Pop Mom Moon
Rabbit Angstrom, the faded basketball hero of Rabbit, Run, is ten years older, and perchance wiser. These scenes from his life are drawn from Rabbit Redux, Mr. Updike’s forthcoming novel.
By John Updike
AUGUST 1971 ISSUE
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I.
Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the air of constant indoor light clinging to them. In winter, Pine Street at this hour is dark; darkness presses down early from the mountain that hangs above this stagnant city of Brewer; but now in summer the granite curbs starred with mica and the row houses differentiated by speckled bastard sidings and the hopeful small porches with their jigsaw brackets and gray milk-bottle boxes and the sooty ginkgo trees and the baking curbside cars wince beneath a brilliance like a frozen explosion. The city, attempting to revive its dying downtown, has torn away blocks of buildings to create parking lots, so that a desolate openness, weedy and rubbled, spills through the once-packed streets, exposing church facades never seen from a distance and generating new perspectives of rear entryways and half-alleys and intensifying the cruel breadth of the light. The sky is cloudless yet colorless, hovering blanched humidity, in the way of these Pennsylvania summers, good for nothing but to make green things grow. Men don’t even tan: filmed by sweat, they turn yellow.
A man and his son, Earl Angstrom and Harry, are among the printers released from work. The father is near retirement, a thin man with no excess left to him, his face washed empty by grievances and caved in above the protruding slippage of bad false teeth. The son is five inches taller and fatter; his prime is soft, somehow pale and sour. The small nose and slightly lifted upper lip that once made the nickname Rabbit fit now seem, along with the thick waist and cautious stoop bred into him by a decade of the linotyper’s trade, clues to weakness, a weakness verging on anonymity. Though his height, his bulk, and a remnant alertness in the way he moves his head continue to distinguish him on the street, years have passed since anyone has called him Rabbit.
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“Harry, how about a quick one?" his father asks. At the corner where their side street meets Weiser there is a bus stop and a bar, the Phoenix, with a girl nude but for cowboy boots in neon outside and cactuses painted on the dim walls inside. Their buses, when they take them, go in opposite directions; the old man takes number 16A around the mountain to the town of Mount Judge, where he has lived his life, and Harry takes number 12 in the opposite direction to Penn Villas, a new development south of the city, ranch houses and quarter-acre lawns contoured as the bulldozer left them and maple saplings tethered to the earth as if otherwise they might fly away. He moved there with Janice and Nelson three years ago. His father still feels the move out of Mount Judge as a rejection, and so most afternoons they have a drink together to soften the day’s parting. Working together ten years, they have grown into the love they would have had in Harry’s childhood, had not his mother loomed so large between them.
“Make it a Schlitz,” Earl tells the bartender.
“Daiquiri,” Harry says. The air conditioning is turned so far up he unrolls his shirt cuffs and buttons them for warmth. He always wears a white shirt to work and after, as a way of canceling the ink. Ritually, he asks his father how his mother is.
But his father declines to make a ritual answer. Usually he says, “As good as can be hoped.”Today he sidles a conspiratorial inch closer at the bar and says, “Not as good as could be hoped, Harry.”She has had Parkinson’s disease for years now. Harry’s mind slides away from picturing her the way she has become, the loosely fluttering knobbed hands, the shuffling, sheepish walk, the eyes that study him with vacant amazement though the doctor says her mind is as good as ever in there, and the mouth that wanders open and forgets to close until saliva reminds it. “At nights, you mean?” The very question offers to hide her in darkness.
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Again the old man blocks Rabbit’s desire to slide by. “No. the nights are better now. They have her on a new pill, and she says she sleeps better now. It’s in her mind, more.”
“What is, Pop?”
“We don’t talk about it. Harry, it isn’t in her nature: it isn’t the type of thing she and I have ever talked about. Your mother and i have just let a certain type of thing go unsaid, it was the way we were brought up: maybe it would have been better if we hadn’t. I don’t know. I mean things now they’ve put into her mind.”
“Who’s this they?” Harry sighs into the daiquiri foam and thinks. He’s going too; they’re both going. Neither makes enough sense. As his father pushes closer against him to explain, he seems one of the hundreds of skinny, whining codgers in and around this city. men who have sucked this same brick tit for sixty years and have dried up with it.
“Why, the ones who come to visit her now she spends half the day in bed. Mamie Kellog, for one.
Julia Arndt’s another. I hate like the Jesus to bother you with it. Harry, but her talk is getting wild, and with Mini on the West Coast you’re the only one to help me straighten out my own mind. I hate to bother you. but her talk is getting so wild that she even talks of telephoning Janice.”
“Janice! Why would she call Janice?”
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“Well" A pull on the Schlitz. A wiping of the wet
upper lip with the bony back of the hand, fingers half-clenched in an old man’s clutching way. A loosetoothed grimacing getting set to dive in. “Well, the talk is about Janice.”
“My Janice?”
“Now, Harry. don’t blow your lid Don’t blame the bearer of bad tidings. I’m trying to tell you what they say. not what I believe.”
“I’m just surprised there’s anything to say. I hardly see her anymore, now that she’s over at Springer’s lot all the time.”
“Well, that’s it. That may be your mistake. Harry, You’ve taken Janice for granted ever since—the time.” The time he left her. The time the baby died. The time she took him back. “Ten years ago.”his father needlessly adds. Harry is beginning, here in this cold bar with cactuses in plastic pots on the shelves beneath the mirrors and the little Schlitz spinner doing its polychrome parabola over and over, to feel the world turn. A hopeful coldness inside him grows, grips his wrists inside his cuffs. The news isn’t all in, a new combination might break it open, this stale peace.
“Harry, the malice of people surpasses human understanding in my book, and the poor soul has no defenses against it—there she lies and has to listen. Ten years ago. wouldn’t she have laid them out? Wouldn’t her tongue have cut them down? They’ve told her that Janice is running around. With one certain man. Harry, Nobody claims she’s playing the held.”
The coldness spreads up Rabbit’s arms to his shoulders, and down the tree of veins toward his stomach. “Do they name the man?”
“Not to my knowledge. Harry. How could they now, when in all likelihood, there is no man?”
Well, if they can make up the idea, they can make up a name.”
The bar television is running, with the sound turned off. For the twentieth time that day the rocket blasts off, the numbers pouring backwards in tenths of seconds faster than the eye until zero is reached; then the white boiling beneath the tall kettle, the lifting so slow it seems certain to tip, the swift diminishment into a retreating speck, a jiggling star. The men dark along the bar murmur among themselves. They have not been lifted, they are left here Harry’s father mutters at him, prying. “Has she seemed any different to you lately. Harry? Listen, I know in all probability it’s what they call a crock of shit, but—has she seemed any. you know, different lately?”
It offends Rabbit to hear his father swear: he lifts his head fastidiously, as if to watch the television, which has returned to a program where people are tryina to guess what sort of prize is hidden behind a curtain, and jump and squeal and kiss each other when it turns out to be an eight-foot frozen-food locker. He might be wrong but for a second he could swear this young housewife opens her mouth in midkiss and gives the m.c. a taste of her tongue. Anyway, she won’t stop kissing. The m.c.’s eyes roll out to the camera for mercy, and they cut to a commercial. In silence images of spaghetti and eyeballs rolling riffle past. “I don’t know" Rabbit says. “She hits the bottle prettv well sometimes, but then so do I.”
“Not you.” the old man tells him. “you’re no drinker. Harry. I’ve seen drinkers all my life, somebody like Boonie over in engraving, there’s a drinker, killing himself with it, and he knows it. he couldn’t stop if they told him he’d die tomorrow. You may have a whiskey or two in the evening, you’re no spring chicken anymore, but you’re no drinker.” He hides his loose mouth in his beer, and Harry taps the bar for another daiquiri. The old man nuzzles closer. “Now, Harry, forgive me for asking if you don’t want to talk about it, but how about in bed? That goes along pretty well, does it?”
“No,”he answers slowly, disdainful of this prying, “I wouldn’t exactly say well. Tell me about Mom. Has she had any of those breathing fits lately?”
“Not a one that I’ve been woken up for. She sleeps like a baby with those new green pills. This new medicine is a miracle, I must admit; ten more years the only way to kill us’ll be to gas us to death—Hitler had the right idea. Already, you know, there aren’t any more crazy people: just give ‘em a pill morning and evening and they’re sensible as Einstein. You wouldn’t exactly say it does . . .go along OK, is that what I understood you said?”
“Well, we’ve never been that great. Pop, frankly. Does she fall down ever? Mom.”
“She may take a tumble or two in the day and not tell me about it. I tell her. I tell her, stay in bed and watch the box. She has this theory the longer she can do things the longer she’ll stay out of bed for good. I figure she should take care of herself, put herself in deep freeze, and in a year or two in all likelihood they’ll develop a pill that’ll clear this up simple as a common cold. Already, you know, some of these cortisones: but the doctor tells us they don’t know but what the side effects may be worse. You know: the big C. My figuring is, take the chance, they’re just about ready to lick cancer anyway, and with these transplants pretty soon they can replace your whole insides.” The old man hears himself talking too much and slumps to stare into his empty beer, the suds sliding down, but can’t help adding, to give it all point. “It’s a terrible thing.” And when Harry fails to respond: “God, she hates not being active.”
The rum is beginning to work. Rabbit has ceased to feel cold, his heart is beginning to lift off. The air in here seems thinner, his eyes adjusting to the dark. He asks, “How’s her mind? You aren’t saying they should start giving her crazy pills?”
“In honest truth, I won’t lie to you, Harry, it’s as clear as a bell, when her tongue can find the words. And as I say, she’s gotten hipped lately on this Janice thing. It would help a lot—Jesus I hate to bother you. but it’s the truth—it would help a lot if you and Janice could spare the time to come over tonight. Not seeing you too often her imagination’s free to take off. Now, I know you’ve promised Sunday for her birthday, but think of it this way: if you’re stuck in bed with nobody but the idiot box and a lot of malicious biddies for company, a week can seem a year. If you could make it up there some evening before the weekend, bring Janice along so Mary could look at her-”
“I’d like to, Pop. You know I would.”
“I know, Jesus, I know. I know more than you think. You’re at just the age to realize your old man’s not the dope you always thought he was.”
“The trouble is, Janice works in the lot office until ten, eleven all the time, and I don’t like to leave the kid alone in the house. In fact, I better be getting back there now just in case.” In case it’s burned down. In case a madman has moved in. These things happen all the time in the papers. He can read in his father’s face—a fishy pinching in at the corners of the mouth, a tightened veiling of the washed-out eyes— the old man’s suspicions confirmed. Rabbit sees red. Meddling old crock. Janice: who’d have that mutt? In love with her father, and there she stuck. Happy as a Girl Scout since she began to fill in at her father’s lot, half these summer nights out way past supper. TV dinners, tuck Nelson in alone and wait up for her to breeze in blooming with rosy cheeks like a child fresh from a hike and talkative, he’s never known her to be so full of herself, in a way it does his heart good. He resents his father trying to get at him with Janice and hits back with the handiest weapon. Mom. “This doctor you have, does he ever mention a nursing home?”
The old man’s mind is slow making the switch back to his own wife. Harry has a thought, a spark like where train wheels run over a track switch. Did Mom ever do it to Pop? Play him false. All this poking around about life in bed hints at some experience. Hard to imagine, not only who with but when; she was always in the house as long as he could remember, nobody ever came to visit but the brush man and the Jehovah’s Witness; yet the thought excites him, as Pop’s rumor chills him, opens up possibilities. Pop is saying, “. . . at the beginning. We want to hold off at least until she’s bedridden. If we reach the point where she can’t take care of herself before I’m on retirement and there all day, it’s an option we might be forced into. I’d hate to see it. though. Jesus, I’d hate to see it.”
“Hey, Pop—?”
“Here’s my forty cents. Plus a dime for the tip.” The way the old man’s hand clings curlingly to the quarters in offering them betrays that they are real silver to him instead of cut-copper-sandwich coins that ring flat on the bar top. Old values. The Depression when money was money. Never be sacred again; not even dimes are silver now. Kennedy’s face killed half dollars; took them out of circulation, and they’ve never come back. Put the metal on the moon. The niggling business of settling their bill delays his question about Mom until they are outdoors, and then he sees he can’t ask it, he doesn’t know his father that well. Out here in the hot light his father has lost all sidling intimacy and looks merely old—liverish scoops below his eyes, broken veins along the sides of his nose, his hair the no-color of cardboard. “What’d you want to ask me?”
“I forget.” Harry says, and sneezes. Coming into this heat from that air conditioning sets off an explosion between his eyes that turns heads around halfway down the block and leaves his nostrils weeping. “No. I remember. The nursing home. How can we afford it? Fifty bucks a day or whatever. It’ll suck us right down the drain.”
His father laughs, with a sudden snap to retrieve his slipping teeth, and does a little shuffling dance step, right here on the baking sidewalk, beneath the white-on-red BUs STOP sign that people have scratched and lipsticked to read PUS DROP. “Harry. God in His way hasn’t been all bad to your mother and me. Believe it or not, there’s some advantages to living so long in this day and age. This Sunday she’s going to be sixty-five and come under Medicare. I’ve been paying in since ‘66; it’s like a great weight rolled off my chest. There’s no medical expense can break us now. They called LBJ every name in the book, but believe me, he did a lot of good for the little man. Wherever he went wrong, it was his big heart betrayed him. These pretty boys in the sky right now. Nixon’ll hog the credit, but it was the Democrats put ‘em there; it’s been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson-the Republicans don’t do a thing for the little man.”
“Right.”Harry says blankly. His bus is coming. “Tell her we’ll be over Sunday.”He pushes to a clear space at the back where, looking out while hanging to the bar, he sees his father as one of the “little men.” Pop stands whittled by the great American glare, squinting in the manna of blessings that come down from the government, shuffling from side to side in nervous happiness that his day’s work is done, that a beer is inside him. that Armstrong is above him, that the U.S. is the crown and stupefaction of human history. Like a piece of grit in the launching pad, he has done his part Still, he has been the one to keep his health; who would have thought Mom would fail first? Rabbit’s mind, as the bus dips into its bag of gears and surges and shudders, noses closer into the image of her he keeps like a dreaded relic; the black hair gone gray, the mannish mouth too clever for her life, the lozenge-shaped nostrils that to him as a child suggested a kind of soreness within, the eyes whose color he had never dared learn closed, bulge-lidded in her failing, the whole long face, slightly shining as if with sweat, lying numbed on the pillow. He can’t bear to see her like this is the secret of his seldom visiting, not Janice. The source of his life staring wasted there while she gropes for the words to greet him. And that gentle tawny smell of sickness that doesn’t even stay in her room but comes downstairs to meet them in the front hall among the umbrellas and follows them into the kitchen, where poor Pop warms their meals. A smell like gas escaping, that used to worry her so when he and Mini were little.
He boys his head and curtly prays. Forgive me, forgive us, make it easy for her. Amen. He only ever prays on buses. Now this bus has that smell.
The bus has too many Negroes.Rabbit notices them more and more. They’ve been here all along; as a tiny kid he remembers streets in Brewer you held your breath walking through, though they never hurt you. just looked; but now they’re noisier. Instead of bald-looking heads, they’re bushy. That’s OK. it’s more Nature. Nature is what we’re running out of Two of the men in the shop are Negroes, and after a while you didn’t even notice: at least they remember how to laugh. Sad business, being a Negro man. always underpaid, their eyes don’t look like our eyes, blood-shot, brown, liquid in them about to quiver out. Read somewhere some anthropologist thinks Negroes instead of being more primitive are the latest thing to evolve, the newest men. In some ways tougher, in some ways more delicate. Certainly dumber, but then, being smart hasn’t amounted to so much, the atom bomb and the onepiece aluminum beer can. And you can’t say Bill Cosby’s stupid.
But against these educated, tolerant thoughts rests a certain fear; he doesn’t see why they have to be so noisy The four seated right under him, jabbing and letting their noise come out in big silvery hoops: they know damn well they’re bugging the fat white wives pulling their shopping bags home Well, that’s kids of any color: but strange. They are a strange race. Not only their skins but the way they’re put together, loose-jointed like lions, strange about the head, as if their thoughts were a different shape and came out twisted even when they meant no menace. It’s as if all these Afro hair bushes and gold earrings and hoopy noise on buses, seeds of some tropical plant sneaked in by the birds, were taking over the garden. His garden. Rabbit knows it’s his garden and that’s why he’s put a flag decal on the back window of the Falcon even though Janice says it’s corny and fascist. In the papers you read about these houses in Connecticut where the parents are away in the Bahamas and the kids come in and smash it up for a party. More and more this country is getting like that. As if it just grew here instead of people laying down their lives to build it.
The bus w’orks its way down Weiser and crosses the Running Horse River and begins to drop people instead of taking them on. The city with its tired fiveand-dimes (that used to be a wonderland: the counters as high as his nose and the Big Little Books smelling like Christmas) and its Krolfs Department Store (where he once worked knocking apart crates behind the furniture department) and its flowerpotted traffic circle where the trolley tracks used to make a clanging star of intersection and then the empty dusty windows where stores have been starved by the suburban shopping malls and the sad narrow places that come and go called Go-Go or Boutique and the funeral parlors with imitation granite faces and the surplus outlets and a shoe parlor that sells hot roasted peanuts and Afro newspapers printed in Phi Sly—M BOY A MARTYRED -and a flower shop where they sell numbers and have punchboards and a variety store next to a pipe-rack clothing retailer—next to a corner dive called JlMBO’S Friendly LOUNGE, cigarette ends of the city snuffed by the bridge; the city gives way, after the hash of open water that in his youth was choked with coal silt (a man once tried to commit suicide from this bridge but stuck there up to his hips until the police pulled him out) but that now has been dredged and supports a flecking of moored pleasure boats, to West Brewer, a gappy imitation of the city, the same squeezed houses of brick painted red, but broken here and there by the twirlers of a car lot, the pumps and blazoned overhang of a gas station, the lakelike depth of a supermarket parking lot crowded with shimmering fins. Surging and spitting. the bus. growing lighter, the Negroes vanishing, moves toward a hope of spaciousness, past residential fortresses with sprinkled lawn around all four sides and clipped hydrangeas above newly pointed retaining walls, past a glimpse of the museum whose gardens were always in blossom and where the swans ate the breadcrusts schoolchildren threw them, then a glimpse of the sunstruck windows, orange facing the sinking sun. of the tall new wing of the County Hospital for the Insane. Closer at hand, the West Brewer Dry Cleaners, a toy store calling itself Hobby Heaven, a Rialto movie house with a stubby marquee: 2001: SPACE OD’SEY. The street curves, becomes a highway, dips into green suburbs where in the twenties little knights of industry built half-timbered dream houses, pebbled mortar and clinker brick, stucco flaky as piecrust, witches’ houses of candy and hardened cookie dough, with two-car garages and curved driveways. In Brewer County, but for a few baronial estates ringed by iron fences and moated by miles of lawn, there is nowhere higher to go than these houses; the most successful dentists may get to buy one. the pushiest insurance salesmen, the suavest ophthalmologists. This section even has another name, distinguishing itself From West Brewer: Penn Park. Penn Villas echoes the name hopefully, though it is not incorporated into this borough but sits on the border of Furnace Township, looking in. The township, where once charcoal-fed furnaces had smelted the iron for revolutionary muskets, is now still mostly farmland, and its few snowplows and single sheriff can hardly cope with this ranch-house village of muddy lawns and potholed macadam and sub-code sewers the developers suddenly left in its care.
Rabbit gets off at a stop in Penn Park and walks down a street of mock Tudor, Emberly Avenue, to where the road surface changes at the township line and becomes Emberly Drive in Penn Villas. He lives on Vista Crescent, third house from the end. Once there may have been here a vista, a softly sloped valley of red barns and fieldstone farmhouses, but more Penn Villas had been added and now the view from any window is as if into a fragmented mirror, of houses like this, telephone wires and television aerials showing where the glass cracked. His house is
faced with apple-green aluminum clapboards and is numbered 26. Rabbit steps onto his flagstone porchlet and opens his door with its three baby windows arranged like three steps, echoing the door chime of three stepped tones.
Hey, Dad,” his son calls from the living room, a room on his right the size of what used to be called a parlor, with a fireplace they never use. “They’ve left earth’s orbit! They’re forty-three thousand miles away.”
“Good for them,” he says. “Your mother here?” “No. At school they let us all into assembly to see the launch.”
“She call at all?”
“Not since I’ve been here. I just got in a while ago.” Nelson, at thirteen, is under average height, with his mother’s dark complexion, and something finely cut and wary about his face that may come from the Angstroms. His long eyelashes come from nowhere, and his shoulder-length hair is his own idea. Somehow, Rabbit feels, if he were taller it would be all right, to have hair so long. As is. the resemblance to a girl is frighteningly strong.
“Whadja do all day?”
The same television program, of people guessing and getting and squealing and kissing the m.c., is still going on.
“Nothing much.”
“Go to the playground?”
“For a while.”
“Then where?”
“Oh. over to West Brewer, just to hang around Billy’s apartment. Hey?”
“Yeah?”
“His father got him a mini-bike for his birthday. It’s real cool. With that real long front part so you have to reach up for the handles.”
“You rode it?”
“He only let me once. It’s all shiny, there isn’t a speck of paint on it; it’s just metal, with a white banana seat.”
“He’s older than you, isn’t he?”
“By two months. That’s all. Just two months, Dad.”
“Where does he ride it? It’s not legal on the street, is it?”
“Their building has a big parking lot he rides it all around. Nobody says anything. It only cost a hundred-eighty dollars. Dad.”
“Keep talking; I’m getting a beer.”
The house is small enough so that the boy can be heard by his father in the kitchen, his voice mixed with gleeful greedy spurts from the television and the chunky suck of the refrigerator door opening and shutting. “Hey, Dad, something I don’t understand.” “Shoot.”
“I thought the Fosnachts were divorced.” “Separated.”
“Then how come his father keeps getting him all this neat junk? You ought to see the hi-fi set he has, that’s all his, for his room, not even to share. Four speakers. Dad, and earphones. The earphones are fantastic. It’s like you’re way inside Tiny Tim.”
“That’s the place to be.” Rabbit says, coming into the living room. “Want a sip?”
The boy takes a sip from the can. putting a keyhole width of foam on the fuzz of his upper lip. and makes a bitter face.
Harry explains, “When people get divorced the father doesn’t stop liking the kids, he just can’t live with them anymore. The reason Fosnacht keeps getting Billy all this expensive stuff is probably he feels guilty for leaving him.”
“Why did they get separated. Dad, do you know?”
“Beats me. The bigger riddle is. why did they ever get married?” Rabbit knew Peggy Fosnacht when she was Peggy Gring, a big-assed wall-eyed girl in the middle row always waving her hand in the air because she thought she had the answer. Fosnacht he knew less well: a weedy little guy always shrugging his shoulders: used to play the saxophone in prom bands, now a partner in a music store on the upper end of Weiser Street, used to be called Chords ‘n’ Records, now Fidelity Audio. At the discount Fosnacht got, Billy’s hi-fi set must have cost next to nothing. Like these prizes they keep socking into these young shriekers. The one that frenchkissed the m.c. is off now, and a colored couple is guessing. Pale, but definitely colored. That’s OK; let ‘em guess, wan. and shriek with the rest of us.
Better that than sniping from rooftops. Still, he wonders how that black bride would be. Big lips, suck you right off, the men are slow as Jesus, long as whips, takes everything to get them up. in there forever, that’s why white women need them, white men too quick about it, have to get on with the job. making America great. Rabbit loves, on Laugh-In. when Teresa does the go-go bit, the way they paint the words in white on her skin. When thev watch as a family Janice and Nelson are always asking him what the words are; since he took up the printer’s trade he can read like a flash, upside down, mirrorwise too: he always had good quick eyes. He asks Nelson. “Why don’t you stay at the playground anymore? When I was your age I’d be playing Horse and Twenty-One all day long.”
“Yeah, but you were good. You were tall.” Nelson used to be crazy for sports. Little League, intramural, but lately he isn’t. Rabbit blames it on a scrapbook his own mother kept, of his basketball days in the late forties, when he set some county records: last winter every time they would go visit Mt. Judge Nelson would ask to get it out. and lie on the floor with it, those old dry-yellow games, the glue dried to dust, MT. JUDGE TOPPLES ORIOLE. ANGSTROM HITS FOR 37. just happening for the kid. that happened twenty years ago, light from a star.
“I got tall,” Rabbit tells him. “At your age I wasn’t much taller than you are.” A lie, but not really. A few inches. In a world where inches matter. Putts. Orbits. Squaring up a form. He feels bad about Nelson’s height. His own never did him much good; if he could take five inches off himself and give them to Nelson he might. If it didn’t hurt.
“Anyway, Dad. sports are square now. Nobody does it.”
“Well, what isn’t square now? Besides pill-popping and draft-dodging. And letting your hair grow down into your eyes. Where the hell is your mother? I’m going to call her. Turn the frigging TV down for once in your life.”
David Frost has replaced The Match Game. so Nelson turns it off entirely. Harry regrets the scared look that glimmered across the kid’s face: like the look on his father’s face when he sneezed on the street. Christ, they’re even scared to let him sneeze. His son and father seem alike fragile and sad to him. That’s the trouble with caring about anybody: you begin to feel bad about them; you want to put them on a shelf.
The telephone is on the lower of a set of see-through shelves that in theory divides the living room from a kind of alcove they call a breakfast nook. A few cookbooks sit on them, but Janice has never to his knowledge looked into them, just dishes up the same fried chicken and tasteless steak and peas and french fries she’s always dished up. Harry dials the familiar number and a familiar voice answers. “Springer Motors. Mr. Stavros speaking.”
“Charlie, hi. Hey, is Janice around?”
“Sure is, Harry. How’s tricks?” Stavros is a salesman and always has to say something.
“Tricky.” he answers.
“Hold on. friend. The good woman’s right here.” Off-phone, his voice calls, “Pick it up. It’s your old man.”
Another receiver is lifted. Through the knothole of momentary silence Rabbit sees the office: the gleaming display cars on the showroom floor, old man Springer’s frosted-glass door shut, the green-topped counter with the three steel desks behind: Stavros at one. Janice at another, and Mildred Kroust the bookkeeper Springer has had for thirty years at the one in between, except she’s usually out sick with some sort of female problem she’s developed late in life so her desk top is empty and bare but for wire baskets and a spindle and a blotter. Rabbit can also see last year’s puppy-dog calendar on the wall and the cardboard cutout of the Toyota station wagon on the old coffeecolored safe, behind the Christmas tree. The last time he was at Springer’s lot was for their Christmas party. “Harry, sweet.”Janice says, and now that he has been made suspicious he does hear something new in her voice, a breathy lilt of faint hurry, of a song he has interrupted her singing. “You’re going to scold me. aren’t you?”
“No. the kid and I were just wondering if—and if so when the hell—we’re going to get a home-cooked meal around here.”
“Oh. I know,” she sings. “I hate it too: it’s just that with Mildred out so much we’ve had to go into her books, and her system is really zilch.”Zilch: he hears another voice in hers. “Honestly,” she sings on. “if it turns out she’s been swindling Daddy of millions, none of us will be surprised.”
“Yeah. Look. Janice. It sounds like you’re having a lot of fun over there—”
“Fun? I’m wording, sweetie.”
“Sure. Now what the hell is really going on?”
“What do you mean, going on? Nothing is going on except your wife is trying to bring home a little extra bread.” Bread? “’Going on’—really. You may think your seven or whatever dollars an hour you get for sitting in the dark diddling that machine is wonderful money. Harry, but the fact is a hundred dollars doesn’t buy anything anymore, it just goes. ”
“Jesus, why am I getting this lecture on inflation? All I want to know is why my wife is never home to cook the goddamn supper for me and the kid.”
“Harry, has somebody been bugging you about me?”
“Bugging? How would they do that0 Janice. Just tell me. shall I put two TV dinners in the oven or what?”
A pause, during which he has a vision: sees her wings hover, her song suspended: imagines himself soaring, rootless, free. An old premonition, dim. Janice says, with measured words, so he feels as when a child watching his mother leveling tablespoons of sugar into a bowl of batter. “Could you. sweet0 Just for tonight? We’re in the middle of a little crisis here, frankly. It’s too complicated to explain, but we have to get some figures firm or we can’t do the paychecks tomorrow.”
“Who’s this we? Your father there?”
“Oh. sure.”
“Could I talk to him a second?”
“Why? He’s out on the lot.”
“I want to know if he got those tickets for the Blasts game. The kid’s dying to go.”
“Well, actually. I don’t see him. I guess he’s gone home for supper.”
“So it’s just you and Charlie there.”
“Other people are in and out. We’re desperately trying to untangle this mess Mildred made. This is the last night. Harry. I promise. I’ll be home between eight and nine, and then tomorrow night let’s all go to a movie together. That space thing is still in West Brewer. I noticed this morning while driving in.”
Rabbit is suddenly tired, of this conversation, of everything. Confusing energy surrounds him. A man’s appetites diminish, but the world’s never. “OK. Be home when you can. But we got to talk.”
“I’d love to talk. Harry.” From her tone she assumes “talk” means fuck, when he did mean talk. She hangs up: a satisfied impatient sound.
He opens another beer. The pull-tab breaks, so he has to find the rusty old church key underneath everything in the knife drawer. He heats up two Salisbury steak dinners; while waiting for the oven to preheat to 400 degrees, he reads the ingredients listed on the package: water, beef, peas, dehydrated potato flakes, bread crumbs, mushrooms, flour, butter, margarine, salt, malto-dextrin. tomato paste, cornstarch. Worcestershire sauce, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, monosodium glutamate, nonfat dry milk, dehydrated onions, flavoring, sugar, caramel color, spice, cysteine and thiamine hydrochloride. gum arabic. There is no clue from the picture on the tinfoil where all this stuff fits in. He always thought gum arabic was something you erased with. Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he’ll always know. He’ll never know how to talk Chinese or how screwing an African princess feels. The six o’clock news is all about space, all about emptiness: some bald man plays with little toys to show the docking and undocking maneuvers, and then a panel talks about the significance of this for the next five hundred years. They keep mentioning Columbus, but as far as Rabbit can see it’s the exact opposite: Columbus flew blind and hit something, these guys see exactly where they’re aiming and it’s a big round nothing. The Salisbury steak tastes of preservative, and Nelson eats only a few bites Rabbit tries to joke him into it: “Can’t eat a TV dinner without TV.”They channel-hop, trying to find something to hold them, but there is nothing; it all slides past until, after nine, on Carol Burnett. she and Gomer Pyle do an actually pretty funny skit about the Lone Ranger. It takes Rabbit back to when he used to sit in the radio-listening armchair back on Jackson Road, its arms darkened with grease spots from the peanut butter cracker-sandwiches he used to stack there to listen with. Mom used to have a fit. Every Monday. Wednesday, and Friday night it came on at seven thirty, and if it was summer you’d come in from kick-the-can or three-stops-or-a-catch and the neighborhood would grow quiet all across the backyards and then at eight the doors would slam and the games begin again, those generous summer days, just enough dark to fit sleep into, a war being fought across oceans just so he could spin out his days in such happiness, in such quiet growing. Eating Wheaties.
In this skit the Lone Ranger has a wife. She stamps around a cabin saying how she hates housework, hates her lonely life. “You’re never home.” she says, “you keep disappearing in a cloud of dust and a hearty ‘Heigh-ho, Silver.’ ” The unseen audience laughs, Rabbit laughs. Nelson doesn’t see what’s so funny. Rabbit tells him, “That’s how they always used to introduce the program.”
The kid says crossly. “I know. Dad,” and Rabbit loses the thread of the skit a little; there has been a joke he didn’t hear whose laughter is dying.
Now the Lone Ranger’s wife is complaining that Daniel Boone brings his wife beautiful furs, but “What do I ever get from you? A silver bullet.” She opens a door and a bushel of silver bullets comes crashing out and floods the floor. For the rest of the skit Carol Burnett and Corner Pyle and the man who plays Tonto (not Sammy Davis, Jr., but another TV Negro) keep slipping and crunching on these bullets, by accident. Rabbit thinks of the millions who are watching, the millions the sponsors are paving, and still nobody took time to realize that this would happen. a mess of silver bullets on the floor. Tonto tells the Lone Ranger, “Better next time, put-um bullet in gun first.”
The wife turns to complaining about Tonto. ‘’Him. Why must we always keep having him to dinner? He never has us back.”
Tonto tells her that if she comes to his tepee, she will be kidnapped by seven or eight braves. Instead of being frightened, she is interested. She rolls those big Burnett eyes and says. “Let’s go, kemo sabe. ”
Nelson asks. “Dad, what’s kemo sabe?”
Rabbit is surprised to have to say. “I don’t know. Something like ‘good friend’ or ‘boss,’ I suppose.” Indeed, come to think of it he understands nothing about Tonto. The Lone Ranger is a white man, so law and order on the range will work to his benefit, but what about Tonto? A Judas to his race, the more disinterested and lonely and heroic figure of virtue. When did he get his payoff? Why was he faithful to the masked stranger? In the boyhood days one never asked. Tonto was simply on “the side of right.” It seemed a correct dream then, red and white together, red loving white as naturally as stripes in the flag. Where has “the side of right” gone? He has missed several jokes while trying to answer Nelson. The skit is approaching its climax. The wife is telling the Lone Ranger. “You must choose between him or me.” Arms folded, she stands fierce.
The Lone Ranger’s pause for decision is not long. “Saddle up. Tonto,” he says. He puts on the phonograph a record of the William Tell Overture, and both men leave. The wife tiptoes over, a bullet crunching underfoot, and changes the record to “Indian Love Call.” Tonto enters from the other side of the screen. He and she kiss and hug. “I’ve always been interested,” Carol Burnett confides out to the audience, her face getting huge, “in Indian affairs.”
There is a laugh from the invisible audience, and even Rabbit sitting there in his easy chair laughs, but underneath the laugh this final gag falls flat, maybe because everybody still thinks of Tonto as incorruptible. as above it all, like Jesus and Armstrong. “Bedtime, huh?” Rabbit says. He turns off the show as it unravels into a string of credits. The sudden little star flares, then fades.
Nelson says, “The kids at school say Mr. Fosnacht was having an affair, that’s why they got divorced.”
“Or maybe he just got tired of not knowing which of his wife’s eyes was looking at him.”
“Dad. what is an affair exactly?”
“Oh, it’s two people seeing each other when they’re married to somebody else.”
“Did that ever happen to you and Mom?”
“I wouldn’t say so. I took a vacation once, that didn’t last very long. When you were about three. You wouldn’t remember.”
“I do, though. I remember Mom crying a lot, and everybody chasing you at the baby’s funeral, and I remember standing in the place on Wilbur Street, with just you in the room beside me, and looking down at the town through the window screen, and knowing Mom was in the hospital.”
“Yeah. Those were poor days. This Saturday, if Grandpa Springer has got the tickets he said he would, we’ll go to the Blasts game.”
“I know.” the boy says, unenthusiastic, and drifts toward the stairs. It unsettles Harry, how in the corner of his eye, once or twice a day, he seems to see another woman in the house, a woman who is not Janice; when it is only his long-haired son.
One more beer. He scrapes Nelson’s uneaten dinner into the Disposal, which sometimes sweetly stinks because the Penn Villas sewers flow sluggishly, carelessly engineered. He moves through the downstairs collecting glasses for the dishwasher; one of Janice’s stunts is to wander around leaving dreggy cups with saucers used as ashtrays and wineglasses coated with vermouth on whatever ledges occur to her—the TV top, a windowsill. How can she be helping untangle Mildred’s mess? Maybe out of the house she’s a whirlwind of efficiency. And a heigh-ho Silver. Indian affairs. Poor Pop and his rumor. Poor Mom lying there prey to poison tongues and nightmares. The two of them, their minds gone dry as haystacks rats slither through. His mind shies away. He looks out the window and sees in dusk the black lines of a TV aerial, an aluminum clothes tree, a basketball hoop on a far garage. How can he get the kid interested in sports? If he’s too short for basketball, then baseball. Anything, just to put something there, some bliss, to live on later for a while. If he goes empty now he won’t last at all. because we get emptier. Rabbit turns from the window and everywhere in his own house sees a slippery disposable gloss. It glints back at him from the synthetic fabric of the livingroom chairs and sofa, the synthetic artiness of a lamp Janice bought with a piece of driftwood weighted and wired as a base, the unnatural-looking natural wood of the shelves empty but for a few ashtrays with the sheen of fairgrounds souvenirs: it glints hack at him from the steel sink, the kitchen linoleum with its whorls as of madness, oil in water, things don’t mix. The window above the sink is black and opaque as the orange that paints the asylum windows. He sees mirrored in it his own wet hands. Underwater. He crumples the aluminum beer can he has absentmindedly drained. Its contents feel metallic inside him: corrosive, fattening. Things don’t mix. His inability to fasten on to any thought and make something of it must be fatigue. Rabbit lifts himself up the stairs, pushes himself through the underwater motions of undressing and dental care, sinks into bed without bothering to turn out the lights downstairs and in the bathroom. He hears from a mournful smothered radio noise that Nelson is still awake. He thinks he should get up and say good-night, give the kid a blessing, but a weight crushes him while light persists into his bedroom, along with the boy’s soft knocking noises, opening and shutting doors. looking tor something to do. Since infancy Rabbit sleeps best when others are up. upright like nails holding down the world, like lampposts, street signs, dandelion stems, cobwebs . . .
Something big slithers into the bed. Janice. The fluorescent dial on the bureau is saying five of eleven, its two hands merged into one finger. She is warm in her nightie. Skin is warmer than cotton. He was dreaming about a parabolic curve, trying to steer on it. though the thing he was trying to steer was fighting him. like a broken sled.
“Get it untangled?"” he asks her.
“Just about. I’m so sorry. Harry. Daddy came back and he just wouldn’t let us go.”
“Catch a nigger by the toe.” he mumbles.
“What sort of evening did you and Nelson have?”
“A kind of nothing sort of evening.”
“Anybody call?”
“Nobody.”
He senses she is, late as it is, alive, jazzed up. and wants to talk, apologetic, wanting to make it up. Her being in the bed changes its quality, from a resisting raft he is seeking to hold to a curving course to a nest, a laden hollow, itself curved. Her hand seeks him out and he brushes her away with an athlete’s old instinct to protect that spot. She turns then her back on him. He accepts this rejection. He nestles against her. Her waist where no bones are nips like a bird dipping. He had been afraid marrying her she would get fat like her mother but as she ages more and more her skinny little stringy go-getter of a father comes out in her. His hand leaves the dip to stray around in front to her belly, faintly lovingly loose from having had two babies. Puppy’s neck. Should he have let her have another to replace the one that died? Maybe that was the mistake. It had all seemed like a pit to him then, her womb and the grave, sex and death, he had pulled back, refused.
II.
The game drags on. with a tedious flurry of strategy, of pinch hitters and intentional walks.
prolonging the end. Hazleton wins. 7-3. Old Man Springer sighs. getting up us if from a nap in an unnatural position. He wipes a fleck of beer from his moustache. “’Fraid our boys didn’t come through for you. Nellie.”he says.
“That’s OK. Grampa. It was neat.”
To Harry he says. “That young Trexler is a comer though”
Groggy and cross from two beers in the sun. Rabbit doesn’t invite Springer into his house after the ball game, just thanks him a lot for everything. The house is silent, like outer space. On the kitchen table is a sealed envelope, addressed “Harry.” The letter inside, in Janice’s half-formed hand, with its unsteady slant and miserly cramping, says,
Harry dear-
I must go off a few days to think. Please don’t try to find or follow us please It is very important that we all respect each other as people and trust each other now.
I was shocked by your idea that I keep a lover since I don’t think this would he honest and it made me wonder if I mean anything to you at all Jell Nelson I’ve gone to the Poconos with Grandmom. Don’t forget to give him lunch money for the playground.
• Love.
Jan
“Jan”—her name from the years she used to work at Kroll’s selling salted nuts in the smock with Jan stitched above the pocket in script. In those days some afternoons they would go to her friend’s apartment up on Eighth Street. The horizontal rose rays as the sun set behind the great gray gasholder. The wonder of it as she let him slip off all her clothes. Underwear more substantial then: stocking snaps to undo, the marks of elastic printed on her skin. Jan. That name suspended in her these fifteen years: the notes she left for him around the house were signed “J.”
“Where’s Mom?” Nelson asks.
“She’s gone to the Poconos.” Rabbit says, pulling the note back toward his chest, in case the boy tries to read it. “She’s gone with Mom-mom. her legs were getting worse in this heat. I know it seems crazy, but that’s how things are sometimes. You and I can eat over at Burger Bliss tonight.”
The boy’s face—freckled, framed by hair that covers his ears, his plump lips buttoned shut and his eves sunk in fear of making a mistake—goes rapt, seems to listen, as when he was three and flight and death were rustling above him. Perhaps his experience then shapes what he says now. Firmly he tells his father. “She’ll be back.”
Sunday dawns muggy. The seven o’clock news says there was scattered shooting again last night in York and the western part of the state. Edgartown police chief Dominick J. Arena is expected today formally to charge Senator Kennedy with leaving the scene of an accident. Apollo Eleven is in lunar orbit and the Eagle is being readied for its historic descent. Rabbit slept badly and turns the box off and walks around the lawn barefoot to shock the headache out of his skull. The houses of Penn Villas are hushed, with the odd Catholic car roaring off to Mass. Nelson comes down around nine, and after making him breakfast. Harry goes back to bed with a cup of coffee and the Sunday Brewer Triumph. Snoopy on the front page of the funny papers is lying dreaming on his doghouse. and soon Rabbit falls asleep. The kid looked scared. The boy’s face shouts, and a soundless balloon comes out. When he awakes, the electric clock says five of eleven. The second hand sweeps around and around: a wonder the gears don’t wear themselves to dust. Rabbit dresses—fresh white shirt out of respect for Sunday—and goes downstairs the second time, his feet still bare, the carpeting fuzzy to his soles, a bachelor feeling. The house feels enormous, all his. He picks up the phone book and looks up STAVROS CHAS 1204 Eisenhower Av. He doesn’t dial, merely gazes at the name and the number as if to see his wife, smaller than a pencil dot. crawling between the letters. He dials a number he knows by heart.
His father answers. “Yes?” A wary voice, ready to hang up on a madman or a salesman.
“Pop. hi; hey, I hope you didn’t wait up or anything the other night; we weren’t able to make it and 1 couldn’t even get to a phone.”
A little pause, not much, just enough to let him know they were indeed disappointed. “No. we figured something came up and went to bed about the usual time. Your mother isn’t one to complain, as you know.”
“Right. Well. took. About today.”
His voice goes hoarse to whisper. “Harry, vou must come over today. You’ll break her heart if you don’t.”
“1 will, 1 will, but—”
The old man has cupped his mouth against the receiver, urging hoarsely, “This may be her last, you know. Birthday.”
“We’re coming. Pop. 1 mean, some of us are. Janice has had to go off.”
“Go off how?”
“It’s kind of complicated, something about her mother’s legs and the Poconos; she decided last night she had to, I don’t know. It’s nothing to worry about. Everybody’s all right, she’s just not here. The kid’s here though.” To illustrate, he calls, “Nelson!”
There is no answer.
“He must be out on his bike. Pop. He’s been right around all morning. When would you like us?”
“Whenever it suits you, Harry. Late afternoon or so. Come as early as you can. We’re having roast beef. Your mother wanted to bake a cake but the doctor thought it might be too much for her. I bought a nice one over at the bakery. Butterscotch icing, didn’t that used to be your favorite?”
“It’s her birthday, not mine. What should I get her for a present?”
“Just your simple presence, Harry, is all the present she desires.”
“Yeah, OK. I’ll think of something. Explain to her Janice won’t be coming.”
“As my father, God rest, used to say, It is to be regretted, but it can’t be helped.”
Once Pop finds that ceremonious vein, he tends to ride it. Rabbit hangs up. The kid’s bike—a rusty Schwinn, been meaning to get him a new one, both fenders rub—is not in the garage. Nor is the Falcon. Only the oil cans, the gas can, the lawnmower, the jumbled garden hose (Janice must have used it last), a lawn rake with missing teeth, and the Falcon’s snow tires are there. For an hour or so Rabbit swims around the house in a daze, not knowing who to call, not having a car. not wanting to go inside with the television set. He pulls weeds in the border beds where that first excited summer of their own house Janice planted bulbs and set in plants and shrubs. Since then they have done nothing, just watched the azaleas die and accepted the daffodils and iris as they came in and let the phlox fight it out as these subsequent summers wore on, nature lost in nature. He weeds until he begins to see himself as a weed and his hand with its ugly big moons on the fingernails as God’s hand choosing and killing; then he goes inside the house and looks into the refrigerator and eats a carrot raw. He looks into the phone directory and looks up Fosnacht; there are a lot of them and it takes him a while to figure out M is the one, M for Margaret and just the initial to put off obscene calls, though if he were on that kick he’d soon figure out that initials were unattached women. “Peggy, hi; this is Harry Angstrom.” He says his name with faint proud emphasis; they were in school together, and she remembers him when he was somebody. “I was just wondering, is Nelson over there playing with Billy? He went off on his bike a while ago and I’m wondering where to.”
Peggy says, “He’s not here, Harry. Sorry.” Her voice is frosted with all she knows, Janice burbling into her ear yesterday. Then more warmly she asks, “How’s everything going?” He reads the equation— Ollie left me; Janice left you: hello.
He says hastily, “Great. Hey, if Nelson comes by. tell him I want hint. We got to go to his grandmother’s.”
Her voice cools in saying good-bye, joins the vast glaring ice-face of all those who know. Nelson seems the one person left in the county who doesn’t know: this makes him even more precious. Yet. when the boy returns. red-faced and damp-haired from hard pedaling, he tells his father, “I was at the Fosnachts.”
Rabbit blinks and says, “OK. After this, let’s keep in better touch. I’m your mother and your father for the time being.”They eat lunch, Lebanon baloney on stale rye. They walk up Emberly to Weiser and catch a 12 bus east into Brewer. It being Sunday, they have to wait twenty minutes under the cloudless colorless sky. At the hospital stop a crowd of visitors gets on. having done their duty, dazed, earning away dead flowers and read books. Boats, white arrowheads tipping wrinkled wakes, are buzzing in the black river below the bridge. A colored kid leaves his foot in the aisle when Rabbit tries to get oft’: he steps over it. “Big feet.”the boy remarks to his companion.
“Fat lips.”Nelson, following, says to the colored boy.
They try to find a store open His mother was always difficult to buy presents for. Other children had given their mothers cheerful junk: dime-store jewelry, bottles of toilet water, boxes of candy, scarves. For Mom that had been too much, or not enough Mim always gave her something she had made: a woven potholder, a hand-illustrated calendar. Rabbit was poor at making things so he gave her himself, his trophies, his headlines. Mom had seemed satisfied: lives and not things concerned her. But nowwhat? What can a dying person want? Grotesque prosthetic devices—arms. legs, battery-operated hearts—run through Rabbit’s head as he and Nelson walk the dazzling. Sunday-stilled downtown of Brewer Up near Ninth and Weiser they find a drugstore open Thermos hollies, sunglasses, shaving lotion. Kodak film, plastic baby pants: nothing for his mother He wants something big. something bright, something to get through to her. Realgirl Liquid Make-up. Super Plenamins. Non-Smear polish remover. Nudit for the Legs. A rack of shampoo-in hair color, a different smiling cunt on every envelope: Snow Queen Blond. Danish Wheat. Killarney Russet. Parisian Spice. Spanish Black Wine. Nelson plucks him by the sleeve of his white shirt and leads to where a Sunbeam Clipmaster and a Roto-Shine Magnetic Electric Shoe Polisher nestle side by side, glossily packaged “She doesn’t wear shoes anymore, just slippers, he says, “and she never cut her hair that I can remember. It used to hang down to her waist.”But his attention is drawn on to a humidifier for $12.95. From the picture on the box. it looks like a fat thing saucer. No matter how immobile she got. it would be there. Around Brewer, though, the summers are as humid as they can be anyway, but maybe in the winter, the radiators dry out the house, the wallpaper peels, the skin cracks: it might help It would be there night and day. when he wasn’t. He moves on to a Kantleek Water Bottle and a two-anda-half-inch reading glass and dismisses both as morbid. His whole insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill. He comes to the Quikease Electric Massager with Scalp Comb. It has the silhouettes of naked women on the box, gracefully touching their shoulders, Lesbians, caressing the backs of their necks, where else the box leaves to the imagination, with what looks like a hairbrush on a live wire. $11.95. Bedsores. It might help. It might make her laugh, tickle, buzz: it is life. Life is a massage. And it costs a dollar less than the humidifier. Time is ticking. Nelson tugs at his sleeve and wants a maple walnut ice cream soda While the kid is eating it. Rabbit buys a birthday card to go with the massager It shows a rooster crowing, a crimson sun rising, and green letters shouting on the outside It’s Great to Get Up in the A.M. . . . and on the inside . . . to Wish You a Happy Birthday, MA! Ma. Am. God, what a lot of ingenious crap there is in the world. He buys it anyway, because the rooster is bright orange and jubilant enough to get through to her. Her eyes aren’t dim necessarily but he better play it safe.
The world outside is bright and barren. The two of them feel alone on the empty street. Rabbit gripping his bulky package. Where is everybody? Is there life on earth’.’ Three blocks down the deserted street of soft asphalt the clock that is the face of a giant flower, the center of the Sunflower Beer sign, says they are approaching four. They wait at the same corner, opposite the Phoenix Bar. where Harry’s father customarily waits. and lake the I6A bus to Mt. Judge. They are the only passengers: the driver tells them mysteriously “They’re about down.”Up they go through the City Park, past the World War II tank and the bandshell and the tennis court, around the shoulder of the mountain. On one side of them, gas stations and a green cliff: on the other, a precipice and, distantly, a viaduct. As the kid gazes out the window, toward the next mountain over. Rabbit asks him. “Where did you go this morning? Tell me the truth.”
The boy answers, finally. “Eisenhower Avenue”
“To see if Mommy’s car was there?”
“I guess.”
“Was it?”
“Yep ”
“D’you go in?”
“Nope. Just looked up at the windows awhile.”
“Did you know the number to look at?”
“One two oh four.”
“That sounds right. ”
They get off at Central, beside the granite Baptist church, and walk up Jackson toward his parents’ house. The streets haven’t changed in his lifetime. They were built too close together for vacant lots and too solidly to tear down, of a reddish brick with purplish bruises in it, and a texture that as a child Rabbit thought of as chapped, like his lips in winter. Maples and horse chestnuts darken the stumpy front lawns, hedged by little wired barricades of barberry and box. The houses are semidetached and heavy; their roofs are slate and their porches have brick walls, and above each door of oak and beveled glass winks a fanlight of somber churchly colors. As a child Rabbit imagined that fanlight to be a child of the windows above the Lutheran altar and therefore of God, a mauve and golden seeing sentinel posted above where he and Pop and Mom and Mim came and went a dozen times a day. Now, entering with his son. still too much a son himself to knock, he feels his parents’ place as stifling. Though the clock on the living-room highboy says only 4:20, darkness has come: dark carpets, thick drawn drapes, dead wallpaper, potted plants crowding the glass on the side that has the windows. Mom used to complain about how they had the inside half of a corner house but when the Bolgers, their old neighbors, died, and their half went onto the market, they made no move to inquire after the price, and a young couple from Scranton bought it, the young wife pregnant and barefoot and the young husband something in one of the new electronics plants out along Route 422; and the Angstroms still live in the dark half. They prefer it. Sunlight fades. Space kills. They sent him, Harry, out in the world to shine, but hugged their own shadows here. Their neighbor house on the other side, across two cement sidewalks with a strip of grass between them, where lived the old Methodist Mom used to fight with about who would mow the grass strip, has had a FOR SALE sign up for a year. People now want more air and land than these huddled hillside neighborhoods can give them. The house smells to Rabbit of preservative; of odors filming other odors, of layers of time, of wax and Aerosol and death; of safety.
Ashape, a shade, comes forward from the kitchen. He expects it to be his father, but it is his mother, shuffling, in a bathrobe, yet erect and moving. She leans forward unsmiling to accept his kiss. Her wrinkled cheek is warm; her hand steadying itself on his wrist is knobbed and cold.
“Happy birthday. Mom.” He hugs the massager against his chest; it is too early to offer it. She stares at the package as if he had put a shield between them.
“I’m sixty-five,” she says, groping for phrases so her sentences end in the middle. “When I was twenty. I told my boyfriend I wanted to be shot. When I was thirty.” It is not so much the strange tremulous attempt of her lips to close upon a thought as the accompanying stare, an unblinking ungathering gaze into space, that lifts her eves out of any flow and frightens Rabbit with a sense of ultimate blindness, of a blackboard from which they will all be wiped clean.
“You told Pop this?”
“Not your dad. Another. I didn’t meet your dad till later. This other one, I’m glad. He’s not here. To see me now.”
“You look pretty good to me,” Rabbit tells her. “I didn’t think you’d be up.”
“Nelson. How do I look. To you?” Thus she acknowledges the boy. She has always been testing him, putting him on the defensive. She has never forgiven him for not being another Harry, for having so much Janice in him. Those little Springer hands, she used to say. Now her own hands, held forgotten in front of her bathrobe belt, constantly work in a palsied waggle.
“Nice,” Nelson says. He is wary. He has learned that brevity and promptness of response are his best defense.
To take the attention off the kid. Rabbit asks her. “Should you be up?”
She laughs, an astonishing silent thing; her head tips back, her big nose glints from the facets of its tip and underside, her hand stops waggling. “I know, the way Earl talks. You’d think from the way he wants me in bed. I’m laid out already. The doctor. Wants me up. I had to bake a cake. Earl wanted. One of those tasteless paps from the bakery. Where’s Janice?”
“Yeah, about that. She’s awfully sorry, she couldn’t come. She had to go off with her mother to the Poconos, it took us all by surprise.”
“Things can be. Surprising.”
From upstairs Earl Angstrom’s thin voice calls anxiously, with a wheedler’s borrowed triumph, “They’re down! Eagle has landed! We’re on the moon, boys and girls! Uncle Sam is on the moon!”
“That’s just. The place for him,” Mom says, and with a rough gesture sweeps her distorted hand back toward her ear, to smooth down a piece of hair that has wandered loose from the bun she still twists up. Funny, the hair as it grays grows more stubborn. They say even inside the grave, it grows. Open coffins of women and find the whole thing stuffed like inside of a mattress. Pubic hair too? Funny it never needs to be cut. When he touches his mother’s arm to help her up the stairs to look at the moon, the flesh above her elbow is disconcerting—loose upon the bone, as on a well-cooked chicken.
The set is in Mom’s bedroom at the front of the house. It has the smell their cellar used to have when they had those two cats. He tries to remember their names. Pansy. And Willy. Willy, the tom, got in so many fights his belly began to slosh and he had to be taken to the Animal Rescue. There is no picture of the moon on the tube, just crackling voices while cardboard cutouts simulate what is happening, and electronic letters spell out who in the crackle of men is speaking.
“. . . literally thousands of little one and two foot craters around the area,” a man is saying in the voice that used to try to sell them Shredded Ralston between episodes of Tom Mix. “We see some angular blocks out several hundred feet in front of us that are probably two feet in size and have angular edges. There is a hill in view just about on the ground track ahead of us. Difficult to estimate, but might be a half a mile or a mile.”
A voice identified as Houston says. “Roger. Tranquillity. We copy. Over.” The voice has that Texas authority. As if words were invented by them, they speak so lovingly. When Rabbit was stationed at Fort Hood in ‘53. Texas looked like the moon to him, brown land running from his knees level as a knife, purple rumpled horizon, sky bigger and barer than he could believe, first time away from his damp green hills, last time too. Everybody’s voice was so nice and gritty and loving, even the girls in the whorehouse.
A voice called Columbia says. “Sounds like a lot better than it did yesterday. At that very low sun angle, it looked rough as a cob then.” As a cob? The electronic letters specify, MIKE COLLINS SPEAKING FROM COMMAND MODULE ORBITING MOON.
Tranquillity says, “It really was rough. Mike, over the targeted landing area. It was extremely rough, cratered and large numbers of rocks that were probably some many larger then five or ten feet in size.” Mom’s room has lace curtains aged yellowish and pinned back with tin daisies that to an infant’s eyes seemed magical, rose-and-thorns wallpaper curling loose from the wall above where the radiator safety valve steams, a kind of plush armchair that soaks up dust. When he was a child this chair was downstairs and he would sock it to release torrents of swirling motes into the shaft of afternoon sun; these whirling motes seemed to him worlds, each an earth, with him on one of them, unthinkably small, unbearably. Some light used to get into the house in late afternoon. between the maples. Now the maples have thronged that light solid, made the room cellar-dim. The bedside table supports an erect little company of pill bottles and a Bible. The wails hold tinted photographs of himself and Mim in high school, taken he remembers by a pushy pudgy little blue-jawed crook who called himself a Studio and weaseled his way into the building every spring and made them line up in the auditorium and wet-comb their hair so their parents couldn’t resist two weeks later letting them take in to the homeroom the money for an 8 by 10 tinted print and a sheet of wallet-sized grislies of themselves; now this crook by the somersault of time has become a donor of selves otherwise forever lost: Rabbit’s skinny head pink in its translucent blond whiffle, his ears out from his head an inch, his eyes unready blue as marbles, even his lower lids youthfully fleshy; and Mim’s face plump between the shoulder-length shampoo-shining sheaves rolled under in Rita Hayworth style, the scarlet tint of her lipstick pinned like a badge on the starched white of her face. Both children smile out into space, through the crook’s smudged lens, from that sweat-scented giggling gym toward their mother bedridden someday.
Columbia jokes. “When in doubt, land long.”
Tranquillity says. “Well, we did.”
And Houston intervenes. “Tranquillity Houston. We have a P twenty-two update for you if you’re ready to copy. Over.”
Columbia jokes again: “At your service, sir.”
Houston, unamused, a city of computers working without sleep, answers. “Right. Mike. P one one zero four thirty two eighteen; P two one zero four thirtyseven twenty-eight and that is four miles south. This is based on a targeted landing site. Over.”
Columbia repeats the numbers.
Tranquillity says, “Our mission timer is now reading nine zero four thirty-four forty-seven and static.”
“Roger, copy. Your mission timer is now static at— say again the time.”
“Nine zero four thirty-four forty-seven.”
“Roger, copy, Tranquillity. That gravity align looked good. We see you recycling.”
“Well. no. I was trying to get time sixteen sixty-five out and somehow it proceeded on the six-twenty-two before I could do a BRP thirty-two enter. I want to log a time here and then I’d like to know whether you want me to proceed on torquing angles or to go back and re-enter again before torquing. Over.”
“Rog, Buzz. Stand by.”
Nelson and his grandfather listen raptly to these procedures; Mary Angstrom turns impatiently—or is it that her difficulty of motion makes all gestures appear impatient?— and makes her shuffling way out into the landing and down the stairs again. Rabbit, heart trembling in its hollow, follows. She needs no help going down the stairs. In the garishly bright kitchen she asks, “Where did you say. Janice was?”
“In the Poconos with her mother.”
“Why should I believe that?”
“Why shouldn’t you?”
She stoops over, waveringly. to open the oven and look in. tangled wire hair falling loose as she bends. She grunts, stands, and states, “Janice. Stays out of my way. These days.”
In his frightened, hypnotized condition. Rabbit can only, it seems, ask questions. “Why would she do that?”
His mother states and stares, only a movement of her tongue between her parted lips betraying that she is trying to speak. “I know too much,” she at last brings out, “about her.”
Rabbit says, “You know only what a bunch of pathetic old gossips tell you about her. And stop bugging Pop about it, he comes into work and bugs me.” Since she does not fight back, he is provoked to go on. “With Mim out turning ten tricks a day in Las Vegas I’d think you’d have more to worry about than poor Janice’s private life.”
“She was always.” his mother brings out, “spoiled.”
“Yes and Nelson too I suppose is spoiled. How would you describe me? Just yesterday I was sitting over at the Blasts game thinking what a lousy baseball player I was, always scared of the ball. I’m a pretty poor husband, a sloppy father, and when the Verity Press folds I’ll fold with it and have to go on welfare. Some life. Thanks, Mom.”
“Hush,” she says, expressionless, “you’ll make. The cake fall,” and like a rusty jackknife she forces herself to bend over and peer into the gas oven.
“Sorry, Mom, but Jesus I’m tired lately.”
“You’ll feel better when. You’re mv age.”
The party is a success. They sit at the kitchen table with the four places worn through the enamel in all those years. It is like it used to be, except that Mom is in a bathrobe and Mim has become Nelson. Pop carves the chicken and then cuts up Mom’s piece in small bits for her: her right hand can hold a fork but cannot use a knife. His teeth slipping down, he proposes a toast in New York State wine to “my Mary, an angel through thick and thin”: Rabbit wonders what the thin was. Maybe this is it. When she unwraps her few presents, she laughs at the massager. “Is this. To keep me hopping?” she asks, and has her husband plug it in, and rests it, vibrating, on the top of Nelson’s head. He needs this touch of cheering up. Harry feels Janice’s absence gnawing at him. When the cake is cut, the kid eats only half a piece, so Rabbit has to eat double to not hurt his mother’s feelings.
Dusk thickens: over in West Brew er the sanatorium windows are burning orange, and on this side of the mountain the shadows sneak like burglars into the narrow concrete space between this house and the unsold one. Through the papered walls, from the house of the young barefoot couple, seeps the dull bass percussion of a rock group, making the matched tins (cookies, sugar, flour, coffee) on Mom’s shelf tingle in their emptiness. In the living room the glass face of the mahogany highboy shivers. Nelson’s eyes begin to sink: his eyelids lower. His little button cupid-curved mouth smiles in apology as he slumps forward into the cold edge of the table. His elders talk about old times in the neighborhood, people of the thirties and forties, once so alive you saw them every day and never thought to take even a photograph. The old Methodist refusing to mow his half of the grass strip. Before him the Zims with that pretty daughter the mother would shriek at every breakfast and supper. The man down the street who worked nights at the pretzel plant and who shot himself one dawn with nobody to hear it but the horses of the milk wagon. They had milk wagons then. The streets were soft dust.
Nelson fights sleep. Rabbit asks him. “Want to head home0”
“Negative, Pop.” He sleepily smiles at his own wit.
Rabbit extends the joke. “The time is twenty-one hours. We better rendezvous with our spacecraft.”
But the spacecraft is empty: a long empty box in the blackness of Penn Villas, slowly spinning in the void, its border beds half-weeded. The kid is frightened to go home. So is Rabbit. They sit on Mom’s bed and watch television in the dark. They are told the men in the big metal spider sitting on the moon cannot sleep, so the moon walk has been moved up several hours. Men in studios, pale and drawn from killing time, demonstrate with life-size mockups what is supposed to happen; on some channels men in space suits are walking around. laying down tinfoil trays as if for a cookout. At last it happens. The real event. Or is it? A television camera on the leg of the module comes on: an abstraction appears on the screen. The announcer explains that the blackness in the top of the screen is the lunar night, the blackness in the lower left corner is the shadow of the spacecraft with its ladder, the whiteness is the surface of the moon. Nelson is asleep, his head on his father’s thigh; funny how kids’ skulls grow damp when they sleep. Like bulbs underground. Mom’s legs are under the blankets: she is propped up on pillows behind him. Pop is asleep in his chair, his breathing a distant sad sea, touching shore and retreating, touching shore and retreating, an old pump that keeps going; lamplight sneaks through a crack in the windowshade and touches the top of his head, his sparse hair mussed into lank feathers. On the bright box something is happening. A snaky shape sneaks down from the upper left corner; it is a man’s leg. It grows another leg, eclipses the bright patch that is the surface of the moon. A man in clumsy silhouette has interposed himself among these abstract shadows and glare. He says something about “steps” that a crackle keeps Rabbit from understanding. Electronic letters traveling sideways spell out MAN IS ON THH MOON. The voice, crackling, tells Houston that the surface is tine and powdery, he can pick it up with his toe, it adheres to his boot like powdered charcoal, that he sinks in only a fraction of an inch, that it’s easier to move around than in the simulations on the earth. From behind him. Rabbit’s mother’s hand with difficulty reaches out, touches the back of his skull, stays there, awkwardly tries to massage his scalp, to ease away thoughts of the trouble she knows he is in. “1 don’t know. Mom,” he abruptly admits. “I know it’s happened, but I don’t feel anything yet.”□
John Updike was a prolific writer of poetry, art and literary criticism, and fiction. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1982 and 1991 for two novels in his “Rabbit” series, becoming one of just three authors to win the award more than once.