Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

“Good. The man from the wedding believed her story and she got an office of her own with a window and her nasty boss broke her leg and lost the man they both liked.”

  “Poor Sigourney,” Harry says. “She should have stuck with the gorillas.” He stands way above his own little herd in the theater lobby, where the ushers move back and forth with green garbage bags and red velvet ropes, getting ready for the five-o’clock shows. “So, guys. What shall we do next? How about miniature golf? How about driving up to St. Petersburg, over this fantastic long bridge they have?”

  Roy’s lower lip starts to tremble, and he has such trouble getting his words out that Judy translates for him. “He says he wants to go home.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Janice concurs. “Grandpa was just teasing. Haven’t you learned that about your grandfather yet, Roy? He’s a terrible tease.”

  Is he? Harry has never thought of himself that way. He sometimes says a thing to try it out, like a head fake, to open up a little space.

  Judy smiles knowingly. “He pretends to be mean,” she says.

  “Grrr,” Grandpa says.

  Forty minutes of southwestern Florida rush-hour traffic bring them to the Deleon exit and Pindo Palm Boulevard and the nicely guarded entrance of Valhalla Village. Up in 413, Pru and Nelson look bathed and refreshed and act as if nothing has ever happened. They listen to the travellers’ tales, foremost the incredible story of how Grandpa ate the grungy birdfood, and Pru sets about making dinner, telling Janice to take the weight off her legs, and Nelson settles on the sofa with a child on each knee in front of the local evening news, giving Harry a pang of jealousy and a sensation of injustice. The surly kid spends the whole day balling this big redhead and then is treated like a hero by these two brats Harry went and knocked himself out for.

  Rabbit sits in the chair across the glass table from the sofa and delicately needles his son. ` Ja catch up finally on your sleep?” he asks.

  Nelson gets the dig and looks over at him with his dark swarmy eyes a little flat across the top, like a cross cat’s. “I went into a place to get a bite to eat last night and stayed at the bar too long,” he tells his father.

  “Ya do that often?”

  With a roll of his eyeballs Nelson indicates the children’s heads right under his face, watching television but perhaps also listening. Little pitchers. “Naa,” he allows. “Just when I’m tense it helps to take off once in a while. Pru understands. Nothing happens.”

  Rabbit holds up a generous hand. “None of my business, right? You’re twenty-one plus. It’s just you could have called. I mean, a considerate person would have called. None of us could enjoy dinner, not knowing what had happened to you. We could hardly eat.”

  “I tried to call, Dad, but I don’t have your number down here memorized and the place I was in some sleazeball had stolen the phone book.”

  “That’s your story this evening? This morning your mother told me you did call here but we were down to dinner.”

  “That, too. I tried once from a phone along the highway and then in this place there was no phone book.”

  “Where was the place? Think I’d know it?”

  “No idea where,” Nelson says, and smiles into the television flicker. “I get lost down here, it’s like one big business strip. One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled.”

  The local news commentator is giving the manatee update. “Manatee herds continue to populate both warm-weather feeding areas and traditional winter refuges as fair weather and eightydegree temperatures continue. A general waterways alert is out: boaters, cut your throttle to half-speed. Throughout the weekend, encounters with manatees remain likely in widely varied habitats around Southwest Florida.”

  “They say that,” Rabbit says, “but I never encounter one.”

  “That’s because you’re never on the water,” Nelson says. “It’s stupid, to be down here like you are and not own a boat.”

  “What do I want a boat for? I hate the water.”

  “You’d get to love it. You could fish all over the Gulf. You don’t have enough to do, Dad.”

  “Who wants to fish, ifyou’re halfway civilized? Dangling some dead meat in front of some poor brainless thing and then pulling him up by a hook in the roof of his mouth? Cruellest thing people do is fish.”

  The blond newscaster, with his hair moussed down so it’s stiff as a wig, tells them, “An adult manatee with calf was reported at midday on Wednesday heading inland along Cape Coral’s Bimini Canal about one-half mile from the Bimini Basin. Sightings like this indicate that while a large number of the Caloosahatchee herd have moved back out into the open waters of the river and back bays, some animals may still be encountered in and near sheltered waterways. To report dead or injured manatees, call 1-800-3421821.” The number rolls across some footage of a manatee family sluggishly rolling around in the water. “And,” he concludes in that sonorous way television announcers have when they see the commercial break coming, “to report a manatee sighting, call the Manatee Hotline at 332-3092.”

  To refresh his rapport with Judy, Rabbit calls over, “How’d you like to have a single big tooth like that mamma manatee?” But the girl doesn’t seem to hear, her fair little face radiantly riveted on one of those ads with California raisins singing and dancing like black men. In a row like the old Mousketeers. Where are they now? Middle-aged parents themselves. Jimmie died years ago, he remembers reading. Died young. It happens. Roy is sucking his thumb and nodding off against Nelson’s chest. Nelson is still wearing the white-collared, pink-striped shirt he wore down in the plane, as if he doesn’t own anything as foolish as a shortsleeved shirt.

  “Tomorrow,” Rabbit loudly promises he doesn’t know who, “I’ll get out on the water. Judy and I will rent a Sunfish. I have it all set up with Ed Silberstein’s son over at the Bayview Hotel.”

  “I don’t know,” Nelson says. “How safe are those things?”

  Rabbit is insulted. “They’re like toys, for Chrissake. If they tip over, you just stand on the centerboard and up they come. Kids ten, eleven years old race them over in the Bay all the time.”

  “Yeah, but Judy’s not even nine yet, not for a couple weeks. And no offense, Dad, you’re way into double digits. And no sailor, from what you just said.”

  “O.K., you do something with your kids tomorrow. You entertain ‘em. I spent over eight hours at it today and dropped around eighty bucks.”

  Nelson tells him, “You’re supposed to want to do things like that. You’re their dear old grandfather, remember?” He softens, slightly. “Sunfishing’s a nice idea. Just make sure she wears a life jacket.”

  “Why don’t you all come along? You, Pru, Sleeping Beauty here. It’s a helluva beach. They keep it clean.”

  “Maybe we will, if I can. I’m expecting a call or two.”

  “From the -lot? Can’t they even manage for half a week?”

  Nelson is drifting away, hiding behind the distraction of television. One of the new Toyota ads is playing, with the blackwoman car salesman. At the end, she and the customer jump into the air and are frozen there. “No,” Nelson is saying, so softly Rabbit can hardly hear. “It’s a contact I made down here.”

  “A contact? What about?”

  Nelson puts his finger to his lip, to signal they should not wake Roy.

  Rabbit gets out his needle again. “Speaking of digits, I keep trying to remember what seemed off about that November statement. Maybe the number of used seemed down for this time of year. Usually it’s up, along with the new models.”

  “Money’s scared, with Reagan going out,” Nelson answers, ever so softly. “Also, Lyle’s put in a new accounting system, maybe they were deferred into the next month and will show up in the December stats. Don’t worry about it, Dad. You and Mom just enjoy Florida. You’ve worked hard all your life. You’ve earned a rest.”

  And the boy, as if to seal in the possibility of irony, kisses little Judy ón the top of her shiny-sleek, carrot-colore
d head. The blue light from the set penetrates the triangular patch of thinning hair between Nelson’s deepening temples. A hostage he’s given to fortune. Your children’s losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.

  “Dinner, guys and gals,” Pru calls from Janice’s aqua kitchen.

  Her meal is a more thought-out affair than Janice’s ever are, with a spicy clear sort of minestrone soup to begin, and a salad on a separate plate, and a fresh white fish, broiled on the stove grill attachment that Janice never takes the trouble to use. Janice has become a great warmer-up of leftovers in the microwave, and a great buyer over at Winn Dixie of frozen meatloaves and stuffed peppers and seafood casseroles in their little aluminum pans that can be tossed into the trashmasher dirty. She was always a minimal housewife and now the technology has caught up with her. The vegetables Pru serves, wild rice and little tender peas and baby onions, have a delicate pointed taste that Harry feels is aimed at him, a personal message the others consume without knowing. “Delicious,” he tells Pru.

  Janice explains to Harry, “Pru went into this little narrow fish store behind Eckerd’s where I never thought to go. Our generation,” she explains to Pru, “didn’t have that much to do with fish. Except I remember Daddy used to bring home a quart of shucked Chesapeake oysters as a treat for himself sometimes.”

  Pru tells Harry in her personally aimed, slightly scratchy Ohio voice, “Oily deepwater fish, bluefish especially, have lots of EPA in their oil, that’s a kind of acid that actually thins your blood and lowers the triglyceride level.”

  She would take care of me, Harry thinks. Pleasurably he complains, “What’s everybody always worried about my cholesterol level for? I must look awful.”

  “You’re a big guy,” Pru says, and the assessment pierces him like a love dart, “and as we all age the proportion of fat in our bodies goes up, and the amount of LDL, that’s low-density lipoprotein, the bad kind of fat, goes up and that of the highdensity, good kind stays the same, so the ratio goes up, and the danger of Apo B attaching to your arteries goes up with it. And we don’t exercise the way people used to, when everybody had farms so the fats don’t get burned up.”

  “Teresa, you know so much,” Janice says, not quite liking being upstaged and using Pru’s baptismal name as a tiny check, to keep her in place.

  The other woman lowers her eyes and drops her voice. “You remember, I took that course at the Brewer Penn State extension. I was thinking, when Roy gets into school full-time, I should have something to do, and thought-maybe nutrition, or dietetics …”

  “I want to get a job, too,” Janice says, annoying Harry with her intrusion into Pru’s demure lecture about his very own, he felt, fatty insides. “The movie we saw this afternoon, all these women working in New York skyscrapers, made me so jealous.” Janice didn’t use to dramatize herself. Ever since her mother died and they bought this condo, she has been building up an irritating confidence, an assumption that the world is her stage and her performance is going pretty well. Around Valhalla Village, she is one of the younger women and on several committees. Just not being senile is considered great down here. When they went to the Drechsels’ seder, she turned out to be the youngest and had to ask the four questions.

  Harry jealously asks Pru, “Does Nelson get the benefit of all this nutrition?”

  Pru says, “He doesn’t need it, really - he hardly ever eats, and he has all this nervous energy. He could use more lipids. But the children - they say now that after two in most American children the cholesterol level is too high. When they did autopsies on young men killed in the Korean War, three-quarters of them had too much fat in their coronary arteries.”

  Harry’s chest is beginning to bind, to ache. His insides are like the sea to him, dark and wet and full of things he doesn’t want to think about.

  Nelson has done nothing to contribute to this conversation but sniff occasionally. The kid’s nose seems to run all the time, and the line of bare skin above his mouse-colored mustache looks chafed. Now he pushes back from his half-eaten fish and announces complacently, “The way I figure, if one thing doesn’t kill you, another will.” Though he rests his palms on the edge of the table, his hands are trembling, the nerves snapping.

  “It’s not what we worry about, it’s when,” his father tells him.

  Janice looks alarmed, her eyes shuttling from one to the other. “Let’s all be cheerful,” she says.

  For dessert, Pru serves them frozen yogurt - much better for you than ice cream, with no cholesterol at all. When the meal is done, Harry hangs around the kitchen counter long enough to dig into the cookie drawer and stuff himself with three quick vanilla Cameos and a broken pretzel. Down here they don’t have the variety of pretzels you get in Brewer but Sunshine sells a box of thick ones that are not too tasteless. He has an impulse to help Janice with the dishes and suppresses it; it’s just throwing plates into the dishwasher and what else did she contribute to the meal? His feet hurt from all that walking they did today; he has a couple of toes that over the years have twisted enough in his shoes to dig their nails into each other if he doesn’t keep them cut close. Pru and Roy and Nelson retreat into their room and he sits a while and watches while Judy, the remote control in hand, bounces back and forth between The Cosby Show, some ice capades, and a scare documentary about foreigners buying up American businesses, and then between Cheers and a drama about saving a fourteenyear-old girl from becoming a prostitute like her mother. So many emergencies, Harry thinks, so much canned laughter, so many actors’ tears, all this effort to be happy, to be brave, to be loved, all this wasted effort. Television’s tireless energy gnaws at him. He sighs and laboriously rises. His body sags around his heart like a tent around a pole. He tells Judy, “Better pack it in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we’re going to go to the beach and sailing.” But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything. These four guests are a strain; he looks forward to their departure Saturday, the last day of 1988.

  Judy continues to stare at the screen and ply her channel changer. “Just the first part of L.A. Law,” she promises, but flicks instead to an ABC news special about “American Kids - Their Diet of Danger.” In their bedroom Janice is reading Elle, looking at the pictures, of superslim models looking stoned.

  ` Janice,” he says. “I have something to ask you.”

  “What? Don’t get me stirred up, I’m reading to make myself sleepy.”

  “Today,” he says. “In that crowd going through the Edison place: Did I look as though I fit in?”

  It takes her a while to shift her focus; then she sees what he wants. “Of course not, Harry. You looked much younger than the other men. You looked like one of their sons, visiting.”

  He decides this is as much reassurance as he dare ask for. “At least,” he agrees with her, “I wasn’t in a wheelchair.” He reads a few pages of history, about the fight between the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis, and how when amid the bloody explosions his chief gunner cried out “Quarter! quarter! for God’s sake!” John Paul Jones hurled a pistol at the man, felling him. But the cry had been heard by Pearson, the Serapis’ commander, who called, “Do you ask for quarter?” Through the clash of battle, gunshot and crackle offire the famous reply came faintly back to him: “I have not yet begun to fight!” The victorious American ship was so damaged it sank the next day, and Jones took the captured Serapis, shorn of its mast, into Holland, exacerbating the British resentment that already existed. All this fury and bravery seems more wasted effort. Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colorful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind. He settles the book on the night table and switches off the lamp. The bar of light beneath the door transmits distant shots and shouts from some TV show, any TV show. He falls asleep with unusual speed, with scarcely a turn into his pillow. His arms, which usually get in the way, fold themselves up like pieces of blanket. His dreams include o
ne in which he has come to a door, a door with a round top to it, and pushes at it. The glass door at McDonald’s except that one you could see the hamburger head through. In his dream he knows there is a presence on the other side, a presence he dreads, hungry and still, but pushes nevertheless, and the dread increases with the pressure, so much that he awakes, his bladder aching to go to the bathroom. He can’t get through the night any more. His prostate or his bladder, losing stretch like goldenrod rubber. His mistake was drinking a Schhtz while channel-surfing with Judy. Falling asleep again is not so easy, with Janice’s deep breathing now and then dipping into a rasping snore just as he begins to relax and his brain to generate nonsense. The luminous bar beneath the door is gone but a kind of generalized lavender light, the light that owls and other animals of the night see to kill by, picks out the planes and big objects of the bedroom. A square bureau holds the glassy rectangle of Nelson’s high-school graduation photo; a fat pale chair holds on one arm Harry’s discarded linen trousers, the folds of cloth suggesting a hollow-eyed skull stretched like chewing gum. Air admitted from the balcony under the folds of the drawn curtain grazes his face. A way of going to sleep is to lie on your back and try to remember the dream you were having. Unease seizes him like a great scalyfooted parrot claw and puts him down again on his face. The next thing he knows he is hearing the mowing machines on the golf course, and the stirred-up seagulls weeping.