by John Updike
A Camry Deluxe wagon, pearl-gray metallic, with the more potent 24-valve 2.5-liter V-6 engine. He was still so sore at being tailgated by that red Camaro and at Janice criticizing his driving that he wasn’t paying any attention to where they parked. He remembers the zebra crosswalk, and the little landscaped mound of center strip where some sun-starved college kid had propped his knapsack and pillowed his head on it to soak up a few rays, and the fussy old guy who thought he was in charge gesturing at you which way the exit and the booth where you pay was, putting too much into it like that husband at the airport gabbing at his wife, Grace, as if she had no sense, meeting that frizzy-haired longtoothed smiling Jewish princess taller than either of them, but he doesn’t remember which of these rows he parked the car in. He parked it in the patch of dead blank brain cells like all of our brains will be when we’re dead unless the universe has cooked up some truly elaborate surprise. The National Enquirer which Janice sometimes brings home from the Winn Dixie keeps reporting people’s near-death experiences, but for Harry they’re too close to the little green men in the UFOs. Even if they’re true it’s not much comfort. Judy’s hand has slipped out of his as he stands puzzling on the strip of grass on the edge of the parking lot, that broad-bladed grass that grows everywhere down here, watered by sprinklers, they call it St. Augustine. It doesn’t feel like real grass to him, too matted and broad, kind of crunchy underfoot. His chest begins to hurt. A sly broad pain, a kind of band under the skin, tightly sewn there.
Judy’s voice floats up to him like a thin lifeline. “What color is the car, Grandpa?”
“Oh, you know,” he says, keeping his sentences short, so as not to stir up his pain. “Pale gray. Metallic finish. The same color as about half the cars in the world. Don’t you panic. It’ll come to me where I left it.”
The poor kid is losing it, in her fight not to cry. “Daddy’ll drive off!” she blurts out.
“Leaving you and me? Why would he do that? He won’t do that, Judy.”
“He gets real mad sometimes, for no real reason.”
“He probably has some reason he doesn’t tell you. How about you? You ever get mad?”
“Not like Daddy. Mom says he should see a doctor.”
“I guess we all should, now and then.” Rabbit’s sense of doom is trickling like cold water through his stomach. Doctors. His own doctor is bringing his son into the practice, so if he drops dead the kid will take right over, won’t miss a Medicare form. You fill a slot for a time and then move out; that’s the decent thing to do: make room. He scans the ranks of glinting metal in their slots for a strip of gray that will ring a bell, and wonders if he is misremembering the color - he has owned so many cars in his life, and sold so many more. He announces, “I think I left it over on the left. In about the third row. What happened, Judy, was there was this old guy kind of directing things, waving which way everybody should go, and the bastard distracted me. Don’t you hate bossy people like that, who know everything better than you do?”
The little girl’s glossy red head mutely nods at his side, too worried for words.
Rabbit rattles on, to chase their clouds away, “Whenever somebody tells me to do something my instinct’s always to do the opposite. It’s got me into a lot of trouble, but I’ve had a lot of fun. This bossy old guy was pointing one direction so I went the other and found a space.” And for a second, in a kind of window between two tightenings of the band across his chest, he sees the space: next to a cream-colored van, a Ford Bivouac with those watery-blue Minnesota plates, parked sloppily over the white line, another cause for irritation. He had to ease in carefully so as to leave Janice room enough to open her door on the right and not rub fenders with the maroon Galaxy on the left. And now he sees from far off in the shimmering Florida heat a strip of cream risen above the other metallic rooftops. Third row, about a wedge shot in. He says in triumph, “Judy, I see it. Let’s go,” and takes her hand again, lest her small perfection be crushed by one of the automobiles cruising the rows looking for a spot. In some of these big white Caddys and Oldses the tiny old driver can hardly see over the hood out the windshield, just clinging to the wheel, body all shrunk and bent by osteoporosis; it hasn’t got him yet, he’s still six feet three as far as he knows, at least his pants don’t drag on the floor, but he hears Janice talk about it, it’s been on TV a fair amount, that commercial with the two women on the train, it affects women more than men, their smaller bones, she takes calcium pills along with all the other vitamin pills next to her orange juice at breakfast. God, is she healthy. She’ll live forever just to spite him.
He and little Judith arrive across the hazardous hot asphalt at the pearl-gray Camry, which is his, he knows, from Janice’s tennis racket and cover on the back seat, flung in there separately the dumb mutt, what’s the use of a cover if you don’t put the racket in it? But nobody is here and the car is locked and Harry threw away the keys. The little girl begins to cry. Luckily he has a handkerchief in the hip pocket of his faded plaid golf pants. He lowers Pru’s blue bag with its load of bricks to the asphalt and puts the little winter coat he has been carrying on top of the car roof, as if to stake a claim, and kneels down and wipes the bits of melted Sky Bar from Judy’s lips and then the tears from her cheeks. He too wouldn’t mind having a cry, squatting here next to the car’s sunstruck metallic flank, his knees complaining on top of everything else, and the small girl’s hot panicked breath adding to the heat. In her distress her freckled nose has begun to run and her mouth taken on a hardness, a stiffness in the upper lip he associates with Nelson when the boy is frightened or angry.
“We can either stay here and let the others find us,” Harry explains to his granddaughter, “or we can go back and look for them. Maybe we’re too tired and hot to do anything but stay here. We could play a game seeing how many different states’ license plates we can find.”
This breaks her sniffling into a wet little laugh. “Then we’d get lost again.” Her eyelids are reddened by the friction of tears and tiny flakes of light shine in her green irises like the microscopic facets that give metallic paint its tinselly quality.
“Look,” he tells her. “Here’s Minnesota, with its little clump of pine trees. Ten Thousand Lakes, it says. Score one for Grandpa.”
Judy merely smiles this time, not granting him a laugh, she knows he’s trying to get her to forgive his mistake in losing the others.
“It’s not us who are lost, we know where we are,” he says. “It’s them.” He stops crouching beside her, the hoity-toity little snip, and stands up, to uncreak his knees, and also to ease the crowded feeling in his chest.
He sees them. Just this side of the zebra crossing, coming this way, struggling with suitcases. He first sees Nelson, carrying Roy on his shoulders like a two-headed monster, and then Pru’s head of red hair puffed out like the Sphinx, and Janice’s white tennis dress. Harry, up to his chest in car roofs, waves his arm back and forth like a man on a desert island. Janice waves back, a quick toss of her hand as if he’s far from what they’re talking about.
But when they’re all reunited Nelson is furious. His face is pale and his upper lip stiff and bristling. “Jesus Christ, Dad, where did you disappear to? We went all the way back upstairs to that stupid candy store when you didn’t show up in the baggage area.”
“We were there, weren’t we, Judy?” Harry says, marvelling at his son’s growing baldness, exposed mercilessly by the Florida sunlight beating down through the thinned strands, and at his mustache, a mouse-colored stray blur like those fuzzballs that collect under furniture. He has noticed these developments before in recent years but they still have the power to astonish him, along with the crow’s feet and bitter cheek lines time has etched in his child’s face, sharp in the sunlight. “We didn’t take more than a minute in the candy store and came right down the escalator to the baggage place,” Rabbit says, pleased to be remembering so exactly, exactly visualizing the two candy bars, the extra nickel he had to fish up for the b
lack counter woman’s upturned silver-polish-colored palm, the skin magazines with the girls’ open mouths, the interleaved teeth of the escalator steps he was afraid Judy might catch her foot on. “We must have slipped by each other in the crowd,” he adds, trying to be helpful and innocuous. His son frightens him.
Janice unlocks the Canny. The baking heat of its interior, released like a ghost, brushes past their faces. They put the suitcases in the way-back. Pru lifts the groggy boy off Nelson’s shoulders and arranges him in the shadows of the back seat; Roy’s thumb is stuck in his mouth and his dark eyes open for an unseeing second. Nelson, his hands at last freed, slaps the top of the Camry and cries in his agony of irritation, “God damn it, Dad, we’ve been frantic, because of you! We thought you might have lost her!” There is a look Nelson gets when he’s angry or frightened that Harry has always thought of as “white around the gills” - a tension draining color from the child’s face and pulling his eyes back into his head. He gets the look from his mother, and Janice got it from hers, dark plump old Bessie, who was a hot-tempered Koerner, she liked to tell them.
“We stuck right together,” Rabbit says calmly. “And don’t dent my fucking car. You’ve damaged enough cars in your life.”
“Yeah, and you’ve damaged enough lives in yours. Now you’re kidnapping my goddamn daughter!”
“I can’t believe this,” Harry begins. A cold arrow of pain suddenly heads down his left arm, through the armpit. He blinks. “My own granddaughter” is all he can organize himself to say.
Janice, looking at his face, asks, “What’s the matter, Harry?”
“Nothing,” he tells her sharply. “Just this crazy kid. Something’s bugging him and I can’t believe it’s me.” A curious gaseous weight, enveloping his head and chest, has descended in the wake of the sudden arrow. He slumps down behind the wheel, feeling faintly disoriented but determined to drive. When you’re retired, you get into your routines and other people, even socalled loved ones, become a strain. This entire other family loads itself into place behind him. Pru swings her nice wide ass in her three-dimensional checked suit into the back seat next to sleeping Roy, and Nelson climbs in on the other side, right behind Harry, so he can feel the kid’s breath on the back of his neck. He turns his head as far as he can and says to Nelson, in the corner of his eye, “I resent the word `kidnap.”’
“Resent it, then. That’s what it felt like. Suddenly we looked around and you weren’t there.”
Like Pan Am 103 on the radar screen. “We knew where we were, didn’t we, Judy?” Harry calls backward. The girl has slithered over her parents and brother into the way-back with the luggage. Harry can see the silhouette of her head with its pigtail and angular ribbon in the rearview mirror.
“I didn’t know where I was but I knew you did,” she answers loyally, casting forward the thin thread of her voice.
Nelson tries to apologize. “I didn’t mean to get so pissed,” he says, “but if you knew what a hassle it is to have two children, the hassle of travelling all day, and then to have your own father steal one of them -“
“I didn’t steal her, for Chnssake,” Harry says. “I bought her a Sky Bar.” He can feel his heart racing, a kind of gallop with an extra kick in one of the legs. He starts up the Camry and puts it in drive and then brakes when the car jerks forward and puts it into reverse, trying not to make contact, as he eases out, with the side of the Minnesota Bivouac, its protruding side mirror and its racing stripe in three tones of brown.
“Harry, would you like me to drive?” Janice asks.
“No,” he says. “Why would I?”
She hesitates; without looking, he can see, in the hesitation, her little pointed tongue poke out of her mouth and touch her upper lip in that way she has when she tries to think, he knows her so well. He knows her so well that making conversation with her is like having a struggle with himself. “You just had a look on your face a minute ago,” she says. “You looked -“
“White around the gills,” he supplies.
“Something like that.”
The old guy who thinks he’s directing the show directs them down the arrows painted on the asphalt toward the tollbooth. The car ahead of theirs in line, a tan Honda Accord with New Jersey plates, GARDEN STATE, has backs of the head in it that look familiar: it’s that jumpy little guy who hopped through the chairs back in the waiting room, good old Grace up beside him, and in the back seat the frizzy-headed daughter and another passenger, a head even taller and the frizz even tighter - the black guy in the Waspy business suit Harry had assumed had nothing to do with them. The old guy is gabbing and gesturing and the black guy is nodding just like Harry used to do with Fred Springer. It’s bad enough even when your father-in-law is the same color. Harry is so interested he nearly coasts into the back of the Honda. “Honey, brake,” Janice says, and out of the blur of her white tennis dress in the corner of his eye she holds out to him fifty cents for the parking-lot charge. An Oriental kid stone-deaf inside his Walkman earmuffs takes the two quarters with a hand jumping along with some beat only he can hear, and the striped bar goes up, and they are free, free to go home.
“Well,” Harry says, back on the weird brief highway, “it’s a helluva thing, to have your own son accuse you of kidnapping. And as to the big deal ofhaving two children, it can’t be that much worse than having one. Either way, your freedom’s gone.”
Actually Nelson has, unwittingly or not, touched a sore point, for Harry and Janice did have two children. Their dead child lives on with them as a silent glue of guilt and shame, an inexpungeable sourness at the bottom of things. And Rabbit suspects himself of having an illegitimate daughter, three years younger than Nelson, by a woman called Ruth, who wouldn’t admit it the last time Harry saw her.
Nelson goes on, helpless in the grip of his hardened resentments, “You go run off with Judy all palsy-walsy and haven’t said boo to little Roy.”
“Say boo? - I’d wake him up, saying boo, he’s been asleep all the time, it’s like he’s drugged. And how much longer you gonna let him suck his thumb? Shouldn’t he be outgrowing it by now?”
“What does it matter to you if he sucks his thumb? How is it hurting you?”
“He’ll get buck teeth.”
“Dad, that’s an old wives’ tale. Pru asked our pediatrician and he said you don’t suck your thumb with your teeth.”
Pru says quietly, “He did say he should outgrow it soon.”
“What makes you so down on everything, Dad?” Nelson whines, unable it seems to find another pitch. The kid is itching and his voice can’t stop scratching. “You used to be a pretty laidback hombre; now everything you say is kind of negative.”
Rabbit wants to lead the boy on, to see how bad he can make him look in front of the women. “Rigid,” he smilingly agrees. “The older you get, the more you get set in your ways. Nobody at Valhalla Village sucks their thumb. There may even be a rule against it, like swimming in the pool without a bathing cap. Like swimming with an earring on. Tell me something. What’s the significance of an earring when you’re married with two children?”
Nelson ignores the question in dignified silence, making his father look bad.
They are breezing along, between shoulders of unreal grass, the palms clicking by like telephone poles. Pru says from the back seat, to change the subject, “I can never get over how flat Florida is.”
“It gets a little rolling,” Harry tells her, “away from the coasts. Ranch and orange-grove country. Rednecks and a lot of Mexicans. We could all go for a drive inland some day. See the real Florida.”
“Judy and Roy are dying to see Disney World,” Nelson says, trying to become reasonable.
“Too far,” his father swiftly tells him. “It’d be like driving to Pittsburgh from Brewer. This is a big state. You need reservations to stay overnight and this time of year there aren’t any. Absolutely impossible.”
This flat statement renders them all wordless. Through the rushing noise of the
air-conditioning fan and the humming of the tires Harry hears from the way-back that for a second time in this first half-hour he has made his granddaughter cry. Pru turns and murmurs to her. Harry shouts back, “There’s lots else to do. We can go to that circus museum in Sarasota again.”
“I hate the circus museum,” he hears Judy’s small voice say.
“We’ve never been to the Edison house in Fort Myers,” he announces, speaking now as patriarch, to the entire carful. “The people at the condo say it’s fascinating, he even invented television it turns out.”
“And the beach, baby,” Pru softly adds. “You know how you love the beach at the Shore.” In a less maternal voice she tells Janice and Harry, “She’s a lovely swimmer now.”
“Driving to the Jersey Shore used to be absolutely the most boring thing we did,” Nelson tells his parents, trying to get down out of his dark cloud into a family mode, willing now in recollection to be a child again.