John Updike - Rabbit Remembered

But Glenn is alive now, and in a good mood. He and Shirley- whose massive body, bales of dough-colored flesh, emits from its unwashed creases an odor that seems terrible until it surrounds you completely-clack down the white-dotted black tiles with a vigor that punctures the milieu as if with gunshots. A few other clients have gathered to watch. Nelson stands there puzzling at the patterns being made. If he ever played dominoes, he's forgotten it. At the Mt. Judge playground, the pavilion sheltered checkers and Chinese checkers, and he and Billy Fosnacht used to play marbles in a circle in the dirt, in that year or two before Billy's estranged parents got him a minibike and the boyhood phase of innocently modest consumption ended. Nelson feels forlorn, watching Shirley and Glenn cackle and stymie each other, extending and halting the speckled snake that winds its angular way across the metal card table. "Back to the boneyard, sap!" Shirley cries, her mirth sending sympathetic eddies through the onlookers, an idle ring transfixed within the orbit of her familiar BO.

"I'll boneyard you, you little sweetheart!" Glenn says. "Take that!" He slaps a double five crossways at one end of the domino snake.

"What does that mean?" Nelson asks. "Putting the double sideways?"

Glenn squints up askance, one blued lid half lowered, his nostril-stud catching on one facet the fluorescent light overhead. "Didn't you ever play dominoes, Nels?" he asks. For all his gay makeup, he has a rough voice, a Brewer street voice, deeper than you expect, and pugnacious. His tone suggests that Nelson is having a boundary problem.

Maybe so. The other clients are listening, alert as children with nothing else to do. But he has been trained to be frank, direct, and fearless, within the therapeutic persona. "Well, if I did, I've forgotten. The objective is what?"

"To kill time," Glenn says.

"You poor baby," says Shirley to Nelson. "Were you an only child?"

Nelson hesitates. Watch those boundaries. "I had a sister. She died as a baby."

This shocks them, as he knew it would. They have their own problems, that's what they're all here for, not to hear his. Shirley offers, "We'll teach you, dearie, when this game is over." Her vast face holds a trace, a delicate imprint like a fern in shale, of the face she had as a young woman. There is a small straight nose and a pointy chin-a triangular bit of bone in the fat.

"Morons can play it," Glenn says in rough encouragement.

One of the likable things about dysfunctionals is that they don't hold grudges. They don't stand on any imagined dignity, they are focused on the minute or two of life in front of them. As he sits there for twenty minutes taking domino lessons from a mountain of a woman in a stained muu-muu, and being coached by a rouged pervert with three glass studs in his face-a fourth, brass, sits on the upper edge of Glenn's plucked eyebrow-Nelson feels his inner snarls loosening, including the knot of apprehension about his lunch date, crazily enough, with a girl out of nowhere who claims to be his sister.

Outside the Center, the rain still comes down but is thinner; it is swirled and rarefied by the wind into a kind of white sunshine. There is no point in putting up an umbrella, it would be popped inside out. Instead, he runs, slowing whenever he feels his shirt getting sweaty inside his raincoat, staying close to the brick buildings, and the facades redone in Permastone, on the south side of Elm Street. Plastic store signs bang and shudder overhead, tin mailboxes swing by one screw beside the front doors of four-story town houses turned into apartments, empty aluminum Mountain Dew cans rattle along in the gutter, leaves swish overhead as gusts plow them like keels through upside-down waves. The elms lining this street died long ago; the Bradford pears the city replaced them with have grown big enough to need cutting back from the electric wires. There are fewer people out on the sidewalk than usual but those that are are oddly blithe. A black couple in yellow slickers stands in a doorway smooching. A skinny Latina clicks along in high square heels and blue jeans and a pink short-sleeved jersey, chatting into a cell phone. Is this a hurricane or not? The weather is being snubbed. People are in rebellion at having it hyped on TV SO relentlessly, to bring up ratings.

He runs past one of those few surviving front-parlor barbershops, where two old guys are waiting their turn while a third sits under the sheet to his neck, all three thin on top, and the barber makes four. Dad didn't want to wait around and become an old guy. He didn't have the patience. The wind traces oval loops through sheets of rain. The clouds above the roofs and chimneys trail tails like ink in water. The odds are less than fifty-fifty, he figures, that his date will show up on such a wild day. He hopes she doesn't; it will get him off the hook.

But there she is, waiting outside The Greenery (Salads, Soups, and Sandwiches) under a sky-blue umbrella, wearing not fat white shoes as she promised but penny loafers with little clear plastic booties snapped over them, like bubble-wrapped toys. "Hi. I'm Nelson," he says, more gruffly than he intended, perhaps because he is panting from running. "You shouldn't have waited outside, you'll get soaked," he goes on in his nervousness, starting their acquaintance on an accusatory note.

She doesn't seem to mind. Her mild eyes, their blue deepened by the blue of the umbrella, take him in as she defends herself: "But it's so exciting out. Feel the electricity in the air? I heard on the radio driving here the eye is over Wilmington."

"I bet it's soon downgraded to just a tropical storm. North Carolina is where it really hit. Pennsylvania never gets the real disasters."

"Well, that's good, isn't it?" Annabelle asks.

Their heads are at the same level. He is short for a man and she is slightly above average for a woman. He wonders if a Passerby would spot them as siblings. "Come on, let's go in" he says, still breathless.

There are six or so other customers, and the last of three booths is free. The interior has that cloakroom scent from long ago of wet clothes and childish secrets. The tidy, self-reliant way Annabelle takes off her white raincoat and red scarf and hangs them up on the peg-hooks by the unmarked door to the restrooms touches Nelson; she is an old maid already. But the bright-eyed flounce with which she sits down and slides her way to the center of the table in the booth suggests that she is still hopeful, still a player in whatever the game is.

The waitress, too middle-aged for her short green uniform, comes over from behind the counter and hands them menus prettily printed with leafy borders but already smudged and tattered by many hands. "Also," she tells them, "we've added hamburgers and hot dogs."

Nelson says, "I thought those were against your principles."

She is lumpy and sallow but not above being amused. "They were, but people kept asking for them. We still won't do pizzas and French fries."

"Way out," Nelson says. Laconic responses have become, these eight years, his professional habit, but this occasion will demand more: he will have to give, to lead. To be a provider.

"I love healthy food," says Annabelle Byer.

"Do you know already?" the waitress asks. "Or would you like a few minutes?" Nelson has been coming here once or twice a week since the place opened last spring, but she is showing him new deference now that he has appeared with a companion. Annabelle is a little round-faced and bland compared with the narrow-hipped Latina in high heels and jeans, but she is not an embarrassment as a date; she could be a colleague at the Center, like Katie Shirk.

"I know," he tells the waitress. "A cup of that broccoli soup you make-"

"It's not a cream soup," the waitress interrupts. "It's a clear soup, some of the customers call it watery."I want it," Nelson insists, "and then the spinach salad, with raspberry vinaigrette, and don't go easy on the bacon bits."