John Updike - Rabbit, Run

He asks her, "What do you want?"

"A Daiquiri."

"You're sure? You're sure now it won't make you sick?" He's noticed that, that she seems a little sick sometimes, and won't eat, and sometimes eats the house down.

"No, I'm not sure but why the hell shouldn't I be sick?"

"Well I don't know why you shouldn't. Why shouldn't anybody?"

"Look, let's not be a philosopher for once. Just get me the drink."

A colored girl in an orange uniform that he guesses from the frills is supposed to look South American comes and he tells her two Daiquiris. She flips shut her pad and walks off and he sees her back is open halfway down her spine, so a bit of black bra shows. Compared with this her skin isn't black at all. Soft purple shadows flitter on the flats of her back where the light hits. She has a pigeon—toed way of sauntering, swinging those orange frills. She doesn't care about him; he likes that, that she doesn't care. The thing about Ruth is lately she's been trying to make him feel guilty about something.

She asks him, "What are you looking at?"

"I'm not looking at anything."

"You can't have it, Rabbit. You're too white."

"Say you really are in a sweet mood."

She smiles defiantly. "I'm just myself."

"God I hope not."

The Negress returns and sets the Daiquiris between them as they sit there silently. The door behind them opens and Margaret comes in with the chill. On top of everything, the guy with her is, he isn't very happy to see, Ronnie Harrison. Margaret says to Rabbit, "Hello, you. You still hanging on?"

"Hell," Harrison says, "it's the great Angstrom," as if he's trying to take Tothero's place in every way. "I've been hearing about you," he adds slimily.

"Hearing what?"

"Oh. The word."

Harrison was never one of Rabbit's favorites and has not improved. In the locker room he was always talking about making out and playing with himself under his little hairy pot of a belly and that pot has really grown. Harrison is fat. Fat and half bald. His kinky brass—colored hair has thinned and the skin of his scalp shows, depending on how he tilts his head. This pink showing through disgusts Rabbit, like the one bald idea that is always showing through Harrison's talk. Still, he remembers one night when Harrison came back into the game after losing two teeth to somebody's elbow and tries to be glad to see him. There were just five of you out there at a time and the other four for that time were unique in the world.

But it seems long ago, and every second Harrison stands there smirking it seems longer. He is wearing a narrow—shouldered seersucker suit and its cool air of business success annoys Rabbit. He feels hemmed in. The problem is, who shall sit where? He and Ruth have gotten on opposite sides of the table, which was the mistake. Harrison decides, and ducks down to sit beside Ruth, with a little catch in the movement that betrays the old limp from his football injury. Rabbit becomes obsessed by Harrison's imperfections. He's ruined the effect of his Ivy League suit by wearing a white tie like a wop. When he opens his mouth the two false teeth don't quite match the others.

"Well, how's life treating the old Master?" he says. "The word is you got it made." His eyes make his meaning by flicking sideways to Ruth, who sits there like a lump, her hands folded around the Daiquiri. Her knuckles are red from washing dishes for him. When she lifts the glass to drink, her chin shows through distorted.

"He made me," she says, setting it down.

"He and who else?" asks Harrison.

Margaret wriggles at Rabbit's side. She feels somehow like Janice: jumpy. Her presence in the left corner of his vision feels like a dark damp cloth approaching that side of his face.

"Where's Tothero?" he asks her.

"Totherwho?"

Ruth giggles, damn her. Harrison bends his head toward Ruth's, pink showing, and whispers a remark. Her lips tuck up in a smile; it's just like that night in the Chinese place, anything he says will please her, except that tonight he is Harrison and Rabbit sits across from them married to this girl he hates. He's sure what Harrison whispers is about him, "the old Master." From the second there were four of them it was clear he was going to be the goat. Like Tothero that night.

"You know damn well who," he tells Margaret. "Marty Tothero."

"Our old coach, Harry!" Harrison cries, and reaches across the table to touch Rabbit's fingertips. "The man who made us immortal!"

Rabbit curls his fingers an inch beyond Harrison's reach and Harrison, with a satisfied smirk, draws back, pulling his palms along the slick table—top so they make a slippery screech of friction.

"Me, you mean," Rabbit says. "You were nothing."

•"Nothing. That seems a little stern. That seems a little stern, Harry old bunny. Let's cast our minds back. When Tothero wanted a guy roughed up, who did he send in to do it? When he wanted a hot shot like you guarded nice and close, who was his boy?" He pats his own. chest. "You were too much of a star to dirty your hands. No, you never fouled anybody, did you? You didn't play football either, and get your knee scrambled, either, did you? No sir, not Harry the bird; he was on wings. Feed him the ball and watch it go in."

"It went in, you noticed."

"Sometimes. Sometimes it did. Harry now don't wrinkle your nose. Don't think we all don't appreciate your ability." From the way he's using his hands, chopping and lifting in a practiced way, Rabbit thinks he must do a lot of talking around a table. Yet there's a tremor; and in seeing that Harrison is afraid of him, Rabbit loses interest. The waitress comes – Harrison orders vodka—and—tonics for himself and Margaret and another Daiquiri for Ruth —and Rabbit watches her back recede as if it is the one real thing in the world: the little triangle of black bra under the two blue—brown pillows of muscle. He wants Ruth to see him looking.

Harrison is losing his salesman's composure. "Did I ever tell you what Tothero once said to me about you? Ace, are you listening?"

"What did Tothero say?" God, this guy is a middle—aged bore and he's not even thirty.

"He said to me, `This is in confidence, Ronnie, but I depend on you to spark the team. Harry is not a team player."'

Rabbit looks down at Margaret and over at Ruth. "Now I'll tell ya what really happened," he says to them. "Old Harrison here went in to Tothero and he said, `Hey, I'm a real spark plug, ain't I, coach? A real play—maker, huh? Not like that lousy showboat Angstrom, huh?' And Tothero was probably asleep and didn't answer, so Harrison goes through the rest of his life thinking, `Gee, I'm a real hero. A real play—maker.' On a basketball team, you see, whenever you have a little runty clumsy guy that can't do anything he's called the play—maker. I don't know where he's supposed to be making all these plays. In his bedroom I guess." Ruth laughs; he's not sure he wanted her to.

"That's not true." Harrison's practiced palms flicker more hastily. "He volunteered it to me. Not that it was anything I didn't know; the whole school knew it."

Did it? Nobody ever told him.

Ruth says, "God, let's not talk basketball. Every time I go out with this bastard we talk nothing but."

He wonders, Did doubt show on his face and she say that to reassure him? Does she in any part of her feel sorry for him?

Harrison perhaps thinks he's been uglier than befits his salesconference suavity. He takes out a cigarette and a lizard—skin Ronson. They can't help but watch him while he snaps a shapely flame into being.

Rabbit turns to Margaret. Something in the way this arranges the nerves in his neck rings a bell, makes him think he turned to her exactly like this a million years ago. He says, "You never answered me."

"Nuts, I don't know where he is. I guess he went home. He was sick."