Rabbit at rest (38 page)

Nelson has changed his tune. He leans toward his mother, his
fingers intertwined to still their shaking, his lips tensed to bite
back his nausea, his dark eyes full of an overflowing confusion
like her own. He is pleadingly, disjointedly, explaining himself.
". . . the only time I feel human, like other people I guess feel
all the time. But when I went after Pru that way tonight it was
like a monster or something had taken over my body and I was
standing outside watching and felt no connection with myself. Like
it was all on television. You're right, I got to ease off. I mean,
it's getting so I can't start the day without . . . a hit . . . and
all day all I think about . . . That's not human either."

"You poor baby," she says. "I know. I know just what you're
saying. It's lack of self-esteem. I had it for years.
Remember, Harry, how I used to drink when we were young?"

Trying to pull him into it, make him a parent too. He won't have
it, yet. He won't buy in. "When we were young? How about when we
were middle-aged, like now even? Hey look, what's this
supposed to be, a therapy session? This kid just clobbered his wife
and is conning the pants off us and you're letting him!"

Judy, lying diagonally on the bed behind her grandmother, and
studying them all with upside-down eyes, joins in, observing,
"When Grandpa gets mad his upper lip goes all stiff just like
Mommy's does."

Nelson comes out of his fog of self-pity enough to say to
her, "Honey, I'm not sure you should be hearing all this."

"Let me put her back to bed," Janice offers, not moving
though.

Harry doesn't want to be left alone with Nelson. He says, "No,
I'll do it. You two keep talking. Hash it out. I've had my say to
this jailbait."

Judy laughs shrilly, her head still upside down on the bed, her
reversed eyelids monstrous. "That's a funny word," her mouth says,
the teeth all wrong, big on bottom and little on top. " Jailbait.'
You mean jailbird.' "

"No, Judy," Harry tells her, taking her hand and trying to pull
her upright. "first you're jailbait, then you're a jailbird. When
you're in jail, you're a jailbird."

"Where the holy fuck is her mother?" Nelson asks the air in
front of his face. "That damn Pru, she's always telling me what a
jerk I am, then she's out to lunch half the time herself. Notice
how broad in the beam she's getting? That's alcohol. The kids come
home from school and find her sound asleep." He says this to
Janice, placating her, badmouthing his wife to his mother, then
suddenly turns to Harry.

"Dad," he says. "Want to split a beer?"

"You must be crazy."

"It'll help bring us down," the boy wheedles. "It'll help us to
sleep."

"I'm fighting sleep; Jesus. It's not me who's wired or whatever
you call it. Come on, Judy. Don't give Grandpa a hard time. He
hurts all over." The child's hand seems damp and sticky in his, and
she makes a game of his pulling her off the bed, resisting to the
point that he feels a squeeze in his chest. And when he gets her
upright beside the bed, she goes limp and tries to collapse onto
the rug. He holds on and resists the impulse to slap her. To Janice
he says sharply, "Ten more minutes. You and the kid talk. Don't let
him con you. Set up some kind of plan. We got to get some order
going in this crazy family."

As he pulls the bedroom door halfway shut, he hears Nelson say,
"Mom, how about you? Wouldn't half a beer be good? We have Mick,
and Miller's."

Judy's room, wherein Ma Springer used to doze and pretend to
watch television, and from whose front windows you can see patches
of Joseph Street, deserted like tundra, blanched by the
streetlights, through the sticky Norway maples, is crowded with
stuffed toys, teddy bears and giraffes and Garfields; but Harry
feels they are all old toys, that nobody has brought this child a
present for some time. Her childhood is wearing out before she is
done with it. She turned nine in January and who noticed? Janice
sent her a Dr. Seuss book and a flowered bathing cap from Florida.
Judy crawls without hesitation or any more stalling into her bed,
under a tattered red puff covered with Peanuts characters. He asks
her if she doesn't need to go pee-pee first. She shakes her
head and stares up at him from the pillow as if amused by how
little he knows about her insides. Slant slices of streetlight
enter around the window shades and he asks her if she would like
him to draw the curtains. Judy says No, she doesn't like it totally
dark. He asks her if the cars going by bother her and she says No,
only the big trucks that shake the house sometimes and there's a
law that says they shouldn't come this way but the police are too
lazy to enforce it. "Or too busy," he points out, always one to
defend the authorities. Strange that he should have this instinct,
since in his life he hasn't

been especially dutiful. Jailbait himself on a couple of
occasions. But the authorities these days seem so helpless, so
unarmed. He asks Judy if she wants to say a prayer. She says No
thanks. She is clutching some stuffed animal that looks shapeless
to him, without arms or legs. Monstrous. He asks her about it and
she shows him that it is a stuffed toy dolphin, with gray back and
white belly. He pats its polyester fur and tucks it back under the
covers with her. Her chin rests on the white profile of Snoopy
wearing his aviator glasses. Linus clutches his blanket; Pigpen has
little stars of dirt around his head; Charlie Brown is on his
pitcher's mound, and then is knocked head over heels by a rocketing
ball. Sitting on the edge of the bed, wondering if Judy expects a
bedtime story, Harry sighs so abjectly, so wearily, that both are
surprised, and nervously laugh. She suddenly asks him if everything
will be all right.

"How do you mean, honey?"

"With Mommy and Daddy."

"Sure. They love you and Roy, and they love each other."

"They say they don't. They fight."

"A lot of married people fight."

"My friends' parents don't."

"I bet they do, but you don't see it. They're being good because
you're in the house."

"When people fight a lot, they get divorced."

"Yes, that happens. But only after a lot of fighting. Has your
daddy ever hit your mommy before, like tonight?"

"Sometimes she hits him. She says he's wasting all our
money."

Harry has no ready answer to that. "It'll work out," he says,
just as Nelson has. "Things work out, usually. It doesn't always
seem that way, but they usually do."

"Like you that time you fell on the sand and couldn't get
up."

"Wasn't that a funny way to act? Yes, and see, here I am, as
good as new. It worked out."

Her face broadens in the dark; she is smiling. Her hair is
spread in dark rays across the glowing pillow. "You were so funny
in the water. I teased you."

"You teased me how?"

"By hiding under the sail."

He casts his weary mind back and tells her, "You weren't
teasing, honey. You were all blue and gaspy when I got you out. I
saved your life. Then you saved mine."

She says nothing. The dark pits of her eyes absorb his version,
his adult memory. He leans down and kisses her warm dry forehead.
"Don't you worry about anything, Judy. Grandma and I will take good
care of your daddy and all of you."

"I know," she says after a pause, letting go. We are each of us
like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing
but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.

Emerging opposite to the closed door of the old sewing room,
where Melame used to sleep, Rabbit sneaks down the hall past the
half-closed door to the master bedroom - he can hear
Janice and Nelson talking, their voices braided into one -
and to the room beyond, a back room with a view of the back yard
and the little fenced garden he used to tend. This was Nelson's
room in the distant days when he went to high school and wore long
hair and a headband like an Indian and tried to learn the guitar
that had been Jill's and spent a small fortune on his collection of
rock LPs, records all obsolete now, everything is tapes, and tapes
are becoming obsolete, everything will be CDs. This room is now
little Roy's. Its door is ajar; with three fingertips on its cool
white wood Harry pushes it open. Light enters it not as sharp
slices from the proximate streetlights above Joseph Street but more
mistily, from the lights of the town diffused and scattered, a
yellow star-swallowing glow arising foglike from the
silhouettes of maples and gables and telephone poles. By this dim
light he sees Pru's long body pathetically asleep across Roy's
little bed. One foot has kicked off its fake-furry slipper
and sticks out bare from its nightie, so filmy it clings to the
shape of her bent full-thighed leg, her short quilted robe
ruched up to her waist, rumpled in folds whose valleys seem
bottomless in the faint light. One long white hand of hers rests
extended on the rumpled covers, the other is curled in a loose fist
and fitted into the hollow between her lips and chin; the bruise on
her cheekbone shows like a leech attached there and her hair, its
carrot-color black in the dark, is disarrayed. Her breath
moves in and out with a shallow exhausted rasp. He inhales through
his nose, to smell her. Perfumy traces float in her injured
aura.

As he bends over for this inspection, Rabbit is startled by the
twin hard gleam of open eyes: Roy is awake. Cuddled on his bed by
his mother, sung a song that has put the singer to sleep, the
strange staring child reaches up through the darkness to seize the
loose skin of his grandfather's looming face and to twist it, his
small sharp fingernails digging in so that Harry has to fight
crying out. He pulls this fierce little crab of a hand away from
his cheek, disembeds it finger by finger, and with a vengeful pinch
settles it back onto Roy's chest. In his animal hurt Harry has
hissed aloud; seeing Pru stir as if to awake, her hand making an
agitated motion toward her tangled hair, he backs rapidly from the
room.

Janice and Nelson are in the bright hall looking for him. With
their thinning hair and muddled scowling expressions they seem
siblings. He tells them in a whisper, "Pru fell asleep on Roy's
bed."

Nelson says, "That poor bitch. She'd be O.K. if she'd just get
off my case."

Janice tells Harry, "Nelson says he feels much more like himself
now and we should go home to bed."

Their voices seem loud, after the foglit silence of Roy's room,
and he pointedly keeps his own low. "What have you two settled? I
don't want this to happen again."

In Nelson's old room, Roy has begun to cry.
He
should
cry; it's Harry's cheek that hurts.

"It won't, Harry," Janice says. "Nelson has promised to see a
counsellor."

He looks at his son to see what this means. The boy visibly
suppresses a smile of collusion, over the necessity ofplacating
women. Harry tells Janice, "I said, Don't let him con ya."

Her forehead, which her bangs do not cover, creases in
impatience. "Harry, it's time to go." She is, as Lyle informed him,
the boss.

On the drive back, he vents his indignation. "What did he say?
What about the money?" Route 422 shudders with tall trucks,
transcontinental eighteen-wheelers. They make better time in
the dead of the night.

Janice says, "He's running the lot and it would be too unmanning
to take it from him. I can't run it and you're going into the
hospital for that angio-thing. Plasty."

"Not till the week after next," he says. "We could always put it
off."

"I know that's what you'd like but we just can't go on
pretending you're fine. It's been nearly four months since New
Year's and in Florida they said you should recover enough in three.
Dr. Breit told me you're not losing weight and avoiding sodium the
way you were told and you could have a recurrence of what happened
on the Sunfish any time."

Dr. Breit is his cardiologist at the St. Joseph's Hospital in
Brewer - a fresh-faced freckled kid with big glasses in
fleshcolored plastic rims. Janice's telling him all this in her
mother's matter-of-fact, determined voice carves a
dreadful hollowness within him. The sloping park as they cruise
through on Cityview Drive seems fragile and papery, the illuminated
trees unreal. There is nothing beneath these rocks, these steep
lawns and proud row houses, but atoms and nothingness, waiting for
him to take his tight-fitting place among them.
Dear God,
reach down. Pull my bad heart out of me.
Thelma said it
helped. Janice's mind, far from prayer, is moving on, her voice
decided and a bit defiant. "As for the money, Nelson did allow as
there has to be some financial restructuring."

"Restructuring! That's what everybody up the creek talks about.
South American countries, those Texas S and Ls. Did he really say
`restructuring'?"

"Well, it's not a word I would have thought to use. Though I
expect when I start with my courses it'll be one of the things they
teach."

"Your courses, Jesus," he says. That tank, painted the wrong
green, how much longer before nobody remembered why it was there
- the ration stamps, the air-raid drills, the screaming
eightcolumn headlines every morning, God versus Satan a simple
matter of the miles gained each day on the road to Aachen? "What
did he say about himself and Pru?"

"He doesn't think she's found another man yet," Janice says. "So
we don't think she'll really leave."

"Well, that's nice and hard-boiled ofyou both. But what
about
her,
her own welfare? You saw her battered face
tonight. How much more should she take? Face it, the kid is utterly
gonzo. Do you see the way he was twitching all the time? And
throwing up then? Did you hear him offer me a beer? A beer, for
Chrissake, when we should have been the cops really. He's damn
lucky the neighbors didn't call 'em."