John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

"Oh. Thanks for explaining that. What a relief."

"As to Toyota, it's no big loss. The company's been stale for years, in my opinion. Look at their TV ads for the Lexus compared with Nissan's for the Infiniti: there's no comparison. Infiniti's are fantastic, there's no car in them, just birds and trees, they're selling a concept. Toyota's selling another load of tin. Don't be so fixated about Toyota. Springer Motors is still there," Nelson states. "The company still has assets. Mom and I are working it out, how to deploy them."

"Good luck," Harry says, rolling up his napkin and reinserting it in its ring, a child's ring of some clear substance filled with tiny needles of varied color. "In our thirty-three years of marriage your mother hasn't been able to deploy the ingredients of a decent meal on the table, but maybe she'll learn. Maybe Mr. Lister'll teach her how to deploy. Pru, that was a lovely meal. Excuse the conversation. You really have a way with fish. Loved those little spicy like peas on top." As he shakes out a Nitrostat from the small bottle he carries everywhere, he sees his hands trembling in a new way not just a tremor, but jumping, as if with thoughts all their own, that they aren't sharing with him.

"Capers," Pru says softly.

"Harry, Nelson is coming back to the lot tomorrow," Janice says.

"Great. That's another relief."

"I wanted to say, Dad, thanks for filling in. The summer stat sheets look pretty good, considering."

"Considering? We pulled off a miracle over there. That Elvira is dynamite. As I guess you know. This Jap that gave us the ax wants to hire her for Rudy over on 422. The inventory is being shifted to his lot." He turns to Janice and says, "I can't believe you're putting this loser back in charge."

Janice says, in the calm tone everybody at the table is acquiring, as if to humor a madman, "He's not a loser. He's your son and he's a new person. We can't deny him a chance."

In a voice more wifely than Janice's, Pru adds, "He really has changed, Harry."

"A day at a time," Nelson recites, "with the help of a higher power. Once you accept that help, Dad, it's amazing how nothing gets you down. All these years, I think I've been seriously depressed; everything seemed too much. Now I just put it all in God's hands, roll over, and go to sleep. You have to keep up the program, of course. There're local meetings, and I drive down to Philly once a week to see my therapist and check on some of my old kids. I love counselling." He turns to his mother and smiles. "I love it, and it loves me."

Harry asks him, "These druggy kids you deal with, they all black?"

"Not all. After a while you don't even see that any more. White or black, they have the same basic problem. Low selfesteem."

Such knowingness, such induced calm and steadiness and virtue: it makes Rabbit feel claustrophobic. He turns to his granddaughter, looking for an opening, a glint, a ray of undoctored light. He asks her, "What do you make of all this, Judy?"

The child's face wears a glaze of perfection – perfect straight teeth, perfectly spaced lashes, narrow gleams in her green eyes and along the strands of her hair. Nature is trying to come up with another winner. "I like having Daddy back," she says, "and not so crazy. He's more responsible." Again, he feels that words are being recited, learned at a rehearsal he wasn't invited to attend. But how can he wish anything for this child but the father she needs?

Out on the curb, he asks Janice to drive the Celica, though it means adjusting the seat and the mirrors. Heading back around the mountain, he asks her, "You really don't want me back at the lot?" He looks down at his hands. Their jumping has subsided but is still fascinating.

"I think for now, Harry. Let's give Nelson the space. He's trying so hard."

"He's full of AA bullshit."

"It's not bullshit if you need it to live a normal life."

"He doesn't look like himself."

"He will as you get used to him."

"He reminds me of your mother. She was always laying down the law."

"Everybody knows he looks just like you. Only not as tall, and he has my eyes."

The park, its shadowy walks, its decrepit tennis courts, its memorial tank that will never fire another shot. You can't see these things so clearly when you're driving. They go by like museum exhibits whose labels have all peeled off. He tries to climb out of his trapped and angry mood. "Sorry if I sounded ugly at dinner, in front of the grandchildren."

"We were prepared for much worse," she says serenely.

"I didn't mean to bring up the money or any of that stuff at all. But somebody has to. You're in real trouble."

"I know," Janice says, letting the streetlights of upper Weiser wash over her -her stubborn blunt-nosed profile, her little hands tight on the steering wheel, the diamond-and-sapphire ring she inherited from her mother. "But you have to have faith. You've taught me that."

"I have?" He is pleasantly surprised, to think that in thirty-three years he has taught her anything. "Faith in what?"

"In us. In life," she says. "Another reason I think you should stay away from the lot now, you've been looking tired. Have you been losing weight?"

"A couple pounds. Isn't that good? Isn't that what the hell I'm supposed to be doing?"

"It depends on how you do it," Janice says, so annoyingly full of new information, new presumption. She reaches over and gives his inner upper thigh, right where they inserted the catheter and he could have bled to death, a squeeze. "We'll be fine," she lies.

Now August, muggy and oppressive in its middle weeks, is bringing summer to a sparkling distillation, a final clarity. The fairways at the Flying Eagle, usually burnt-out and as hard as the cartpaths this time of year, with all the rain they've had are still green, but for the rough of reddish-brown buckgrass, and an occasional spindly maple sapling beginning to show yellow. It's the young trees that turn first – more tender, more attuned. More fearful.

Ronnie Harrison still swings like a blacksmith: short backswing, ugly truncated follow-through, sometimes a grunt in the middle. No longer needed at the lot, needing a partner if he was going to take up golf again, Rabbit remembered Thelma's saying how they had had to resign from the club because of her medical bills. Over the phone, Ronnie had seemed surprised – Harry had surprised himself, dialling the familiar digits trained into his fingers by the dead affair – but had accepted, surprisingly. They were making peace, perhaps, over Thelma's body. Or reviving a friendship – not a friendship, an involvement – that had existed since they were little boys in knickers and hightop sneakers scampering through the pebbly alleys of Mt. Judge. When Harry thinks back through all those years, to Ronnie's pugnacious thick-upped dulleyed face as it loomed on the elementary-school playground, to Ronnie crowingly playing with his big pale cucumber of a prick (circumcised, and sort of flat on its upper side) in the locker room, and then to Ronnie on the rise and on the make in his bachelor years around Brewer, one of the guys it turned out who had gone with Ruth before Rabbit did, Ronnie in those years full of smartass talk and dirty stories, a slimy operator, and then to Ronnie married to Thelma and working for Schuylkill Mutual, a kind of a sad sack really, plugging along doggedly, delivering his pitch, talking about "your loved ones" and when you're "out of the picture," slowly becoming the wanly smiling bald man in the photo on Thelma's dresser whom Harry could feel looking up his ass, so once to Thelma's amusement he got out of bed and put the photo flat on the bureau top, so afterwards she always turned it away before he arrived of an afternoon, and then to Ronnie as a widower, with the face of a bleached prune, pulled-looking wrinkles down from his eyes, an old guy's thin skin showing pink at the cheekbones, Harry feels that Ronnie has always been with him, a presence he couldn't avoid, an aspect of himself he didn't want to face but now does. That clublike cock, those slimy jokes, the blue eyes looking up his ass, what the hell, we're all just human, bodies with brains at one end and the rest just plumbing.