Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

  “Send him back to college,” Harry says. “She had an apartment out there, they can both move into one.”

  “He doesn’t want to go,” Janice tells them, not for the first time.

  “And why the hell not?” Harry asks, the question still exciting to him, though he knows he’s beaten.

  “Oh Harry,” Janice says wearily, “nobody knows. You didn’t go to college, why should he?”

  “That’s the reason. Look at me. I don’t want him to live my life. I’m living it and that’s enough.”

  “Darling, I said that from his point of view, not to argue with you. Of course Mother and I would have preferred he had graduated from Kent and not got so involved with this secretary. But that’s not the way it is.”

  “He can’t go back to college with a wife as if nothing happened,” Bessie states. “They knew her out there as one of the employees and I think he’d be embarrassed. He needs a job.”

  “Great,” Harry says, enjoying being perverse, letting the women do the constructive thinking. “Maybe his father-in-law can get him a job out in Akron.”

  “You saw the mother,” Ma Springer says. “There’s no help there.”

  “Uncle Rob was a real swinger, though. What does he do up in the shoe factory? Punch the holes for the laces?”

  Janice imitates her mother’s flat, decided rhythm. “Harry. Nelson must come to work at the lot.”

  “Oh Christ. Why? Why? This is a huge country. It has old factories, new factories, farms, stores, why can’t the lazy brat get a job at one of them? All those summers he was back from Kent he never got a job. He hasn’t had a job since that paper route when he was fourteen and needed to buy Beatles records.”

  Janice says, “Going up to the Poconos a month every summer meant he couldn’t get anything too serious, he used to complain about it. Besides, he did do some things. He babysat for a time there, and he helped that high-school teacher who was building his own home, with the solar panels and the cellar full of rocks that stored heat.”

  “Why doesn’t he go into something like that? That’s where the future is, not selling cars. Cars have had it. The party’s over. It’s going to be all public transportation twenty years from now. Ten years from now, even. Why doesn’t he take a night course and learn how to program a computer? If you look at the want ads, that’s all there is, computer programmers and electronic engineers. Remember when Nelson rigged up all those hi-fi components and even had speakers hooked up on the sunporch? He could do all that, what happened?”

  “What happened is, he grew up,” Janice says, finishing off the coconut liqueur, tilting her head back so far her throat shows the pale rings that when her head is held normally are wrinkles. Her tongue probes the bottom of the glass. With Nelson and Pru pan of the household, Janice drinks more freely; they sit around getting silly and waiting up for Johnny Carson or Saturday Night Live, her smoking has gotten back up to over a pack a day in spite of Harry’s nagging to get her to quit. Now in this discussion she’s acting as if he is some natural disturbance they must let boringly run its course.

  He is getting madder. “I offered to take him on in Service, there’s the department they can always use an extra man, Manny’d have him trained as a full-fledged mechanic in no time. You know what mechanics pull down an hour now? Seven bucks, and it costs me over eight to pay ‘em that what with all this fringe stuff. And once they can work faster than the flat rate they get bonuses. Our top men take home over fifteen thousand a year and a couple of them aren’t much older than Nelson.”

  “Nelson doesn’t want,” Janice says, “to be a grease monkey any more than you do.”

  “Happiest days of my life,” he lies, “were spent working with my hands.”

  “It isn’t easy,” Ma Springer decides to tell them, “being old, and a widow. In everything I do, after I pray about it, I try to ask myself, `Now what would Fred want?’ And I know with absolute certainty in this instance he would want little Nellie to come work on the lot if that’s what the boy desired. A lot of these young men now wouldn’t want such a job, they don’t have the thick skins a salesman has to have, and it’s not so glamorous, unless you began by following the hind end of a horse around all day the way the people of my generation did.”

  Rabbit bristles, impatient. “Bessie, every generation has its problems, we all start behind the eight ball. Face the facts. How much you gonna pay Nelson? How much salary, how much commission? You know what a dealer’s profit margin is. Three per cent, three lousy little per cent, and that’s being cut down to nothing by a lot of new overhead you can’t pass on the customer with these fixed prices Toyota has. Oil going up takes everything up with it; in the five years I’ve been in charge heating costs have doubled, electricity is way up, delivery costs are up, plus all these social security hikes and unemployment to pay so the bums in this country won’t have to give up their yacht or whatever, half the young people in the country go to work just enough to collect unemployment, and now the interest on the inventory is going out of sight. It’s just like the Weimar thing, people’s saving are being washed right down the tube, everybody agrees there’s a recession coming to curl your hair. The economy is shot, Ma, we can’t hack it, we don’t have the discipline the Japs and Germans do, and on top of this you want me to hire a piece of dead weight who happens to be my son.”

  “In answer to your question,” Ma says, grunting a little as she shifts the sorer leg on the hassock, “the minimum wage is going to be three-ten an hour so if he works forty hours a week you’ll have to give him a hundred twenty-five a week, and then the bonuses you’d have to figure on the usual formula, isn’t it now something like twenty per cent of the gross profit on the sale, and then going to twenty-five over a certain minimum? I know it used to be a flat five per cent of the net amount of the sale, but Fred said you couldn’t do that with foreign cars for some reason.”

  “Bessie, with all respect, and I love you, but you are crazy. You pay Nelson five hundred a month to start with and set commissions on top of that he’s going to be taking home a thousand a month for bringing in the company only twenty-five hundred. To pay Nelson that amount it should mean he sells, depending on the proportion of new to used, between seven to ten cars a month for an agency that doesn’t move twenty-five a month overall!”

  “Well, maybe with Nelson there you’ll move more,” Ma says.

  “Dreamer,” Harry says to her. “Detroit’s getting tooled up finally to turn out subcompacts a dime a dozen, and there’s going to be stiffer import taxes any day now. Twenty-five a month is optimum, honest to God.”

  “The people that remember Fred will like to see Nelson there,” she insists.

  Janice says, “Nelson says the mark-up on the new Toyotas is at least a thousand dollars.”

  “That’s a loaded model, with all the extras. The people who buy Toyotas aren’t into extras. Basic Corollas are what we sell mostly, four to one. And even on the bigger models the carrying costs amount to a couple hundred per unit with money going to Hell the way it is.”

  She is obstinate and dumb. “A thousand a car,” she says, “means he has to sell only five a month, the way you figure it.”

  “What about Jake and Rudy! ” he cries. “How could the kid sell even five without cutting into Jake and Rudy? Listen, if you two want to know who your loyal employees are, it’s Jake and Rudy. They work all the shit hours you ask ‘em to, on the floor nights and weekends, they moonlight to make up for all the low hours you tell ‘em to stay away, Rudy runs a little bike repair shop out of his garage, in this day and age, everybody else begging for handouts, they’re still taking a seventy-five base and a one-fifty draw. You can’t turn guys like that out in the cold.”

  “I wasn’t thinking so much of Jake and Rudy,” Ma Springer says, with a frown resting one ankle on top of the other. “How much now does Charlie make?”

  “Oh no you don’t. We’ve been through this. Charlie goes, I go.”

  “Just for my inf
ormation.”

  “Well, Charlie pulls down around three-fifty a week - rounds out to over twenty thousand a year with the bonuses.”

  “Well, then,” Ma Springer pronounces, easing the ankle back to where it was, “you’d actually save money, taking Nelson on instead. He has this interest in the used cars, and that’s Charlie’s department, hasn’t it been?”

  “Bessie, I can’t believe this. Janice, talk to her about Charlie.”

  “We’ve talked, Harry. You’re making too much of it. Mother has talked to me and I thought it might do Charlie good to make a change. She also talked to Charlie and he agreed.”

  Harry is disbelieving. “When did you talk to Charlie?”

  “At the reception,” Ma Springer admits. “I saw you looking over at us.”

  “Well my God, whajja say?”

  This is some old lady, Rabbit thinks, sneakers, Ace bandages, cotton dress up over her knees, puffy throat, funny silver-browed eyeglasses, and all. Once in a while, in the winters since old Fred cashed in, she has visited the lot wearing the mink coat he gave her for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and there was a glitter on that fur like needles of steel, like a signal crackling out of mission control. She says, “I asked him how his health was.”

  “The way we worry about Charlie’s health you’d think he was in a wheelchair.”

  “Janice has told me, even ten years ago he was taking nitroglycerine. For a man only in his thirties then, that’s not good.”

  . “Well what did he say, how his health was?”

  “Fair,” Ma Springer answers, giving it the local two syllables, Fai-ir. “Janice herself claims you complain he doesn’t do his share anymore, just sits huddled at the desk playing with paperwork he should leave for Mildred to do.”

  “Did I say all that?” He looks at Janice, his betrayer. He has always thought of her darkness as a Springer trait but of course old man Springer was fair, thin-skinned pink; it is her mother’s blood, the Koerners’, that has determined her coloring.

  She flicks her cigarette at the ashtray impatiently. “More than once,” she says.

  “Well I didn’t mean your mother should go fire the guy.”

  “Fire was never used as a word,” Ma Springer says. “Fred would never have fired Charlie, unless his personal life got all out of hand.”

  “You got to go pretty far to get out of hand these days,” Harry says, resenting that this is the case. He had tried to have fun too early.

  Ma Springer rolls her weight uncomfortably on the sofa. “Well I must say, this chasing that girl out to Ohio -“

  “He took her to Florida, too,” Harry says, so quickly both women stare at him with their button-black eyes. It’s true, it galls him more than it should, since he could never warm to Melanie himself and had nowhere to take her anyhow.

  . “We talked about Florida,” Ma Springer says. “I asked him if now that winter’s coming he mightn’t be better off down there. Amy Gehringer’s son-in-law, that used to work in an asbestos plant in New Jersey until they got that big scare, has retired down there on the compensation, and he’s under fifty. She says he tells her there are a lot of young people coming down there now, to get away from the oil crisis, it’s not just the old people like in all the jokes, and of course there are jobs to be had there too. Charlie’s clever. Fred recognized that from the start.”

  “He has this mother, Ma. An old Greek lady who can’t speak English and who’s never been out of Brewer hardly.”

  “Well maybe it’s time she was. You know people think we old people are such sticks in the mud but Grace Stuhl’s sister, older than she is, mind you, and buried two husbands right in the county, went out to visit her son in Phoenix and loved it so she’s bought her own little condominium and even, Grace was telling me, her burial plot, that’s how much she pulled up her roots.”

  “Charlie’s not like you, Harry,” Janice explains. “He’s not scared of change.”

  He could take that green glass egg and in one stride be at the sofa and pound it down into her dense skull. Instead he ignores her, saying to Ma, “I still haven’t heard exactly what you said to Charlie, and he said to you.”

  “Oh, we reminisced. We talked about the old days with Fred and we agreed that Fred would want Nellie to have a place at the lot. He was always one for family, Fred, even when family let him down.”

  That must mean him, Rabbit thinks. Letting that shifty little wheeler-dealer down is about the last thing on his conscience.

  “Charlie understands family,” Janice interposes, in that smooth matronly voice she can do now, imitating her mother. “All the time I was, you know, seeing him, he was absolutely ready to stand aside and have me go back.”

  Bragging about her affair to her own mother. The world is falling apart fast.

  “And so,” Ma Springer sighs - she is wearying of this, her legs hurt and aren’t improving, old people need their privacy - “we tried to come to an understanding of what Fred would want and came up with this idea of a leave for Charlie, for six months with half pay, and then at the end we’d see how Nellie was working out. In the meantime if the offer of another job comes Charlie’s way he’s to be free to take it, and then we’ll settle at that point with two months’ pay as a bonus, plus whatever his Christmas bonus would be for all of 1979. This wasn’t just worked out at the party, I was over there today while you were playing golf.”

  He had been carrying an 83 into the last hole and then hooked into the creek and took an 8. It seems he’ll never break 90 there, unless he does it in his sleep. Webb Murkett’s relaxed swing is getting on his nerves. “Sneaky,” he says. “I thought you didn’t trust yourself to drive the Chrysler in Brewer traffic anymore.”

  “Janice drove me over.”

  “Aha.” He asks his wife, “How did Charlie like seeing you there on this mission of mercy?”

  “He was sweet. This has all been between him and Mother. But he knows Nelson is our son. Which is more than you seem to.”

  “No, no, I know he is, that’s the trouble,” Harry tells her. To old lady Springer he says, “So you’re paying Charlie thousands to hand Nelson a job he probably can’t do. Where’s the savings for the firm in that? And you’re going to lose sales without Charlie, I don’t have half the contacts around town he does. Not just Greeks, either. Being single he’s been in a lot of bars, that’s where you win people’s trust around here.”

  “Well, it may be.” Ma Springer gets herself to her feet and stamps each one softly on the carpet, testing if either is asleep. “It may all be a mistake, but in this life you can’t always be afraid of mistakes. I never liked that about Charlie, that he was unwilling to get married. It bothered Fred too, I know. Now I must get myself upstairs and see my Angels. Though it’s not been the same since Farrah left.”

  “Don’t I get a vote?” Harry asks, almost yelling, strapped as he feels into the Barcalounger. “I vote against it. I don’t want to be bothered with Nelson over there.”

  “Well,” Ma says, and in her long pause he has time to appreciate how big she is, how broad from certain angles, like a tree trunk seen suddenly in terms of all the toothpicks it would make, all those meals and days gone into this bulk, the stiff heavy seesaw of her hips, the speckled suet of her arms, “as I understand Fred’s will, he left the lot to me and Janice, and I think we’re of a mind.”

  “Two against three, Harry, in any case,” Janice says, with a winning smile.

  “Oh screw you,” he says. “Screw Springer Motors. I suppose if I don’t play dead doggie you two’ll vote to can me too.”

  They don’t deny it. While Ma’s steps labor up the staircase, Janice, beginning to wear that smudged look she gets when the day’s intake catches up with her, gets to her feet and tells him confidentially, “Mother thought you’d take it worse than you did. Want anything from the kitchen? This CocoRibe is really addictive.”

  October first falls on a Monday. Autumn is starting to show its underside: out of low cloud
s like a row of torn mattresses a gray rain is knocking the leaves one by one off the trees. That lonely old maple behind the Chuck Wagon across Route 111 is bare now down to its lower branches, which hang on like a monk’s fringe. Not a day for customers: Harry and Charlie gaze together through the plate-glass windows where the posters now say COMING, ALL NEW COROLLAS • New 1.8-liter engine • New aerodynamic styling

  Aluminum wheels on SR5 models • Removable sunrooflmoonroof • Best selling car in the world! Another paper banner proclaims THE COROLLA TERCEL • First Front-Wheel Drive Toyota • Toyota’s Lowest Price & Highest Mileage • 33 Est. MPG • 43 EPA Estimated Highway MPG. “Well,” Harry says, after clearing his throat, “the Phillies went out with a bang.” By shutting out the Montreal Expos on the last day of the season, 2-0, they enabled Pittsburgh to win the championship of the National League East.

  “I was rooting for the Expos,” Charlie says.

  “Yeah, you hate to see Pittsburgh win again. They’re so fucking jivey. All that Family crap.”