by John Updike
Jill speaks very slowly. "Pretty late."
"How do you feel?"
"Better. For now."
"We got to get you to a doctor."
"It won't help."
He has a better idea, so obvious he cannot imagine why he has never thought of it before. "We got to get you back to your father."
"You forget. He's dead."
"Your mother, then."
"The car's dead."
"We'll get it out of hock."
"It's too late," Jill tells him. "It's too late for you to try to love me."
He wants to answer, but there is a puzzling heavy truth in this that carries him under, his hand caressing the inward dip of her waist, a warm bird dipping toward its nest.
Sunshine, the old clown. So many maple leaves have fallen that morning light slants in baldly. A headache grazes his skull, his dream (Pajasek and he were in a canoe, paddling upstream, through a dark green country; their destination felt to be a distant mountain striped and folded like a tablecloth. "When can I have my silver bullet?" Rabbit asked him. "You promised." "Fool," Pajasek told him. "Stupid." "You know so much more," Rabbit answered, nonsensically, and his heart opened in a flood of light) merges with the night before, both unreal. Jill sleeps dewily beside him; at the base of her throat, along her hairline, sweat has collected and glistens. Delicately, not to disturb her, he takes her wrist and turns it so he can see the inside of her freckled arm. They might be bee-stings. There are not too many. He can talk to Janice. Then he remembers that Janice is not here, and that only Nelson is their child. He eases from the bed, amused to discover himself in underwear, like those times when Mom had left his pajamas on the line to dry.
After breakfast, while Jill and Skeeter sleep, he and Nelson rake and mow the lawn, putting it to bed for the winter. He hopes this will be the last mowing, though in fact the grass, parched in high spots, is vigorously green where a depression holds moisture, and along a line from the kitchen to the street -perhaps the sewer connection is broken and seeping, that is why the earth of Penn -Villas has a sweetish stink. And the leaves-he calls to Nelson, who has to shut off the razzing mower to listen, "How the hell does such a skinny little tree produce so many leaves?"
"They aren't all its leaves. They blow in from the other trees."
And he looks, and sees that his neighbors have trees, saplings like his, but some already as tall as the housetops. Someday Nelson may come back to this, his childhood neighborhood, and find it strangely dark, buried in shade, the lawns opulent, the homes venerable. Rabbit hears children calling in other yards, and sees across several fences and driveways kids having a Saturday scrimmage, one voice piping, "I'm free, I'm free," and the ball obediently floating. This isn't a bad neighborhood, he thinks, this could be a nice place if you gave it a chance. And around the other houses men with rakes and mowers mirror him. He asks Nelson, before the boy restarts the mower, "Aren't you going to visit your mother today?"
"Tomorrow. Today she and Charlie were driving up to the Poconos, to look at the foliage. They went with some brother of Charlie's and his wife."
"Boy, she's moving right in." A real Springer. He smiles to himself, perversely proud. The legal stationery must be on the way. And then he can join that army of the unattached, of Brewer geezers. Human garbage, Pop used to say. He better enjoy Vista Crescent while he has it. He resumes raking, and listens for the mower's razzing to resume. Instead, there is the lurch and rattle of the starter, repeated, and Nelson's voice calling, "Hey Dad. I think it's out of gas."
A Saturday, then, of small sunlit tasks, acts of caretaking and commerce. He and Nelson stroll with the empty five-gallon can up to Weiser Street and get it filled at the Getty station. Returning, they meet Jill and Skeeter emerging from the house, dressed to kill. Skeeter wears stovepipe pants, alligator shoes, a maroon turtleneck and a peach-colored cardigan. He looks like the newest thing in golf pros. Jill has on her mended white dress and a brown sweater of Harry's; she suggests a cheerleader, off to the noon pep rally before the football game. Her face, though thin, and the skin of it thin and brittle like isinglass, has a pink flush; she seems excited, affectionate. "There's some salami and lettuce in the fridge for you and Nelson to make lunch with if you want. Skeeter and I are going into Brewer to see what we can do about this wretched car. And we thought we might drop in on Babe. We'll be back late this after. Maybe you should visit your mother this afternoon, I feel guilty you never do."
"O.K., I might. You O.K.?" To Skeeter: "You have bus fare?"
In his clothes Skeeter puts on a dandy's accent; he thrusts out his goatee and says between scarcely parted teeth, ` Jilly is loaded. And if we run short, your name is good credit, right?" Rabbit tries to recall the naked man of last night, the dangling penis, the jutting heels, the squat as by a jungle fire, and cannot; it was another terrain.
Serious, a daylight man, he scolds: "You better get back before Nelson and I go out around six. I don't want to leave the house empty." He drops his voice so Nelson won't hear. "After last night, I'm kind of spooked."
"What happened last night?" Skeeter asks. "Nothin' spooky that I can remember, we'se all jest folks, livin' out life in these Benighted States." He has put on all his armor, nothing will get to him.
Rabbit tests it: "You're a baad nigger."
Skeeter smiles in the sunshine with angelic rows of teeth; his spectacles toss halos higher than the TV aerials. "Now you're singing my song," he says.
Rabbit asks Jill, "You O.K. with this crazyman?"
She says lightly, "He's my sugar daddy," and puts her arm through his, and linked like that they recede down Vista Crescent, and vanish in the shufe of picture windows.
Rabbit and Nelson finish the lawn. They eat, and toss a football around for a while, and then the boy asks if he can go off and join the scrimmage whose shouts they can hear, he knows some of the kids, the same kids who look into windows but that's O.K., Dad; and really it does feel as though all can be forgiven, all will sink into Saturday's America like rain into earth, like days into time. Rabbit goes into the house and watches the first game of the World Series, Baltimore outclassing the Mets, for a while, and switches to Penn State outclassing West Virginia at football, and, unable to sit still any longer with the bubble of premonition swelling inside him, goes to the phone and calls his home. "Hi Pop, hey. I thought of coming over this after but the kid is outside playing a game and we have to go over to Fosnachts tonight anyhow, so can she wait until tomorrow? Mom. Also I ought to get hot on changing the screens around to storm windows, it felt chilly last night."
"She can wait, Harry. Your mother does a lot of waiting these days."
"Yeah, well." He means it's not his fault, he didn't invent old age. "When is Mim coming in?"
"Any day now, we don't know the exact day. She'll just arrive, is how she left it. Her old room is ready."
"How's Mom sleeping lately? She still having dreams?"
"Strange you should ask, Harry. I always said, you and your mother are almost psychic. Her dreams are getting worse. She dreamed last night we buried her alive. You and me and Mim together. She said only Nelson tried to stop it."
"Gee, maybe she's warming up to Nelson at last."
"And Janice called us this morning."
"What about? I'd hate to have Stavros's phone bill."
"Difficult to say, what about. She had nothing concrete that we could fathom, she just seems to want to keep in touch. I think she's having terrible second thoughts, Harry. She says she's exceedingly worried about you."
"I bet."
"Your mother and I spent a lot of time discussing her call; you know our Mary, she's never one to admit when she's disturbed -"
"Pop, there's somebody at the door. Tell Mom I'll be over tomorrow, absolutely."
There had been nobody at the door. He had suddenly been unable to keep talking to his father, every word of the old man's dragging with reproach. But having lied frightens him now; "nobody" has become an evil presen
ce at the door. Moving through the rooms stealthily, he searches the house for the kit Skeeter must use to fix Jill with. He can picture it from having watched television: the syringe and tourniquet and the long spoon to melt the powder in. The sofa cushions divulge a dollar in change, a bent paperback of Soul on Ice, a pearl from an earring or pocketbook. Jill's bureau drawers upstairs conceal nothing under the underwear but a box of Tampax, a packet of hairpins, a halffull card of Enovid pills, a shy little tube of ointment for acne. The last place he thinks to look is the downstairs closet, fitted into an ill-designed corner beside the useless fireplace, along the wall of stained pine where the seascape hangs that Janice bought at Kroll's complete with frame, one piece in fact with its frame, a single shaped sheet of plastic, Rabbit remembers from hanging it on the nail. In this closet, beneath the polyethylene bags holding their winter clothes, including the mink stole old man Springer gave Janice on her twenty-first birthday, there is a squat black suitcase, smelling new, with a combination lock. Packed so Skeeter could grab it and run from the house in thirty seconds. Rabbit fiddles with the lock, trying combinations at random, trusting to God to make a very minor miracle, then, this failing, going at it by system, beginning 111, 112, 113, 114, and then 211, 212, 213, but never hits it, and the practical infinity of numbers opens under him dizzyingly. Some dust in the closet starts him sneezing. He goes outdoors with the Windex bottle for the storm windows.
This work soothes him. You slide up the aluminum screen, putting the summer behind you, and squirt the inside window with the blue spray, give it those big square swipes to spread it thin, and apply the tighter rubbing to remove the film and with it the dirt; it squeaks, like birdsong. Then slide the winter window down from the slot where it has been waiting since April and repeat the process; and go inside and repeat the process, twice: so that at last four flawless transparencies pennit outdoors to come indoors, other houses to enter yours.
Toward five o'clock Skeeter and Jill return, by taxi. They are jubilant; through Babe they found a man willing to give them six hundred dollars for the Porsche. He drove them upcounty, he examined the car, and Jill signed the registration over to him.
"What color was he?" Rabbit asks.
"He was green," Skeeter says, showing him ten-dollar bills fanned in his hand.
Rabbit asks Jill, "Why'd you split it with him?"
Skeeter says, "I dig hostility. You want your cut, right?" His lips push, his glasses glint.
Jill laughs it off. "Skeeter's my partner in crime," she says.
"You want my advice, what you should do with that money?" Rabbit says. "You should get a train ticket back to Stonington."
"The trains don't run any more. Anyway, I thought I'd buy some new dresses. Aren't you tired of this ratty old white one? I had to pin it up in the front and wear this sweater over it."
"It suits you," he says.
She takes up the challenge in his tone. "Something bugging you?"
"Just your sloppiness. You're throwing your fucking life away."
"Would you like me to leave? I could now."
His arms go numb as if injected: his hands feel heavy, his palms tingly and swollen. Her nibbling mouth, her apple hardness, the seafan of her cedar-colored hair on their pillows in the morning light, her white valentine of packed satin. "No," he begs, "don't go yet."
"Why not?"
"You're under my skin." The phrase feels unnatural on his lips, puffs them like a dry wind in passing; it must have been spoken for Skeeter, for Skeeter cackles appreciatively.
"Chuck, you're leaming to be a loser. I love it. The Lord loves it: Losers gonna grab the earth, right?"
Nelson returns from the football game with a bruised upper lip, his smile lopsided and happy. "They give you a hard time?" Rabbit asks.
"No, it was fun. Skeeter, you ought to play next Saturday, they asked who you were and I said you used to be a quarterback for Brewer High."
"Quarterback, shit, I was full back, I was so small they couldn't find me."
"I don't mind being small, it makes you quicker."
"O.K.," his father says, "see how quick you can take a bath. And for once in your life brush your hair."
Festively Jill and Skeeter see them off to the Fosnachts. Jill straightens Rabbit's tie, Skeeter dusts his shoulders like a Pullman porter. "Just think, honey," Skeeter says to Jill, "our little boy's all growed up, his first date."
"It's just dinner," Rabbit protests. "I'll be back for the eleveno'clock news."
"That big honky with the sideways eyes, she may have something planned for dessert."
"You stay as late as you want," Jill tells him. "We'll leave the porch light on and won't wait up."
"What're you two going to do tonight?"
"Jes' read and knit and sit cozy by the fire," Skeeter tells him.
"Her number's in the book if you need to get ahold of me. Under just M."
"We won't disturb you," Jill tells him.
Nelson unexpectedly says, "Skeeter, lock the doors and don't go outside unless you have to."
The Negro pats the boy's brushed hair. "Wouldn't dream of it, chile. Ol' tarbaby, he just stay right here in his briar patch."
Nelson says suddenly, panicking, "Dad, we shouldn't go."
"Don't be dumb." They go. Orange sunlight stripes with long shadows the spaces of flat lawn between the low houses. As Vista Crescent curves, the sun moves behind them and Rabbit is struck, seeing their elongated shadows side by side, by how much like himself Nelson walks: the same loose lope below, the same faintly tense stillness of the head and shoulders above. In shadow the boy, like himself, is as tall as the giant at the top of the beanstalk, treading the sidewalk on telescoping legs. Rabbit turns to speak. Beside him, the boy's overlong dark hair bounces as he strides to keep up, lugging his pajamas and toothbrush and change of underwear and sweater in a paper grocery bag for tomorrow's boat ride, an early birthday party. Rabbit finds there is nothing to say, just mute love spinning down, love for this extension of himself downward into time when he will be in the grave, love cool as the flame of sunlight burning level among the stick-thin maples and fallen leaves, themselves flames curling.
And from Peggy's windows Brewer glows and dwindles like ashes in a gigantic hearth. The river shines blue long after the shores turn black. There is a puppy in the apartment now, a fuzzy big-pawed Golden that tugs at Rabbit's hand with a slippery nipping mouth; its fur, touched, is as surprising in its softness as ferns. Peggy has remembered he likes Daiquiris; this time she has mix and the electric blender rattles with ice before she brings him his drink, half froth. She has aged a month: a pound or two around her waist, two or three more gray hairs showing at her parting. She has gathered her hair back in a twist, rather than letting it straggle around her face as if she were still in high school. Her face looks pushed-forward, scrubbed, glossy. She tells him wearily, "Ollie and I may be getting back together."
She is wearing a blue dress, secretarial, that suits her more than that paisley that kept riding up her pasty thighs. "That's good, isn't it?"
"It's good for Billy." The boys, once Nelson arrived, went down the elevator again, to try to repair the mini-bike in the basement. "In fact, that's mostly the reason; Ollie is worried about Billy. With me working and not home until dark, he hangs around with that bad crowd up toward the bridge. You know, it's not like when we were young, the temptations they're exposed to. It's not just cigarettes and a little feeling up. At thirteen now, they're ready to go."
Harry brushes froth from his lips and wishes she would come away from the window so he could see all of the sky. "I guess they figure they might be dead at eighteen."
"Janice says you like the war."
' "I don't like it; I defend it. I wasn't thinking of that, they have a lot of ways to die now we didn't have. Anyway, it's nice about you and Ollie, if it works out. A little sad, too."
"Why sad?"
"Sad for me. I mean, I guess I blew my chance, to -"
"To wha
t?"
"To cash you in."
Bad phrase, too harsh, though it had been an apology. He has lived with Skeeter too long. But her blankness, the blankness of her silhouette as Peggy stands in her habitual pose against the windows, suggested it. A blank check. A woman is blank until you fuck her. Everything is blank until you fuck it. Us and Vietnam, fucking and being fucked, blood is wisdom. Must be some better way but it's not in nature. His silence is leaden with regret. She remains blank some seconds, says nothing. Then she moves into the space around him, turns on lamps, lifts a pillow into place, plumps it, stoops and straightens, turns, takes light upon her sides, is rounded into shape. A lumpy big woman but not a fat one, clumsy but not gross, sad with evening, with Ollie or not Ollie, with having a lengthening past and less and less future. Three classes behind his, Peggy Gring had gone to high school with Rabbit and had seen him when he was good, had sat in those hot bleachers screaming, when he was a hero, naked and swift and lean. She has seen him come to nothing. She plumps down in the chair beside his and says, "I've been cashed in a lot lately."
"You mean with Ollie?"
"Others. Guys I meet at work. Ollie minds. That may be why he wants back in."
"If Ollie minds, you must be telling him. So you must want him back in too."
She looks into the bottom of her glass; there is nothing there but ice. "And how about you and Janice?"
"Janice who? Let me get you another drink."
"Wow. You've become a gentleman."
"Slightly."
As he puts her gin-and-tonic into her hand, he says, "Tell me about those other guys."
"They're O.K. I'm not that proud of them. They're human. I'm human."
"You do it but don't fall in love?"
"Apparently. Is that terrible?"
"No," he says. "I think it's nice."
"You think a lot of things are nice lately."
"Yeah. I'm not so uptight. Sistah Peggeh, I'se seen de light."
The boys come back upstairs. They complain the new headlight they bought doesn't fit. Peggy feeds them, a casserole of chicken legs and breasts, poor dismembered creatures simmering. Rabbit wonders how many animals have died to keep his life going, how many more will die. A barnyard full, a farmful of thumping hearts, seeing eyes, racing legs, all stuffed squawking into him as into a black sack. No avoiding it: life does want death. To be alive is to kill. Dinner inside them, they stuff themselves on television: Jackie Gleason, My Three Sons, Hogan's Heroes, Petticoat Junction, Mannix. An orgy. Nelson is asleep on the floor, radioactive light beating on his closed lids and open mouth. Rabbit carries him into Billy's room, while Peggy tucks her own son in. "Mom, I'm not sleepy." "It's past bedtime." "It's Saturday night." "You have a big day tomorrow." "When is he going home?" He must think Harry has no ears. "When he wants to." "What are you going to do?" "Nothing that's any of your business." "Mom." "Shall I listen to your prayers?" "When he's not listening." " Then you say them to yourself tonight."