John Updike - Rabbit Is Rich

As they swing down into the steep part of Eisenhower, Nelson breaks the silence and asks, "Didn't you used to live up on one of these cross streets?"

"Yeah. Summer. For a couple of months, ages ago. Your mother and I were having some problems. What makes you ask?"

"I just remembered. Like when you feel you've been someplace before, only it must have been in a dream. When I'd miss you real bad Mom used to put me in the car and we'd drive over here and look at some house hoping you'd come out. It was in a row that all looked alike to me."

"And did I? Come out."

"Not that I can ever remember. But I don't remember much about it, just being there in the car, and Mom having brought some cookies along to keep me entertained, and her starting to cry."

"Jesus, I'm sorry. I never knew about this before, that she drove you over."

"Maybe it just happened once. But it feels like more than once. I remember her being so big."

Eisenhower flattens out and they pass without comment number 1204, where Janice years later had fled to Charlie Stavros, and where Nelson used to come on his bicycle and look up at the window. The kid had been desperate for a mini-bike at the time, and Mim had finally gotten him one, but he hadn't used it much, a sadness had attached to it, it was a piece ofjunk somewhere now. Funny about feelings, they seem to come and go in a flash yet outlast metal.

Down over the abandoned car yards they go, through the factory outlet district, and left on Third, then right on lower Weiser, past white windowless Schoenbaum Funeral Directors, and then over the bridge. The traffic is mostly composed of old ladies poking back from their restaurant lunch they owed themselves after church and of carloads of kids already beered-up heading for the ballgame in the stadium north of Brewer where the Blasts play. Left on Route 111. D I S C O. FUEL ECONOMY. They have forgotten to turn on the radio, so distracting has the tension between them been. Harry clears his throat and says, "So Melanie's getting set to go back to college. You must be too."

Silence. The subject of college is hot, too hot to touch. He should have been asking the kid what he's been learning at the lot. SPRINGER MOTORS. They pull in. Three weeks since Harry's seen it, and as with the house there's been a pollution. That Caprice he sometimes drove when the Corona was out of action isn't there, must have been sold. Six new Corollas are lined up next to the highway in their sweet and sour colors. Harry can never quite get over how small their wheels look, almost like tricycle wheels compared to the American cars he grew up with. Still, they're the guts of the line: buy cheap, most people are still poor, face it. You don't -get something for nothing but hope springs eternal. Like a little sea of melting candy his cars bake in the sun. Since it's Sunday Harry parks right next to the hedge that struggles up front around the entrance and that collects at its roots all the stray wrappers and napkins that blow across 111 from the Chuck Wagon. The display windows need washing again. A paper banner bearing the slogan of the new TV campaign, OH WHAT A FEELING, fills the top half of the lefthand pane. The showroom has two new Celicas, one black with a yellow side stripe and one blue with a white one. Under the OH WHAT A FEELING poster, featuring some laughing cunt in a bathing suit splashing around in some turquoise pool with an Alp or Rocky in the background, lurks something different, a little low roachlike car that is no Toyota. Harry has no key; Nelson lets them in the double glass door with his. The strange car is a TR-6 convertible, polished up for sale but unmistakably worn, the windshield dull with the multiplied scratches of great mileage, the fender showing that slight ripple where metal has been bruised and healed. "What the hell is this?" Harry asks, lifted to a great height by the comparative lowness of this intruding automobile.

"Dad, that's my idea we talked about, to sell convertibles. Honest, hardly anybody makes 'em anymore, even Jaguar has quit, they're bound to go up and up. We're asking fifty-five hundred and already a couple of guys have almost bought it."

"Why'd the owner get rid of it if it was worth so much? What'd you give him on the trade?"

"Well, it wasn't a trade-in exactly -"

"What was it, exactly?"

"We bought it -"

"You bought it!"

"A friend of Billy Fosnacht's has this sister who's marrying some guy who's moving to Alaska. It's in great shape, Manny went all over it."

"Manny and Charlie let you go ahead with this?"

"Why wouldn't they? Charlie's been telling me how he and old man Springer used to do all these crazy things, they'd give away stuffed animals and crates of oranges and have these auctions with girls in evening gowns where the highest bid got the car even if it was only five dollars – guys from car rodeos used to come -"

"That was the good old days. These are the bad new days. People come in here looking for Toyotas, they don't want some fucking British sports car -"

"But they will, once we have the name."

"We have a name. Springer Motors, Toyota and used. That's what we're known for and that's what people come in here for." He hears his voice straining, feels that good excited roll of anger building in him, like in a basketball game when you're down ten points and less than five minutes left on the clock and you've just taken one too many elbows in the ribs, and all the muscles go loose suddenly and something begins lifting you and you know nothing is impossible, with faith. He tries to hold himself back, this is a fragile kid and his son. Still, this has been his lot. "I don't remember discussing any convertibles with you."

"One night, Dad, we were sitting in the living room just the two of us, only you got sore about the Corona and changed the subject."

"And Charlie really gave you the green light?"

"Sure; he kind of shrugged. With you gone he had the new cars to manage, and this whole shipment came in early -"

"Yeah. I saw. That close to the road they'll pick up all the dust."

"- and anyway Charlie's not my boss. We're equals. I told him Mom-mom had thought it was a good idea."

"Oh. You talked to Ma Springer about this?"

"Well not exactly at the time, she was off with you and Mom, but I know she wants me to plug into the lot, so it'll be three generations and all that stuff."

Harry nods. Bessie will back the kid, they're both black-eyed Springers. "O.K., I guess no harm done. How much you pay for this crate?"

"He wanted forty-nine hundred but I jewed him down to forty-two."

"Jesus. That's way over book. Did you look at the book? Do you know what the book is?"

"Dad of course I know what the fucking book is, the point is convertibles don't go by the book, they're like antiques, there's only so many and there won't be any more. They're what they call collectibles."

"You paid forty-two for a '76 TR that cost six new. How many miles on it?"

"A girl drove it, they don't drive a car hard."

"Depends on the girl. Some of these tootsies I see on the road are really pushing. How many miles did you say?"

"Well, it's kind of hard to say; this guy who went to Alaska was trying to fix something under the dashboard and I guess he didn't know which -"

"Oh boy. O.K., let's see if we can unload it for wholesale and chalk it up to experience. I'll call Hornberger in town tomorrow, he still handles TR and MG, maybe he'll take it off our hands as a favor."

Harry realizes why Nelson's short haircut troubles him: it reminds him of how the boy looked back in grade school, before all that late Sixties business soured everything. He didn't know how short he was going to be then, and wanted to become a baseball pitcher like Jim Bunning, and wore a cap all summer that pressed his hair in even tighter to his skull, that bony freckled unsmiling face. Now his necktie and suit seem like that baseball cap to be the costume of doomed hopes. Nelson's eyes brighten as if at the approach of tears. "Take if off our hands for cost? Dad, I know we can sell it, and clear a thousand. And there's two more."