Rabbit, Run

by John Updike

  The noise makes Nelson fretful and whiny. As if, being closest to the dark gate from which the baby has recently emerged, he is most sensitive to the threat the infant is trying to warn them of. Some shadow invisible to their better­-formed senses seems to grab Rebecca as soon as she is left alone. Rabbit puts her down, tiptoes into the living-room; they hold their breath. Then, with a bitter scratch, the mem­brane of silence breaks, and the wobbly moan begins again, Nnnh, A-nnnnnih!

  “Oh my God,” Rabbit says. “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”

  Around five in the afternoon, Janice begins to cry. Tears burble down her dark pinched face. “I’m dry,” she says. “I’m dry. I just don’t have anything to feed her.” The baby has been at her breasts repeatedly.

  “Forget it,” he says. “She’ll conk out. Have a drink. There’s some old whisky in the kitchen.”

  “Say; what is this Have a drink routine of yours? I’ve been trying not to drink. I thought you didn’t like me to drink. All afternoon you’ve been smoking one cigarette after another and saying, ‘Have a drink. Have a drink.’ ”

  “I thought it might loosen you up. You’re tense as hell.”

  “I’m no tenser than you are. What’s eating you? What’s on your mind?”

  “What’s happened to your milk? Why can’t you give the kid enough milk?”

  “I’ve fed her three times in four hours. There’s nothing there any more.” In a plain, impoverished gesture, she pres­ses her breasts through her dress.

  “Well have a drink of something.”

  “Say what did they tell you at church? ‘Go on home and get your wife soused’? You have a drink if that’s on your mind.”

  “I don’t need a drink.”

  “Well you need something. You’re the one’s upsetting Becky. She was fine all morning until you came home.”

  “Forget it. Just forget it. Just forget the whole stinking thing.

  “Baby cry!”

  Janice puts her arm around Nelson. “I know it honey. She’s hot. She’ll stop in a minute.”

  “Baby hot?”

  They listen for a minute and it does not stop; the wild feeble warning, broken by tantalizing gaps of silence, goes on and on. Warned, but not knowing of what, they blunder about restlessly through the wreckage of the Sunday paper, inside the apartment, whose walls sweat like the walls of prison. Outside, the sky holds a wide queenly state, blue through the hours, and Rabbit is further panicked by the thought that on such a day his parents used to take them on long pleasant walks, that they are wasting a beautiful Sun­day. But they can’t get organized enough to get out. He and Nelson could go but Nelson’s strange fright makes him re­luctant to leave his mother, and Rabbit, hoping to possess her eventually, hovers near her like a miser near treasure. His lust glues them together.

  She feels this and is oppressed by it. “Why don’t you go out? You’re making the baby nervous. You’re making me nervous.”

  “Don’t you want a drink?”

  “No. No. I just wish you’d sit down or stop smoking or rock the baby or something. And stop touching me. It’s too hot. I think I should be back at the hospital.”

  “Do you hurt? I mean down there.”

  “Well I wouldn’t if the baby would stop. I’ve fed her three times. Now I must feed you supper. Ohh. Sundays make me sick. What did you do in church that makes you so busy?”

  “I’m not busy. I’m trying to be helpful.”

  “I know. That’s what’s so unnatural. Your skin smells funny.”

  “How?”

  “Oh I don’t know. Stop bothering me.”

  “I love you.”

  “Stop it. You can’t. I’m not lovable right now.”

  “You just lie down on the sofa and I’ll make some soup.”

  “No no no. You give Nelson his bath. I’ll try to nurse the baby again. Poor thing there’s nothing there.”

  They eat supper late but in broad light; the day is one of the longest of the year. They sip soup by the flickering light of Rebecca’s urgent cries; her fragile voice is a thin filament burning with erratic injections of power. But as, amid the stacked dishes on the sink, under the worn and humid furni­ture, and in the coffin-like hollow of the plaited crib, the shadows begin to strengthen, the grip of the one with which Becky has been struggling all afternoon relaxes, and sudden­ly she is quiet, leaving behind a solemn guilty peace. They had failed her. A foreigner speaking no English but pregnant with a great painful worry had been placed among them and they had failed her. At last, night itself had swept in and washed her away like a broken piece of rubbish.

  “It couldn’t have been colic, she’s too young for colic,” Janice says. “Maybe she was just hungry, maybe I’m out of milk.”

  “How could that be, you’ve been like footballs.”

  She looks at him squinting, sensing what’s up. “Well don’t think you’re going to play.” But he thinks he spies a smile there.

  Nelson goes to bed as he does when he’s sick, willingly, whimpering. His sister was a drain on him today. Sunk in the pillow, Nelson’s brown head looks demure and com­pact. As the child hungrily roots the bottle in his mouth, Rabbit hovers, seeking what you never find, the expression with which to communicate, to transfer, those fleeting bur­dens, ominous and affectionate, that are placed upon us and as quickly lifted, like the touch of a brush. Obscure repent­ance clouds his mouth, a repentance out of time and action, a mourning simply that he exists in a world where the brown heads of little boys sink gratefully into narrow beds sucking bottles of rubber and glass. He cups his hand over the bulge of Nelson’s forehead. The boy drowsily tries to brush it off, waggles his head with irritation, and Harry takes it away and goes into the other room.

  He persuades Janice to have a drink. He makes it—he doesn’t know much about alcoholic things—of half whisky and half water. She says it tastes hateful. But after a while consumes it.

  In bed he imagines that he can feel its difference in her flesh. There is that feeling of her body coming into his hand, of fitting his palm, that makes a welcome texture. All under her nightie up to the pit of her throat her body is still for him. They lie sideways, facing each other. He rubs her back, first lightly, then toughly, pushing her chest against his, and gathers such a feel of strength from her pliancy that he gets up on an elbow to be above her. He kisses her dark hard face scented with alcohol. She does not turn her head, but he reads no rejection in this small refusal of mo­tion, that lets him peck away awkwardly at a profile. He stifles his tide of resentment, reschooling himself in her slowness. Proud of his patience, he resumes rubbing her back. Her skin keeps its secret, as does her tongue; is she feeling it? She is mysterious against him, a sullen weight whose chemistry is impervious to ideas, impregnable to their penetration. Is he kindling the spark? His wrist aches. He dares undo the two buttons of her nightie front and lifts the leaf of cloth so a long arc is exposed in the rich gloom of the bed, and her warm breast flattens against the bare skin of his chest. She submits to this maneuver and he is filled with the joyful thought that he has brought her to this fullness. He is a good lover. He relaxes into the warmth of the bed and pulls the bow on his pajama waist. She has been shaved and scratches; he settles lower, on the cotton patch. This unnaturalness, this reminder of her wound makes his confidence delicate, so he is totally de­stroyed when her voice—her thin, rasping, dumb-girl’s voice—says by his ear, “Harry. Don’t you know I want to go to sleep?”

  “Well why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “I didn’t know what you were doing. I thought you were just being nice.”

  “So this isn’t nice.”

  “Well, it’s not nice when I can’t do anything.”

  “You can do something.”

  “No I can’t. Even if I wasn’t all tired and confused from Rebecca’s crying all day I can’t. Not for six weeks. You know that.” />
  “Yeah, I know, but I thought—” He’s terribly embar­rassed.

  “What did you think?”

  “I thought you might love me anyway.”

  After a pause she says, “I do love you.”

  “Just a touch, Jan. Just let me touch you.”

  “Can’t you go to sleep?”

  “No I can’t. I can’t. I love you too much. Just hold still.”

  It would have been easy a minute ago to get it over with but all this talk has taken the fine point off. It’s a bad con­tact and her stubborn limpness makes it worse; she’s killing it by making him feel sorry for her and ashamed and foolish. The whole sweet thing is just sweat and work and his ridiculous inability to finish it against the dead hot wall of her belly. She pushes him back. “You’re just using me,” she says. “It feels horrible.”

  “Please, baby. I’m almost there.”

  “It feels so cheap.”

  Her daring to say this infuriates him; he realizes she hasn’t had it for three months and in all that time has gotten an unreal idea of what love is. She exaggerates its impor­tance, has imagined it into something rare and precious she’s entitled to half of when all he wants is to get rid of it so he can move on, on into sleep, down the straight path, for her sake. It’s for her sake.

  “Roll over,” he says.

  “I love you,” she says with relief, misunderstanding, think­ing he’s dismissing her. She touches his face in farewell and turns her back.

  He scrunches down and fits himself between her buttocks, cool. It’s beginning to work, steady, warm, when she twists her head and says over her shoulder, “Is this a trick your whore taught you?”

  He thumps her shoulder with his fist and gets out of bed and his pajama bottoms fall down. The night breeze filters in through the window screen. She turns on her back into the center of the bed and explains out of her dark face, “I’m not your whore, Harry.”

  “Damn it,” he says, “that was the first thing I’ve asked from you since you came home.”

  “You’ve been wonderful,” she says.

  “Thanks.”

  “Where are you going?”

  He is putting on his clothes. “I’m going out. I’ve been cooped up in this damn hole all day.”

  “You went out this morning.”

  He finds his suntans and puts them on. She asks, “Why can’t you try to imagine how I feel? I’ve just had a baby.”

  “I can. I can but I don’t want to, it’s not the thing, the thing is how I feel. And I feel like getting out.”

  “Don’t. Harry. Don’t.”

  “You can just lie there with your precious ass. Kiss it for me.”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” she cries, and flounces under the covers, and smashes her face down into her pillow.

  Even this late he might have stayed if she hadn’t accepted defeat by doing this. His need to love her is by, so there’s no reason to go. He’s stopped loving her at last so he might as well lie down beside her and go to sleep. But she asks for it, lying there in a muddle sobbing, and outside, down in the town, a motor guns and he thinks of the air and the trees and streets stretching bare under the streetlamps and goes out the door.

  The strange thing is she falls asleep soon after he goes; she’s been used to sleeping alone lately and it’s a physical relief not having him in bed kicking his hot legs and twisting the sheets into ropes. That business of his with her bottom made her stitches ache and she sinks down over the small pain all feathers. Around four in the morning Becky cries her awake and she gets up; her nightie taps her body lightly. Her skin feels unnaturally sensitive as she walks about. She changes the baby and lies down on the bed to nurse her. As Becky takes the milk it’s as if she’s sucking a hollow place into her mother’s body; Harry hasn’t come back. By this time if he just went out to cool off he would be back.

  The baby keeps slipping off the nipple because she can’t keep her mind on her; a taste like dry toast keeps touching her lips; she keeps listening for Harry’s key to scratch at the door.

  Mother’s neighbors will laugh their heads off if she loses him again, she doesn’t know why she should think of Moth­er’s neighbors except that all the time she was home Mother kept reminding her of how they sneered and there was al­ways that with Mother the feeling she was dull and plain and a disappointment, and she thought when she got a hus­band it would be all over, all that. She would be a woman with a house on her own. And she thought when she gave this baby her name it would settle her mother but instead it brings her mother against her breast with her blind mouth poor thing and she feels she’s lying on top of a pillar where everyone in the town can see she is alone. She feels cold. The baby won’t stay on the nipple nothing will hold to her.

  She gets up and walks around the room with the baby on her shoulder patting to get the air up and the baby poor thing so floppy and limp keeps sliding and trying to dig its little boneless legs into her to hold tight and the nightie blown by the breeze keeps touching her calves the backs of her legs her ass as he called it. Makes you feel filthy they don’t even have decent names for parts of you.

  If there would be a scratch at the lock and he would come in the door he could do whatever he wanted with her have any part of her if he wanted what did she care that was marriage. But when he tried tonight it just seemed so unfair, she still aching and him sleeping with that prostitute all those weeks and him just saying Roll over in that impatient voice like it was just something he wanted to have done with and who was she not to let him after she had let him run off what right had she to any pride? Any self-respect. That was just why she had to have some because he didn’t think she dared have any after she let him run off that was the funny thing it was his bad deed yet she was supposed not to have any pride afterwards to just be a pot for his dirt. When he did that to her back it was so practiced and reminded her of all those weeks he was off doing what he pleased and she was just helpless Mother and Peggy feeling sorry for her and everybody else laughing she couldn’t bear it.

  And then his going off to church and coming back full of juice. What right did he have to go to church? What did he and God talk about behind the backs of all these women exchanging winks that was the thing she minded if they’d just think about love when they make it instead of thinking about whatever they do think about think about whatever they’re going to do whenever they’ve got rid of this little hot clot that’s bothering them. You can feel in their fingers if they’re thinking about you and tonight Harry was at first and that’s why she let him go on it was like lying there in an envelope of yourself his hands going around you but then he began to be rough and it made her mad to feel him thinking about himself what a good job he was doing sucking her along and not at all any more about how she felt exhausted and aching, poking his thing at her belly like some elbow. It was so rude.

  Just plain rude. Here he called her dumb when be was too dumb to have any idea of how she felt any idea of how his going off had changed her and how he must nurse her back not just wade in through her skin without having any idea of what was there. That was what made her panicky ever since she was little this thing of nobody knowing how you felt and whether nobody could know or nobody cared she had no idea. She didn’t like her skin, never had it was too dark made her look like an Italian even if she never did get pimples like some of the other girls and then in those days both working at Kroll’s she on the salted nuts when Harry would lie down beside her on Mary Han­nacher’s bed the silver wallpaper he liked so much and close his eyes it seemed to melt her skin and she thought it was all over she was with somebody. But then they were married (she felt awful about being pregnant before but Harry had been talking about marriage for a year and any­way laughed when she told him and said Great she was terribly frightened and he said Great and lifted her put his arms around under her bottom and lifted her like you would a child he could be so wonderful when you didn’t expect it in a way it seemed important that you didn’t expect it there
was so much nice in him she couldn’t explain to anybody she had been so frightened about being pregnant and he made her be proud) they were married and she was still little clumsy dark-complected Janice Springer and her husband was a conceited lunk who wasn’t good for anything in the world Daddy said and the feeling of being alone would melt a little with a drink. It wasn’t so much that it dis­solved the lump as made the edges nice and rainbowy.

  She’s been walking around patting the baby until her wrists and ankles hurt and poor tiny Rebecca is asleep with her legs around the breast that still has its milk in it. She wonders if she should try to make her take some and thinks no if she can sleep let her sleep. She lifts the poor tiny thing weighing nothing off the sweaty place on her shoulder and lays her down in the cool shadows of the crib. Already the night is dimming, dawn comes early to the town facing east on its mountainside. Janice lies down on the bed but the sense of light growing beside her on the white sheets keeps her awake. Pleasantly awake at first; the coming of morning is so clean and makes her feel like she did through the second month Harry was hiding. Mother’s great Japanese cherry tree blooming below her window and the grass coming up and the ground smelling wet and ashy and warm. She had thought things out and was resigned to her marriage being finished. She would have her baby and get a divorce and never get married again. She would be like a kind of nun she had just seen that beautiful picture with Audrey Hepburn. And if he came back it would be equally simple: she would forgive him everything and stop her drinking which annoyed him so though she didn’t see why and they would be very nice and simple and clean to­gether because he would have gotten everything out of his system and love her so because she had forgiven him and she would know now how to be a good wife. She had gone to church every week and talked with Peggy and prayed and had come to understand that marriage wasn’t a refuge it was a sharing and she and Harry would start to share everything. And then, it was a miracle, these last two weeks had been that way.