Rabbit at rest (2 page)

And he has never forgot how, thirty years ago it will be this
June, his baby daughter Rebecca June drowned and when he went back
to the apartment alone there was still this tubful of tepid gray
water that had killed her. God hadn't pulled the plug. It would
have been so easy for Him, Who set the stars in place. To have it
unhappen. Or to delete from the universe whatever it was that
exploded that Pan Am 747 over Scotland. Those bodies with hearts
pumping tumbling down in the dark. How much did they know as they
fell, through air dense like tepid water, tepid gray like this
terminal where people blow through like dust in an air duct, to the
airline we're all just numbers on the computer, one more or less,
who cares? A blip on the screen, then no blip on the screen. Those
bodies tumbling down like wet melon seeds.

A star has appeared in the daytime sky, in the blue beneath the
streaks of stratocirrus, an airplane glinting, lowering, heading
straight toward them. This glint, he thinks, holds his near and
dear: Nelson his son, his left-handed
daughter-in-law called Pru though she was christened
Teresa, Judy his eight-year-old granddaughter, and Roy
his four-year-old grandson, born the same fall Harry
and Janice began to spend half the year in Florida. The baby
actually was named after both fathers, Harold Roy, but everybody
calls him Roy, something Harry could resent since Roy Lubell is a
sorehead laid-off Akron steamfitter who didn't even come to
the wedding and never did shit for his seven hungry kids. Pru still
seems hungry and in that she reminds Harry of himself. The star
grows, has become a saucer shape glinting in a number of points, a
winged aluminum machine aglide and enlarging above the sulky flat
scrubland and horizon thready with palms. He imagines the plane
exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a
ball of red flame shadowed in black like you see on TV all the
time, and he is shocked to find within himself, imagining this, not
much emotion, just a cold thrill at being a witness, a kind of
bleak wonder at the fury of chemicals, and relief that he hadn't
been on the plane himself but was instead safe on this side of the
glass, with his faint pronged sense of doom.

Janice is at his side again. She is breathless, excited. "Harry,
hurry," she says. "They're
here, ten
minutes early, there
must have been a tail wind from Newark. I came out of the Ladies
and went down to the gate and couldn't find you, you weren't
there.
Where
were you?"

"Nowhere. Just standing here by the window." That plane he had
mentally exploded hadn't been their plane at all.

Heart thumping, his breath annoyingly short, he strides after
his little wife down the wide gray carpeting. Her pleated tennis
skirt flicks at the brown backs of her thighs and her multilayered
white Nikes look absurdly big at the end of her skinny legs, like
Minnie Mouse in her roomy shoes, but Janice's getup is no more
absurd than many in this crowd of greeters: men with bankers' trim
white haircuts and bankers' long grave withholding faces wearing
Day-Glo yellow-green tank tops stencilled CORAL POINT
or CAPTIVA ISLAND and tomato-red bicycle shorts and Bermudas
patterned with like fried eggs and their permed and
thick-middled women in these ridiculous one-piece
exercise outfits like long flannel underwear in pink or blue, baby
colors on Kewpie-doll shapes, their costumes advertising the
eternal youth they have found like those skiers and tennis players
and golfers now who appear on television laden with logos like
walking billboards. The hunchbacked little Jewish guy in such a
hurry has already met his loved one, a tall grinning woman, a
Rachel or Esther with frizzedout hair and a big pale profile,
carrying over one arm her parka from Newark, her plump dumpy mother
on the other side of her, Grace was her name, while the old man
with angry choppy gestures is giving the women the latest version
of his spiel, they listening with half an ear each to this newest
little thing he feels very strongly about. Rabbit is curious to see
that this grown daughter, a head taller than her parents, appears
to have no mate. A tall black man, slick-looking in a
three-piece gray suit, but nothing of a dude, carrying
himself with a businesslike Waspy indifference to his appearance
and lugging one of those floppy big bags that smart travellers use
and that hog all the overhead rack space, is trailing unnaturally
close behind. But he can't be a relation, he must be just trying to
pass, like that black chick in the red Camaro coming in off 75.
Everybody tailgating, that's the way we move along now.

Harry and Janice reach Gate A5. People get off of airplanes in
clots, one self-important fusspot with three bags or some
doddery old dame with a cane bunching those behind them. You wonder
if we haven't gone overboard in catering to cripples. "There they
are," Janice pronounces at last, adding under her breath to Harry
quickly, "Nelson looks exhausted."

Not so much exhausted, Rabbit thinks, as shifty. His son is
carrying his own son on his left arm, and Nelson's right eye
squints, the lid seeming to quiver, as if a blow might come from
that unprotected side. Roy must have fallen asleep on the flight,
for his head leans against his father's neck seeking a pillow
there, his eyes open with that liquid childish darkness but his
plump mouth mute, gleaming with saliva, in shock. Harry goes
forward as soon as the ropes allow to lift the burden from his son,
but Nelson seems reluctant to let go, as if the child's own
grandfather is a kidnapper; Roy, too, clings. With a shrug of
exasperation Harry gives up and leans in close and kisses Roy's
velvety cheek, finer than velvet, still feverish with sleep, and
shakes his own son's small and clammy hand. In recent years Nelson
has grown a mustache, a tufty brown smudge not much wider than his
nose. His delicate lips underneath it never seem to smile. Harry
looks in vain into this fearful brown-eyed face for a trace
of his blue-eyed own. Nelson has inherited Janice's tense
neatness of feature, with her blur of evasion or confusion in the
eyes; the puzzled look sits better on a woman than a man. Worse,
Janice's high forehead and skimpy fine hair have become in Nelson a
distinctly growing baldness. His receding temples have between them
a transparent triangle of remaining hair soon to become an island,
a patch, and at the back of his head, when he turns to kiss his
mother, a swath of skin is expanding. He has chosen to wear a worn
blue denim jacket down on the plane, over a crisp dressy shirt,
though, pink stripes with white collar and cuffs, so he seems half
cocked, like a married rock star or a weekend gangster. One earlobe
bears a tiny gold earring.

"Mmmm-wah!"Janice says to cap her hello kiss; she has
learned to make such noises down here, among the overexpressive
Jewish women.

Harry carefully greets Judith and Pru. Going to be nine in less
than a month, the skinny girl is a sketch of a woman, less than
lifesize and not filled in. A redhead like her mother. Lovely
complexion, cheeks rosy under the freckles, and the details of her
face lashes, eyebrows, ears, nostril-wings, lips quick to
lift up on her teeth - frighteningly perfect, as if too easy
to smash. When he bends to kiss her he sees in front ofher ear the
sheen of childhood's invisible down. She has Pru's clear green eyes
and carrot-colored hair but nothing as yet in her frail
straight frame and longish calm face of the twist that life at some
point gave Pru, making her beauty even when she was
twenty-four slightly awkward, limping as it were, a look that
has become more wry and cumbersome with the nine years of marriage
to Nelson. She likes Harry and he likes her though they have never
found a way around all these others to express it. "What a pair of
beauties," he says now, of the mother and daughter.

Little Judy wrinkles her nose and says, "Grandpa's been eating
candy again, for shame on him. I could smell it, something with
peanuts in it, I can tell. He even has some little pieces stuck
between his teeth. For shame."

He had to laugh at this attack, at the accuracy of it, and the
Pennsylvania-Dutch way the little girl said, "for shame."
Local accents are dying out, but slowly, children so precisely
imitate their elders. Judy must have overheard in her house Nelson
and Pru and maybe Janice talking about his weight problem and
rotten diet. If they were talking, his health problems might be
worse than he knows. He must look bad.

"Shit," he says, in some embarrassment. "I can't get away with
anything any more. Pru, how's the world treating you?"

His daughter-in-law surprises him by, as he bends
dutifully forward to kiss her cheek, kissing him flush on the
mouth. Her lips have a wry regretful shy downward twist but are
warm, warm and soft and big as cushions in the kiss's aftermath
within him. Since he first met her in the shadows of Ma Springer's
house that longago summer - a slender slouching shape thrust
into the midst of their lives, Nelson's pregnant Roman Catholic
girlfriend from Ohio, a Kent State University secretary named
Teresa Lubell, suddenly become the carrier of Harry's genes into
eternity - Pru has broadened without growing heavy in that suety
Pennsylvania way. As if invisible pry bars have slightly spread her
bones and new calcium been wedged in and the flesh gently stretched
to fit, she now presents more front. Her face, once narrow like
Judy's, at moments looks like a flattened mask. Always tall, she
has in the years of becoming a hardened wife and matron allowed her
long straight hair to be cut and teased out into bushy wings a
little like the hairdo of the Sphinx. Her hips and shoulders too
have widened, beneath the busy pattern - brown and white and
black squares and diamond-shapes arranged to look
three-dimensional of the checked suit she put on for the
airplane, a lightweight suit wrinkled by the three hours of sitting
and babysitting. A stuffed blue shoulder bag is slung across one
shoulder and her arms and hands clutch a gray wool topcoat, two
children's jackets, several slippery children's books based on
morning television shows, a Cabbage Patch doll with its bunchy
beige face, and an inflated plastic dinosaur. She has big hands,
with pink, cracked knuckles. Harry's mother had hands like that,
from washing clothes and dishes. How did Pru get them, in this age
of appliances? He stands gazing at her in a half-second's
post-kiss daze. Having a wife and children soon palled for
him, but he never fails to be excited by having, in the flesh, a
daughter-in-law.

She says, slangily, to mask the initial awkwardness when they
meet, "You're lookin' good, Harry. The sunny South agrees with
you."

What did that frontal kiss mean? Its slight urgency. Some sad
message there. She and Nelson never did quite fit.

"Nobody else thinks so," he says, and grabs at her shoulder bag.
"Lemme help you carry some of this stuff I'll take the bag." He
begins to pull it off.

Pru shifts the coat and toys to extend her arm to let him take
it but at the same time asks him, "Should you?"

Harry asks, "Why does everybody treat me like some Goddamn kind
of invalid?" but he is asking the air; Pru and Janice are hugging
with brisk false enthusiasm and Nelson is plodding ahead down the
long gray corridor with Roy back to sleep on his shoulder. Harry is
irritated to see that though Nelson has a careful haircut that
looks only a few days old the barber left one of those tails, like
a rat's tail, uncut and hanging down over the boy's collar, under
the spreading bald spot. How old does he think he is, seventeen?
Little Judy trails her father but Nelson is not waiting or looking
back. The girl is just old enough to sense that in her nice proper
airplane outfit she should not sacrifice all dignity and run to
catch up. She wears a navy-blue winter coat over a pink
summer dress; its pink hem shows below the coat, and then her bare
legs, which look long, longer than when he saw her last in early
November. But it is the back of her head that kills him, her shiny
carrot-colored hair braided into a pigtail caught into a
showy stiff white ribbon. Something of her mother's Catholic
upbringing in that ribbon, decking out the Virgin or the baby Jesus
or Whoever to go on parade, to go on a ride in the sky. The sleek
back of Judy's head, the pigtail bouncing as she tries not to run,
so docilely, so unthinkingly wears the showy ribbon her mother put
there that Harry smiles. Hurrying his stride, he catches up and
reaches down and says, "Hey there, good-lookin'," and takes
the hand she with a child's reflex lifts to be taken. Her hand is
as surprisingly moist as her mother's lips were warm. Her head with
its bone-white parting is higher than his waist. She
complains to her mother, Harry has heard from Janice, about being
the tallest girl in her section of the third grade. The mean boys
tease her.

"How's school going?" he asks.

"I hate it,"Judy tells him. "There are all these kids think
they're big shots. The girls are the absolute worst."

"Do you ever think you're a big shot?"

She ponders this. "Some boys are always getting after me but I
tell them to fuck off."

He clucks his tongue. "That's pretty rough language for the
third grade."

"Not really," she says. "Even the teacher says `damn' sometimes
when we get her going."

"How do you get her going?"

Judy smiles upward, her mother's quick wide-mouthed smile
without the crimp. "Sometimes we all hum so she can't see our
mouths move. A couple weeks ago when she tried to make us all sing
Christmas carols one of these big-shot boys I told you about
said it was against his parents' religion and his father was a
lawyer and would sue everybody."

"He sounds like a pain in the ass," Rabbit says.

"Grandpa. Don't talk dirty."

"That's not dirty, that's just saying where it hurts. If you say
somebody's a pain in the bottom it sounds dirtier. Hey. Here's the
place I bought that peanut candy you smelled. Want some?"