Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  When Nelson finally comes out in his expensive smoky-blue pajamas he is surprised and annoyed to find her here, though he does try not to show it. “I thought you’d be with the others. They sure as hell made a racket getting out of here.”

  “No,” she tells her son, “I get enough sun and wanted to spend a little time with you before you rush back.”

  “That’s nice,” he says, and goes back into his room, and comes out a minute later wearing his bathrobe, for modesty she supposes, with his own mother. You think of all the times you changed their diapers and gave them a bath and then one day you’re shut out. It’s a summer-weight robe, a mauve paisley, that reminds her of what rich people used to wear in movies when she was a girl. Robes, smoking jackets, top hats and white ties, flowing white gowns if you were Ginger Rogers, up to your chin in ostrich feathers or was it white fox? Young people now don’t have that to live up to, to strive toward, the rock stars just wear dirty blue jeans and even the baseball players, she has noticed looking over Harry’s shoulder at the television, don’t bother to shave, like the Arab terrorists. When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams.

  She offers to make Nelson what was once his favorite breakfast, French toast. Those years on Vista Crescent before they all got into such trouble she would make a thing of its being Sunday morning with the French toast, before Nelson went off to Sunday school. He had really been such a trusting child, so easy to please, with his little cowlick in his eyebrow and his brown eyes shuttling so anxiously between her and Harry.

  He says, “No thanks, Mom. Just let me get some coffee and don’t hassle me with food. The thought of fried bread full of syrup makes me want to barf.”

  “Your appetite does seem poor lately.”

  “Whaddeyou want, me to get hog fat like Dad? He should lose fifty pounds, it’s going to kill him.”

  “He’s too fond of snacky things, that’s where he gets the weight. The salt attracts water.”

  There are tarry dregs left in the Aromaster, enough to fill half a cup. Janice remembers buying that percolator at the K Mart on Route 41 when she and Harry were new down here; she had been drawn to the Krups ten-cup Brewmaster but Harry was still sold on Consumer Reports and said they said the Braun twelve-cup Aromaster was better. Nelson makes that face he used to make as a child with cod-liver oil and pours the eleventh-and-a-half cup down the sink. He sniffs prolongedly and picks up the News-Press from the counter under the see-through window. He reads aloud, “City reduces charge against football star. Lake Okeechobee’s cure may be hard to swallow,” but it is clear to both of them that they must talk really.

  Janice says, “You sit in the living room and read the paper a minute while I make a fresh pot of coffee. Would you like the last of those Danish we bought? If you don’t your father will eat it.”

  “No, Mom, like I said. I don’t want to eat any junk.”

  As the water in the percolator comes to a boil, he laughs to himself in the living room. “Get this,” he calls, and reads aloud, ” `The highly commended head of Cape Coral’s police narcotics team will be fired because of an investigation that showed he mishandled nearly one thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine he borrowed from the Sanibel Police Department. The borrowed cocaine is missing, police say, and has been replaced with a handful of baking soda in a department storage box.’ ” Nelson adds, as if she is too dumb to get the point, “Everybody’s snorting and stealing down here, even the head of the narc squad.”

  “How about you?” Janice asks.

  He thinks she means coffee and says “Sure” and holds out his cup without taking his eyes from the newspaper. “Says here southwestern Florida was the hottest place in the country yesterday.”

  Janice brings the percolator and sets it on the glass table, on a section of the newspaper she folds over to make an insulating pad. She has a superstitious fear of cracking the glass with heat, though Harry laughs at her and says you couldn’t crack it with a blowtorch. Men laugh about things like this and electricity but don’t always know. Bad things do happen, and then men try to pretend they didn’t, or it was some other man’s fault. She settles firmly on the fold-out sofa next to the wicker armchair Nelson is in, and spreads her thighs to broaden her lap the way she often saw her mother do when she was determined to be firm, and tells him, “No, I meant about you and cocaine. What is the story, baby?”

  When he looks over at her she is reminded of that frightened sly way he looked that whole summer when he was twelve. Among the things she can never forgive herself for was the way he would come over on his bicycle to Eisenhower Avenue and stand outside Charlie’s place hoping to get a glimpse of her, his mother run off with another man. He asks, “Who says there’s a story?”

  “Your wife says, Nelson. She says you’re hooked and you’re blowing a lot of money you don’t have.”

  “That crazy lying bitch. You know how she’ll say anything to make a dramatic effect. When did she fill you full of this crap?”

  “Don’t be so rude in your language. A body can see at a glance things aren’t right. Teresa let a little out the night before last when you didn’t come home till after midnight, and then yesterday we had more chances to talk, while your father was walking ahead with the children.”

  “Yeah, what’s he trying to do, anyway, this great-big-lovable-grandpa routine he’s pulling on my kids? He was never that way with me.”

  “Don’t keep changing the subject. Maybe he’s trying to make up with them for some of his mistakes with you. Anyway your father’s not who concerns me these days. He had a hard time when we were younger giving up his freedom but he seems to be at peace now. Which is what I can’t say about you. You’re jumpy and rude and your mind isn’t on anything that’s in this room or has to do with your family. You’re thinking of something else every minute and I can only think from what I read and see on television that it’s drugs. Pru says it’s cocaine, and probably crack now, she believes you’ve stayed clear of heroin, though evidently the two go together in something called speedballing.”

  “You need to inject that, Ma, and I’ll never go near a needle. That you can count on. Jesus, you can get AIDS that way.”

  “Yes, well, AIDS. We all have that to worry us now.” She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world, with precious little pleasure in compensation. Nelson may have his weaknesses but her sense of him is that he has never been crazy about sex like his father - that his generation got enough of it early enough for the magic to wear off. Her poor Harry, until he began to slow down, he hopped into bed every night expecting wonders. And maybe she, too, at a time in her life, was as foolish. That time she felt she brought Charlie back from the edge of the grave with it. With sheer love. For a woman it’s power, the only power they let you have until recently.

  Nelson takes advantage of her silence to marshal an attack. “What if I do do a little toot on the weekends? It’s no worse than all that sipping you do. Ever since I can remember you’ve had a little glass next to you in the kitchen or wherever. You know, Mom, alcohol kills, eventually. There are these scientific studies that show coke is much less harmful to the body than booze.”

  “Well,” she says, tugging her short khaki skirt down over her thighs, “it may be less harmful but it seems to be a lot more expensive.”

  “That’s because idiotic laws make it illegal.”

  “Yes, that’s right - whatever bad you can say about alcohol at least it’s legal. When your granddaddy Springer was young it wasn’t and he never developed the taste for it, or he might not have made such a good thing out of his life for us all to enjoy.” She sees his lips parting to interrupt and lifts her voice to continue, “And you’re a lot like him in a lot of respects, Nelson. You have his nervous energy, you always have to be figuring at something, all the time, and I hate to see that energy of yours wasted on a selfdestructive thing like this.” She sees him trying to break in and concludes, “Now, you must tell me about cocai
ne, Nelson. You must help an old lady understand. What makes it worth it? Pru says your unpaid bills are piling way up, so it must be worth quite a lot.”

  Nelson in exasperation slaps his body back into the chair, so that the wicker creaks; she hears something snap. “Mom. I don’t want to talk about my private life. I’m thirty-two years old, for Chrissake.”

  “Even at eighty-two you’ll still be my son,” she tells him.

  He tells her, “You’re trying to act and talk like your mother but you and I both know you’re not that sharp, you’re not that tough.” But saying this makes him feel so guilty he looks away, toward the bright breezy Florida day beyond the balcony, with its squeaky birdsong and mufed sounds of golf, the day climbing toward noon and temperatures in the mid-eighties, the warmest spot in the entire nation. His mother keeps her eyes on his face. In the wash of light his skin looks transparent, worn thin by unhealth, by unnatural consumption. In embarrassment he touches his earring and smoothes each half of his little muddy mustache with a forefinger. “It relaxes me,” he tells her at last.

  Janice waits for more, and prompts, “You don’t seem that relaxed.” She adds, “You were a tense child, Nelson. You took everything very seriously.”

  He says rapidly, “How else’re you supposed to take it? Like a big joke, like Dad does, as if the fucking world is nothing but a love letter to yours truly?”

  “Let’s try to keep talking about you, not your father. As you say, I’m a simple woman. Not sharp, not tough. I’m very ignorant about a lot of things. The simplest things about this, like how much it takes and how much it costs. I don’t even know how you take it - up the nose or smoke it or what you put it in to smoke it or any of that. All I know about cocaine is what’s on Miami Vice and the talk shows and they don’t explain very much. It’s just not something I ever thought would make a difference in my life.”

  His embarrassment increases, she sees, as when he was six and sick and she would quiz him about his bowel movements. Or once when he was fourteen and she mentioned the stains on his bedsheets. But he wants to talk, she also sees, about these details, to show off the knowledge his manhood has obtained. He sighs in surrender and closes his eyes and says, “It’s hard to describe. You know that expression about drunks, `feeling no pain’? After a hit, I feel no pain. I guess that means I feel pain the rest of the time. Everything goes from black and white to color. Everything is more intense, and more hopeful. You see the world the way it was meant to be. You feel powerful.” This last confidence is so intimate the boy bats his eyelids, his lashes long as a girl’s, and blushes.

  Janice feels slightly queasy, brought this close to the something neutral and undecided in her son’s sexual nature - something scared out of him - and brings her legs up on the sofa under her, the short skirt hiking up above the knees. Her legs are still firm and trim at fifty-two, her best feature as a girl and woman, her hair having always been skimpy and her breasts small and her face nondescript. She especially loves her legs here in Florida, where they turn brown and compare favorably with those of the other women, who have let themselves get out of shape or never had a shape to start with. These Jewish women tend to have piano legs, and low hips. Letting her son enjoy her ignorance, Janice asks, “How many of these snorts do you need at a time, to feel the bright colors?”

  He laughs, superior. “They’re called lines, Mom, if you snort them. You chop up this powder with a razor blade on a mirror usually and make them into lines about an eighth of an inch wide and an inch or two long. You inhale them into your nose with a straw or a glass tooter you can buy at these places down in Brewer near the bridge. Some of the guys use a rolled-up dollar bill; if say it’s a hundred-dollar bill, that’s considered cool.” He smiles, remembering these crisp, glittering procedures, among friends in their condos and apartments in the high northeastern section of Brewer, backing up to Mt. Judge.

  His mother asks, “Does Pru do this with you?”

  His face clouds. “She used to, but then stopped when she was pregnant with Roy, and then didn’t take it up again. She’s become quite rigid. She says it destroys people.”

  “Is she right?”

  “Some people. But not really. Those people would have gone under to something. Like I say, it’s better for you physically than alcohol. You can do a line at work quick in the john and nobody can tell the difference, except you feel like Superman. Sell like Superman, too. When you feel irresistible, you’re hard to resist.” He laughs again, showing small grayish teeth like hers. His face is small like hers, as if not wanting to put too much up front where the world can damage it. Whereas Harry in his middle age has swelled, his face a moon above it all. People down here, these smart Jews, like to kid him and take advantage, like the three in that foursome.

  She touches her upper lip with her tongue, not certain where to take this interview now. She knows she will not be able to pry Nelson this open soon again. He is flying back tomorrow afternoon, to make a New Year’s party. She asks, “Do you do crack, too?”

  He becomes more guarded. He lights a Camel and throws his head back to drink the last of the coffee. A nerve in his temple is twitching, under the gray transparent skin. “Crack’s just coke that’s been freebased for you - little pebbles, they call them rock. You smoke them in a kind of pipe, usually.” He gestures; smoke loops around his face. “It’s a nice quick lift, quicker than snorting. But then you crash quicker. You need more. You get in a run.”

  “You do this, then. Smoke crack.”

  “I’ve been known to. What’s the diff? It’s handy, it’s all over the street these last couple years, it’s dirt cheap, what with the competition between the gangs. Fifteen, even ten dollars a rock. They call it candy. Mom, it’s no big deal. People your age are superstitious about drugs but it’s just a way of relaxing, of getting your kicks. People since they lived in caves have had to have their kicks. Opium, beer, smack, pot - it’s all been around for ages. Coke’s the cleanest of them all, and the people who use it are successful by and large. It keeps them successful, actually. It keeps them sharp.”

  Her hand has come to rest on her own bare foot there on the sofa cushion. She gives her toes a squeeze, and spreads them to feel air between. “Well you see how stupid I am,” she says. “I thought it was all through the slums and behind most of the crime we read about.”

  “The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are.”

  She bleakly nods. Daddy used to hate it, when people blamed the government. She unfolds first one leg, resting her heel on the round glass table, and then brings the other parallel, so the bare calves touch; she arches her brown, tendony insteps as if to invite admiration. Her legs still look young, and her face never did. She jackknifes her legs down and sets her feet on the rug, all business again. “Let me heat up the coffee. And wouldn’t you like to split that stale Danish with me? Just to keep it out ofyour father’s stomach?”

  “You can have it all,” he tells her. “Pru doesn’t let me eat junk like that.” Janice finds this rude. She’s his mother, not Pru. As she stands in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to heat, Nelson calls in to her comfortably, finding another subject, “Here’s an off duty assistant fire chief hit a motorcycle with his blinkers and siren on - probably stoned. And they think it might rain on New Year’s.”

  “We need it,” Janice says, returning with the Aromaster and the Danish cut in half on a plate. “I like the weather warm, but this December has been unreal.”

  “Did you notice in the kitchen what time it was?”

  “Getting toward noon, why?”

  “I was thinking what a pain in the ass it is to have only one car down here. If nobody minds, when they get back, I could run some errands.”

  “What sort of errands would they be?”

  “You know. Stuff at the drugstore. I could do with some Sominex. Roy has a rash from leaving his wet bathing suit on after swimming i
n all that chlorine; isn’t there some ointment I could get him?”

  “You wouldn’t be going back to the people you were with in the fish restaurant the night before last? People who can sell you some lines, or rocks, or whatever you call them?”

  “Come on, Mom, don’t play detective. You can’t grill me, I’m an adult. I’m sorry I told you half of what I did.”

  “You didn’t tell me what really interests me, which is how much this habit is costing you.”

  “Not much, honest. Do you know, computers and cocaine are about the only items in the economy that are coming down in price? In the old days it cost a fortune, nobody but pop musicians could afford it, and now you can get a whole gram for a lousy seventy-five dollars. Of course, you don’t know how much it’s been cut, but you learn to get a dealer you can trust.”