John Updike - Rabbit Remembered

"We never got a menu," Nelson tells her.

But before the girl can retreat to get them one, Annabelle says, "We're in a hurry. Just bring me a hamburger."

Nelson looks at the specials blackboard above the counter and says, "O.K., I'll have the split-pea soup and the half a bean-sprouts sandwich."

"To drink?"

"Coffee."

"A medium Sprite," Annabelle says.

He accuses her, when the waitress leaves, "Your teeth look perfect."

"No, actually they need a lot of care. My molars are full of fillings and may have to be crowned. I've always had a sweet tooth. Then Jim," she prompted.

"Then Jim-Jim is an addict. You name it, he's addicted. He has a beer belly from booze and yellow fingers from cigarettes and he's been on methadone for years. But he'll do uppers, downers, he'd get hooked on M &Ms if there was nothing else."

"Yum," says Annabelle.

"Jim decides to tell us, maybe just to rile us all up, that the meaning of life is sex, and he starts to describe a sexual adventure he just had, with all the words in place, in this sort of eye-rolling philosophizing way, a girl he met in a Third Street bar…"

"Go on."

"She did this, he suggested that, she said why not, dude, the earth began to shudder and shake-I had to cut him off, which I hate to do, but it was pure exhibitionism, Rosa actually walked out, it was SO inappropriate-"

"I know," Annabelle says. "I get that with my Alzheimer's patients. They de-inhibit."

"Your father," Nelson says, thinking the subject needed a change. "The man you thought was your father. Did he ever look at you?"

Her eyes lose their sleepy look; a stonewashed-denim blue, they widen like a doll's when you sit it erect.

"I mean," Nelson hastens to explain, "unlike my father, who didn't look around at me in the dream, even though I know he knew I was there."

"Yes," she says. "Frank did look at me. Especially-"

"Especially after you were sixteen," Nelson supplies.

"He died when I was sixteen. He began to look earlier than that. When I was fourteen." Her eyes regain their unimpeachable calm. "But, you know, nothing. He was a wonderful, generous man. My mother wasn't always easy. She had a temper, and wasn't really a country person. She couldn't talk to the other farm women, Mennonite some of them."

More capable than she looks, the waitress brings his pea soup with the frothy half-sandwich and Annabelle's hamburger with chips and a slice of pickle, cut the long way. The smell of ground grilled meat travels to him across the Formica, reminding him of high school-its cafeteria lunches, its aimless car rides that ended with Whoppers at Burger King. Since his father's death of sludgy arteries he has been careful to watch his diet; his blood pressure is high for his age, and so is his cholesterol. It was aggressive of Annabelle, he feels, to order a hamburger, just as her outfit is aggressive, the purple turtleneck stretched by the push of her breasts. He wonders if as with the woman across the street her bra is beige, a clinging silky Olga or lacy Bali or satiny Barelythere. Her innocence feels learned, a layer. After two bites of her hamburger she confesses, "I dread Thanksgiving. I don't know what you expect of me."

"Expect? I don't expect much, just you to be yourself and the others to be polite."

"See, that's it. Why should they have to make an effort to be polite? A girlfriend of mine from when I worked at St. Joe's has invited me to spend the holiday with her family, over in Brewer Heights. Wouldn't that be better? Easier for everybody?"

He goes into counsellor mode; his voice slows, each word weighed. "Easier isn't necessarily better. You're family to me and I'd like you to be there with me."

"Family to you but not to them. To your mother I'm just a reminder of old misery."

"The misery of the world," he says, reaching into himself to overcome her resistance. "That's what I kept thinking during my group this morning-the pity of everything, all of us, these confused souls trying so pathetically hard to break out of the fog- to see through our compulsions, our needs as they chew us up. I got panicky and let it get out of control. The group ran me. "

"Several of the old men I look after," she says, trying to join in his drift, "think they're married to me. They want to hold my hand. They think I'm the right age for them, they forget how old they are, when they don't look into the mirror."

"That Egyptian plane that went down," he goes on. "One of the pilots decided to commit suicide and take everybody with him. Children and everybody. Because he couldn't pay his daughter's medical bills. People are crazy. At times when I'm with the clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little."

"So why do you want me to come with your family to Thanksgiving?"

"The same reason you showed up at the house," Nelson says. "Without your mother, you're stuck. You're not going anywhere. You're under a spell, and we've got to break it."

"My savior." She picks up the limp pickle slice with a dainty grip and before biting it with her deceptively pretty teeth gives him a challenging, sisterly look. "Nelson, are you sure it's my spell you're trying to break?"

He is nervous on behalf of his mother and sister and his own self, but things at Thanksgiving go pretty well until the four bottles of California sauterne have been drunk and people are restless and irritable from sitting so long at the table, the Springers' polished mahogany dining-room table, two overlapping tablecloths needed to cover it with its extra leaves inserted. The day is unseasonably warm and spotted with fits of rain, showers that come and go. The summer's drought has been forgotten. They need frost now. Daffodil and crocus shoots are coming up and the lilac buds have the fullness they should have in April. Some cog has slipped in the sky, clogged as it is with emissions from all our heedless cars.

Of the Harrison boys, nerdy, divorced Alex has come up from Virginia, and Georgie from New York, still unmarried and no great mystery why, and Ron Junior with his wife, pudgy Margie, and three children from where they live, in a new development off the old pike to Maiden Springs. That makes eleven with Nelson and Annabelle, but because she owes her so much hospitality and fortifying advice over the years Mom invited Doris Dietrich, as she now is, and her elderly rich husband, Henry, whom Doris calls Deet. Janice never dreamed Doris would accept but she did, loftily saying they had given the cook the holiday off and she was dreading trying to whip up an elaborate meal just for Deet. He is eighty, at least, and even deafer than Doris. Still, he holds himself erect and looks distinguished, a Diamond County aristocrat, a living reminder of the days when the vast old hosiery mills were still mills and not discount clothing outlets. After much dithering and debate, it was decided to put him at Janice's right and Annabelle next to him and Georgie, in Nelson's estimation the least menacing of the Harrisons, on her right.

And the old gent did appreciate-the thin red skin on his cheekbones glowed-being seated beside the best-looking youngish woman there. Margie, Annabelle's only competitor, was one of those local girls who with their chunky sturdy legs in white bobby socks and big boobs in the bulky letter sweater are knockouts as seventeen-year-old cheerleaders but don't carry it past thirty, sinking into fat with their mothers. Ron Junior had put on weight, too, and a construction worker's permanent tan. His mother's mouth, with her slightly shy but welcoming smile, had acquired in his face the stubborn closed set of a man who had settled for less than he might have. His two years up at Lehigh had gone into nailing two-by-fours into tacky house frames, rows of them on half-acre lots. He had become a version of his father, meaty and balding and potentially pugnacious, though without an insurance salesman's pallor. Alex, the oldest and tallest, now looked most like their mother-stringy and wry, the way she became in her long illness, and intelligent and prim in his wire-rimmed glasses. Was it working with miniature circuits that had made his mouth the size of a tight buttonhole? He had done the best of the three boys, moving out to the West Coast and back, climbing the computer programmer's zigzag ladder, though since it was a field where the brightest and luckiest made millions before thirty perhaps he felt like a failure; at any rate, he had a slight apologetic stoop, which was also like his mother as her life had wound down.