John Updike - Rabbit Remembered

As she hopes, he comes home before Nelson, so they can develop a position, which Nelson is bound to oppose. "I won three bucks and only hit two duck hooks off the tee. On the seventeenth I sank a putt you wouldn't believe," he says, having come in through the back door to put his golf clubs and clothes in the tidy golf closet he made with all that plaster dust. The space smells, now, of him, of his sweat on the club handles, in the spikeless shoes, even the sour inside of the hats he wears. Each hat hangs on its own hook, and there is one where the glove hangs like a bat drying out, upside down. She likes Ronnie's neatness, but on the other hand feels scolded by it, the same as with her mother. He moves with a certain sluggish pained quality, limping back into the kitchen. "How was bridge?" he asks politely. Maybe there is usually in second marriages a little stiffness, a certain considerate wariness.

"I kept wondering why I was playing," Janice tells him. "I did something that irritated Doris terribly, I forget exactly what. She's getting old and crabby. Deet spoils her."

"What's for dinner? Did you remember to defrost anything?" Ronnie has learned what questions to ask. Thelma was a clever cook and a zealous housekeeper, along with all else she did, teaching school and raising three boys. Janice at first had tried to give Ronnie real meals, but something always dried out or was underdone, and her attempts at seasoning, though she thought she followed the recipe exactly, miscarried into a funny suspicious taste. With the yuppifying of greater Brewer, all these vague industries coming in that didn't make anything you could handle or drive or put in a box really-"the information industry," they said-there were more and more pleasant and not very expensive restaurants to eat out at; you didn't have to go downtown any more as Daddy and Mother used to for a little celebration, usually in one of the two big hotels downtown, the Conrad Weiser or the Thad Stevens. And otherwise the supermarkets sold wonderful frozen meals and sealed salads.

"Well, I forgot, if truth be known," Janice confesses. "I just got back five minutes ago. I've been doing so much else, and this morning, what a shock, Ronnie, this girl shows up at the door-"

Ronnie is not listening, he is opening the refrigerator door and peering in. "There's still some chicken salad from two nights ago, I don't suppose it's turned yet. And those Japanese noodles Nelson likes. Oh, yeah, and way back behind the wilted lettuce a container of three-bean salad we never got to-should it have that cloudy look? I guess we can make do. They say eating less is better for you." He moves to the counter to turn on the Sony. "Lemme just catch the news, for the weather. The radio wants rain tomorrow, I'll believe it when I see it. La Nina has screwed up the jet stream so it thinks we're the Sahara."

"Ronnie, please don't turn on TV. Pay attention, this is serious. This girl-'woman' I should say, Nelson's age more or less-rang the doorbell, which still needs fixing by the way, and said she was Harry's daughter. Her mother died this summer and told her before she died. Ruth sicced her on us."

Now she does have Ronnie's attention. He has lost thirty pounds since Janice first knew him, and he has that deflated, slumped look of people you remember as fatter. His hair, which was kinky and brass-colored, is almost all gone, even over his ears, so they stick out as rubbery red flesh. His pale eyelashes are almost invisible now, which makes his eyelids look pink and rubbed. Like Doris Kaufmann's, his face has become pruny, but the wrinkles aren't as deep as in her leathery skin. Ronnie, though Harry always spoke of him as a crude plug-ugly, in fact has thin babyish skin that makes physical contact with him a little silky surprise, which is something Harry couldn't have known. Now the man fastens on what to Janice had been the least interesting of the morning's revelations. "So Ruth Leonard is dead," he says.

Janice remembers that Ronnie knew this Ruth back in the period when Harry did, that he had fucked her in fact, which Harry always resented, which seemed strange to Janice since in this period a lot of people evidently had. Janice had never met Ruth but there had been this slutty kind of girl in high school, their names got written on lavatory Walls, SUSIE PETROCELLI SUCKED MY BOYFRIEND'S COCK, and CAROLE STICHTER IS A MORON WHORE, from bad families on the lower side of town usually; no special looks, overweight and quiet in class, they had existed even under Eisenhower when everybody was supposed to be so pure. She cannot believe a forty-year-old fuck could mean much to Ronnie but from the stunned, slumped way he stands there in his sweated-up knit polo shirt and plaid golf pants it does. "On that farm of hers," he says. "The drought killed her." He is trying to joke away that trance men get into trying to remember what it was like entering a certain woman's space. Now that space is nowhere on earth and he will never get back into it.

"Wake up, honey. According to the girl she hadn't lived on the farm for years, she lived in Brewer with this daughter and worked for some shady investments outfit in that glass building across from where Kroll's used to be. Anyway, why do you care?"

"I don't, much. It was Rabbit that got stuck on her. To me she was just a hooer. What proof did this girl have that she was his kid?"

"None-just some confusing facts only she would know, about how her mother lied to her about when she and this man Byer were married so it would seem he was the father instead of somebody earlier. There's more of that went on than we think, back before abortions were easy."

"They're too easy, if you ask me. These black and Hispanic kids have one like an annual check-up. Nobody cares."

"Ronnie, that's not the point! We need to discuss this girl before Nelson comes home!"

Harry always thought Ronnie was terribly obtuse-called him an enforcer, a deliberate-foul artist-but Janice doesn't find him obtuse so much as on occasion having a quality of being in the way, of not letting anything just glide past if he doesn't absolutely agree with every detail. He has sat in too many living rooms refusing to leave until the man of the house sees the necessity of buying insurance, it's that blunt thereness he has. Harry was fascinated by Ronnie's big prick and it is big, flat along the top as if you could rest a wineglass on it at half-mast, but what struck Janice the first time was the relatively little difference between it erect and not. Whereas with Harry it was like night and day, between being curled asleep like a baby and being wide-eyed and six feet tall and up and at it.

"O.K.," Ronnie says in his plodding, relentless voice, "the point is

Ruth did a lot of screwing back then-who's to say it was Hotshot that knocked her up? Did the girl look like him?"

She tries to be honest. "It's awful to say this, but I've forgotten exactly what Harry looked like. There was something about her, a kind of, I don't know, pale glow, and a way she couldn't quite sit still, that rang a bell, I thought."

"You thought. You'll have to do better than that before you owe her anything."

"She didn't say I did owe her anything. What she did say was her mother told her to come see us because she'd be alone in the world."

"We're all alone in the world, it turns out," he says. Janice doesn't know quite what he means but it hurts. Harry may have felt it but he would never have said that to her. She wonders sometimes if Ronnie married her just to score somehow on Harry. His lashless, pink-lidded eyes shift in embarrassment past her face, which she knows looks shocked, toward the clock on the microwave, worried about dinner or Nelson arriving home. He tells her, "There'll be money in it at the end, believe me, if you have anything more to do with this bimbo."