by John Updike
He says, “Also, Dad, I noticed the Deion Sanders case is being pushed back into the sports pages and somewhere in Section B there’s an article about fighting flab that’ll give you a laugh.”
“Yeah, flab. I’m flabby on the inside even.”
This is the cue for his son to look sincere and ask, “How’re you doing anyway?” The kid’s face goes a little white around the gills, as if he fears his father will really tell him. His haircut is annoying, too - short on top and too long in the back, that pathetic rat-tail. And the tiny earring.
“Pretty good, considering.”
“Great. This big beefy doctor with the funny accent came out and talked to us and said that the first one is the one a lot of people don’t survive and in your case now, for a while at least, it’s just a matter of changing your lifestyle a little.”
“That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn’t want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?”
Nelson’s eyes get dark and swarmy, the way they do whenever his father mentions God. The conversation keeps sticking, it doesn’t flow, Harry keeps thinking how he is falling, the kid is like a weight on his chest. Come on, he says to himself, try. You only live once.
“Pru told me you were up all night with worry.”
“Yeah, well, she exaggerates, but sort of. I don’t know why I can’t sleep down here. It all feels phony to me, and there’s all this stuff back in Brewer I should be tending to.”
“Like at the lot? Between holidays is a slow week usually. Everybody’s feeling broke after Christmas.”
“Well, yeah, and other stuff. I keep feeling hassled.”
“That’s life, Nelson. Hassle.”
“I suppose.”
Harry says, “I been thinking about our conversation, about Toyotas being so dull. Give ‘em credit, they’re trying to sex the line up. They’re coming out with this Lexus luxury sedan next fall. V-8 engine even.”
“Yeah, but they won’t let us regular dealerships handle it. They’re establishing a whole new retail network. Let ‘em, it’s going to flop anyway. The Japanese aren’t Italians. Luxury isn’t their bag.”
“I forgot about that separate Lexus network. I tell ya, Nelson, I’m not quite with it. I’m in a fog.”
“Join the crowd,” Nelson says.
“And oh yeah - the stat sheets. I’ve been thinking about that. Are you having trouble moving the used? Don’t get greedy. Ten per cent markup is all you should expect, it’s worth shaving the profit just to keep the inventory flowing.”
“O.K., Dad. If you say so. I’ll check it out.”
The conversation sticks again. Roy squirms in his father’s grip. Harry is falling, the light is just a skin of the dark, thinner than an airplane’s skin, thinner than an aluminum beer can. Grab something, anything. “She’s turned out to be quite a fine woman, Pru,” he volunteers to his son.
The boy looks surprised. “Yeah, she’s not bad.” And he volunteers, “I should try to be nicer to her.”
“How?”
“Oh - you know. Clean up my act. Try to be more mature.”
“You always seemed pretty mature to me. Maybe too, early on. Maybe I didn’t set such a good example of maturity.”
“All the more reason, then. For me, I mean.”
Does Harry imagine it, or is there a stirring, a tiny dry coughing, behind the curtain next to him, in the bed he cannot see? His phantom roommate lives. He says, “I’m really getting anxious about you making your plane.”
“Sorry about that, by the way. I feel crummy leaving. Pru and I were talking last night, if we ought to stay a few more days, but, I don’t know, you make plans, you get socked in.”
“Don’t I know it. What could you do, staying? Your old man’s fine. He’s in great hands. I just have to learn to live with a not so great heart. A bum ticker. Charlie’s done it for twenty years, I can do it.” But then Rabbit adds, threatening to pass into the maudlin, the clingy, the elegiac, “But, then, he’s a wiry little Greek and I’m a big fat Swede.”
Nelson has become quite tense. He radiates a nervous desire to be elsewhere. “O.K., Dad. You’re right, we’d better get moving. Give Grandpa a kiss,” he tells Roy.
He leans the boy in, like shovelling off a wriggling football, to kiss his grandfather’s cheek. But Roy, instead of delivering a kiss, grabs the double-barrelled baby-blue oxygen tube feeding into Harry’s nose and yanks it out.
`Jesus!” Nelson says, showing emotion at last. “You all right? Did that hurt?” He whacks his son on the bottom, and sets him down on the floor.
It did hurt slightly, the sudden smarting violence of it, but Harry has to laugh. “No problem,” he says. “It just sits in there, like upside-down glasses. Oxygen, I don’t really need it, it’s just one more perk.”
Roy has gone rubber-legged with rage and collapses on the shiny floor beside the bed. He writhes and makes a scrawking breathless noise and Nelson bends down and hits him again.
“Don’t hit the kid,” Harry tells him, not emphatically. “He just wanted to do me a favor.” As best he can with his free hand, he resettles the two pale-blue tubes one over each ear as they come from the oxygen box hung on the wall behind him and resettles the clip, with its gentle enriching whisper, on his septum. “He maybe thought it was like blowing my nose for me.”
“You little shit, you could have killed your own grandfather,” Nelson explains down at the writhing child, who has to be hauled, kicking, out from under the bed.
“Now who’s exaggerating,” Harry says, “I’m tougher to kill than that,” and begins to believe it. Roy, white in the gills just like his dad, finds his voice and lets loose a yell and tries to throw himself out of Nelson’s grasp. The rubber heels of nurses are hurrying toward them down the hall. The unseen roommate suddenly groans behind his white curtain, with a burbly, deep-pulmonary-trouble kind of groan. Roy is kicking like a landed fish and must be catching Nelson in the stomach; Harry has to chuckle, to think of the child doing that. On one grab: deft. Maybe in his four-yearold mind he thought the tubes were snakes eating at his grandfather’s face; maybe he just thought they were too ugly to look at.
Full though his arms are, Nelson manages to lean in past the tangle of life-supporting connections and give Harry’s cheek the quick kiss he meant Roy to bestow. A warm touch of mustache. A sea-urchin’s sting. The watery monster stirring behind the bed curtain releases another burbling, wracking groan from the deeps. Alarmed nurses enter the room; their cheeks are flushed. The head nurse looms, with her waxy woven tresses, like oodles of black noodles or packets of small firecrackers.
“Oh yeah,” Harry thinks to add as Nelson hurries his yelling, writhing burden away, down the hall, toward Pennsylvania. “Happy 1989!”
II. PA
SUN AND MOON, rise and fall: the well-worn wheels of nature that in Florida impinge where beach meets sea are in Pennsylvania mufed, softened, sedimented over, clothed in the profoundly accustomed. In the Penn Park quarter-acre that Janice and Harry acquired a decade ago, there is, over toward the neighboring house built of clinker bricks, a weeping cherry tree, and he likes to be back when it blossoms, around April tenth. By then, too, baseball has come north - Schmidt this year hitting two home runs in the first two games, squelching all talk that he was through and lawns are sending up tufts of garlic. The magnolias and quince are in bloom, and the forsythia is out, its glad cool yellow calling from every yard like a sudden declaration of the secret sap that runs through everybody’s lives. A red haze of budding fills the maples along the curbs and runs through the woods that still exist, here and there, ever more thinly, on the edge of developments old and new.
His first days back, Rabbit likes to drive around, freshening his memory and hurting himself with the pieces of his old self that cling to almost every corner ofthe Brewer area. The streets where he was a kid are still there, though the trolley cars no longer run. The iron bridges, the railroad yards rust inside the no
ose of bypasses that now encircles the city. The license plates still have an orange keystone in the middle, but now say You’ve Got a Friend in Pennsylvania, which he always found sappy, and sappier still those imitation plates that can be bolted on the front bumper and say You’ve Got a Friend in JESUS. The covers of telephone directories boast The UnCommonwealth of Pennsylvania. Behind the wheel of his car, he gravitates to Mt. Judge, the town where he was born and raised, on the opposite side of Brewer from Penn Park. In this fortresslike sandstone church with its mismatching new wing, the Mt. Judge Evangelical Lutheran, he was baptized and confirmed, in a shirt that chafed his neck like it had been starched in lye, and here, further along Central, in front of a candy store now a photocopying shop, he first felt himself in love, with Margaret Schoelkopf in her pigtails and hightop shoes. His heart had felt numb and swollen above the sidewalk squares like one of those zeppelins you used to see in the sky, the squares of cement like city blocks far beneath his floating childish heart. Every other house in this homely borough holds the ghost of someone he once knew who now is gone. Empty to him as seashells in a collector’s cabinet, these plain domiciles with their brick-pillared porches and dim front parlors don’t change much; even the slummier row houses such as he and Janice lived in on Wilbur Avenue when they were first married are just the same in shape, climbing the hill like a staircase, though those dismal old asphalt sidings the tints of bruise and dung have given way to more festive substances imitating rough-hewn stone or wooden clapboards, thicker on some facades than others, so there is a little step up and down at the edges as your eye moves along the row. Harry always forgets, what is so hard to picture in flat Florida, the speckled busyness, the antic jammed architecture, the distant blue hilliness forcing in the foreground the gabled houses to climb and cling on the high sides of streets, the spiky retaining walls and sharp slopes crowned by a barberry hedge or tulip bed, slopes planted more and more no longer in lawn but ground cover like ivy or juniper that you don’t have to mow once a week with those old-fashioned reel mowers. Some people would rig their mowers with a rope on the handle so they could let it slither clattering down and then pull it back up. Rabbit smiles in his car, remembering those wooden-handled old mowers and that longdead Methodist neighbor of theirs on Jackson Road Mom used to feud with about mowing the two-foot strip of grass between the cement walks that ran along the foundation walls of their houses. The old Methodist couple had bought the house from the Zims when they moved to Cleveland. Carolyn Zim had been so pretty - like Shirley Temple only without the dimple, more of a Deanna Durbin sultriness, on this little girl’s body - that Mr. and Mrs. fought all the time, Mom said, Mrs. being jealous. He used to wait by his window for a glimpse in the soft evening of Carolyn undressing for bed, across the little air space. His room: he can almost remember the wallpaper, its extra-yellowed look above the radiator, the varnished shelf where his teddy bears sat, the bushel basket his Tinker Toy spokes and hubs and his rubber soldiers and lead airplanes lived in. There was a taste, oilclothy, or like hot windowsill paint, or the vanilla and nutmeg when Mom baked a cake, to that room he can almost taste again, but not quite, it moves into the shadows, it slips behind the silver-painted radiator with its spines imprinted with scrolling designs in blurred low relief.
Brewer, too, that torpid hive, speaks to him of himself, of his past grown awesomely deep, so that things he remembers personally, V-E day or the Sunday Truman declared war on North Korea, are history now, which most of the people in the world know about only from books. Brewer was his boyhood city, the only city he knew. It still excites him to be among its plain flowerpot-colored blocks, its brick factories and row housing and great grim churches all mixed together, everything heavy and solid and built with an outmoded decorative zeal. The all but abandoned downtown, wide Weiser Street which he can remember lit up and as crowded as a fairgrounds in Christmas season, has become a patchwork of rubble and parking lots and a few new glass-skinned buildings, stabs at renewal mostly occupied by banks and government agencies, the stores refusing to come back in from the malls on Brewer’s outskirts. The old Baghdad, once one of a half-dozen first-run movie theaters along Weiser, now stands between two vacant lots, its Arab-style tiles all stripped away and its marquee, that last advertised triple-X double features, peeling and rusting and holding the letters ELP and on the line below that SAV ME scrambled remnant of an appeal for historic restoration. The movie palaces of his boyhood, packed with sweet odors and dark velvet, murmurs and giggles and held hands, were history. HELP SAVE ME. There had been a kind of Moorish fountain in the lobby, colored lights playing on the agitated water. The music store, Chords ‘n’ Records, that Ollie Fosnacht used to run twenty years ago a few doors up from the Baghdad, and that then became Fidelity Audio, is still a store, called now The Light Fantastic, selling running shoes, two whole windows of them. Must be a market for them among the minorities. Mug and run.
In Rabbit’s limited experience, the more improvements they’ve loaded onto running shoes, the more supporting pads and power wedges and scientifically designed six-ply soles and so on, the stiffer and less comfortable they’ve become: as bad as shoes. And those running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric. green so tight they show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to display. Ollie Fosnacht’s estranged wife Peggy died about eight years ago, of breast cancer that had metastasized. Rabbit reflects that she was the first woman he has slept with who has died, has actually bitten the bullet. Then realizes this is not true. There was Jill. He used to fuck Jill that crazy summer, though he could tell she didn’t much like it. Too young to like it. And maybe that whore in Texas who with a curious drawling courtesy made him an unvirgin is dead now too. They don’t have long lives, with the hours, the booze, the beatings.
And the drugs that most of them are into, and AIDS. But, then, who does live forever? We all take a beating. Must be the way they figure, it’s sooner or later. They’re just like us only more so. These guys in prison now who bite the guards to give them AIDS with their saliva. We’re turning into mad dogs -the human race is one big swamp of viruses.
Back from the hollow center of Brewer, in the tight brick rows built a century ago when the great mills now abandoned or turned into factory outlet stores still smoked and vibrated, spinning textiles and casting steel, life goes on as lively as ever, though in a darker shade. He likes cruising these streets. In April at least they brim with innocent energy. Four leggy young blacks cluster about a bicycle being repaired. A Hispanic girl in the late-afternoon slant of sun steps out of her narrow slice of a house in high silk heels and a lilac-colored party dress and a diagonal purple sash and at her waist a great cloth rose: she is a flower, the moment says, and a swarm ofboys has gathered, jostling, bumbling, all dressed in steelgray windbreakers and green Army pants, a gang uniform of sorts, Harry supposes. In Brewer people still use the streets, they sit out on their steps and little porches in an expectant way you never see in Deleon. And the Pennsylvania row houses take a simple square approach to shelter, not so different from those cities of aligned cereal boxes the teacher had you set up with cut-out doors and crayoned-on windows in first grade; it makes Harry happy after his winter in Florida with its condominiums interwoven with golf courses, its tile-roofed towers of time-shared apartments, its villages that aren’t villages, its thousand real-estate angles and prettifications of the flimsy.
In the slate-gray two-door Celica he and Janice lock into their garage when they take the pearl-gray Canny wagon south in the fall, he feels safe gliding along and attracts not too many stares, though in the tough section near the tracks, on the rounded corner step of a boarded-up tavern, a little rounded dark girl in a sweatshirt sits in the lap of a boy already barechested though the spring air is still chilly, and alternately kisses him with a languid and determined open mouth and gazes insolently at the cars streaming by. The half-naked boy i
s too stoned to stare, perhaps, but she gives Harry a look through the Celica’s side window that would wipe him away if it could. Fuck her. Fuck him, her eyes say. She seemed to sense what he was doing, rolling by, trying to steal a little life for himself out of the south Brewer scene, all these lives that are young and rising like sap where his is old and sinking.
There has been a lot of living in these tired streets. The old row houses have been repainted, residinged, updated with aluminum awnings and ironwork railings themselves grown old. They are slots still being filled, with street numbers the builders set in stained-glass fanlights above the doors. The blocks were built solid, there would never be any renumbering. Once he lived in one of these - number 326, the number of his hospital room reminded him - with Ruth, and used to shop for quick necessities at that corner store there, now called ROSA’S GROCERIES (Tienda de Comestibles), and stare out the window at the rose window of a limestone church now become the PAL Community Center / Centro Comunidad. The city is quicker than he remembers it, faster on the shuffle, as the blocks flicker by, and buildings that he felt when a boy were widely spaced now appear adjacent. The coughdrop factory, the skyscraper courthouse, the Y where he tried to take swimming lessons and caught pneumonia instead, coming out into the winter streets with wet hair, are all around corners from one another, and close to the post office with its strange long empty lobby, busy and lighted only at one end where a grate or two is up, and to the Ben Franklin, a proud gilded downtown hotel now a Ramada Motor Inn. There his class, Mt. Judge ‘51, had its senior prom, he in a summer tux and Mary Ann in a lavender satin strapless gown whose crinoline petticoats gave them so much trouble in the car afterward they had to laugh, her round white thighs lost in all those rustling folds and hems, Easter eggs in a papery nest, her underpants damp from all the dancing, a spongy cotton pillow, stuffed with her moss, a powerful moist musk scent, Mary Ann the first woman whose smell he made his own, all of her his own, every crevice, every mood, before he went off to do his two years in the Army and she without a word of warning married somebody else. Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner. Whenever he went out with Mary Ann, knowing she was his to harvest in the warm car, the blue family Plymouth, he felt like a winner, offhand, calm, his life set at an irresistible forward slant.
