Rabbit at rest (61 page)

The forsythia and beauty bush both have been getting out of hand
during this wet summer and Harry, on this cloudy cool Thursday
before the Labor Day weekend, has been trying to prune them back
into shape for the winter. With the forsythia, you take out the
oldest stem from the base, making the bush younger and thinner and
more girlish suddenly, and then cut back the most flagrant skyward
shoots and the down-drooping branches on their way to reroot
in among the day lilies. It doesn't do to be tenderhearted; the
harder you cut back now, the more crammed with glad yellow blossoms
the stubby branches become in the spring. The beauty bush poses a
tougher challenge, an even tighter tangle. Any attempt to follow
the tallest stems down to their origin gets lost in the net of
interwoven branchlets, and the bottom thicket of small trunks is so
dense as to repel a clipper or pruning saw; there is not a
knife's-width of space. The bush in this season of neglect
has grown so tall he really should go to the garage for the
aluminum stepladder. But Rabbit is reluctant to face the garage's
grimy tumble of cast-aside tires and stiff hoses and broken
flowerpots and rusted tools inherited from the previous owners, who
failed to clean out the garage the same way they left a stack of
Playboys
in an upstairs closet. In ten years he and Janice
have added their own stuff to the garage, so that gradually there
wasn't space for one car let alone two in it; it has become a cave
of deferred decisions and sentimentally cherished junk so packed
that if he tries to extract the ladder several old paint cans and a
lawn sprinkler bereft of its washers will come clattering down. So
he stretches and reaches into the beauty bush until his chest
begins to ache, with the sensation of an inflexible patch stitched
to the inner side of his skin. His nitroglycerin pills got left in
the sweat-rimmed pocket of his plaid golf slacks last night
when he went to bed early, alone, having fed himself a beer and
some Corn Chips after that match with Ronnie ended so sourly.

To placate the pain, he switches to weeding the day lilies and
the violet hosta. Wherever a gap pennits light to activate the
sandy soil, chickweed and crabgrass grow, and purslane with its
hollow red stems covers the earth in busy round-leaved
zigzags. Weeds too have their styles, their own personalities that
talk back to the gardener in the daze of the task. Chickweed is a
good weed, soft on the hands unlike thistles and burdock, and pulls
easily; it knows when the jig is up and comes willingly, where wild
cucumber keeps breaking off at one of its many joints, and grass
and red sorrel and poison ivy spread underground, like creeping
diseases that cannot be cured. Weeds don't know they're weeds. Safe
next to the trunk of the weeping cherry a stalk of blue lettuce has
grown eight feet tall, taller than he. Those days he spent ages ago
being Mrs. Smith's gardener among her rhododendrons, the one time
he ever felt rooted in a job.
Fine strong young man,
she
had called him at the end, gripping him with her claws.

A block and a half away, the traffic on Penn Boulevard murmurs
and hisses, its purr marred by the occasional sudden heave and
grind of a great truck shifting gears, or by an angry horn, or the
wop-wop-wopping bleat of an ambulance rushing some poor
devil to the hospital. You see them now and then, driving down a
side street, these scenes: some withered old lady being carried in
a stretcher down her porch stairs in a slow-motion sled ride,
her hair unpinned, her mouth without its dentures, her eyes staring
skyward as if to disown her body; or some red-faced goner
being loaded into the double metal doors while his abandoned mate
in her bathrobe snivels on the curb and the paramedics close around
his body like white vultures feeding. Rabbit has noticed a certain
frozen peacefulness in such terminal street tableaux. A certain
dignity in the doomed one, his or her moment come round at last; a
finality that isolates the ensemble like a spotlit créche. You
would think people would take it worse than they do. They don't
scream, they don't accuse God. We curl into ourselves, he supposes.
We become numb bundles of used-up nerves. Earthworms on the
hook.

From far across the river, a siren wails in the heart of Brewer.
Above, in a sky gathering its fishscales for a rainy tomorrow, a
small airplane rasps as it coasts into the airport beyond the old
fairgrounds. What Harry instantly loved about this house was its
hiddenness: not so far from all this traffic, it is yet not easy to
find, on its macadamized dead end, tucked with its fractional
number among the more conspicuous homes of the Penn Park rich. He
always resented these snobs and now is safe among them. Pulling
into his dead-end driveway, working out back in his garden,
watching TV in his den with its wavery lozenge-paned windows,
Rabbit feels safe as in a burrow, where the hungry forces at loose
in the world would never think to find him.

Janice pulls in in the pearl-gray Camry wagon. She is
fresh from the afternoon class at the Penn State extension on Pine
Street: "Real Estate Mathematics -Fundamentals and
Applications." In a student outfit of sandals and
wheat-colored sundress, with a looseknit white cardigan
thrown over her shoulders, her forehead free of those Mamie
Eisenhower bangs, she looks snappy, and brushed glossy, and younger
than her age. Everything she wears these days has shoulders; even
her cardigan has shoulders. She walks to him over what seems a
great distance in the little quarter-acre yard, their
property expanded by what has become a mutual strangeness.
Unusually, she presents her face to be kissed. Her nose feels cold,
like a healthy puppy's. "How was class?" he dutifully asks.

"Poor Mr. Lister seems so sad and preoccupied lately," she says.
"His beard has come in all full of gray. We think his wife is
leaving. him. She came to class once and acted very snooty, we all
thought."

"You all are getting to be a mean crowd. Aren't these classes
about over? Labor Day's coming."

"Poor Harry, do you feel I've deserted you this summer? What are
you going to do with all this mess you've pruned away? The beauty
bush looks absolutely ravaged."

He admits, "I was getting tired and making bad decisions. That's
why I stopped."

"Good thing," she says. "There wouldn't have been anything left
but stumps. We'd have to call it the ugliness bush."

"Listen, you, I don't see you out here helping. Ever."

"The outdoors is your responsibility, the indoors is mine
- isn't that how we do it?"

"I don't know how we do anything any more, you're never here. In
answer to your question, I'd planned to stack what I cut over
behind the fish pond to dry out and then burn it next spring when
we're back from Florida."

"You're planning ahead right into 1990; I'm impressed. That year
is still very unreal to me. Won't the yard look ugly all winter
then, though?"

"It won't look ugly, it'll look natural, and we won't be here to
see it anyway."

Her tongue touches the upper lip of her mouth, which has opened
in thought. But she says nothing, just "I guess we won't, if we do
things as normal."

"If ? "

She doesn't seem to hear, gazing at the fence-high heap of
pruned branches.

He says, "If you're so in charge of the indoors, what are we
having for dinner?"

"Damn," she says. "I meant to stop by at the farm stand there at
the end of the bridge and pick up some sweet corn, but then I had
so much else on my mind I sailed right by. I thought we'd have the
corn with what's left of Tuesday's meatloaf and those dinner rolls
in the breadbox before they get moldy. There was a wonderful tip in
the
Standard
about how to freshen stale bread in the
microwave, I forget what exactly, something to do with water. There
must be a frozen veg in the freezer part we can have instead of
sweet corn."

"Or else we could sprinkle salt and sugar on ice cubes," he
says. "One thing I know's in the fridge is ice cubes."

"Harry, it's been on my
mind
to go shopping, but the
IGA is so far out of the way and the prices at the Turkey Hill are
ridiculous, and the convenience store over on Penn Boulevard has
those surly kids behind the counter who I think punch extra figures
into the cash register."

"You're a shrewd shopper, all right," Harry tells her. The
mackerel sky is forming a solid gray shelf in the southwest; they
move together toward the house, away from the shadow of coming
dark.

Janice says, "So." Saying "so" is something she's picked up
recently, from her fellow-students or her teachers, as the
word for beginning to strike a deal. "You haven't asked me how I
did on my last quiz. We got them back."

"How did you do?"

"Beautifully, really. Mr. Lister gave me a B minus but said it
would have been a B plus if I could organize my thoughts better and
clean up my spelling. I know it's `i' before `e' sometimes and the
other way around some other times, but
when?"

He loves her when she talks to him like this, as if he has all
the answers. He leans the long-handled clippers in the garage
against the wall behind a dented metal trash can and hangs the
pruning saw on its nail. Shadowy in her sundress, she moves ahead
of him up the back stairs and the kitchen light comes on. Inside
the kitchen, she rummages, with that baffled frowning expression of
hers, biting her tongue tip, in the refrigerator for edible
fragments. He goes and touches her waist in the wheat-colored
dress, lightly cups her buttocks as she bends over looking.
Tenderly, he complains, "You didn't come home until late last
night."

"You were asleep, poor thing. I didn't want to risk waking you
so I slept in the guest room."

"Yeah, I get so groggy, suddenly. I keep wanting to finish that
book on the American Revolution but it knocks me out every
time."

"I shouldn't have given it to you for Christmas. I thought you'd
enjoy it."

"I did. I do. Yesterday was a hard day. First Ronnie tied me on
the last hole when I had the bastard all but beaten, and then he
snubbed my invitation to play again. And then Nelson called all
jazzed up with some crazy scheme about water scooters and
Yamaha."

"I'm sure Ronnie has his reasons," Janice says. "I'm surprised
he played with you at all. How do you feel about Brussels
sprouts?"

"I don't mind them."

"To me, they always taste spoiled; but they're all we have. I
promise
to get to the IGA tomorrow and stock up for the
long weekend."

"We going to have Nelson and his tribe over?"

"I thought we might all meet at the club. We've hardly used it
this summer."

"He sounded hyper on the phone - do you think he's back on
the stuff already?"

"Harry, Nelson is
very
straight now. That place really
has given him religion. But I agree, Yamaha isn't the answer. We
must raise some capital and put ourselves on a solvent basis before
we start courting another franchise. I've been talking to some of
the other women getting their licenses -"

"You discuss our personal financial problems?"

"Not ours as such, just as a case study. It's all purely
hypothetical. In real-estate class we always have a lot of
case studies. And they all thought it was
grotesque to
be
carrying a mortgage amounting to over twenty-five hundred a
month on the lot when we have so much other property."

Rabbit doesn't like the trend here. He points out, "But this
place is already mortgaged. What do we pay? Seven hundred a
month."

"I know
that, silly. Don't forget, this is my business
now." She has stripped the Brussels sprouts of their waxpaper box
and put them in the plastic safe dish and put it in the microwave
and punches out the time - three blips, a peep, and then a
rising hum. "We bought this place ten years ago," she tells him,
"for seventyeight thousand and put fifteen down and have about ten
or fifteen more in equity by now, it doesn't accumulate very fast
in the first half of payback, there's a geometric curve they tell
you about, so let's say there's still fifty outstanding; in any
case, housing prices have gone way up in this area since 1980, it's
been flattening out but hasn't started to go
down
yet,
though it might this winter, you'd begin by asking two twenty, two
thirty let's say, with the Penn Park location, and the seclusion,
the fact that it has real limestone walls and not just facing, it
has what they call historic value; we certainly wouldn't settle for
less than two hundred, which minus the fifty would give us one
fifty, which would wipe out two-thirds of what we owe Brewer
Trust!"

Rabbit has rarely heard this long an utterance from Janice, and
it takes him a few seconds to understand what she has been saying.
"You'd sell this place?"

"Well, Harry, it is very extravagant to keep it just for the
summer essentially, especially when there's all that extra room
over at Mother's."

"I love this place," he tells her. "It's the only place I've
ever lived where I felt at home, at least since Jackson Road. This
place has class. It's us."

"Honey, I've loved it too, but we must be practical, that's what
you've always been telling me. We don't need to own four
properties, plus the lot."

"Why not sell the condo, then?"

"I thought of that, but we'd be lucky to get out of it what we
paid for it. In Florida, places are like cars - people like
them brand new. The new malls and everything are to the east."

"What about the Poconos place?"

"There's not enough money there either. It's an unheated shack.
We need two hundred thousand, honey."

"We
didn't roll up that debt to Toyota - Nelson
did it, Nelson and his faggy boyfriends."