Rabbit at rest (48 page)

After they hear him make a trip down the hall to the bathroom,
they come and visit him, the poor little semi-orphans. Their
four eyes, two green, two brown, feast on him from the bed's edge.
Judy's face seems longer and graver than it was in Florida. She
will have an Angstrom leanness, a hunted look. Her dress is
lilaccolored, with white smocking. Does he imagine a touch of
extra redness to her lips? Does Pru allow that? Certainly the
child's hair has been given an artificial wave, a
carrot-colored crimp. She asks, "Grandpa, did it hurt in the
hospital?"

"Not much, Judy. It hurt my feelings, mostly, to be there at
all."

"Did they fix that thing inside you?"

"Oh, yes. Don't you worry about that. My doctors says I'm better
than ever."

"How come you're in bed, then?"

"Because Grandma was studying for her quiz and I didn't want to
bother her."

"She says you're going to sleep over."

"Looks that way, doesn't it? A pajama party. Before you were
born, Judy, Grandma and I lived here for years and years, with your
great-grandmother Springer. You remember her?"

The child's eyes stare, their green intensified by the maple
trees at the window. "A little bit. She had fat legs and wore thick
orange stockings."

"That's right." But can Ma be no more than that in this child's
memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?

"I used to hate her stockings," Judy goes on, as if sensing his
need for more and trying to meet it.

"Those were Sup-Hose," Harry explains.

"And she wore funny little round glasses she never took off:
She'd let me play with the case. It snapped."

Roy, bored to hear all this about a woman he never met, begins
to talk. His round face strains upward as if he's trying to swallow
something rough, and his arched eyebrows pull his dark shiny eyes
painfully open. "Daddy - Daddy won't -" or perhaps he said
"went"; he seems unable to wrestle his thoughts into shape and
begins again with the strained word "Daddy."

Impatiently Judy gives him a push; he falls against a bedpost,
there in the narrow space between the mattress edge and the beaded
wainscoting. "Shut up if you can't talk," she tells him. "Daddy's
in a rehab place getting better."

The child has hit his head; he stares at his grandfather as if
waiting to be told what to do. "Ouch," Harry says for him,
and, sitting up against Ma Springer's old brown headboard,
opens his arms to the child. Roy dives against his chest and lets
himself bawl, about his hurt head. His hair, when Harry rubs it, is
stickily fine, like Janice's yesterday, when she cried. Something
about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy.
They've got you where they want you.

Judy talks right through Roy's aggrieved noise. "Grandpa, want
to watch one of my videos with me? I have
Dumbo
and
The Sound of Music
and
Dirty Dancing."

"I'd love to see
Dirty Dancing
sometime, I've seen the
other two, but shouldn't you be doing your homework before
dinner?"

The child smiles. "That's what Daddy always says. He never wants
to watch a video with me." She looks at Roy being cradled and pulls
at her brother's arm. "Come on, stupid. Don't lean on Grandpa's
chest, you'll hurt him."

They go away. A ghostly moment as Judy stood by the bed reminded
him of Jill, another of the many dead people he knows. The numbers
are growing. Life is like a game they used to play on the
elementary-school playground,
Fox-in-the-Morning. You all lined up on one side
of the asphalt area marked out for games. One person was "it," and
that one would call out "Fox in the morning," and you would
all run to the other side, and "it" would grab one victim from the
running throng and drag him or her into the circle painted on the
asphalt, and then there would be two "it"s, and these would capture
a few more on the next massed gallop from safety to safety, and
these four would become eight, and soon a whole mob would be roving
the center; the proportions were reversed. The last person left
uncaught became "it" for the next game.

Sparse specks of rain have appeared on the panes. His eyelids
feel heavy again; a fog within is rising up to swallow his brain.
When you are sleepy an inner world smaller than a seed in
sunlight expands and becomes irresistible, breaking the shell
of consciousness. It is so strange; there must be some other
way of being alive than all this eating and sleeping, this burning
and freezing, this sun and moon. Day and night blend into each
other but still are nothing the same.

The call to dinner comes from far away, through many
thicknesses of lath and plaster and hollow air, and from its
sharp tone is being repeated. He can't believe he's been asleep; no
time has passed, just a thought or two took a strange elastic shape
as it went around a corner. His mouth feels furry. The specks of
rain on the window are still few, few enough to be counted. He
recalls remembering today the window screens they had in the Wilbur
Street apartment, the kind you used to buy in hardware stores
before combination storms made them obsolete. They never
precisely fit, leaving splinters of light through which the
mosquitoes and midges could crawl, but that wasn't the something
tragic about them. Tragedy lay in a certain filtered summer breath
they admitted, the glint of sun along segments of the mesh, an
overlooked fervor in their details - the bent
screening, the sliding adjustable frame stamped with the
manufacturer's name, the motionless molding of the window itself,
like the bricks that all through Brewer loyally hold their pattern
though the masons that laid them long ago are dead. Something
tragic in matter itself, the way it keeps watch no matter how great
our misery. He went back to the apartment that day after Becky died
and nothing was changed. The water in the tub, the chops in the
skillet. The call to dinner repeats again, closer, in Janice's
sharp voice, at the foot of the stairs: "Harry. Dinner."

"Coming, for Chrissake," he says.

Janice called but the meal was cooked by Pru; it is light,
delicious, healthful. Baked sole garnished with parsley and chives
and flavored with pepper and lemon, asparagus served steaming in a
rectangular microwave dish, and in a big wooden bowl a salad
including celery and carrot slices and dates and green grapes. The
salad bowl and microwave equipment are new since Ma Springer
died.

Everybody eats but nobody has much to say except Janice, who
chatters on bravely about her quiz, her class, the people in it,
some of them women like herself developing midlife careers and
others young people that seem much the way we were in the Fifties,
running scared, economically, and playing everything safe. She
mentions her teacher, Mr. Lister, and Judy laughs out loud at the
name, repeating it, the rhyme of it. "Don't laugh, Judy, he has
such a sad face," Janice says.

Judy tells some involved story about what a boy at school did
today: he accidentally spilled paint for a poster they were making
all over the floor and when the teacher bawled him out took the
spilled jar and shook it at her so some got on her dress. Meanwhile
there is this one black boy in the class, his family has just moved
to Mt. Judge from Baltimore, and he was painting his face all over
with these designs that have a secret meaning, he said. Her talk is
a little like her excited channel-flipping and it occurs to
Harry that she is making it up or confusing her own classroom with
classroom shows she has seen on television.

Pru asks Harry how he is feeling. He says fine; his breathing
does feel freer since the operation - "the procedure, the
doctors like to call it" - and his memory for that matter
better. He wonders how soft in the head he was getting before
without realizing it. Really, he says, apologizing to her for her
trouble, thanking her for the good healthy meal that he has managed
to get down on top of the fermenting lump of Corn Chips, saying he
could perfectly well have been left alone in his own house
tonight.

Janice says she knows it is probably foolish but she could never
forgive herself if he took a bad turn while she was in class and
how could she concentrate on liens and curtilage and lex loci
thinking he was back in the house drowning?

The other adults at the table hold their breaths at this slip;
Harry gently says, when the silence gets unbearable, "You don't
mean drowning," and Janice asks, "Did I say drowning?," knowing now
in her ear's recall that she did. Harry sees that she only seems to
have forgotten Rebecca, that in her own mind she is always and will
always be the woman who drowned her own baby. It was this time of
year, late spring, they are approaching the anniversary, in June.
Janice rises, flustered, blushing, shamed.

"Who wants coffee besides me?" she asks, all eyes upon her, like
an actress who must come up with some line.

"And there's some butter-pecan ice cream for dessert if
anybody wants," Pru says, her flat Ohio voice having fallen over
the years into the local locutions, that considerate Pennsylvania
way of speaking as if to make things clear in a stupefying haze.
She has taken off the cardigan and folded back the cuffs of her
mannish khaki shirt so that half her downy freckled forearms show,
there at the kitchen table, under the faceted-glass light
fixture overhead.

"My favorite flavor," Harry says, pitying his wife, wanting to
help her out of the brightly lit center of the stage; even little
Roy with his inky eyes is staring at Janice, sensing something
strange, a curse nobody mentions.

"Harry, that's the worst possible thing for you," Janice says,
grateful for this opportunity he has given her for a quarrel, a
scene. "Ice cream and nuts both."

Pru says, "I got some frozen yogurt with Harry in mind. Peach
and banana I think are the flavors."

"It's not the same," Harry says, clowning to keep the attention
of both women. "I want butter-pecan. With something. How
about some good old-fashioned apple strudel, with all that
sort of wallpaper paste inside? Or some sticky buns? Or
shoo-fly pie? Yum: huh, Roy?"

"Oh, Harry, you're going to kill yourself!" Janice cries,
excessively, her grief centered elsewhere.

"There's something called ice milk," Pru is saying, and he feels
that her heart too is elsewhere, that throughout the meal she has
been maneuvering around the covered-up hole of Nelson's
absence, which no one has mentioned, not even the wide-eyed
children.

"Shoo-fly pie," Roy says, in an oddly deep and mannish
voice, and when they explain to him that there isn't really any,
that it was just a joke of Grandpa's, he feels he has made a
mistake, and in his weariness at learning all day to be more
independent he begins to whimper.

"Makes your eyes light up," Rabbit sings to him, "and your tummy
say `howdy."'

Pru takes Roy upstairs while Janice serves Judy
butter-pecan ice cream and stacks the dishes into the
dishwasher. Harry kept his spoon and digs into Judy's dish while
Janice's back is turned. He loves that second when the tongue
flattens the ice cream against the roof of the mouth and the
fragments of pecan emerge like stars at evening. "Oh Grandpa, you
shouldn't," Judy says, looking at him with genuine fright, though
her lips want to smile.

He touches his own lips with a finger and promises, "Just one
spoonful," while going for another.

The child calls for help: "Grandma!"

"He's just teasing," Janice says, but asks him, "Would you like
your own dish?"

This gets him up from the table. "I shouldn't have ice cream,
that's the worst thing for me," he tells her, and scolds, seeing
the jumble of plates she has stacked in the dishwasher, "My God,
you have no system - look at all the space you're
wasting!"

"You stack it, then," she says, a modern woman, and while he
does, fitting the dishes closer together, in harrowlike rows, she
gathers together her papers and book and purse from the diningroom
table. "Damn," she says, and comes to the kitchen to tell Harry,
"All my planning this morning what to wear and I forget to bring a
raincoat." The rain has settled in outside, sheathing the house in
a loud murmur.

"Maybe Pru could lend you one."

"It would fall off me," she says. But she goes upstairs to where
Pru is putting Roy to bed and after a conversation Harry can't hear
comes down in a cherry-red waterproof plastic coat, with wide
lapels and a belt too long and gleaming zigzags under the light.
"Do I look ridiculous?"

"Not exactly," he tells her. It excites him, this transposition:
you follow the zigzagging creases up expecting to see
red-haired Pru staring back and instead it's Janice's
middle-aged face, framed in a splashy bandanna not hers
either.

"Also, damn, I'm so mad at myself, I left my lucky pen on the
upstairs table back home. And there's no time to drive back for it,
in all this rain."

"Maybe you're taking all this too seriously," he says. "What're
you trying to prove to the teacher?"

"I'm trying to prove something to myself," she says. "Tell Pru
I've left and that I'll be back at ten-thirty, maybe eleven
if we decide to go out for beers afterward. You go to bed and rest.
You look tired, honey." She gives him in parting a pointed little
fingering kiss, grateful for something. Glad to go. All these other
male advisers she suddenly has - Charlie, Mr. Lister, the new
accountant - seem an invasion as devious as that televised
catheter nudging forward into his shadowy webbed heart.

The murmur around the house sounds louder after Janice's
footsteps on the porch and the sound of the Camry starting up. She
has a panicky way of racing the engine before she puts a car in
gear, and usually jumps off like a drag-racer. Janice is
wrapped in Pru's cherry raincoat, and he is the man of Pru's
house.