by John Updike
“Nelson will steal ‘em,” he says. “He knows the combination now too.”
“Harry. What a thing to say.”
“You know how much that scrape he gave your mother’s Chrysler is going to cost? Eight hundred fucking bucks minimum. He must have been out of his head. You could see poor Pru was humiliated, I wonder how long she’ll let things cook before she gets smart and asks for a divorce. That’ll cost us, too.” His overcoat, so weighted, drags his shoulders down. He feels, as if the sidewalk now is a downslanted plane, the whole year dropping away under him, loss after loss. His silver is scattered, tinsel. His box will break, the janitor will sweep up the coins. It’s all dirt anyway. The great sad lie told to children that is Christmas stains Weiser end to end, and through the murk he glimpses the truth that to be rich is to be robbed, to be rich is to be poor.
Janice recalls him to reality, saying, “Harry, please. Stop looking so tragic. Pru loves Nelson, and he loves her. They won’t get a divorce.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about how silver’s going to go down.”
“Oh, what do we care if it does? Everything’s just a gamble anyway.”
Bless that dope, still trying. The daughter of old Fred Springer, local high roller. Rolled himself into a satin-lined coffin. In the old days they used to bury the silver and put the corpses in slots in the wall.
“I’ll walk down to the car with you,” Janice says, worriedwifely. “I have to get my packages back from that bitch as you call her. How much did you want to go to bed with her by the way?” Trying to find a topic he’ll enjoy.
“Hardly at all,” he confesses. “It’s terrifying in fact, how little. Did you get a look at her fingernails? Sccr-ratch.”
The week between the holidays is a low one for car sales: people feel strapped after Christmas, and with winter coming, ice and salt on the road and fenderbenders likely, they are inclined to stick with the heap they have. Ride it out to spring is the motto. At least the snowmobile’s been moved around to the back where nobody can see it, instead of its sitting there like some kind of cousin of those new little front-wheel-drive Tercels. Where do they get their names? Sounds like an Edsel. Even Toyota, it has too many o’s, makes people think of “toy.” Datsun and Honda, you don’t know where they’re coming from. Datsun could be German from the sound of it, data, rat-tat-tat, rising sun. The Chuck Wagon across Route 111 isn’t doing much of a business either, now that it’s too cold to eat outdoors or in the car, unless you leave the motor running, people die doing that every winter, trying to screw. The build-up is terrific though of hoagie wrappers and milkshake cartons blowing around in the lot, with the dust. Different kind of dust in December, grayer and grittier than summer dust, maybe the colder air, less lift in it, like cold air holds less water, that’s why the insides of the storm windows now when you wake up in the morning have all that dew. Think of all the problems. Rust. Dry rot. Engines that don’t start in the morning unless you take off the distributor cap and wipe the wires. Without condensation the world might last forever. On the moon, for example, there’s no problem. Or on Mars either it turns out. New Year’s, Buddy Inglefinger is throwing the blast this year, guess he was afraid of dropping out of sight with the old gang, getting the wind up about the trip to the islands they’re taking without inviting him. Wonder who his hostess is going to be, that flat-chested sourpuss with straight black hair running some kind of crazy shop in Brewer or that girl before her, with the rash on the inside of her thighs and even between her breasts you could see in a bathing suit, what was her name? Ginger. Georgene. He and Janice just want to make an appearance to be polite, you get to a certain age you know nothing much is going to happen at parties, and leave right after midnight. Then six more days and, powie, the islands. Just the six of them. Little Cindy down there in all that sand. He needs a rest, things are getting him down. Sell less than a car a day in this business not counting Sundays and you’re in trouble. All this tin getting dusty and rusty, the chrome developing pimples. Metal corrodes. Silver dropped two dollars an ounce the minute he bought it from that bitch.
Nelson, who has been in the shop with Manny fussing over the repairs to the Chrysler, the kid wanting a break on the full $18.50 customer rate and Manny explaining over and over like to a moron how if you shave the rate for agency employees it shows up in the books and affects everybody’s end-of-the-month incentive bonus, comes over and stands by his father at the window.
Harry can’t get used to the kid in a suit, it makes him seem even shorter somehow, like one of those midget emcees in a tuxedo, and with his hair shaped longer now and fluffed up by Pru’s blowdrier after every shower Nellie seems a little mean-eyed dude Harry never knew. Janice used to say when the boy was little how he had Harry’s ears with that crimp in the fold at the tip like one of the old-fashioned train conductors had taken his punch, but the tips of Nelson’s are neatly covered by soft shingles of hair and Harry hasn’t bothered to study his own since at about the age of forty he came out of that adolescent who-am-I vanity trip. He just shaves as quick as he can now and gets away from the mirror. Ruth had sweetly small tightly folded ears, he remembers. Janice’s get so tan on top an arch of tiny dark spots comes out. Her father’s lobes got long as a Chinaman’s before he died. Nelson has a hotlooking pimple almost due to pop in the crease above his nostril, Harry notices in the light flooding through the showroom window. The slant of sun makes all the dust on the plate glass look thick as gold leaf this time of year, the arc of each day is so low. The kid is trying to be friendly. Come on. Unbend.
Harry asks him, “You stay up to watch the 76ers finish?”
“Naa.”
“That Gervin for San Antonio was something, wasn’t he? I heard on the radio this morning he finished with forty-six points.”
“Basketball is all goons, if you ask me.”
“It’s changed a lot since my day,” Rabbit admits. “The refs used to call travelling once in a while at least; now, Christ, they eat up half the floor going in for a lay-up.”
“I like hockey,” Nelson says.
“I know you do. When you have the damn Flyers on there’s nowhere in the house you can go to get away from the yelling. All those apes in the crowd go for is to see a fight break out and someone’s teeth get knocked out. Blood on the ice, that’s the drawing card.” This isn’t going right; he tries another topic. “What do you think about those Russkis in Afghanistan? They sure gave themselves a Christmas Present.”
“It’s stupid,” Nelson says. “I mean, Carter’s getting all upset. It’s no worse than what we did in Vietnam, it’s not even as bad because at least it’s right next door and they’ve had a puppet government there for years.”
“Puppet governments are O.K., huh?”
“Well everybody has ‘em. All of South America is our puppet governments.”
“I bet that’d be news to the spics.”
“At least the Russians, Dad, do it when they’re going to do it. We try to do it and then everything gets all bogged down in politics. We can’t do anything anymore.”
“Well not with young people talking like you we can’t,” Harry says to his son. “How would you feel about going over and fighting in Afghanistan?”
The boy chuckles. “Dad, I’m a married man. And way past draft age besides.”
Can this be? Harry doesn’t feel too old to fight, and he’s going to be forty-seven in February. He’s always been sort of sorry they didn’t send him to Korea when they had him in the Army, though at the time he was happy enough to hunker down in Texas. They had a funny straight-on way of looking at the world out there: money, booze, and broads, and that was it. Down to the bones. What is it Mim likes to say? God didn’t go west, He died on the trail. To Nelson he says, “You mean you got married to stay out of the next war?”
“There won’t be any next war, Carter will make a lot of noise but wind up letting them have it, just like he’s letting Iran have the hostages. Actually, Bil
ly Fosnacht was saying the only way we’ll get the hostages back is if Russia invades Iran. Then they’d give us the hostages and sell us the oil because they need our wheat.”
“Billy Fosnacht - that jerk around again?”
“Just for vacation.”
“No offense, Nelson, but how can you stand that pill?”
“He’s my friend. But I know why you can’t stand him.”
“Why can’t I?” Harry asks, his heart rising to what has become a confrontation.
Turning full toward his father beside the gold-dusted pane, the boy’s face seems to shrink with hate, hate and fear of being hit for what he is saying. “Because Billy was there the night you were screwing his mother while Skeeter was burning up Jill in the house we should have been in, protecting her.”
That night. Ten years ago, and still cooking in the kid’s head, alive like a maggot affecting his growth. “That still bugs you, doesn’t it?” Rabbit says mildly.
The boy doesn’t hear, his eyes lost in those sockets sunk as if thumbs had gripped too deep in clay, trying to pick up a lump. “You let Jill die.”
“I didn’t, and Skeeter didn’t. We don’t know who burnt the house down but it wasn’t us. It was the neighbors, their idea of a Welcome Wagon. You got to let it go, kid. Your mother and me have let it go.”
“I know you have.” The sound of Mildred Kroust’s electric typewriter rattles muffled in the distance, a couple in maroon parkas is stalking around in the lot checking the price stickers taped inside the windows, the boy stares as if stunned by the sound of his father’s voice trying to reach him.
“The past is the past,” Harry goes on, “you got to live in the present. Jill was headed that way no matter what the rest of us did. The first time I saw her, she had the kiss of death on her face.”
“I know that’s what you want to think.”
“It’s the only way to think. When you’re my age you’ll see it. At my age if you carried all the misery you’ve seen on your back you’d never get up in the morning.” A flicker of something, a split second when he feels the boy actually listening, encourages Harry to urge his voice deeper, more warmly. “Once that baby of yours shows up,” he tells the boy, “you’ll have your hands full. You’ll have a better perspective.”
“You want to know something?” Nelson asks in a rapid dead voice, looking through him with lifted eyes the slant light has stolen color from.
“What?” Rabbit’s heart skips.
“When Pru fell down those stairs. I’m not sure if I gave her a push or not. I can’t remember.”
Harry laughs, scared. “Of course you didn’t push her. Why would you push her?”
“Because I’m as crazy as you.”
“We’re not crazy, either of us. Just frustrated, sometimes.”
“Really?” This seems information the kid is grateful for.
“Sure. Anyway, everybody survived. When is he due? He or she.” Fear rolls off this kid so thick Harry doesn’t want to keep talking to him. The way his eyes looked transparent that instant, all the brown lifted out.
Nelson lowers his eyes, surly again. “They think about three more weeks.”
“That’s great. We’ll be back in plenty of time. Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven’t done everything right in my life. I know I haven’t. But I haven’t committed the greatest sin. I haven’t laid down and died.”
“Who says that’s the greatest sin?”
“Everybody says it. The church, the government. It’s against Nature, to give up, you’ve got to keep moving. That’s the thing about you. You’re not moving. You don’t want to be here, selling old man Springer’s jalopies. You want to be out there, learning something.” He gestures toward the west, beyond West Brewer. “How to hang glide, or run a computer, or whatever.”
He has talked too much and closed up the space that opened in Nelson’s resistance for a second. Nelson accuses: “You don’t want me here.”
“I want you where you’re happy and that’s not here. Now I didn’t want to say anything but I’ve been going over the figures with Mildred and they’re not that hot. Since you came here and Charlie left, gross sales are down about eleven per cent over last year, this same period, November-December.”
The boy’s eyes water. “I try, Dad. I try to be friendly and semiaggressive and all that when the people come in.”
“I know you do, Nelson. I know you do.”
“I can’t go out and drag ‘em in out of the cold.”
“You’re right. Forget what I said. The thing about Charlie was, he had connections. I’ve lived in this county all my life except those two years in the Army and I don’t have that kind of connections.”
“I know a lot of people my age,” Nelson protests.
“Yeah,” Harry says, “you know the kind of people who sell you their used-up convertibles for a fancy price. But Charlie knows the kind of people who actually come in and buy a car. He expects ‘em to; he’s not surprised, they’re not surprised. Maybe it’s being Greek, I don’t know. No matter what they say about you and me, kid, we’re not Greek.”
This joking doesn’t help; the boy has been wounded, deeper than Harry wanted. “I don’t think it’s me,” Nelson says. “It’s the economy.”
The traffic on Route 111 is picking up; people are heading home in the gloom. Harry too can go; Nelson is on the floor till eight. Climb into the Corona and turn on the four-speaker radio and hear how silver is doing. Hi ho, Silver. Harry says, in a voice that sounds sage in his own ears, almost like Webb Murkett’s, “Yeah, well, that has its wrinkles. This oil thing is hurting the Japanese worse than it is us, and what hurts them should be doing us good. The yen is down, these cars cost less in real dollars than they did last year, and it ought to be reflected in our sales.” That look on Cindy’s face in the photograph, Harry can’t get it out of his mind: an anxious startled kind of joy, as if she was floating away in a balloon and had just felt the earth lurch free. “Numbers,” he tells Nelson in stern conclusion. “Numbers don’t lie, and they don’t forgive.”
New Year’s Day was when Harry and Janice had decided to go to Ma Springer with their news, which they had been keeping to themselves for nearly a week. Dread of how the old lady might react had prompted the postponement, plus a groping after ceremony, a wish to show respect for the sacred bonds of family by announcing the break on a significant day, the first of a new decade. Yet now that the day is here, they feel hungover and depleted from having stayed at Buddy Inglefinger’s until three in the morning. Their tardy departure had been further prolonged by an uproarious commotion over cars in the driveway - a car that wouldn’t start, belonging to Thelma Harrison’s Maryland cousin, who was visiting. There was a lot of boozy shouting and fallingdown helpfulness in the headlights as jump cables were found and Ronnie’s Volvo was jockeyed nose to nose with the cousin’s Nova, everybody poking their flashlight in to make sure Ronnie was connecting positive to positive and not going to blow out the batteries. Harry has seen jump cables actually melt in circumstances like this. Some woman he hardly knew had a mouth big enough to put the head of a flashlight in it, so her cheeks glowed like a lampshade. Buddy and his new girl, a frantic skinny sixfooter with frizzed-out hair and three children from a broken marriage, had made some kind of punch of pineapple juice and rum and brandy, and the taste of pineapple still at noon keeps returning. On top of Harry’s headache Nelson and Pru, who stayed home with Mom-mom last night watching on television straight from Times Square Guy Lombardo’s brother now that Guy Lombardo is dead, are hogging the living room watching the Cotton Bowl Festival Parade from Texas, so he and Janice have to take Ma Springer into the kitchen to get some privacy. A deadly staleness flavors the new decade. As they sit down at the kitchen table for their interview, it seems to him that they have already done this, and are sitting down to a rerun.
Janice, her eyes ringed by weariness, turns to him in his daze and says, “Harry, you begin.”
“Me?”
�
�My goodness, what can this be?” Ma asks, pretending to be cross but pleased by the formality, the two of them touching her elbows and steering her in here. “You’re acting like Janice is pregnant but I know she had her tubes tied.”
“Cauterized,” Janice says softly, pained.
Harry begins. “Bessie, you know we’ve been looking at houses.”
Playfulness snaps out of the old lady’s face as if pulled by a rubber band. The skin at the corners of her set lips is crossed and recrossed, Harry suddenly sees, by fine dry wrinkles. In his mind his mother-in-law has stayed as when he first met her, packed into her skin; but unnoticed by him Bessie’s hide has loosened and cracked like putty in a cellar window, has developed the complexity of paper crumpled and then smoothed again. He tastes pineapple. A small black spot of nausea appears and grows as if rapidly approaching down the great parched space of her severe, expectant silence.
“Now,” he must go on, swallowing, “we think we’ve found one we like. A little stone two-story over in Penn Park. The realtor thinks it might have been a gardener’s cottage that somebody sold off when the estates were broken up and then was enlarged to fit a better kitchen in. It’s on a little turnaround off Franklin Drive behind the bigger houses; the privacy is great.”
