John Updike - Rabbit Remembered

"And what about her and Vince Foster?" Ron Junior asks. "Don't think that's not going to come up again if she runs."

"The king and queen of sleaze," his wife goes on in a kind of rapture. "I can't stand them!" This is marriage, Annabelle sees, this joint rapture.

"Yes," Georgie breaks in, his voice tense, having been coiled within him, "I will vote for her. She has her heart in the right place, unlike all you Republicans. She's for choice, for freedom of expression, for g-giving the p-poor a break." He is starting to stammer in his excitement; the other Harrisons narrow their eyes and sigh in an old reflex of pity and contempt; he is not the scapegoat they want today.

"Like the poor Palestinians. Like Mrs. Arafat. They loved that in New York. 'Here, honey, have a hug,'" Ron Junior runs on.

"You New Yorkers," Alex says to his brother loftily, "you're all-" He hangs on what seems to be an "f," and Georgie jumps in:

"Fags, you're trying to say."

"Full of shit, I was going to say, and then thought better of it. We have ladies and a little girl at this table." He pinches his mouth smaller yet.

"He has no coat-tails," Ron Senior says, still thinking practically. "The jerk should have been impeached and we all know it."

"He was impeached," Nelson says to his stepfather. "What he shouldn't have been was convicted, and he wasn't, if you'll recall."

But Nelson isn't the scapegoat they want either. His stepfather says patiently, "Nellie, he lied to us, the American people. He said right out on television, 'I did not have sex with that woman, what's-hername.'"

Annabelle feels compelled to speak up. "I think he's an excellent President," she says.

Her voice, though shy, is clean and pure, startling. The agitated table, smelling of food eaten and uneaten, falls into a hush. She is their guest, just barely. Who is she, come back from nowhere with her pale round face?

"How so, dear?" Doris Dietrich asks, from the other corner of the table. Her gaudy earrings, strips of copper, twitter as she brings her head forward to hear the answer.

Annabelle fights the blush she feels beginning. She elongates her neck to spread the heat. She loves Clinton, she realizes, from all those hours at the television set, letting his A-student earnestness wash over her, his lip-biting pauses for the judicious word, his gently raspy hillbilly accent. "Oh, the usual things people say," she says. "He really does make you feel he cares-that he sees you. He's been there, poor in a crummy town, with an abusive stepfather. And his cleverness, knowing all those facts, and being always right. All those experts on television like George Will saying bombing Kosovo would never work and then it did. And the way he went into Haiti. And has brought peace to Ireland."

"He's a draft dodger!" Ron Junior cannot keep in. "If I was a soldier I'd tell him to stuff his orders. Don't send me to Bosnia!"

"She was asked a question, let her answer," Nelson says; he is used to running groups.

She goes on, hating making a speech, blushing hotly now, but- having handled the mortally ill so often, knowing what waits for us, all of us, including all of us here at this table-not afraid of speaking her mind, when after all her President had kept going doing his job with the entire country full of cheap and ugly cracks, "He loves people, he truly does. And he has nerve. He knows when to gamble and when to hold back. And he doesn't hold a grudge, even against those in the Congress who hated him and tried to ruin him. Yes, it was too bad about-about his needing a little affection, but maybe he was entitled to some. Aren't we all?"

"A blow job is a little affection?" the host asks, giving her again one of those looks, a thrust from some past where she didn't exist.

"Well-"

"Of course," Nelson intervenes. "That's just what it is."

"That right, Georgie?" Alex asks his younger brother.

"Drop dead, Lex. Go back to the Bible Belt. Though as a matter of fact I agree with Annabelle, I think it's pathetic that this idiotic puritanical nation reduced its President to acting like a sneaky teen-ager. Any other country in the world, he could have a harem if he does the job."

Deet has heard enough to know they are talking about Clinton. He says in that commanding deaf voice, "The man may have his good intentions, but he is too extreme, giving all this government money to those who refuse to work. Raising taxes on the rich hurts the economy over all, history shows time and time again."

"He's for workfare," Nelson says, almost suffocated by the ignorance around him. "The liberals hate him for it."

"He makes me ashamed of being an American," Margie volunteers. Something in her akin to sexual passion has been tripped; her face shows spots of outgrown acne. "He makes America look ridiculous, drowning us in sleaze and then flying around all over the world as if nothing whatsoever has happened.

It's so brazen."

Her little girl, two or so, is too big to be penned into a high chair this long; hearing her mother's voice strain, feeling her mother's blood boil, she begins to kick and whimper. With an irritable backhand she flicks her peas and cut-up turkey off the tray onto the floor. "Hey, take it easy, Alice," says Ron Junior, who has been hit in his necktie by some of the peas.

"Well," his father says, "I'll say this for Slick Willie, he's brought the phrase out in the open. When I was young you had to explain to girls what it was. They could hardly believe they were supposed to do it."

Janice thinks Ronnie looks tired-blue below the eyes, his hair just a gauze up top, his ears feverish. Having lost one husband prematurely, she is watchful of this one, with his silky skin, his steady ways.

Nelson says to Margie, softly, between them, "Brazen, he's still President, for Chrissake," and to Deet, loudly, "Actually, Mr. Dietrich, fiscally he's about as conservative as a Democrat can get. We're feeling the pinch at the treatment center, I can tell you."

"Face it, Nellie, the guy stinks," says Ron Junior, while his daughter wriggles in his lap, glad to be out of the chair but not wishing to be confined by her father's embrace either. "He's dead meat. He's a leftover going fuzzy at the back of the fridge."

Alex opines primly, "He makes Nixon look like a saint. At least Nixon had the decency to get out of our faces. He could feel shame."

"Nixon? I never heard him admit anything except how sorry he felt for himself," Nelson says.

"It's the sleaze!" Margie cries in a kind of orgasm, visibly quivering. Alice starts to whimper in sympathy. Her mother gestures toward her. "What are children supposed to think? What do you tell Boy Scouts?"

"Boy Scouts!" Georgie exclaims, a big grin creasing his face. "Keep your mind out of the gutter, that's what our scoutmaster used to tell us. But none of us did. Boy Scouts are no saints. He was no saint either, it turned out."-

"A much-maligned man," Deet announces, having heard the word "Nixon." "What he did then would be shrugged off now."

"Like Reagan shrugged off Iran-Contra," Nelson says. "Not that he had a clue what they were talking about. Talk about senile dementia!"

"He made the Russkies bite the dust, I'll tell you. He brought the damn Wall down," says Ron Senior, lifting the bottle in front of him and finding that it is empty. "Janice, is there any more wine? Is it all drunk up at your end?"

Doris Dietrich beside him also calls down to Janice. "Janice, what do you think? What do you think about Hillary's running?"

Janice tries to focus. She had been thinking of how much like Harry Nelson was, defending Presidents. Her son has that expression on his face Harry used to call "white around the gills." Why do they do it, care so about those distant men? They identify. They think the country is as fragile as they are. Her father, who hated Roosevelt to the day he died, would get so excited, saying the Democrats were giving the country away. She tells the expectant table, "Oh…she should run if it makes her feel better. Let her get it out of her system. Ronnie, you've had enough wine. It's time to clear, but everybody except Annabelle stay sitting. She may help me."