by John Updike
Skeeter. In quite another voice Harry says, “Skeeter was killed in Philly last April, did I tell ya?”
“You keep telling me.”
“I’m not blaming the blacks on the assembly line, I’m just saying it sure makes for lousy cars.”
Nelson is on the attack, frazzled and feeling rotten, poor kid. “And who are you to criticize me and Pru for going out to see some friends when you were off with yours seeing those ridiculous exotic dancers? How could you stand it, Mom?”
Janice says, “It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. They keep it within bounds. It really wasn’t any worse than it used to be at the old fairgrounds.”
“Don’t answer him,” Harry tells her. “Who’s he to criticize?”
“The funny thing,” Janice goes on, “is how Cindy and Thelma and I could agree which girl was the best and the men had picked some girl entirely different. We all liked this tall Oriental who was very graceful and artistic and they liked, Mother, the men liked some little chinless blonde who couldn’t even dance.”
“She had that look about her,” Harry explains. “I mean, she meant it.”
“And then that tubby dark one that turned you on. With the feather.”
“Olive-complected. She was nice too. The feather I could have done without.”
“Mom-mom doesn’t want to hear all this disgusting stuff,” Nelson says from the back seat.
“Mom-mom doesn’t mind,” Harry tells him. “Nothing fazes Bessie Springer. Mom-mom loves life.”
“Oh I don’t know,” the old lady says with a sigh. “We didn’t have such things when we might have been up to it. Fred I remember used to bring home the Playboy sometimes, but to me it seemed more pathetic than not, these eighteen-year-old girls that are really just children except for their bodies.”
“Well who isn’t?” Harry asks.
“Speak for yourself, Dad,” Nelson says.
“No now, I meant,” Ma insists, “you wonder what their parents raised them for, seeing them all naked just the way they were born. And what the parents must think.” She sighs. “It’s a different world.”
Janice says, “I guess at this same place Monday nights they have ladies’ night with male strippers. And they say really the young men become frightened, Doris Kaufinann was telling me, the women grab for them and try to get up on the stage after them. The women over forty they say are the worst.”
“That’s so sick,” Nelson says.
“Watch your mouth,” Harry tells him. “Your mother’s over forty.”
“Dad.”
“Well I wouldn’t behave like that,” she says, “but I can see how some might. I suppose a lot of it depends on how satisfying the husband you have is.”
“Mo-om,” the boy protests.
They have swung around the mountain and turned up Central and by the electric clock in the dry cleaner’s window it is three of ten. Harry calls back, “Looks like we’ll make it, Bessie!”
The town hall has its flag at half-mast because of the hostages. At the church the people in holiday clothes are still filing in, beneath the canopy of bells calling with their iron tongues, beneath the wind-torn gray clouds of this November sky with its scattered silver. Letting Ma out of the Mustang, Harry says, “Now don’t pledge the lot away, just for Soupy’s organ.”
Nelson asks, “How will you get home, Mom-mom?”
“Oh, I guess I can get a ride with Grace Stuhl’s grandson, he generally comes for her. Otherwise it won’t kill me to walk.”
“Oh Mother,” Janice says. “You could never walk it. Call us at the house when the meeting’s over if you haven’t a ride. We’ll be home.” The club is down to minimal staff now; they serve only packaged sandwiches and half the tennis court nets are down and already they have relocated the pins to temporary greens. A sadness in all this plucks at Rabbit. Driving home with just Janice and Nelson he remembers the way they used to be, just the three of them, living together, younger. The kid and Janice still have it between them. He’s lost it. He says aloud, “So you don’t like Toyotas.”
“It’s not a question of like, Dad, there isn’t that much about ‘em to like or dislike. I was talking to some girl at the party last night who’d just bought a Corolla, and all we could talk about was the old American cars, how great they were. It’s like Volvos, they don’t have it anymore either, it’s not something anybody can control. It’s like, you know, time of life.”
The boy is trying to be conversational and patch things up; Harry keeps quiet, thinking, Time of life, the crazy way you’re going, zigzagging around and all those drugs, you’ll be lucky to get to my time of life.
“Mazdas,” Nelson says. “That’s what I’d want to have an agency in. That rotary engine is so much more efficient than the four-cycle piston, you could run this country on half the gas, once they get the seal perfected.”
“Go over and ask Abe Chafetz for a job then. I heard he was going broke, the Mazdas have so many bugs. Manny says they’ll never get the seal right.”
Janice says, placating, “I think the Toyota ads on television are very clever and glamorous.”
“Oh the ads have charisma,” Nelson says. “The ads are terrific. It’s the cars I’m talking about.”
“Don’t you love,” Harry asks, “that new one with Scrooge, the way he cackles and goes off into the distance?” He cackles, and Janice and Nelson laugh, and for the last block home, down Joseph Street beneath the bare maples, their three heads entertain common happy memories, of Toyota commercials, of men and women leaping, average men and women, their clothes lifted in cascading slow-motion folds like angels’ robes, like some intimate violence of chemical mating or hummingbird wing magnified and laid bare in its process, leaping and falling, grinning and then in freeze-frame hanging there, defying gravity.
“We got to get out of here,” Harry says hoarsely to Janice in their bedroom some days later, on the eve of Pru’s return from her week of grace in the hospital. It is night; the copper beech, stripped of its leaves and clamorous pods, admits more streetlight into their room than in summer. One or two of the panes in the window on the side nearer the street, the side where Rabbit sleeps, hold imperfections, patches of waviness or elongated bubbles, scarcely visible to the eye of day but which at night hurl onto the far wall, with its mothlike shadows of medallion pattern, dramatic amplifications, the tint of each pane also heightened in the enlargement, so that an effect of stained glass haunts the area above Janice’s jumbled mahogany dresser descended from the Koemers, beside the fourpanelled door that locks out the world. Ten years of habitancy, in the minutes or hours between when the bedside lamps are extinguished and sleep is achieved, have borne these luminous rectangles into Harry’s brain as precious entities, diffuse jewels pressed from the air, presences whose company he will miss if he leaves this room. He must leave it. Intermixed with the abstract patterns the imperfect panes project are the unquiet shadows of the beech branches as they shudder and sway in the cold outside.
“Where would we go?” Janice asks.
“We’d buy a house like everybody else,” he says, speaking in a low hoarse voice as if Ma Springer might overhear this breath of treachery through the wall and the mumble and soft roar of her television set as a crisis in her program is reached, then a commercial bursts forth, and another crisis begins to build. “On the other side of Brewer, closer to the lot. That drive through the middle of town every day is driving me crazy. Wastes gas, too.”
“Not Penn Villas,” she says. “You’ll never get me back into Penn Villas.”
“Me neither. What about Penn Park though? With all those nice divorce lawyers and dermatologists? I’ve always kind of dreamed, ever since we used to play them in basketball, of living over there somewhere. Some house with at least stone facing on the front, and maybe a sunken living room, so we can entertain the Murketts in decent style. It’s awkward having anybody back here, Ma goes upstairs after dinner but the place is so damn gloomy, and now we’re going to b
e stuck with Nelson and his crew.”
“He was saying, they plan to get an apartment when things work out.”
“Things aren’t going to work out, with his attitude. You know that. The ride is free here and with him around we wouldn’t feel so rotten leaving your mother. This is our chance.” His hand has crept well up into her nightie; in his wish to have his vision shared he grips her breasts, familiar handfuls, a bit limp like balloons deflating with her age; but still thanks to all that tennis and swimming and old Fred Springer’s stingy lean genes her body is holding up better than most. Her nipples stiffen, and his prick with no great attention paid to it is hardening on the sly. “Or maybe,” he pursues, his voice still hoarse, “one of those mock-Tudor jobbies that look like piecrust and have those steep pitched roofs like witches’ houses. Jesus, wouldn’t Pop be proud, seeing me in one of those?”
“Could we afford it,” Janice asks, “with the mortgage rates up around thirteen per cent now?”
He shifts his hand down the silvery slick undulations of her belly to the patch of her hair, that seems to bristle at his touch. He ought to eat her sometime. Bed her down on her back with her legs hanging over the side and just kneel and chew her cunt until she came. He used to when they were courting in that apartment of the other girl’s with its view of the old gray gas tanks by the river, kneel and just graze in her ferny meadow for hours, nose, eyelids rubbing up against the wonder of it. Any woman, they deserve to be eaten once in a while, they don’t come so your mouth is full like with an oyster, how do whores stand it, cock after cock, cuts down on VD, but having to swallow, must amount to pints in the course of a week. Ruth hated it that time, but some cunts now if you read the sex tapes in Ouí lap it up, one said it tasted to her like champagne. Maybe it wouldn’t be the living room that would be sunken, it could be the den, just somewhere where there’s a carpeted step down or two, so you know you’re in a modern home. “That’s the beauty of inflation,” he says seductively to Janice. “The more you owe, the better you do. Ask Webb. You pay off in shrunken dollars, and the interest Uncle Sam picks up as an income tax deduction. Even after buying the Krugerrands and paying the September taxes we have too much money in the bank, money in the bank is for dummies now. Sock it into the down payment for a house, we’d be letting the bank worry about the dollar going down and have the house appreciating ten, twenty per cent a year at the same time.” Her cunt is moistening, its lips growing loose.
“It seems hard on Mother,” Janice says in that weak voice she gets, lovemaking. “She’ll be leaving us this place some day and I know she expects we’d stay in it with her till then.”
“She’ll live for another twenty years,” Harry says, sinking his middle finger in. “In twenty years you’ll be well over sixty.”
“And wouldn’t it seem strange to Nelson?”
“Why? It’s what he wants, me out of the way. I depress the kid.”
“Harry, I’m not so sure it’s you that’s doing it. I think he’s just scared.”
“What’s he got to be scared of?”
“The same thing you were scared of at his age. Life.”
Life. Too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday. “Well he shouldn’t have come home if that’s the way he was going to feel,” Harry says. He’s losing his erection.
“He didn’t know,” Janice says. He can feel, his finger still in her, that her mind too is drifting away from their flesh, into sad realms of family. “He didn’t know you’d be so hard on him. Why are you?”
Fucking kid not thirteen years old and tried to take Jill from him, back in Penn Villas after Janice had gone. “He’s hard on me,” Harry says. He has ceased to whisper. Ma Springer’s television set, when he listens, is still on - a rumbling, woofing, surging noise less like human voices than a noise Nature would make in the trees or along the ocean shore. She has become a fan of the ABC eleven-thirty special report on the hostages and every morning tells them the latest version of nothing happening. Khomeini and Carter both trapped by a pack of kids who need a shave and don’t know shit, they talk about old men sending young men off to war, if you could get the idiotic kids out of the world it might settle down to being a sensible place. “He gets a disgruntled look on his face every time I open my mouth to talk. Everything I try to tell him at the lot he goes and does the opposite. Some guy comes in to buy this Mercury that was the other one of the convertibles the kid wrecked that time and offers a snowmobile on the trade-in. I thought it was a joke until the other day I go in and the Mercury’s gone and this little yellow Kawasaki snowmobile is sitting up in the front row with the new Tercels. I hit the roof and Nelson tells me to stop being so uptight, he allowed the guy four hundred on it and it’ll give us more publicity than twice that in ads, the crazy lot that took a snowmobile on trade-in.”
Janice makes a soft noise that were she less tired would be laughter. “That’s the kind of thing Daddy used to do.”
“And then behind my back he’s taken on about ten grand’s worth of old convertibles that get about ten miles to the gallon nobody’ll want and this caper with Pru is running up a fucking fortune. There’s no benefits covering her.”
“Shh. Mother can hear.”
“I want her to hear, she’s the one giving the kid all his high and mighty ideas. Last night, you hear them cooking up how he’s going to have his own car for him and Pru, when that old Newport of hers just sits in the garage six days out of seven?” A muffled sound of chanting comes through the papered wall, Iranians outside the Embassy demonstrating for the benefit of the TV cameras. Rabbit’s throat constricts with frustration. “I got to get out, honey.”
“Tell me about the house,” Janice says, taking his hand in hers and returning it to her pussy. “How many rooms would it have?”
He begins to massage, dragging his fingers along the crease on one side, then the other, of the triangle, and then bisecting with a thoughtful stroke, looking for the fulcrum, the nub, of it. Cindy’s hair had looked darker than Janice’s, less curly, alive maybe with needles of light like the fur of Ma Springer’s old coat. “We wouldn’t need a lot of bedrooms,” he tells Janice, `just a big one for us, with a big mirror you can see from the bed -“
“A mirror! Where’d you get the idea of a mirror?”
“Everybody has mirrors now. You watch yourself making love in them.”
“Oh, Harry. I couldn’t.”
“I think you could. And then at least another bedroom, in case your mother has to come live with us, or we have guests, but not next to ours, with at least a bathroom between so we don’t hear her television, and downstairs a kitchen with all new equipment including a Cuisinart -“
“I’m scared of them. Doris Kaufinann says for the first three weeks she had hers everything came out mush. One night it was pink mush and the next night green mush was the only difference.”
“You’ll learn,” he croons, drawing circles on her front, circles that widen to graze her breasts and beaver and then diminish to feather into her navel like the asshole of that olive bitch along 422, “there are instruction books, and a refrigerator with an automatic ice-maker, and one of those wall ovens that’s at the height of your face so you don’t have to bend over, and I don’t know about all this microwave, I was reading somewhere how they fry your brains even if you’re in the next room …” Moist, she is so moist her cunt startles him, touching it, like a slug underneath a leaf in the garden. His prick undergoes such a bulbous throb it hurts. “… and this big sunken living room with lights along the side where we can give parties.”
“Who would we give these parties for?” Her voice is sinking into the pillow like the dust of a mummy’s face, so weak.
“Oh…” His hand continues to glide, around and around, carrying the touch of wetness up to her nipples and adorning first one then the other with it like tinsel on the tips of a Christmas tree. “… everybody. Dons Kaufinann and all those
other tennis Lesbians at the Flying Eagle, Cindy Murkett and her trusty sidekick Buddy Inglefinger, all the nice girls who work their pretty asses off for a better America down at the Gold Cherry, all the great macho guys in the service and parts department of Springer Motors -“
Janice giggles, and simultaneously the front door downstairs slams. After visiting Pru, Nelson has been going to that bar that used to be the Phoenix and bumming around with that creepy crowd that kills time there. It oppresses Harry, this freedom: if the kid has been excused from evening floor duty to visit Pru for the week then he has no business going out getting stewed on the time. If the kid was so shook up when she took her tumble he ought to be doing something better than this out of gratitude or penance or whatever. His footsteps below sound drunken, one plunked down on top of the other, bump, bump, across the living room between the sofa and the Barcalounger and past the foot of the stairs, making the china in the sideboard tingle, on into the kitchen for one more beer. Harry’s breath comes quick and short, thinking of that surly puzzled face sucking the foam out of one more can: drinking and eating up the world, and out of sheer spite at that. He feels the boy’s mother at his side listening to the footsteps and puts her hand on his prick; in expert reflex her fingers pump the loose skin of the sides. Simultaneous with Nelson’s footsteps below as he treads back into the living room toward the Barcalounger, Harry thrusts as hard as if into the olive chick’s ass into the socket Janice’s wifely hand makes and speeds up his hypnotic tracing of rapid smooth circles upon the concave expectancy of her belly, assuring her hoarsely, of the house he wants, “You’ll love it. You’ll love it.”
