John Updike: Rabbit, Run

Rabbit goes to his wife and, putting his arms around her, has a vivid experience of her – her tear—hot breath, the blood—tinged white of her eyes. In an affectionate reflex he dips his knees to bring his loins against her, but her solid belly prevents him. He straightens to his full height above her and says, "O.K. You bought a bathing suit."

Sheltered by his chest and arms she blurts with an earnestness he didn't know she still could hold, "Don't run from me, Harry. I love you."

"I love you. Now come on, you bought a bathing suit."

"Red," she says, rocking sadly against him. But her body when tipsy has a brittleness, an unconnectedness, that feels disagreeable in his arms. "With a strap that ties behind your neck and a pleated skirt you can take off for the water. Then my varicose veins hurt so much Mother and I went into the basement of Kroll's and had chocolate sodas. They've redone the whole luncheonette section, the counter isn't there any more. But my legs still hurt so Mother brought me home and said you could pick up the car and Nelson. I thought a drink might help the pain."

"Hnuh."

"I thought you'd be home before now. Where were you?"

"Oh, clowning around. I played ball with some kids down the alley." The couple has parted.

"I tried to take a nap but I couldn't. Mother said I looked tired."

"You're supposed to look tired. You're a modem housewife."

"And meanwhile you're off in the alley playing like a twelveyear—old?"

It gripes him that she didn't see his crack about being a housewife, based on the "image" the MagiPeel people tried to have their salesmen sell to, as ironical and at bottom pitying and fond. There seems no escaping it: she is dumb. He says, "Well what's the difference if you're sitting here watching a program for kids under two?"

"Who was shushing a while ago?"

"Ah, Janice." He sighs. "Screw you. Just screw you."

She looks at him clearly a long moment. "I'll get supper," she at last decides.

He is all repentance. "I'll run over and get the car and bring the kid back. The poor kid must think he has no home. What the hell makes your mother think my mother has nothing better to do than take care of other people's kids?" Indignation rises in him again at her missing the point of why he wanted to watch Jimmie, for professional reasons – to earn a living to buy sugar for her to put into her rotten old Old—fashioneds.

She moves into the kitchen, angry but not angry enough. She should be really sore, or not sore at all, since all he had said was what he has done a couple hundred times. Say, on the average once every three days for three years. What's that? Three hundred. That often? Then why is it always a struggle? She used to make it easier before they got married. She could be sudden then. Just a girl. Nerves like new thread. Skin smelled like fresh cotton. Her girlfriend at work had an apartment in Brewer they used. Pipeframe bed, silver medallions in the wallpaper; a view westward of the great blue gas tanks by the edge of the river. After work, working both at Kroll's then, she selling candy and cashews in a white smock with ` Jan" stitched on her pocket and he lugging easy chairs and maple end tables around on the floor above, hammering apart packing crates from nine to five, the itch of the packing excelsior getting into his nose and eyes and making them burn. That filthy black crescent of bins behind the elevators, the floor covered with bent nails, his palms black and Chandler the fairy mincing in every hour on the hour telling him to wash his hands so he wouldn't foul the furniture. Lava soap. Its lather was gray. Hip hands grew yellow calluses from using the crowbar. After 5:30, the dirty day done, they would meet by the doors, chained to keep customers out, a green—glass—paved chamber of silence between the two sets of doors, in the shallow side windows the bodiless mannequin heads in their feathered hats and necklaces of pink pearls eavesdropping on the echoing farewell gossip. Every employee hated Kroll's, yet they left it slow as swimming. Janice and Rabbit would meet in this chamber, with the dim light and green floor like something underwater, and push at the one unchained door, push up into the light, and walk, never admitting they were going there, toward the silver medallions, hand in hand tired walking gently against the current of home—going traffic, and make love with the late daylight coming level in the window. She was shy about him seeing her. She made him keep his eyes shut. And then with a shiver come as soon as he was in, her inside softly grainy, like a silk slipper. Lying side by side on this other girl's bed, feeling lost, having done the final thing; the wall's silver and the fading day's gold.

The kitchen is a small room off the living room, a tight aisle between machines that were modern five years ago. She drops something metal, a pan or cup. "Think you can make it without burning yourself ?" he calls in.

"Are you still here?" is the answer.

He goes to the closet and takes out the coat he hung up so neatly. It seems to him he's the only person around here who cares about neatness. The clutter behind him in the room – the Old—fashioned glass with its corrupt dregs, the chock—full ashtray balanced on the easy—chair arm, the rumpled rug, the floppy stacks of slippery newspapers, the kid's toys here and there broken and stuck and jammed, a leg off a doll and a piece of bent cardboard that went with some breakfast—box cutout, the rolls of fuzz under the radiators, the continual crisscrossing mess – clings to his back like a tightening net. He tries to sort out picking up his car and then his kid. Or should he pick up the kid first? He wants more to see the kid. It would be quicker to walk over to Mrs. Springer's, she lived closer. But suppose she was watching out the window for him to come so she could pop out and tell him how tired Janice looked? Whowouldn't be tired after tramping around trying to buy something with you you miserable nickel—hugger? You fat hag. You old gypsy. If he had the kid along this might not happen. Rabbit likes the idea of walking up from his mother's place with his boy. Two—and—a—half, Nelson walks like a trooper, with choppy stubborn steps. They'd walk along under the trees and then like magic there would be Daddy's car at a curb. But it will take longer this way, what with his own mother talking slyly and roundabout about how incompetent Janice is. He hated it when his mother went on like that; maybe she did it just to kid him, but he couldn't take her lightly, she was somehow too powerful, at least with him. He had better go for the car first and pick the kid up with it. But he doesn't want to do it this way. He just doesn't. The problem knits in front of him and he feels sickened by the intricacy.

Janice calls from the kitchen, "And honey pick up a pack of cigarettes, could you?" in a normal voice that says everything is forgiven, everything is the same.

Rabbit freezes, standing looking at his faint yellow shadow on the white door that leads to the hall, and senses he is in a trap. It seems certain. He goes out.

Outdoors it is growing dark and cool. The Norway maples exhale the smell of their sticky new buds and the broad livingroom windows along Wilbur Street show beyond the silver patch of a television set the warm bulbs burning in kitchens, like fires at the backs of caves. He walks downhill. The day is gathering itself in. He now and then touches with his hand the rough bark of a tree or the dry twigs of a hedge, to give himself the small answer of a texture. At the comer, where Wilbur Street meets Potter Avenue, a mailbox stands leaning in twilight on its concrete post. Tall two—petaled street sign, the cleat—gouged trunk of the telephone pole holding its insulators against the sky, fire hydrant like a golden bush: a grove. He used to love to climb the poles. To shinny up from a friend's shoulders until the ladder of spikes came to your hands, to get up to where you could hear the wires sing. Their song was a terrifying motionless whisper. It always tempted you to fall, to let the hard spikes in your palms go and feel the space on your back, feel it take your feet and ride up your spine as you fell. He remembers how hot your hands felt at the top, robbed full of —splinters from getting up to where the spikes began. Listening to the wires as if you could hear what people were saying, what all that secret adult world was about. The insulators giant blue eggs in a windy nest.