by John Updike
“Is there a comb anywhere, Mr. Tothero? I ought to use the can.”
Under their feet the men in the Sunshine Athletic Association laugh and catcall at some foolishness. Rabbit pictures passing among them and asks, “Say, should everybody see me?”
Tothero becomes indignant, as he used to now and then at practice, when everybody was just fooling around the basket and not going into the drills. “What are you afraid of, Harry? That poor little Janice Springer? You overestimate people. Nobody cares what you do. Now we’ll just go down there and don’t be too long in the toilet. And I haven’t heard any thanks from you for all I’ve done for you, and all I am doing.” He takes the comb stuck in the brush bristles and gives it to Harry.
A dread of marring his freedom blocks the easy gesture of expressing gratitude. Rabbit pronounces “Thanks” thin-lipped.
They go downstairs. Contrary to what Tothero had promised, all of the men—old men, mostly, but not very old, so that their impotence has a nasty vigor—look up with interest at him. Insanely, Tothero introduces him repeatedly: “Fred, this is my finest boy, a wonderful basketball player, Harry Angstrom, you probably remember his name from the papers, he twice set a county record, in 1950 and then he broke it in 1951, a wonderful accomplishment.”
“Is that right, Marty?”
“Harry, an honor to meet you.”
Their alert colorless eyes, little dark smears like their mouths, feed on the strange sight of him and send acid impressions down to be digested in their disgusting big beer-tough stomachs. Rabbit sees that Tothero is a fool to them, and is ashamed of his friend and of himself. He hides in the lavatory. The paint is worn off the toilet seat and the washbasin is stained by the hot-water faucet’s rusty tears; the walls are oily and the towel-rack empty. There is something terrible in the height of the tiny ceiling: a square yard of a dainty metal pattern covered with cobwebs in which a few white husks of insects are suspended. His depression deepens, becomes a kind of paralysis; he walks out and rejoins Tothero limping and stiffly grimacing, and they leave the place in a dream. He feels affronted, vaguely invaded, when Tothero gets into his car. But, just as in a dream he never stops to question, Rabbit slides in behind the wheel and, in the renewed relation of his arms and legs to the switches and pedals, puts on again the mantle of power. His wet-combed hair feels stiff on his head.
He says sharply, “So you think I should’ve drunk with Janice.”
“Do what the heart commands,” Tothero says. “The heart is our only guide.” He sounds weary and far away.
“Into Brewer?”
There is no answer.
Rabbit drives up the alley, coming to Potter Avenue, where the water from the ice plant used to run down. He goes right, away from Wilbur Street, where his apartment is, and two more turns bring him into Central Street heading around the mountain to Brewer. On the left, land drops away into a chasm floored by the slick still width of the Running Horse River; on the right, gasoline stations glow, twirlers flicker on strings, spotlights protest.
As the town thins, Tothero’s tongue loosens. “The ladies we’re going to meet, now Harry, I have no conception of what the other one will be like, but I know you’ll be a gentleman. And I guarantee you’ll like my friend. She is a remarkable girl, Harry, with seven strikes against her from birth, but she’s done a remarkable thing.”
“What?”
“She’s come to grips. Isn’t that the whole secret, Harry; to come to grips? It makes me happy, happy and humble, to have, as I do, this very tenuous association with her. Harry?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you realize, Harry, that a young woman has hair on every part of her body?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.” Distaste, like an involuntary glandular secretion, has stained his throat.
“Do,” Tothero says. “Do think about it. They are monkeys, Harry. Women are monkeys.”
He says it so solemn, Rabbit has to laugh.
Tothero laughs too, and comes closer on the seat. “Yet we love them, Harry, don’t we? Harry, why do we love them? Answer that, and you’ll answer the riddle of life.” He is squirming around, crossing and uncrossing his legs, leaning over and tapping Rabbit’s shoulder and jerking back and glancing out the side window and turning and tapping again. “I am a hideous person, Harry. A person to be abhorred. Harry, let me tell you something.” As a coach he was always telling you something. “My wife calls me a person to be abhorred. But do you know when it began? It began with her skin. One day in the spring, in nineteen forty-three or four, it was during the war, without warning it was hideous. It was like the hides of a thousand lizards stitched together. Stitched together clumsily. Can you picture that? That sense of it being in pieces horrified me, Harry. Are you listening? You’re not listening. You’re wondering why you came to me.”
“What you said about Janice this morning kind of worries me.”
“Janice! Let’s not talk about little mutts like Janice Springer, Harry boy. This is the night. This is no time for pity. The real women are dropping down out of the trees.” With his hands he imitates things falling out of trees. “Plippity, plippity.”
Even discounting the man as a maniac, Rabbit becomes expectant. They park the car off Weiser Avenue and meet the girls in front of a Chinese restaurant.
The girls waiting under crimson neon have a floral delicacy; like a touch of wilt the red light rims their fluffy hair. Rabbit’s heart thumps ahead of him down the pavement. They all come together and Tothero introduces Margaret, “Margaret Kosko, Harry Angstrom, my finest athlete, it’s a pleasure for me to be able to introduce two such wonderful young people to one another.” The old man’s manner is queerly shy; his voice has a cough waiting in it.
After Tothero’s build-up, Rabbit is amazed that Margaret is just another Janice—that same sallow density, that stubborn smallness. Scarcely moving her lips, she says, “This is Ruth Leonard. Marty Tothero, and you, whatever your name is.” Ruth is fat alongside Margaret, but not that fat. Chunky, more. But tall. She has flat blue eyes in square-cut sockets. Her upper lip pushes out a little, like with an incipient blister, and her thighs fill the front of her dress so that even standing up she has a lap. Her hair, kind of a dirty ginger color, is bundled in a roll at the back of her head.
“Harry,” Rabbit says. “Or Rabbit.”
“That’s right!” Tothero cries. “The other boys used to call you Rabbit. I had forgotten.” He coughs.
“Well you’re a big bunny,” Ruth remarks. Beyond her the parking meters with their red tongues recede along the curb, and at her feet, pinched in lavender straps, four sidewalk squares meet in an x.
“Just big outside,” he says.
“That’s me too,” she says.
“God I’m hungry,” Rabbit tells them all, just to say something. From somewhere he’s got the jitters.
“Hunger, hunger,” Tothero says, as if grateful for the cue. “Where shall my little ones go?”
“Here?” Harry asks. He sees from the way the two girls look at him that he is expected to take charge. Tothero is moving back and forth like a crab sideways and bumps into a middle-aged couple strolling along. His face shows such surprise at the collision, and he is so elaborately apologetic, that Ruth laughs; her laugh rings on the street like a handful of change thrown down. At the sound Rabbit begins to loosen up; the space between the muscles of his chest feels filled with warm air. Tothero pushes into the glass door first, Margaret follows, and Ruth takes his arm and says, “I know you. I went to West Brewer High and got out in fifty-one.”
“That’s my class.” Like the touch of her hand on his arm, her being his age pleases him, as if, even in high schools on opposite sides of the city, they have learned the same things and gained the same view of life. The Class of ‘51 view.
“You beat us,” she says.
“You had a lousy team.”
“No we didn’t. I went with three of the players.”
“Three at once?”
“In a way.”
“Well. They looked tired.”
She laughs again, the coins thrown down, though he feels ashamed of what he has said, she is so good-natured and maybe was pretty then. Her complexion isn’t good now. But her hair is thick. A young Chinaman in a drab linen coat blocks their way past the glass counter where an American girl in a kimono sits counting threadbare bills. “Please, how many?”
“Four,” Rabbit says, when Tothero is silent.
Unexpected, generous gesture, Ruth slips off her short white coat and gives it to Rabbit: soft, bunched cloth. The motion stirs up a smell of perfume on her.
“Four, yes please this way,” and the waiter leads them to a red booth. The place has just recently reopened as Chinese; pink paintings of Paris are still on the wall. Ruth staggers a little; Rabbit sees from behind that her heels, yellow with strain, tend to slip sideways in the net of lavender straps that pin her feet to the spikes of her shoes. But under the shiny green stretch of her dress her broad bottom packs the cloth with a certain composure. Her waist tucks in trimly, squarely, like the lines of her face. The cut of the dress bares a big V-shaped piece of her fat fair back. In arriving at the booth, he bumps against her; the top of her head comes to his nose. The prickly smell of her hair stitches the store-bought scent behind her ears. They bump because Tothero is ushering Margaret into her seat so ceremoniously, a gnome at the mouth of his cave. Standing there waiting, Rabbit is elated to think that a stranger passing outside the restaurant window, like himself last night outside that West Virginia diner, would see him with a woman. He seems to be that stranger, staring in, envying himself his body and his woman’s body. Ruth bends down and slides over. The skin of her shoulders gleams and then dims in the shadow of the booth. Rabbit sits down too and feels her rustle beside him, settling in, the way women do, fussily, as if making a nest.
He discovers he has held on to her coat. Pale limp pelt, it sleeps in his lap. Without rising be reaches up and hangs it on the coat-pole hook above him.
“Nice to have a long arm,” she says, and looks in her purse and takes out a pack of Newports. “Tothero says I have short arms.”
“Where’d you meet that old bum?” This so Tothero can hear if he cares.
“He’s not a bum, he’s my old coach.”
“Want one?” A cigarette.
He wavers. “I’ve stopped.”
“So that old bum was your coach,” she sighs. She draws a cigarette from the turquoise pack of Newports and hangs it between her orange lips and frowns at the sulphur tip as she strikes a match, with curious feminine clumsiness, away from her, holding the paper match sideways and thus bending it. It flares on the third scratch.
Margaret says, “Ruth.”
“Bum?” Tothero says, and his heavy face looks unwell and lopsided in cagey mirth, as if he’s started to melt. “I am, I am. A vile old bum fallen among princesses.”
Margaret sees nothing against her in this and puts her hand on top of his on the table and in a solemn dead voice insists, “You’re nothing like a bum.”
“Where is our young Confucian?” Tothero asks and looks around with his free arm uplifted. When the boy comes he asks, “Can we be served alcoholic beverages here?”
“We bring in from next door,” the boy says. Funny the way the eyebrows of Chinese people look embedded in the skin instead of sticking out from it. Their faces look washed always.
“Double Scotch whisky,” Tothero says. “My dear?”
“Daiquiri,” Margaret says; it sounds like a wisecrack.
“Children?”
Rabbit looks at Ruth. Her face is caked with orange dust. Her hair, her hair which seemed at first glance dirty blond or faded brown, is in fact many colors, red and yellow and brown and black, each hair passing in the light through a series of tints, like the hair of a dog. “Hell,” she says. “I guess a Daiquiri.”
“Three,” Rabbit tells the boy, thinking a Daiquiri will be like a limeade.
The waiter recites, “Three Daiquiri, one double whisky Scotch on the rocks,” and goes.
Rabbit asks Ruth, “When’s your birthday?”
“August. Why?”
“Mine’s April,” he says. “I win.”
“You win.” As if she knows how this makes him feel warmer; you can’t feel master, quite, of a woman who’s older.
“If you recognized me,” he asks, “why didn’t you recognize Mr. Tothero? He was coach of that team.”
“Who looks at coaches? They don’t do any good, do they?”
“Don’t do any good? A high-school team is all coach; isn’t it?”
Tothero answers, “It’s all boy, Harry. You can’t make gold out of lead. You can’t make gold out of lead.”
“Sure you can,” Rabbit says. “When I came out in my freshman year I didn’t know my feet from my, elbow.”
“Yes you did, Harry, yes you did. I had nothing to teach you; I just let you run.” He keeps looking around. “You were a young deer,” he continues, “with big feet.”
Ruth asks, “How big?”
Rabbit tells her, “Twelve D. How big are yours?”
“They’re tiny,” she says. “Teeny weeny little.”
“It looked to me like they were falling out of your shoes He pulls his head back and slumps slightly, to look down past the table edge, into the submarine twilight where her fore-shortened calves hang like tan fish. They dart back under the seat.
“Don’t look too hard, you’ll fall out of the booth,” she says, ruffled, which is good. Women like being mussed. They never say they do, but they do.
The waiter comes with the drinks and begins laying their places with paper placemats and lusterless silver. He does Margaret and is halfway done on Tothero when Tothero takes the whisky glass away from his lips and says in a freshened, tougher voice, “Cutlery? For Oriental dishes? Don’t you have chopsticks?”
“Chopsticks, yes.”
“Chopsticks all around,” Tothero says positively. “When in Rome.”
“Don’t take mine!” Margaret cries, slapping her hand with a clatter across her spoon and fork when the waiter reaches. “I don’t want any sticks.”
“Harry and Ruth?” Tothero asks. “Your preference?”
The Daiquiri does have the taste of limeade, riding like oil on the top of a raw transparent taste. “Sticks,” Rabbit says in a deep voice, delighted to annoy Margaret. “In Texas we never touched metal to chicken hoo phooey.”
“Ruth?” Tothero’s facial attitude toward her is timid and forced.
“Oh I guess. If this dope can I can.” She grinds out her cigarette and fishes for another.
The waiter goes away like a bridesmaid with his bouquet of unwanted silver. Margaret is alone in her choice, and this preys on her. Rabbit is glad; she is a shadow on his happiness.
“You ate Chinese food in Texas?” Ruth asks.
“All the time. Give me a cigarette.”
“You’ve stopped.”
“I’ve started. Give me a dime.”
“A dime! The hell I will.”
The needless urgency of her refusal offends him, it sounds as if she wants a profit. Why does she think he’d steal from her? What would he steal? He dips into his coat pocket and comes up with coins and takes a dime and puts it into the little ivory tune-selector that burns mildly on the wall by their table. Leaning over, past her face, he turns the leaves listing titles and finally punches the buttons for “Rocksville, P-A.” “Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston,” he says.
“Listen to the big traveler,” Ruth says. She gives him a cigarette. He forgives her about the dime.
“So you think,” Tothero says steadily, “that coaches don’t do anything.”
“They’re worthless,” Ruth says.
“Hey come on,” Rabbit says.
The waiter comes back with their chopsticks and two menus. Rabbit is disappointed in the
chopsticks; they feel like plastic instead of wood. The cigarette tastes rough, a noseful of straw. He puts it out. Never again.
“We’ll each order a dish and then share it,” Tothero tells them. “Now who has favorites?”
“Sweet and sour pork,” Margaret says. One thing about her, she is very definite.
“Harry?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’s the big Chinese-food specialist?” Ruth says.
“This is in English. I’m used to ordering from a Chinese menu.”
“Come on, come on, tell me what’s good.”
“Hey cut it out; you’re getting me rattled.”
“You were never in Texas,” she says.
He remembers the house on that strange treeless residential street, the green night growing up from the prairie, the flowers in the window, and says, “Absolutely I was.”
“Doing what?”
“Serving Uncle.”
“Oh, in the Army; well that doesn’t count. Everybody’s been to Texas with the Army.”
“You order whatever you think is good,” Rabbit tells Tothero. He is irritated by all these Army veterans Ruth seems to know, and strains to hear the final bars of the song he spent a dime to play. In this Chinese place he can just make out a hint, coming it seems from the kitchen, of the jangling melody that exhilarated him last night in the car.
Tothero gives the waiter the order and when he goes away tries to give Ruth the word. The old man’s thin lips are wet with whisky, and saliva keeps trying to sneak out of the corner of his mouth. “The coach,” he says, “the coach is concerned with developing the three tools we are given in life; the head, the body, and the heart.”
“And the crotch,” Ruth says. Margaret, of all people, laughs. She really gives Rabbit the creeps.
“Young woman, you’ve challenged me, and I deserve the respect of your attention.” He speaks with grave weight.
“Shit,” she says softly, and looks down. “Don’t sob on me.” He has hurt her. The wings of her nostrils whiten; her coarse make-up darkens.
“One. The head. Strategy. Most boys come to a basketball coach from alley games and have no conception of the, of the elegance of the game played on a court with two baskets. Won’t you bear me out, Harry?”