Rabbit Redux

by John Updike

  “You do? That’s the only thing you can think of to do, talk about me?” He means to be funny, to keep her mood alive, but her face stops, hovers a second; and Nelson’s tells him he has struck on something. What they do. In that little car. Well, they don’t need much space, much contact: young bodies. The kid’s faint mustache, black hairs; her cedar mane. Bodies not sodden yet like his. At that keen age the merest touch. Their brother-sister shyness, touching hands in the flicker of wet glass at the sink. If she’d offer to lay hairy old heavy him the first night, what wouldn’t she do to bring the kid along; somebody has to. Why not? Chief question facing these troubled times. Why not.

  Though he doesn’t pursue this guilt he has startled from her, that night he does make her take him squarely, socks it into her, though she offers her mouth and her cunt is so tight it sears. She is frightened when he doesn’t lose his hardness; he makes her sit up on him and pulls her satin hips down, the pelvis bones starved, and she sucks in breath sharply and out of pained astonishment pitched like delight utters, “You’re wombing me!” He tries to picture it. A rosy-black floor in her somewhere, never knows where he is, in among kidneys, intestines, liver. His child bride with flesh-colored hair and cloudy innards floats upon him, stings him, sucks him up like a cloud, falls, forgives him. His love of her coats him with distaste and confusion, so that he quickly sleeps, only his first dreams jostled when she gets from bed to go wash, check on Nelson, talk to God, take a pill, whatever else she needs to do to heal the wound where his seared cock was. How sad, how strange. We make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.

  Harry’s father sidles up to him at the coffee break. “How’s every little thing, Harry?”

  “Not bad.”

  “I hate like hell to nag like this, you’re a grown man with your own miseries, I know that, but I’d be appreciative as hell if you’d come over some evenings and talk to your mother. She hears all sorts of malicious folderol about you and Janice now, and it would help settle her down if you could put her straight. We’re no moralists, Harry, you know that; your mother and I tried to live by our own lights and to raise the two children God was good enough to give us by those same lights, but I know damn well it’s a different world now, so we’re no moralists, me and Mary.”

  “How is her health, generally?”

  “Well, that’s another of these problematical things, Harry. They’ve gone ahead and put her on this new miracle drug, they have some name for it I can never remember, L-dopa, that’s right, L-dopa, it’s still in the experimental stage I guess, but there’s no doubt in a lot of cases it works wonders. Trouble is, also it has these side effects they don’t know too much about, depression in your mother’s case, some nausea and lack of appetite; and nightmares, Harry, nightmares that wake her up and she wakes me up so I can hear her heart beating, beating like a tom-tom. I never heard that before, Harry, another person’s heart in the room as clear as footsteps, but that’s what these L-dopa dreams do for her. But there’s no doubt, her talk comes easier, and her hands don’t shake that way they have so much. It’s hard to know what’s right, Harry. Sometimes you think, Let Nature take its course, but then you wonder, What’s Nature and what isn’t? Another side effect” – he draws closer, glancing around and then glancing down as his coffee slops in the paper cup and burns his fingers – “I shouldn’t mention it but it tickles me, your mother says this new stuff she’s taking, whatever you call it, makes her feel, how shall I say?” – he glances around again, then confides to his son – “lovey-dovey. Here she is, just turned sixty-five, lying in bed half the day, and gets these impulses so bad she says she can hardly stand it, she says she won’t watch television, the commercials make it worse. She says she has to laugh at herself. Now isn’t that a helluva thing? A good woman like that. I’m sorry to talk your ear off, I live alone with it too much, I suppose, what with Mim on the other side of the country. Christ knows it isn’t as if you don’t have your problems too.”

  “I don’t have any problems,” Rabbit tells him. “Right now I’m just holding my breath to when the kid gets back into school. His state of mind’s pretty well stabilized, I’d say. One of the reasons, you know, I don’t make it over to Mt. Judge as often as I should, Mom was pretty rough on Nelson when he was little and the kid is still scared of her. On the other hand I don’t like to leave him alone in the house, with all these robberies and assaults all over the county, they come out into the suburbs and steal anything they can get their hands on. I was just setting an item, some woman over in Perley Township, they stole her vacuum cleaner and a hundred feet of garden hose while she was upstairs going to the bathroom.”

  “It’s these God, damn, blacks, is what it is.” Earl Angstrom lowers his voice so it turns husky, though Buchanan and Farnsworth always take their coffee break outside in the alley, with Boonie and the other drinkers. “I’ve always called ’em black and they call themselves blacks now and that suits me fine. They can’t do a white man’s job, except for a few, and take even Buck, he’s never made head of makeup though he’s been here the longest; so they have to rob and kill, the ones that can’t be pimps and prizefighters. They can’t cut the mustard and never could. This country should have taken whosever advice it was, George Washington if memory serves, one of the founding fathers, and shipped ’em all back to Africa when we had a chance. Now, Africa wouldn’t take ’em. Booze and Cadillacs and white pussy, if you’ll pardon my saying so, have spoiled ’em rotten. They’re the garbage of the world, Harry. American Negroes are the lowest of the low. They steal and then they have the nerve to say the country owes it to ’em.”

  “O.K., O.K.” To see his father passionate about anything disagrees with Rabbit. He shifts to the most sobering subject they have between them: “Does she mention me much? Mom.”

  The old man licks spittle from his lips, sighs, slumps confidingly lower, glancing down at the cooled scummed coffee in his hands. “All the time, Harry, every minute of the day. They tell her things about you and she raves against the Springers; oh, how she carries on about that family, especially the women of it. Apparently, the Mrs. is saying you’ve taken up with a hippie teenager, that’s what drove Janice out of the house in the first place.”

  “No, Janice went first. I keep inviting her back.”

  “Well, whatever the actualities of the case are, I know you’re trying to do the right thing. I’m no moralist, Harry, I know you young people nowadays have more tensions and psychological pressures than a man my age could tolerate. If I’d of had the atomic bomb and these rich-kid revolutionaries to worry about, I’d no doubt just have put a shotgun to my head and let the world roll on without me.”

  “I’ll try to get over. I ought to talk to her,” Rabbit says. He looks past his father’s shoulder to where the yellow-faced wall clock jumps to within a minute of 11:10, the end of the coffee break. He knows that in all this rolling-on world his mother is the only person who knows him. He remembers from the night we touched the moon the nudge delivered out of her dying, but doesn’t want to open himself to her until he understands what is happening inside him enough to protect it. She has something happening to her, death and L-dopa, and he has something happening to him, Jill. The girl has been living with them three weeks and is learning to keep house and to give him a wry silent look saying I know you when he offers to argue about Communism or kids today or any of the other sore spots where he feels rot beginning and black madness creeping in. A little wry green look that began the night he hurt her upwards and touched her womb.

  His father is more with him than he suspects, for the old man draws still closer and says, “One thing it’s been on my mind to say, Harry, forgive me talking out of turn, but I hope you’re taking all the precautions, knock up one of these minors, the law takes a very dim view. Also, they say they’re dirty as weasels and giving everybody the clap.” Absurdly, as the clock ticks the last minute and the end-of-break bell rasps, the old man claps.

/>   In his clean crisp after-work shirt he opens the front door of the apple-green house and hears guitar music from above. Guitar chords slowly plucked, and two high small voices moving through a melody. He is drawn upstairs. In Nelson’s room, the two are sitting on the bed, Jill up by the pillows in a yoga position that displays the crotch of her black lace underpants. A guitar is cradled across her thighs. Rabbit has never seen the guitar before; it looks new. The pale wood shines like a woman oiled after a bath. Nelson sits beside Jill in Jockey shorts and T-shirt, craning his neck to read from the sheet of music on the bedspread by her ankles. The boy’s legs, dangling to the floor, look suddenly sinewy, long, beginning to be shaded with Janice’s dark hair, and Rabbit notices that the old posters of Brooks Robinson and Orlando Cepeda and Steve McQueen on a motorcycle have been removed from the boy’s walls. Paint has flaked where the Scotch tape was. They are singing, “. . . must a man wa-alk down”; the delicate thread breaks when he enters, though they must have heard his footsteps on the stairs as warning. The kid’s being in his underclothes is O.K.: far from dirty as a weasel, Jill has gotten Nelson to take a shower once a day, before his father’s homecoming, perhaps because her own father came home to Stonington only on Fridays and deserved a ceremony.

  “Hey, Dad,” Nelson says, “this is neat. We’re singing harmony.”

  “Where did you get the guitar?”

  “We hustled.”

  Jill nudges the boy with a bare foot, but not quick enough to halt the remark.

  Rabbit asks him, “How do you hustle?”

  “We stood on streetcorners in Brewer, mostly at Weiser and Seventh, but then we moved over to Cameron when a pig car slowed down to look us over. It was a gas, Dad. Jill would stop these people and tell ’em I was her brother, our mother was dying of cancer and our father had lit out, and we had a baby brother at home. Sometimes she said a baby sister. Some of the people said we should apply to welfare, but enough gave us a dollar or so so finally we had the twenty dollars Ollie promised was all he’d charge us for a forty-four dollar guitar. And he threw in the music free after Jill talked to him in the back room.”

  “Wasn’t that nice of Ollie?”

  “Harry, it really was. Don’t look like that.”

  He says to Nelson, “I wonder what they talked about.”

  “Dad, there was nothing dishonest about it, these people we stopped felt better afterwards, for having got us off their conscience. Anyway, Dad, in a society where power was all to the people money wouldn’t exist anyway, you’d just be given what you need.”

  “Well hell, that’s the way your life is now.”

  “Yeah, but I have to beg for everything, don’t I? And I never did get a mini-bike.”

  “Nelson, you get some clothes on and stay in your room. I want to talk to Jill a second.”

  “If you hurt her, I’ll kill you.”

  “If you don’t shut up, I’ll make you live with Mommy and Charlie Stavros.”

  In their bedroom, Rabbit carefully closes the door and in a soft shaking voice tells Jill, “You’re turning my kid into a beggar and a whore just like yourself,” and, after waiting a second for her to enter a rebuttal, slaps her thin disdainful face with its prim lips and its green eyes drenched so dark in defiance their shade is as of tree leaves, a shuffling concealing multitude, a microscopic forest he wants to bomb. His slap feels like slapping plastic: stings his fingers, does no good. He slaps her again, gathers the dry flesh of her hair into his hand to hold her face steady, feels cold fury when she buckles and tries to slither away but, after a fist to the side of her neck, lets her drop onto the bed.

  Still shielding her face, Jill hisses up at him, strangely hisses out of her little spaced inturned teeth, until her first words come. They are calm and superior. “You know why you did that, you just wanted to hurt me, that’s why. You just wanted to have that kick. You don’t give a shit about me and Nelson hustling. What do you care about who begs and who doesn’t, who steals and who doesn’t?”

  A blankness in him answers when she asks; but she goes on. “What have the pig laws ever done for you except screw you into a greasy job and turn you into such a gutless creep you can’t even keep your idiotic wife?”

  He takes her wrist. It is fragile. Chalk. He wants to break it, to feel it snap; he wants to hold her absolutely quiet in his arms for the months while it will heal. “Listen. I earn my money one fucking dollar at a time and you’re living on it and if you want to go back bumming off your nigger friends, go. Get out. Leave me and my kid alone.”

  “You creep,” she says, “you baby-killing creep.”

  “Put another record on,” he says. “You sick bitch. You rich kids playing at life make me sick, throwing rocks at the poor dumb cops protecting your daddy’s loot. You’re just playing, baby. You think you’re playing a great game of happy cunt but let me tell you something. My poor dumb mutt of a wife throws a better piece of ass backwards than you can manage frontwards.”

  “Backwards is right, she can’t stand facing you.”

  He squeezes her chalk wrist tighter, telling her, “You have no juice, baby. You’re all sucked out and you’re just eighteen. You’ve tried everything and you’re not scared of nothing and you wonder why it’s all so dead. You’ve had it handed to you, sweet baby, that’s why it’s so dead. Fucking Christ you think you’re going to make the world over you don’t have a fucking clue what makes people run. Fear. That’s what makes us poor bastards run. You don’t know what fear is, do you, poor baby? That’s why you’re so dead.” He squeezes her wrist until he can picture the linked curved bones in it bending ghostly as in an X ray; and her eyes widen a fraction, a hairspace of alarm he can see only because he is putting it there.

  She tugs her wrist free and rubs it, not lowering her eyes from his. “People’ve run on fear long enough,” Jill says. “Let’s try love for a change.”

  “Then you better find yourself another universe. The moon is cold, baby. Cold and ugly. If you don’t want it, the Commies do. They’re not so fucking proud.”

  “What’s that noise?”

  It is Nelson crying, outside the door, afraid to come in. It had been the same way with him and Janice, their fights: just when they were getting something out of them, the kid would beg them to stop. Maybe he imagined that Becky had been killed in just such a quarrel, that this one would kill him. Rabbit lets him in and explains, “We were talking politics.”

  Nelson squeezes out in the spaces between his sobs. “Daddy, why do you disagree with everybody?”

  “Because I love my country and can’t stand to have it knocked.”

  “If you loved it you’d want it better,” Jill says.

  “If it was better I’d have to be better,” he says seriously, and they all laugh, he last.

  Thus, through lame laughter – she still rubs her wrists, the hand he hit her with begins to hurt – they seek to reconstitute their family. For supper Jill cooks a filet of sole, lemony, light, simmered in sunshine, skin flaky brown; Nelson gets a hamburger with wheat-germ sprinkled on it to remind him of a Nutburger. Wheatgerm, zucchini, water chestnuts, celery salt, Familia: these are some of the exotic items Jill’s shopping brings into the house. Her cooking tastes to him of things he never had: candlelight, saltwater, health fads, wealth, class. Jill’s family had a servant, and it takes her some nights to understand that dirtied dishes do not clear and clean themselves by magic, but have to be carried and washed. Rabbit, still, Saturday mornings, is the one to vacuum the rooms, to bundle his shirts and the sheets for the laundry, to sort out Nelson’s socks and underwear for the washer in the basement. He can see, what these children cannot, dust accumulate, deterioration advance, chaos seep in, time conquer. But for her cooking he is willing to be her servant, part-time. Her cooking has renewed his taste for life. They have wine now with supper, a California white in a half-gallon jug. And always a salad: salad in Diamond County cuisine tends to be a brother of sauerkraut, fat with creamy dressing, but Ji
ll’s hands serve lettuce in an oily film invisible as health. Where Janice would for dessert offer some doughy goodie from the Half-A-Loaf, Jill concocts designs of fruit. And her coffee is black nectar compared to the watery tar Janice used to serve. Contentment makes Harry motionless; he watches the dishes be skimmed from the table, and resettles expansively in the living room. When the dishwashing machine is fed and chugging contentedly, Jill comes into the living room, sits on the tacky carpet, and plays the guitar. What does she play? “Farewell, Angelina, the sky is on fire,” and a few others she can get through a stanza of. She has maybe six chords. Her fingers on the frets often tighten on strands of her hanging hair; it must hurt. Her voice is a thin instrument that quickly cracks. “All my tri-als, Lord, soon be o-over,” she sings, quitting, looking up for applause.

  Nelson applauds. Small hands.

  “Great,” Rabbit tells her and, mellow on wine, goes on, in apology for his life, “No kidding, I once took that inner light trip and all I did was bruise my surroundings. Revolution, or whatever, is just a way of saying a mess is fun. Well, it is fun, for a while, as long as somebody else has laid in the supplies. A mess is a luxury, is all I mean.”

  Jill has been strumming for him, between sentences, part helping him along, part poking fun. He turns on her. “Now you tell us something. You tell us the story of your life.”

  “I’ve had no life,” she says, and strums. “No man’s daughter, and no man’s wife.”

  “Tell us a story,” Nelson begs. From the way she laughs, showing her roundish teeth and letting her thin cheeks go dimply, they see she will comply.

  “This is the story of Jill and her lover who was ill,” she announces, and releases a chord. It’s as if, Rabbit thinks, studying the woman-shape of the guitar, the notes are in there already, waiting to fly from the dovecote of that round hole. “Now Jill,” Jill goes on, “was a comely lass, raised in the bosom of the middle class. Her dad and mother each owned a car, and on the hood of one was a Mercedes star. I don’t know how much longer I can go on rhyming.” She strums quizzically.