Rabbit at rest (47 page)

"But I had no
right, you
had no right either, to do the
things we did!"

"For Chrissake, don't bawl. It was the times," he says. "The
Sixties. The whole country was flipping out back then. We weren't
so bad. We got back together."

"Yes, and sometimes I wonder if that wasn't just more
selfindulgence. We haven't made each other happy, Harry."

She wants to face this with him but he smiles as if in his
sleep. "You've made me happy," he says. "I'm sorry to hear it
didn't work both ways."

"Don't," she says. "Don't just score points. I'm trying to be
serious. You know I've always loved you, or wanted to, if you'd let
me. Ever since high school, at least ever since Kroll's. That's one
of the things Charlie was telling me last night, how crazy about
you I've always been." Her face heats; his failure to respond
embarrasses her; she hurries on, turning left on Eisenhower. A gap
in the clouds makes the hood of the Carnry glare; then it is dipped
deeper into cloud shadow. "It really was a pretty restaurant," she
says, "the way they've fixed it up and everything, these little
Vietnamese women so petite they made me feel like a horse. But they
spoke perfect English, with Pennsylvania accents - second
generation, can it be? Has it been that long since the war? We
should go there sometime."

"I wouldn't dream of intruding. It's your and Charlie's place."
He opens his eyes and sits up. "Hey. Where're we going? This is the
way to Mt. judge."

She says, "Harry, now don't get mad. You know I have to go to
class and take the quiz tonight, and I'd feel too funny leaving you
alone for three hours just out of the hospital, so Pru and I worked
it out that you and I would sleep in Mother's old bed, which they
moved across the hall into the old sewing room when Mother's room
became Judy's room. This way you'll have babysitters while I'm
off."

"Why can't I go to my own fucking house? I was looking forward
to it. I lived in that damn barn of your mother's for ten years and
that was enough."

"Just for one night, honey. Please - otherwise I'll be
sick with worry and flunk my quiz. There are all those Latin and
funny old English words you're expected to know."

"My heart's fine. Better than ever. It's like a sink trap after
all the hair and old toothpaste has been cleaned out. I saw the
bastards do it. Nothing will happen ifyou leave me alone, I
promise."

"That nice Dr. Breit told me before they did it there was a
chance of a coronary occlusion."

"That was while they were doing it, with the catheter in. The
catheter's out now. It's been out nearly a week. Come on, honey.
Take me home."

"Just one night, Harry, please. It's a kindness to everybody.
Pru and I thought it would distract the children from their
father's not being there."

He sinks back into his seat, giving up. "What about my pajamas?
What about my toothbrush?"

"They're there. I brought them over this morning. I tell you,
this day. I've really had to plan. Now, after we've got you
settled, I must study, absolutely."

"I don't want to be in the same house with Roy," he says,
sulking humorously, resigned to what after all is a tiny adventure,
a night back in Mt. Judge. "He'll hurt me. Down in Florida he
yanked the oxygen tube right out of my nose."

Janice remembers Roy stamping on all those ants but nevertheless
says, "I spent the whole morning with him and he couldn't have been
sweeter."

Pru and Roy are not there. Janice leads Rabbit upstairs and
suggests he lie down. Ma's old bed has been freshly made up; his
offwhite pajamas are folded nicely on his pillow. He sees in the
murky far comer next to an old wooden-cased Singer sewing
machine the dressmaker's dummy, dust-colored, eternally
headless and erect. Ma's big bed crowds the room so there are just
a few inches of space on one side next to the window and on the
other beside the wall with its wainscoting. The sewing room has a
wainscoting of vamished beaded boards, set upright and trimmed at
chest-level with a strip of molding. The door of a shallow
closet in the corner is made of the same boards. When he opens it,
the door bumps annoyingly on the bedpost of Ma's old bed, a bedpost
turned with a flattened knob at the top like a hard, brownpainted
mushroom, and the paint on it has crackled into small rectangles,
like a puddle that has dried. He opens the door to hang up his blue
coat, among cobwebby crammed old irons and toasters, coverlets
folded and preserved in yellowing cellophane moth bags, and a rack
of Fred Springer's dead neckties. Harry folds back his shirtsleeves
and begins to feel like himself, the idea of spending a day back in
Mt. Judge is beginning to amuse him. "Maybe I'll take a little
walk."

"Should you?" Janice asks.

"Absolutely. It's the best thing for you, that's what everybody
at the hospital says. They had me walking the halls."

"I thought you might want to lie down."

"Later, maybe. You go study. Go on, this quiz ofyours is making
me nervous."

He leaves her at the dining-room table with her book and
her photocopies and heads up Joseph Street to Potter Avenue, where
the ice-plant water used to run down in the gutter. The
gutter has been long dry but the cement was permanently tinged
green. Rabbit walks away from the center of the borough with its
dry cleaners and Turkey Hill Minit Market and Pizza Hut and Sunoco
and discount stereo and new video store that used to be a shoe
store and aerobics class above what had been a bakery when he was a
boy. The smell of warm dough and icing out of its doors would make
him drool. He walks uphill to where Potter Avenue meets Wilbur
Street; here a green mailbox used to lean on a concrete post and
now the bigger boxy kind with the rounded top stands instead,
painted blue. A fire hydrant painted red, white, and blue for the
Bicentennial in the Seventies has been given a fresh and garish
coat of the orange you see on life jackets and joggers' vests and
hunters' outfits, as if a fog creeping into our way of life is
making everything harder to see. He walks up Wilbur, feeling the
steep slope tug at his heart. The street in its lower blocks holds
pretentious large houses like the Springers', stucco and brick and
slate, fortresslike, with gables and acres of roof, some of them
now split up into condos reached by wooden outside stairs that look
tacky. Beyond the alley where long ago there used to be a telephone
pole with a backboard bolted to it, Rabbit's chest has that full
feeling, his ribs like bands of pressure, and he pops a Nitrostat
under his tongue and waits for the relief and the tingle, while
cool cloud shadows slide rapidly across the forested edge of the
mountain above him. He had hoped he would need to take fewer pills
but maybe it takes time for the operation to sink in.

He continues hiking, alone on the sloping sidewalk, up into the
block where he and Janice lived when they were first married. Built
all at once in the Thirties, a row of frame semi-detached
climbs the hill like a staircase. Like the fire hydrant, they have
become brighter, painted in fanciful storybook colors, pale purple
and canary yellow, aqua and orange, colors that no respectable
Pennsylvania householder would have applied when Harry was young.
Life was not only bigger but more solemn then. Colors were bruise
and dung, in gritty sidings that rubbed off on your fingers and
were tar underneath.

His own house, the seventh in the row, number 447, had tired
wooden steps that have been replaced with concrete inset with
irregular multicolored pieces of broken tile and covered with a
central runner of green outdoor carpeting; the house door into the
vestibule has been painted a high-gloss ochre on its panels
and maroon on its stiles, so a bold double cross is figured forth,
ornamented by a brass knocker in the shape of a fox's head. Camaros
and BMWs are parked out front; glass curtains and splashy abstract
prints dress the windows. This row, a kind of slum when Harry and
Janice and two-year-old Nelson lived here, has been
spruced up: festive yuppie money has taken it over. These
apartments are fashionable, high above the town as they are. Back
then, thirty years ago, from the third floor, the view across the
asphalted rooftops to the peaked houses and parked cars lower down
just seemed an enlargement of their discontent, their defeat, a
sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what
seemed for a while to be triumphs. There had been, being here makes
him remember, those cheap sliding screens at the windows, and a
rusty furnace odor in the vestibule, and a plastic clown some kid
had left in the dirt under the front-porch steps, now
concrete carpeted green like those traffic islands down at Valhalla
Village.

This row used to end Wilbur Street; development had stopped at a
gravel turnaround, and an abandoned gravel quarry made the
transition to the mountain's shaggy back side. Now a double row,
not quite new, of shingled condominiums, with strangely exaggerated
chimneys and gables like houses in a child's storybook, occupies
still higher ground. The windows and doors and trim boards of these
condos are tinted in pale and playful colors. The plantings and
little lawns are still tenuous; last night's downpour washed from
the deforested acres of the mountain reddish mud that has drifted,
hardening, all along the fresh curbs and overflowed onto the
street's blue-black asphalt. We're using it all up, Harry
thinks. The world.

He turns and walks downhill. On Potter Avenue he continues past
Joseph and goes into a Turkey Hill Minit Market and to suppress his
melancholy buys a ninety-nine-cent bag of Corn Chips.
NET WT. 6%4 oz. 177 grams.
Manufactured by Keystone Food Prod.,
Inc., Easton, Pa. 18042 U.S.A. Ingredients: Corn, vegetable oil
(contains one or more of the following oils: peanut, cottonseed,
corn, partially hydrogenated soybean), salt.
Doesn't sound so
bad. KEEP ON KRUNCHIN', the crinkly pumpkin-colored bag
advises him. He loves the salty ghost of Indian corn and the way
each thick flake, an inch or so square, solider than a potato chip
and flatter than a Frito and less burny to the tongue than a
triangular red-peppered Dorito, sits edgy in his mouth and
then shatters and dissolves between his teeth. There are certain
things you love putting into your mouth - Nibs, Good &
Plentys, dry-roasted peanuts, lima beans cooked not too soft
- and the rest is more or less disagreeable mush, or meat
that gives the teeth too tough a fight and if you think about it
almost makes you gag. Ever since childhood, Rabbit has had mixed
feelings about eating, especially the creatures that not too long
ago were living just like you. Sometimes he imagines he can taste
the terror of the ax in the slice of turkey or chicken and
the happy snorting and wallowing in pork and the stupid monotony of
a cow's life in beef, and in lamb a hint of urine like that whiff
from Thelma's face in the hospital. Her dialysis now and their
night in that tropical hut, bodily fluids, but there were
limits to what bodies can do, and limits of involvement what
with Janice and Ron and the kids and fussy living rooms all over
Diamond County, and some limitation within him really, a
failure or refusal to love any substance but his own. And she
too, she did tend afterwards to be curiously severe with him, as
though he had become disgusting now that she had eaten, his
sour-milk smell tainting her satisfied mouth. His meat having
been eaten by her and now she being eaten by all that microscopic
chewing from within. Lupus means wolf, she had told him, one of the
autoimmune diseases in which the body attacks itself,
antibodies attack your own tissue, self-hatred of a sort.
Thinking of Thelma, Harry feels helpless and in his helplessness
hard-hearted. The Corn Chips as he walks along the pavement
begin to accumulate in his gut into a knotted muchness, a little
ball of acid, and yet he cannot resist putting just one more into
his mouth, to feel its warped salty edges, its virgin crunchiness,
on his tongue, between his teeth, among these salivating membranes.
By the time he gets back to 89 Joseph behind its wall of sticky
leafed-out Norway maples he has consumed the full bag,
even the fragments of salt and corn small enough for an ant to
carry back to his brown queen bloated in her maze beneath the
sidewalk; he has wrapped himself around all 6%a ounces of sheer
poison, pure sludge in his arteries, an oily aftertaste in
his throat and between his teeth. He hates himself, with a certain
relish.

Janice is working at the dining-room table, making lists
for herself to memorize. When she looks up, her eyes have a
rubbed frowning look and her mouth is open a dark slot. He hates to
see it, hates to see her struggling so hard not to be dumb. His
long walk has left him so tired he goes upstairs and takes off his
slacks to keep the crease and lies down on Ma Springer's bed, on
top of the covers but under the Amish quilt, a patchwork quilt that
releases to his nostrils a memory of how Ma smelled toward the end,
with a musty far odor of fleshly corners gone unwashed.

He finds himself suddenly scared to be out of the hospital
whiteness, the antisepsis, the halls of softly clattering
concern focused upon him . . . sick him.

He must have fallen asleep, for when he opens his eyes the day
has a different tone through the room's single window: a cooler,
shadowed menace. The rain coming closer. The clouds and
treetops merging. From the sounds downstairs, Pru and both
children are home, and footsteps move about in the hall outside
much as years ago he would hear Melanie and Nelson sneak back and
forth at night. It is not night, it is late afternoon. The
children, home from school, have been instructed to be quiet
because Grandpa is sleeping; but they are unable to resist the
spurts of squalling and of glee that come over them. Life is noise.
Rabbit's stomach hurts, he forgets why.