Rabbit Redux

by John Updike

  “Yeah. I guess we did a number on him.” The “we” – him, her, Mim, Mom; ties of blood, of time and guilt, family ties. He does not ask her for more description. He has never understood exactly about women, why they have to menstruate for instance, or why they feel hot some times and not others, and how close the tip of your prick comes to their womb or whether the womb is a hollow place without a baby in it or what, and instinct disposes him to consign Stavros to that same large area of feminine mystery. He doesn’t want to bring back any lovelight into her eyes, that are nice and quick and hard on him, the prey.

  Perhaps she had prepared to tell him more, how great her love was and how pure it will remain, for she frowns as if checked by his silence. She says, “You must help me with Nelson. All he’ll talk to me about is this terrible mini-bike your sister bought him.”

  He gestures at the burned green shell. “My clothes weren’t the only thing went up in that.”

  “The girl. Were she and Nelson close?”

  “She was sort of a sister. He keeps losing sisters.”

  “Poor baby boy.”

  Janice turns and they look together at where they lived. Some agency, the bank or the police or the insurance company, has put up a loose fence of posts and wire around it, but children have freely approached, picking the insides clean, smashing the windows, storm windows and all, in the half that still stands. Some person has taken the trouble to bring a spray can of yellow paint and has hugely written NIGGER on the side. Also the word KILL. The two words don’t go together, so it is hard to tell which side the spray can had been on. Maybe there had been two spray cans. Demanding equal time. On the broad stretch of aluminum clapboards below the windows, where in spring daffodils come up and in summer phlox goes wild, yellow letters spell in half-script, Pig Power = Clean Power. Also there is a peace sign and a swastika, apparently from the same can. And other people, borrowing charred sticks from the rubble, have come along and tried to edit and add to these slogans and symbols, making Pig into Black and Clean into Cong. It all adds up no better than the cluster of commercials TV stations squeeze into the chinks between programs. A clown with a red spray can has scrawled between two windows TRICK OR TREAT.

  Janice asks, “Where was she sleeping?”

  “Upstairs. Where we did.”

  “Did you love her?” For this her eyes leave his face and contemplate the trampled lawn. He remembers that this camel coat has a detachable hood for winter, that snaps on.

  He confesses to her, “Not like I should have. She was sort of out of my class.” Saying this makes him feel guilty, he imagines how hurt Jill would be hearing it, so to right himself he accuses Janice: “If you’d stayed in there, she’d still be alive somewhere.”

  Her eyes lift quickly. “No you don’t. Don’t try to pin that rap on me, Harry Angstrom. Whatever happened in there was your trip.” Her trip drowns babies; his burns girls. They were made for each other. She offers to bring the truth into neutral. “Peggy says the Negro was doping her, that’s what Billy says Nelson told him.”

  “She wanted it, he said. The Negro.”

  “Strange he got away.”

  “Underground Railroad.”

  “Did you help him? Did you see him after the fire?”

  “Slightly. Who says I did?”

  “Nelson.”

  “How did he know?”

  “He guessed.”

  “I drove him south into the county and let him off in a cornfield.”

  “I hope he’s not ever going to come back. I’d call the police, I mean, I would if –” Janice lets the thought die, premature.

  Rabbit feels heightened and frozen by this giant need for tact; he and she seem to be slowly revolving, afraid of jarring one another away. “He promised he won’t.” Only in glory.

  Relieved, Janice gestures toward the half-burned house. “It’s worth a lot of money,” she says. “The insurance company wants to settle for eleven thousand. Some man talked to Daddy and offered nineteen-five as is. I guess the lot is worth eight or nine by itself, this is becoming such a fashionable area.”

  “I thought Brewer was dying.”

  “Only in the middle.”

  “I tell you what. Let’s sell the bastard.”

  “Let’s.”

  They shake hands. He twirls the car keys in front of her face. “Lemme drive you back to your parents’.”

  “Do we have to go there?”

  “You could come to my place and visit Mom. She’d love to see you. She can hardly talk now.”

  “Let’s save that,” Janice says. “Couldn’t we just drive around?”

  “Drive around? I’m not sure I still know how to drive.”

  “Peggy says you drove her Chrysler.”

  “Gee. A person doesn’t have many secrets in this county.”

  As they drive east on Weiser toward the city, she asks, “Can your mother manage the afternoon alone?”

  “Sure. She’s managed a lot of them.”

  “I’m beginning to like your mother, she’s quite nice to me, over the phone, when I can understand what she’s saying.”

  “She’s mellowing. Dying I guess does that to you.” They cross the bridge and drive up Weiser in the heart of Brewer, past the Wallpaper Boutique, the roasted peanut newsstand, the expanded funeral home, the great stores with the facades where the pale shadow of the neon sign for the last owner underlies the hopeful bright sign the new owners have put up, the new trash disposal cans with tops like flying saucers, the blank marquees of the deserted movie palaces. They pass Pine Street and the Phoenix Bar. He announces, “I ought to be out scouting printshops for a job, maybe move to another city. Baltimore might be a good idea.”

  Janice says, “You look better since you stopped work. Your color is better. Wouldn’t you be happier in an outdoor job?”

  “They don’t pay. Only morons work outdoors anymore.”

  “I would keep working at Daddy’s. I think I should.”

  “What does that have to do with me? You’re going to get an apartment, remember?”

  She doesn’t answer again. Weiser is climbing too close to the mountain, to Mt. Judge and their old homes. He turns left on Summer Street. Brick three-stories with fanlights; optometrists’ and chiropractors’ signs. A limestone church with a round window. He announces, “We could buy a farm.”

  She makes the connection. “Because Ruth did.”

  “That’s right, I’d forgotten,” he lies, “this was her street.” Once he ran along this street toward the end and never got there. He ran out of steam after a few blocks and turned around. “Remember Reverend Eccles?” he asks Janice. “I saw him this summer. The Sixties did a number on him, too.”

  Janice says, “And speaking of Ruth, how did you enjoy Peggy?”

  “Yeah, how about that? She’s gotten to be quite a girl about town.”

  “But you didn’t go back.”

  “Couldn’t stomach it, frankly. It wasn’t her, she was great. But all this fucking, everybody fucking, I don’t know, it just makes me too sad. It’s what makes everything so hard to run.”

  “You don’t think it’s what makes things run? Human things.”

  “There must be something else.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “No? Nothing else?”

  Instead of answering, she says, “Ollie is back with her now, but she doesn’t seem especially happy.”

  It is easy in a car; the STOP signs and corner groceries flicker by, brick and sandstone merge into a running screen. At the end of Summer Street he thinks there will be a brook, and then a dirt road and open pastures; but instead the city street broadens into a highway lined with hamburger diners, and drive-in sub shops, and a miniature golf course with big plaster dinosaurs, and food-stamp stores and motels and gas stations that are changing their names, Humble to Getty, Atlantic to Arco. He has been here before.

  Janice says, “Want to stop?”

  “I ate lunch. Didn’t you?”

/>   “Stop at a motel,” she says.

  “You and me?”

  “You don’t have to do anything, it’s just we’re wasting gas this way.”

  “Cheaper to waste gas than pay a motel, for Chrissake. Anyway don’t they like you to have luggage?”

  “They don’t care. Anyway I think I did put a suitcase in the back, just in case.”

  He turns and looks and there it is, the tatty old brown one still with the hotel label on from the time they went to the Shore, Wildwood Cabins. The same suitcase she must have packed to run to Stavros with. “Say,” he says. “You’re full of sexy tricks now, aren’t you?”

  “Forget it, Harry. Take me home. I’d forgotten about you.”

  “These guys who run motels, don’t they think it’s fishy if you check in before suppertime? What time is it, two-thirty.”

  “Fishy? What’s fishy, Harry? God, you’re a prude. Everybody knows people screw. It’s how we all got here. When’re you going to grow up, even a little bit?”

  “Still, to march right in with the sun pounding down –”

  “Tell him I’m your wife. Tell him we’re exhausted. It’s the truth, actually. I didn’t sleep two hours last night.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather go to my parents’ place? Nelson’ll be home in an hour.”

  “Exactly. Who matters more to you, me or Nelson?”

  “Nelson.”

  “Nelson or your mother?”

  “My mother.”

  “You are a sick man.”

  “There’s a place. Like it?”

  Safe Haven Motel the sign says, with slats strung below it claiming

  QUEEN SIZE BEDS

  ALL COLOR TVS

  SHOWER & BATH

  TELEPHONES

  “MAGIC FINGERS”

  A neon VACANCY sign buzzes dull red. The office is a little brick tollbooth; there is a drained swimming pool with a green tarpaulin over it. At the long brick façade bleakly broken by doorways several cars already park; they seem to be feeding, metal cattle at a trough. Janice says, “It looks crummy.”

  “That’s what I like about it,” Rabbit says. “They might take us.”

  But as he says this, they have driven past. Janice asks, “Seriously, haven’t you ever done this before?”

  He tells her, “I guess I’ve led a kind of sheltered life.”

  “Well, it’s by now,” she says, of the motel.

  “I could turn around.”

  “Then it’d be on the wrong side of the highway.”

  “Scared?”

  “Of what?”

  “Me.” Racily Rabbit swings into a Garden Supplies parking lot, spewing gravel, brakes just enough to avoid a collision with oncoming traffic, crosses the doubled line, and heads back the way they came. Janice says, “If you want to kill yourself, go ahead, but don’t kill me; I’m just getting to like being alive.”

  “It’s too late,” he tells her. “You’ll be a grandmother in a couple more years.”

  “Not with you at the wheel.”

  But they cross the double line again and pull in safely. The VACANCY sign still buzzes. Ignition off. Lever at P. The sun shimmers on the halted asphalt. “You can’t just sit here,” Janice hisses. He gets out of the car. Air. Globes of ether, pure nervousness, slide down his legs. There is a man in the little tollbooth, along with a candy bar machine and a rack of black-tagged keys. He has wet-combed silver hair, a string tie with a horseshoe clasp, and a cold. Placing the registration card in front of Harry, he pats his chafed nostrils with a blue bandana. “Name and address and license plate number,” he says. He speaks with a Western twang.

  “My wife and I are really bushed,” Rabbit volunteers. His ears are burning; the blush spreads downward, his undershirt feels damp, his heart jars his hand as it tries to write, Mr. and Mrs. Harold Angstrom. Address? Of course, he must lie. He writes unsteadily, 26 Vista Crescent, Penn Villas, Pa. Junk mail and bills are being forwarded to him from that address. Wonderful service, the postal. Put yourself in one of those boxes, sorted from sack to sack, finally there you go, plop, through the right slot out of millions. A miracle that it works. Young punk revolutionaries, let them try to get the mail through, through rain and sleet and dark of night. The man with the string tie patiently leans on his Formica desk while Rabbit’s thoughts race and his hand jerks. “License plate number, that’s the one that counts,” he peaceably drawls. “Show me a suitcase or pay in advance.”

  “No kidding, she is my wife.”

  “Must be on honeymoon straight from haah school.”

  “Oh, this.” Rabbit looks down at his peppermint-and-cream Mt. Judge athletic jacket, and fights the creeping return of his blush. “I haven’t worn this for I don’t know how many years.”

  “Looks to almost fit,” the man says, tapping the blank space for the plate number. “Ah’m in no hurry if you’re not,” he says.

  Harry goes to the show window of the little house and studies the license plate and signals for Janice to show the suitcase. He lifts an imaginary suitcase up and down by the handle and she doesn’t understand. Janice sits in their Falcon, mottled and dimmed by window reflections. He pantomimes unpacking; he draws a rectangle in the air; he exclaims, “God, she’s dumb!” and she belatedly understands, reaching back and lifting the bag into view through the layers of glass between them. The man nods; Harry writes his plate number (U20–692) on the card and is given a numbered key (17). “Toward the back,” the man says, “more quaat away from the road.”

  “I don’t care if it’s quiet, we’re just going to sleep,” Rabbit says; key in hand, he bursts into friendliness. “Where’re you from, Texas? I was stationed there with the Army once, Fort Larson, near Lubbock.”

  The man inserts the card into a rack, looking through the lower half of his bifocals, and clucks his tongue. “You ever get up around Santa Fe?”

  “Nope. Never. Sorry I didn’t.”

  “That’s my idea of a goood place,” the man tells him.

  “I’d like to go someday. I really would. Probably never will, though.”

  “Don’t say that, young buck like you, and your cute little lady.”

  “I’m not so young.”

  “You’re yungg,” the man absentmindedly insists, and this is so nice of him, this and handing over the key, people are so nice generally, that Janice asks Harry as he gets back into the car what he’s grinning about. “And what took so long?”

  “We were talking about Santa Fe. He advised us to go.”

  The door numbered 17 gives on a room surprisingly long, narrow but long. The carpet is purple, and bits of backlit cardboard here and there undercut the sense of substance, as in a movie lobby. A fantasy world. The bathroom is at the far end, the walls are of cement-block painted rose, imitation oils of the ocean are trying to adorn them, two queen-sized beds look across the narrow room at a television set. Rabbit takes off his shoes and turns on the set and gets on one bed. A band of light appears, expands, jogs itself out of diagonal twitching stripes into The Dating Game. A colored girl from Philly is trying to decide which of three men to take her out on a date; one man is black, another is white, the third is yellow. The color is such that the Chinese man is orange and the colored girl looks bluish. The reception has a ghost so that when she laughs there are many, many teeth. Janice turns it off. Like him she is in stocking feet. They are burglars. He protests, “Hey. That was interesting. She couldn’t see them behind that screen so she’d have to tell from their voices what color they were. If she cared.”

  “You have your date,” Janice tells him.

  “We ought to get a color television, the pro football is a lot better.”

  “Who’s this we?”

  “Oh – me and Pop and Nelson and Mom. And Mim.”

  “Why don’t you move over on that bed?”

  “You have your bed. Over there.”

  She stands there, firm-footed on the wall-to-wall carpet without stockings, nice-ankled. Her dull wool skirt
is just short enough to show her knees. They have boxy edges. Nice. She asks, “What is this, a put-down?”

  “Who am I to put you down? The swingingest broad on Eisenhower Avenue.”

  “I’m not so sure I like you anymore.”

  “I didn’t know I had that much to lose.”

  “Come on. Shove over.”

  She throws the old camel loden coat over the plastic chair beneath the motel regulations and the fire inspector’s certificate. Being puzzled darkens her eyes on him. She pulls off her sweater and as she bends to undo her skirt the bones of her shoulders ripple in long quick glints like a stack of coins being spilled. She hesitates in her slip. “Are you going to get under the covers?”

  “We could,” Rabbit says, yet his body is as when a fever leaves and the nerves sink down like veins of water into sand. He cannot begin to execute the energetic transitions contemplated: taking off his clothes, walking that long way to the bathroom. He should probably wash in case she wants to go down on him. Then suppose he comes too soon and they are back where they’ve always been. Much safer to lie here enjoying the sight of her in her slip; he had been lucky to choose a little woman, they keep their shape better than big ones. She looked older than twenty at twenty but doesn’t look that much older now, at least angry as she is, black alive in her eyes. “You can get in but don’t expect anything, I’m still pretty screwed up.” Lately he has lost the ability to masturbate; nothing brings him up, not even the image of a Negress with nipples like dowel-ends and a Hallowe’en pumpkin instead of a head.

  “I’ll say,” Janice says. “Don’t expect anything from me either. I just don’t want to have to shout between the beds.”

  With heroic effort Rabbit pushes himself up and walks the length of the rug to the bathroom. Returning naked, he holds his clothes in front of him and ducks into the bed as if into a burrow, being chased. He feels particles of some sort bombarding him. Janice feels skinny, strange, snaky-cool, the way she shivers tight against him immediately; the shock on his skin makes him want to sneeze. She apologizes: “They don’t heat these places very well.”