by John Updike
“Yea, sure. Just yesterday—”
“Second—let me finish, Harry, and then you can talk—second, the body. Work the boys into condition. Make their legs hard.” He clenches his fist on the slick table. “Hard. Run, run, run. Run every minute their feet are on the floor. You can’t run enough. Thirdly”—he puts the index finger and thumb of one hand to the corners of his mouth and flicks away the moisture—“the heart. And here the good coach, which I, young lady, certainly tried to be and some say was, has his most solemn opportunity. Give the boys the will to achieve. I’ve always liked that better than the will to win, for there can be achievement even in defeat. Make them feel the, yes, I think the word is good, the sacredness of achievement, in the form of giving our best.” He dares a pause now, and wins through it, glancing at each of them in turn to freeze their tongues. “A boy who has had his heart enlarged by an inspiring coach,” he concludes, “can never become, in the deepest sense, a failure in the greater game of life.” Confident that he has sold them, he draws on his glass, which is mostly ice cubes. As he tilts it up they ride forward and rattle against his lips.
Ruth turns to Rabbit and asks quietly, as if to change the subject, “What do you do?”
He laughs. “Well I’m not sure I do anything any more. I should have gone to work this morning. I uh, it’s kind of hard to describe, I demonstrate something called the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler.”
“And I’m sure he does it well,” Tothero says. “I’m sure that when the MagiPeel Corporation board sits down at their annual meeting, and ask themselves ‘Now who has done the most to further our cause with the American public?’ the name of Harry Rabbit Angstrom leads the list.”
“What do you do?” Rabbit asks her in turn.
“Nothing,” Ruth answers. “Nothing.” And her eyelids make a greasy blue curtain as she sips her Daiquiri. Her chin takes something of the liquid’s green light.
The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn’t had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen’s sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite’s innocent gusto. Candy. Heaped on a smoking breast of rice. Each is given such a tidy hot breast, and Margaret is in a special hurry to muddle hers with glazed chunks; all eat well. Their faces take color and strength from the oval plates of dark pork, sugar peas, chicken, stiff sweet sauce, shrimp, water chestnuts, who knows what else. Their talk grows hearty.
“He was terrific,” Rabbit says of Tothero. “He was the greatest coach in the county. I would’ve been nothing without him.”
“No, Harry, no. You did more for me than I did for you. Girls, the first game he played he scored twenty points.”
“Twenty-three,” Harry says.
“Twenty-three points! Think of it.” The girls eat on. “Remember, Harry, the state tournaments in Harrisburg; Dennistown and their little set-shot artist.”
“He was tiny,” Harry tells Ruth. “About five two and ugly as a monkey. Really a dirty player too.”
“Ah, but he knew his trade,” Tothero says, “he knew his trade. He had us, too, until Harry went wild.”
“All of a sudden the basket looked big as a well. Everything I threw went in. Then this runt trips me.”
“So he did,” Tothero says. “I’d forgotten.”
“He trips me, and over I go, bonk, against the mat. If the walls hadn’t been padded I’da been killed.”
“Then what happened, Harry? Did you cream him? I’ve forgotten this whole incident.” Tothero’s mouth is full of food and his hunger for revenge is ugly.
“Why, no,” Rabbit says slowly. “I never fouled. The ref saw it and it was his fifth foul and he was out. Then we smothered ‘em.”
Something fades in Tothero’s expression; his face goes slack. “That’s right, you never fouled. Harry was always the idealist.”
Rabbit shrugs. “I didn’t have to.”
“The other strange thing about Harry,” Tothero tells the two women. “He was never hurt.”
“No, I once sprained my wrist,” Rabbit corrects. The thing you said that really helped me—”
“What happened next in the tournaments? I’m frightened at how I’ve forgotten this.”
“Next? Pennoak, I think. Nothing happened. They beat us.”
“They won? Didn’t we beat them?”
“Oh hell no. They were good. They had five good players. What’d we have? Just me, really. We had Harrison, who was O.K., but after that football injury he never had the touch, really.”
“Ronnie Harrison?” Ruth asks.
Rabbit is startled. “You know him?” Harrison had been a notorious bedbug.
“I’m not sure,” she says, complacently enough.
“Shortish guy with kinky hair. A little bitty limp.”
“No, I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t think so.” She is pleasingly dexterous with the chopsticks, and keeps one hand lying palm up on her lap. He loves when she ducks her head, that thick simple neck moving forward making the broad tendons on her shoulder jump up, to get her lips around a piece of something. Pinched with just the right pressure between the sticks; funny how plump women have that delicate touch. Margaret shovels it in with her dull bent silver.
“We didn’t win,” Tothero repeats, and calls, “Waiter.” When the boy comes Tothero asks for another round of the same drinks.
“No, not for me, thanks,” Rabbit says. “I’m high enough on this as it is.”
“You’re just a big clean-living kid, aren’t you, you,” Margaret says. She doesn’t even know his name yet. God, he hates her.
“The thing, I started to say, the thing you said that really helped me,” Rabbit says to Tothero, “is that business about almost touching your thumbs on the two-handers. That’s the whole secret, really, getting the ball in front of your hands, where you get that nice lifty feeling. Just zwoops off.” His hands show how.
“Oh, Harry,” Tothero says sadly, “you could shoot when you came to me. All I gave you was the will to win. The will to achievement.”
“You know my best night,” Rabbit says, “my best night wasn’t that forty-pointer that time against Allenville, it was in my junior year, we went down to end of the county real early in the season to play, a funny little hick school, about a hundred in all six grades; what was its name? Bird’s Nest? Something like that. You’ll remember.”
“Bird’s Nest,” Tothero says. “No.”
“It was the only time I think we ever scheduled them. Funny little square gymnasium where the crowd sat up on the stage. Some name that meant something.”
“Bird’s Nest,” Tothero says. He is bothered. He keeps touching his ear.
“Oriole!” Rabbit exclaims, perfect in joy. “Oriole High. This little kind of spread-out town, and it was early in the season, so it was kind of warm still, and going down in the bus you could see the things of corn like wigwams out in the fields. And the school itself kind of smelled of cider; I remember you made some joke about it. You told me to take it easy, we were down there for practice, and we weren’t supposed to try, you know, to smother ‘em.”
“Your memory is better than mine,” Tothero says. The waiter comes back and Tothero takes his drink right off the tray, before the boy has a chance to give it to him.
“So,” Rabbit says. “We go out there and there are these five farmers clumping up and down, and we get about fifteen points up right away and I just take it easy. And there are just a couple dozen people sitting up on the stage and the game isn’t a league game so nothing matters much, and I get this funny feeling I can do anything, just drifting around, passing the ball, and all of a sudden I know, you see, I know I can do anything. The second half I take maybe just ten shots, and every one goes right in, not just bounces in, but doesn’t touch the rim, like I’m dropping stones do
wn a well. And these farmers running up and down getting up a sweat, they didn’t have more than two substitutes, but we’re not in their league either, so it doesn’t matter much to them, and the one ref just leans over against the edge of the stage talking to their coach. Oriole High. Yeah, and then afterwards their coach comes down into the locker room where both teams are changing and gets a jug of cider out of a locker and we all passed it around. Don’t you remember?” It puzzles him, yet makes him want to laugh, that he can’t make the others feel what was so special. He resumes eating. The others are done and on their second drinks.
“Yes, sir, Whosie, you’re a real sweet kid,” Margaret tells him.
“Pay no attention, Harry,” Tothero says, “that’s the way tramps talk.”
Margaret hits him: her hand flies up from the table and across her body into his mouth, flat, but without a slapping noise.
“Socko,” Ruth says. Her voice is indifferent. The whole thing is so quiet that the Chinaman, clearing their dishes away, doesn’t look up, and seems to hear nothing.
“We’re going,” Tothero announces, and tries to stand up, but the edge of the table hits his thighs, and he can stand no higher than a hunchback. The slap has left a little twist in his mouth that Rabbit can’t bear to look at, it’s so ambiguous and blurred, such a sickly mixture of bravado and shame and, worst, pride or less than pride, conceit. This deathly smirk issues the words, “Are you coming, my dear?”
“Son of a bitch,” Margaret says, yet her little hard nut of a body slides over, and she glances behind her to see if she is leaving anything, cigarettes or a purse. “Son of a bitch,” she repeats, and there is something pretty in the level way she says it. Both she and Tothero seem calmer now, determined and kind of rigid.
Rabbit starts to push up from the table, but Tothero sets a rigid urgent hand on his shoulder, the coach’s touch, that Rabbit had so often felt on the bench, just before the pat on the bottom that sent him into the game. “No no, Harry. You stay. One apiece. Don’t let our vulgarity distract you. I couldn’t borrow your car, could I?”
“Huh? How would I get anywhere?”
“Quite right, you’re quite right. Forgive my asking.”
“No, I mean, you can if you want—” In fact he feels deeply reluctant to part with a car that is only half his.
Tothero sees this. “No no. It was an insane thought. Good night.”
“You bloated old bastard,” Margaret says to him. He glances toward her, then down fuzzily. She is right, Harry realizes, he is bloated; his face is lopsided like a tired balloon. Yet this balloon peers down at him as if there was some message bulging it, heavy and vague like water.
“Where will you go?” Tothero asks.
“I’ll be fine. I have money. I’ll get a hotel,” Rabbit tells him. He wishes, now that he has refused him a favor, that Tothero would go.
“The door of my mansion is open,” Tothero says. “There’s the one cot only, but we can make a mattress—”
“No, look,” Rabbit says severely. “You’ve saved my life, but I don’t want to saddle you. I’ll be fine. I can’t thank you enough anyway.”
“We’ll talk sometime,” Tothero promises; his hand twitches, and accidentally taps Margaret’s thigh.
“I could kill you,” Margaret says at his side, and they go off, looking from the back like father and daughter, past the counter where the waiter whispers with the American girl, and out the glass door, Margaret first. The whole thing seems so settled: like little wooden figures going in and out of a barometer.
“God, he’s in sad shape.”
“Who isn’t?” Ruth asks.
“You don’t seem to be.”
“I eat, is what you mean.”
“No, listen, you have some kind of complex about being big. You’re not fat. You’re right in proportion.”
She laughs, catches herself, looks at him, laughs again and squeezes his arm and says, “Rabbit, you’re a Christian gentleman.” Her using his own name enters his ears with unsettling warmth.
“What she hit him for?” he asks, giggling in fear that her hands, resting on his forearm, will playfully poke his side. He feels in her grip the tension of this possibility.
“She likes to hit people. She once hit me.”
“Yeah, but you probably asked for it.”
She replaces her hands on the table. “So did he. He likes being hit.”
He asks, “You know him?”
“I’ve heard her talk about him.”
“Well, that’s not knowing him. That girl is dumb.”
“Isn’t she. She’s dumber than you can know.”
“Look, I know. I’m married to her twin.”
“Ohhh. Married.”
“Hey, what’s this about Ronnie Harrison? Do you know him?”
“What’s this about you being married?”
“Well, I was. Still am.” He regrets that they have started talking about it. A big bubble, the enormity of it, crowds his heart. It’s like when he was a kid and suddenly thought, coming back from somewhere at the end of a Saturday afternoon, that this—these trees, this pavement—was life, the real and only thing.
“Where is she?”
This makes it worse, picturing Janice, where would she go? “Probably with her parents. I just left her last night.”
“Oh. Then this is just a holiday. You haven’t left her.”
“I think I have.”
The waiter brings them a plate of sesame cakes. Rabbit takes one tentatively, thinking they will be hard, and is delighted to have it become in his mouth mild elastic jelly, through the shell of bland seeds. The waiter asks, “Gone for good, your friends?”
“It’s O.K., I’ll pay,” Rabbit says.
The Chinaman nods and retreats.
“You’re rich?” Ruth asks.
“No, poor.”
“Are you really going to a hotel?” They both take several sesame cakes. There are perhaps twenty on the plate.
“I guess I’ll tell you about Janice. I never thought of leaving her until the minute I did; all of a sudden it seemed obvious. She’s about five-six, sort of dark-complected—”
“I don’t want to hear about it.” Her voice is positive; her many-colored hair, as she tilts back her head and squints at a ceiling light, settles into one grave shade. The light was more flattering to her hair than it is to her face; on this side of her nose there are some spots in her skin, blemishes that make bumps through her powder.
“You don’t,” he says. The bubble rolls off his chest. If it doesn’t worry anybody else why should it worry him? “O.K. What shall we talk about? What’s your weight?”
“One-fifty.”
“Ruth, you’re tiny. You’re just a welterweight. No kidding. Nobody wants you to be all bones. Every pound you have on is priceless.”
He’s talking just for happiness, but something he says makes her tense up. “You’re pretty wise, aren’t you?” she asks, tilting her empty glass toward her eyes. The glass is a shallow cup on a short stem, like an ice-cream dish at a fancy birthday party. It sends pale arcs of reflection swimming across her face.
“You don’t want to talk about your weight, either. Huh.” He pops another sesame cake into his mouth, and waits until the first pang, the first taste of jelly, subsides. “Let’s try this. What you need, Mrs. America, is the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler. Preserve those vitamins. Shave off fatty excess. A simple adjustment of the plastic turn screw, and you can grate carrots and sharpen your husband’s pencils. A host of uses.”
“Don’t Don’t be so funny.”
“O.K.”
“Let’s be nice.”
“O.K. You start.”
She plops a cake in and looks at him with a funny full-mouth smile, the corners turned down tight, and a frantic look of agreeableness strains her features while she chews. She swallows, her blue eyes widened round, and gives a little gasp before launching into what he thinks will be a remark but turns out
to be a laugh, right in his face. “Wait,” she begs. “I’m trying.” And returns to looking into the shell of her glass, thinking, and the best she can do, after all that, is to say, “Don’t live in a hotel.”
“I got to. Tell me a good one.” He instinctively thinks she knows about hotels. At the side of her neck where it shades into her shoulder there is a shallow white hollow where his attention curls and rests.
“They’re all expensive,” she says. “Everything is. Just my little apartment is expensive.”
“Where do you have an apartment?”
“Oh a few blocks from here. On Summer Street. It’s one flight up, above a doctor.”
“It’s yours alone?”
“Yeah. My girl friend got married.”
“So you’re stuck with all the rent and you don’t do anything.”
“Which means what?”
“Nothing. You just said you did nothing. How expensive is it?”
She looks at him curiously, with that alertness he had noticed right off, out by the parking meters.
“The apartment,” he says.
“A hundred-ten a month. Then they make you pay for light and gas.”
“And you don’t do anything.”
She gazes into her glass, making reflected light run around the rim with a rocking motion of her hands.
“Whaddeya thinking?” he asks.
“Just wondering.”
“Wondering what?”
“How wise you are.”
Right here, without moving his head, he feels the wind blow. So this is the drift; he hadn’t been sure. He says, “Well I’ll tell ya. Why don’t you let me give you something toward your rent?”
“Why should you do that?”
“Big heart,” he says. “Ten?”
“I need fifteen.”
“For the light and gas. O.K. O.K.” He is uncertain what to do now. They sit looking at the empty plate that had held a pyramid of sesame cakes; they have eaten them all. The waiter, when he comes, is surprised to see this; his eyes go from the plate to Rabbit to Ruth, all in a second. The check amounts to $9.60. Rabbit puts a ten and a one on top of it, and besides these bills he puts a ten and a five. He counts what’s left in his wallet; three tens and four ones. When he looks up, Ruth’s money has vanished from the slick table. He stands up and takes her little soft coat and holds it for her, and like a great green fish, his prize, she heaves across and up out of the booth and coldly lets herself be fitted into it. He calculates, a dime a pound.