John Updike - Rabbit Remembered

Roy is taller than his grandmother and about the same height as Nelson and Ronnie and Pru and Annabelle, but he will get taller; at fifteen his growth spurt has years to go. The dark Springer genes have overruled the Angstrom pallor in the boy's hair and brows and the long curved eyelashes, like his father's but without the deepset wary look. His upper lip is fuzzy and his ears stick out and his eyes are bright; the new century is his. He puts his knuckly hand in Annabelle's competent soft one and tells her, "My sister is sorry not to meet you this time. She had a message I was to give you: your father was a doll."

"A doll?" Annabelle smiles.

"A neat guy, I think she meant. He died when she was eight so she has a lot more memories of him than I do."

Nelson interposes, "She remembers Dad's saving her life once in Florida, in a Sailfish that capsized. Another way to frame it would be that he nearly killed her."

"Nelson," Pru says in half-hearted wifely rebuke.

Roy volunteers, "I remember going to visit him in the hospital once, the high white bed and all these tubes going in and out of him. Also how when there was any candy or nuts around you had to compete with him for them-he'd steal a candy bar right out from under your nose."

This is a success; everyone laughs. Roy gives his mother's slightly lopsided grin, and Annabelle says, "Thank you so much, Roy. You've helped make him real to me."

"We'll have to have you over for dinner in the new year," Ronnie tells her, in a rehearsed voice, not quite looking at her. "I got a ton of Rabbit stories even Janice hasn't heard."

"We have a reservation at the Lookout," Nelson intervenes. To his elders he explains, "That's the fancy new restaurant in the old Pinnacle Hotel. When I called at first they said they were full up. But Billy got us into the first sitting, at seven."

"The maître d's upper-right bicuspid is all mine," Billy explains. "We had to go back in; the first didn't take. Some people burst into tears when that happens."

"Oh, how beautiful you all look!" Janice exclaims, as something in the occasion, the sudden clumping here of strands going back deep into her time on earth, brims over for her. "You all go and have a gorgeous time!" The teariness conjured by remembering Peggy Fosnacht, earnest wall-eyed clumsy Peggy, who had been Peggy Gring when Janice and she were young, blurs her survey of the four adult children, her son among them, and the mother of her grandchildren, all so touching, dressed up to greet this particular calendrical doom, with Harry and Fred and Mother and little Becky all squeezed inside them somehow, the DNA. "Just think," she says, "the next time we see each other, the year will have all those zeros in it! I can't stand it!"

"O.K., Mom," Nelson says nervously.

Ronnie says, husbandly-expansive, covering for her tears, pompously proud of them, "Young Bill Gates here and I are going to have a great time making hotdogs and popcorn and watching the boob tube, watching the future roll our way. It's been 2000 for hours in Fiji and Japan-no Y2K problems in Sydney or Tokyo as far as they can tell. Paris was spectacular a half-hour ago and at seven it's going to hit London, Blair and the Queen and their dumb Dome. For most of the world, midnight is already history! Time is relative, as Einstein pointed out. Isn't that right, Roy?"

"Sort of like that," the boy says, embarrassed by so crudely approximate a truth.

"It stretches," Ronnie obnoxiously insists. "Like a condom." Go to church all he wants, this guy is never going to get his brains out of his pants.

They are de-inhibiting together. Billy announces, "I keep thinking of all those that didn't quite make it. JFK Junior, Payne Stewart, and the other day the Lone Ranger, poor guy."

"God bless you, Billy!" Janice exclaims, burbling out of some chaotic reserve of sorrow that Nelson, dry-eyed, sees into as into a dark well at whose bottom his own head in silhouette glimmers in a disk of reflected sky. Under the pressure of the momentous impalpable event almost upon them they all kiss, Nelson Roy and Janice Pru and Billy Mrs. Angstrom (as he still thinks of her) and Ronnie Annabelle, who tries to deflect him to a cheek but is nailed on the mouth-the same cushiony kind of lips, he cannot but remember, that Ruth once sucked him off with, down in a shack on the Jersey Shore, salt air making everything sticky, the odors of sex tossed everywhere like their clothes, she going at it as if leisurely reducing a Popsicle, stopping and starting and giving him the eye up across his bare belly with its sheen of golden hairs. They all kiss, kiss there by the door, the door with its rasping, failing bell and oval brass knob burnished by uncountable hands, by uncountable comings and goings in the twentieth century, at 89 Joseph Street. The house across the street, Nelson sees, is ablaze as if for a party; in the upper front room the young woman of the house passes preoccupied in a glitzy blouse, her mouth moving with urgent words he cannot hear.

Hurry, they mustn't be late, the maître d' will give their table away; they scramble in an exclamatory tumble into Nelson's off-white Corolla parked at the curb, as excited as teen-agers to be out and off. The plan is the meal and then a movie, not one of the four at the tired mall on the way into Brewer, though as they pass Billy says wistfully in the back seat, "I'd love to see Galaxy Quest. One of my hygienists says there's a great sex scene where one of the humans makes out with an extraterrestrial female who turns back into, like, an octopus when she gets excited."

"Nice," says Annabelle, in the back seat with him.

He goes on, "The most heartbreaking death at the end of this year to my mind, though, was that woman up in a nursing home in Allentown yesterday who was the world's oldest person, it turns out. A hundred nineteen. If she'd hung on just two more days she would have lived in three different centuries."

"I guess that'd be worth doing," Pru says dryly, not quite accepting of Billy yet. She is intent beside Nelson, silently helping him drive. She senses he is stressed. He is thinking of Michael DiLorenzo, another who didn't quite make it into the third millennium.

"Did any of you know," Billy asks, "that the world's oldest person was a Pennsylvanian?"

Annabelle waits for Pru or Nelson to say something rude, and when they don't allows, "I'm not surprised. Old people love this state. Only Florida has more, proportionally."

The movie Nelson wants them to see is American Beauty, cited the year's best by a number of big-city critics, but assailed by several of Pennsylvania's defenders of decency, and now playing at a second-run, cut-price theatre called Instant Classics, out beyond the old fairgrounds. And they do see it, getting back into Nelson's car at twenty past eleven in a state of some coziness after five hours together, sitting through the movie and before that making polite talk at the restaurant, thinking up topics, steering the two men away from childhood reminiscences, the women talking about their career dissatisfactions, each of the four in private scared of the millennial moment, trying to absorb its significance from the air, the tepid snow-free air. The view during the meal, up on Mt., one table back from the windows but nevertheless grand, displayed on reality's wide screen Brewer's grid stretching beneath them to the black swerve of the river and the few great holding tanks still not dismantled and the suburbs receding with an everdimmer radiance toward lights that show scattered on wooded indigo hills, the home lights of Diamond County.

Back in the Corolla, the movie uneasily digesting on top of the dinner with its wine and smoked oysters, Pru says, "Well, I didn't think that was so great. Could you believe that ending? I couldn't. Stars at night from a field, his grandmother's hands-that guy never acted like a man who had ever noticed his grandmother's hands or anything except his own selfish itches and threatened ego."