Rabbit Redux

by John Updike

  But against these educated tolerant thoughts leans a certain fear; he doesn’t see why they have to be so noisy. The four seated right under him, jabbing and letting their noise come out in big silvery hoops; they know damn well they’re bugging the fat Dutchy wives pulling their shopping bags home. Well, that’s kids of any color: but strange. They are a strange race. Not only their skins but the way they’re put together, loose-jointed like lions, strange about the head, as if their thoughts are a different shape and come out twisted even when they mean no menace. It’s as if, all these Afro hair bushes and gold earrings and hoopy noise on buses, seeds of some tropical plant sneaked in by the birds were taking over the garden. His garden. Rabbit knows it’s his garden and that’s why he’s put a flag decal on the back window of the Falcon even though Janice says it’s corny and fascist. In the papers you read about these houses in Connecticut where the parents are away in the Bahamas and the kids come in and smash it up for a party. More and more this country is getting like that. As if it just grew here instead of people laying down their lives to build it.

  The bus works its way down Weiser and crosses the Running Horse River and begins to drop people instead of taking them on. The city with its tired five and dimes (that used to be a wonderland, the counters as high as his nose and the Big Little Books smelling like Christmas) and its Kroll’s Department Store (where he once worked knocking apart crates behind the furniture department) and its flowerpotted traffic circle where the trolley tracks used to make a clanging star of intersection and then the empty dusty windows where stores have been starved by the suburban shopping malls and the sad narrow places that come and go called Go-Go or Boutique and the funeral parlors with imitation granite faces and the surplus outlets and a shoeshine parlor that sells hot roasted peanuts and Afro newspapers printed in Philly crying MBOYA MARTYRED and a flower shop where they sell numbers and protection and a variety store next to a pipe-rack clothing retailer next to a corner dive called JIMBO’S Friendly LOUNGE, cigarette ends of the city snuffed by the bridge – the city gives way, after the flash of open water that in his youth was choked with coal silt (a man once tried to commit suicide from this bridge but stuck there up to his hips until the police pulled him out) but that now has been dredged and supports a flecking of moored pleasure boats, to West Brewer, a gappy imitation of the city, the same domino-thin houses of brick painted red, but spaced here and there by the twirlers of a car lot, the pumps and blazoned over-hang of a gas station, the lakelike depth of a supermarket parking lot crammed with shimmering fins. Surging and spitting, the bus, growing lighter, the Negroes vanishing, moves toward a dream of spaciousness, past residential fortresses with sprinkled lawn around all four sides and clipped hydrangeas above newly pointed retaining walls, past a glimpse of the museum whose gardens were always in blossom and where the swans ate the breadcrusts schoolchildren threw them, then a glimpse of the sunstruck windows, pumpkin orange blazing in reflection, of the tall new wing of the County Hospital for the Insane. Closer at hand, the West Brewer Dry Cleaners, a toy store calling itself Hobby Heaven, a Rialto movie house with a stubby marquee: 2001 SPACE OD’SEY. Weiser Street curves, becomes a highway, dips into green suburbs where in the Twenties little knights of industry built half-timbered dream-houses, pebbled mortar and clinker brick, stucco flaky as pie crust, witch’s houses of candy and hardened cookie dough with two-car garages and curved driveways. In Brewer County, but for a few baronial estates ringed by iron fences and moated by miles of lawn, there is nowhere higher to go than these houses; the most successful dentists may get to buy one, the pushiest insurance salesmen, the slickest ophthalmologists. This section even has another name, distinguishing itself from West Brewer: Penn Park. Penn Villas echoes the name hopefully, though it is not incorporated into this borough but sits on the border of Furnace Township, looking in. The township, where once charcoal-fed furnaces had smelted the iron for Revolutionary muskets, is now still mostly farmland, and its few snowplows and single sheriff can hardly cope with this ranch-house village of muddy lawns and potholed macadam and sub-code sewers the developers suddenly left in its care.

  Rabbit gets off at a stop in Penn Park and walks down a street of mock Tudor, Emberly Avenue, to where the road surface changes at the township line, and becomes Emberly Drive in Penn Villas. He lives on Vista Crescent, third house from the end. Once there may have been here a vista, a softly sloped valley of red barns and fieldstone farmhouses, but more Penn Villas has been added and now the view from any window is as into a fragmented mirror, of houses like this, telephone wires and television aerials showing where the glass cracked. His house is faced with apple-green aluminum clapboards and is numbered 26. Rabbit steps onto his flagstone porchlet and opens his door with its three baby windows arranged like three steps, echoing the door-chime of three stepped tones.

  “Hey Dad,” his son calls from the living room, a room on his right the size of what used to be called a parlor, with a fireplace they never use. “They’ve left earth’s orbit! They’re forty-three thousand miles away.”

  “Lucky them,” he says. “Your mother here?”

  “No. At school they let us all into assembly to see the launch.”

  “She call at all?”

  “Not since I’ve been here. I just got in a while ago.” Nelson, at twelve, is under average height, with his mother’s dark complexion, and something finely cut and wary about his face that may come from the Angstroms. His long eyelashes come from nowhere, and his shoulder-length hair is his own idea. Somehow, Rabbit feels, if he were taller it would be all right, to have hair so long. As is, the resemblance to a girl is frightening.

  “Whadja do all day?”

  The same television program, of people guessing and getting and squealing and kissing the m.c., is still going on.

  “Nothing much.”

  “Go to the playground?”

  “For a while.”

  “Then where?”

  “Oh, over to West Brewer, just to hang around Billy’s apartment. Hey, Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “His father got him a mini-bike for his birthday. It’s real cool. With that real long front part so you have to reach up for the handles.”

  “You rode it?”

  “He only let me once. It’s all shiny, there isn’t a speck of paint on it, it’s just metal, with a white banana seat.”

  “He’s older than you, isn’t he?”

  “By four months. That’s all. Just four months, Dad. I’m going to be thirteen in three months.”

  “Where does he ride it? It’s not legal on the street, is it?”

  “Their building has a big parking lot he rides it all around. Nobody says anything. It only cost a hundred-eighty dollars, Dad.”

  “Keep talking, I’m getting a beer.”

  The house is small enough so that the boy can be heard by his father in the kitchen, his voice mixed with gleeful greedy spurts from the television and the chunky suck of the refrigerator door opening and shutting. “Hey Dad, something I don’t understand.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I thought the Fosnachts were divorced.”

  “Separated.”

  “Then how come his father keeps getting him all this neat junk? You ought to see the hi-fi set he has, that’s all his, for his room, not even to share. Four speakers, Dad, and earphones. The earphones are fantastic. It’s like you’re way inside Tiny Tim.”

  “That’s the place to be,” Rabbit says, coming into the living room. “Want a sip?”

  The boy takes a sip from the can, putting a keyhole width of foam on the fuzz of his upper lip, and makes a bitter face.

  Harry explains, “When people get divorced the father doesn’t stop liking the kids, he just can’t live with them any more. The reason Fosnacht keeps getting Billy all this expensive crap is probably he feels guilty for leaving him.”

  “Why did they get separated, Dad, do you know?”

  “Beats me. The bigger riddle is, why did they e
ver get married?” Rabbit knew Peggy Fosnacht when she was Peggy Gring, a big-assed walleyed girl in the middle row always waving her hand in the air because she thought she had the answer. Fosnacht he knows less well: a weedy little guy always shrugging his shoulders, used to play the saxophone in prom bands, now a partner in a music store on the upper end of Weiser Street, used to be called Chords ’n’ Records, now Fidelity Audio. At the discount Fosnacht got, Billy’s hi-fi set must have cost next to nothing. Like these prizes they keep socking into these young shriekers. The one that French-kissed the m.c. is off now and a colored couple is guessing. Pale, but definitely colored. That’s O.K., let ’em guess, win, and shriek with the rest of us. Better than that sniping from rooftops. Still, he wonders how that black bride would be. Big lips, suck you right off, the men are slow as Jesus, long as whips, takes everything to get them up, in there forever, that’s why white women need them, white men too quick about it, have to get on with the job, making America great. Rabbit loves, on Laugh-In, when Teresa does the go-go bit, the way they paint the words in white on her skin. When they watch, Janice and Nelson are always asking him what the words are; since he took up the printer’s trade he can read like a flash, upside down, mirror-wise too: he always had good quick eyes, Tothero used to tell him he could see the ball through the holes of his ears, to praise him. A great secret sly praiser, Tothero. Dead now. The game different now, everything the jump shot, big looping hungry blacks lifting and floating there a second while a pink palm long as your forearm launched the ball. He asks Nelson, “Why don’t you stay at the playground anymore? When I was your age I’d be playing Horse and Twenty-one all day long.”

  “Yeah, but you were good. You were tall.” Nelson used to be crazy for sports. Little League, intramural. But lately he isn’t. Rabbit blames it on a scrapbook his own mother kept, of his basketball days in the early Fifties, when he set some county records: last winter every time they would go visit Mt. Judge Nelson would ask to get it out and lie on the floor with it, those old dry-yellow games, the glue dried so the pages crackle being turned, MT. JUDGE TOPPLES ORIOLE, ANGSTROM HITS FOR 37, just happening for the kid, that happened twenty years ago, light from a star.

  “I got tall,” Rabbit tells him. “At your age I wasn’t much taller than you are.” A lie, but not really. A few inches. In a world where inches matter. Putts. Fucks. Orbits. Squaring up a form. He feels bad about Nelson’s height. His own never did him much good, if he could take five inches off himself and give them to Nelson he would. If it didn’t hurt.

  “Anyway, Dad, sports are square now. Nobody does it.”

  “Well, what isn’t square now? Besides pill-popping and draft-dodging. And letting your hair grow down into your eyes. Where the hell is your mother? I’m going to call her. Turn the frigging TV down for once in your life.”

  David Frost has replaced The Match Game so Nelson turns it off entirely. Harry regrets the scared look that glimmered across the kid’s face: like the look on his father’s face when he sneezed on the street. Christ they’re even scared to let him sneeze. His son and father seem alike fragile and sad to him. That’s the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.

  The telephone is on the lower of a set of see-through shelves that in theory divides the living room from a kind of alcove they call a breakfast nook. A few cookbooks sit on them but Janice has never to his knowledge looked into them, just dishes up the same fried chicken and tasteless steak and peas and French fries she’s always dished up. Harry dials the familiar number and a familiar voice answers. “Springer Motors. Mr. Stavros speaking.”

  “Charlie, hi. Hey, is Janice around?”

  “Sure is, Harry. How’s tricks?” Stavros is a salesman and always has to say something.

  “Tricky,” Rabbit answers.

  “Hold on, friend. The good woman’s right here.” Off-phone, his voice calls, “Pick it up. It’s your old man.”

  Another receiver is lifted. Through the knothole of momentary silence Rabbit sees the office: the gleaming display cars on the showroom floor, old man Springer’s frosted-glass door shut, the green-topped counter with the three steel desks behind: Stavros at one, Janice at another, and Mildred Kroust the bookkeeper Springer has had for thirty years at the one in between, except she’s usually out sick with some sort of female problem she’s developed late in life, so her desk top is empty and bare but for wire baskets and a spindle and a blotter. Rabbit can also see last year’s puppy-dog calendar on the wall and the cardboard cutout of the Toyota station wagon on the old coffee-colored safe, behind the Christmas tree. The last time he was at Springer’s lot was for their Christmas party. Springer is so tickled to get the Toyota franchise after years of dealing in second-hand he has told Harry he feels “like a kid at Christmas all year round.” He tried ten years ago to turn Rabbit into a car salesman but in the end Harry opted to follow his own father into honest work. “Harry sweet,” Janice says, and he does hear something new in her voice, a breathy lilt of faint hurry, of a song he has interrupted her singing. “You’re going to scold me, aren’t you?”

  “No, the kid and I were just wondering if and if so when the hell we’re going to get a home-cooked meal around here.”

  “Oh I know,” she sings, “I hate it too, it’s just that with Mildred out so much we’ve had to go into her books, and her system is really zilch.” Zilch: he hears another voice in hers. “Honestly,” she sings on, “if it turns out she’s been swindling Daddy of millions none of us will be surprised.”

  “Yeah. Look, Janice. It sounds like you’re having a lot of fun over there –”

  “Fun? I’m working, sweetie.”

  “Sure. Now what the fuck is really going on?”

  “What do you mean, going on? Nothing is going on except your wife is trying to bring home a little extra bread.” Bread? “‘Going on’ – really. You may think your seven or whatever dollars an hour you get for sitting in the dark diddling that machine is wonderful money, Harry, but the fact is a hundred dollars doesn’t buy anything anymore, it just goes.”

  “Jesus, why am I getting this lecture on inflation? All I want to know is why my wife is never home to cook the fucking supper for me and the fucking kid.”

  “Harry, has somebody been bugging you about me?”

  “Bugging? How would they do that? Janice. Just tell me, shall I put two TV dinners in the oven or what?”

  A pause, during which he has a vision: sees her wings fold up, her song suspended: imagines himself soaring, rootless, free. An old premonition, dim. Janice says, with measured words, so he feels as when a child watching his mother levelling tablespoons of sugar into a bowl of batter, “Could you, sweet? Just for tonight? We’re in the middle of a little crisis here, frankly. It’s too complicated to explain, but we have to get some figures firm or we can’t do the paychecks tomorrow.”

  “Who’s this we? Your father there?”

  “Oh sure.”

  “Could I talk to him a second?”

  “Why? He’s out on the lot.”

  “I want to know if he got those tickets for the Blasts game. The kid’s dying to go.”

  “Well, actually, I don’t see him, I guess he’s gone home for supper.”

  “So it’s just you and Charlie there.”

  “Other people are in and out. We’re desperately trying to untangle this mess Mildred made. This is the last night, Harry, I promise. I’ll be home between eight and nine, and then tomorrow night let’s all go to a movie together. That space thing is still in West Brewer, I noticed this morning driving in.”

  Rabbit is suddenly tired, of this conversation, of everything. Confusing energy surrounds him. A man’s appetites diminish, but the world’s never. “O.K. Be home when you can. But we got to talk.”

  “I’d love to talk, Harry.” From her tone she assumes “talk” means fuck, when he did mean talk. She hangs up: a satisfied impatient sound.

  He opens another beer. T
he pull-tab breaks, so he has to find the rusty old church key underneath everything in the knife drawer. He heats up two Salisbury steak dinners; while waiting for the oven to preheat to 400°, he reads the ingredients listed on the package: water, beef, peas, dehydrated potato flakes, bread crumbs, mushrooms, flour, butter, margarine, salt, maltodextrin, tomato paste, corn starch, Worcestershire sauce, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, monosodium glutamate, nonfat dry milk, dehydrated onions, flavoring, sugar, caramel color, spice, cysteine and thiamine hydrochloride, gum arabic. There is no clue from the picture on the tinfoil where all this stuff fits in. He always thought gum arabic was something you erased with. Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he’ll always know. He’ll never know how to talk Chinese or how screwing an African princess feels. The six o’clock news is all about space, all about emptiness: some bald man plays with little toys to show the docking and undocking maneuvers, and then a panel talks about the significance of this for the next five hundred years. They keep mentioning Columbus but as far as Rabbit can see it’s the exact opposite: Columbus flew blind and hit something, these guys see exactly where they’re aiming and it’s a big round nothing. The Salisbury steak tastes of preservative and Nelson eats only a few bites. Rabbit tries to joke him into it: “Can’t watch TV without a TV dinner.” They channel-hop, trying to find something to hold them, but there is nothing, it all slides past until, after nine, on Carol Burnett, she and Gomer Pyle do an actually pretty funny skit about the Lone Ranger. It takes Rabbit back to when he used to sit in the radio-listening armchair back on Jackson Road, its arms darkened with greasespots from the peanut-butter cracker-sandwiches he used to stack there to listen with. Mom used to have a fit. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday night The Lone Ranger came on at seven-thirty, and if it was summer you’d come in from kick-the-can or three-stops-or-a-catch and the neighborhood would grow quiet all across the back yards and then at eight the doors would slam and the games begin again, those generous summer days, just enough dark to fit sleep into, a war being fought across oceans so he could spin out his days in such happiness, in such quiet growing. Eating Wheaties, along with Jack Armstrong, and Jell–O, which brought you Jack Benny.