protect her and keep her clean? She is too big, he would look like a fool, she likes the dirt, she came out of it. Once she drove him past her old home in Akron, she never took him in, what a sad row, houses with wooden porches with old refrigerators on them. Melame would have been better, her brother played polo. At least Pru should take off her shoes. He sees himself rising up to tell her but in truth feels too stoned to move, obliged to sit here and mellow between the fluffy worms of the carpet and the worm holes of the ceiling. The music has gas bubbles in it, popping in the speakers, and Donna Summer’s zombie voice slides in and out of itself, doubling, taking all parts. Stuck on you, stuck like glue. The fairy that Slim stopped dancing with offers Pru a toke and she sucks the wet tip of the joint and holds it down deep without losing a beat of the music, belly and feet keeping that twitch. Nelson sees that to an Akron slum kid like this Brewer is a city of hicks and she’s showing them all something.

  A girl he noticed before, she came here with some big redfaced clod who actually wore a coat and tie to this brawl, comes and sits on the floor beside Nelson under Ilie Nastase and takes the beer from between his ankles to sip from it. Her smiling pale round face looks a little lost here but willing to please. “Where do you live?” she asks, as if picking up with him a conversation begun with someone else.

  “In Mt. Judge?” He thinks that’s the answer.

  “In an apartment?”

  “With my parents and my grandmother.”

  “Why is that?” Her face shines amiably with sweat. She has been drinking too. But there is a calm about her he is grateful for. Her legs stretch out beside his in white pants that look radiant where that jellyfish of strangeness moves across them.

  “It’s cheaper.” He softens this. “We thought no point in looking for a place until the baby comes.”

  “You have a wife?”

  “There she is.” He gestures toward Pru.

  The girl drinks her in. “She’s terrific.”

  “You could say that.”

  “What does that tone of voice mean?”

  “It means she’s bugging the shit out of me.”

  “Should she be bouncing like that? I mean, the baby.”

  “Well, they say exercise. Where do you live?”

  “Not far. On Youngquist. Our apartment isn’t near as grand as this, we’re on the first floor back, overlooking a little yard where all the cats come. They say our building might be going condo.”

  “That good or bad?”

  “Good if you have the money, bad if you don’t I guess. We just started working in town and my - my man wants to go to college when we get our stake.”

  “Tell him, Forget it. I’ve been to college and it’s absolute horse poop.” She has a pleasant puffy look to her upper lip and he’s sorry to see, from the way she holds her mouth, that he’s left her nothing to say. “What do you work at?” he asks her.

  “I’m a nurses’ aide in an old people’s home. I doubt if you know it, Sunnyside out toward the old fairgrounds.”

  “Isn’t it depressing?”

  “People say that but I don’t mind it. They talk to me, that’s mostly what people want, company.”

  “You and this man aren’t married?”

  “Not yet. He wants to get further along in life. I think it’s good. We might want to change our minds.”

  “Smart. That chick in green out there got herself knocked up and I had no choice.” Not much answer to this either. Yet the girl doesn’t show boredom, like so many people do with him. At the lot he watches Jake and Rudy prattle away and he envies how they do it without feeling idiotic. This strange face hangs opposite his calmly, mildly attentive, the eyes a blue paler than you almost ever see and her skin milky and her nose slightly tipped up and her gingery hair loosely bundled to the back. Her ears are exposed and pierced but unadorned. In his stoned condition the squarish white folds of these ears seem very vivid. “You say you just moved to town,” Nelson says. “Whe
re’d you move from?”

  “Near Galilee. Know where that is?”

  “More or less. When I was a kid we went down there to the drag race strip a couple times.”

  “You can hear the engines from our place, on a quiet night. My room is on the side and I used to always hear them.”

  “Where we live there’s always traffic going by. My room used to be out in back but now it’s up front.” Dear little ears, small like his, though nothing else about her is small, especially. Her thighs really fill those bright white pants. “What does your father do, he a farmer?”

  “My father’s dead.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “No, it was hard, but he was getting along. He was a farmer, you’re right, and he had the school bus contract for the township.”

  “Still, that’s too bad.”

  “I have a wonderful mother though.”

  “What’s wonderful about her?”

  In his stupidity he keeps sounding combative. But she doesn’t seem to mind. “Oh. She’s just very understanding. And can be very funny. I have these two brothers -“

  “You do?”

  “Yes, and she’s never tried to make me feel I should back down or anything because I’m a girl.”

  “Well why would she?” He feels jealous.

  “Some mothers would. They think girls should be quiet and smart. Mine says women get more out of life. With men, it’s if you don’t win every time, you’re nothing.”

  “Some momma. She has it all figured.”

  “And she’s fatter than I am and I love her for that.”

  You’re not fat, you’re just nice, he wants to tell her. Instead he says, “Finish up the beer. I’ll get us another.”

  “No thanks - what’s your name?”

  “Nelson.” He should ask her hers but the words stick.

  “Nelson. No thanks, I just wanted a sip. I should go see what Jamie’s doing. He’s in the kitchen with some girl -“

  “Who’s showing her tits.”

  “That’s right.”

  “My theory on that is, those that got real tits to show don’t.” He glances down. The vertical ribs of her russet knit sweater are pushed slightly apart as they pass over the soft ample shelf there. Below that the white cloth of her slacks, taut in wrinkles where belly meets thighs in a triangle, has a radiance that manifests the diagonal run of the threads, the way the cloth was woven and cut. Below that her feet are bare, with a pinkness along the outer edge of each big toe fresh from the pressure of her discarded shoes.

  The girl has been made to blush by this survey of her body. “What do you do since college, Nelson?”

  “I just veg out. No, actually, I sell cars. Not your ordinary tacky cars but special old convertibles, that nobody makes anymore. Their value is going to go up and up, it has to.”

  “Sounds exciting.”

  “It is. Jesus, the other day in the middle of town I saw this white Thunderbird parked, with red leather seats, the guy still had the top down though it’s getting pretty cold, and I nearly flipped. It looked like a yacht. When they turned out those things there wasn’t all this penny-pinching.”

  “Jamie and I just bought a Corolla. It’s in his name but I’m the one that uses it, there isn’t any bus that goes out to the fairgrounds anymore and Jamie has a job he can walk to, in this place that makes bug-killers, you know, those electric grids with a purple light that people put outdoors by their pools or barbecues.”

  “Sounds groovy. Must be a slack season for him though.”

  “You’d think so but it’s not, they’re busy making them for next year, and they ship all over the South.”

  “Huh.” Maybe they’ve had enough of this conversation. He doesn’t want to hear any more about Jamie’s bug-killers.

  But the girl keeps going, she’s relaxed with him now, and so young everything is new to her. Nelson guesses she’s three or four years younger than he is. Pru is over a year older, and that irritates him right now, along with her defiant dancing and her pregnancy and all these blacks and queers she’s not afraid of. “So I really should put in my half,” she is explaining, “even though he makes twice what I do. His parents and my mother loaned us the down payment equally though I know she couldn’t afford it. Next year if I can get a part-time job somewhere I want to begin nurse’s training. Those RNs make a fortune doing just what I’m doing now, except they’re allowed to give injections.”

  `Jesus, you want to spend your whole life around sick people?”

  “I like taking care of things. On the farm until my father died there were always chickens and animals. I used to shear my own sheep even.”

  “Huh.” Nelson has always been allergic to animals.

  “Do you dance, Nelson?” she asks him.

  “No. I sit and drink beer and feel sorry for myself.” Pru is bouncing around now with a Puerto Rican or something. Manny has a couple of them working for him in the shop now. He doesn’t know what disease they get as kids, but their cheeks have worse than pocks - like little hollow cuts all over.

  “Jamie won’t dance either.”

  “Ask one of the fairies. Or just go do it by yourself, somebody’ll pick you up.”

  “I love to dance. Why do you feel sorry for yourself?”

  “Oh… my father’s a prick.” He doesn’t know why this popped out of his mouth. Something about the goody-goody way in which the girl speaks of her own parents. But in thinking of his father, what strikes Nelson about the large bland face that appears to his inner eye is a mournful helplessness. His father’s face bloats like an out-of-focus close-up in some war movie in the scramble of battle before floating away. Big and white and vague as on that day when he held him on his lap, when the world was too much for the two of them.

  “You shouldn’t say that,” the girl says, and stands. Luminous long legs. Her thighs make a kind of lap even when she stands. Her pink-rimmed bare feet sunk in the shag rug so close nearly kill him, they are so sexy. What did she say that for? Making him feel guilty and scolded. Her own father is dead. She makes him feel he’s killed his. She can go fuck. She goes and dances, standing shy along the wall for a minute and then moving in, loosening. He doesn’t want to watch and get envious; he heaves himself up, to get another beer and steal another look at the girl in the kitchen. Sad, tits by themselves, on a woman sitting up. Little half-filled purses. This Jamie’s face and hands are broad and scraped-looking and he has loosened his tie to let his bull neck breathe. Another girl is reading his palm; they are all sitting around a little porcelain kitchen table, with spots worn black where place settings were, which reminds Nelson of something. What? A poster in here is of Marlon Brando in the black-leather get-up of The Wild One. Another shows Alice Cooper with his green eyelids and long fingernails. The refrigerator with its cool shelves of yogurt in paper cups and beer in sharply lettered sixpacks seems an island of decent order amid all this. Nelson is reminded of the lot, its rows of new Toyotas, and his stomach sinks. Sometimes at the lot, standing in the showroom with no customers in sight, he feels return to him from childhood that old fear of being in the wrong place, of life being run by rules nobody would share with him. He returns to the big front room with its fake ceiling and thinks that Pru looks ridiculously older than the other dancers: a little frizzy-haired girl called Dody Weinstein interning in teen fashions at Kroll’s and Slim and this Lyle in the soccer shirt back together again and Pam their hostess in a big floppy muu-muu her body is having fits within, while the wan lights of Brewer fall away beyond the bay window, and the girl without a name waits in her white pants to be picked up while she stands to one side shivering from side to side in time to the music. One night in a lifetime, one life in a night. She looks a little self-conscious but happy to be here, out of the sticks. The black bubbles in the speakers pop faster and faster, and his wife with her cannonball gut is about to fall flat on her face. He goes to Pru and pulls her by her wrist away. Her spic thug of a partner dead-pan writhes to the girl in
white pants and picks her up. Babe it’s gotta be tonight, babe it’s gotta be tonight. Nelson is squeezing Pru’s wrist to hurt. She is unsteady, pulled out of the music, and this further angers him, his wife getting tipsy. Defective equipment breaking down on purpose just to show him up. Her brittle imbalance makes him want to smash her completely.