John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

Though Judy swears Roy has been to the movies before, he doesn't seem to understand you can't just talk up as in your own living room. He keeps asking why, with a plaintive inflection: "Why she take off her clothes?" "Why she so mad at that man?" Harry likes it, in the movie, when you see that Melanie Griffith in her whorehouse underwear has a bit of honest fat to her, not like most of these Hollywood anorectics, and when she bursts in upon her boyfriend with the totally naked girl, like herself supposed to be Italian but not like her aspiring to be a Wall Street wheeler-dealer, riding the guy in the astride position, her long bare side sleek as the skin of a top shell and her dark-nippled boobs right on screen for a good five seconds. But the plot, and the farce of the hero and heroine worming their way into the upper-crust wedding, he feels he saw some forty years ago with Cary Grant or Gary Cooper and Irene Dunne or jean Arthur. When Roy loudly asks, "Why don't we go now?" he is willing to go out into the lobby with him, so Janice and Judy can see the picture to the end in peace.

He and Roy split a box of popcorn and try a video game called Annihilation. Though he always thought of himself as pretty good on eye-hand coordination, Harry can't hit a single space monster as it twitches and wiggles past in computer graphics. Roy, so small he has to be held up to the control panel until his twitching, wiggling weight gives Harry a pain across his shoulders, isn't any better. "Well, Roy," he sums up, when he gets his breath back, "if it was all up to us, the world would be taken over by space monsters." The boy, more accustomed to his grandfather now, stands close, and his breath smells buttery from the popcorn, making Harry slightly queasy: this thin unconscious stream of childish breath reminds him of the overhead vent in an airplane.

When the crowd comes out of Cinema 3, Janice announces, "I think I need a job. Wouldn't you like me better, Harry, if I was a working girl?"

"Which state would you work in?"

"Pennsylvania, obviously. Florida is for vacations."

He doesn't like the idea. It has something fishy and uncomfortable about it, like that batch of November stats from Springer Motors. "What work would you do?"

"I don't know. Not work at the lot, Nelson hates us to get in his way. Sell something, maybe. My father was one and my son is one so why shouldn't I be one? A salesperson."

Rabbit doesn't know what to answer. After all these years of his grudgingly sticking with her, he can't imagine him begging her to stick with him, though this is his impulse. He changes conversational partners. "Judy. How did the movie come out?"

"Good. The man from the wedding believed her story and she got an office of her own with a window and her nasty boss broke her leg and lost the man they both liked."

"Poor Sigourney," Harry says. "She should have stuck with the gorillas." He stands way above his own little herd in the theater lobby, where the ushers move back and forth with green garbage bags and red velvet ropes, getting ready for the five-o'clock shows. "So, guys. What shall we do next? How about miniature golf? How about driving up to St. Petersburg, over this fantastic long bridge they have?"

Roy's lower lip starts to tremble, and he has such trouble getting his words out that Judy translates for him. "He says he wants to go home."

"Who doesn't?" Janice concurs. "Grandpa was just teasing. Haven't you learned that about your grandfather yet, Roy? He's a terrible tease."

Is he? Harry has never thought of himself that way. He sometimes says a thing to try it out, like a head fake, to open up a little space.

Judy smiles knowingly. "He pretends to be mean," she says.

"Grrr," Grandpa says.

Forty minutes of southwestern Florida rush-hour traffic bring them to the Deleon exit and Pindo Palm Boulevard and the nicely guarded entrance of Valhalla Village. Up in 413, Pru and Nelson look bathed and refreshed and act as if nothing has ever happened. They listen to the travellers' tales, foremost the incredible story of how Grandpa ate the grungy birdfood, and Pru sets about making dinner, telling Janice to take the weight off her legs, and Nelson settles on the sofa with a child on each knee in front of the local evening news, giving Harry a pang of jealousy and a sensation of injustice. The surly kid spends the whole day balling this big redhead and then is treated like a hero by these two brats Harry went and knocked himself out for.

Rabbit sits in the chair across the glass table from the sofa and delicately needles his son. ` Ja catch up finally on your sleep?" he asks.

Nelson gets the dig and looks over at him with his dark swarmy eyes a little flat across the top, like a cross cat's. "I went into a place to get a bite to eat last night and stayed at the bar too long," he tells his father.

"Ya do that often?"

With a roll of his eyeballs Nelson indicates the children's heads right under his face, watching television but perhaps also listening. Little pitchers. "Naa," he allows. "Just when I'm tense it helps to take off once in a while. Pru understands. Nothing happens."

Rabbit holds up a generous hand. "None of my business, right? You're twenty-one plus. It's just you could have called. I mean, a considerate person would have called. None of us could enjoy dinner, not knowing what had happened to you. We could hardly eat."

"I tried to call, Dad, but I don't have your number down here memorized and the place I was in some sleazeball had stolen the phone book."

"That's your story this evening? This morning your mother told me you did call here but we were down to dinner."

"That, too. I tried once from a phone along the highway and then in this place there was no phone book."

"Where was the place? Think I'd know it?"

"No idea where," Nelson says, and smiles into the television flicker. "I get lost down here, it's like one big business strip. One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled."

The local news commentator is giving the manatee update. "Manatee herds continue to populate both warm-weather feeding areas and traditional winter refuges as fair weather and eightydegree temperatures continue. A general waterways alert is out: boaters, cut your throttle to half-speed. Throughout the weekend, encounters with manatees remain likely in widely varied habitats around Southwest Florida."

"They say that," Rabbit says, "but I never encounter one."

"That's because you're never on the water," Nelson says. "It's stupid, to be down here like you are and not own a boat."

"What do I want a boat for? I hate the water."

"You'd get to love it. You could fish all over the Gulf. You don't have enough to do, Dad."

"Who wants to fish, ifyou're halfway civilized? Dangling some dead meat in front of some poor brainless thing and then pulling him up by a hook in the roof of his mouth? Cruellest thing people do is fish."

The blond newscaster, with his hair moussed down so it's stiff as a wig, tells them, "An adult manatee with calf was reported at midday on Wednesday heading inland along Cape Coral's Bimini Canal about one-half mile from the Bimini Basin. Sightings like this indicate that while a large number of the Caloosahatchee herd have moved back out into the open waters of the river and back bays, some animals may still be encountered in and near sheltered waterways. To report dead or injured manatees, call 1-800-3421821." The number rolls across some footage of a manatee family sluggishly rolling around in the water. "And," he concludes in that sonorous way television announcers have when they see the commercial break coming, "to report a manatee sighting, call the Manatee Hotline at 332-3092."

To refresh his rapport with Judy, Rabbit calls over, "How'd you like to have a single big tooth like that mamma manatee?" But the girl doesn't seem to hear, her fair little face radiantly riveted on one of those ads with California raisins singing and dancing like black men. In a row like the old Mousketeers. Where are they now? Middle-aged parents themselves. Jimmie died years ago, he remembers reading. Died young. It happens. Roy is sucking his thumb and nodding off against Nelson's chest. Nelson is still wearing the white-collared, pink-striped shirt he wore down in the plane, as if he doesn't own anything as foolish as a shortsleeved shirt.