Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

  “I’ve heard it. You want to open a drug treatment center.”

  “Maybe some day down the road. But for now I think we should work on the lot as what it is. It looks great, by the way, with all those little Toyotas in those funny colors of theirs gone. People are still coming in to buy used, they think we must be having a bargain sale, and a couple of companies are interested in the location - Hyundai for instance has this big new place over past Hayesville but the location is up behind a cloverleaf and nobody can figure out how to get to it, there’s too much landscaping, they’d love to have a spot right on 111 - but what I’m calling about was this idea I got last night, I ran it past Mom, she said to talk to you.”

  “O.K., O.K., you’re good to include me,” Harry says.

  “Last night I was out on the river, you know over where they have all these little river cottages with colored lights and porches and steps going down into the water?”

  “I don’t know, actually, I’ve never been there, but go on.”

  “Well, Pru and I were over there last night with Jason and Pam, you may have heard me mention them.”

  “Vaguely.” All these pauses for confirmation, they are wearing Harry down. Why can’t the kid just spit it out? Is his father such an ogre?

  “Anyway this guy they know has one of these cottages, it was neat, the colored lights and music on the radios and up and down the river all these boats, people water skiing and all -“

  “Sounds terrific. I hope. Jason and Pam don’t belong to that old Lyle-Slim crowd.”

  “They knew ‘em, but they’re straight, Dad. They’re even thinking of having a baby.”

  “If you’re going to keep coke licked, you got to stay away from the old coke crowd.”

  “Like I said, they’re real straight arrow. One of their best friends is Ron Harrison, Jr., the carpenter.”

  What is that supposed to mean? Does Nelson know about him and Thelma? “O.K., O.K.,” Harry says.

  “So we were sitting there on the porch and this fantastic thing

  goes by - a motorcycle on the water. They have different names

  for them - wet bikes, surf jets, jet skis -“

  “Yeah, I’ve seen ‘em in Florida, out on the ocean. They look unsafe.”

  “Dad, this was the best I ever saw - it went like a rocket. Just buzzed along. Jason said it’s called a Yamaha Waverunner and it operates on a new principle, I don’t know, it compresses water somehow and then shoots it out the back, and he said the only guy who sells ‘em, a dinky little back-yard shop up toward Shoemakersville, can’t keep ‘em in stock, and anyway he’s not that interested, he’s a retired farmer who just does it as a hobby. So I called Yamaha’s sales office in New York this morning and talked to a guy. It wouldn’t be just Waverunners we’d sell, of course, we’d carry the motorcycles, and their snowmobiles and trailers, and they make generators a lot of small companies use and these three- and four-wheelers, ATVs, that farmers have now to get around their places, a lot more efficient than electric golf carts -‘

  “Nelson. Wait. Don’t talk so fast. What about Manny and the boys over in Service?”

  “It isn’t Manny any more, Dad. It’s Arnold.”

  “I meant to say Arnold. The guy who looks like a pig in pajamas mincing around. I know who Arnold is. I don’t care who he is, he or she for that matter, who heads the fucking service division, they’re used to cars, big things with four wheels that run on gasoline instead of compressed water.”

  “They can adjust. People can adjust, if you’re under a certain age. Anyway, Mom and I have already trimmed Service. We let go three mechanics, and are running some ads for inspection packages. We want to pep up the used end, for a while it’ll be only used just like Grandpa Springer started out, he used to tell me how he kept the Toyotas out in back out of sight, people had this distrust of Japanese products. In a way it’s better already, the people without much to spend aren’t scared off by the new car showroom and the yen exchange rate and all. So -?”

  “So?”

  “What do you think of the Yamaha idea?”

  “O.K., now remember. You asked. And I appreciate your asking. I’m touched by that, I realize you don’t have to ask me anything, you and your mother have the lot locked up. But in answer to your question, I think it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Jet skis are a fad. Next year it’ll be jet roller skates. The profit on a toy like a motorcycle or a snowmobile is maybe a tenth that on a solid family car - can you sell ten times as many? Don’t forget, there’s a Depression coming.”

  “Who says?”

  “I say; everybody says! Everybody says Bush is just like Hoover. You’re too young to remember Hoover.”

  “That was an inflated stock market. The market if anything is undersold now. Why would we have a Depression?”

  “Because we don’t have any discipline! We’re drowning in debt! We don’t even own our own country any more! My image of this is you were sitting there on the porch of that shack with all these colored lights stoned on something or other and this thing buzzes by and you think, `Wow! Salvation!’ You’re almost thirtythree and you’re still into toys and fads. You came back from that detox place stuffed full of good intentions and now you’re getting rocks in the brain again.”

  There is a pause. The old Nelson would have combatted him with some childish defensive whining. But the voice on the other end of the line at last says, with a touch of the ministerial gravity and automated calm Rabbit had noticed at dinner the other week, “What you don’t realize about a consumer society, Dad, is it’s all fads in a way. People don’t buy things because they need ‘em. You actually need very little. You buy something because it’s beyond what you need, it’s something that will enhance your life, not just keep it plugging along.”

  “It sounds to me like you did too much mystic meditation at that detox place.”

  “You say detox just to bug me. It was a treatment center, and then a halfway house for rehab. The detox part of it just takes a couple days. It’s getting the relational poison out of your system that takes longer.”

  “Is that what I am to you? Relational poison?” Being snubbed by Ronnie Harrison won’t stop rankling, underneath this conversation. Just because you boffed a man’s dead wife, he shouldn’t get bitter about it. He’s known Ronnie all his life.

  Again, Nelson is silent. Then: “Maybe, but not only. I keep trying to love you, but you don’t really want it. You’re afraid of it, it would tie you down. You’ve been scared all your life of being tied down.”

  Rabbit cannot speak; he is letting a Nitrostat dissolve under his tongue. It burns like a little pellet of red candy, and induces a floating dilated feeling that adds inches to his sensation of height. The kid will make him cry if he thinks about it. He says, “Let’s cut the psychology and get down to earth. What the hell do you and your mother intend to do about that hundred fifty thousand dollars Toyota has to have by the end of the month or else it will prosecute?”

  “Oh,” the boy says airily, “didn’t Mom tell you? That’s been settled. They’ve been paid. We took out a loan.”

  “A loan? Who would trust you?”

  “Brewer Trust. A second mortgage on the lot property, it’s worth at least half a million. A hundred forty-five, and they consolidated it with the seventy-five for Slims five cars, which will be coming back to us pretty much as a credit on the rolling inventory we were maintaining with Mid-Atlantic Motors. As soon as they took our inventory over to Rudy’s lot, don’t forget, they started owing us.”

  “And you’re somehow going to pay back Brewer Trust selling water scooters?”

  “You don’t have to pay a loan back, they don’t want you to pay it back; they just want you to keep up the installments. Meanwhile, the value of the dollar goes down and you get to taxdeduct all the interest. We were underfinanced, in fact, before.”

  “Thank God you’re back in the saddle. How does your mother like the Yamaha connection?”

  “
She likes it. She’s not like you; she’s open, and willing to be creative. Dad, there’s something I think we should try to process sometime. Why do you resent it so, me and Mom getting out into the world and trying to learn new things?”

  “I don’t resent it. I respect it.”

  “You hate it. You act jealous and envious. I say this in love, Dad. You feel stuck, and you want everybody to be stuck with you.”

  He tries giving back the kid a little of his own medicine, some therapeutic silence. His Nitrostat rings that little bell in the seat of his pants, and his dilated blood vessels lift weight from the world around him, making it seem delicate and distant, like Neptune’s rings. “It wasn’t me,” he says at last, “who ran Springer Motors into the ground. But do what you want. You’re the Springer, not me.”

  He can hear a voice in the background, a female voice, and then that seashell sound of a telephone mouthpiece with a hand placed over it. When Nelson’s voice returns, it has changed tint, as if dipped in something, by what has passed between him and Elvira. Love juices have flowed. Maybe the kid is normal after all. “Elvira has something she wants to ask you. What do you think of the Pete Rose settlement?”

  “Tell her I think it was the best both sides could do. And I think he should get into the Hall of Fame anyway, on the strength of his numbers. But tell her Schmidt is my idea of a classy ballplayer. Tell her I miss her.”

  Hanging up, Harry pictures the showroom, the late-afternoon light on the dust on the display windows, tall to the sky now with all the banners down, and the fun going on, amazingly, without him.

  The thready lawn behind their little limestone house at 14Vz Franklin Drive has the dry kiss of autumn on it: brown patches and the first few fallen leaves, cast off by the weeping cherry, his neighbor’s black walnut, the sweet cherry that leans close to the house so he can watch the squirrels scrabble along its branches, and the willow above the empty cement fish pond with the bluepainted bottom and rim of real seashells. These trees still seem green and growing but their brown leaves are accumulating in the grass. Even the hemlock toward the neighboring house of thin yellow bricks, and the rhododendrons along the palisade fence separating the Angstroms’ yard from the property of the big mockTudor house of clinker bricks, and the shaggy Austrian pines whose cast-off needles clutter the cement pond, though all evergreen, are tinged by summer’s end, dusty and sweetly dried-out like the smell that used to come from the old cedar hope chest where Mom kept spare blankets and their good embroidered linen tablecloth for Thanksgiving and Christmas and the two old crazy quilts she had inherited from the Renningers. It was family legend that these quilts were fabulously valuable but when, in some family crunch when Harry was in his early teens, they tried to sell them, the best offer they could get was sixty dollars apiece. After much talk around the porcelain kitchen table, they took the offer, and now authentic old quilts like that bring thousands if in good condition. When he thinks about those old days and the amounts of money they considered important it’s as if they were being cheated, getting by on slave wages, eating bread that cost eleven cents a loaf. They were living in a financial dungeon, back there on Jackson Road, and the fact that everybody else was in it too only makes it sadder. Just thinking about those old days lately depresses him; it makes him face life’s constant depreciation. Lying awake at night, afraid he will never fall asleep or will fall asleep forever, he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.

  The forsythia and beauty bush both have been getting out of hand during this wet summer and Harry, on this cloudy cool Thursday before the Labor Day weekend, has been trying to prune them back into shape for the winter. With the forsythia, you take out the oldest stem from the base, making the bush younger and thinner and more girlish suddenly, and then cut back the most flagrant skyward shoots and the down-drooping branches on their way to reroot in among the day lilies. It doesn’t do to be tenderhearted; the harder you cut back now, the more crammed with glad yellow blossoms the stubby branches become in the spring. The beauty bush poses a tougher challenge, an even tighter tangle. Any attempt to follow the tallest stems down to their origin gets lost in the net of interwoven branchlets, and the bottom thicket of small trunks is so dense as to repel a clipper or pruning saw; there is not a knife’s-width of space. The bush in this season of neglect has grown so tall he really should go to the garage for the aluminum stepladder. But Rabbit is reluctant to face the garage’s grimy tumble of cast-aside tires and stiff hoses and broken flowerpots and rusted tools inherited from the previous owners, who failed to clean out the garage the same way they left a stack of Playboys in an upstairs closet. In ten years he and Janice have added their own stuff to the garage, so that gradually there wasn’t space for one car let alone two in it; it has become a cave of deferred decisions and sentimentally cherished junk so packed that if he tries to extract the ladder several old paint cans and a lawn sprinkler bereft of its washers will come clattering down. So he stretches and reaches into the beauty bush until his chest begins to ache, with the sensation of an inflexible patch stitched to the inner side of his skin. His nitroglycerin pills got left in the sweat-rimmed pocket of his plaid golf slacks last night when he went to bed early, alone, having fed himself a beer and some Corn Chips after that match with Ronnie ended so sourly.

  To placate the pain, he switches to weeding the day lilies and the violet hosta. Wherever a gap pennits light to activate the sandy soil, chickweed and crabgrass grow, and purslane with its hollow red stems covers the earth in busy round-leaved zigzags. Weeds too have their styles, their own personalities that talk back to the gardener in the daze of the task. Chickweed is a good weed, soft on the hands unlike thistles and burdock, and pulls easily; it knows when the jig is up and comes willingly, where wild cucumber keeps breaking off at one of its many joints, and grass and red sorrel and poison ivy spread underground, like creeping diseases that cannot be cured. Weeds don’t know they’re weeds. Safe next to the trunk of the weeping cherry a stalk of blue lettuce has grown eight feet tall, taller than he. Those days he spent ages ago being Mrs. Smith’s gardener among her rhododendrons, the one time he ever felt rooted in a job. Fine strong young man, she had called him at the end, gripping him with her claws.

  A block and a half away, the traffic on Penn Boulevard murmurs and hisses, its purr marred by the occasional sudden heave and grind of a great truck shifting gears, or by an angry horn, or the wop-wop-wopping bleat of an ambulance rushing some poor devil to the hospital. You see them now and then, driving down a side street, these scenes: some withered old lady being carried in a stretcher down her porch stairs in a slow-motion sled ride, her hair unpinned, her mouth without its dentures, her eyes staring skyward as if to disown her body; or some red-faced goner being loaded into the double metal doors while his abandoned mate in her bathrobe snivels on the curb and the paramedics close around his body like white vultures feeding. Rabbit has noticed a certain frozen peacefulness in such terminal street tableaux. A certain dignity in the doomed one, his or her moment come round at last; a finality that isolates the ensemble like a spotlit créche. You would think people would take it worse than they do. They don’t scream, they don’t accuse God. We curl into ourselves, he supposes. We become numb bundles of used-up nerves. Earthworms on the hook.

  From far across the river, a siren wails in the heart of Brewer. Above, in a sky gathering its fishscales for a rainy tomorrow, a small airplane rasps as it coasts into the airport beyond the old fairgrounds. What Harry instantly loved about this house was its hiddenness: not so far from all this traffic, it is yet not easy to find, on its macadamized dead end, tucked with its fractional number among the more conspicuous homes of the Penn Park rich. He always resented these snobs and now is safe among them. Pulling into his dead-end driveway, working out back in his garden, watching TV in his den with its wavery lozenge-paned windows, Rabbit feels safe as i
n a burrow, where the hungry forces at loose in the world would never think to find him.

  Janice pulls in in the pearl-gray Camry wagon. She is fresh from the afternoon class at the Penn State extension on Pine Street: “Real Estate Mathematics -Fundamentals and Applications.” In a student outfit of sandals and wheat-colored sundress, with a looseknit white cardigan thrown over her shoulders, her forehead free of those Mamie Eisenhower bangs, she looks snappy, and brushed glossy, and younger than her age. Everything she wears these days has shoulders; even her cardigan has shoulders. She walks to him over what seems a great distance in the little quarter-acre yard, their property expanded by what has become a mutual strangeness. Unusually, she presents her face to be kissed. Her nose feels cold, like a healthy puppy’s. “How was class?” he dutifully asks.

  “Poor Mr. Lister seems so sad and preoccupied lately,” she says. “His beard has come in all full of gray. We think his wife is leaving. him. She came to class once and acted very snooty, we all thought.”

  “You all are getting to be a mean crowd. Aren’t these classes about over? Labor Day’s coming.”