Rabbit at rest (45 page)

Last night it rained hard for an hour, she was kept awake by its
drumnning on the air-conditioner, and they say showers this
evening again, though the sun is making a kind of tawny fog
slanting across the yard through the neighbor's tall trees to where
Harry has his little vegetable garden in imitation of the one his
parents had in the back yard on Jackson Road, all he grows is
lettuce and carrots and kohlrabi, he does love to nibble. She sees
with her coffee that Bryant and Willard are getting along better on
the Today show after that unfortunate thing with Bryant's private
memo being exposed in all the papers, really nothing's private any
more, the scandalmongers never rest, always hoping for another
Watergate, her father's death was brought on by Watergate she has
always felt. The news is mostly about China and Gorbachev, you can
never trust Communists not to gang up on you, and Panama where that
evil pockmarked Noriega just won't leave, and how Pennsylvania
voters yesterday turned down the tax reform that Governor Casey
wanted; people thought it would mean a tax increase and if there's
anything you can count on Americans to be these last ten years it's
selfish.

She tries to pick an outfit suitable for seeing your son off to
a drug clinic and then babysitting for Roy all morning while Pru
drives Nelson into North Philadelphia, which she's very nervous
about, who wouldn't be, they do terrible things now, deliberately
rear-end you and then drive off with your car when you get
out, there is no such thing any more as a good Philadelphia
neighborhood, and for a striking-looking younger woman like
Pru is it's worse. Pru hopes to be back by noon so Janice can go
pick Harry up at the hospital, by twelve-thirty at the latest
the nurse on duty warned, they don't like to give them lunch that
last day and the girls coming round to make the beds don't like
having somebody in one of them dirtying the sheets and then
leaving. It makes her stomach nervous to think of Harry and his
heart, men are so fragile it turns out, though that nice young
intelligent Dr. Breit seemed delighted with what the balloon did,
but Harry's image of himself has changed, he speaks of himself
almost as if he's somebody he knew a long time ago, and he seems
more of a baby than he ever did, letting her make all the
decisions. She doesn't see how she can leave him alone in their
house his first night out of the hospital, but she can't miss the
quiz either, it really makes more sense with all this coming and
going and the children upset about their father's going off to the
rehab to shift her base of operations to Mother's house and to wear
the smart light wool outfit she bought two years ago at the
Wanamaker's out at the mall on the old fairgrounds (didn't they use
to get excited in school, getting the day off and all the rides,
the one where four of you were in a kind of cylinder and the boy
opposite would be above you and then below and the sky every which
way and your skirt doing heaven knows what, the smells of sawdust
and cotton candy, and the freaks and animals and prizes for tossing
little hoops at pegs that were bigger than they looked), a
navy-blue-and-white outfit with a kicky blue
pleated skirt and off-white satin jersey and blue
buttonlessjacket with wide shoulders that always come back from the
cleaner's with the padding askew or bent or tom loose, it's a
terrible fashion as far as dry cleaning goes. The first time she
posed for Harry in that suit he said it made her look like a little
policeman - the shoulders and the piping on the pockets, she
supposed, gave it the look of a uniform but it would do all day,
she thinks, from having not to break down in saying goodbye to
Nelson to taking this quiz with all the strange old terms in it,
curtilage and messuage and socage and fee simple and fee tail and
feoffee and copyhold and customary freehold and mortmain and
devises and
lex
loci
rei sitae.
The little old
elementary-school desks have been uprooted and taken away in
favor of one-armed chairs of combination aluminum tubing and
orange plastic, but the old blackboards are still there, gray with
chalk dust rubbed in over the years, and the high windows you have
to have a pole to raise and lower, and those high floating lights
like flattened moons, like big hollow flowers upside down on their
thin stems. Janice loves being back in class again, trying to
follow the teacher and learn new things but also aware of the other
students, their breathing and their feet scraping and the silent
effort of their minds. The class is women three out of four and
most younger than she but not all, to her relief she is not the
oldest person in the class and not the dumbest either. The years
with their heartbreak and working off and on over at the lot have
taught her some things; she wishes her parents were alive to see
her, sitting with these twenty-five others studying to get
their licenses, the city sounds and Hispanic music and customized
Hispanic cars revving their engines on Pine Street beyond the tall
windows, sitting there with her notebooks and pencils and yellow
highlighter (they didn't have those when she went to high school);
but of course if they were alive she wouldn't be doing this, she
wouldn't have the mental space. They were wonderful parents but had
never trusted her to manage by herself, and her marrying Harry
confirmed them in their distrust. She made bad decisions.

The teacher, Mr. Lister, is a doleful tall rumpled man with
jowls that make him look like a dog. He gave her a B on the last
quiz and likes her, she can tell. The other students, even the
younger ones, like her too, and lend her cigarettes in the bathroom
break at eightthirty and invite her to come out with them for a
beer afterward at ten. She hasn't accepted yet but she might some
night when things are more normal with Harry, just to show she's
not stuck-up. At least she hasn't let herself go to fat like
some of the women her age in the class - shocking, really, to
see flesh piled up like that, and not doing anything to reduce,
just carrying these hundreds of pounds back and forth and scarcely
able to squeeze them into the desks. You wonder how long people can
live like that. One of the few natural blessings God handed Janice
was a tidy figure and that she has tried to keep, for Harry's sake
as well as her own. He does seem prouder of her, the older they
get. He looks at her sometimes as if she's just dropped down out of
the moon.

Even with hurrying this morning, she gets caught in the slow
traffic through the thick of the Brewer rush hour. All these cars,
where are they going? By the side of the highway as it heads around
the side of the mountain you can see erosion from last night's
heavy rain - big twisted ditches of red clay washed away,
weeds and all. At Joseph Street she parks and goes up the walk
scared of what chaos she'll find, but Nelson is dressed in one of
those putty-colored suits he has and Pru in brown slacks and
a khaki-colored mannish shirt under a red cardigan sweater
with the arms loosely knotted around her shoulders, an outfit to
drive in. Both she and Nelson look pale and drawn; you can almost
see the agitated psychic energy around their heads, like one of
those manifestations Harry scoffs at on
Unsolved
Mysteries.

In the kitchen, showing Janice the special
peanut-butter-and honey sandwich she has made just the
way Roy likes it (otherwise he throws everything on the floor, even
the TastyKake for dessert), Pru perhaps thinks the older woman
notices something wrong in her manner and explains in a hurried low
voice, "Nelson had some coke hidden around the house and thought we
should use it up before he goes. It was too much even for him, so I
did a few lines. I honestly don't know what he sees in it -
it burned and I sneezed and then couldn't fall asleep but otherwise
felt nothing.
Nothing. I
said to him, `If this is all it
is I don't see any problem in giving it up,' I'd have a harder time
giving up Hershey bars."

But just the fact that she is talking so much, confessing so
freely, stroking the lank red hair back from her forehead with a
caressing gesture of both hands, with trembling fingertips,
indicates to Janice that there has been a chemical event. Her son
is poisonous. Everything he touches. With all her maternal effort
she's brought destruction into the world.

Nelson has stayed in the front room, sitting on the Barcalounger
with Roy in his arms, murmuring to the boy and gently blowing to
tickle his ear. He looks up at his mother with resentment written
all over his face. He says to her, "You know why I'm doing this,
don't you?"

"To save your own life," Janice tells him, lifting the child out
of his lap. Roy is growing heavier by the day and she puts him down
on his own legs. "Time you start making him walk," she explains to
Nelson.

"Just like you're making me go to this stupid useless place,"
Nelson says. "I want that perfectly clear. I'm going because you're
making me and not because I admit I have any problem."

A weight of weariness floods her, as if she is at the end and
not the beginning of her day. "From what it seems you've done with
the money, we all have a problem."

The boy scarcely flinches, but does for an instant lower his
eyelids, with their beautiful lashes, a little long for a boy's.
She has always found those lashes heartbreaking. "It's just debt,"
he says. "If Lyle weren't so sick now he'd have explained it to you
better. We were just borrowing against future income. It would have
all worked out."

Janice thinks of the quiz she must face tonight and of poor
Harry with that metal worm they put into his heart and she tells
her son, "Darling, you've been stealing, and not just pennies from
the change jar. You're an addict. You've been out of your head.
You've not been yourself for I don't know how long and that's all
any of us want, for you to be yourself again."

His lips, thin like her own, tighten so as to disappear under
his mustache, that seems to be growing out, getting droopier. "I'm
a recreational user just like you're a social drinker. We need it.
We losers need a lift."

"I'm not a loser, Nelson, and I hope you're not." She feels a
tightness growing in her but she tries to keep her voice low and
level like Charlie would. "We had this same conversation in Florida
and you made promises then you didn't keep. Your problem is too
much for me, it's too much for your wife, it's too much for your
father - much too much for him."

"Dad doesn't give a damn."

"He does. Don't interrupt. And your problem is too much for you.
You need to go to this place where they've developed a method,
where they're experienced. Your counsellor wants you to go."

"Ike says it's all a con. He says everything's a con."

"That's just his black way of talking. He got you in, he wants
you to go."

"Suppose I can't stand it?" She and Harry never sent him off to
summer camp, for fear he couldn't stand it.

"You must stand it, or -"

"Yeah, or what, Mom?"

"Or else."

He tries to mock her: "Oh sure. What are you and Charlie and old
Harry going to do to me, put me in jail?" It is a real question; in
nervousness he loudly sniffs, and then rubs his pink nostrils.

She tries to give him a real answer, saying in the level soft
voice, "We wouldn't be the ones doing it. The Toyota Company and
the police would be doing it, if they were called in."

He sniffs again, in disbelief. "Why would you call them in? I'll
put the money back. I was always going to put it back. You care
more about the dumb lot than you care about me."

His tone is trying for a bantering lightness, but her own mood
has hardened; outrage has seized her, and self-righteousness.
"You stole from me, never mind that. But you stole from your
grandfather. You stole from what he had built."

Nelson's guarded eyes widen; his pallor seems a prisoner's in
the murky parlor light. "Granpop always wanted me to run the lot.
And what about my kids? What about Judy and Roy if you carry
through on all these threats?" Roy has whimpered and collapsed to
the floor, and is leaning against her ankles, hoping to distract
her, hating the sounds of this conversation.

"You should have been thinking of them before now," Janice says
stonily. "You've been stealing from them, too." She takes a weary
pride in her stoniness; her head is numb but clear, with the
product of her own womb pleading and wriggling beneath her. This
numbness she feels must be the
power
her women's group in
Florida talks about, the power men have always had.

Nelson tries outrage of his own. "Ah, fuck, Mom. Don't give me
all this, all this `How could you do this to your mother and
father?' What about what you did to me, all that mess around when
Becky died so I never had a sister, and then that time you ran away
with your oily Greek and crazy Dad brought Jill and then Skeeter
into the house and they tried to make me take dope when I was just
a little kid?"

Janice realizes that with all her stoniness and inner hardness
she has been crying, her throat feels raw and tears have been
flowing stupidly down her face. She wipes at them with the back of
her hand and asks shakily, "How much dope did they make you
do?"

He squirms, retreats a bit. "I don't know," he says. "They let
me take a puff of pot now and then. But they were doing worse stuff
and didn't try to hide it from me."

She works with a balled-up Kleenex at drying her face and
eyes, thinking what a messy start she is having to this day, in a
costume that was supposed to see her through the roles of mother,
grandmother, ministering wife, eager student, and prospective
working girl. "Your childhood I guess wasn't ideal," she admits,
stabbing under her eyes, feeling distracted, ready for her next
role, "but then whose is? You shouldn't sit in judgment of your
parents. We did the best we could while being people too."