John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

"Dad?"

"Yes," he says, gathering up his disused voice, trying to imagine what you can say to a son whose wife you've boffed. "Nellie," he says, "how the hell is everybody?"

The distant voice is gingerly, shy, also not sure what is appropriate. "We're fine, pretty much."

"You're staying clean?" He didn't mean to take the offensive so sharply; the other voice, fragile in its distance, is stunned into silence for a moment.

"You mean the drugs. Sure. I don't even think about coke, except at NA meetings. Like they say, you give your life over to a higher power. You ought to try it, Dad."

"I'm working on it. Listen, no kidding, I am. I'm proud ofyou, Nelson. Keep taking it a day at a time, that's all anybody can do."

Again, the boy seems momentarily stuck. Maybe this came over as too preachy. Who is he to preach? Shit, he was just trying to share, like you're supposed to. Harry holds his tongue.

"There's been so much going on around here," Nelson tells him, "I really haven't thought about myself that much. A lot of my problem, I think, was idleness. Hanging around the lot all day waiting for some action, for the customers to show up, really preys on your selfconfidence. I mean, you have no control. It was degrading."

"I did it, for fifteen years I did it, every day."

"Yeah, but you have a different sort of temperament. You're more happy-go-lucky."

"Stupid, you mean."

"Hey Dad, I didn't call up to quarrel. This isn't exactly fun for me, I've been putting it off. But I got some things to say."

"O.K., say 'em." This isn't working out. He doesn't want to be this way, he is putting his anger at Janice onto the kid. Her silence has hurt him. He can't stop, adding, "You've sure taken your time saying anything, I've been down here all by myself for two weeks. I saw old Dr. Morris and he thinks I'm so far gone I should stop eating."

"Well," Nelson says back, "if you were so crazy to talk you could have come over that night instead of getting in the car and disappearing. We weren't going to kill you, we just wanted to talk it through, to understand what had happened, really, in terns of family dynamics. Pru's as good as admitted it was a way of getting in touch with her own father."

"With Blubberlips Lubell? Tell her thanks a lot." But he is not displeased to hear Nelson taking a firmer tone with him. You're not a man in this world until you've got on top of your father. In his own case, it was easier, the system had beaten Pop so far down already. "Coming over there that night felt like a set-up," he explains to Nelson.

"Well, Mom didn't think any of us should try to get in touch if that's the kind of cowardly trick you were going to pull. She wasn't too happy you telephoned Pru instead of her, either."

"I kept trying our number but she's never home."

"Well, whatever. She wanted me to let you know a couple things. One, she has an offer on the house, not as much as she'd hoped for, one eighty-five, but the market's pretty flat right now and she thinks we should take it. It would reduce the debt to Brewer Trust to the point where we could manage it."

"Let me get this straight. This is the Penn Park house you're talking about? The little gray stone house I've always loved?"

"What other house could you think? We can't tell the Mt. Judge house -where would we all live?"

"Tell me, Nelson,. I'm just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents' house in crack?"

The boy begins to sound more like himself. He whines, "I keep telling you, I was never that much into crack. The crack just came into it toward the end, it was so much more convenient than freebasing. I'm sorry, Jesus. I went to rehab, I took the vows, I'm trying to make amends like they say. Who are you to still be on my case?"

Who indeed? "O.K.," Rabbit says. "Sorry to mention it. What else did your mother tell you to tell me?"

"Hyundai is interested in the lot, the location is just what they want and don't have. They'd enlarge the building out toward the back like I always wanted to do." Goodbye, Paraguay, Rabbit thinks. "They'd keep the service people on, with a little retraining, and some of the sales force, Elvira might go over to Rudy's on 422. Hyundai's made her a counteroffer. But they don't want me. No way. Word gets around, I guess, among these Oriental companies."

"I guess," Harry says. Too much ninjó not enough giri. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry, Dad. It frees me up. I'm thinking of becoming a social worker."

"A social worker!"

"Sure, why not? Help other people instead of myself for a change. It's a two-year course at the Penn State extension, I could still get in for this October."

"Sure, why not, come to think of it," Rabbit agrees. He is beginning to dislike himself, for being so agreeable, for wanting to worm back into everybody's good graces.

"Me and the lawyers all think if it goes through we should lease to Hyundai rather than sell; if we sell the house in Penn Park we wouldn't need any more capital and should keep the lot as an investment, Mom says it's going to be worth millions by the year 2000."

"Wow," Harry says unenthusiastically. "You and your mom are quite a team. Anything else to hit me with?"

"Well, this maybe isn't any of your business, but Pru thought it was. We're trying to get pregnant."

"We?"

"We want to have a third child. All this has made us realize how much we've been neglecting our marriage and how much really we have invested in making it work. Not only for Judy and Roy, but for ourselves. We love each other, Dad."

Maybe this is supposed to make him feel jealous, and there is a pang, just under the right ventricle. But Rabbit's basic emotion is relief, at being excused from having to keep any kind of candle burning at Pru's shrine. Good luck to her, her and her sweet slum hunger. "Great," he tells the boy. He can't resist adding, "Though I'm not so sure social workers make enough to support three kids." And, getting mad, feeling squeezed, he goes on, "And tell your mother I'm not so sure I want to sign our house away. It's not like the lot, we're co-owners, and she needs my signature on the sales agreement. Ifwe split up, my signature ought to be worth quite a bit, tell her."

"Split up?" The boy sounds frightened. "Who's saying anything about splitting up?"

"Well," Harry says, "we seem split up now. At least I don't see her down here, unless she's under the bed. But don't you worry about it, Nelson. You've been through this before and I felt lousy about it. You get on with your own life. It sounds like you're doing fine. I'm proud of you. Or did I say that?"

"But everything kind of depends on selling the Penn Park house."

"Tell her I'll think about it. Tell Judy and Roy I'll give 'em a call one of these days."

"But, Dad -"

"Nelson, I got this low-cal frozen dinner in the oven and the buzzer went off five minutes ago. Tell your mother to call me sometime if she wants to talk about it. Must run. Terrific to talk to you. Really." He hangs up.

He has been buying low-cal frozen meals, raw vegetables like cabbage and carrots, and no more sodium-laden munchies. He has lost three pounds on the bathroom scale, if he weighs himself naked and right in the morning after taking a crap. At night, to keep himself away from the TV and the breadbox in the kitchen drawer and the beer in the refrigerator, he gets into bed and reads the book Janice gave him for last Christmas. Its author has joined Roy Orbison and Bart Giamatti in that beyond where some celebrities like Elvis and Marilyn expand like balloons and become gods but where most shrivel and shrink into yellowing obituaries not much bigger than Harry's will be in the Brewer Standard. In the News-Press he doesn't expect to get an inch. He read in her obituary that the author had been a niece of Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Harry remembers Morgenthau: the pointy-nosed guy who kept urging him and his schoolmates to buy war stamps with their pennies. It's a small world, and a long life in a way.