John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

The children eat with them, Judy and Harry on one side of the Springers' mahogany dining-room table, set as if for a holiday, Janice and Roy on the other, Pru and Nelson at the heads. Nelson offers grace; he makes them all hold hands and shut their eyes and after they're ready to scream with embarrassment pronounces the words, "Peace. Health. Sanity. Love."

"Amen," says Pru, sounding scared.

Judy can't stop staring up at Harry, to see what he makes of it. "Nice," he tells his son. "That something you learned at the detox place?"

"Not detox, Dad, rehab."

"Whatever it was, it was full of religion?"

"You got to admit you're powerless and dependent on a higher power, that's the first principle of AA and NA."

"As I remember it, you didn't use to go much for any higherpower stuff."

"I didn't, and still don't, in the form that orthodox religion presents it in. All you have to believe in is a power greater than ourselves – God as we understand Him."

Everything sounds so definite and pat, Harry has to fight the temptation to argue. "No, great," he says. "Anything that gets you through the night, as Sinatra says." Mim had quoted that to him once. In this Springer house tonight Harry feels a huge and regretful distance from Mim and Mom and Pop and all that sunken God-fearing Jackson Road Thirties-Forties world.

"You used to believe a lot of that stuff," Nelson tells him.

"I did. I do," Rabbit says, annoying the kid, he knows, with his amiability. But he has to add, "Hallelujah. When they stuck that catheter into my heart, I saw the light."

Nelson announces, "They tell you at the center that there'll be people who mock you for going straight, but they don't say one of them will be your own father."

"I'm not mocking anything. Jesus. Have all the peace and love and sanity you want. I'm all for it. We're all all for it. Right, Roy?"

The little boy stares angrily at being suddenly singled out. His loose wet lower lip begins to tremble; he turns his face toward his mother's side. Pru tells Harry, in a soft directed voice in which he does sense a certain mist of acknowledgment, of rain splashing at a screened window, "Roy's been very upset, readjusting to Nelson's coming back."

"I know how he feels," Harry says. "We'd all gotten used to his not being around."

Nelson looks toward Janice in protest and appeal and she says, "Nelson, tell us about the counselling work you did," in the fake tone of one who has already heard about it.

As Nelson speaks, he sits with a curious tranquillized stillness; Harry is used to the kid, from little on up, being full of nervous elusive twitches, that yet had something friendly and hopeful about them. "Mostly," he says, "you just listen, and let them work it out through their own verbalization. You don't have to say much, just show you're willing to wait, and listen. The most hardened street kids eventually open up. Once in a while you have to remind them you've been there yourself, so their war stones don't impress you. A lot have been dealers, and when they start bragging how much money they made all you have to do is ask, `Where is it now?' They don't have it," Nelson tells the listening table, his own staring children. "They blew it."

"Speaking of blowing it -" Harry begins.

Nelson overrides him with his steady-voiced sermon. "You try to get them to see themselves that they are addicts, that they weren't outsmarting anybody. The realization has to come from them, from within, it's not something they can accept imposed on them by you. Your job is to listen; it's your silence, mostly, that leads them past their own internal traps. You start talking, they start resisting. It takes patience, and faith. Faith that the process will work. And it does. It invariably does. It's thrilling to see it happen, again and again. People want to be helped. They know things are wrong."

Harry still wants to speak but Janice intercedes by telling him, loudly for their audience at the table, "One of Nelson's ideas about the lot is to make it a treatment center. Brewer doesn't have anything like the facilities it needs to cope with the problem. The drug problem."

"That's the absolutely dumbest idea I've ever heard," Harry says promptly. "Where's the money in it? You're dealing with people who have no money, they've blown it all for drugs."

Nelson is goaded into sounding a bit more like his old self. He whines, "There's grant money, Dad. Federal money. State. Even do-nothing Bush admits we got to do something."

"You've got twenty employees you've fucked up over there at the lot, and most of'em have families. What happens to the mechanics in Service? What about your sales reps – poor little Elvira?"

"They can get other jobs. It's not the end of the world. People don't stick with jobs the way your scared generation did."

"Yeah, scared – with your generation on the loose we got reason to be scared. How would you ever turn that cement-block shed over there into a hospital?"

"It wouldn't be a hospital -"

"You're already one hundred fifty thousand in the hole to Toyota Inc. and two weeks to pay it off in. Not to mention the seventy-five grand you owe Brewer Trust."

"Those purchases in Slims name, the cars never left the lot, so there's really no -"

"Not to mention the used you sold for cash you put in your own pocket."

"Harry," Janice says, gesturing toward their audience of listening children. "This isn't the place."

"There is no place where I can get a handle on what this lousy kid has done! Over two hundred thousand fucking shekels – where's it going to come from?" Sparks of pain flicker beneath the muscles of his chest, he feels a dizziness in which the faces at the table float as in a sickening soup. Bad sensations have been worsening lately; it's been over three months since that angioplasty opened his LAD. Dr. Breit warned that restenosis often sets in after three months.

Janice is saying, "But he's learned so much, Harry. He's so much wiser. It's as if we sent him to graduate school with the money."

"School, all this school! What's so great about school all of a sudden? School's just another rip-off. All it teaches you is how to rip off dopes that haven't been to school yet!"

"I don't want to go back to school," Judy pipes up. "Everybody there is stuck-up. Everybody says the fourth grade is hard."

"I don't mean your school, honey." Rabbit can hardly breathe; his chest feels full of bits of Styrofoam that won't dissolve. He must get himself unaggravated.

From the head of the table Nelson radiates calm and solidity. "Dad, I was an addict. I admit it," he says. "I was doing crack, and a run of that gets to be expensive. You're afraid to crash, and need a fresh hit every twenty minutes. If you go all night, you can run through thousands. But that money I stole didn't all go to my habit. Lyle needed big money for some experimental stuff the FDA jerks are sitting on and has to be smuggled in from Europe and Mexico."

"Lyle," Harry says with satisfaction. "How is the old computer whiz?"

"He seems to be holding his own for the time being."

"He'll outlive me," Harry says, as a joke, but the real possibility of it stabs him like an icicle. "So Springer Motors," he goes on, trying to get a handle on it, "went up in coke and pills for a queer." How queer, he wonders, staring at his middle-aged, fattened-up, rehabilitated son, is the kid? Pru's answer to that had never quite satisfied him. If Nelson wasn't queer, how come she let Harry ball her? A lot of pent-up hunger there, her coming twice like that.

Nelson tells him, in that aggravating tranquillized nothingcan-touch-me tone, "You get too excited, Dad, about what really isn't, in this day and age, an awful lot of money. You have this Depression thing about the dollar. There's nothing holy about the dollar, it's just a unit of measurement."