Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  “It stinks, in my humble. There’s nothing new about it. Oh, it’s bigger, a bit, and the engine is up from two point eight to three point oh, and twenty-four valves instead of twelve, so you get more oomph, but for a basic twenty-one K you expect a little oomph - my God. The dashboard is a disaster. The climatecontrol panel slides out like a drawer and won’t budge unless the ignition’s on, which is ridiculous, number one, and two, they kept from last year’s model their crazy idea of two sets of audio controls so you have all these extra buttons when already there’s enough for an airplane cockpit. It costs luxury, Dad, and it drives luxury you could say, but it looks cheap inside and pseudo-Audi outside. Toyota, let’s face it, has about the styling imagination of a gerbil. Their cars don’t express anything. Good cars, classic cars - the Thirties Packards, the little Jags with the long hood and spoked wheels, the Fifties finned jobbies, even the VW bug expressed something, made a statement. Toyotas don’t express anything but playing it safe and stealing other people’s ideas. Look at their pickup. The pickup used to be hot, but now they’ve let Ford and GM right back into the market. Look at the MR-2. It doesn’t sell for shit now.”

  Harry argues, “High insurance is hurting everybody’s twoseaters. Toyota puts out a good solid machine. They handle well and they last, and people know that and respect it.”

  Nelson cuts him short. “And they’re so damn dictatorial - they tell you exactly what to charge, what to put in the windows, what your salespeople should wear, how many square feet of this and that you have to have to be good enough to lick their bazoo. When I took over I was surprised at all the crap you and Charlie had been swallowing all those years. They expect you to be their robot.”

  Now Rabbit is fully offended. “Welcome to the real world, kid. You’re going to be part of some organization or other in this life. Toyota’s been good to us and good to your grandfather and don’t you forget it. I can remember Fred Springer when he first got the Toyota franchise saying he felt like a kid at Christmas all year round.” The women in the family are always saying Nelson is a throwback to his grandfather and Harry hopes by mentioning dead Fred to bring the boy back into line. All this blaspheming Toyota makes Harry uneasy.

  But Nelson goes on, “Grandpa was a dealer, Dad. He loved to make deals. He used to tell about it: you came up short on some and made out like a bandit on others and it was fun. There was some play in the situation, some space for creativity. Unloading the trade-ins is about the only spontaneous creative thing left in the business now, and Toyota tells you they don’t want a bunch of ugly American junk up front on the lot, you almost have to sell the used cars on the sly. At least you can cut an extra grand or so if you get a dummy; selling new is just running the cash register. I don’t call that selling, just standing at the checkout counter.”

  “Not bad for forty-five thou plus benefits.” What Nelson makes a year now. Harry and Janice quarrel about it; he says it’s too much, she says he has a family to support. “When I was your age,” he tells the boy, perhaps not for the first time, “I was pulling down- thirteen five a year as a Linotyper and came home dirty every night. The job gave me headaches and ruined my eyes. I used to have perfect eyes.”

  “That was then, Dad, this is now. You were still in the industrial era. You were a blue-collar slave. People don’t make money an hour at a time any more; you just get yourself in the right position and it comes. I know guys, lawyers, guys in real estate, no older than me and not as smart who pull in two, three hundred K on a single transaction. You must know a lot of retired money down here. It’s easy to be rich, that’s what this country is all about.”

  “These must be the guys doing all that selling-off of Nevada to the Japanese you’re so upset about. What’re you so hungry for money for anyway? You live mortgage-free in that house your mother gives you, you must be saving a bundle. Speaking of used cars - ‘

  “Dad, I hate to break the news to you, but forty thousand just isn’t a fuck of a lot if you want to live with any style.”

  “Jesus, how much style do you and Pru need? Your house is free, all you do is cover heat and taxes -“

  “The taxes on that barn have crept up to over four grand. Mt. Judge real estate is way up since the new baby boom, even a semidetached over toward that slummy end of Jackson Road where you used to live goes for six figures. Also the federal tax reform didn’t do a thing for my bracket, you got to be rich to get the benefits. Lyle was showing me on a spread sheet - “

  “That’s something else I wanted to ask you about. Whose idea was it to replace Mildred Kroust with this guy?”

  “Dad, she’d been with Springer Motors forever - “

  “I know, that was the point. She could do it all in her sleep.”

  “She couldn’t, actually, though she was asleep a lot of the time. She never could handle computers, for one thing. Oh sure, she tried, but one little scramble or error message’d show up on the screen she’d blame the machine and call up the company to send a repairman over at a hundred twenty an hour when all that was wrong was she couldn’t read the manual and had hit the wrong key. She was ancient. You should have let her go when she reached retirement age.”

  The apartment door furtively clicks open. “Just me,” Janice’s voice calls. “Pru and the babies wanted to stay at the pool a little longer and I thought I’d come back and start dinner. I thought we’d just have odds and ends tonight; I’ll see if there’s any soup to warm up. Keep talking, boys.” She doesn’t intrude upon them; her footsteps head into the kitchen. She must imagine they are having a healing talk, father to son. In fact Harry is looking at Nelson as if the boy is a computer. There is a glitch, a secret. He talks too much, too rapidly. Nellie used to be taciturn and sullen and now he keeps spilling out words, giving more answer than there was question. Something is revving him up, something is wrong. Harry says, of Mildred Kroust, “She wasn’t that old, actually, was she? Sixty-eight? Sixty-nine?”

  “Dad, she was in her seventies and counting. Lyle does all she ever used to do and comes in only two or three days a week.”

  “He’s doing it all different, I can see on the stat sheets. That was the thing I wanted to ask you about, the figures on the used in the November set.”

  For some reason, the kid has gone white around the gills again. He pokes his cigarette through the hole at the beer pull-tab and then crushes the can in one hand, no big trick now that they’re made of paper-thin aluminum. He rises from his chair and seems to be heading toward his mother, who has been knocking things around in the kitchen.

  ‘Janice! ” Harry shouts, turning his head with difficulty, his neck stiff with fat.

  She stands in the kitchen entryway in a wet black bathing suit and a purple wraparound skirt, to make herself decent for the elevator. She looks a touch foozled: she cracked open the Campari bottle before leading the others down to the pool and must have hurried back to give herself another slug. Her skimpy hair is wet and stringy. “What?” she says, responding guiltily to the urgent sound of Harry’s voice.

  “Where did that latest batch of sheets from the lot go? Weren’t they sitting over on the desk?”

  This desk is one they bought cheap down here, in a hurry to furnish their place, in the same style as the end tables flanking the blond fold-out sofa and their bedroom bureaus - white-painted wood with the legs slashed at intervals with gold paint to imitate bamboo joints. It has only three shallow drawers that stick in the humidity and some cubby holes up top where bills and invitations get lost. The desktop, of some glazed marmoreal stuff like petrified honey-vanilla ice cream, is generally covered by a drift of unanswered letters and bank statements and statements from their stockbrokers and money management fund and golf scorecards and Xeroxed announcements from the Village Activities Committee, called VAC since life down here is supposedly a perpetual vacation. Also Janice has a way of tearing out clippings from health magazines and The National Enquirer and the Fort Myers News-Press and then forgetting who she meant to send th
em to. She looks frightened.

  “Were they?” she asks. “Maybe I threw them out. Your idea, Harry, is just pile everything on it and it’ll still be there next year when you want it.”

  “These just came in last week. They were November’s financial summaries.”

  Her mouth pinches in and her face seems to click shut on a decision she will stick to blindly no matter what happens, the way women will. “I don’t know where they went to. What I especially hate are your old golf cards drifting around. Why do you keep them?”

  “I write tips to myself on them, what I learned on that round. Don’t change the subject, Janice. I want those Goddamn stat sheets.”

  Nelson stands beside his mother at the mouth of the kitchen, the crushed can in his hand. Without the denim jacket his shirt looks even more sissified, with its delicate pink stripes and white French cuffs and round-pointed white collar. The boy and Janice are near the same height, with tense small cloudy faces. Both look furtive. “No big deal, Dad,” Nelson says in a dry-mouthed voice. “You’ll be getting the December summaries in a couple of weeks.” When he turns toward the refrigerator, to get himself another beer, he gives Rabbit a heartbreaking view of the back of his head - the careful rat’s tail, the curved sliver of earring, the growing bald spot.

  And when Pru comes back from the pool with the children, all of them in rubber flipflops and hugging towels around their shoulders and their hair pasted flat against their skulls, the two small children shivering gleefully, their lips bluish, their miniature fingers white and wrinkled from the water, Harry sees Pru in a new way, as the weakest link in a conspiracy against him. That cushiony frontal kiss she gave him at the airport. The pelvis that in her high-cut but otherwise demure white bathing suit looks so gently pried wider by the passing years.

  Their fifth winter down here, this is, and Harry still wakes amazed to find himself actually in Florida, beside the Gulf of Mexico. If not exactly beside it, within sight of it, at least he was until that new row of six-story condos with ornamental turrets and Spanish-tile roofs shut out the last distant wink of watery horizon. When he and Janice bought the place in 1984 you could still see from their balcony snatches of the Gulf, a dead-level edge to the world over the rooftops and broken between the raw new towers like the dots and dashes of Morse code, and in their excitement they bought a telescope and tripod at a nautical shop at the mall a mile down Pindo Palm Boulevard. In its trembling little circle of vision, that first winter, they would catch a sailboat with its striped spinnaker bellying out or a luxury yacht with tall white sides peeling back the waves silently or a fishing charter with its winglike gaffing platforms or, farthest out, a world unto itself, a rusty gray oil freighter headed motionlessly toward Mobile or New Orleans or back toward Panama or Venezuela. In the years since, their view of the water has been built shut, skyscraper hotels arising along the shore, constructions the color of oatmeal or raspberry whip or else sheer glass like vertical distillations, cold and pure, of the Gulf’s blue-green.

  Where these towers arise had once been nothing but sand and mangrove swamp and snaky tidal inlets slipping among the nets of roots and dimpling where an alligator or a water moccasin glided; and then a scattering of white-painted houses and unpainted shacks in feeble imitation of the South to the north, scratching out some cotton and grazing some cattle on the sandy soil, sending north shuffling herds of beef on the hoof to the starving rebel troops in the Civil War; and then houses closer together, some of brick and wrought iron and of limestone and granite barged in from Alabama quarries. Then, in the era after Reconstruction, to this appendage of the South came the railroads and the rich and the sick and the hopeful misfits, this being frontier in an unexpected direction. Busts followed booms; optimism kept washing in. Now, with the jets and Social Security and the national sunworship, they can’t build onto it fast enough, this city called Deleon, named after some Spanish explorer killed for all his shining black breastplate by the poisoned arrow of a Seminole in 1521 near here or a place like it, and pronounced Deelyun by the locals, as if they are offering to deal you in. The past glimmers like a dream at the back of Harry’s mind as he awakes; in his semiretirement he has taken to reading history. It has always vaguely interested him, that sinister mulch of facts our little lives grow out of before joining the mulch themselves, the fragile brown rotting layers of previous deaths, layers that if deep enough and squeezed hard enough make coal as in Pennsylvania. On quiet evenings, while Janice sits on the sofa sipping herself into stupidity with some lamebrain TV show, he lies on the bed leaning back against its padded satiny headboard with a book, staring dizzily down into the past as if high in a jade-green treehouse.

  The sound that breaks into his dreams and dispels them is the rasp of golf greens being mowed, and then the scarcely less mechanical weeping noise of the seagulls gathering on the freshly watered fairways, where the earthworms are surfacing to drink. The head of their bed is by the big glass sliding doors, left open a crack to take in the winter-morning cool, in these few months when the air-conditioner is non-essential; so the cool salt air, sweetened with the scent of fresh fairways, reminds his face of where he is, this mass-produced paradise where Janice’s money has taken him. She is not in the bed, though her warmth still greets his knee as he spreadeagles into her space. In deference to his height of six three, they have at last bought a king-size bed, so for the first time in his life his feet do not hang over the bottom and force him to sleep on his belly like a dead man floating. It took him a long time to get used to it, his feet not hooking onto the mattress this way but instead being forced to bend at the ankle or else point sideways. He gets foot cramps. He tries to sleep on his side, slightly curled up; it gives his mouth space to breathe and his belly room to slop into, and it frightens his frail heart less than hanging face down over the thickness of the mattress. But his arms don’t know where to go. A hand crooked under his head loses circulation at the wrist and its numbness awakes him, tingling as if with an electric shock. If he lies on his back, Janice says, he snores. She snores herself now, now that they are approaching elderly, but he tries not to blame her for it: poor mutt, she can’t help what she does when asleep, snoring and sometimes farting so bad he has to bury his nose in the pillow and remind himself she’s only human. Poor women: they have a lot of leaks down there, their bodies are too complicated. He hears her now in the kitchen, talking in an unreal high needling sort of voice, the way we talk to children.

  Rabbit listens for the lower younger voice of the children’s mother to chime in but instead hears, close to his head, a bird cheeping in the Norfolk pine whose branches can be touched from their balcony. He still can’t get over Norfolk pines, the way they look like the plastic trees you buy for Christmas, the branches spaced like slats and each one of them a plume perfect as a bird’s feather and the whole tree absolutely conical in shape. The bird’s cheeping sounds like a piece of moist wood being rhythmically made to squeak against another. Most nature in Florida has a manufactured quality. Wall-to-wall carpet, green outdoor carpeting on the cement walks, crunchy St. Augustine grass in the space between the walks, all of it imposed on top of the sand, the dirty-gray sand that sprays over your shoes when you take a divot down here.

  Today is Wednesday, he has a golf date, his usual foursome, tee-off time at nine-forty: the thought gives him a reason to get out of bed and not just lie there forever, trying to remember his dream. In his dream he had been reaching out toward something his sleeping eyes didn’t let him see through his lids, something round and shadowy and sad, big-bellied with the vague doom he tries to suppress during the daytime.

  Up, Rabbit examines the phony-looking branches of the Norfolk pine to see if he can see the noisy bird. He expects from the self-importance of the sound a cockatoo or toucan at least, a squawky tropical something with foot-long tailfeathers hanging down, but all he sees is a small brown bird such as flicker all around in Pennsylvania. Maybe it is a Pennsylvania bird, a migrant down here just like him.
A snowbird.

  He goes into the bathroom and brushes his teeth and urinates. Funny, it used to make a throaty splash in the toilet bowl, now a kind of grudging uncertain stream comes out, he has to rise once and sometimes even twice in the night, sitting on the toilet like a woman; what with the foreskin folded over sleepily he can never be sure which direction it will come out in, bad as a woman, they can’t aim either. He shaves and weighs himself. He’s gained a pound. Those Planter’s Peanut Bars. He moves to leave the bedroom and realizes he can’t. In Florida he sleeps in his underwear; pajamas get twisted around him and around two in the morning feel so hot they wake him up, along with the pressure in his bladder. With Pru and the kids here he can’t just wander into the kitchen in his underwear. He hears them out there, bumping into things. He either should put on his golf pants and a polo shirt or find his bathrobe. He decides on the bathrobe, a burgundy red with gray lapels, as being more -what’s that word that keeps coming up in medieval history? - seigneurial. Hostly. Grandpatemal. It makes a statement, as Nelson would say.

  By the time Rabbit opens the door, the first fight of the day has begun in the kitchen. Precious little Judy is unhappy; salt tears redden the rims of her lids though she is trying, shaky-voiced, not to cry. “But half the kids in my school have been. Some of them have even been twice, and they don’t even have grandparents living in Florida!” She can’t reach Disney World.