by John Updike
In Florida, there is no trouble finding Golden Oldies stations on the car radio. We’re all oldies down here. The music of your life, some of the announcers like to call it, and it keeps tumbling in, Patti Page begging “Never let me gooooo, I love you soooooo,” and then doing so perkily that Latin-American bit with “Aye yi yi” and the caballeros, and finishing “I’ve waited all my life, to give you all my love, my heart belongs to you,” and then Tony Bennett or one of those other mooing Italians with “Be My Love,” speaking of all my love, and then Gogi Grant and “The Wayward Wind,” he hasn’t thought of Gogi Grant for ages, it’s a rare song that doesn’t light up some of his memory cells, while the landscape outside the car windows beyond the whoosh of the airconditioner gets more and more honkytonk - Flea World, Active Adult Living and car after car goes by with an orange Garfield stuck to the back window with paws that are suction cups. “Why you ramble, no one knows,” Nat “King” Cole singing “Rambling Rose,” ending so gently, “Why I want you, no one knows,” you can just about see that wise slow smile, and then “Tzena, Tzena,” he hasn’t heard that for years either, the music doesn’t come ethnic any more, and “Oh, My Papa,” speaking of ethnic, and Kay Starr really getting her back into “Wheel of Fortune,” all those hiccups, hard-driving, “Puleazzze let it be now,” and “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” that really goes back, he was walking to grade school then with Lottie Bingaman, in love with Margaret Schoelkopf, and Presley’s “Love Me Tender,” knock him all you want, before he got fat and druggy and spooked in the end he had a real voice, a beautiful voice, not like foghorn Sinatra, and then Ray Charles, now there’s another real voice, “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” “dreaming of yesterdayssss,” the way it trails off like that, that funny blind man’s waggle of the head, and Connie Francis, “Where the Boys Are,” a voice to freeze your scalp all right, but whose life are these songs? That was beachparty era, he was all married and separated and reconciled and working at Verity Press by then, no more parties for him. Ronnie Harrison and Ruth fucking all weekend at the Jersey Shore: that still rankles.
The station fades out and in trying to find another he passes through a broadcast church service, evangelical, a man shouting “Jesus knows! Jesus looks into your heart! Jesus sees the death in your heart!” and Harry passes on, coming upon, too late for all of the sobbing, Johnny Ray’s “Cry,” “If your sweetheart sends a letter of goodbye,” that was around the time he had to go into the Army and part from Mary Ann, he didn’t know it would be for good, they argued about Johnny Ray, Rabbit insisting the guy had to be a fruit to sing that way, and then down in Texas he realized the song was for him, his sweetheart sent a letter. Next number, Dean Martin comes on loafing through “That’s Amore”: by now Harry had come back and taken up with Janice, the quiet girl behind the nuts counter at Kroll’s, her little tight body, the challenge of her puzzled dark eyes, he remembers because he would joke, “That’s amore,” after they would fuck in the room Linda Hammacher would let them use, with its view of the dove-gray gas tanks by the river. “Only the Lonely,” the late Roy Orbison warbles. “There goes my baby, there goes my heart,” in that amazing voice that goes higher and higher till you think it must break like crystal, as in a way it did; Rabbit supposed his being dead is what makes this one a Golden Oldie.
The songs roll on, broken every half-hour by summaries of the news. A bombing in Colombia has injured eighty-four, the Colombian woes are increased by a drop in coffee prices, President Bush’s upcoming speech on the nation’s drug problems rouses Washington speculation, can he do a Reagan? Also in Washington, officials are still hopeful that the newborn baby panda, fighting for its life in an incubator, will survive. Locally, manatees continue active in the Caloosahatchee Basin, and the Dolphins were beaten yesterday in Miami by the Philadelphia Eagles, twenty to ten. Rabbit likes hearing this score, but the old songs, all that syrup about love, love, the sweetness, the cuteness, the doggies in the window and Mommy kissing Santa Claus and the naughty lady of Shady Lane, the background strings and pizzicato bridges and rising brass crescendos meant to thrill the pants off you, wear him down: he resents being made to realize, this late, that the songs of his life were as moronic as the rock the brainless kids now feed on, or the Sixties and Seventies stuff that Nelson gobbled up - all of it designed for empty heads and overheated hormones, an ocean white with foam, and listening to it now is like trying to eat a double banana split the way he used to. It’s all disposable, cooked up to turn a quick profit. They lead us down the garden path, the music manufacturers, then turn around and lead the next generation down with a slightly different flavor of glop.
Rabbit feels betrayed. He was reared in a world where war was not strange but change was: the world stood still so you could grow up in it. He knows when the bottom fell out. When they closed down Kroll’s, Kroll’s that had stood in the center of Brewer all those years, bigger than a church, older than the courthouse, right at the head of Weiser Square there, with every Christmas those otherworldly displays of circling trains and nodding dolls and twinkling stars in the corner windows as if God Himself put them there to light up this darkest time of the year. As a little kid he couldn’t tell what God did from what people did; it all came from above somehow. He can remember standing as a child in the cold with his mother gazing into this world of tinselled toys as real as any other, the air biting at his cheeks, the sound of the Salvation Army bells begging, the smell of the hot soft pretzels sold on Weiser Square those years, the feeling around him of adult hurrying -bundled-up bodies pushing into Kroll’s where you could buy the best of everything from drapes to beds, toys to pots, china to silver. When he worked there back in Shipping you saw the turnover, the hiring and firing, the discontinued lines, the abrupt changes of fashion, the panicky gamble of all this merchandising, but still he believed in the place as a whole, its power, its good faith. So when the system just upped one summer and decided to close Kroll’s down, just because shoppers had stopped coming in because the downtown had become frightening to white people, Rabbit realized the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of the money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible. If Kroll’s could go, the courthouse could go, the banks could go. When the money stopped, they could close down God Himself.
For miles in the vicinity of Disney World and beyond, lesser amusement and theme parks hold out their cups for the tourist overflow. Waxworks. Wet ‘n’ Wild, a water slide. Sea World. Circus World, not the one that’s redux down in Sarasota. What a dumb word, as dumb as faux, you see it everywhere suddenly, faux fur, faux jewelry. False is what they mean. A museum of old dolls and toys. Old, old, they sell things as antiques now that aren’t even as old as he is, another racket. On Route 27, going due south, you enter slightly rolling dry pale farm country, bleached by heat, with pale cattle in wide parched fields and orange groves with their dark dense irrigated green, and giant tanks holding water, shaped like giant mushrooms, like spaceships come from beyond. At the side of the road little wobbly hand-painted signs offer BOILED PEANUTS, tiny Mexican girls manning the stands, and there is, in faint echo of the giant theme parks to the north, a touching dusty amusement park, spindly structures put together for a minute’s giddy sensation, idle, waiting for the evening’s little customers.
The sun is high now and the morning’s tattered gray clouds have melted away and the heat is serious, crushing, frightening when he steps out of the Celica at a Texaco to use the facilities because there is no escape from it, like snow at the South Pole, it even drifts into the men’s room, as humid a heat as in the Pennsylvania summer but more searing, more wrathful. The road is wide but has lights and roads coming from the bleached farmland; the small cities drift by, Lake Wales, Frostproof, Avon Park, Sebring, and he wonders about the lives led there, away from the coasts, away from the condos and the fishing charters, by people who wake up and g
o to work just like those in Brewer, only everything flattened by the sun: how did they get here, so near the edge of the world, on this sand spit that a little rise in sea level because of Antarctica melting because of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would wash away? A column of thick smoke appears on his left, toward the Seminole reservation, thick and poisonous, a disaster, an atomic bomb, war has been declared while he’s been drowning in musical memories; he expects to run into a forest fire, but nothing happens, the column of smoke slowly recedes on his left, he’ll never know what it was. A dump most likely. Harry’s whole body feels cramped because of long sitting and he takes a Nitrostat because of the cute little rush it gives you, the inner loosening, the tickle.
The land gets less and less settled and more scraggy. The towns take on funny names like Lake Placid and Venus and Old Venus and Palmdale; just beyond Palmdale, after you cross the Fisheating Creek, at Harrisburg no less, the state capital up there but a nothing down here, you bear right on 29, a narrow road so straight and flat you can see for miles, trucks coming at you through a shimmer that cuts off their wheels, rednecks in pickups pushing in the rearview mirror to pass, hardly any signs, a feeling all around of swamp, so remote from civilization the radio station fades, its last song of your life before it finally fades is somebody called Connie Boswell, way before Rabbit’s time, singing “Say It Isn’t So” with a rueful little lisp, quietly as if she’s just talking it to you, “You’ve found somebody newww,” the band behind her soft and tinny like those that used to play in hotel lobbies with lots of potted palms, a Twenties feeling, they lived hard, no worry about smoking and drinking and cholesterol, just do it, “Ssay it isn’t sso,” he could almost cry, she sounds so sincere, so truly wounded. What ís Janice’s game, anyway? He’ll find out soon enough.
You think 29 will never end, between its ditches of swamp water, its stiff gray vegetation, but it finally comes into 80, at La Belle, streaming west just south of the Caloosahatchee, and then you’re almost home, there are signs to the Southwest Florida Regional Airport and planes roaring low overhead, he could shoot them down through his windshield if he were the Vincennes. For nostalgia’s sake, to get back into it, the Florida thing, he pushes on past Interstate 75 to Route 41. Starvin’ Marvin. Universal Prosthetics. Superteller. STARLITE MOTEL. That time he and Janice wound up in a motel like they were an illicit couple when in fact they’d been married for thirteen years. Unlucky number but they survived it. Thirty-three years married this year. Thirtyfour since they first fucked. Back in Kroll’s he never realized she’d come into money eventually. She just seemed a pathetic little mutt behind the nuts counter, “Jan” stitched to her brown smock, something insecure and sexy about her, a secure independent woman like Elvira probably isn’t so much into sex, Jan was, she was amazed when he went down on her like he used to for Mary Ann in the car, only now on a bed. Mom didn’t take to Jan; standing in the kitchen with soapy hands she would say Fred Springer was a con artist with his used cars. Now Springer Motors is kaput, finito. Down the tubes just like Kroll’s. Nothing is sacred.
Harry comes to his turning off 41. The plumes of pampas grass, the flowering shrubs along the curving streets look different this time of year, more florid. He has never been down here at this time of year before. It seems emptier, fewer cars in the driveways, more curtains drawn, the sidewalks looking less walked-on than ever, the traffic thinner even though this is rush hour, with that late-afternoon pall in the air, like tarnish on silver. He doesn’t see a single squashed armadillo on Pindo Palm Boulevard. The guard at the security gate of Valhalla Village, a lean bespectacled black Harry hasn’t seen before, doesn’t know him, but finds his name on the list of tenants and waves him through without a smile, all efficiency, probably college-educated, over-qualified.
The code on the inner entrance door of Building B doesn’t work. So many numbers in his life, he may be getting it wrong. But after the third time it fails to click him in, he figures it’s not him, the code has been changed. And so, limping from a stiffness in his right leg from pushing on the accelerator for over three days, Harry has to hobble over across the carpeted traffic island and the asphalt, in the dazing heat, through the rush of half-forgotten tropical aromas, hibiscus, bougainvillea, dry palm thatch, crunchy broad-bladed St. Augustine grass, to the management office in Building C to get it, the new code.
They say they sent the notice to his summer address up north; he tells them, “My wife must have torn it up or lost it or something.” His voice talking to people again sounds odd and croaky, coming from several feet outside himself, like the to-one-side echo or chorus that sometimes startles you on the car stereo system. He feels awkward and vulnerable out of the car: a sea snail without its shell. On his way by, he looks into Club Nineteen and is surprised to see nobody at the tables, inside or out, though a couple of foursomes are waiting on the first tee, in the lengthening shadows. You don’t play, he guesses, in the middle of the day this time of year.
The elevator has a different color inspection card in the slip-in frame, the peach-colored corridor smells of a different air freshener, with a faint nostalgic tang of lemonade. The door of 413 opens easily, his two keys scratch into their wiggly slots and turn, there are no cobwebs to brush against his face, no big brown hairy spiders scuttling away on the carpet. He imagines all sorts of spooky things lately. The condo is like it always was, as absolutely still as a reconstruction of itself- the see-through shelves, the birds and flowers Janice made of small white shells, the big green glass egg that used to sit in Ma Springer’s living room, the blond square sofa, the fake-bamboo desk, the green-gray dead television screen. Nobody bothered to disturb or rob the place: kind of a snub. He carries his two bags into the bedroom and opens the sliding door onto the balcony. The sound of his footsteps makes deep dents in the silence of the place. An electric charge of reproach hangs in the stagnant air. The condo hadn’t expected him, he is early. Having arrived at it after such a distance makes everything appear magnified, like the pitted head of a pin under a microscope. The whole apartment-its furniture, its aqua cabinets and Formica countertop, its angles of fitted door frame and baseboard - seems to Rabbit a tight structure carefully hammered together to hold a brimming amount of fear.
A white telephone sits waiting to ring. He picks it up. There is no buzz. God on the line. Disconnected for the season. Today is Sunday, tomorrow is Labor Day. The old familiar riddle: how do you telephone the phone company without a telephone?
But the phone, once it is connected, still doesn’t ring. The days go by empty. The Golds next door are back in Framingham. Bernie and Fern Drechsel are up north bouncing between their two daughters’ houses, one in Westchester County and the other still in Queens, and their son’s lovely home in Princeton and a cottage he has in Manahawkin. The Silbersteins have a place in North Carolina they go to from April to November. Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn’t go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, “You ever been to Toledo?” The Valhalla dining room is spooky - empty tables and an echoing click of silver on china and Bingo only once a week. The golf course has noisy foursomes on it early in the morning, waking Harry up with the moon still bright in the sky - younger men, local Deleon business types who buy cut-rate off-season memberships - and then the fairways from ten to about four bake in the mid-nineties heat, deserted but for the stray dog cutting diagonally across or the cats scratching in the sand traps. When Harry one morning gets up his nerve for a round by himself, planning to take a cart, he discovers the pro shop has lost his golf shoes. The kid at the counter - the pro and assistant pro are both still up north at country clubs that don’t close down until late October says he’s sure they’re somewhere, it’s just that this time of year there’s a different system.
The only other person in the fourth-floor corridor who seems to be here is the crazy woman in 402, Mrs. Zabritski, a widow with wild white hair, pinned up by two old tortoise-shell combs that just add to the confusion. The
Golds have told him she survived one of the concentration camps when a girl. She looks at Harry as if he’s crazy too, to be here.
He explains to her one day, since they meet at the elevator and she looks at him funny, “I had this sudden impulse to come down early this year. My wife’s just starting up in the real-estate business and I got bored hanging around the house.”
Mrs. Zabritski’s little neckless head is screwed around at an angle on her shoulder, as if she’s bracing an invisible telephone against her ear. She stares up at him furiously, her lips baring her long false teeth in a taut oval that reminds him of that Batman logo you saw everywhere this summer. Her eyes have veiny reds to them, stuck hot and round in their skeletal sockets, that wasting-away look Lyle had. “It’s hell,” the tiny old lady seems to pronounce, her lips moving stiffly, trying to keep her teeth in.
“It’s what? What is?”
“This weather,” she says. “Your wife -” She halts, her lips working.
“My wife what?” Rabbit tries to curb his tendency to shout, since hearing doesn’t seem to be one of her problems, regardless of that pained way her head is cocked.