John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

"I want to see you in four weeks. Here are slips for the blood tests and EKG, and prescriptions for a diuretic and a relaxant for you at night. Don't forget the diet lists. Walk. Not violently, but vigorously, two or three miles a day."

"O.K.," Rabbit says, beginning to rise from his chair, feeling as light as a boy called into the principal's office and dismissed with a light reprimand.

But Dr. Morris fixes him with those sucked-out old blue eyes and says, "Do you have any sort of a job? According to my last information here, you were in charge of a car agency."

"That's gone. My son's taken over and my wife wants me to stay out of the kid's way. The agency was founded by her father. They'll probably wind up having to sell it off."

"Any hobbies?"

"Well, I read a lot of history. I'm a kind of a buff, you could say."

"You need more than that. A man needs an occupation. He needs something to do. The best thing for a body is a healthy interest in life. Get interested in something outside yourself, and your heart will stop talking to you."

The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way. He resumes rising from the chair and takes Dr. Morris' many slips of paper out into the towering heat. The few other people out on the parking lot seem tinted smoke rising from their shadows, barely cxisting. The radio in the Celica is full of voices yammering about Deion Sanders, about Koch losing the New York Democratic primary to a black, about the SAT scores dropping in Lee County, about President Bush's televised appeal to America's schoolchildren yesterday. "The man's not doing anything!" one caller howls.

Well, Rabbit thinks, doing nothing works for Bush, why not for him? On the car seat next to him Dr. Morris' prescriptions and medical slips and Xeroxed diet sheets lift and scatter in the breeze from the car air-conditioning. On another station he hears that the Phillies beat the Mets last night, two to one. Dickie Thon homered with one out in the ninth, dropping the pre-season pennant favorites five and a half games behind the once-lowly Chicago Cubs. Harry tries to care but has trouble. Ever since Schmidt retired. Get interested is the advice, but in truth you are interested in less and less. It's Nature's way.

But he does begin to walk. He even drives to the Palmetto Palm Mall and buys a pair of walking Nikes, with a bubble of special hi-tech air to cushion each heel. He sets out between nine and ten in the morning, after eating breakfast and digesting the News-Press, and then again between four and five, returning to a nap and then dinner and then television and a page or two of his book and a sound sleep, thanks to the walking. He explores Deleon. First, he walks the curving streets of low stucco houses within a mile of Valhalla Village, with unfenced front yards of tallish tough grass half-hiding bits of dried palm frond, a Florida texture in that, a cozy sere Florida scent. Encountering a UPS man delivering or a barking small dog – a flat-faced Pekinese with its silky long hair done up in ribbons – is like finding life on Mars. Then, growing ever fonder of his Nikes (that bubble in the heel, he thought at first it was just a gimmick but maybe it does add bounce), he makes his way to the downtown and the river, where the town first began, as a fort in the Seminole wars and a shipping point for cattle and cotton.

He discovers, some blocks back from the beachfront and the green glass hotels, old neighborhoods where shadowy big spicy gentle trees, live oaks and gums and an occasional banyan widening out on its crutches, overhang wooden houses once painted white but flaking down to gray bareness, with louvered windows and roofs of corrugated tin. Music rises from within these houses, scratchy radio music, and voices raised in argument or jabbery jubilation, bright fragments of overheard life. The sidewalks are unpaved, small paths such as cats make have been worn diagonally between the trees, in and out of private property, the parched grass growing in patches, packed dirt littered with pods and nuts. It reminds Harry of those neighborhoods he blundered into trying to get out of Savannah, but also of the town of his childhood, Mt. Judge in the days of Depression and distant war, when people still sat on their front porches, and there were vacant lots and oddshaped cornfields, and men back from work in the factories would water their lawns in the evenings, and people not long off the farm kept chickens in back-yard pens, and peddled the eggs for odd pennies. Chickens clucking and pecking and suddenly squawking: he hasn't heard that sound for forty years, and hasn't until now realized what he's been missing. For chicken coops tucked here and there dot this sleepy neighborhood he has discovered.

In the daytime here, under the heavy late-summer sun, there are few people moving, just women getting in and out of cars with pre-school children. The slams of their car doors carry a long way down the dusty straight streets, under the live oaks. At some corners there are grocery stores that also sell beer and wine in the permissive Southern way, and pastel-painted bars with the door open on a dark interior, and video rental places with horror and kung-fu tapes displayed in the window, the boxes' colors being bleached by the sun. One day he passes an old-fashioned variety store, in a clapboarded one-story building, displaying all sorts of innocent things – erector sets, model airplane kits, Chinese-checker boards and marbles – that he hadn't known were still being sold. He almost goes in but doesn't dare. He is too white.

Toward late afternoon, when he takes his second walk of the day, the neighborhood begins to breathe, a quickness takes hold, men and boys return to it, and Rabbit walks more briskly, proclaiming with his stride that he is out for the exercise, just passing through, not spying. These blocks are black, and there are miles of them, a vast stagnant economic marsh left over from Deleon's Southern past, supplying the hotels and condos with labor, with waiters and security guards and chambermaids. To Harry, whose Deleon has been a glitzy community of elderly refugees, these blocks feel like a vast secret, and as the shadows lengthen under the trees, and the chickens cease their day-long clucking, his senses widen to grasp the secret better, as when in whispering knickers he would move through Mt. Judge unseen, no taller than a privet hedge, trying to grasp the unspeakable adult meaning of the lit windows, of the kitchen noises filtering across the yards mysterious and damp as jungles. An unseen child would cry, a dog would bark, and he would tingle with the excitement of simply being himself, at this point of time and space, with worlds to know and forever to live, Harold C. Angstrom, called Hassy in those lost days never to be relived. He prolongs his walks, feeling stronger, more comfortable in this strange city where he is at last beginning to exist as more than a visitor; but as darkness approaches, and the music from the glowing slatted windows intensifies, he begins to feel conspicuous, his whiteness begins to glimmer, and he heads back to the car, which he has taken to parking in a lot or at a meter downtown, as base for his widening explorations.

Coming back one day around six-thirty, just in time for a shower and a look at the news while his TV dinner heats in the oven, he is startled by the telephone's ringing. He has ceased to listen for it as intensely as in that first lonely week. When it does ring, it has been one of those recordings ("Hello there, this is Sandra") selling health insurance or a no-frills burial plan or reduced-fee investment services, going through all the numbers by computer, you wonder how it pays, Harry always hangs up and can't imagine who would listen and sign up for this stuff. But this time the caller is Nelson, his son.