Rabbit Remembered

by John Updike

  "That was so nice," Annabelle continues on her track, "when she is willing but he doesn't sleep with her and makes her a hamburger instead." Nelson has never heard her voice like this, free-associating and childishly trusting. Maybe this evening isn't such a failure as it felt. He has the persistent sensation that there is one more person in the car than the four of them.

  "Hey Nelson," Billy's voice whines from the back seat. "Aren't you on this road the wrong way?"

  He had been wondering why the traffic was so thin. They have become the only car on the highway, speeding between dark slopes of farmland and distant Christmas lights.

  "You're heading toward Maiden Springs!" Billy tells him. "Brewer is behind us!"

  "Son of a fucking bitch," Nelson says. "I asked for directions coming out of the parking lot and nobody helped."

  "Nelson, you've lived here all your life," Pru points out.

  "Yeah, but not around the fairgrounds. I hate this area. The fair always depressed me, the way the school made us go every September."

  "Me, too," Billy says. "I was terrified of the freaks. And those rides used to do a job on my stomach. I remember once with Belly Majka in one of those that roll you around opposite each other being afraid I was going to throw up in her face."

  "Take the next exit," Pru says, in a low, sharply aimed wife's voice. "Go left at the overpass and then right to get you back on the highway going the other way."

  "I know how to reverse direction," Nelson snaps at her.

  "And the animals in cages," Billy goes on. "I have a nightmare about being in a cage that gets smaller and smaller, like an egg slicer."

  "You poor dear worried thing," Annabelle says silkily.

  Pru says to Annabelle, as Nelson angrily whips the car up and around the exit ramp, "I think that was unrealistic, too. Most men would have just screwed her anyway. I mean, he'd been dreaming about almost nothing else."

  But it is hard for her to break into the cocoon of mutual narcissistic regard being woven in the back seat. From the little overpass road, dark farmland seems to stretch in every direction, broken only by a Gulf station, its towering oval sign aglow, level with the profile of the hills. Nelson asks the back seat, "What do you think, Annabelle? How far would the older man have gone? The father figure?"

  Her gentle voice arrives: "Nelson, what are you asking?"

  "How far did Mr. Byer go with you? My gut tells me," he says, recklessly wheeling through the entrance ramp and heading down the highway toward where Brewer's dome of light stains the sky, "he went pretty far. That's why you're always saying what a great guy he was. He wasn't. He was into touchy-feely. A good thing he died when you were sixteen, it might have got a lot worse."

  "Baby," Pru says to her husband, but there is no stopping him, now that he and the Corolla are headed in the right direction. He needs to undress his sister, in front of Billy.

  "And your mother was no help, was she? She was a savvy old tramp, she must have guessed. She'd been through the mill, why not you, huh?"

  "That's not true!" Annabelle cries. "She never knew anything! And he never-what's the word?-"

  "Penetrated," Nelson offers.

  "Exactly!" she says. "He just groped, all in the name of parental affection, of course." This bit of sarcasm pries her open; she makes a strange shuddering prolonged sound of upheaved regret, then pours out, sobs making her gasp, "I didn't dare ask him to stop, he'd handled me since I was a baby, it didn't seem right, yet how could it be very wrong? It was as if he couldn't help it, he was, like, sleepwalking. He'd tuck me in afterwards."

  "He knew what you didn't know," Nelson points out. "That he wasn't your real father. And your mother knew it loo."

  "She had no idea what he was doing, I'm positive. But it was so much a relief when he died that I blamed myself. It had got to be a secret between us, as if I wanted it too, when I hated it!" Her tears are coming freely now, pent-up, accusing. Nelson squints into the high headlights, trucks and those fucking SUVs, that afflict his eyes from behind and ahead. The traffic is hurrying in both directions toward some disaster, the end of time as they've known it. Annabelle goes the next step, crying, "I felt I'd killed him! Good for me!" Her round face flashes in his rearview mirror, one teary eye meeting his.

  "Right," Nelson says calmly. "It really screwed you up with men since, didn't it? How come, do you think, you've never married?"

  "Oh stop it!" she protests. "Why do you want me married, why do you care?" She sinks back, sobbing now with a muffled, burbling quality that suggests Billy is comforting her. Nelson can't risk turning his head to look into the back seat; his sensation of a fifth person in the car is so strong he needs to strengthen his grip on the steering wheel.

  Billy says, "Great going, Nelson. So that's psychotherapy."

  "It helps to get things in the open," he sulkily says. "Then you go from there." He stares ahead. He has always disliked this flat side of Brewer, as opposed to the tilting Mt. Judge side. Serve-yourself gas stations with ranks of pumps, fast-food franchises with plastic mini-playgrounds for obese toddlers, dismal six-store strip malls, carpet and linoleum outlets, vegetable stands boarded up for the winter, cutesy Amish cut-outs beckoning ignorant tourists from the inner cities to Real Pa. Dutch Cuisine. He knows where he is now. If he stays on this new improved 222 a bypass will hurl him right around Brewer southwest toward Lancaster and the Turnpike; instead he turns off, by the mattress warehouse with the Aurora Massage Parlor tucked in behind, on old Route 111, which runs parallel to the river, the silhouette of Mt. Judge far to their right, crowned by the distant lights of the Pinnacle Hotel, where they had been, the four of them, sitting and eating and making polite conversation, a few hours ago. Time does wonders.

  Pru says, twisting her head to talk to Annabelle, "So you got pawed. So did I. My father was a crumb-bum, when you think about it. It's not the end of the world." She is tough. Her nose looks sharp as a witch's in profile but he senses her bulk, her body in the shimmery silk dress and rust-brown overcoat, as radiating warmth. Her long hands lie idle in her shadowy lap. He reaches down to adjust the car heat, and his own hand and Pru's knees show similarly pale in the dash-light glow. He remembers how once when she was new to their family she surprisingly comforted him by telling him, Why, honey. I think from what I've seen your parents are quite fond of each other. Couples that have stayed together that long, they must have something.

  In the back seat, his sister is sniffling and Billy is saying, "Easy, easy. We're talking ancient history."

  The road has stoplights now, and up ahead somebody, a car dealer or club owner, has gone to the expense of renting a bank of spotlights; three of them stir the sky to the limits of the local haze.

  "We are passing," Nelson announces in a tour guide's droning tone, "the former site of Springer Motors Toyota Agency, now derelict."

  Mom sold the acreage and building to a computer-components company that never took off; a sudden turn in technology left it behind. By inner moonlight Nelson sees the ghosts of his father and himself and Charlie Stavros and Elvira Ollenbach standing at the boarded-up windows looking out at Route 111 for customers that will never come.

  "My father's!" Annabelle says, sitting up with a rustle. "I remember. With Jamie. He bought an orange Corolla, eventually."

  "It was my mother's, more," Nelson says. "It's sad to see. The company that bought it from her is still in bankruptcy proceedings, ten years later. They've probably forgotten that they own it. I heard a Barnes and Noble was interested, to make a superstore."

  The spotlights are a little farther down Route 111, in front of what was once a Planter's Peanuts store and became, added on to, a disco in the Seventies. The tall thin silhouette of Mr. Peanut outside, a twelve-foot billboard, became a nearly nude dancing girl with her naughty parts covered by bubbles, but that was too sexist to last. Now the humanoid shape holds a cowgirl in short white skirt and high white boots advertising PURE COUNTRY MUSIC. Country music keeps coming back. Or is it just slow t
o go away? The parking lot looks only half full. People with sense are staying home tonight, exhausted by the hype, petrified of fanatic Arabs sneaking in from Canada.

  "Hey, Nellie," Billy pipes up. "It's getting close to midnight, and we're nowhere."

  "I know, I'm going as fast as I can. If you hadn't got me lost-"

  "Did Nelson ever tell you the story," Pru asks Annabelle, "how he lost the agency up his nose?"

  "No, not really." Her voice sounds dried out, for now.

  "Say, thanks a lot," Nelson complains to his wife.

  "Siblings should have no secrets," Pru says, and makes, he knows without looking, that prudish little mouth of hers, as if sucking on something tart. "Nelson wasn't always such a saint."

  "He was a pill of a sissy, in fact," Billy contributes, making the fun rougher. "A real little mamma's boy, terrified of his father, who was a pretty nice guy, actually."

  "Unlike yours," Nelson tells him. "What a sleazebag."

  "Very musical, though," Billy tells Annabelle. "He could play anything, any instrument, by ear."

  "Oh, I've always wanted to be able to do that!" she responds, snuggling from the way her voice squeezes down. Does Nelson imagine it, or is there the purr of a zipper being unzipped, that long diagonal zipper on the front of her dress? His sister giggles, and a hand is lightly slapped.

  Nelson drives the Corolla through West Brewer. Those new-style icicle lights hang like bright napkins from the little porches of the row houses that slant down to the river and the Weiser Street Bridge. The Bridge has old-fashioned lamp standards, yellow glass balls and iron curlicues going green with age, but the light falls cold and contemporary from tall violet tubes on aluminum stems. At the far end of the bridge sits an upscale coffee bar that used to be a black hangout, Jimbo's Friendly Lounge, before the blacks were chased out of South Brewer by gentrification. Then there unrolls beneath the wheels of the Corolla Brewer's main drag in all its Yuletide glory: the trees rimming Weiser Square are looped with necklaces of white lights, scribbles in three dimensions. The square, an open farmer's market originally, was decades ago blocked to form an ill-advised pedestrian park to revive the downtown, but it turned into a dangerous forest, and by a newer plan has been reopened to automobile traffic. They pass Fourth Street, and the bronze statue of Conrad Weiser in Mohawk headdress in the center of the traffic circle at Fifth Street. Trolley cars used to go east, west, north, and south from this point, to amusement parks and picnic groves. The human traffic thickens; the city fathers have laid on a Millennium Ball in the atrium of the glass-enclosed mall between Fifth and Sixth on the left side of the street, as well as the Christian-rock concert a block up on the right, in the great hole. A dim din penetrates the car windows.

  "Hey Nelson," Billy says. "The Sunflower Beer clock says it's midnight! Here it's the millennium and we're all stuck in this little Jap jalopy! Nothing's moving!"

  "Don't panic," Nelson tells him. "That clock never told the right time. The Laid-Back is only up at Ninth, we'll be there in a minute."

  Then Nelson sees the dire occur: at the intersection of Sixth and Weiser, where Kroll's Department Store used to be, two cars ahead of them, the traffic light goes out. Hanging high above the asphalt, the light was green, and now is dead. Not red, dead. The sticky traffic halts completely. Revellers, mostly Hispanic kids in jeans and windbreakers, dart among the cars. A shout is going up, but here and there, as if nobody knows exactly what is happening. The cars behind them honk, in celebration or exasperation. The streetlights flicker.

  "Oh my God," Annabelle says, "terrorists just like they said," and begins to cry again.

  "It's a little glitch," Billy says, feigning calm, though this must feel like a tunnel to him. "These lights are all on computers."

  "Son of a bitch!" Nelson says. Decades of wrongs, hurts, unjust deaths press behind his eyes. He pushes down on the window locks. Hooded kids with sparkle dust on their faces are crowding around the Corolla, and looking up the street toward Mt. Judge. The city's fire alarms begin to wail; church bells are dully ringing. At the top of Mt. Judge, fireworks ignite, one slow bloom after another, mingled with staccato gashes, potassium white and barium green, sodium yellow and chlorine blue, dying, blossoming, dying in drifts of dismissed sparks as the dull concussions thud through the windshield. "We're missing it!" he cries.

  The Corolla was the third car from the intersection when the traffic light went out. The first car glided through, unaware of the breakdown, and the next waited for the car on the right to come out and cut across. Sixth is one-way here, so there is no traffic from the left. The cars behind are in the dark, but up this close to the intersection the problem and its solution are plain: take your turn, in democratic American style. The car ahead of Nelson, a little cherry-red specimen of the remodelled VW Beetle, cute as a bug, with oval slant taillights like Disney animal eyes, creeps out and through, and the car on the right, a serious, four-ring, square-cut tan Audi, takes its turn like a good citizen. Then it is Nelson's turn, his dirty white Toyota's turn, to pass through the doused light and continue on, up Weiser toward the mountain and its fireworks, past where Kroll's used to be and where Mom and Dad got together (if they hadn't, he would not exist, think of that) and on across Seventh, where mile-long trains of coal would drag through from Pottsville to Philly and once upon a time there was a Chinese restaurant, and on up to look for a parking space in the blocks beyond the Laid-Back, around where Dad used to set type for the Verity Press. It will be jolly, to walk, the four of them, out in the air. He has an image of a frozen Daiquiri, or should it be a Margarita, with salt all around the rim?

  "Hey!" he exclaims. Tailgating the Audi, a black-and-silver Ford Expedition, a huge SUV with truck wheels and a side mirror the size of a human head, keeps coming, trying to barrel through out of turn, against all decency and order. Some brat of the local rich, beered-up and baseball-hatted, with his smirking airhead buddies, gives Nelson a glazed so-what stare. Nelson sees red. "That fucker," he says. This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. Pru shrieks when she realizes that Nelson's foot is firm on the accelerator and that nothing short of ramming into the Expedition will stop their forward motion. Its fat high bumper-two-tone, the lower half chrome-reflects their right headlight in a flaring smear; she braces for the bump, the crazed windshield, the crumpled metal, the thud of pain. But the cocky brat in the baseball cap sees with widened eyes that Nelson isn't kidding; and brakes hard, so his buddies' empty heads all bounce in unison. The Corolla skims by, still accelerating, missing by an inch. The dig-out smell of hot rubber fills the interior. The couple in the back seat cheer, a bit breathlessly. "I hate SUVs," Nelson explains. "Pretentious gas-guzzlers, they think they own the road."

  High in the tinted windshield, so it looks greenish, a ball of twinkling fire expands. The Christian-rock music thumps away in the vast illumined excavation on their right. Nelson shivers, as if a contentious spirit is leaving him. And now Pru is attacking him, trying to hug him, her nose poking into his cheek, her breath fluttering warm on his neck. "Oh honey, that was great, the way you made that asshole chicken out. I think I wet my pants."

  "Me, too, almost," says Annabelle.

  "It's funny about death," Billy contributes from the back seat. "When you actually face it, it's kind of a rush."

  To Nelson Pru says, so softly the others could hear only if they were to ignore each other and listen hard, "Let's not hang around too long at the Laid-Back. I thought I'd stay at your place tonight."

  Chapter 5

  From: Roy Angstrom, Esq. [royson@buckeyemedia.com] Sent: Saturday, January 8, 2000, 8:29 AM To: ron.harrison@qwikbrew.com. Subject: Thanking you

  Hi Grandma and Ron-Its been a week so its "high time" to check in and thank you for the great time we had together New Years Eve. I really enjoyed seeing all those fireworks around the world moving across all the time zones. It made me feel how small the planet EARTH is. Mom said there were even some on Mt Judge we could of
seen. The thing I remember best was on David Letterman the three slobby guys where the one hit a golf ball off the fat ones belly button and the third guy caught it in his mouth. He could of broke a tooth doing that.

  The reason Mom didn't come back to the house at all was that they nearly had a fatal accident when the traffic lights went out and it left them all exausted. She says Dad will be coming out to live with us here in Ohio and thats great too.

  Heres a joke-how do you tell when a Islamic terrorist is scared? Answer-he shiites in his pants. Actually it was nice that in Iran they let them go except for the passenger who had his throat cut for looking funny at the one they called the Doctor. What really took my interest in the news is this Tibetan boy just my age who was the second most important lama in the world and escaped by walking several days through a blizzard in the Himmelayas, hes called the KARMAPA. On the same website I read where the Dolly Lama (the most important lama) said of YK2 "Millennium? The sun and the moon are the same to me." You can look all this up Ron at www.tibet.com. A lot of jokes are at www.ohyesyouare.com. Sample-How do you tell Al Gore from Bill Bradley? Answer one is a bore and one sags badly. ROTFL (rolling on the floor laughing).

  Thanx again for a really great time and teaching me 3-handed pinockle. I dont expect to stay up playing pinockle past midnight again until I get to college, maybe to Kent State like Dad. Its the best.

  luv u both;-) (wink) ROY

  "Hi? Annabelle? It's-"

  "Nelson! How is it going?"

  "Not bad. Good, actually. Her apartment is pretty roomy, though eventually we might look for a house. Roy would like a house in Stow."

  "He must be thrilled."

  "Thrills at that age wear off in about half an hour, but, yeah, he seems pleased. And Judy is pleased. She says boyfriends take you much more seriously if you have a father on the premises. She's broken up, thank God, with that creep who kept her in Ohio to go to some very stuffy party, as she described it. She wishes now she'd come to Brewer."