Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

  He circles around into the alley of bluestone grit and puts the Corona into the garage beside the ‘74 navy-blue Chrysler Newport that Fred got the old lady for her birthday the year before he died and that she drives around town with both hands tight on the wheel, with the look on her face as if a bomb might go off under the hood. Janice always keeps her Mustang convertible parked out front by the curb, where the maple drippings can ruin the top faster. When the weather gets warm she leaves the top down for .nights at a time so the seats are always sticky. Rabbit swings down the overhead garage door and carries up the cement walk through the back yard like twin car headlights into a tunnel his strange consciousness of having not one child now but two.

  Janice greets him in the kitchen. Something’s up. She is wearing a crisp frock with pepperminty stripes but her hair is still scraggly and damp from an afternoon of swimming at the club pool. Nearly every day she has a tennis date with some of her girlfriends at the club they belong to, the Flying Eagle Tee and Racquet, a newish organization laid out on the lower slopes of Mt. Judge’s woodsy brother mountain with the Indian name, Mt. Pemaquid, and then kills the rest of the afternoon lying at poolside gossiping or playing cards and getting slowly spaced on Spritzers or vodkaand-tonics. Harry likes having a wife who can be at the club so much. Janice is thickening through the middle at the age of fortythree but her legs are still hard and neat. And brown. She was always dark-complected and with July not even here she has the tan of a savage, legs and arms almost black like some little Polynesian in an old Jon Hall movie. Her lower lip bears a trace of zinc oxide, which is sexy, even though he never loved that stubborn slothke set her mouth gets. Her still-wet hair pulled back reveals a high forehead somewhat mottled, like brown paper where water has been dropped and dried. He can tell by the kind of heat she is giving off that she and her mother have been fighting. “What’s up now?” he asks.

  “It’s been wild,” Janice says. “She’s in her room and says we should eat without her.”

  “Yeah well, she’ll be down. But what’s to eat? I don’t see anything cooking.” The digital clock built into the stove says 6:32.

  “Harry. Honest to God I was going to shop as soon as I came back and changed out of tennis things but then this postcard was here and Mother and I have been at it ever since. Anyway it’s summer, you don’t want to eat too much. Doris Kaufmann, I’d give anything to have her serve, she says she never has more than a glass of iced tea for lunch, even in the middle of winter. I thought maybe soup and those cold cuts I bought that you and Mother refuse to touch, they have to be eaten sometime. And the lettuce is coming on in the garden now so fast we must start having salads before it gets all leggy.” She had planted a little vegetable garden in the part of the back yard where Nelson’s swing set used to be, getting a man from down the block to turn the earth with his Rototiller, the earth miraculously soft and pungent beneath the crust of winter and Janice out there enthusiastic with her string and rake in the gauzy shadows of the budding trees; but now that summer is here and the leafed-out trees keep the garden in the shade and the games at the club have begun she has let the plot go to weeds.

  Still, he cannot dislike this brown-eyed woman who has been his indifferent wife for twenty-three years this past March. He is rich because of her inheritance and this mutual knowledge rests adhesively between them like a form of sex, comfortable and sly. “Salad and baloney, my favorite meal,” he says, resigned. “Lemme have a drink first. Some window-shoppers came in to the lot today just as I was leaving. Tell me what postcard.”

  As he stands by the refrigerator making a gin-and-bitter-lemon, knowing these sugary mixers add to the calories in the alcohol and help to keep him overweight but figuring that this Saturday evening meal in its skimpiness will compensate and maybe he’ll jog a little afterwards, Janice goes in through the dark dining room into the musty front parlor where the shades are drawn and Ma Springer’s sulking spirit reigns, and brings back a postcard. It shows a white slope of snow under a stark blue wedge of sky; two small dark hunched figures are tracing linked S’s on the slanted snow, skiing. GREETINGS FROM COLORADO red cartoon letters say across the sky that looks like blue paint. On the opposite side a familiar scrawled hand, scrunched as if something in the boy had been squeezed too tight while his handwriting was coming to birth, spells out:

  Hi Mom & Dad & Grandmom:

  These mts. make Mt. Judge look sick! No snow tho, just plenty of grass (joke). Been learning to hang glide. Job didn’t work out, guy was a bum. Penna. beckons. OK if I bring Melanie home too? She could get job and be no troble. Love,

  Nelson

  “Melanie?” Harry asks.

  “That’s what Mother and I have been fighting about. She doesn’t want the girl staying here.”

  “Is this the same girl he went out there with two weeks ago?”

  “I was wondering,” Janice says. “She had a name more like Sue or Jo or something.”

  “Where would she sleep?”

  “Well, either in that front sewing room or Nelson’s room.”

  “With the kid?”

  “Well really, Harry, I wouldn’t be utterly surprised. He is twenty-two. When have you gotten so Puritanical?”

  “I’m not being Puritanical, just practical. It’s one thing to have these kids go off into the blue and go hang gliding or whatever else and another to have them bring all their dope and little tootsies back to the nest. This house is awkward upstairs, you know that. There’s too much hall space and you can’t sneeze or fart or fuck without everybody else hearing; it’s been bliss, frankly, with just us and Ma. Remember the kid’s radio all through high school to two in the morning, how he’d fall asleep to it? That bed of his is a little single, what are we supposed to do, buy him and Melody a double bed?”

  “Melanie. I don’t know, she can sleep on the floor. They all have sleeping bags. You can try putting her in the sewing room but I know she won’t stay there. We wouldn’t have.” Her blurred dark eyes gaze beyond him into time. “We spent all our energy sneaking down hallways and squirming around in the back seats of cars and I thought we could spare our children that.”

  “We have a child, not children,” he says coldly, as the gin expands his inner space. They had children once, but their infant daughter Becky died. It was his wife’s fault. The entire squeezed and cut-down shape of his life is her fault; at every turn she has been a wall to his freedom. “Listen,” he says to her, “I’ve been trying to get out of this fucking depressing house for years and I don’t want this shiftless arrogant goof-off we’ve raised coming back and pinning me in. These kids seem to think the world exists to serve them but I’m sick of just standing around waiting to be of service.”

  Janice stands up to him scarcely flinching, armored in her country-club tan. “He is our son, Harry, and we’re not going to turn away a guest of his because she is female in sex. If it was a boyfriend of Nelson’s you wouldn’t be at all this excited, it’s the fact that it’s a girlfriend of Nelson’s that’s upsetting you, a girlfriend of Nelson’s. If it was a girlfriend of yours, the upstairs wouldn’t be too crowded for you to fart in. This is my son and I want him here if he wants to be here.”

  “I don’t have any girlfriends,” he protests. It sounds pitiful. Is Janice saying he should have? Women, once sex gets out in the open, they become monsters. You’re a creep ifyou fuck them and a creep if you don’t. Harry strides into the dining room, making the glass panes of the antique breakfront shudder, and calls up the dark stained stairs that are opposite the breakfront, “Hey Bessie, come on down! I’m on your side!”

  There is a silence as from God above and then the creak of a bed being relieved of a weight, and reluctant footsteps slither across the ceiling toward the head of the stairs. Mrs. Springer on her painful dropsical legs comes down talking: “This house is legally mine and that girl is not spending one night under a roof Janice’s father slaved all his days to keep over our heads.”

  The breakfront quivers
again; Janice has come into the dining room. She says in a voice tightened to match her mother’s, “Mother, you wouldn’t be keeping this enormous roof over your head if it weren’t for Harry and me sharing the upkeep. It’s a great sacrifice on Harry’s part, a man of his income not having a house he can call his own, and you have no right to forbid Nelson to come home when he wants to, no right, Mother.”

  The plump old lady groans her way down to the landing three steps shy of the dining-room floor and hesitates there saying, in a voice tears have stained, “Nellie I’m happy to see whenever he deems fit, I love that boy with all my soul even though he hasn’t turned out the way his grandfather and I had hoped.”

  Janice says, angrier in proportion as the old lady makes herself look pathetic, “You’re always bringing Daddy in when he can’t speak for himself but as long as he was alive he was very hospitable and tolerant of Nelson and his friends. I remember that cookout Nelson had in the back yard for his high-school graduation when Daddy had had his first stroke already, I went upstairs to see if it was getting too rowdy for him and he said with his wry little smile” -tears now stain her own voice too - ” `The sound of young voices does my old heart good.”’

  That slippery-quick salesman’s smile of his, Rabbit can see it still. Like a switchblade without the click.

  “A cookout in the back yard is one thing,” Mrs. Springer says, thumping herself in her dirty aqua sneakers down the last three steps of the stairs and looking her daughter level in the eye. “A slut in the boy’s bed is another.”

  Harry thinks this is pretty jazzy for an old lady and laughs aloud. Janice and her mother are both short women; like two doll’s heads mounted on the same set of levers they turn identically chocolateeyed, slot-mouthed faces to glare at his laugh. “We don’t know the girl is a slut,” Harry apologizes. “All we know is her name is Melanie instead of Sue.”

  “You said you were on my side,” Mrs. Springer says.

  “I am, Ma, I am. I don’t see why the kid has to come storming home; we gave him enough money to get him started out there, I’d- like to see him get some kind of grip on the world. He’s not going to get it hanging around here all summer.”

  “Oh, money,” Janice says. “That’s all you ever think about. And what have you ever done except hang around here? Your father got you one job and my father got you another, I don’t call that any great adventure.”

  “That’s not all I think about,” he begins lamely, of money, before his mother-in-law interrupts.

  “Harry doesn’t want a home of his own,” Ma Springer tells her daughter. When she gets excited and fearful of not making herself understood her face puffs up and goes mottled. “He has such disagreeable associations from the last time you two went out on your own.”

  Janice is firm, younger, in control. “Mother, you know nothing about it. You know nothing about life period. You sit in this house and watch idiotic game shows and talk on the phone to what friends you have that are still alive and then sit in judgment on Harry and me. You know nothing of life now. You have no idea.”

  “As if playing games at a country club with the nickel rich and coming home tiddled every night is enough to make you wise,” the old lady comes back, holding on with one hand to the knob of the newel post as if to ease the pain in her ankles. “You come home,” she goes on, “too silly to make your husband a decent supper and then want to bring this tramp into a house where I do all the housekeeping, even if I can scarcely stand to stand. I’m the one that would be here with them, you’d be off in that convertible. What will the neighbors make of it? What about the people in the church?”

  “I don’t care even if they care, which I dare say they won’t,” Janice says. “And to bring the church into it is ridiculous. The last minister at St. John’s ran off with Mrs. Eckenroth and this one now is so gay I wouldn’t let my boy go to his Sunday school, if I had a boy that age.”

  “Nellie didn’t go that much anyway,” Harry recalls. “He said it gave him headaches.” He wants to lower the heat between the two women before it boils over into grief. He sees he must break this up, get a house of his own, before he runs out of gas. Stone outside, exposed beams inside, and a sunken living room: that is his dream.

  “Melanie,” his mother-in-law is saying, “what kind of name is that? It sounds colored.”

  “Oh Mother, don’t drag out all your prejudices. You sit and giggle at the Jeffersons as if you’re one of them and Harry and Charlie unload all their old gas-hogs on the blacks and if we take their money we can take what else they have to offer too.”

  Can Melanie actually be black? Harry is asking himself, thrilled. Little cocoa babies. Skeeter would be so pleased.

  “Anyway,” Janice is going on, looking frazzled suddenly, “nobody’s said the girl is black, all we know is she hang glides.”

  “Or is that the other one?” Harry asks.

  “If she comes, I go,” Bessie Springer says. “Grace Stuhl has all those empty rooms now that Ralph’s passed on and she’s more than once said we should team up.”

  “Mother, I find that humiliating, that you’ve been begging Grace Stuhl to take you in.”

  “I haven’t been begging, the thought just naturally occurred to the both of us. I’d expect to be bought out here, though, and the values in the neighborhood have been going way up since they banned the through truck traffic.”

  “Mother. Harry hates this house.”

  He says, still hoping to calm these waters, “I don’t hate it, exactly; I just think the space upstairs -“

  “Harry,” Janice says. “Why don’t you go out and pick some lettuce from the garden like we said? Then we’ll eat.”

  Gladly. He is glad to escape the house, the pinch of the women, their heat. Crazy the way they flog at each other with these ghosts of men, Daddy dead, Nelson gone, and even Harry himself a kind of ghost in the way they talk of him as if he wasn’t standing right there. Day after day, mother and daughter sharing that same house, it’s not natural. Like water blood must run or grow a scum. Old lady Springer always plump with that sausage look to her wrists and ankles but now her face puffy as well like those movie stars whose cheeks they stuff cotton up into to show them getting older. Her face not just plumper but wider as if a screw turning inside is spreading the sides of her skull apart, her eyes getting smaller, Janice heading the same way though she tries to keep trim, there’s no stopping heredity. Rabbit notices now his own father talking in his own brain sometimes when he gets tired.

  Bitter lemon fading in his mouth, an aluminum colander pleasantly light in his hand, he goes down the brick back steps into grateful space. He feels the neighborhood filter through to him and the voices in his brain grow still. Dark green around him is damp with coming evening, though this long day’s lingering brightness surprises his eye above the shadowy masses of the trees. Rooftops and dormers notch the blue as it begins to blush brown; here also electric wires and television aerials mar with their scratches the soft beyond, a few swallows dipping as they do at day’s end in the middle range of air above the merged back yards, where little more than a wire fence or a line of hollyhocks marks the divisions of property. When he listens he can hear the sounds of cooking clatter or late play, alive in this common realm with a dog’s bark, a bird’s weep weep, the rhythmic far tapping of a hammer. A crew of butch women has moved in a few houses down and they’re always out in steel-toed boots and overalls with ladders and hammers fixing things, they can do it all, from rain gutters to cellar doors: terrific. He sometimes waves to them when he jogs by in twilight but they don’t have much to say to him, a creature of another species.

  Rabbit swings open the imperfect little gate he constructed two springs ago and enters the fenced rectangle of silent vegetable presences. The lettuce flourishes between a row of bean plants whose leaves are badly bug-eaten and whose stems collapse at a touch and a row of feathery carrot tops all but lost in an invasion of plantain and chickweed and purselane and a pulpy weed with
white-and-yellow flowers that grows inches every night. It is easy to pull, its roots let go docilely, but there are so many he wearies within minutes of pulling and shaking the moist earth free from the roots and laying bundles of the weed along the chicken-wire fence as mulch and as barrier to the invading grasses. Grass that won’t grow in the lawn where you plant it comes in here wild to multiply. Seed, so disgustingly much of it, Nature such a cruel smotherer. He thinks again of the dead he has known, the growingly many, and of the live child, if not his then some other father’s, who visited him today with her long white legs propped up on cork heels, and of the other child, undoubtedly his, the genes show even in that quick scared way he looks at you, who has threatened to return. Rabbit pinches off the bigger lettuce leaves (but not the ones at the base so big as to be tough and bitter) and looks into his heart for welcome, welcoming love for his son. He finds instead a rumple of apprehensiveness in form and texture like a towel tumbled too soon from the dryer. He finds a hundred memories, some vivid as photographs and meaningless, snapped by the mind for reasons of its own, and others mere facts, things he knows are true but has no snapshot for. Our lives fade behind us before we die. He changed the boy’s diapers in the sad apartment high on Wilbur Street, he lived with him for some wild months in an apple-green ranch house called 26 Vista Crescent in Penn Villas, and here at 89 Joseph he watched him become a high-school student with a wispy mustache that showed when he stood in the light, and a headband like an Indian’s instead of getting a haircut, and a fortune in rock records kept in the sunny room whose drawn shades are above Harry’s head now. He and Nelson have been through enough years together to turn a cedar post to rot and yet his son is less real to Harry than these crinkled leaves of lettuce he touches and plucks. Sad. Who says? The calm eyes of the girl who showed up at the lot today haunt the growing shadows, a mystery arrived at this time of his own numb life, death taking his measure with the invisible tapping of that neighborhood hammer: each day he is a little less afraid to die. He spots a Japanese beetle on a bean plant leaf and with a snap of his fingernail - big fingernails, with conspicuous cuticle moons - snaps the iridescent creature off: Die.