Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

  She is afraid he means Becky. But he really rarely thinks of their dead infant, and then pleasantly, as of a brief winter day’s sun on last night’s snowfall, though her name was June. “Oh, Pop and Mom mostly. Wondering if they’re watching. You do so much to get your parents’ attention for so much of your life, it seems weird to be going on without them. I mean, who cares now?”

  “A lot of people care,” Janice says, clumsily earnest.

  “You don’t know what it feels like,” he tells her. “You still have your mother.”

  “For just a little while yet,” Bessie says, playing an ace of clubs. Gathering in the trick with a deft rounding motion of her hand, she pronounces, “Your father now was a good worker, who never gave himself airs, but your mother I must confess I never could abide. A sharp tongue, in a plain body.”

  “Mother. Harry loved his mother.”

  Bessie snaps down the ace of hearts. “Well that’s right and proper I guess, at least they say it is, for a boy to like his mother. But I used to feel sorry for him when she was alive. She drove him to have an uncommon high opinion of himself and yet could give him nothing to grab a hold of, the way Fred and I could you.”

  She talks of Harry as if he too is dead. “I’m still here, you kriow,” he says, flipping on the lowest heart he has.

  Bessie’s mouth pinches in and her face slightly bloats as her black eyes stare down at her cards. “I know you’re still here, I’m not saying anything I won’t say to your face. Your mother was an unfortunate woman who caused a lot of devilment. You and Janice when you were starting out would never have had such a time of it if it hadn’t been for Mary Angstrom, and that goes for ten years ago too. She thought too much of herself for what she was.” Ma has that fanatic tight look about the cheeks women get when they hate one another. Mom didn’t think that much of Bessie Springer either - little upstart married to that crook, a woman without enough brains to grease a saucepan living in that big house over on Joseph Street looking down her nose. The Koerners were dirt farmers and not even the good dirt, they farmed the hills.

  “Mother, Harry’s mother was bedridden all through that time the house burned down. She was dying.”

  “Not so dying she didn’t stir up a lot of mischief before she went. If she’d have let you two work out your relations with these others there would never have been a separation and all the grief. She was envious of the Koerners and had been since Day One. I knew her when she was Mary Renninger two classes ahead of me in the old Thad Stevens School before they built the new high school where the Morris farm used to be, and she thought too much of herself then. The Renningers weren’t country people, you see, they came right out of Brewer and had that slum mentality, that cockiness. Too tall for her sex and too big for her britches. Your sister, Harry, got all her looks from your father’s side. Your father’s father they say was one of those very fair Swedes, a plasterer.” With a thump of her thumb she lays down the ace of diamonds.

  “You can’t lead trump until after the third trick,” Harry reminds her.

  “Oh, foolish.” She takes the ace back and stares at her cards through the unbecoming though fashionable eyeglasses she bought recently - heavy blue shell frames hinged low to S-shaped temples and with a kind of continuous false eyebrow of silvery inlay. They aren’t even comfortable, she has to keep touching the bridge to push them up on her little round nose.

  Her agony is so great pondering the cards, Harry reminds her, “You only need one point to make your bid. You’ve already made it.”

  “Yes, well … make all you can while you can, Fred used to say.” She fans her cards a little wider. “Ali. I thought I had another one of those.” She lays down a second ace of clubs.

  But Janice trumps it. She pulls in the trick and says, “Sorry, Mother. I only had a singleton of clubs, how could you know?”

  “I had a feeling as soon as I put down that ace. I had a premonition.”

  Harry laughs; you have to love the old lady. Cabined with these two women, he has grown soft and confiding, as when he was a little boy and asked Mom where ladies went wee-wee. “I used to sometimes wonder,” he confides to Bessie, “if Mom had -ever, you know, been false to Pop.”

  “I wouldn’t have put it past her,” she says, grim-upped as Janice leads out her own aces. Her eyes flash at Harry. “See, ifyou’d have let me play that diamond she wouldn’t have gotten in.”

  “Ma,” he says, “you can’t take every trick, don’t be so greedy. I know Mom must have been sexy, because look at Mim.”

  “What do you hear from your sister?” Ma asks to be polite, staring down at her cards again. The shadows thrown by her ornate spectacle frames score her cheeks and make her look old, dragged down, where there is no anger to swell the folds of her face.

  “Mim’s fine. She’s running this beauty parlor in Las Vegas. She’s getting rich.”

  “I never believed half ofwhat people said about her,” Ma utters absently.

  Now Janice has run through her aces and plays a king of spades to the ace she figures Harry must have. Since she joined up with that bridge-and-tennis bunch of witches over at the Flying Eagle, Janice isn’t as dumb at cards as she used to be. Harry plays the expected ace and, momentarily in command, asks Ma Springer, “How much of my mother do you see in Nelson?”

  “Not a scrap,” she says with satisfaction, whackingly trumping his ten of spades. “Not a whit.”

  “What can I do for the kid?” he asks aloud. It is as if another has spoken, through him. Fog blowing through a window screen.

  “Be patient,” Ma answers, triumphantly beginning to run out the trumps.

  “Be loving,” Janice adds.

  “Thank God he’s going back to college next month.”

  Their silence fills the cottage like cool lake air. Crickets.

  He accuses, “You both know stuff I don’t.”

  They do not deny it.

  He gropes. “What do you both think of Melanie, really? I think she depresses the kid.”

  “I dare say the rest are mine,” Ma Springer announces, laying down a raft of little diamonds.

  “Harry,” Janice tells him. “Melanie’s not the problem.”

  “If you ask me,” Ma Springer says, so firmly they both know she wants the subject changed, “Melanie is making herself altogether too much at home.”

  On television Charlie’s Angels are chasing the heroin smugglers in a great array of expensive automobiles that slide and screech, that plunge through fruit carts and large panes of glass and finally collide one with another, and then another, tucking into opposing fenders and grilles in a great slow-motion climax of bent metal and arrested motion and final justice. The Angel who has replaced Farrah Fawcett-Majors gets out of her crumpled Malibu and tosses her hair: this becomes a freeze-frame. Nelson laughs in empathetic triumph over all those totalled Hollywood cars. Then the more urgent tempo and subtly louder volume of the commercial floods the room; a fresh palette of reflected light paints the faces, chubby and clownish side by side, of Melanie and Nelson as they sit on the old sofa of gray nappy stuff cut into a pattern and gaze at the television set where they have placed it in the rearranged living room, where the Barcalounger used to be. Beer bottles glint on the floor beneath their propped-up feet; hanging drifts of sweetish smoke flicker in polychrome as if the ghosts of Charlie’s Angels are rising to the ceiling. “Great smash-up,” Nelson pronounces, with difficulty rising and fumbling the television off.

  “I thought it was stupid,” Melanie says in her voice of muffled singing.

  “Oh shit, you think everything is stupid except what’s his name, Kerchief.”

  “G. I. Gurdjieff” She has a prim mode of withdrawal, into mental regions where she knows he cannot reach. At Kent it became clear there were realms real for others not real to him not just languages he didn’t know, or theorems he couldn’t grasp, but drifting areas of unprofitable knowledge where nevertheless profits of a sort were being made. Melanie was mystical, sh
e ate no meat and felt no fear, the tangled weedy gods of Asia spelled a harmony to her. She lacked that fury against limits that had been part of Nelson since he had known he would never be taller than five nine though his father was six three, or perhaps before that since he had found himself helpless to keep his father and mother together and to save Jill from the ruin she wanted, or perhaps before that since he had watched grownups in dark suits and dresses assembling around a small white coffin, with silvery handles and something sparkly in the paint, that they told him held what had been his baby sister, born and then allowed to die without anybody asking him; nobody ever asked him, the grownup world was like that, it just ground on, and Melanie was part of that world, smugly smiling out at him from within that bubble where the mystery resided that amounted to power. It would be nice, as long as he was standing, to take up one of the beer bottles and smash it down into the curly hair of Melanie’s skull and then to take the broken half still in his hand and rotate it into the smiling plumpnesses of her face, the great brown eyes and cherry lips, the mocking implacable Buddha calm. “I don’t care what the fuck his dumb name is, it’s all bullshit,” he tells her instead.

  “You should read him,” she says. “He’s wonderful.”

  “Yeah, what does he say?”

  Melanie thinks, unsmiling. “It’s not easy to sum up. He says there’s a Fourth Way. Besides the way of the yogi, the monk, and the fakir.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “And if you go this way you’ll be what he calls awake.”

  “Instead of asleep?”

  “He was very interested in somehow grasping the world as it is. He believed we all have plural identities.”

  “I want to go out,” he tells her.

  “Nelson, it’s ten o’clock at night.”

  “I promised I might meet Billy Fosnacht and some of the guys down at the Laid-Back.” The Laid-Back is a new bar in Brewer, at the comer of Weiser and Pine, catering to the young. It used to be called the Phoenix. He accuses her, “You go out all the time with Stavros leaving me here with nothing to do.”

  “You could read Gurdjieff,” she says, and giggles. “Anyway I haven’t gone out with Charlie more than four or five times.”

  “Yeah, you work all the other nights.”

  “It isn’t as if we ever do anything, Nelson. The last time we sat and watched television with his mother. You ought to see her. She looks younger than he does. All black hair.” She touches her own dark, vital, springy hair. “She was wonderful.”

  Nelson is putting on his denim jacket, bought at a shop in Boulder specializing in the worn-out clothes of ranch hands and sheep herders. It had cost twice what a new one would have cost. “I’m working on a deal with Billy. One of the other guys is going to be there. I gotta go.”

  “Can I come along?”

  “You’re working tomorrow, aren’t you?”

  “You know I don’t care about sleep. Sleep is giving in to the body.”

  “I won’t be late. Read one of your books.” He imitates her giggle.

  Melanie asks him, “When have you last written to Pru? You haven’t answered any of her recent letters.”

  His rage returns; his tight jacket and the very wallpaper of this room seem to be squeezing him smaller and smaller. “How can I, she writes twice every fucking day, it’s worse than a newspaper. Christ, she tells me her temperature, what she’s eaten, when she’s taken a crap practically -“

  The letters are typewritten, on stolen Kent stationery, page after page, flawlessly.

  “She thinks you’re interested,” Melanie says in reproach. “She’s lonely and apprehensive.”

  Nelson gets louder. “She’s apprehensive! What does she have to be apprehensive about? Here I am, good as gold, with you such a goddam watchdog I can’t even go into town for a beer.”

  Go.”

  He is stabbed by guilt. “Honest, I did promise Billy; he’s going to bring this kid whose sister owns a ‘76 TR convertible with only fifty-five thousand miles on it.”

  “Just go,” Melanie says quietly. “I’ll write to Pru and explain how you’re too busy.”

  “Too busy, too busy. Who the hell am I doing all this for except for fucking silly-ass Pru?”

  “I don’t know, Nelson. I honestly don’t know what you’re doing or who you’re doing it for. I do know that I found a job, according to our plan, whereas you did nothing except finally bully your poor father into making up a job for you.”

  “My poor father! Poor father! Listen who do you think put him where he is? Who do you think owns the company, my mother and grandmother own it, my father is just their front man and doing a damn lousy job of it too. Now that Charlie’s run out of moxie there’s nobody over there with any drive or creativity at all. Rudy and Jake are stooges. My father’s running that outfit into the ground; it’s sad.”

  “You can say all that, Nelson, and that Charlie’s run out of moxie which I think I’m in a better position than you to know, but you haven’t shown me much capacity for responsibility.”

  He hears, though frustrated and guilty to the point of tears, a deliberate escalation in her “capacity for responsibility” in answer to his mention of “creativity.” Against the Melanies of the world he will always come in tongue-tied. “Bullshit” is all he can say.

  “You have a lot of feelings, Nelson,” she tells him. “But feel

  ings aren’t actions.” She stares at him as if to hypnotize him,

  batting her eyes once.

  “Oh Christ. I’m doing exactly what you and Pru wanted me to do.”

  “You see, that’s how your mind works, putting everything off on others. We didn’t want you to do anything specific, we just wanted you to cope like an adult. You couldn’t seem to do it out there so you came back here to put yourself in phase with reality. I don’t see that you’ve done it.” When she bats her eyelids like that, her head becomes a doll’s, all hollow inside. Fun to smash. “Charlie says,” Melanie says, “you’re overanxious as a salesman; when the people come in, they’re scared away.”

  “They’re scared away by the lousy tinny Japanese cars that cost a fortune because of the shit-eating yen. I wouldn’t buy one, I don’t see why anybody else should buy one. It’s Detroit. Detroit has let everybody down, millions of people depending for jobs on Detroit’s coming up with some decent car design and the assholes won’t do it.”

  “Don’t swear so much, Nelson. It doesn’t impress me.” As she gazes steadily up at him her eyeballs show plenty of white; he pictures the also plentiful white orbs of her breasts and he doesn’t want this quarrel to progress so far she won’t comfort him in bed. She hasn’t ever sucked him off but he bets she does it for Charlie, that’s the only way these old guys can get it up. Smiling that hollow-headed Buddha smile, Melanie says, “You go off and play with the other little boys, l’ll stay here and write Pru and won’t tell her you said her ass is silly. But I’m getting very tired, Nelson, of covering for you.”

  “Well who asked you to? You’re getting something out of it too.” In Colorado she had been sleeping with a married man who was also the partner of the crumb Nelson was supposed to spend the summer working for, putting up condominiums in ski country. The man’s wife was beginning to make loud noises though she had been around herself and the other guy Melanie was seeing had visions of himself as a cocaine supplier to the beautiful people at Aspen and yet lacked the cool and the contacts, and seemed headed for jail or an early grave depending on which foot he tripped over first. Roger the guy’s name was and Nelson had liked him, the way he sidled along like a lanky yellow hound who knows he’s going to be kicked. It had been Roger who had gotten them into hang gliding, Melanie too prudent but Pru surprisingly willing to try, joking about how this would be one way to solve all their problems. Her face so slender in the great white crash helmet they rented you at the Highlands base, up on the Golden Horn, in the second before the launch into astonishing, utterly quiet space she would give him that same
wry sharp estimating look sideways he had seen the first time she had decided to sleep with him, in her little studio apartment in that factorylike high-rise over in Stow, her picture window above a parking lot. He had met Melanie first, in a course they both took called the Geography of Religions: Shintó, shamanism, the Jains, all sorts of antique superstitions thriving, according to the maps, in overlapping patches, like splotches of disease, and in some cases even spreading, the world was in such a desperate state. Pru was not a student but a typist for the Registrar’s office over in Rockwell Hall; Melanie had gotten to know her during a campaign by the Students’ League for a Democratic Kent to create discontent among the university employees, especially the secretaries. Most of such friendships withered when the next cause came along but Pru had stuck. She wanted something. Nelson had been drawn to her grudging crooked smile, as if she too had trouble spinning herself out for display, not like these glib kids who had gone from watching TV straight to the classroom with never a piece of the world’s real weather to halt their tongues. And also her typist’s hard long hands, like the hands of his grandmother Angstrom. She had taken her portable Remington west with her in hopes of finding some free-lance work out of Denver, so she typed her letters telling him when she went to sleep and when she woke up and when she felt like vomiting, whereas he has to respond in his handwriting that he hates, it is such a childish-looking scrawl. The fluent perfection of her torrent of letters overwhelms him, he couldn’t have known she would be the source of such a stream. Girls write easier than boys somehow: he remembers the notes in green ink Jill used to leave around the house in Penn Villas. And he remembers, suddenly, more of the words of the song Mommom used to sing: “Reide, reide, Geile / Alle Schtunn en Medi / Geht’s iwwer der Schtumbe / Fallt’s Bubbli nunner!” with the last word, where Baby falls down, nunner, not sung but spoken, in a voice so solemn he always laughed.