Rabbit, Run

by John Updike

  And then Harry had suddenly put his whore’s filthiness into it and asked her to love it and the unfairness makes her cry aloud softly, as if startled by something in the empty bed with her.

  The last hours are like some narrow turn in a pipe that she can’t force her thought through. Again and again she comes up to the sound of him saying “Roll over” and can’t squeeze through it, can’t not feel panicked and choked. She gets out of bed and wanders around with her one tight breast the nip­ple stinging and goes into the kitchen in her bare feet and sniffs the empty glass Harry made her drink whisky out of. The smell is dark and raw and soft and deep, and she thinks maybe a sip will cure her insomnia. Make her sleep until the scratch at the door awakens her and she sees his big white body ramble in sheepishly and she can say Come to bed, Harry it’s all right, do me, I want to share it, I really want it, really.

  She puts just an inch of whisky in, and not much water because it would take too long to drink, and no ice cubes because the noise of the tray might wake up the children. She takes this dose to the window and stands looking down past the three tar roofs at the sleeping town. Already a few kitchen and bedroom lights show pale here and there. A car, its headlights dull disks that do not throw beams into the thinning darkness, eases down Wilbur toward the center of town. The highway, half-hidden by the silhouettes of houses, like a river between banks of trees, this early swishes with traffic. She feels the workday approaching like an army of light, feels the dark ridged houses beneath her as potentially stirring, waking, opening like castles to send forth their men, and regrets that her own husband is unable to settle into the nationwide rhythm of which one more beat is about to sound. Why him? What was so precious about him? Anger at Harry begins to bloom, and to stifle it she drains the glass and turns in the dawn; everything in the apartment is a shade of brown. She feels lopsided; the pres­sure in the unused breast pulls her.

  She goes into the kitchen and makes another drink, strong­er than the first, thinking that after all it’s about time she had a little fun. She hadn’t had a moment to herself since she came back from the hospital. The thought of fun makes her movements quick and airy; she fairly runs in her bare feet across the gritty carpet back to the window, as if to a show arranged just for her. Mounted in her white gown above everything she can see, she touches her fingers to her tight breast so that the milk starts to leak, stains the white cloth with slow warmth.

  The wetness slides down her front and turns cold in the air by the window. Her varicose veins ache from standing. She goes and sits in the moldy brown armchair and is sickened by just the angle at which the mottled wall meets the pasty ceiling. The angle tips her, muddles up and down. The pattern on the wallpaper swarms; the flowers are brown spots that swim in the murk and chase each other and merge hungrily. It’s hateful. She turns her face away and studies the calm green globe of the dead television set. The front of her nightie is drying; the crusty stiffness scratches her. Baby book said keep nipples clean, soap gently: germs enter scratches. She sets the drink on the round chair arm and stands up and pulls her nightgown over her head and sits down again. It gives her nakedness a mossy hug. She puts the bunched nightgown in her lap on top of her Modess pad and belt and pulls the footstool over cleverly with her toes and rests her ankles on it and admires her legs. She always thought she had good legs. Straight small nice even thighs. She does have good legs. Their tapering wavering silhouettes are white against the deep shadow of the rug. The dim light erases the blue veins left from carrying Becky. She wonders if her legs are going to go as bad as Mother’s: She tries to imagine the ankles as thick as the knees and they do seem to swell. She reaches down to reas­sure herself by feeling the ankles’ hard narrow bones and her shoulder knocks the whisky glass off the chair arm. She jumps up, startled to feel the air embrace her bare skin, cool space sweep around her wobbly, knobbed body. She giggles. If Harry could see her now. Luckily there wasn’t much in the glass. She tries to walk boldly into the kitchen with no clothes on like a whore but the sense of somebody watching her, which began when she stood at the window and made her milk flow, is too strong; she ducks into the bedroom and wraps the blue bathrobe around her and then mixes the drink. There is still a third of the bottle left. Tiredness makes the rims of her lids dry but she has no desire to go back to bed. She has a horror of it because Harry should be there. This absence is a hole that widens and she pours a little whisky into it but it’s not enough and when she goes to the window for the third time it is now light enough to see how drab everything is. Someone has smashed a bottle on one of the tar roofs. The gutters of Wilbur Street are full of mud that washes down from the new development. While she looks the streetlights, great pale strings of them, go off in patches. She pictures the man at the power plant pulling the switches, little and gray and hunchbacked and very sleepy. She goes to the television set and the band of light that suddenly flares in the green rectangle sparks joy in her breast but it’s still too early, the light is just a speckling senseless brightness and the sound is nothing but static. As she sits there watching the blank radiance a feeling of some other person standing behind her makes her snap her head around several times. She is very quick about it but there is always a space she can’t see which the other person could dodge into if he’s there. It’s the television has called him into the room but when she turns off the set she starts to cry immediately. She sits there with her face in her hands, her tears crawling out between her fingers and her sobs shak­ing through the apartment. She doesn’t stifle them because she wants to wake somebody; she is sick of being alone. In the bleaching light the walls and furniture are clear and re­gain their colors and the merging brown spots have gone into herself.

  She goes and looks at the baby, the poor thing lying there snuffling the crib sheet, its little hands twitching up by its ears, and reaches down and strokes its hot membranous head and lifts it out its legs all wet and takes it to nurse in the arm­chair that looks toward the window. The sky beyond is a pale smooth blue that looks painted on the panes. There is nothing to see but sky from this chair, they might be a hun­dred miles up, in the basket of a great balloon. A door on the other side of the partition slams and her heart leaps but then of course it’s just another tenant maybe grumpy Mr. Cappello going off to work, the stairs rumbling reluctantly. This wakes Nelson and for a time her hands are full. In making breakfast for them she breaks an orange-juice glass, it just drifts away from her thumb into the brittle sink. When she bends over Nelson to serve him his Rice Krispies he looks up at her and wrinkles his nose; he smells sadness and its familiar odor makes him timid with her. “Daddy go away?” He’s such a good boy saying this to make it easy on her, all she has to do is answer “Yes.”

  “No,” she says. “Daddy went out to work early this morn­ing before you got up. He’ll be home for supper like he always is.”

  The child frowns at her and then parrots with sharp hope, “Like always is?”

  Worry has stretched his head high, so his neck seems a stem too thin to support the ball of his skull with its broad whorl of pillow-mussed hair. “Daddy will be home,” she repeats. Having taken on herself the burden of lying, she needs a little more whisky for support. There is a murk in­side her which she must tint a bright color or collapse. She takes the dishes out to the kitchen but they slide so in her hands she doesn’t try to wash them. She thinks she must change out of her bathrobe into a dress but in taking the steps into the bedroom forgets her purpose and begins making the bed. But something whose presence she feels on the wrinkled bed frightens her so that she draws back and goes into the other room to be with the children. It’s as if in telling them Harry would be back as normal she’s put a ghost in the apartment. But the other person does not feel like Harry, it feels like a burglar, a teasing burglar dancing from room to room ahead of her.

  When she picks up the baby again she feels its wet legs and thinks of changing it but cleverly realizes she is drunk and might stab it with the pins. She is very
proud of thinking this through and tells herself to stay away from the bottle so she can change the baby in an hour. She puts good Becky in her crib and, wonderfully, doesn’t hear her cry once. She and Nelson sit and watch the tail end of Dave Garroway and then a program about Elizabeth and her hus­band entertaining a friend of his who is always going away on camping trips being a bachelor and turns out to be a better cook than Elizabeth. For some reason watching this makes her so nervous that just out of television-watching habit she goes to the kitchen and makes herself a little drink, mostly ice cubes, just to keep sealed shut the great hole that is threatening to pull open inside of her again. She takes just a sip and it’s like a swallow of blue light that makes everything clear. She must just arch over this one little gap and at the end of the day after work Harry will be back and no one will ever know, no one will laugh at Mother. She feels like a rainbow arching protectively over Harry, who seems infinitely small under her, like some children’s toy. She thinks how good it would be to play with Nelson; it is bad for him to watch television all morning. She turns it off and finds his coloring book and crayons and they sit on the rug and color opposite pages.

  Janice repeatedly hugs him and talks to make him laugh and is very happy doing the actual coloring. In high school, art was the one subject she wasn’t afraid of and she always got a B. She smiles in the delight of coloring her page, a barnyard, so well, of feeling the little rods of color in her fingers make such neat parallel strokes and her son’s small body intent and hard beside hers. Her bathrobe fans out on the floor around her and her body seems beautiful and broad. She moves to get her shadow off the page and sees that she has colored one chicken partly green and not stayed within the lines at all well and her page is ugly; she starts to cry; it is so unfair, as if someone standing behind her without understanding a thing has told her her coloring is ugly. Nelson looks up and his quick face slides wide and he cries, “Don’t! Don’t, Mommy!” She prepares to have him pitch forward into her lap but instead he jumps up and runs with a lopsided almost crippled set of steps into the bedroom and falls on the floor kicking.

  She pushes herself up from the floor with a calm smile and goes into the kitchen, where she thinks she left her drink. The important thing is to complete the arch to the end of the day, to be a protection for Harry, and it’s silly not to have the one more sip that will make her long enough. She comes out of the kitchen and tells Nelson, “Mommy’s stopped crying, sweet. It was a joke. Mommy’s not crying. Mommy’s very happy. She loves you very much.” His rubbed stained face watches her. Like a stab from behind the phone rings. Still carrying that calmness she answers it. “Hello?”

  “Darling? It’s Daddy.”

  “Oh, Daddy!” Joy just streams through her lips.

  He pauses. “Baby, is Harry sick? It’s after eleven and he hasn’t shown up at the lot yet.”

  “No, he’s fine. We’re all fine.”

  There is another pause. Her love for her father flows toward him through the silent wire. She wishes the conversa­tion would go on forever. He asks, “Well, where is he? Is he there? Let me speak to him, Janice.”

  “Daddy, he’s not here. He went out early this morning.”

  “Where did he go? He’s not at the lot.” She’s heard him say the word “lot” a million times it seems; he says it like no other man; it’s dense and rich from his lips, as if all the world is concentrated in it. All the good things of her grow­ing up, her clothes, her toys, their house, came from the “lot.”

  She is inspired; car-sale talk is one thing she knows. “He went out early, Daddy, to show a station wagon to a pros­pect who had to go to work or something. Wait. Let me think. He said the man had to go to Allentown early this morning. He had to go to Allentown and Harry had to show him a station wagon. Everything’s all right, Daddy. Harry loves his job.”

  The third pause is the longest. “Darling. Are you sure he’s not there?”

  “Daddy, aren’t you funny? He’s not here. See?” As if it has eyes she thrusts the receiver into the air of the empty room. It’s meant as a daughter’s impudent joke but unex­pectedly just holding her arm out makes her feel sick. When she brings the receiver back to her ear be is saying in a remote ticky voice, “darling. All right. Don’t worry about anything. Are the children there with you?”

  Feeling dizzy, she hangs up. This is a mistake, but she thinks on the whole she’s been clever enough. She thinks she deserves a drink. The brown liquid spills down over the smoking ice cubes and doesn’t stop when she tells it to; she snaps the bottle angrily and blot-shaped drops topple into the sink. She goes into the bathroom with the glass and comes out with her hands empty and a taste of toothpaste in her mouth. She remembers looking into the mirror and patting her hair and from that she went to brushing her teeth. With Harry’s toothbrush.

  She discovers herself making lunch, like looking down in­to a food advertisement in a magazine, bacon strips sizzling in a pan at the end of a huge blue arm. She sees the BB’s of fat flying in the air like the pretty spatter of a fountain in a park and wonders at how quick their arcs are. They prick her hand on the handle and she turns the purple gas down. She pours a glass of milk for Nelson and pulls some leaves off of a head of lettuce and sets them on a yellow plastic plate and eats a handful herself. She thinks she won’t set a place for herself and then thinks she will be­cause maybe this trembling in her stomach is hunger and gets another plate and stands there holding it with two hands in front of her chest wondering why Daddy was so sure Harry was here. There is another person in the apartment she knows but it’s not Harry and the person has no business here any­way and she determines to ignore him and continues setting lunch with a slight stiffness operating in her body. She holds on to everything until it is well on the table.

  Nelson says the bacon is greasy and asks again if Daddy go away and his complaining about the bacon that she was so clever and brave to make at all annoys her so that after his twentieth refusal to eat even a bit of lettuce she reaches over and slaps his rude face. The stupid child can’t even cry he just sits there and stares and sucks in his breath again and again and finally does burst forth. But luckily she is equal to the situation, very calm, she sees the unreason of his whole attempt and refuses to be bullied. With the smoothness of a single great wave she makes his bottle, takes him by the hand, oversees his urinating, and settles him in bed. Still shaking with the aftermath of sobs, he roots the bottle in his mouth and she is certain from the glaze on his watchful eyes that he is locked into the channel to sleep. She stands by the bed, surprised by her stern strength.

  The telephone rings again, angrier than the first time, and as she runs to it, running because she does not want Nelson disturbed, she feels her strength ebb and a brown staleness washes up the back of her throat. “Hello.”

  “Janice.” Her mother’s voice, even and harsh. “I just got back from shopping in Brewer and your father’s been trying to reach me all morning. He thinks Harry’s gone again. Is he?”

  Janice closes her eyes and says, “He went to Allentown.”

  “What would he do there?”

  “He’s going to sell a car.”

  “Don’t be silly. Janice. Are you all right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “Drinking what?”

  “Now don’t worry, I’m coming right over.”

  “Mother, don’t. Everything is fine. I just put Nelson into his nap.”

  “I’ll have a bite to eat out of the icebox and come right over. You lie down.”

  “Mother, please don’t come over.”

  “Janice, now don’t talk back. When did he go?”

  “Stay away, Mother. He’ll be back tonight.” She listens and adds, “And stop crying.”

  Her mother says, “Yes you say stop when you keep bring­ing us all into disgrace. The first time I thought it was all his fault but I’m not so sure any more. Do you hear? I’m not so sure.”

&nb
sp; Hearing this speech has made the sliding sickness in her so steep she wonders if she can keep her grip on the phone. “Don’t come over, Mother,” she begs. “Please.”

  “I’ll have a bite of lunch and be over in twenty minutes. You go to bed.”

  Janice replaces the receiver and looks around her with horror. The apartment is horrible. Coloring books on the floor, glasses, the bed unmade, dirty dishes everywhere. She runs to where she and Nelson crayoned, and tests bending over. She drops to her knees, and the baby begins to cry. Panicked with the double idea of not disturbing Nelson and of concealing Harry’s absence, she runs to the crib and nightmarishly finds it smeared with orange mess. “Damn you, damn you,” she moans to Rebecca, and lifts the little filthy thing out and wonders where to carry her. She takes her to the armchair and biting her lips unpins the diaper. “You little pig,” she murmurs, feeling that the sound of her voice is holding off the other person who is gathering in the room. She takes the soaked daubed diaper to the bath­room and drops it in the toilet and dropping to her knees fumbles the bathtub plug into its hole. She pulls on both faucets as wide as they will go, knowing from experiment that both opened wide make the right tepid mixture. The water bangs out of the faucet like a fist. She notices the glass of watery whiskey she left on the top of the toilet and takes a long stale swallow and then puzzles how to get it off her hands. All the while Rebecca screams. As if she has mind enough to know she’s filthy. Janice takes the glass with her and spills it on the rug with her knee while she strips the baby of its nightie and sweater. She carries the sopping clothes to the television set and puts them on top while she drops to her knees and tries to stuff the crayons back into their box. Her head aches with all this jarring up and down. She takes the crayons to the kitchen table and dumps the uneaten bacon and lettuce into the paper bag under the sink but the mouth of the bag leans partly closed and the lettuce falls behind into the darkness in back of the can and she crouches down with her head pounding to try to see it or get it with her fingers and is unable. Her knees sting from so much kneeling. She gives up and to her surprise sits flatly on a kitchen chair and looks at the gaudy soft noses of the crayons poking out of the Crayola box. Hide the whisky. Her body doesn’t move for a second but when it does she sees her hands with the little lines of dirt on her fingernails put the whisky bottle into a lower cabinet with some old shirts of Harry’s she was saving for rags he would never wear a mended shirt not that she was any good at mending them. She shuts the door, it bangs but doesn’t catch, and on the edge of linoleum beside the sink the cork cap of the whisky bottle stares at her like a little top hat. She puts it in the garbage bag. Now the kitchen is clean enough. In the living-room Rebecca is lying naked in the fuzzy armchair with her belly puffing out sideways to yell and her lumpy curved legs clenched and red. Janice’s other baby was a boy and it still seems unnatural to her, be­tween the girl’s legs, those two little buns of fat instead of a boy’s triple business (when the doctor had Nelson cir­cumcised Harry hadn’t wanted him to he hadn’t been and thought it was unnatural she had laughed at him he was so mad). The baby’s face goes red with each squall and Janice closes her eyes and thinks how really horrible it is of Mother to come and ruin her day just to make sure she’s lost Harry again. She can’t wait a minute to find out and this awful baby can’t wait a minute and there are the clothes on top of the television set. She takes them into the bathroom and drops them into the toilet on top of the diaper and turns off the faucets. The wavery gray line of the water is almost up to the lip of the tub. On the skin quick wrinkles wander and under it a deep mass waits colorless. She wishes she could have the bath. Brimful of composure she returns to the living-room. She tips too much trying to dig the tiny rubbery thing out of the chair so drops to her knees and scoops Rebecca into her arms and carries her into the bathroom held sideways against her breasts. She is proud to be carrying this to completion; the baby will be clean. She drops gently to her knees by the big calm tub and does not expect her sleeves to be soaked. The water wraps around her forearms like two large hands; under her amazed eyes the pink baby sinks down like a gray stone.