Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

“Poor Harry, do you feel I’ve deserted you this summer? What are you going to do with all this mess you’ve pruned away? The beauty bush looks absolutely ravaged.”

  He admits, “I was getting tired and making bad decisions. That’s why I stopped.”

  “Good thing,” she says. “There wouldn’t have been anything left but stumps. We’d have to call it the ugliness bush.”

  “Listen, you, I don’t see you out here helping. Ever.”

  “The outdoors is your responsibility, the indoors is mine - isn’t that how we do it?”

  “I don’t know how we do anything any more, you’re never here. In answer to your question, I’d planned to stack what I cut over behind the fish pond to dry out and then burn it next spring when we’re back from Florida.”

  “You’re planning ahead right into 1990; I’m impressed. That year is still very unreal to me. Won’t the yard look ugly all winter then, though?”

  “It won’t look ugly, it’ll look natural, and we won’t be here to see it anyway.”

  Her tongue touches the upper lip of her mouth, which has opened in thought. But she says nothing, just “I guess we won’t, if we do things as normal.”

  “If ? “

  She doesn’t seem to hear, gazing at the fence-high heap of pruned branches.

  He says, “If you’re so in charge of the indoors, what are we having for dinner?”

  “Damn,” she says. “I meant to stop by at the farm stand there at the end of the bridge and pick up some sweet corn, but then I had so much else on my mind I sailed right by. I thought we’d have the corn with what’s left of Tuesday’s meatloaf and those dinner rolls in the breadbox before they get moldy. There was a wonderful tip in the Standard about how to freshen stale bread in the microwave, I forget what exactly, something to do with water. There must be a frozen veg in the freezer part we can have instead of sweet corn.”

  “Or else we could sprinkle salt and sugar on ice cubes,” he says. “One thing I know’s in the fridge is ice cubes.”

  “Harry, it’s been on my mind to go shopping, but the IGA is so far out of the way and the prices at the Turkey Hill are ridiculous, and the convenience store over on Penn Boulevard has those surly kids behind the counter who I think punch extra figures into the cash register.”

  “You’re a shrewd shopper, all right,” Harry tells her. The mackerel sky is forming a solid gray shelf in the southwest; they move together toward the house, away from the shadow of coming dark.

  Janice says, “So.” Saying “so” is something she’s picked up recently, from her fellow-students or her teachers, as the word for beginning to strike a deal. “You haven’t asked me how I did on my last quiz. We got them back.”

  “How did you do?”

  “Beautifully, really. Mr. Lister gave me a B minus but said it would have been a B plus if I could organize my thoughts better and clean up my spelling. I know it’s `i’ before `e’ sometimes and the other way around some other times, but when?”

  He loves her when she talks to him like this, as if he has all the answers. He leans the long-handled clippers in the garage against the wall behind a dented metal trash can and hangs the pruning saw on its nail. Shadowy in her sundress, she moves ahead of him up the back stairs and the kitchen light comes on. Inside the kitchen, she rummages, with that baffled frowning expression of hers, biting her tongue tip, in the refrigerator for edible fragments. He goes and touches her waist in the wheat-colored dress, lightly cups her buttocks as she bends over looking. Tenderly, he complains, “You didn’t come home until late last night.”

  “You were asleep, poor thing. I didn’t want to risk waking you so I slept in the guest room.”

  “Yeah, I get so groggy, suddenly. I keep wanting to finish that book on the American Revolution but it knocks me out every time.”

  “I shouldn’t have given it to you for Christmas. I thought you’d enjoy it.”

  “I did. I do. Yesterday was a hard day. First Ronnie tied me on the last hole when I had the bastard all but beaten, and then he snubbed my invitation to play again. And then Nelson called all jazzed up with some crazy scheme about water scooters and Yamaha.”

  “I’m sure Ronnie has his reasons,” Janice says. “I’m surprised he played with you at all. How do you feel about Brussels sprouts?”

  “I don’t mind them.”

  “To me, they always taste spoiled; but they’re all we have. I promise to get to the IGA tomorrow and stock up for the long weekend.”

  “We going to have Nelson and his tribe over?”

  “I thought we might all meet at the club. We’ve hardly used it this summer.”

  “He sounded hyper on the phone - do you think he’s back on the stuff already?”

  “Harry, Nelson is very straight now. That place really has given him religion. But I agree, Yamaha isn’t the answer. We must raise some capital and put ourselves on a solvent basis before we start courting another franchise. I’ve been talking to some of the other women getting their licenses -“

  “You discuss our personal financial problems?”

  “Not ours as such, just as a case study. It’s all purely hypothetical. In real-estate class we always have a lot of case studies. And they all thought it was grotesque to be carrying a mortgage amounting to over twenty-five hundred a month on the lot when we have so much other property.”

  Rabbit doesn’t like the trend here. He points out, “But this place is already mortgaged. What do we pay? Seven hundred a month.”

  “I know that, silly. Don’t forget, this is my business now.” She has stripped the Brussels sprouts of their waxpaper box and put them in the plastic safe dish and put it in the microwave and punches out the time - three blips, a peep, and then a rising hum. “We bought this place ten years ago,” she tells him, “for seventyeight thousand and put fifteen down and have about ten or fifteen more in equity by now, it doesn’t accumulate very fast in the first half of payback, there’s a geometric curve they tell you about, so let’s say there’s still fifty outstanding; in any case, housing prices have gone way up in this area since 1980, it’s been flattening out but hasn’t started to go down yet, though it might this winter, you’d begin by asking two twenty, two thirty let’s say, with the Penn Park location, and the seclusion, the fact that it has real limestone walls and not just facing, it has what they call historic value; we certainly wouldn’t settle for less than two hundred, which minus the fifty would give us one fifty, which would wipe out two-thirds of what we owe Brewer Trust!”

  Rabbit has rarely heard this long an utterance from Janice, and it takes him a few seconds to understand what she has been saying. “You’d sell this place?”

  “Well, Harry, it is very extravagant to keep it just for the summer essentially, especially when there’s all that extra room over at Mother’s.”

  “I love this place,” he tells her. “It’s the only place I’ve ever lived where I felt at home, at least since Jackson Road. This place has class. It’s us.”

  “Honey, I’ve loved it too, but we must be practical, that’s what you’ve always been telling me. We don’t need to own four properties, plus the lot.”

  “Why not sell the condo, then?”

  “I thought of that, but we’d be lucky to get out of it what we paid for it. In Florida, places are like cars - people like them brand new. The new malls and everything are to the east.”

  “What about the Poconos place?”

  “There’s not enough money there either. It’s an unheated shack. We need two hundred thousand, honey.”

  “We didn’t roll up that debt to Toyota - Nelson did it, Nelson and his faggy boyfriends.”

  “Well, you can say that, but he can’t pay it back, and he was acting as part of the company.”

  “What about the lot? Why can’t you sell the lot? That much frontage on Route 111 is worth a fortune; it’s the real downtown, now that people are scared to go into the old downtown because of the spics.”

  A look of pain
crosses Janice’s face, rippling her exposed forehead; for once, he realizes, he is thinking slower than she is. “Never,” she says curtly. “The lot is our number-one asset. We need it as a base for Nelson’s future, Nelson’s and your grandchildren’s. That’s what Daddy would want. I remember when he bought it after the war, it had been a country gas station, with a cornfield next to it, that had closed during the war when there were no cars, and he took Mother and me down to look at it, and I found this dump out back, out in that brambly part you call Paraguay, all these old auto parts and green and brown soda bottles that I thought were so valuable, it was like I had discovered buried treasure I thought, and I got my school dress all dirty so that Mother would have been mad if Daddy hadn’t laughed and told her it looked like I had a taste for the car business. Springer Motors won’t sell out as long as I’m alive and well, Harry. Anyway,” she goes on, trying to strike a lighter note, “I don’t know anything about industrial real estate. The beauty of selling this place is I can do it myself and get the salesperson’s half of the broker’s commission. I can’t believe we can’t get two for it; half of six per cent of two hundred thousand is six thousand dollars -all mine!”

  He is still playing catch-up. “You’d sell it - I mean, you personally?”

  “Of course, you big lunk, for a real-estate broker. It would be my entrée, as they call it. How could Pearson and Schrack, for instance, or Sunflower Realty, not take me on as a rep if I could bring in a listing like that right off the bat?”

  “Wait a minute. We’d live in Florida most of the time -“

  “Some of the time, honey. I don’t know how much I could get away at first, I need to establish myself. Isn’t Florida, honestly, a little boring? So flat, and everybody we know so old.”

  “And the rest of the time we’d live in Ma’s old house? Where would Nelson and Pru go?”

  “They’d be there, obviously. Harry, you seem a little slow. Have you been taking too many pills? Just the way we and Nelson used to live with Mother and Daddy. That wasn’t so bad, was it? In fact, it was nice. Nelson and Pru would have built-in babysitters, and I wouldn’t have to do all this housekeeping by myself.”

  “What housekeeping?”

  “You don’t notice it, men never do, but there’s an awful lot of simple drudgery to keeping two separate establishments going. You know how you always worry about one place being robbed while we’re in the other. This way, we’d have one room at Mother’s, I mean Nelson’s - I’m sure they’d give us our old room back - and we’d never have to worry!”

  Those bands of constriction, with their edges pricked out in pain, have materialized across Harry’s chest. His words come out with difficulty. “How do Nelson and Pru feel about us moving in?”

  “I haven’t asked yet. I thought I might this evening, after I ran it by you. I really don’t see how they can say no; it’s my house, legally. So: what do you think?” Her eyes, which he is used to as murky and careful, often blurred by sherry or Campari, shine at the thought of her first sale.

  He isn’t sure. There was a time, when he was younger, when the thought of any change, even a disaster, gladdened his heart with the possibility of a shake-up, of his world made new. But at present he is aware mostly of a fluttering, binding physical resistance within him to the idea of being uprooted. “I hate it, offhand,” he tells her. “I don’t want to go back to living as somebody’s tenant. We did that for ten years and finally got out of it. People don’t live all bunched up, all the generations, any more.”

  “But they do, honey - that’s one of the trends in living, now that homes have become so expensive and the world so crowded.”

  “Suppose they have more children.”

  “They won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do. Pru and I have discussed it.”

  “Does Pru ever feel crowded, I wonder, by her mother-in-law?”

  “I wouldn’t know why. We both want the same thing - a happy and healthy Nelson.”

  Rabbit shrugs. Let her stew in her own juice, the cocky little mutt. Going off to school and thinking she’s learned everybody’s business. “You go over after supper and see how they like your crazy plan. I’m dead set against it, if my vote counts. Sell off the lot and tell the kid to get an honest job, is my advice.”

  Janice stops watching the microwave tick down its numbers and comes close to him, unexpectedly, touching his face again with that ghostly searching gesture, tucking her body against his to remind him sexually of her smallness, her smallness fitting his bigness, when they first met and still now. He smells her brushedback salt-and-pepper hair and sees the blood-tinged whites of her dark eyes. “Of course your vote counts, it counts more than anybody’s, honey.” When did Janice start calling him honey? When they moved to Florida and got in with those Southerners and Jews. The Jewish couples down there had this at-rest quality, matched like pairs of old shoes, the men accepting their life as the only one they were going to get, and pleased enough. It must be a great religion, Rabbit thinks, once you get past the circumcision.

  He and Janice let the house issue rest as a silent sore spot between them while they eat. He helps her clear and they add their plates to those already stacked in the dishwasher, waiting to be run through. With just the two of them, and Janice out of the house so much, it takes days for a sufficient load to build up on the racks. She telephones Nelson to see if they’re going to be in and puts her white cardigan back on and gets back into the Camry and drives off to Mt. Judge. Wonder Woman. Rabbit catches the tail end of Jennings, a bunch of twitchy old black-and-white clips about World War II beginning with the invasion of Poland fifty years ago tomorrow, tanks versus cavalry, Hitler shrieking, Chamberlain looking worried; then he goes out into the dusk and the mosquitoes to stack the already wilting brush more neatly in the corner behind the cement pond with its fading blue bottom and widening crack. He gets back into the house in time for the last ten minutes of Wheel of Fortune. That Vanna! Can she strut! Can she clap her hands when the wheel turns! Can she turn those big letters around! She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.

  By the end of the Cosby summer rerun, one of those with too much Theo in it, Harry is feeling sleepy, depressed by the idea of Janice selling the house but soothed by the thought that she’ll never do it. She’s too scatterbrained, she and the kid will just drift along deeper and deeper into debt like the rest of the world; the bank will play ball as long as the lot has value. The Phillies are out in San Diego and in sixth place anyway. He turns the TV sound way down and by the comforting shudder of the silenced imagery stretches out his feet on the Turkish hassock they brought from Ma Springer’s house when they moved and slumps down deeper into the silvery-pink wing chair he and Janice bought at Schaechner’s ten years ago. His shoulders ache from all that pruning. He thinks of his history book but it’s upstairs by the bed. There is a soft ticking at the lozenge-pane windows: rain, as on that evening at the beginning of summer, when he’d just come out of the hospital, the narrow room with the headless sewing dummy, another world, a dream world. The phone wakes him when it rings. He looks at the thermostat clock as he goes to the hall phone. 9:20. Janice has been over there a long time. He hopes it isn’t one of those coke dealers that still now and then call, about money they are owed or a new shipment of fresh “material” that has come in. You wonder how these dealers get so rich, they seem so disorganized and hit-or-miss. He was having a dream in the wing chair, some intense struggle already fading and unintelligible, with an unseen antagonist, but in a vivid domed space, like an old-time railroad terminal only the ceiling was lower and paler, a chapel of some kind, a tight space that clings to his mind, making his hand look ancient and strange - the back swollen and bumpy, the fingers withered - as it reaches for the receiver on the wall.

  “Harry.” He has never heard Janice’s voice sound like this, so stony, so dead.

  “Hi. Where are you? I was getting afraid you’d had an accident.”

&
nbsp; “Harry, I -” Something grabs her throat and will not let her speak.

  “Yeah?”

  Now she is speaking through tears, staggering over gulps, suppressed sobs, lumps in her throat. “I described my idea to Nelson and Pru, and we all agreed we shouldn’t rush into it, we should discuss it thoroughly, he seemed more receptive than she, maybe because he understands the financial problems -“

  “Yeah, yeah. Hey, it doesn’t sound so bad so far. She’s used to considering the house as hers, no woman likes to share a kitchen.”

  “After she’d put the children to bed, she came down with this look on her face and said there was something then that Nelson and I should know, if we were all going to live together.”

  “Yeah?” His own voice is still casual but he is no longer sleepy; he can see what is coming like a tiny dot in the distance that becomes a rocket ship in a space movie.

  Janice’s voice firms up, goes dead and level and lower, as if others might be listening outside the door. She would be in their old bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, Judy asleep beyond one wall and Roy behind the wall opposite. “She said you and she slept together that night you stayed here your first night out of the hospital.”