John Updike - Rabbit Remembered

Her attempt to protect the girl fails, for everybody except the Dietrichs and Margie and Alice picks up dirty dishes and crowds into the kitchen. Ron Junior's two boys, Angus and Ron III , have taken Ron Senior's golf clubs out of his closet to the sunporch and set up a kind of putting course among overturned summer furniture. They are taking fuller and fuller swings, and their father gets to them just before something is broken-the rippled glass table where they sometimes eat in the summer, or a panel of screening he has just fitted with new Fiberglas mesh. "We're going to have pies, boys," Janice promises them, and then remembers that she should have been warming the apple and mince in the oven instead of just sitting there listening to them all argue.

There is a milling about at the kitchen counter as the guests deposit the plates and glasses and silver. Annabelle starts rinsing the plates into the Disposall and stacking them in the dishwasher, whose baby-blue interior is new to her. Her host comes over to help, which is his right, it being his kitchen. But it brings him very close, his sports jacket off and his sleeves rolled up so the blond-white fur of forearm hair shows; he lightly bumps her aside and takes the wet plates into his hands. There is a density to him, a fullness of blood that her own veins feel. "We'll load all the big plates into the lower rack and save the saucers for the next load."

"I can move away, Mr. Harrison, if you'd like to do it."

"Why? This works. You rinse, I load." He is close enough that she smells the sweet sauterne around his red-eared head. "So," he says, "a blow job's just a way of showing affection."

"That's what I said." She has dealt in her life with so many older men coming on to her that she feels calm with it, confident she can fend.

"You're your mother's daughter, all right."

"I am?"

"I knew your mother, once. Before she got involved with that jerk Angstrom."

"Oh?" Fear and fascination twitter together inside her. Her hand trembles, setting the delicate old wineglasses, family treasures with etched designs, into the upper rack. He takes them from her two at time, and rearranges those she has set in place.

"Otherwise, they rattle around and break," he explains.

"What was she like then?" She asks this but has already decided she doesn't want the conversation to continue. She half turns away from him, looking for a towel to dry her hands.

Ronnie keeps his voice low, so Janice, putting her pies belatedly into the oven, doesn't hear. "She'd fuck anybody," he says softly into the fine hair at the side of Annabelle's neck.

"Why didn't you do that before?" Nelson is whining at his mother.

"Oh, it slipped my mind," she says, "everybody getting so excited about Clinton. Isn't his term about up, in any case?"

"Not soon enough," Ron Junior shouts from the sunporch, where he is trying to restore order.

"It must feel funny," Ronnie murmurs to Annabelle, "being the illegitimate daughter of a hooer and a bum."

Tears spring to her eyes as if at the lash of a twig while walking in the woods. Nelson sees the change in her face, sees her wheel from the sink with her wet hands still up in the air, and in two steps is at her side. "What happened?" he asks, his breath hot, his eyes sunk deeper into his skull.

"Nothing," she gasps, struggling not to sob."What did he say?"He didn't say anything."I asked her," Ronnie tells his stepson conversationally, "how it felt being the bastard kid of a whore and a bum. I didn't ask her for a blow job, though."

"Ronnie!" Janice exclaims, letting the oven door slam."Well, shit," he says, only a bit abashed, "what's she doing here anyway, telling us what a great guy Clinton is?"

Nelson squares up to him, though he is a bit shorter and was neveran athlete. "You told Mom she could come. You said you wanted to see how Ruth Leonard's daughter turned out."

"Now I know. Looks just like her, without the ginger in her hair. And cunt, my guess is." Buried years of righteous resentment surface in the cool guess.

"You couldn't stand it, could you?" Nelson says. "My father beating you out every time. Every time you went up against him, he beat you out. That's how he was, Ronnie. A winner. You, you're a loser."

"You'd know," Ronnie says.

Others have pushed into the kitchen, the older two Harrison sons."What's going on?" Georgie asks.

"Mom," Nelson asks his mother. "Why did you marry him? How could you do that to us?" The "us," he realizes, must include his dead father.

Janice looks as though she has had this conversation with her son before, and is weary to death of it. "He's good to me," she explains. "He's had too much to drink. Haven't you, Ron?"

"No," he says. "Not quite enough in fact. You drank it all at your end."

"Please forget whatever he said," she says to Annabelle. "Let's go for a walk, some of us. While the pies warm up."

"The rain has started up again," Alex points out.

Ron Junior wants to defend his father but doesn't quite know from what. "You squirt," he says to Nelson. "This was all your crazy idea, bringing her. "

"It's thrown him for a loop," Georgie offers to explain, from his New York angle, seeing his father with a detachment the other two haven't managed yet, as an old man getting older. "She got him stirred up, remembering." His young-old face with its exaggerated big features reveals, in the tug of a smile crease at a corner of his lips, what he shares with his brothers, satisfaction that at last some sort of counterblow has been struck for Rabbit Angstrom's leading their mother into adultery.

"I am not stirred up," Ronnie says, with the oblivious stolidity of the insurance agent who will not go away, who will not leave the house until a policy has been sold. "This is my house and I like to have some control over who comes into it."

"Well, we're going," Nelson tells him. "This is it. Mom, I'll come by for my things when this pig isn't here."

"Nelson, you have no place to stay!"

"I'll find one. Come on, Annabelle. Here," and he dodges around Ronnie, startlingly, and rips a generous length of paper towel from the rack under the old-fashioned wooden cabinets and hands it to his sister, to dry her wet and soapy hands with.

Numb, heaped with disgrace, she follows him back into the dining room, past the tall breakfront where Ma Springer's precious Koerner china trembles at their double retreat. Annabelle has to hurry with her choppy small steps to keep up. She dressed for this occasion in a white cashmere cardigan and cinnamon-brown skirt, perhaps a little tight and short for the company. But that's how skirts come now, from New York via the buyers for the malls.

Only Margie, little Alice, and the Dietrichs are left at the Thanksgiving table. A cloud of Doris's cigarette smoke lies up against the ceiling, around the brass-plated dome fixture. Nelson stops to bend down and say loudly, "Mr. Dietrich, I'm sorry, but something has come up and we must run before the pies. Happy Thanksgiving. You too, Mrs. Dietrich. Keep being a friend to Mom, she needs you. Margie, I guess we don't agree entirely about Clinton but that's a very cute little girl you have there."

"Goodbye," Annabelle says to the table in a scarcely audible croak, her throat sore from her choked-down sobs. She dabs at her wet cheeks with the paper towel, held in the hand that Nelson isn't squeezing as he pulls her along. The two small boys have made their way ahead of them into the living room and have turned on the Zenith television. A football game: green-and-white uniforms deploy on a bright-green ground with a yellow ten-yard line supplied by computer graphics. The top of the set is crammed with knickknacks, including a heavy pale-green glass egg that since his earliest childhood seemed miraculous to Nelson. How did they get that tear-shaped bubble in there? He has no coat and her jacket hangs in the hall. The front door with its thin panes of ornamentally frosted glass sticks in the dampness of the day, but with a screech pops open, releasing them to the porch and its fresh air. It is raining; the air is chilly, alive. As a child he always loved this porch, his Springer grandparents' porch, where there was a cushioned glider that squeaked and smelled like the oilcloth mattress in his playpen. And there had been an armchair of unpainted wicker. People don't use their porches any more; the furniture was taken to the Mt. Judge dump, now closed, in some decade when he wasn't paying much attention. Being adult, it seems, consists of not paying much attention. The wicker smelled to his childish nostrils of its vegetable origin, of a willow tree in a storybook, leaning beside a pond, trailing its drooping branches and feathery leaves in the crystal-pure water. His senses feel clean again, the rain sharp on his face, the patter in the maple leaves overhead distinct, each drop, as he tugs his sister toward the tired white Corolla he brought her in. The house across the street, where the pumpkins and the woman in her bra have shone forth, is dark, empty. The neighbors are away for the holiday, and thus miss seeing the heir leave 89 Joseph Street for good.