Rabbit, Run

by John Updike

  “How do you know the store’s open?”

  “Isn’t it? Sure it is. Those little stores make all their money on Sundays, what with the supermarkets.” He goes to the window and looks up at the corner. Sure, the door of the place opens and a man comes out with a newspaper.

  “Your shirt’s filthy,” she says behind him.

  “I know.” He moves away from the windowlight. “It’s To­thero’s shirt. I got to get some clothes. But let me get food now. What shall I get?”

  “What do you like?” she asks.

  The thing about her is, she’s good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they’re a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature. The pavement kicks under his feet as he runs to the grocery store in his dirty shirt. What do you like? He has her. He knows he has her.

  He brings back eight hot dogs in cellophane, a package of frozen lima beans, a package of frozen French fries, a quart of milk, a jar of relish, a loaf of raisin bread, a ball of cheese wrapped in red cellophane, and, on top of the bag, a Ma Sweitzer’s shoo-fly pie. It all costs $2.43. As she brings the things out of the bag in her tiny stained kitchen, Ruth says, “You’re kind of a bland eater.”

  “I wanted lamb chops but he only had hot dogs and sa­lami and hash in cans.”

  While she cooks he wanders around her living-room and finds a row of pocketbook mysteries on a shelf under a table beside a chair. The guy in the bunk beside his at Fort Hood used to read those all the time. Ruth has opened the win­dows, and the cool March air is sharpened by this memory of baking Texas. Ruth’s curtains of dingy dotted Swiss blow; their gauze skin gently fills and they lean in toward him as he stands paralyzed by a more beautiful memory: his home, when he was a child, the Sunday papers rattling on the floor, stirred by the afternoon draft, and his mother rattling the dishes in the kitchen; when she is done, she will organize them all, Pop and him and baby Miriam, to go for a walk. Because of the baby, they will not go far, just a few blocks maybe to the old gravel quarry, where the ice pond of win­ter, melted into a lake a few inches deep, doubles the height of the quarry cliff by throwing its rocks upside down into a pit of reflection. But it is only water; they take a few steps further along the edge and from this new angle the pond mirrors the sun, the illusion of inverted cliffs is wiped out, and the water is as solid as ice with light. Rabbit holds little Mim hard by the hand. “Hey,” he calls to Ruth. “I got a terrific idea. Let’s go for a walk this afternoon.”

  “Walk! I walk all the time.”

  “Let’s walk up to the top of Mt. Judge from here.” He can’t remember having ever gone up the mountain from the Brewer side; gusts of anticipation sweep over him, and as he turns, exalted, away from the curtains stiff and leaning with the breeze, huge church bells ring. “Yeah let’s,” he calls into the kitchen. “Please.” Out on the street people leave church carrying wands of green absent-mindedly at their sides.

  When Ruth serves lunch be sees she is a better cook than Janice; she has boiled the hot dogs somehow without splitting them. With Janice, they always arrived at the table torn and twisted, cracked from end to end in wide pink mouths that seemed to cry out they’d been tortured. He and Ruth eat at a small porcelain table in the kitchen. As he touches his fork to his plate he remembers the cold feel in his dream of Janice’s face dropping into his hands, and the memory spoils his first bite, makes it itself a kind of horror. Nevertheless he says, “Terrific,” and gamely goes ahead and eats, and does regain some appetite. Ruth’s face across from him takes some of the white crudity of the table-top; the skin of her broad forehead shines and the two blemishes beside her nose are like spots something spilled has left. She seems to sense that she has be­come unattractive, and eats obsequiously, with quick little self-effacing bites.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “What?”

  “You know I still have that car parked over on Cherry Street.”

  “You’re O.K. The meters don’t matter on Sunday.”

  “Yeah, but they will tomorrow.”

  “Sell it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sell the car. Get rich quick.”

  “No, I mean— Oh. You mean for you. Look, I still have thirty dollars, why don’t you let me give it to you now?” He reaches toward his hip pocket.

  “No, no, I did not mean that. I didn’t mean anything. It just popped into my fat head.” She is embarrassed; her neck goes splotchy and his pity is roused, to think how pretty she appeared last night.

  He explains. “You see, my wife’s old man is a used-car dealer and when we got married he sold us this car at a pretty big discount. So in a way it’s really my wife’s car and anyway since she has the kid I think she ought to have it. And then as you say my shirt’s dirty and I ought to get my clothes if I can. So what I thought was, after lunch why don’t I sneak over to my place and leave the car and pick up my clothes?”

  “Suppose she’s there?”

  “She won’t be. She’ll be at her mother’s.”

  “I think you’d like it if she was there,” Ruth says.

  He wonders; imagines opening the door and finding Janice sitting there in the armchair with an empty glass watching television, and feels, like a small collapse within him, like a piece of food stuck in his throat at last going down, his re­lief at finding her face still firm, still its old dumb obstinate walnut of a face. “No, I wouldn’t,” he tells Ruth. “I’m scared of her.”

  “Obviously,” Ruth says.

  “There’s something about her,” he insists. “She’s a menace.”

  “This poor wife you left? You’re the menace, I’d say.”

  “No.”

  “Oh that’s right. You think you’re a rabbit.” Her tone in saying this is faintly jeering and irritable, he doesn’t know why.

  She asks, “What do you think you’re going to do with these clothes?” That’s it; she feels him moving in.

  He admits, “Bring them here.”

  She takes in the breath but comes out with nothing. “Just for tonight,” he pleads. “You’re not doing anything are you?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Probably not.”

  “Well then, great. Hey. I love you.”

  She rises to clear away the plates and stands there, thumb on china, staring at the center of the white table. She shakes her head heavily and says, “You’re bad news.”

  Across from him her broad pelvis, snug in a nubbly brown skirt, is solid and symmetrical as the base of a powerful column. His heart rises through that strong column and, en­raptured to feel his love for her founded anew yet not daring to lift his eyes to the test of her face, he says, “I can’t help it. You’re such good news.”

  He eats three pieces of shoo-fly pie and a crumb in the corner of his lips comes off on her sweater when he kisses her breasts good-by in the kitchen. He leaves her with the dishes. His car is waiting for him on Cherry Street in the cool spring noon mysteriously; it is as if a room of a house he owned had been detached and scuttled by this curb and now that the tide of night was out stood up glistening in the sand, slightly tilting but unharmed, ready to sail at the turn of a key. Under his rumpled and dirty clothes his body feels clean, narrow, hollow. The car smells secure: rubber and dust and painted metal hot in the sun. A sheath for the knife of himself. He cuts through the Sunday-stunned town, the soft rows of domestic brick, the banistered porches calm pools of wood. He drives around the great flank of Mt. Judge; its slope by the highway is dusted the yellow-green of new leaves; higher up the evergreens make a black horizon with the sky. The view has changed since the last time he came this way. Yesterday morning the sky was ribbed with thin-stretched dawn clouds, and he was exhausted, heading into the center of the net, where alone there seemed a chance of rest. Now the no
on of another day has burned away the clouds, and the sky in the windshield is blank and cold, and he feels nothing ahead of him, Ruth’s delicious nothing, the nothing she told him she did. Her eyes were that blue. Unflecked. Your heart lifts forever through that black sky.

  His mood of poise crumbles as he descends into the fa­miliar houses of Mt. Judge. He becomes cautious, nervous. He turns up Jackson, up Potter, up Wilbur, and tries to make out from some external sign if there is anyone in his apartment. No telltale light would show; it is the height of day. No car is out front. He circles the block twice, straining his neck to see a face at the window. Purple opaque panes. Ruth was wrong; he doesn’t want to see Janice.

  The bare possibility makes him so faint that when he gets out of the car the bright sun almost knocks him down. As he climbs the stairs, the steps seem to calibrate, to restrain by notches, a helpless tendency in his fear-puffed body to rise. He raps on the door, braced to run. Nothing answers on the other side. He taps again, listens, and takes the key out of his pocket.

  Though the apartment is empty, it is yet so full of Janice he begins to tremble; the sight of that easy chair turned to face the television attacks his knees. Nelson’s broken toys on the floor derange his head; all the things inside his skull, the gray matter, the bones of his ears, the apparatus of his eyes, seem clutter clogging the tube of his self; his sinuses choke, with a sneeze or tears, he doesn’t know. The living­-room has the feel of dust. The shades are still drawn. Janice drew them in the afternoons to keep glare off the television screen. Someone has made gestures of cleaning up; her ash­trays and her empty glass have been taken away. Rabbit puts the door key and the car keys on top of the television case, metal painted brown in imitation of wood grain. As he opens the closet door the knob bumps against the edge of the set. Some of her clothes are gone.

  He means to reach for his clothes but instead turns and wanders toward the kitchen, trying to gather up the es­sence of what he has done. Their bed sags in the filtered sunlight. Never a good bed. Her parents had given it to them. On the bureau sit a few of her bottles and jars and a finger­nail scissors and a spool of white thread and a needle and some brass hairpins and a telephone book and a Baby Ben with luminous numbers and a recipe she never used torn from a magazine and a necklace made of wood beads carved in Java he got her for Christmas. Insecurely tilted against the wall is the big oval mirror they took away when her parents had a new bathroom put in; he always meant to at­tach it to the plaster above her bureau for her but never got around to buying molly bolts. A glass on the window­sill, half full of stale, bubbled water, throws a curved patch of diluted sun onto the bare place where the mirror should have been fixed. Three long nicks, here, scratched in the wall, parallel; what ever made them, when? Beyond the edge of the made bed a white triangle of bathroom floor shows: the time after her shower, her bottom blushing with steam, lifting her arms gladly to kiss him, soaked licks of hair in her armpits. What gladness had seized her, and then him, unasked?

  In the kitchen he discovers an odd oversight. The pork chops never taken from the pan, cold as death, riding con­gealed grease. He dumps them out in the paper bag under the sink and with a spatula scrapes crumbs of the stiff specked fat after them. The bag, stained dark brown at the bottom, smells of something sweetly rotting. He puzzles, the can is downstairs out back, can’t take two trips. He de­cides to forget it. He draws scalding water into the sink and puts the pan in to soak. The breath of steam like a whisper in a tomb frightens him.

  In haste he takes clean Jockey pants, T-shirts, and socks from a drawer, three shirts in cellophane and blue cardboard from another, a pair of laundered suntans from a third, draws his two suits and a sports shirt from the closet, and wraps the smaller clothing in the suits to form a bundle he can carry. The job makes him sweat. Clutching his clothes be­tween two arms and a lifted thigh, he surveys the apartment once more, and the furniture, carpeting, wallpaper all seem darkly glazed with the murk filming his own face; the rooms are filled with flavor of an awkward job, and he is glad to get out. The door snaps shut behind him irrevocably. His key is inside.

  Toothbrush. Razor. Cuff links. Shoes. At each step down he remembers something he forgot. He hurries, his feet patter. Jumps. His head almost hits the naked bulb burning at the end of a black cord in the vestibule. His name on the mailbox seems to call at him as he sweeps past; its letters of blue ink crowd the air like a cry. He feels ridiculous, duck­ing into the sunlight like one of those weird thieves you read about in the back pages of newspapers who instead of stealing money and silver carry away a porcelain wash­basin, twenty rolls of wallpaper, or a bundle of old clothes.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Angstrom.”

  A neighbor is passing, Miss Arndt, in a lavender church hat, carrying a palm frond in clutched hands. “Oh. Hello. How are you?” She lives three houses up; they think she has cancer.

  “I am just splendid,” she says. “Just splendid.” And stands there in sunshine, bewildered by splendor, flatfooted, leaning unconsciously against the slope of the pavement. A green car goes by too slowly. Miss Arndt sticks in his way, ami­ably confused, grateful for something, her simple adherence to the pavement it seems, like a fly who stops walking on the ceiling to marvel at itself.

  “How do you like the weather?” he asks.

  “I love it, I love it; Palm Sunday is always blue. It makes the sap rise in my legs.” She laughs and he follows; she stands rooted to the hot cement between the feathery shade of two maples. She knows nothing, he becomes certain.

  “Yes,” he says, for her eyes have snagged on his arms. “I seem to be doing spring cleaning.” He shrugs the bundle to clarify.

  “Good,” she says, with a surprising sarcastic snarl. “You young husbands, you certainly take the bit in your teeth.” Then she twists, and exclaims, “Why, there’s a clergyman in there!”

  The green car has come back, even more slowly, down the center of the street. With a dismay that makes the bundle of clothes double its weight in his arms, Rabbit realizes he is pinned. He lurches from the porch and strides past Miss Arndt saying, “I got to run,” right on top of her considered remark, “It’s not Reverend Kruppenbach.”

  No, of course not Kruppenbach; Rabbit knows who it is, though he doesn’t know his name. Episcopal. The Springers were Episcopalians, more of the old bastard’s social climbing, everyone else was Lutheran or Reformed if they were any­thing. He doesn’t quite run; the downward pavement jars his heels at every stride, he can’t see the cement under the bun­dle he carries. If he can just make the alley. His one hope is the preacher can’t be sure it’s him. He feels the green car crawling behind him; he thinks of throwing the clothes away and really running. If he could get into the old ice plant. But it’s a block away. He feels Ruth, the dishes done, wait­ing on the other side of the mountain. Blue beyond blue under blue.

  As a shark nudges silent creases of water ahead of it the green fender makes ripples of air that break against the back of Rabbit’s knees. The faster he walks the harder these ripples break. Behind his ear a childishly twanging voice pipes, “I beg your pardon. Are you Harry Angstrom?”

  With a falling sensation of telling a lie Rabbit turns and half-whispers, “Yes.”

  The fair young man with his throat manacled in white lets his car glide diagonally against the curb, yanks on the hand­brake, and shuts off the motor, thus parking on the wrong side of the street, cockeyed. Funny how ministers ignore small laws. Rabbit remembers how Kruppenbach’s son used to tear around town on a motorcycle. It always impressed him. “Well, I’m Jack Eccles,” this minister says, and inconse­quently laughs a syllable. The white stripe of an unlit ciga­rette hanging from his lips makes with the echoing collar a comic picture in the car window. He gets out of his car, a ‘58 olive Buick four-door, and offers his hand. To accept it Rabbit has to put his big ball of clothes down in the strip of grass between the pavement and curb.

  Eccles’ handshake, eager and practiced and hard, seems to s
ymbolize for him an embrace. For an instant Rabbit fears he will never let go. He feels caught, foresees explanations, embarrassments, prayers, reconciliations rising up like dank walls; his skin prickles in desperation. He feels tenacity in his captor.

  The minister is about his age or a little older and a good bit shorter. But not small; a sort of needless muscularity runs under his black coat. He stands edgily, with his chest faintly cupped. He has long reddish eyebrows that push a worried wrinkle around above the bridge of his nose, and a little pale pointed knob of a chin tucked under his mouth. Despite his looking vexed there is something friendly and silly about him.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “Huh? Nowhere.” Rabbit is distracted by the man’s suit; it only feigns black. It is really blue, a sober but elegant, lightweight, midnight blue. While his little vest or bib or whatever is black as a stove. The effort of keeping the cigarette between his lips twists Eccles’ laugh into a snort. He slaps the breasts of his coat. “Do you have a match by any chance?”

  “Gee I’m sorry, no. I quit smoking.”

  “You’re a better man than I am.” He- pauses and thinks, then looks at Harry with startled, arched eyebrows. The dis­tention makes his gray eyes seem round and as pale as glass. “Can I give you a lift?”

  “No. Hell. Don’t bother.”

  “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “No; you don’t really want to, do you?”

  “I do, yes. Very much.”

  “Yeah. O.K.” Rabbit picks up his clothes and walks around the front of the Buick and gets in. The interior has that sweet tangy plastic new-car smell; he takes a deep breath of it and cools his fear. “This is about Janice?”

  Eccles nods, staring out the rear window as he backs away from the curb. His upper lip overhangs his lower; there are scoops of weary violet below his eyes.

  “How is she? What did she do?”

  “She seems much saner today. She and her father came to church this morning.” They drive down the street. Eccles adds nothing, just gazes through the windshield, blinking. He pokes the lighter in on the dashboard.