by John Updike
“He’s gone with Billy Fosnacht to Brewer to look at mini-bikes.”
“I don’t want him looking at mini-bikes. He’ll get killed.” The other child his daughter was killed. The world is quicksand. Find the straight path and stick to it.
“Oh Harry, it won’t do any harm to look. Billy has one he rides all the time.”
“I can’t afford it.”
“He’s promised to earn half the money himself. I’ll give him our half out of my money, if you’re so uptight.” Her money: her father gave her stocks years ago. And she earns money now. Does she need him at all? She asks, “Are you sure you closed the door? There’s a terrible draft suddenly. There’s not much privacy in this house, is there?”
“Well Jesus how much privacy do you think I owe you?”
“Well you don’t have to stand there staring, you’ve seen me take a bath before.”
“Well I haven’t seen you with your clothes off since I don’t know when. You’re O.K.”
“I’m just a cunt, Harry. There are billions of us now.”
A few years ago she would never have said “cunt.” It excites him, touches him like a breath on his cock. The ankle she is reaching to shave starts to bleed, suddenly, brightly, shockingly. “God,” he tells her, “you are clumsy.”
“Your standing there staring makes me nervous.”
“Why’re you taking a bath right now anyway?”
“We’re going out to supper, remember? If we’re going to make the movie at eight o’clock we ought to leave here at six. You should wash off your ink. Want to use my water?”
“It’s all full of blood and little hairs.”
“Harry, really. You’ve gotten so uptight in your old age.”
Again, “uptight.” Not her voice, another voice, another voice in hers.
Janice goes on, “The tank hasn’t had time to heat enough for a fresh tub.”
“O.K. I’ll use yours.”
His wife gets out, water spilling on the bathmat, her feet and buttocks steamed rosy. Her breasts sympathetically lift as she lifts her hair from the nape of her neck. “Want to dry my back?”
He can’t remember the last time she asked him to do this. As he rubs, her smallness mixes with the absolute bigness naked women have. The curve that sways out from her waist to be swelled by the fat of her flank. Rabbit squats to dry her bottom, goosebumpy red. The backs of her thighs, the stray black hairs, the moss moist between. “O.K.,” she says, and steps off. He stands to pat dry the down beneath the sweep of her upheld hair: Nature is full of nests. She asks, “Where do you want to eat?”
“Oh, anywhere. The kid likes the Burger Bliss over on West Weiser.”
“I was wondering, there’s a new Greek restaurant just across the bridge I’d love to try. Charlie Stavros was talking about it the other day.”
“Yeah. Speaking of the other day –”
“He says they have marvellous grape leaf things and shish kebab Nelson would like. If we don’t make him do something new he’ll be eating at Burger Bliss the rest of his life.”
“The movie starts at seven-thirty, you know.”
“I know,” she says, “that’s why I took a bath now,” and, a new Janice, still standing with her back to him, nestles her bottom against his fly, lifting herself on tiptoe and arching her back to make a delicate double damp spreading contact. His mind softens; his prick hardens. “Besides,” Janice is going on, edging herself on tiptoes up and down like a child gently chanting to Banbury Cross, “the movie isn’t just for Nelson, it’s for me, for working so hard all week.”
There was a question he was about to ask, but her caress erased it. She straightens, saying, “Hurry, Harry. The water will get cold.” Two damp spots are left on the front of his suntans. The muggy bathroom has drugged him; when she opens the door to their bedroom, the contrast of cold air cakes him; he sneezes. Yet he leaves the door open while he undresses so he can watch her dress. She is practiced, quick; rapidly as a snake shrugs forward over the sand she has tugged her black pantyhose up over her legs. She nips to the closet for her skirt, to the bureau for her blouse, the frilly silvery one, that he thought was reserved for parties. Testing the tub with his foot (too hot) he remembers.
“Hey Janice. Somebody said today your parents were in the Poconos. Last night you said your father was at the lot.”
She halts in the center of their bedroom, staring into the bathroom. Her dark eyes darken the more; she sees his big white body, his spreading slack gut, his uncircumcised member hanging boneless as a rooster comb from its blond roots. She sees her flying athlete grounded, cuckolded. She sees a large white man a knife would slice like lard. The angelic cold strength of his leaving her, the anticlimax of his coming back and clinging: there is something in the combination that she cannot forgive, that justifies her. Her eyes must burn on him, for he turns his back and begins to step into her water: his buttocks merge with her lover’s, she thinks how all men look innocent and vulnerable here, reverting to the baby they were. She says firmly, “They were in the Poconos but came back early. Mom always thinks at these resorts she’s being snubbed,” and without waiting for an answer to her lie runs downstairs.
While soaking in the pool tinged by her hair and blood Rabbit hears Nelson come into the house. Voices rise muffled through the ceiling. “What a crummy mini-bike,” the child announces. “It’s busted already.”
Janice says, “Then aren’t you glad it isn’t yours?”
“Yeah, but there’s a more expensive kind, really neat, a Gioconda, that Grandpa could get at discount for us so it wouldn’t cost any more than the cheap one.”
“Your father and I agree, two hundred dollars is too much for a toy.”
“It’s not a toy, Mom, it’s something I could really learn about engines on. And you can get a license and Daddy could drive it to work some days instead of taking a bus all the time.”
“Daddy likes taking the bus.”
“I hate it!” Rabbit yells, “it stinks of Negroes,” but no voice below in the kitchen acknowledges hearing him.
* * *
Throughout the evening he has this sensation of nobody hearing him, of his spirit muffled in pulpy insulation, so he talks all the louder and more insistently. Driving the car (even with his flag decal the Falcon feels more like Janice’s car than his, she drives it so much more) back down Emberly to Weiser, past the movie house and across the bridge, he says, “Goddammit I don’t see why we have to go back into Brewer to eat, I spend all frigging day in Brewer.”
“Nelson agrees with me,” Janice says. “It will be an interesting experiment. I’ve promised him there are lots of things that aren’t gooey, it’s not like Chinese food.”
“We’re going to be late for the movie, I’m sure of it.”
“Peggy Fosnacht says –” Janice begins.
“That dope,” Rabbit says.
“Peggy Fosnacht says the beginning is the most boring part. A lot of stars, and some symphony. Anyway there must be short subjects or at least those things that want you to go out into the lobby and buy more candy.”
Nelson says, “I heard the beginning is real neat. There’s a lot of cave men eating meat that’s really raw, he nearly threw up a guy at school said, and then you see one of them get really zapped with a bone. And they throw the bone up and it turns into a spaceship.”
“Thank you, Mr. Spoil-It-All,” Janice says. “I feel I’ve seen it now. Maybe you two should go to the movie and I’ll go home to bed.”
“The hell,” Rabbit says. “You stick right with us and suffer for once.”
Janice says, conceding, “Women don’t dig science.”
Harry likes the sensation, of frightening her, of offering to confront outright this faceless unknown he feels now in their lives, among them like a fourth member of the family. The baby that died? But though Janice’s grief was worse at first, though she bent under it like a reed he was afraid might break, in the long years since, he has become sole heir t
o the grief. Since he refused to get her pregnant again the murder and guilt have become all his. At first he tried to explain how it was, that sex with her had become too dark, too serious, too kindred to death, to trust anything that might come out of it. Then he stopped explaining and she seemed to forget: like a cat who sniffs around in corners mewing for the drowned kittens a day or two and then back to lapping milk and napping in the wash basket. Women and Nature forget. Just thinking of the baby, remembering how he had been told of her death over a pay phone in a drugstore, puts a kink in his chest, a kink he still associates, dimly, with God.
At Janice’s directions he turns right off the bridge, at JIMBO’S Friendly LOUNGE, and after a few blocks parks on Quince Street. He locks the car behind them. “This is pretty shimmy territory,” he complains to Janice. “A lot of rapes lately down here.”
“Oh,” she says, “the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It’s a woman who changed her mind afterward.”
“Watch how you talk in front of the kid.”
“He knows more now than you ever will. That’s nothing personal, Harry, it’s just a fact. People are more sophisticated now than when you were a boy.”
“How about when you were a girl?”
“I was very dumb and innocent, I admit it.”
“But?”
“But nothing.”
“I thought you were going to tell us how wise you are now.”
“I’m not wise, but at least I’ve tried to keep my mind open.”
Nelson, walking a little ahead of them but hearing too much anyway, points to the great Sunflower Beer clock on Weiser Square, which they can see across slate rooftops and a block of rubble on its way to being yet another parking lot. “It’s twenty after six,” he says. He adds, not certain his point was made, “At Burger Bliss they serve you right away, it’s neat, they keep them warm in a big oven that glows purple.”
“No Burger Bliss for you, baby,” Harry says. “Try Pizza Paradise.”
“Don’t be ignorant,” Janice says, “pizza is purely Italian.” To Nelson she says, “We have plenty of time, there won’t be anybody there this early.”
“Where is it?” he asks.
“Right here,” she says; she has led them without error.
The place is a brick row house, its red bricks painted ox-blood red in the Brewer manner. A small un-neon sign advertises it, The Taverna. They walk up sandstone steps to the doorway, and a motherly mustached woman greets them, shows them into what once was a front parlor, now broken through to the room beyond, the kitchen behind swinging doors beyond that. A few center tables. Booths along the two walls. White walls bare but for some picture of an oval-faced yellow woman and baby with a candle flickering in front of it. Janice slides into one side of a booth and Nelson into the other and Harry, forced to choose, slides in beside Nelson, to help him with the menu, to find something on it enough like a hamburger. The tablecloth is a red checked cloth and the daisies in a blue glass vase are real flowers, soft, Harry notices, touching them. Janice was right. The place is nice. The only music is a radio playing in the kitchen; the only other customers are a couple talking so earnestly they now and then touch hands, immersed in some element where they cannot trust their eyes, the man red in the face as if choking, the woman stricken pale. They are Penn Park types, cool in their clothes, beige and pencil-gray, the right clothes insofar as any clothes can be right in this muggy river-bottom in the middle of July. Their faces have an edgy money look: their brows have that frontal clarity the shambling blurred poor can never duplicate. Though he can never now be one of them Harry likes their being here, in this restaurant so chaste it is chic. Maybe Brewer isn’t as dead on its feet as it seems.
The menus are in hectographed handwriting. Nelson’s face tightens, studying it. “They don’t have any sandwiches,” he says.
“Nelson,” Janice says, “if you make a fuss out of this I’ll never take you out anywhere again. Be a big boy.”
“It’s all in gobbledy-gook.”
She explains, “Everything is more or less lamb. Kebab is when it’s on a skewer. Moussaka, it’s mixed with eggplant.”
“I hate eggplant.”
Rabbit asks her, “How do you know all this?”
“Everybody knows that much; Harry, you are so provincial. The two of you, sitting there side by side, determined to be miserable. Ugly Americans.”
“You don’t look all that Chinese yourself,” Harry says, “even in your little Lord Fauntleroy blouse.” He glances down at his fingertips and sees there an ochre smudge of pollen, from having touched the daisies.
Nelson asks, “What’s kalamaria?”
“I don’t know,” Janice says.
“I want that.”
“You don’t know what you want. Have the souvlakia, it’s the simplest. It’s pieces of meat on a skewer, very well done, with peppers and onions between.”
“I hate pepper.”
Rabbit tells him, “Not the stuff that makes you sneeze, the green things like hollow tomatoes.”
“I know,” Nelson says. “I hate them. I know what a pepper is, Daddy; my God.”
“Don’t swear like that. When did you ever have them?”
“In a Pepperburger.”
“Maybe you should take him to Burger Bliss and leave me here,” Janice says.
Rabbit asks, “What are you going to have, if you’re so fucking smart?”
“Daddy swore.”
“Ssh,” Janice says, “both of you. There’s a nice kind of chicken pie, but I forget what it’s called.”
“You’ve been here before,” Rabbit tells her.
“I want melopeta,” Nelson says.
Rabbit sees where the kid’s stubby finger (Mom always used to point out, he has those little Springer hands) is stalled on the menu and tells him, “Dope, that’s a dessert.”
Shouts of greeting announce in the doorway a large family all black hair and smiles, initiates; the waiter greets them as a son and rams a table against a booth to make space for them all. They cackle their language, they giggle, they coo, they swell with the joy of arrival. Their chairs scrape, their children stare demure and big-eyed from under the umbrella of adult noise. Rabbit feels naked in his own threadbare little family. The Penn Park couple very slowly turn around, underwater, at the commotion, and then resume, she now blushing, he pale – contact, touching hands on the tablecloth, groping through the stems of wineglasses. The Greek flock settles to roost but there is one man left over, who must have entered with them but hesitates in the doorway. Rabbit knows him. Janice refuses to turn her head; she keeps her eyes on the menu, frozen so they don’t seem to read. Rabbit murmurs to her, “There’s Charlie Stavros.”
“Oh, really?” she says, yet she still is reluctant to turn her head.
But Nelson turns his and loudly calls out, “Hi, Charlie!” Summers, the kid spends a lot of time over at the lot.
Stavros, who has such bad and sensitive eyes his glasses are tinted lilac, focuses. His face breaks into the smile he must use at the close of a sale, a sly tuck in one corner of his lips making a dimple. He is a squarely marked-off man, Stavros, some inches shorter than Harry, some years younger, but with a natural reserve of potent gravity that gives him the presence and poise of an older person. His hairline is receding. His eyebrows go straight across. He moves deliberately, as if carrying something fragile within him; in his Madras checks and his rectangular thick hornrims and his deep squared sideburns he moves through the world with an air of having chosen it. His not having married, though he is in his thirties, adds to his quality of deliberation. Rabbit, when he sees him, always likes him more than he had intended to. He reminds him of the guys, close-set, slow, and never rattled, who were play-makers on the team. When Stavros, taking thought, moves around the obstacle of momentary indecision toward their booth, it is Harry who says, “Join us,” though Janice, face downcast, has already slid over.
Charlie speaks to Janice. “
The whole caboodle. Beautiful.”
She says, “These two are being horrible.”
Rabbit says, “We can’t read the menu.”
Nelson says, “Charlie, what’s kalamaria? I want some.”
“No you don’t. It’s little like octopuses cooked in their own ink.”
“Ick,” Nelson says.
“Nelson,” Janice says sharply.
Rabbit says, “Sit yourself down, Charlie.”
“I don’t want to butt in.”
“It’d be a favor. Hell.”
“Dad’s being grumpy,” Nelson confides.
Janice impatiently pats the place beside her; Charlie sits down and asks her, “What does the kid like?”
“Hamburgers,” Janice moans, theatrically. She’s become an actress suddenly, every gesture and intonation charged to carry across an implied distance.
Charlie’s squarish intent head is bowed above the menu.
“Let’s get him some keftedes. O.K., Nelson? Meatballs.”
“Not with tomatoey goo on them.”
“No goo, just the meat. A little mint. Mint’s what’s in Life Savers. O.K.?”
“O.K.”
“You’ll love ’em.”
But Rabbit feels the boy has been sold a slushy car. And he feels, with Stavros’s broad shoulders next to Janice’s, and the man’s hands each sporting a chunky gold ring, that the table has taken a turn down a road Rabbit didn’t choose. He and Nelson are in the back seat.
Janice says to Stavros, “Charlie, why don’t you order for all of us? We don’t know what we’re doing.”
Rabbit says, “I know what I’m doing. I’ll order for myself. I want the” – he picks something off the menu at random – “the païdakia.”
“Païdakia” Stavros says. “I don’t think so. It’s marinated lamb, you need to order it the day before, for at least six.”
Nelson says, “Dad, the movie starts in forty minutes.”
Janice explains, “We’re trying to get to see this silly space movie.”
Stavros nods as if he knows. There is a funny echo Rabbit’s ears pick up. Things said between Janice and Stavros sound dead, duplicated. Of course they work together all day. Stavros tells them, “It’s lousy.”
