Rabbit Redux

by John Updike

  He breaks his egg into the pan, sets the flame low, thinks guiltily of his mother. Janice turns off the vacuum, comes over, pours herself some coffee to sit opposite him with as he eats. Lack of sleep has left purple dents beneath her eyes. He asks her, “Are you going to tell him?”

  “I suppose I must.”

  “Why? Wouldn’t you like to keep him?”

  “What are you saying, Harry?”

  “Keep him, if he makes you happy. I don’t seem to, so go ahead, until you’ve had your fill at least.”

  “Suppose I never have my fill?”

  “Then I guess you should marry him.”

  “Charlie can never marry anybody.”

  “Who says?”

  “He did once. I asked him why not and he wouldn’t say. Maybe it has to do with his heart murmur. That was the only time we ever discussed it.”

  “What do you and he discuss? Except which way to do it next.”

  She might have risen to this taunt but doesn’t. She is very flat, very honest and dry this morning, and this pleases him. A graver woman than he has known reveals herself. We contain chords someone else must strike. “We don’t say much. We talk about funny little things, things we see from his windows, things we did as children. He loves to listen to me; when he was a boy they lived in the worst part of Brewer, a town like Mt. Judge looked marvellous to him. He calls me a rich bitch.”

  “The boss’s daughter.”

  “Don’t, Harry. You said that last night. You can’t understand. It would sound silly, the things we talk about. He has a gift, Charlie does, of making everything exciting – the way food tastes, the way the sky looks, the customers that come in. Once you get past that defensiveness, that tough guy act, he’s quite quick and, loving, in what he sees. He felt awful last night, after you left, that he had made you say more than you meant to. He hates to argue. He loves life. He really does, Harry. He loves life.”

  “We all do.”

  “Not really. I think our generation, the way we were raised, makes it hard for us to love life. Charlie does. It’s like – daylight. You want to know something?”

  He agrees, “Sure,” knowing it will hurt.

  “Daylight love – it’s the best.”

  “O.K. Relax. I said, keep the son of a bitch.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Only one thing. Try to keep the kid from knowing. My mother already knows, the people who visit her tell her. It’s all over town. Talk about daylight.”

  “Let it be,” Janice says. She rises. “Goddam your mother, Harry. The only thing she’s ever done for us is try to poison our marriage. Now she’s drowning in the poison of her life. She’s dying and I’m glad.”

  “Jesus, don’t say that.”

  “Why not? She would, if it were me. Who did she want you to marry? Tell me, who would have been wonderful enough for you? Who?”

  “My sister,” he suggests.

  “Let me tell you something else. At first with Charlie, whenever I’d feel guilty, so I couldn’t relax, I’d just think of your mother, how she’s not only treated me but treated Nelson, her own grandson, and I’d say to myself, O.K., fella, sock it to me, and I’d just come.”

  “O.K., O.K. Spare me the fine print.”

  “I’m sick, so sick, of sparing you things. There’ve been a lot of days” – and this makes her too sad to confess, so that a constraint slips like a net over her face, which goes ugly under the pull – “when I was sorry you came back that time. You were a beautiful brainless guy and I’ve had to watch that guy die day by day.”

  “It wasn’t so bad last night, was it?”

  “No. It was so good I’m angry. I’m all confused.”

  “You’ve been confused from birth, kid.” He adds, “Any dying I’ve been doing around here, you’ve been helping it right along.” At the same time, he wants to fuck her again, to see if she can turn inside out again. For some minutes last night she turned all tongue and his mouth was glued to hers as if in an embryo the first cell division had not yet occurred.

  The phone rings. Janice plucks it from its carriage on the kitchen wall and says, “Hi, Daddy. How was the Poconos? Good. I knew she would. She just needed to feel appreciated. Of course he’s here. Here he is.” She holds it out to Rabbit. “For you.”

  Old man Springer’s voice is reedy, coaxing, deferential. “Harry, how’s everything?”

  “Not bad.”

  “You still game for the ball game? Janice mentioned you asked about the tickets to the Blasts today. They’re in my hand, three right behind first base. The manager’s been a client of mine for twenty years.”

  “Yeah, great. The kid spent the night at the Fosnachts, but I’ll get him back. You want to meet at the stadium?”

  “Let me pick you up, Harry. I’ll be happy to pick you up in my car. That way we’ll leave Janice yours.” A note in his voice that didn’t used to be there, gentle, faintly wheedling: nursing along an invalid. He knows too. The world knows. It’ll be in the Vat next week. LINOTYPER’S WIFE LAYS LOCAL SALES REP. Greek Takes Strong Anti-Viet Stand.

  “Tell me, Harry,” Springer wheedles on, “how is your mother’s health? Rebecca and I are naturally very concerned. Very concerned.”

  “My father says it’s about the same. It’s a slow process, you know. They have drugs now that make it even slower. I’ve been meaning this week to get up to Mt. Judge to see her but we haven’t managed.”

  “When you do, Harry, give her our love. Give her our love.”

  Saying everything twice: he probably swung the Toyota franchise because the Japs could understand him second time around.

  “O.K., sure enough. Want Janice back?”

  “No, Harry, you can keep her.” A joke. “I’ll be by twelve-twenty, twelve-thirty.”

  He hangs up. Janice is gone from the kitchen. He finds her in the living room crying. He goes and kneels beside the sofa and puts his arms around her but these actions feel like stage directions followed woodenly. A button is off on her blouse and the sallow curve of breast into the bra mixes with her hot breath in his ear. She says, “You can’t understand, how good he was. Not sexy or funny or anything, just good.”

  “Sure I can. I’ve known some good people. They make you feel good.”

  “They make you feel everything you do and are is good. He never told me how dumb I am, every hour on the hour like you do, even though he’s much smarter than you could ever imagine. He would have gone to college, if he hadn’t been a Greek.”

  “Oh. Don’t they let Greeks in now? The nigger quota too big?”

  “You say such sick things, Harry.”

  “It’s because nobody tells me how good I am,” he says, and stands. The back of her neck is vulnerable beneath him. One good karate chop would do it.

  The driveway crackles outside; it’s much too early for Springer. He goes to the window. A teal-blue Fury. The passenger door swings open and Nelson gets out. On the other side appears Peggy Gring, wearing sunglasses and a miniskirt that flashes her big thighs like a card dealer’s thumbs. Unhappiness — being deserted – has made her brisk, professional. She gives Rabbit hardly a hello and her sunglasses hide the eyes that he knows from school days look northeast and northwest. The two women go into the kitchen. From the sound of Janice snuffling he guesses a confession is in progress. He goes outside to finish the yard work he began last night. All around him, in the back yards of Vista Crescent, to the horizons of Penn Villas with their barbecue chimneys and aluminum wash trees, other men are out in their yards; the sound of his mower is echoed from house to house, his motions of bending and pushing are carried outwards as if in fragments of mirror suspended from the hot blank sky. These his neighbors, they come with their furniture in vans and leave with the vans. They get together to sign futile petitions for better sewers and quicker fire protection but otherwise do not connect. Nelson comes out and asks him, “What’s the matter with Mommy?”

  He shuts off the mower. “What’s
she doing?”

  “She’s sitting at the table with Mrs. Fosnacht crying her eyes out.”

  “Still? I don’t know, kid; she’s upset. One thing you must learn about women, their chemistries are different from ours.”

  “Mommy almost never cries.”

  “So maybe it’s good for her. Get lots of sleep last night?”

  “Some. We watched an old movie about torpedo boats.”

  “Looking forward to the Blasts game?”

  “Sure.”

  “But not much, huh?”

  “I don’t like sports as much as you do, Dad. It’s all so competitive.”

  “That’s life. Dog eat dog.”

  “You think? Why can’t things just be nice? There’s enough stuff for everybody to share.”

  “You think there is? Why don’t you start then by sharing this lawnmowing? You push it for a while.”

  “You owe me my allowance.” As Rabbit hands him a dollar bill and two quarters, the boy says, “I’m saving for a mini-bike.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Also, Dad –?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think I should get a dollar twenty-five an hour for work. That’s still under the federal minimum wage.”

  “See?” Rabbit tells him. “Dog eat dog.”

  As he washes up inside, pulling grass bits out of his cuffs and putting a Band-aid on the ball of his thumb (tender place; in high school they used to say you could tell how sexy a girl was by how fat she was here), Janice comes into the bathroom, shuts the door, and says, “I’ve decided to tell him. While you’re at the ball game I’ll tell him.” Her face looks taut but pretty dried-out; patches of moisture glisten beside her nose. The tile walls amplify her sniffs. Peggy Gring’s car roars outside in leaving.

  “Tell who what?”

  “Tell Charlie. That it’s all over. That you know.”

  “I said, keep him. Don’t do anything for today at least. Calm down. Have a drink. See a movie. See that space movie again, you slept through the best parts.”

  “That’s cowardly. No. He and I have always been honest with each other, I must tell him the truth.”

  “I think you’re just looking for an excuse to see him while I’m tucked away at the ball park.”

  “You would think that.”

  “Suppose he asks you to sleep with him?”

  “He wouldn’t.”

  “Suppose he does, as a graduation present?”

  She stares at him boldly: dark gaze tempered in the furnace of betrayal. It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere. “I would,” she says.

  “Where are you going to find him?”

  “At the lot. He stays on until six summer Saturdays.”

  “What reason are you going to give him? For breaking it off.”

  “Why, the fact that you know.”

  “Suppose he asks you why you told?”

  “It’s obvious why I told. I told because I’m your wife.”

  Tears belly out between her lids and the tension of her face breaks like Nelson’s when a hidden anxiety, a D or a petty theft or a headache, is confessed. Harry denies his impulse to put his arm around her; he does not want to feel wooden again. She teeters, keeping her balance while sobbing, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, while the plastic shower curtain rustles at her shoulder.

  “Aren’t you going to stop me?” she brings out at last.

  “Stop you from what?”

  “From seeing him!”

  Given this rich present of her grief, he can afford to be cruel. Coolly he says, “No, see him if you want to. Just as long as I don’t have to see the bastard.” And, avoiding the sight of her face, he sees himself in the cabinet mirror, a big pink pale man going shapeless under the chin, his little lips screwed awry in what wants to be a smile.

  The gravel in the driveway crackles again. From the bathroom window he sees the boxy dun top of Springer’s spandy new Toyota wagon. To Nelson he calls, “Grandpa’s here. Let’s go-o.” To Janice he murmurs, “Sit tight, kid. Don’t commit yourself to anything.” To his father-in-law, sliding in beside him, across a spaghetti of nylon safety straps, Rabbit sings, “Buy me some peanuts and crack-er-jack . . .”

  The stadium is on the northern side of Brewer, through a big cloverleaf, past the brick hulks of two old hosiery mills, along a three-lane highway where in these last years several roadside restaurants have begun proclaiming themselves as Pennsylvania Dutch, with giant plaster Amishmen and neon hex signs. GENUINE “Dutch” COOKING. Pa. Dutch Smörgåsbord. Trying to sell what in the old days couldn’t be helped. Making a tourist attraction out of fat-fried food and a diet of dough that would give a pig pimples. They pass the country fairgrounds, where every September the same battered gyp stands return, and the farmers bring their stinking livestock, and Serafina the Egyptian Temptress will take off all her clothes for those yokels who put up a dollar extra. The first naked woman he saw was Serafina or her mother. She kept on her high heels and a black mask and bent way backwards; she spread her legs and kept a kind of token shimmy rhythm as she moved in a semi-circle so every straining head (luckily he was tall even then) could see a trace of her cleft, an exciting queasy-making wrinkle shabbily masked by a patch of hair that looked to him pasted-on. Rubbed threadbare? He didn’t know. He couldn’t imagine.

  Springer is shaking his head over the York riots. “Sniper fire four nights in a row, Harry. What is the world coming to? We’re so defenseless, is what strikes me, we’re so defenseless against the violent few. All our institutions have been based on trust.”

  Nelson pipes up. “It’s the only way they can get justice, Grandpa. Our laws defend property instead of people.”

  “They’re defeating their own purposes, Nellie. Many a white man of good will like myself is being turned against the blacks. Slowly but surely he’s being turned against them. It wasn’t Vietnam beat Humphrey, it was law and order in the streets. That’s the issue that the common man votes upon. Am I right or wrong, Harry? I’m such an old fogey I don’t trust my own opinions any more.”

  One old geezer, Harry is remembering, at the side of the little stage, reached from behind and put his hand up on her pussy, shouting, “Aha!” She stopped her dance and stared out of the black mask. The tent went quiet; the geezer, surprisingly, found enough blood in himself to blush. Aha. That cry of triumph, as if he had snared a precious small animal, Harry never forgot. Aha. He slouches down and in answer to Springer says, “Things go bad. Food goes bad, people go bad, maybe a whole country goes bad. The blacks now have more than ever, but it feels like less, maybe. We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn’t big enough for all that wanting. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

  Old man Springer laughs; he snorts and snarls so his little gray mouse of a mustache merges with his nostril hairs. “Did you hear about Teddy Kennedy this morning?”

  “What about him? No.”

  “Shut your ears, Nellie. I forgot you were in the car or I wouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  “What, Grandpa? What did he do? Did somebody shoot him?”

  “Apparently, Harry” – Springer talks out of the side of his mouth, as if to shield Nelson, yet so distinctly the child can easily hear – “he dumped some girl from Pennsylvania into one of those Massachusetts rivers. Murder as plain as my face.” Springer’s face, from the side, is a carving of pink bone, with rosy splotches where the cheekbones put most pressure, and a bump of red on the point where the nose turns. An anxious sharp face creased all over by a salesman’s constant smile. One thing at least about setting type, there’s a limit on how much ass you must kiss.

  “Did they get him? Is he in jail, Grandpa?”

  “Ah, Nellie, they’ll never put a Kennedy in jail. Palms will be greased. Evidence will be suppressed. I call it a crying shame.”

  Rabbit asks, “What do you mean, dumped some girl?”

  “T
hey found her in his car upside down in the water beside some bridge, I forget the name, one of those islands they have up there. It happened last night and he didn’t go to the police until they were about to nab him. And they call this a democracy, Harry, is the irony of it.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “I’d call it a police state run by the Kennedys, is what I would call it. That family has been out to buy the country since those Brahmins up in Boston snubbed old Joe. And then he put himself in league with Hitler when he was FDR’s man in London. Now they’ve got the young widow to marry a rich Greek in case they run out of American money. Not that she’s the goodie-gumdrop the papers say; those two were a match. What’s your opinion, Harry? Am I talking out of line? I’m such a back number now I don’t trust to hear myself talk.” Aha.

  “I’d say,” Harry says, “you’re right with it. You should join the kids and buy yourself a bomb to throw.”

  Springer looks over from driving (the yellow parabolas of a McDonald’s flash by; the tinsel spinners of a Mobil station break the noon sun into trinkets) to see if he has oversold. How timid, really, people who live by people must be. Earl Angstrom was right about that at least: better make your deals with things. Springer says, hedgily smiling, showing porcelain teeth beneath the gray blur, “I’ll say this for the Kennedys, however, they don’t get my dander up like FDR. There was a man, Harry, so mad he died of maggots in the brain. One thing to be said for the Kennedys, they didn’t try to turn the economy upside down for the benefit of the poor, they were willing to ride along with the System as it’s been handed down.”

  Nelson says, “Billy Fosnacht says when we grow up we’re going to overthrow the System.”

  Springer can’t hear, lost in his vision of executive madness and corruption. “He tried to turn it upside down for the benefit of the black and white trash, and when that didn’t work for eight years he finagled the little Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor so he had a war to bail him out of the Depression. That’s why you have these wars, believe it or not, to bail the Democrats out of their crazy economics. LBJ, now, as soon as he got his four-year guarantee, went into Vietnam where nobody wanted us, just to get the coloreds up into the economy. LBJ, he was an FDR man. Truman, the same thing in Korea. History bears me out, every time, call me an old fogey if you want to: what’s your angle on it, Nelson?”