Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

  “I took this course in sociology at Kent. The reason you’re so tight with your money, you got the habit of poverty when you were a child, in the Depression. You were traumatized.”

  “We weren’t that bad off. Pop got decent money, printers were never laid off like some of the professions. Anyway who says I’m tight with my money?”

  “You owe Melanie three dollars already. I had to borrow from her.”

  “You mean those three pizzas cost thirteen dollars?”

  “We got a couple of sixpacks to go with them.”

  “You and Melanie can pay for your own beer. We never drink it around here. Too fattening.”

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “Upstairs. And another thing. Don’t leave your mother’s car out front with the top down. Even if it doesn’t rain, the maples drop something sticky on the seats.”

  “I thought we might go out again.”

  “You’re kidding. I thought you said you got only an hour’s sleep last night.”

  “Dad, lay off the crap. I’m going on twenty-three.”

  “Twenty-three, and no sense. Give me the keys. I’ll put the Mustang out back in the garage.”

  “Mo-om,” the boy shouts upwards. “Dad won’t let me drive your car!”

  Janice is coming down. She has put on her peppermint dress and looks tired. Harry tells her, “All I asked was for him to put it in the garage. The maple sap gets the seats sticky. He says he wants to go out again. Christ, it’s nearly ten o’clock.”

  “The maples are through dripping for the year,” Janice says. To Nelson she merely says, “If you don’t want to go out again maybe you should put the top up. We had a terrible thunderstorm two nights ago. It hailed, even.”

  “Why do you think,” Rabbit asks her, “your top is all black and spotty? The sap or whatever it is drips down on the canvas and can’t be cleaned off”

  “Harry, it’s not your car,” Janice tells him.

  “Piz-za,” Melanie calls from the kitchen, her tone bright and pearly. “Mangiamo, prego!”

  “Dad’s really into cars, isn’t he?” Nelson asks his mother. “Like they’re magical, now that he sells them.”

  Harry asks her, “How about Ma? She want to eat again?”

  “Mother says she feels sick.”

  “Oh great. One of her spells.”

  “Today was an exciting day for her.”

  “Today was an exciting day for me too. I was told I’m a tightwad and think cars are magical.” This is no way to be, spiteful. “Also, Nelson, I birdied the eighteenth, you know that long dogleg? A drive that just cleared the creek and kept bending right, and then I hit an easy five-iron and then wedged it up to about twelve feet and sank the damn putt! Still have your clubs? We ought to play.” He puts a paternal hand on the boy’s back.

  “I sold them to a guy at Kent.” Nelson takes an extra-fast step, to get out from under his father’s touch. “I think it’s the stupidest game ever invented.”

  “You must tell us about hang gliding,” his mother says.

  “It’s neat. It’s very quiet. You’re in the wind and don’t feel a thing. Some of the people get stoned beforehand but then there’s the danger you’ll think you can really fly.”

  Melanie has sweetly set out plates and transferred the pizzas from their boxes to cookie sheets. Janice asks, “Melanie, do you hang glide?”

  “Oh no,” says the girl. “I’d be terrified.” Her giggling does not somehow interrupt her lustrous, caramel-colored stare. “Pru used to do it with Nelson. I never would.”

  “Who’s Pru?” Harry asks.

  “You don’t know her,” Nelson tells him.

  “I know I don’t. I know I don’t know her. If I knew her I wouldn’t have to ask.”

  “I think we’re all cross and irritable,” Janice says, lifting a piece of pepperoni loose and laying it on a plate.

  Nelson assumes that plate is for him. “Tell Dad to quit leaning on me,” he complains, settling to the table as if he has tumbled from a motorcycle and is sore all over.

  In bed, Harry asks Janice, “What’s eating the kid, do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Something is.” - “Yes.”

  As they think this over they can hear Ma Springer’s television going, chewing away at Moses from the Biblical sound of the voices, shouting, rumbling, with crescendos of music between. The old lady falls asleep with it on and sometimes it crackles all night, if janice doesn’t tiptoe in and turn it off. Melanie had gone to bed in her room with the dressmaker’s dummy. Nelson came upstairs to watch The Jeffersons with his grandmother and by the time his parents came upstairs had gone to bed in his old room, without saying goodnight. Sore all over. Rabbit wonders if the young couple from the country will come into the lot tomorrow. The girl’s pale round face and the television screen floating unwatched in Ma Springer’s room become confused in his mind as the exalted music soars. Janice is asking, “How do you like the girl?”

  “Melanie baby. Spooky. Are they all that way, of that generation, like a rock just fell on their heads and it was the nicest experience in the world?”

  “I think she’s trying to ingratiate herself. It must be a difficult thing, to go into a boyfriend’s home and make a place for yourself. I wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes with your mother.”

  Little she knows, the poison Mom talked about her. “Mom was like me,” Harry says. “She didn’t like being crowded.” New people at either end of the house and old man Springer’s ghost sittirig downstairs on his Barcalounger. “They don’t act very lovey,” he says. “Or is that how people are now? Hands off.”

  “I think they don’t want to shock us. They know they must get around Mother.”

  “Join the crowd.”

  Janice ponders this. The bed creaks and heavy footsteps slither on the other side of the wall, and the excited cries of the television set are silenced with a click. Burt Lancaster just getting warmed up. Those teeth: can they be his own? All the stars have them crowned. Even Harry, he used to have a lot of trouble with his molars and now they’re snug, safe and painless, in little jackets of gold alloy costing four hundred fifty each.

  “She’s still up,” Janice says. “She won’t sleep. She’s stewing.” In the positive way she pronounces her s’s she sounds more and more like her mother. We carry our heredity concealed for a while and then it pushes through. Out of those narrow DNA coils.

  In a stir of wind as before a sudden rain the shadows of the copper-beech leaves surge and fling their ragged interstices of streetlight back and forth across the surfaces where the ceiling meets the far wall. Three cars pass, one after the other, and Harry’s sense of the active world outside sliding by as he lies here safe wells up within him to merge with the bed’s nebulous ease. He is in his bed, his molars are in their crowns. “She’s a pretty good old sport,” he says. “She rolls with the punches.”

  “She’s waiting and watching,” Janice says in an ominous voice that shows she is more awake than he. She asks, “When do I get my turn?”

  “Turn?” The bed is gently turning, Stavros is waiting for him by the great display window that brims with dusty morning light. You asked for it.

  “You came last night, from the state I was in this morning. Me and the sheet.”

  The wind stirs again. Damn. The convertible is still out there with the top down. “Honey, it’s been a long day.” Running out of gas. “Sorry.”

  “You’re forgiven,” Janice says. “Just.” She has to add, “I might think I don’t turn you on much anymore.”

  “No, actually, over at the club today I was thinking how much sassier you look than most of those broads, old Thelma in her little skirt and the awful girlfriend of Buddy’s.”

  “And Cindy?”

  “Not my type. Too pudgy.”

  “Liar.”

  You got it. He is dead tired yet something holds him from the black surface of sleep, and in that half-state just before or after he sink
s he imagines he hears lighter, younger footsteps slither outside in the hall, going somewhere in a hurry.

  Melanie is as good as her word, she gets a job waitressing at a new restaurant downtown right on Weiser Street, an old restaurant with a new name, The Crepe House. Before that it was the Café Barcelona, painted tiles and paella, iron grillwork and gazpacho; Harry ate lunch there once in a while but in the evening it had attracted the wrong element, hippies and Hispanic families from the south side instead of the white-collar types from West Brewer and the heights along Locust Boulevard, that you need to make a restaurant go in this city. Brewer never has been much for Latin touches, not since Carmen Miranda and all those Walt Disney Saludos Amigos movies. Rabbit remembers there used to be a Club Castanet over on Warren Avenue but the only thing Spanish had been the name and the frills on the waitresses’ uniforms, which had been orange. Before the Crepe House had been the Barcelona it had been for many years Johnny Frye’s Chophouse, good solid food day and night for the big old-fashioned German eaters, who have eaten themselves pretty well into the grave by now, taking with them tons of pork chops and sauerkraut and a river of Sunflower Beer. Under its newest name, Johnny Frye’s is a success; the lean new race of downtown office workers comes out of the banks and the federal offices and the deserted department stores and makes its way at noon through the woods the city planners have inflicted on Weiser Square and sits at the little tile tables left over from the Café Barcelona and dabbles at glorified pancakes wrapped around minced whatever. Even driving through after a movie at one of the malls you can see them in there by candlelight, two by two, bending toward each other over the crepes earnest as hell, on the make, the guys in leisure suits with flared open collars and the girls in slinky dresses that cling to their bodies as if by static electricity, and a dozen more just like them standing in the foyer waiting to be seated. It has to do with diet, Harry figures - people now want to feel they’re eating less, and a crepe sounds like hardly a snack whereas if they called it a pancake they would have scared everybody away but kids and two-ton Katrinkas. Harry marvels that this new tribe of customers exists, on the make, and with money. The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started. The Crepe House is such a hit they’ve bought the decrepit brick building next door and expanded into the storerooms, leaving the old cigar store, that still has a little gas pilot to light up by by the cash register, intact and doing business. To staff their new space the Crepe House needed more waitresses. Melanie works some days the lunch shift from ten to six and other days she goes from five to near one in the morning. One day Harry took Charlie over to lunch for him to see this new woman in the Angstrom life, but it didn’t work out very well: having Nelson’s father show up as a customer with a strange man put roses of embarrassment in Melanie’s cheeks as she served them in the midst of the lunchtime mob.

  “Not a bad looker,” Charlie said on that awkward occasion, gazing after the young woman as she flounced away. The Crepe House dresses its waitresses in a kind of purple colonial mini, with a big bow in back that switches as they walk.

  “You can see that?” Harry said. “I can’t. It bothers me, actually. That I’m not turned on. The kid’s been living with us two weeks now and I should be climbing the walls.”

  “A little old for wall-climbing, aren’t you, chief? Anyway there are some women that don’t do it for some men. That’s why they turn out so many models.”

  “As you say she has all the equipment. Big knockers, ifyou look.”

  “I looked.”

  “The funny thing is, she doesn’t seem to turn Nelson on either, that I can see. They’re buddies all right; when she’s home they spend hours in his room together playing his old records and talking about God knows what, sometimes they come out of there it looks like he’s been crying, but as far as Jan and I can tell she sleeps in the front room, where we put her as a sop to old lady Springer that first night, never thinking it would stick. Actually Bessie’s kind of taken with her by now, she helps with the housework more than Janice does for one thing; so at this point wherever Melanie sleeps I think she’d look the other way.”

  “They’ve got to be fucking,” Stavros insisted, setting his hands on the table in that defining, faintly menacing way he has: palms facing, thumbs up.

  “You’d think so,” Rabbit agreed. “But these kids now are spooky. These letters in long white envelopes keep arriving from Colorado and they spend a lot of time answering. The postmark’s Colorado but the return address printed on is some dean’s office at Kent. Maybe he’s flunked out.”

  Charlie scarcely listened. “Maybe I should give her a buzz, if Nelson’s not ringing her bell.”

  “Come on, Charlie. I didn’t say he’s not, I just don’t get that vibe around the house. I don’t think they do it in the back of the Mustang, the seats are vinyl and these kids today are too spoiled.” He sipped his Margarita and wiped the salt from his lips. The bartender here was left over from the Barcelona days, they must have a cellarful of tequila. “To tell you the truth I can’t imagine Nelson screwing anybody, he’s such a sourpussed little punk.”

  “Got his grandfather’s frame. Fred was sexy, don’t kid yourself. Couldn’t keep his hands off the clerical help, that’s why so many of them left. Where’d you say she’s from?”

  “California. Her father sounds like a bum, he lives in Oregon after being a lawyer. Her parents split a time ago.”

  “So she’s a long way from home. Probably needs a friend, along more mature lines.”

  “Well I’m right there across the hall from her.”

  “You’re family, champ. That doesn’t count. Also you don’t appreciate this chick and no doubt she twigs to that. Women do.”

  “Charlie, you’re old enough to be her father.”

  “Aah. These Mediterranean types, they like to see a little gray hair on the chest. The old mastoras.”

  “What about your lousy ticker?”

  Charlie smiled and put his spoon into the cold spinach soup that Melanie had brought. “Good a way to go as any.”

  “Charlie, you’re crazy,” Rabbit said admiringly, admiring yet once again in their long relationship what he fancies as the other man’s superior grip upon the basic elements of life, elements that Harry can never settle in his mind.

  “Being crazy’s what keeps us alive,” Charlie said, and sipped, closing his eyes behind his tinted glasses to taste the soup better. “Too much nutmeg. Maybe Janice’d like to have me over, it’s been a while. So I can feel things out.”

  “Listen, I can’t have you over so you can seduce my son’s girlfriend.”

  “You said she wasn’t a girlfriend.”

  “I said they didn’t act like it, but then what do I know?”

  “You have a pretty good nose. I trust you, champ.” He changed the subject slightly. “How come Nelson keeps showing up at the lot?”

  “I don’t know, with Melanie off at work he doesn’t have much to do, hanging around the house with Bessie, going over to the club with Janice swimming till his eyes get pink from the chlorine. He shopped around town a little for a job but no luck. I don’t think he tried too hard.”

  “Maybe we could fit him in at the lot.”

  “I don’t want that. Things are cozy enough around here for him already.”

  “He going back to college?”

  “I don’t know. I’m scared to ask.”

  Stavros put down his soup spoon carefully. “Scared to ask,” he repeated. “And you’re paying the bills. If my father had ever said to anybody he was scared of anything to do with me, I think the roof would have come off the house.”

  “Maybe scared isn’t the word.”

  “Scared is the word you used.” He looked up squinting in what seemed to be pain through his thick glasses to perceive Melanie more clearly as, in a flurry of purple colonial flounces, she set before Harry a Crépe con Zucchini and before Charlie a Crépe aux Champignons et Oignons. The sc
ent of their vegetable steam remained like a cloud of perfume she had released from the frills of her costume before flying away. “Nice,” Charlie said, not of the food. “Very nice.” Rabbit still couldn’t see it. He thought of her body without the frills and got nothing in the way of feeling except a certain fear, as if seeing a weapon unsheathed, or gazing upon an inflexible machine with which his soft body should not become involved.

  But he feels obliged one night to say to Janice, “We haven’t had Charlie over for a while.”

  She looks at him curiously. “You want to? Don’t you see enough of him at the lot?”

  “Yeah but you don’t see him there.”

  “Charlie and I had our time, of seeing each other.”