Rabbit Remembered

by John Updike

  It was Judy who remembered, about two exits up the road. Though Nelson floored the accelerator, it seemed to take forever getting to the next exit and reversing their direction on 95. His whole body went watery with guilt and hurry. The black desk clerk, who had just come on duty, looked dubious at Nelson's panting explanation, but let them have the key again. It was strange to be let back in, as if into an empty tomb-as if they all had died or been abducted. The beds were still unmade, the towels wet outside the shower stall. They found a child's toothbrush in the bathroom as well as Grandpa's remains sitting docilely on the cabinet shelf, the square urn blending in like one of those combination safes motels sometimes give you. Nelson felt this tremendous rush of reunion at the time, taking the canister into his arms, a bliss of wiped-out sins. Afterwards, with schooled hindsight, he saw that there had been a certain unconscious vengeance in their leaving Dad behind, as he had more than once left them behind.

  Nelson doesn't remember if they all laughed about it, forgetting the head of their family like that, but he does remember that Aunt Mim wore too much black at the funeral, all black, gloves and hat and big sunglasses, more a style statement than a proclamation of mourning. She stood out like a swish vampire among the quiet orderly rows of the hillside cemetery, on the back slope of Mt. Judge, where Earl W. (1905-1976) and Mary R. (1904-1974) Angstrom rested beneath a rose-colored polished double headstone one grassy stride away from the smaller, older, duller dove-colored stone saying.

  REBECCA JUNE ANGSTROM

  1959

  His sister. He has always blamed himself somehow. If he had been more pleasing to Dad he wouldn't have left and Mom wouldn't have gotten drunk and it wouldn't have happened. At Dad's funeral Aunt Mim seemed an animated, irreverent slash of black among the dowdy mourners (there were some aging male strangers, even, who showed up, having worked with the deceased at Verity Press or the Toyota agency or played with or against the dead man in his teen-age prime and who felt enough connection to take a morning out of their own remaining lives) but Dad had loved her, and she him, with the heavy helplessness of blood, that casts us into a family as if into a doom.

  "The funniest thing, Aunt Mim," Nelson says over the phone. "It turns out Dad had a baby by the woman he lived with that time and she's showed up. It was a girl baby, and she's thirty-nine, and a nurse living right here in Brewer. She grew up on a farm. I had lunch with her. She looks a little like Dad before he got really fat but when his face was turning round-kind of, you know, sleepy-eyed, with very white skin. So as well as a nephew you have a niece."

  "Damn," the phone crackled after a pause. "I'll have to rewrite my will. How come she showed up now? Did Harry know she existed?"

  "He guessed, I guess, but didn't know for sure. Her mother wouldn't tell him. She died this summer and told Annabelle before she did. She came to us."

  "Who's us?"

  "The family. Me and Mom and Ronnie."

  "I bet Ronnie's just thrilled. And Janice even more so. I think it was you she came to, Nelson. So what's your thought?"

  "Well, it's not as if she's not managing, she makes better money than I do, but she seems awfully alone. I think she should get to meet some people. But I don't know so many people since I kicked coke, except for the clients at work."

  At her end of the line, Aunt Mim considers. "How long since you've known about this girl?"

  "Since September."

  "And you're just calling to tell me now?"

  "I've been sitting on it, I guess."

  "You're embarrassed," the woman concludes. "Don't be embarrassed, kid. Your father didn't understand birth control. You were born some months early, as I remember. It's not your funeral. Want some advice from your old aunt, whose life is no model for anybody?"

  "Sure."

  "This little nursie's not your problem. At thirty-nine, everybody's their own problem. You have a family-how are they?"

  This is getting to be a disappointing conversation. If there was anybody he thought would see with him the wonder of his having a sister it was Aunt Mim, his father's sister. "They're good, I guess. Pru finally had enough of me and a year and a half ago took the kids back to Akron. She works for a Greek lawyer downtown, near the old Goodrich factory."

  "Oh, those Greeks," says Aunt Mim. "They invented democracy,they'll tell you."

  "And Judy's out of school and thinking of becoming an airline stewardess."

  "flight attendant, they like to be called. Some of them, the way they carry on is legal only in Nevada."

  "I know. She worries me. She's kind of wild."

  "You worry too much. Life is wild. When it isn't a total bore."

  "And my little boy, Roy, is almost fifteen. We communicate by e-mail. He's bright, it turns out."

  "You sound surprised. Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid. So. And now a sister to fill in the gaps. You're quite a family man, Nelson, I don't know where you get it from. The

  Springer side, I guess. They were good Germans. The Angstroms never quite fit in."

  "I thought you might have some ideas."

  "Ideas about what?"

  "What I should do, about having a sister."

  "Well, your father used to hold my hand crossing the street, and he liked to watch me pee, but maybe she's beyond that. What's her name, did you say?"

  "Annabelle. Annabelle Byer."

  "Who was Byer?"

  "Her stepdad. He was the farmer."

  "He's dead, too."

  "Right."

  "More and more is dead, are you old enough to notice? Vegas is dead, the way it was-a sporting town. The people used to come here had a little class-the gangsters, the starlets. A little whiff of danger, glamour, you name it. Class. The guys used to pay cash for everything, off a big roll of fifties. Now it's herds. Herds and herds of Joe Nobodies. Bozos. The hoi polloi, running up credit-card debt. Gambling is legal in half the states so they've built these huge moron-catchers along the Strip, all the way to the airport. A Pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, Venice-it's all here, Nelson, all for the morons. It's depressing as hell. Sometimes I think of going back east, but where would I fit in?"

  "You'd fit in here, Aunt Mim," he hears himself saying. "The house is too big as it is."

  She laughs, then coughs, then laughs again. "I never had the figure for it, Diamond County life. I was skinny, the other girls hated me. What shape is your sister in?"

  "She's a little plump, but not, you know, overboard. Some of our clients at the Center-"

  "There you have it," Aunt Mim interrupts. "She's letting herself go. You can't afford in life to do that if you're gonna contend." He has used up her patience. She can only give so much time to the past. She lives in a hustling world. "Come on out and see me, Nellie. Bring your sister if you want. They've got the airfares down to nothing, to keep the moron-catchers booked up. If you want to wait till Judy flies the skies, it'll be cheaper yet. I'll keep. I never smoked except for show. Charlie Stavros still above ground?"

  So it falls to him to break the news. "No, I'm sorry to say. He had this triple bypass, and there was a murmur or something, a bad valve, and they opened him up again, but this time an infection set in-"

  "You're scaring me, kid. He was a good guy. He had a touch of it. Class. You, you're lovable. Your Aunt Mim loves you, and don't you forget it." And she hangs up, without saying goodbye or seeing if he had a last word. He hadn't even asked her how her beauty parlor was doing, or if she had a husband.

  One night in early November, Nelson dreams he is lying in his bedroom, which is true, although it is somehow smaller, like the little front room where Ron's computer sits. He gets out of bed when he hears a distant clicking noise. He goes to the window and sees out in the back yard a tall man practicing chip shots in the moonlight. The man is bent over and intent and a certain sorrow emanates from him in the gray-blue light. His back is turned and he doesn't turn his head to look up at Nelson though Nelson dreads that this will happen-a staring white mask in moonlight. Inste
ad there is just that patient concentration, as if on a task he has been assigned for eternity-the little studied half-swing, a slump-shouldered contemplation of the result, a disconsolate trundling another ball with the face of the club into position at the man's feet, and another studied swing. Nelson feels indignation that this mournful tall middle-aged stranger, in nondescript trousers and a long-sleeved blue-gray shirt, should have wandered into their yard from Joseph Street and be trespassing so brazenly, making that irritating, repeating noise in the middle of the night. Neither in his dream nor when woken by it does Nelson announce to himself who the homeless man is.

  He has passed into wakefulness. The door to the hallway, the latch not quite seated, has been swinging back and forth as if at a ghostly touch, clicking, nudged by the drafts that circulate through the house now that the cooling weather has turned on the furnace. Ronnie is always trying to turn the thermostat down; he says the lousy Arabs are putting the screws on oil again and the price of a barrel has more than doubled in a year.

  Nelson forces himself from the warm bed, glancing out the window to see if a tall man is really there practicing chipping, and pushes the door so the latch decisively clicks. The sharp noise rings through the silent house. Not quite silent: the furnace sighs, the refrigerator throbs. His mother in the next room sleeps with a man not his father. It used to be his parents' room, he used to hear them cutting up some nights, making more noise than they thought. The two front bedrooms are empty, staring out at a Joseph Street bare of traffic. Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong-you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.

  Next morning he calls Annabelle at her apartment. She sounds sleepy; he guesses she had been on night duty and he woke her up. Apologetically, he asks her to have lunch with him again, at the same place if that was all right with her. "Oh yes," she says, "that was a lovely place," in the overly sincere voice of someone who is groping to remember. Had she been failing to think of him as much as he had been thinking of her?

  This time, The Greenery is crowded. They have to wait for a booth, and his head jangles with the angry, forlorn, earnest voices of a Relationships group he had led at the Center at ten this morning. The motherly waitress is not here, replaced by a girl young enough to be a clumsy, overworked teen-aged child of their own. Annabelle wears an outfit, blue jeans and a purple turtleneck, that seems to announce to him a new, careless, on-my-own side of her. Maybe she hadn't been up recovering from late duty when she sounded sleepy. She has never claimed to have no men friends.

  The fall has turned cooler. On top of the turtleneck she wears an embroidered red jacket from India or someplace. No hurricane sweeps Elm Street with its drizzling fringe; the sun shines weakly, a white blur in a hazed sky above the city's cornices, but enough leaves are down in the Bradford pear trees for a bald light to strike off the macadam, gleaming where the surface was patched by dribbles of tar. The overworked waitress settles them in a front booth that is still uncleared from the last customers, with him facing the window this time. His face feels lit up so that all its imperfections and wormy nerves show. Nelson is used to the Center twilight, the half-windows giving on street level, and the cluttered gloom of 89 Joseph Street. He says, "I dreamed of my father last week. Our father. I think it was him."

  "You're not sure?"

  "I never saw his face. But the, the affect"-she has to know the word, any nurse would-"was his. His toward the end. Before he ran south and died."

  "Is that what he did?"

  "Didn't you know? Yes, basically-he got in the car and drove to his condo in Deleon, that's on the Gulf side, rather than face my mother."

  "I can see why. She has a mind of her own."

  "Funny, that was just the thing he thought she didn't have."

  "What was his affect? You started to say."

  Nelson thinks back. "Discouraged. But dogged. Going through the motions. He was practicing golf in our backyard, which was something he never did. There wasn't room-there was a vegetable garden, and a swing set. In fact he never practiced his golf at all. He just got up on the tee and expected to be terrific."

  "And was he?"

  "Not very, actually. But in his mind he had all this potential."

  "He sounds dear. Like a little boy who's always been somebody's pet."

  "That was him. Do you think it means anything, the dream?"

  "You tell me, Nelson. You're the shrink."

  "I'm not a shrink. I keep telling the clients that. They keep looking to me to have answers-all the world wants a guru. A savior. I'm nobody's savior."

  "Not even mine?" She smiles-he thinks she smiles, her face is in shadow, the big window bright behind her, with the sidewalk trees going bare. "In the dream, did he say anything to you? Did he- did he give you any instructions?"

  "None. He never did. Almost never. He didn't even look at me. I think I made him too sad."

  "Why was that?"

  "Maybe I reminded him of his other child, the one that died. My sister Becky. Also, he hated my being so short, taking after my mother."

  "Did he, or did you just think that? You're as tall as I am, and I'm not short. Five seven."

  "Really?" He is thinking about something else; he is rattled enough to tell her. "I tried to run my Relationships group this morning, we discussed how to make it through the holidays-everything goes up in the holidays, suicides, psychotic breaks, acting out; the expectations are too much-and it got away from me, onto the meaning of life. Glenn, this suicidal gay with diamond studs all over his face, gets his kicks telling everybody how there is no meaning, the universe is an accident, a hiccup in empty space, and our existence is a cruel joke evolution has played on us, and he'd just as soon be out of it as not but he has too much contempt for the whole farce even to give it the satisfaction of pulling the trigger. This sends Rosa off the deep end, she's a bipolar who in her manic phase says Jesus talks to her personally through various systems He has. She tells Glenn he's going straight to Hell and won't get any pity from her; she'll look down at him and laugh.

  This gets Shirley, she's a three-hundred-pound binger with a history' of ECT for depression, this gets her riled up and she says Glenn is a very kind and considerate person and that the meaning of life for her is in small acts of kindness, not in some remote God in Heaven."

  "How did empty space hiccup? Did Glenn explain it?"

  "Sort of. Virtual particles, I think he said. Empty space isn't really empty but full of virtual particles that come and go in nanoseconds. They somehow got together and made the Big Bang. He keeps up with all this stuff."

  "That's interesting. He doesn't sound suicidal to me."

  "Me neither! He just says he is so he won't have to leave us. We're his family. Then Michael-have I told you about Michael?"

  "Just a little. He's the pretty boy with the rich self-made parents."

  "Exactly." At times talking to Annabelle is like talking to himself, they are in such accord. "Michael gets very angry and says he'd like to know how people who think they talk to Jesus know it's not the Devil pretending to be Jesus and that the voices that talk to him use dirty words he would never use, that's how he knows they're from outside his head. I'm pleased he can come out with all this, he tends to stay above it all when he even bothers to show up. He was in his first year at Penn when he broke. Then Jim-you want to hear all this garbage? You don't."

  "Finish, Nelson. I do. But we must get the waitress and order. She hasn't even cleared the table and I have a dental appointment at two."

  "You do? I never schedule the dentist after lunch."

  "I brought floss and a toothbrush in my purse," Annabelle says primly, complacently. Her hair with its fluffy ragged cut makes a halo against the window, her face in shadow round like a solar eclipse. She suddenly s
eems a total stranger, an angel of blankness, and he wonders what he is doing here; she is too much for him to take on. The same gnawing he wakes to at night attacks his stomach and robs him of appetite at the very moment when the waitress, flushed and overwhelmed, comes to their booth, stacks the used plates on her arm, and asks for their order.

  "We never got a menu," Nelson tells her.

  But before the girl can retreat to get them one, Annabelle says, "We're in a hurry. Just bring me a hamburger."

  Nelson looks at the specials blackboard above the counter and says, "O.K., I'll have the split-pea soup and the half a bean-sprouts sandwich."

  "To drink?"

  "Coffee."

  "A medium Sprite," Annabelle says.

  He accuses her, when the waitress leaves, "Your teeth look perfect."

  "No, actually they need a lot of care. My molars are full of fillings and may have to be crowned. I've always had a sweet tooth. Then Jim," she prompted.

  "Then Jim-Jim is an addict. You name it, he's addicted. He has a beer belly from booze and yellow fingers from cigarettes and he's been on methadone for years. But he'll do uppers, downers, he'd get hooked on M amp;Ms if there was nothing else."

  "Yum," says Annabelle.

  "Jim decides to tell us, maybe just to rile us all up, that the meaning of life is sex, and he starts to describe a sexual adventure he just had, with all the words in place, in this sort of eye-rolling philosophizing way, a girl he met in a Third Street bar…"

  "Go on."

  "She did this, he suggested that, she said why not, dude, the earth began to shudder and shake-I had to cut him off, which I hate to do, but it was pure exhibitionism, Rosa actually walked out, it was SO inappropriate-"

  "I know," Annabelle says. "I get that with my Alzheimer's patients. They de-inhibit."