by John Updike
“Driving is boring,” Rabbit pontificates, “but it’s what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.”
“Harry,” Janice says. “You’re going too fast again. Do you want to take 75, or push on to Route 41?”
* * *
Of all the roads Harry has seen in his life, Route 41, the old Tamiami Trail, is the most steadily depressing. It is wider than commercial-use, unlimited-access highways tend to be up north, and somehow the competitive roadside enterprise looks worse in constant sunlight, as if like plastic garbage bags it will never rot away. WINN DIXIE. PUBLIX. Eckerd Drugs. K Mart. Wal-Mart. TACO BELL. ARK PLAZA. Joy Food Store. Starvin’ Marvin Discount Food Wine and Beer. Among the repeating franchises selling gasoline and groceries and liquor and drugs all mixed together in that peculiar lawless way they have down here, low -pale buildings cater especially to illness and age. Arthritic Rehabilitation Center. Nursefinder, Inc. Cardiac Rehabilitation Center. Chiropractix. Legal Offices - Medicare and Malpractice Cases a Speciality. Hearing Aids and Contact Lenses. West Coast Knee Center. Universal Prosthetics. National Cremation Society. On the telephone wires, instead of the sparrows and starlings you see in Pennsylvania, lone hawks and buzzards sit. Banks, stylish big structures in smoked glass, rise higher than the wires with their glossy self-advertisements. First Federal. Southeast. Barnett Bank with its Superteller. C & S proclaiming All Services, servicing the millions and billions in money people bring down here along with their decrepit bodies, the loot of all those lifetimes flooding the sandy low land, floating these big smoked-glass superliners.
Alongside 41, between the banks and stores and pet suppliers and sprinkler installers, miles of low homes are roofed with fat white cooling tile. A block or two back from the highway in the carbon-monoxide haze tall pink condos like Spanish castles or Chinese pagodas spread sideways like banyan trees. Banyan trees fascinate Harry down here, the way they spread by dropping down vines that take root; they look to him like enormous chewing gum on your shoe. Easy Drugs. Nu-VIEW. Ameri-Life and Health. Starlite Motel. JESUS CHRIST Is LORD. His carful of family grows silent and dazed as he drives the miles, stopping now and then at the overhead lights that signal an intersecting road, a secondary road heading west to beaches and what mangrove swamps survive and east to the scruffy prairie being skinned in great square tracts for yet more development. Development! We’re being developed to death. Each turning off of Route 41 takes some people home, to their little niche in the maze, their own parking spot and hard-bought place in the sun. The sun is low enough over the Gulf now to tinge everything pink, the red of the stoplights almost invisible. At the Angstroms’ own turnoff, two more miles of streets unfold, some straight and some curving, through blocks of single-family houses with half-dead little front yards ornamented by plumes of pampas grass and flowering bushes on vacation from flowering in this dry butt-end of the year. Janice and Harry at first thought they might purchase one of these pale one-story houses lurking behind their tropical bushes and orange trees, caves of coolness and dark, with their secret pools out back behind the garages with their automatic doors, but such houses reminded them unhappily of the house they had in Penn Villas that saw so much marital misery and strangeness before it burned down, half of it, so they settled for a two-bedroom condominium up high in the air, on the fourth floor, overlooking a golf course from a narrow balcony screened by the top branches of Norfolk pines. Of all the addresses where Harry has lived in his life - 303 Jackson Road; Btry A, 66th FA Bn, Fort Larson, Texas; 447 Wilbur Street, Apt. #5; whatever the number on Summer Street was where he parked himself with Ruth Leonard that spring long ago; 26 Vista Crescent; 89 Joseph Street for ten years, courtesy of Ma Springer; 14%2 Franklin Drive - this is the highest number by far: 59600 Pindo Palm Boulevard, Building B, #413. He hadn’t been crazy about the thirteen, in fact he thought builders didn’t put that number in things, but maybe people are less superstitious than they used to be. When he was a kid there was all sorts of worry, not altogether playful, about black cats and spilled salt and opening umbrellas in the house and kicking buckets and walking under ladders. The air was thought then to have eyes and ears and to need placating.
VALHALLA VILLAGE: a big grouted sign, the two words curved around a gold ring of actual brass, inlaid and epoxied-over to discourage vandalous thieves. You turn in at the security booth, get recognized by the guard there, park in one of two spaces with your condo number stencilled right on the asphalt, use your key on the outer door of Building B, punch out the code number to open the inner door, take the elevator, and walk to your left. The corridor is floored in peach-colored carpet and smells of air freshener, to mask the mildew that creeps into every closed space in Florida. A crew comes through three times a week vacuuming and the rug gets lathered and the walls worked once a month, and there are plastic bouquets in little things like basketball hoops next to every numbered door and a mirror across from the elevator plus a big runny-colored green and golden vase on a table shaped like a marble half-moon, but it is still not a space in which you want to linger.
With their suitcases bumping the walls of silver and peach and Janice and Pru still gamely gabbing and little Roy being made to walk on his own two feet now that he’s awake for once and crying about it at every step, Harry feels they are disturbing a mortuary calm, though in fact most everybody behind these doors has contrived something to do in the afternoon, golf or tennis or a beauty-parlor appointment or a bus trip to the Everglades. You live life here as if your condo is just home base, a sort of airconditioned anteroom to the sunny mansion of all outdoors. Stay inside, you might start to mildew. Around five-thirty, an eerie silence of many simultaneous naps descends, but at four o’clock it’s too early for that.
The door to 413 has a double lock operated with two keys, one of which also opens the outer door downstairs. With the impatient mass of his entire family and its baggage pressing behind him, Harry fumbles a bit, his hand jumping the way it does when he’s feeling crowded in the chest, his notched key scratching at the wiggly small slot, but then it fits and turns and clicks and the door swings open and he is home. This place could belong to one of millions of part-time Floridians but in fact is his, his and Janice’s. You enter in a kind of foyer, a closet door to the left and on the right see-through shelves of stained wood Janice has loaded with birds and flowers she made out of shells in a class she took that first year down here, when she was still enthusiastic about shells. Enthusiasm about shells doesn’t last, nor does taking Spanish lessons so you can talk to the help. It’s a phase the greenhorns, the fresh snowbirds, must go through. Baby scallops make feathers and petals, augurs do as bird beaks, slipper shells are like little boats. The shelves, which also hold a few of Ma Springer’s knickknacks, including a big green glass egg with a bubble inside it, separate the foyer from the kitchen, with the dining room beyond it; straight ahead lies the living-room area, where they have the TV and the comfortable wicker chairs and a low round glass table they often eat dinner from, if a show they care about is on. To the left, a square-armed blond sofa can be folded out for a bed and a hollow door leads to the master bedroom, which has a bathroom and a storage area where Janice keeps an ironing board she never uses and an exercise bicycle she rides when she thinks she’s getting overweight, to Nelson’s old tapes of the Bee Gees that he outgrew long ago. The guest bedroom is entered off the living room, to the right, and has its own bathroom that backs up to the kitchen plumbing. The arrangement other years has been that Nelson and Pru take this room with a cot for the baby and Judith sleeps on the foldout sofa, but Harry is not sure this arrangement is still proper. The little ones have grown: Roy perhaps is too big and observant to share a bedroom with his parents and the girl is getting to be enough of a lady to deserve a little privacy.
He explains his plan: “This year I thought we might put the cot in the storage room for Judy, she can use our bathroom and then shut the door, and give Roy the livi
ng-room sofa.”
The small boy gazes upward at his grandfather while his thumb sneaks toward his mouth. He has a flubby sort of mouth that Rabbit associates with the Lubells; neither the Angstroms nor the Springers have bunched-up fat lips like that, like a row of plump berries run together, but Teresa’s father, in the one time Harry met him, visiting Akron because he went to Cleveland for a dealer conference anyway, did, if you could see around the two days’ beard and the cigarette always in the guy’s fat mouth. It’s as if Pru’s worthless creep of a father has been disguised as a child and sent to spy on them all. The kid takes in everything and says nothing. Harry speaks down to him roughly: “Yeah, what’s the matter with that?”
The thumb roots in deeper and the child’s eyes, darker even than Nelson’s and Janice’s, shine with distrust. Judy offers to explain: “He’s scared to be alone in this room all by himself, the baby.”
Pru tries to help. “Sweetie, Mommy and Daddy would be right in that other room, where you used to sleep before you became so grown up.”
Nelson says, “You might have discussed it first with us, Dad, before you switched everything around.”
“Discuss it, when is there a chance to discuss anything with you? Every time I call the lot you’re not there, or the line is busy. I used to get Jake or Rudy at least, now all I get is some fruityvoiced pal of yours you’ve hired.”
“Yeah, Lyle tells me how you grill him about everything.”
“I don’t grill him, I’m just trying to act interested. I still have an interest up there, even if you do think you’re running it half the year.”
“Ha f the year! All the year, from what Mom says.”
Janice intervenes: “What Mom says is her legs hurt after all that sitting in the car and she’s thinking of moving the cocktail hour ahead if this is how we’re all going to talk for five days. Nelson, your father was trying to be considerate about the sleeping arrangements. He and I discussed it. Judy, which would you rather, the sofa or the ironing room?”
“I didn’t mind the old way,” she says.
Little Roy is trying to follow the drift of this discussion and removes his thumb enough for his flubby lips to mouth something Rabbit does not understand. Whatever he’s saying, it makes Roy’s eyes water to think of it. “Eeeeee” is all Harry hears, at the end of the sentence.
Pru translates: “He says she gets to watch TV.”
“What a disgusting baby tattletale,” says Judy, and quick as a dragonfly darting over water she skims across the carpet and with an open hand whacks her little brother on the side of his spherical head. Pru cuts his hair in a kind of inverted bowl-shape. As when a faucet gasps emptily for a second after being turned on, his outrage silences him a moment, though his mouth is open. His yell when it comes arrives at full volume; against its sonic background Judy explains to them all, with a certain condescending air, “Just Johnny Carson sometimes when everybody else was asleep, and Saturday Night Live once that I can remember.”
Harry asks her, “So you’d rather stay in here with the lousy TV than have a little cozy room of your own?”
“It doesn’t have any windows,” she points out shyly, not wanting to hurt his feelings.
“Fine, fine,” Harry says. “I don’t give a fuck where anybody sleeps,” and in demonstration of his indifference strides into his own bedroom, past the king-size bed they bought down here, with its padded headboard covered in quilted satin and a matching jade-green coverlet that is as hard to fold up as the ones in hotels, into the little windowless room and picks up the folding cot, with its sheets and baby-blue Orlon blanket on it, and lugs it through the doorways, banging the frames and one of the wicker armchairs in the living room, into the guest bedroom. He is embarrassed: he overestimated how fast Judy was growing, he had wanted to embower her as his princess, he doesn’t know little girls, his one daughter died and his other is not his.
Janice says, “Harry, you mustn’t overexert yourself, the doctor said.”
“The doctor said,” he mocks. “All he ever sees is people over seventy-five and he says to me just what he says to them.”
But he is breathing hard, and Pru hastens after him to spare him the effort of straightening the folding leg, a U-shape of metal tubing, that has come unclicked and folded underneath, and pulls taut the sheets and blanket. Back in the living room, Harry says to Nelson, who is holding little Roy in his arms again, “Now are you and the brat happy?”
For answer Nelson turns to Janice and says, “Jesus, Mom, I don’t know as I can stand five days of this.”
But then when they all get settled - the suitcases unpacked into bureaus, Judy and Roy fed milk and cookies and changed into bathing suits and taken to the heated Valhalla Village pool by their mother and Janice, who has to sign them in - Harry and Nelson sit each with a beer at the round glass table and try to be friends. “So,” Harry says, “how’s the car business?”
“You know as well as I do,” Nelson says. “You see the stat sheets every month.” He has developed a nervous irritable habit of grimacing and hunching his shoulders, as though somebody behind him might be about to knock him on the head. He smokes a cigarette as if he’s feeding himself something through a tube, constantly fiddling with the shape of the ash on the edge of a white clamshell he has borrowed from Janice’s collection.
“How do you like the ‘89s?” Harry asks, determined not to put it off, now that he and the boy are alone. “I haven’t seen the actual cars yet, just the brochures. Beautiful brochures. How many millions you think those ad agencies get for making up those brochures? I was looking at the Corolla one trying to figure out if they really had driven that sedan and that wagon up into the mountains or were just faking it, and I had to laugh. The cars were posed on snow but there were no tracks showing how they got there! Look at it sometime.”
Nelson is not much amused. He shapes his ash into a perfect cone and then suddenly stabs it out, twisting the butt vehemently. His hands shake more than a young man’s should. He sips his beer, leaving shreds of foam on his tufty mustache, and, looking level at his father, says, “You asked me what I thought of the ‘89s. The same thing I thought about the ‘88s. Dull, Dad. Boxy. They’re still giving us cars that look like gas-misers when there’s been a gas glut for ten years. Americans want to go back to fins and convertibles and the limo look and these Japs are still trying to sell these tidy little boxes. And not cheap, either. That’s what hurts. The lousy dollar against the yen. Why should people pay seventeen grand for a GTS when in the same range you can get a Mustang or Beretta GT or Mazda MX-6?”
“A Celica doesn’t cost seventeen grand,” Harry says. “Mine back home listed at less than fifteen.”
“Get a few options and it does.”
“Don’t push the options at people - you get a name in the county for loading. People come in determined to have a stripped model, you should sell ‘em one without making ‘em feel they’re being cheapskates.”
“Tell it to California,” Nelson says. “Practically all they want to part with are loaded models. The automatic notchbacks, the All-Trac Turbos. You want a basic ST or GT, it takes months for the order to come through. Luxury is where the bigger profit is, all the way up the line back to Tokyo. You have to try to sell what they send us - the one machine they make that’s really moving, the Camry, you can’t wheedle enough out of the bastards. They treat us like dirt, Dad. They see us as soft. Soft lazy Americans, over the hill. Ten more years, they’ll have bought the whole country. Some television show I was watching, they already own all of Hawaii and half of L.A. and Nevada. They’re buying up thousands of acres of desert in Nevada! What’re they going to do with it? Set off Japanese atom bombs?”
“Don’t get down on the Japanese like that, Nelson. We’ve done fine riding along with the Japanese.”
“Riding along, you said it. Like riding along in the back seat of a Tercel. You always talk of them with such awe, like they’re supermen. They’re not. Some of their design, you
get away from the little safe dependable cheapie family car, is a disaster. The Land Cruiser is a dog, it doesn’t begin to compete with the Cherokee, and neither does the 4-Runner, it was so underpowered they had to come with a V-6 engine that turns out to be a guzzler - fourteen miles to the gallon, I was reading in Consumer Reports. And that van! It’s ridiculous. Where the engine is, up between the front seats, the only way to get to the front from the back is get all the way out and climb back in. In the winter in Pennsylvania, people don’t like to do that. So many customers have been complaining, I drove one myself the other day just to see, and even though I’m no giant, boy, did I feel squeezed in - no foot room to speak of, and no place to put your elbow. And zilch acceleration: pull into a fast-moving highway you’ll get rear-ended. The wind pushed me all over 422, the damn thing is so tall - I could hardly step up into it.”
That’s right, Harry is thinking, you’re no giant. Nelson seems to him strangely precise and indignant and agitated, like a nicely made watch with one tooth off a cogwheel or a gummy spot in the lubrication. The kid keeps sniffing, and lights another cigarette, after not enjoying the one he just snuffed out. He keeps touching his nose, as if his mustache hurts. “Well,” Harry says, taking a relaxed tone to try to relax his son, “vans were never the bread and butter, and Toyota knows they have a lemon. They’re getting a total revamp out by ‘91. How do you like the new Cressida?”
