Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  Their laughter seems speeded-up, like the action in a beer commercial; their mockery in its unnatural unison holds a premonition for Harry, that he has wasted the day, that now he must hurry, hurry to catch up, like when he used. to run late to school with a watery flutter in his stomach. The three other men, returning to their solid domestic arrangements, in farewell cuff at him, even pinch the nape of his neck, as if to rouse him from a spiritual torpor. In Florida, he thinks, even friendship has a thin, provisional quality, since people might at any minute buy another condominium and move to it, or else up and die.

  You leave the clubs with the pro shop, and the shoes. Rabbit -walks in his moccasins, worn so loose his feet move in them without seeming to rub leather, across the parking lot and a striped piece of driveway and one of the complex’s little traffic islands covered in green outdoor carpeting to the entryway of Building B. He uses his key and punches in the code on the panel in the narrow space where two closed-circuit television cameras are watching him, pulls the door - it doesn’t buzz, it goes ding ding ding like a fire truck backing up - and takes the elevator to the fourth floor. In 413, his home away from home, Janice and Pru and the kids are playing Hearts, that is three of them are and Roy is holding a fistful of cards while his mother tells him what to do and which to discard. His face has a puffy look as though it’s been an afternoon of frustrations and disappointments. They all greet Harry as if he’s going to rescue them from death by boredom, but he feels so beat all he wants to do is lie down and let his body soak in nothingness. He asks, “Where’s Nelson?”

  It’s not the right question, at least in front of the kids. Janice and Pru glance toward one another and then Pru volunteers, “He’s out doing a few errands in the car.” Down here they only have one car, the Camry, leaving Harry’s Celica back in Penn Park. It works out, since most everything they need -drugs, magazines, haircuts, bathing suits, tennis balls - they can find within the Valhalla complex. The little food commissary in Building C charges airport prices, so Janice usually does a big shopping once a week at the Winn Dixie a half-mile down Pindo Palm Boulevard. About once a week also they visit their bank in downtown Deleon, on a plaza two blocks back from the beachfront where elevator music is always playing, both inside the bank and outside; they must have speakers hidden in the trees. Maybe twice a month they go to a movie at a cineplex in a giant mall over on Palmetto Palm Boulevard two miles away. But days at a stretch go by when the car just sits there in its parking slot, attracting rust and white splotches of birdshit.

  “What kind of errands does he have to do?”

  “Oh Harry,” Janice says. “People need things. He doesn’t like the kind of beer you buy. He likes a special kind of dental floss, tape instead of thread. And he likes to drive around; he gets claustrophobic.”

  “We all get claustrophobic,” he tells her. “Most of us don’t go stealing cars about it.”

  “You look exhausted. Did you lose?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “You always lose. He plays with these three Jewish men,” she explains to her daughter-in-law, “and they always take twenty dollars off of him.”

  “Don’t be so prejudiced, you sound like your mother. And for your information I win as often as not.”

  “I never hear about it when you do. They keep telling you how good you are, and then take your money.”

  “You dope, one of them lost twenty dollars with me, he was my partner!”

  Serenely she says, just like her mother, addressing nobody in particular, “They probably give it back to him; they’re all in cahoots.”

  It occurs to him that she is saying these disagreeable and absurd things as a distraction from Nelson’s rude and mysterious absence.

  Judy says, “Grandpa, come take Roy’s hand and play. He doesn’t know how to even hold the cards and he’s being fussy.”

  Roy obligingly proves her point by throwing the cards down on the round glass table, much as this morning he threw the spoon. “I hate games,” he says, with a curious precision, like one of those old-fashioned dolls that would say a little speech when you pulled a string that came out of their backs.

  Judy swiftly whomps him, with the hand not holding her cards. She chops with her fist at his shoulders and neck, and when he squalls in self-defense explains to him, “You messed up the trick so now nobody can play. And I was going to shoot the moon!” Pru neatly fans her hand face down on the table and with the other arm, a downy arm oflong loving bones, pulls the wailing little boy against her chest; seeing this, Judy flares into jealousy, goes pinkeyed the way women do before they decide to cry, and races off toward Harry and Janice’s bedroom.

  Pru smiles wanly, looking exhausted herself. “Everybody’s tired and cranky,” she sort of sings, over the top of Roy’s head so Judy can hear it too.

  Janice stands, a bit wobbly for a second. She knocks the glass ‘table with her shin, and next to her abandoned hand of Hearts an orange juice glass half full of Campari shivers, the scarlet circlet of it, making him think of the pond when Ed’s ball skipped in. She is back into her tennis dress. Dried sweat-stains on its side and beneath the arms are outlined like continents on a very faint map. “Maybe we made them do too much,” she explains to Harry. “We did this enormous shopping, went to lunch at Burger King, came back here, Pru took them for swimming and shufeboard for two hours, and then Judy and I went over to the tennis courts and knocked the ball around.”

  “How’d she do?” he asks.

  Janice laughs as if surprised. “Terrific, actually. She’s going to be a jock, just like you.”

  Rabbit goes into his bedroom. If nobody but Janice were here, he would lie on this bed, push his eyes through a few pages of the history book she gave him for Christmas, close his eyes on the sound of the bird dryly chirping in the Norfolk pine, and succumb to the great heaviness of being. But Judy has beat him to his own king-size bed with its jade-green fitted coverlet. She is curled up and hiding her face. He lies down close to the edge and lets her press her knees against his presence. He admires her hair, the amazing protein perfection of it, the long pale strands that in sun deepen to a shiny orange. “Better rest up for Bingo tonight,” he says.

  “If Roy goes I’m not going,” she says.

  “Don’t be down on Roy,” he tells her. “He’s a good scout.”

  “He’s not. I was going to shoot the moon. I’d already took the Queen of Spades, and I had the Ace of Hearts and the Jack and some others and then he ruins it all and Mommy thinks that’s so cute. He gets all the attention and everything ever since he was born, just because he’s a boy!”

  He admits, “It’s tough. I was in your shoes, except it was reversed. I had a sister instead of a brother.”

  “Didn’t you hate her?” She removes her face from her folded arms and stares up at him with rubbed-looking green eyes.

  He answers, “No. I guess, to be honest, I loved her. I loved Mim.” The truth of this shocks him: he realizes how few others in his life he has loved so bluntly, without something of scorn, as his little wiry Mim. Her face seemed a narrower, harder version of his, with the same short upper lip, only a brunette, and a girl. Himself transposed into quite another key, and yet the melody recognizable. He remembers the sticky grip of her fingers in his when Mom and Pop would lead them on their Sunday walk, up the mountain to the Pinnacle Hotel and then back along the edge of the quarry; Mim hung on and roused protectiveness in him and perhaps used it up for everybody else, for every other female. Mim as his own blood sister had a certain unforced claim over him no woman since has been able to establish.

  “Was she younger than you or older?”

  “Younger. Younger even than me than Roy is than you. But she was a girl and girls are less ornery than boys. Though I guess Mim was ornery in her way. Once she got to be sixteen, she put my parents through hell.”

  “Grandpa, what’s `ornery’?”

  “Oh, you know. Mean. Contrary. Rebellious.”

  “Like Da
ddy?”

  “I don’t think of your daddy as ornery, just, what’s the word? - uptight. People get to him more than they do to most people. He’s sensitive.” Formulating even this much thickens his tongue and blurs his mind. “Judy, let’s have a contest. You lie over there and I’ll lie here and we’ll see who can fall asleep soonest.”

  “Who’ll be the judge?”

  “Your mother,” he says, letting his moccasins fall from his feet onto the floor over the edge of the bed. He closes his eyes on the posterlike Florida sunshine and in the intimate red of his brain envisions swooping on a bicycle down Jackson Road and then Potter Avenue with Mim on the handlebars of his rattly old blue Elgin, she maybe six and he twelve, if they hit a rock or pothole she’ll go flying with him and the bike on top of her grinding her into the asphalt and ruining her pretty face forever, a woman’s face is her fortune, but in her faith in him she sings, he can’t remember the song, just the sensation of snatches of words flicked back into his ears as her long black hair whips against his eyes and mouth, making the bicycle ride more dangerous still. He led Mim into danger but always led her out. Shoo-fly pie. That was one of the songs she used to sing around the house, day after day until it drove them all crazy. Shoo-fly pie and apple pan dowdy, makes your eyes light up, your tummy say “howdy!” And then she would do a thing with her eyes that would make the whole rest of the family laugh.

  He feels Judy ease her weight from his side and with that exaggerated, creaking stealth of small children move around the foot of the bed and out of the room. The door clicks, female voices whisper. Their whispers merge with a dream, involving an enormous scoop-shaped space, an amphitheater, an audience somehow for whom he is performing, though there is no other person in the dream, just this sense of presence, of echoing august dreadfully serious presence. He wakes frightened, with dribble down from one comer of his mouth. He feels like a drum that has just been struck. The space he was dreaming of he now recognizes as his rib cage, as if he has become his own heart, a huffing puffing pumping man at mid-court, waiting for the whistle and the highreaching jump-off. At some point in his sleep his chest began to ache, a stale sorrowful ache he associates with the pathetically bad way he played golf this afternoon, unable to concentrate, unable to loosen up. He wonders how long he has slept. The poster of sunshine and palm tops and distant pink red-roofed buildings pasted on the outer skin of the sliding windows has dulled in tint, gone shadowy, and the sounds of golf, its purposeful concussions alternating with intent silence and involuntary cries of triumph or disappointment, have subsided. And in the air outside, like the fluttering tinsel above a used-car lot, birds of many makes are calling to each other to wrap up the day. This hour or two before supper, when play - the last round of Horse at the basket out by the garage in the alley - used to be most intense, has become nap time as he slowly sinks toward earth with his wasting muscles and accumulating fat. He must lose some weight.

  Only Judy is in the living room. She is flicking silently back and forth between channels. Faces, black in The Jeffersons, white in Family Ties, imploringly pop into visibility and then vanish amid shots of beer cans plunged into slow-motion waterfalls, George Bush lugging a gun through Texas underbrush, a Florida farmer gesturing toward his burnt fields, a Scotland Yard detective doing a little lecture with a diagram of an airplane’s hold. “What’s he saying?” Harry asks, but even as he asks, the image is gone, replaced by another, of a manatee being implanted with an electronic tracking device by a male pony-tailed manatee-conservation freak. An impatient rage within the child, a gluttony for images, brushes the manatee away. “Two channels back,” Harry begs. “About the Pan Am plane.”

  “It was a bomb, silly,” Judy says. “It had to be.”

  Children, they believe that headlines always happen to other people. “For Chrissake, cool it with the channel-changer. Lemme get a beer and I’ll show you a neat card game. Where is everybody?”

  “Grandma went to her women’s group, Mom put Roy down for his nap.”

  “Your daddy -?” He thinks midway he shouldn’t bring it up, but the words are out.

  Judy shrugs and finishes the sentence. “Hasn’t checked in yet.”

  It turns out she already knows how to play Rummy. In fact, she catches him with his hand full of three-of-a-kinds he was waiting to lay down when he had gin. Caught. Their laughter brings Pru out of her bedroom, in little white shorts her widened hips have stretched into horizontal wrinkles. Her face has taken wrinkles from the pillow, and seems a bit blurred and bloated by sleep, or a spell of crying. How suggestible female flesh is. Her feet are long and bare, with that chipped toenail polish. He asks his daughter-in-law, “What’s up?”

  She too shrugs. “I guess we’ll go to dinner when Janice comes back. I’ll feed Roy some applesauce to hold him.”

  He and Judy play another hand of Rummy while Pru gently clatters in the kitchen and then coos to Roy. Evening down here comes without much ceremony; suddenly the air beyond the balcony is gray as if with fine fog, and sea-scent drifts in through the sliding doors, and the sounds of birds and golf have gone away. This is peace. He resents it when Janice comes back, with that aggressive glow her women’s group gives her. “Oh Harry, you men have been so awful! Not only were we considered chattel, but all those patriarchal religions tried to make us feel guilty about menstruating. They said we were unclean.”

  “Sorry,” he says. “That was a crummy thing to do.”

  “That was Eve’s basic sin, the lady professor told us,” Janice goes on, half to Pru. “Something about apples being the color of blood, I couldn’t quite follow it.”

  Harry interrupts, “By any chance are either of you two Eves like me, sort of starving?”

  “We bought you lots of healthy snacks,” Pru says. “Apricots dried without sulphur, unsalted banana chips.”

  “Is that what that stuff was in little plastic bags? I thought it might be for Chinese food and I shouldn’t touch it.”

  “Yes,” Janice decides, “let’s just go to dinner. We’ll leave a note for Nelson. Pru, any old dress. Evenings, they won’t seat shorts and men without jackets.”

  The Mead Hall, on the floor of Building B above Club Nineteen, is a combination restaurant and function room. On the one hand, there are menus with choices and prices, and waitresses in brief gold outfits echoing Valhalla’s ring-gold theme, that figures here and there in the decor when the interior decorator remembered it, and there is even a wine steward in a summer tux and a kind of bicycle lock around his neck; on the other hand, as you go in a bulletin board is loaded with announcements and leaflets and tinted sheets about this or that set of lessons or lecture or concert or square dance or travelogue you could attend in the area, and all the time you’re eating, on Wednesday and Saturday nights, Bingo goes on on the other side of the room, run from a stage and microphone somewhat out of sight behind an enormous flanged pillar that holds up the room’s starry curved ceiling. The ceiling is a skylight for part of its breadth. That strange, scooping, personified space in his dream: could it have been simply this hall, conjured up because his stomach wanted food? Rabbit feels like Marty Tothero, looking at the menu, faced for the thousandth time with the same old choices among steak and veal, pork and ham, shrimps and scallops, swordfish Cajun style and fillets of sole stuffed with mussels, mushrooms, and artichoke hearts.

  The pillar on two of its broad sides bears giant muddy ceramic murals about the Vikings: broadswords and horned helmets and dragon-headed ships protrude from the enamelled mass in its numerous blotchy colors, but the men wielding and wearing and sailing these protrusions are swallowed up in a crazy weave of anus and legs and lightning bolts, a kind ofbloody basketwork in honor of history. “Seventy-one,” the lugubrious male voice hidden behind the pillar intones. It repeats, “Seven one.”

  It is hard to carry on a conversation with the numbers blaring from the loudspeakers. Pru mothers Roy and coaxes a little baked potato and a single stir-fried shrimp into him. Janice
talks Judy into ordering a lobster and then has to show her how to crack it, how to push out the big curved piece of white meat with a finger up through the poor boiled creature’s ass, how to suck the little tail segments, the same way you suck artichoke leaves. Rabbit, who has ordered eye-of-round steak, can hardly bear to watch; to him, eating lobster - its many little feathery legs, its eyes on stalks, its antennae roasted red like the rest - is nightmarish, a descent back into the squirmy scrabbly origins of life. Crabs, too, and oysters and clams: all around him in Florida he sees old people stuffing their faces with this filthy gluey unspeakable stuff; and telling you furthermore it’s good for you, better than steak and hamburger, which is what he usually orders, though he doesn’t mind a breaded pork chop or piece of veal, or a slice of ham with a pineapple ring or some moon-shaped snitzes of baked apple and on the side some greasy Dutch fries like a slipping stack of poker chips. That’s how ham comes in Pennsylvania. You can’t get sausage down here, at least not the spicy pork sausage he was raised on, or scrapple drenched in maple syrup, or apple pie with enough cinnamon in it, or shoo-fly pie at all. Janice went to a nutrition group a few winters ago and came back telling him how he was clogging his arteries with all this fat and dough. So for a while there was a rash of salads and low-cal pasta and fish and fowl back in the condominium; but whenever he gets into the Mead Hall he can order what he wants. With steak, you have to specify well-done or it comes rubbery and blue-rare. Disgusting. All the things that satisfy your appetite and seem so beautiful are disgusting when you don’t have the appetite. Disposable meat.