by John Updike
Mim intercedes. “Nelson, when will you show me your famous mini-bike?”
“It’s not much good, it keeps breaking down.” He studies her, his possible playmate. “You can’t ride it in clothes like that.”
“Out West,” she says, “everybody rides motorcycles in trendy knits.”
“Did you ever ride a motorcycle?”
“All the time, Nelson. I used to be den mother for a pack of Hell’s Angels. We’ll ride over and look at your bike after supper.”
“It’s not the kid’s bike, it’s somebody else’s,” Rabbit tells her.
“It’ll be dark after supper,” Nelson tells Mim.
“I love the dark,” she says. Reassured, he clumps upstairs, ignoring his father. Rabbit is jealous. Mim has learned, these years out of school, what he has not: how to manage people.
Shakily, Mom lifts her teacup, sips, sets it down. A perilous brave performance. She is proud of something; he can tell by the way she sits, upright, her neck cords stretched. Her hair has been brushed tight about her head. Tight and almost glossy. “Mim,” she says, “went calling today.”
Rabbit asks, “On who?”
Mim answers. “On Janice. At Springer Motors.”
“Well.” Rabbit pushes back from the table, his chair legs scraping. “What did the little mutt have to say for herself?”
“Nothing. She wasn’t there.”
“Where was she?”
“He said seeing a lawyer.”
“Old man Springer said that?” Fear slides into his stomach, nibbling. The law. The long white envelope. Yet he likes the idea of Mim going over there and standing in one of her costumes in front of the Toyota cutout, a gaudy knife into the heart of the Springer empire. Mim, their secret weapon.
“No,” she tells him, “not old man Springer. Stavros.”
“You saw Charlie there? Huh. How does he look? Beat?”
“He took me out to lunch.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know, some Greek place in the black district.”
Rabbit has to laugh. People dead and dying all around him, he has to let it out. “Wait’ll he tells her that.”
Mim says, “I doubt he will.”
Pop is slow to follow. “Who’re we talking about, Mim? That slick talker turned Janice’s head?”
Mom’s face gropes; her eyes stretch as if she is strangling while her mouth struggles to frame a droll thought. In suspense they all fall silent. “Her lover,” she pronounces. A sick feeling stabs Rabbit.
Pop says, “Well I’ve kept my trap shut throughout this mess, don’t think Harry there wasn’t a temptation to meddle but I kept my peace, but a lover in my book is somebody who loves somebody through thick and thin and from all I hear this smooth operator is just after the ass. The ass and the Springer name. Pardon the expression.”
“I think,” Mom says, faltering though her face still shines. “It’s nice. To know Janice has.”
“An ass,” Mim finally completes for her. And it seems to Rabbit wicked that these two, Pop and Mim, are corrupting Mom on the edge of the grave. Coldly he asks Mim, “What’d you and Chas talk about?”
“Oh,” Mim says, “things.” She shrugs her knitted hip off the kitchen table, where she has been perched as on a bar stool. “Did you know, he has a rheumatic heart? He could kick off at any minute.”
“Fat chance,” Rabbit says.
“That type of operator,” Pop says, snarling his teeth back into place, “lives to be a hundred, while they bury all the decent natural Americans. Don’t ask me why it works that way, the Lord must have His reasons.”
Mim says, “I thought he was sweet. And quite intelligent. And much nicer about you all than you are about him. He was very thoughtful about Janice, he’s probably the first person in thirty years to give her some serious attention as a person. He sees a lot in her.”
“Must use a microscope,” Rabbit says.
“And you” Mim says, turning, “he thinks you’re about the biggest spook he’s ever met. He can’t understand why if you want Janice back you don’t come and get her back.”
Rabbit shrugs. “Too proud or lazy. I don’t believe in force. I don’t like contact sports.”
“I did tell him, what a gentle brother you were.”
“Never hurt a fly if he could help it, used to worry me,” Pop says. “As if we’d had a girl and didn’t know it. Isn’t that the truth, Mother?”
Mom gets out, “Never. All boy.”
“In that case, Charlie says,” Mim goes on.
Rabbit interrupts: “ ‘Charlie’ yet.”
“‘In that case,’ he said, ‘why is he for the war?’”
“Fuck,” Rabbit says. He is more tired and impatient than he knew. “Anybody with any sense at all is for the damn war. They want to fight, we got to fight. What’s the alternative? What?”
Mim tries to ride down her brother’s rising anger. “His theory is,” she says, “you like any disaster that might spring you free. You liked it when Janice left, you liked it when your house burned down.”
“And I’ll like it even more,” Rabbit says, “when you stop seeing this greasy creep.”
Mim gives him the stare that has put a thousand men in their place. “Like you said. He’s my type.”
“A gangster, right. No wonder you’re out there screwing yourself into the morgue. You know where party chicks like you wind up? In coroners’ reports, when you take too many sleeping pills when the phone stops ringing, when the gangsters find playmates in not such baggy condition. You’re in big trouble, Sis, and the Stavroses of the world are going to be no help. They’ve put you where you are.”
“Maa-om,” Mim cries, out of old instinct appealing to the frail cripple nodding at the kitchen table. “Tell Harry to lay off.” And Rabbit remembers, it’s a myth they never fought; they often did.
When Pop and Harry return from work the next day, Harry’s last day on the job, the Toronado with New York plates is not in front of the house. Mim comes in an hour later, after Rabbit has put the supper chops in the oven; when he asks her where she’s been, she drops her big stripey bag on the old davenport and answers, “Oh, around. Revisiting the scenes of my childhood. The downtown is really sad now, isn’t it? All black-topped parking lots and Afro-topped blacks. And linoleum stores. I did one nice thing, though. I stopped at that store on lower Weiser with the lefty newspapers for sale and bought a pound of peanuts. Believe it or not Brewer is the only place left you can get good peanuts in the shell. Still warm.” She tosses him the bag, a wild pass; he grabs it left-handed and as they talk in the living room he cracks peanuts. He uses a flowerpot for the shells.
“So,” he says. “You see Stavros again?”
“You told me not to.”
“Big deal, what I tell you. How was he? Still clutching his heart?”
“He’s touching. Just the way he carries himself.”
“Boo hoo. You analyze me some more?”
“No, we were selfish, we talked about ourselves. He saw right through me. We were halfway into the first drink and he looks me up and down through those tinted glasses and says, ‘You work the field don’t you?’ Gimme a peanut.”
He tosses a fistful overhanded; they pelt her on the chest. She is wearing a twitchy little dress that buttons down the front and whose pattern imitates lizardskin. When she puts her feet up on the hassock he sees clear to the crotch of her pantyhose. She acts lazy and soft; her eyes have relented, though the makeup shines as if freshly applied. “That’s all you did?” he asks. “Eat lunch.”
“Th-that’s all, f-f-folks.”
“What’re you tryin’ to prove? I thought you came East to help Mom.”
“To help her help you. How can I help her, I’m no doctor.”
“Well, I really appreciate your help, fucking my wife’s boyfriend like this.”
Mim laughs at the ceiling, showing Harry the horseshoe curve of her jaw’s underside, the shining white jugular bulge. As if cut by a knife the l
augh ends. She studies her brother gravely, impudently. “If you had a choice, who would you rather went to bed with him, her or me?”
“Her. Janice, I can always have too, I mean it’s possible; but you, never.”
“I know,” Mim gaily agrees. “Of all the men in the world, you’re the only one off bounds. You and Pop.”
“And how does that make me seem?”
She focuses hard on him, to get the one-word answer. “Ridiculous.”
“That’s what I thought. Hey, Jesus. Did you really give Stavros a bang today? Or’re you just getting my goat? Where would you go? Wouldn’t Janice miss him at the office?”
“Oh – he could say he was out on a sale or something,” Mim offers, bored now. “Or he could tell her to mind her own business. That’s what European men do.” She stands, touches all the buttons in the front of her lizardskin dress to make sure they’re done. “Let’s go visit Mom.” Mim adds, “Don’t fret. Years ago, I made it a rule never to be with a guy more than three times. Unless there was some percentage in getting involved.”
That night Mim gets them all dressed and out to dinner, at the Dutch smörgåsbord diner north toward the ball park. Though Mom’s head waggles and she has some trouble cutting the crust of her apple pie, she manages pretty well and looks happy: how come he and Pop never thought of getting her out of the house? He resents his own stupidity, and tells Mim in the hall, as they go in to their beds – she is back in her old room, Nelson sleeps with him now – “You’re just little Miss Fix-It, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she snaps, “and you’re just big Mister Muddle.” She begins undoing her buttons in front of him, and closes her door only after he has turned away.
Saturday morning she takes Nelson in her Toronado over to the Fosnachts; Janice has arranged with Mom that she and Peggy will do something all day with the boys. Though it takes twenty minutes to drive from Mt. Judge to West Brewer, Mim is gone all morning and comes back to the house after two. Rabbit asks her, “How was it?”
“What?”
“No, seriously. Is he that great in the sack, or just about average in your experience? My theory for a while was there must be something wrong with him, otherwise why would he latch on to Janice when he can have all these new birds coming up?”
“Maybe Janice has wonderful qualities.”
“Let’s talk about him. Relative to your experience.” He imagines that all men have been welded into one for her, faces and voices and chests and hands welded into one murmuring pink wall, as once for him the audience at those old basketball games became a single screaming witness that was the world. “To your wide experience,” he qualifies.
“Why don’t you tend your own garden instead of hopping around nibbling at other people’s?” Mim asks. When she turns in that clown outfit, her lower half becomes a gate of horizontal denim stripes.
“I have no garden,” he says.
“Because you didn’t tend it at all. Everybody else has a life they try to fence in with some rules. You just do what you feel like and then when it blows up or runs down you sit there and pout.”
“Christ,” he says, “I went to work day after day for ten years.”
Mim tosses this off. “You felt like it. It was the easiest thing to do.”
“You know, you’re beginning to remind me of Janice.”
She turns again; the gate opens. “Charlie told me Janice is fantastic. A real wild woman.”
Sunday Mim stays home all day. They go for a drive in Pop’s old Chevy, out to the quarry, where they used to walk. The fields that used to be dusted white with daisies and then yellow with goldenrod are housing tracts now; of the quarry only the great gray hole in the ground remains. The Oz-like tower of sheds and chutes where the cement was processed is gone, and the mouth of the cave where children used to hide and frighten themselves is sealed shut with bulldozed dirt and rusted sheets of corrugated iron. “Just as well,” Mom pronounces. “Awful things. Used to happen there. Men and boys.” They eat at the aluminum diner out on Warren Street, with a view of the viaduct, and this meal out is less successful than the last. Mom refuses to eat. “No appetite,” she says, yet Rabbit and Mim think it is because the booths are close and the place is bright and she doesn’t want people to see her fumble. They go to a movie. The movie page of the Vat advertises: I Am Curious Yellow, Midnight Cowboy, a double bill of Depraved and The Circus (Girls Never Played Games Like This Before!), a Swedish X-film titled Yes, and Funny Girl Funny Girl sounds like more of the same but it has Barbra Streisand; there will be music. They make it late to the 6:30 show. Mom falls asleep and Pop gets up and walks around in the back of the theater and talks to the usher in a penetrating whine until one of the scattered audience calls out “Shh.” On the way out, the lights on, a trio of hoods give Mim such an eye Rabbit gives them back the finger. Blinking in the street, Mom says, “That was nice. But really Fanny. Was very ugly. But stylish. And a gangster. She always knew Nick Arnstein was a gangster. Everybody. Knew it.”
“Good for her,” Mim says.
“It isn’t the gangsters who are doing the country in,” Pop says. “If you ask me it’s the industrialists. The monster fortunes. The Mellons and the du Ponts, those are the cookies we should put in jail.”
Rabbit says, “Don’t get radical, Pop.”
“I’m no radical,” the old man assures him, “you got to be rich to be radical.”
Monday, a cloudy day, is Harry’s first day out of work. He is awake at seven but Pop goes off to work alone. Nelson goes with him; he still goes to school in West Brewer and switches buses on Weiser. Mim leaves the house around eleven, she doesn’t say where to. Rabbit scans the want ads in the Brewer Standard. Accountant. Administrative Trainee. Apprentice Spray Painter. Auto Mechanic. Bartender. The world is full of jobs, even with Nixon’s Depression. He skips down through Insurance Agents and Programmers to a column of Salesmen and then turns to the funnies. Goddam Apartment 3-G: he feels he’s been living with those girls for years now, when is he going to see them with their clothes off? The artist keeps teasing him with bare shoulders in bathrooms, naked legs in the foreground with the crotch coming just at the panel edge, glimpses of bra straps being undone. He calculates: after two months’ pay from Verity he has thirty-seven weeks of welfare and then he can live on Pop’s retirement. It is like dying now: they don’t let you fall though, they keep you up forever with transfusions, otherwise you’ll be an embarrassment to them. He skims the divorce actions and doesn’t see himself and goes upstairs to Mom.
She is sitting up in the bed, her hands quiet on the quilted coverlet, an inheritance from her own mother. The television is also quiet. Mom stares out of the window at the maples. They have dropped leaves enough so the light in here seems harsh. The sad smell is more distinct: fleshly staleness mingled with the peppermint of medicine. To spare her the walk down the hall they have put a commode over by the radiator. To add a little bounce to her life, he sits down heavily on the bed. Her eyes with their film of clouding pallor widen; her mouth works but produces only saliva. “What’s up?” Harry loudly asks. “How’s it going?”
“Bad dreams,” she brings out. “L-dopa does things. To the system.”
“So does Parkinson’s Disease.” This wins no response. He tries, “What do you hear from Julia Arndt? And what’s-er-name, Mamie Kellog? Don’t they still come visiting?”
“I’ve outlasted. Their interest.”
“Don’t you miss their gossip?”
“I think. It scared them when. It all came true.”
He tries, “Tell me one of your dreams.”
“I was picking scabs. All over my body. I got one off and underneath. There were bugs, the same. As when you turn over a rock.”
“Wow. Enough to make you stay awake. How do you like Mini’s being here?”
“I do.”
“Still full of sauce, isn’t she?”
“She tries to be. Cheerful.”
“Hard as nails, I’d say.”
“Inch by inch,” Mom says.
“Huh?”
“That was on one. Of the children’s programs. Earl leaves the set on and makes me watch. Inch by inch.”
“Yeah, go on.”
“Life is a cinch. Yard by yard. Life is hard.”
He laughs appreciatively, making the bed bounce more. “Where do you think I went wrong?”
“Who says. You did?”
“Mom. No house, no wife, no job. My kid hates me. My sister says I’m ridiculous.”
“You’re. Growing up.”
“Mim says I’ve never learned any rules.”
“You haven’t had to.”
“Huh. Any decent kind of world, you wouldn’t need all these rules.”
She has no ready answer for this. He looks out of her windows. There was a time – the year after leaving, even five years after – when this homely street, with its old-fashioned high crown, its sidewalk blocks tugged up and down by maple roots, its retaining walls of sandstone and railings of painted iron and two-family brickfront houses whose siding imitates gray rocks, excited Rabbit with the magic of his own existence. These mundane surfaces had given witness to his life; this cup had held his blood; here the universe had centered, each downtwirling maple seed of more account than galaxies. No more. Jackson Road seems an ordinary street anywhere. Millions of such American streets hold millions of lives, and let them sift through, and neither notice nor mourn, and fall into decay, and do not even mourn their own passing but instead grimace at the wrecking ball with the same gaunt facades that have outweathered all their winters. However steadily Mom communes with these maples – the branches’ misty snake-shapes as inflexibly fixed in these two windows as the leading of stained glass – they will not hold back her fate by the space of a breath; nor, if they are cut down tomorrow to widen Jackson Road at last, will her staring, that planted them within herself, halt their vanishing. And the wash of new light will extinguish even her memory of them. Time is our element, not a mistaken invader. How stupid, it has taken him thirty-six yean to begin to believe that. Rabbit turns his eyes from the windows and says, to say something, “Having Mim home sure makes Pop happy”; but in his silence Mom, head rolling on the pillow, her nostrils blood-red in contrast with the linen, has fallen asleep.
