John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

By the time Rabbit opens the door, the first fight of the day has begun in the kitchen. Precious little Judy is unhappy; salt tears redden the rims of her lids though she is trying, shaky-voiced, not to cry. "But half the kids in my school have been. Some of them have even been twice, and they don't even have grandparents living in Florida!" She can't reach Disney World.

Janice is explaining, "It's really a whole separate trip, sweetheart. You should fly to Orlando if you want to go. To go from here -"

"'d be like driving to Pittsburgh," Harry finishes for her.

"Daddy promised!" the child protests, with such passion that her four-year-old brother, holding a spoon suspended in his fist above a bowl of Total he is mushing without eating, sobs in sympathy. Two drops of milk fall from his slack lower lip.

"Dull driving, too," Harry continues. "Stoplights all down Route 27. We come that way sometimes, driving down."

Pru says, "Daddy didn't mean this time, he meant some other time when we have more days."

"He said this time," the child insists. "He's always breaking promises."

"Daddy's very busy earning money so you can have all the things you want," Pru tells her, taking the prim tone of one woman losing patience with another. She too is wearing a bathrobe, a little quilted shorty patterned with violet morning glories and their vines. Her freckled thighs have that broad bland smoothness of car fenders. Her feet are long and bony, pink in their toe joints and papery-white on top, in cork-soled lipstickred clogs. Her toenail polish is chipped, and Rabbit finds that pretty sexy too.

"Oh, yeahhh," the child replies, with a furious sarcastic emphasis Harry doesn't understand. Family life, life with children, is something out of his past, that he has not been sorry to leave behind; it was for him like a bush in some neglected corner of the back yard that gets overgrown, a lilac bush or privet some bindweed has invaded from underneath with leaves so similar and tendrils so tightly entwining it gives the gardener a headache in the sun to try to separate bad growth from good. Anyway he basically had but the one child, Nelson, one lousy child, though he was reading somewhere the other day that a human male produces enough sperm to populate not just the planet Earth but Mars and Venus as well, if they could support life. It's a depressing thought, too planetary, like that unreachable round object in his dream, that the whole point of his earthly existence has been to produce little Nellie Angstrom, so he in turn could produce Judy and Roy, and so on until the sun burns out.

Now Nelson is stirred up and sucked into the kitchen by the fuss. He must have heard himself being talked about, and comes in from the guest bedroom, barechested and unshaven in rumpled smoky-blue pajama bottoms that look expensive. Unease infiltrates Harry's abdomen with this observation of Nelson's expensive tastes, something he is trying to remember about numbers, something he can't reach. Janice said the boy looked exhausted and he does look thin, with faint shadows flickering between his ribs. There is a touch of aggression about the bare chest, something territorial, taken with Pru's shorty robe. The pajama game. Dons Day and, who was it, John Raitt? Despite the quality of his pajamas, Nelson looks haggard and scruffy and mean, with the unshaven whiskers and that tufty little mustache like what dead Fred Springer used to wear and his thinning hair standing up in damp spikes. Rabbit remembers how deeply Nelson used to sleep as a child, how hot and moist his skull on the pillow would feel. "What's this about promises?" the boy asks angrily, staring at a space between Judy and Pru. "I never promised to go up to Orlando this trip."

"Daddy, there's nothing to do in this dumb part of Florida. I hated that circus museum last year, and then on the way back the traffic was so miserable Roy threw up in the Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot!"

"Route 41 does a job on you," Harry admits.

"There's tons to do," Nelson says. "Go swim in the pool. Go play shuffleboard." He runs dry almost immediately and looks in panic at his mother.

Janice says to Judy, "The Village has tennis courts where you and I can go and hit balls."

"Roy'll have to come and he always spoils it," the little girl complains, the vision of it freshening her tears again.

"- and there's the beach – " Janice goes on.

Judy replies, just making objections now, "Our teacher says the sun gives you skin damage and the earlier you get it the more cancer you'll get later on."

"Don't be such a fucking smart-ass," Nelson says to her. "Your grandmother's trying to be nice."

His remark makes the child's tears spill, out through the curved lashes onto her cheeks like the silvery jerking tracks rain makes on windowpanes. "I wasn't being -" she tries to get out.

At her age, this girl should be happier than she is, Harry thinks. "Sure you were," he tells her. "And why not? It's boring, going somewhere with family, away from your friends. We all remember what it's like, we used to drag your daddy to the Jersey Shore, and then make him go up to the Poconos and have hay-fever up in those Godawful dark pines. Torture! The things we do to each other in the name of fun! O.K. Here's my plan. Anybody want to hear my plan?"

The little girl nods. The others, even Roy who's been carefully shaping his Total mush into a kind of pyramid with the back of his spoon, watch him as if he is a conjurer. It's not so hard, to get back into the swing of family life. You just have to come out of yourself a little. It's like basketball was, those first two or three minutes, when amid the jamming and yelling and body heat and crowd noise you realized that you were going to have to do it yourself, nobody was going to do it for you. "Today I got to play golf," he begins.

"Great," Nelson says. "That's a big help. You're not going to make Judy caddy, if that's your plan. You'll bend her spine out of shape."

"Nellie, you're getting paranoid," Harry tells him. The boy's been trying ever since that business with Jill twenty years ago to protect women against his father. His son is the only person in the world who sees him as dangerous. Harry feels the day's first twinge in the chest, a little playful burning like a child flirting with a lit match. "That wasn't my plan, no, but why not sometime? She could carry my lightweight bag, I'd take out two of the woods and one of the wedges and she and I could walk a couple holes some late afternoon when the tee times are over. I could show her the swing. But in the foursome, actually, we ride carts. I'd rather we walked, for the exercise, but the other bozos insist. Actually, they're great guys, they all have grandchildren, they'd love Judy. She could ride in my place." He can picture it, her sitting there like a slim little princess, Bernie Drechsel with his cigar in his mouth at the wheel of the electric cart.

He is losing his conjurer's audience, thinking out loud this way. Roy drops his spoon and Pru squats down to pick it up, her shorty robe flaring out over one thigh. A lacy peep of jet-black bikini underpants. A slightly shiny vaccination oval high up. Nelson groans. "Out with it, Dad. I got to go to the bathroom." He blows his nose on a paper towel. Why is his nose always running? Harry has read somewhere, maybe People on the death of Rock Hudson, that that's one of the first signs of AIDS.

Harry says, "No more circus museum. Actually, they've closed it. For renovations." He had noticed a story about it in the Sarasota paper a week or so ago, headlined Circus Redux. He hates that word, you see it everywhere, and he doesn't know how to pronounce it. Like arbitrageur and perestroika. "My plan was this. Today, I got to play golf but tonight there's Bingo in the dining hall and I thought the kids or at least Judy would enjoy that, and we could all use a real meal for a change. Tomorrow, we could either go to this Lionel Train and Seashell Museum that Joe Gold says is just terrific, or in the other direction, south, there's the Edison house. I've always been kind of curious about it but it may be a little advanced for the kids, I don't know. Maybe the invention of the telephone and the phonograph doesn't seem too exciting to kids raised on all this computerized crap they have now."