John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

But Gregg sheds a little amiability and says, "The boats are exclusively for the use of hotel guests and get included in their charges, but I think about a hundred twenty for the four of you would cover it, with the lockers and beach access and two Sunfish for an hour each."

Pru speaks up. "We don't want two. I'd be terrified."

He looks her up and down and says with a new thrust in his voice, a little friendly lean in from a guy who deals with a lot of women in this job, "No need to be terrified, Teresa. They can't sink, and lifesavers are compulsory. Worst case and you feel you have no control, just let go of the sail and we'll come out for you in the launch."

"Thanks but no thanks," Pru says, a bit perkily Harry thinks, but, then, she and this guy are about the same age. Baby boomers. Rock and roll, dope, Leave It to Beaver, physical fitness. And wait till they discover they both come from Ohio.

Gregg Silvers turns to him and says, "Ninety should about do it, then."

The sum seems an invitation to tip him ten, but Harry wonders if this wouldn't be insulting, since he is here as a family friend, and waits for Gregg to fetch the bill from the muffin-topped boy at the desk. When Rabbit and Roy are alone in the locker room, he tells the child, "Jesus, Roy, that just about cleaned out poor old Grandpa's wallet!"

Roy looks up at him with frightened inky eyes. "Will they put us in jail?" he asks, his voice high and precise, like wind chimes.

Harry laughs. "Where'd you get that idea?"

"Daddy hates jail."

"Well who doesn't!" Harry says, wondering if the child is quite right in the head. Roy doesn't understand you should loosen the string of bathing trunks to pull them on, and while he fumbles and struggles his little penis sticks straight out, no longer than it is thick, cute as a button mushroom. He is circumcised. Rabbit wonders what his own life would have been like if he had been circumcised. The issue comes up now and then in the newspapers. Some say the foreskin is like an eyelid; without it the constantly exposed glans becomes less sensitive, it gets thick-skinned and dull rubbing against cloth all the time. A letter he once read in a skin magazine was from a guy who got circumcised in midwife and found his sexual pleasure and responsiveness went so far down his circumcised life was hardly worth living. If Harry had been less responsive he might have been a more dependable person. Getting a hard-on you can feel the foreskin sweetly tug back, like freezing cream lifting the paper cap on the old-time milk bottles. From the numb look of his prick Roy will be a solid citizen. His grandfather reaches down a hand to lead him out to the beach.

Harry and Janice after their first year or two in Florida, when in their excitement at being here they bought a telescope for the balcony and three or four times a week would drive the two miles to the Deleon public beach for a walk and picnic supper if not a swim, gradually stopped visiting the Gulf. So it hits him now as something fresh, unforeseen, this immensity of water, of air, of a surface of flux battered into a million oscillating dents. The raw glory of it all overpowers for a moment the nagging aches and worries in his chest and releases him into self-forgetfulness. Such light-struck and level grandeur is like nothing he knew in the Pennsylvania landscape, hemmed in by woods and hills and housetops, a land dingy with centuries of use, where even the wild patches, the quarries and second-growth woodland and abandoned factories and rnineshafts, had been processed by men and discarded. Here, all feels virgin, though in fact there is a history too, of Indians and conquistadores and barefoot mailmen who served the mosquito-plagued coastal settlements. On the right and left of the horizon are islands where the millionaires used to come by private railroad car for the tarpon fishing in April. Spanish and French pirates once hid among these islands. Gold is still buried in their sands. They are flat and seem very distant from where Harry and Roy stand on the beach wall. It is all so bright, so open, the world feels created anew, in synthetic elements. Sailboats, windsurfing rigs, those motorcycles that buzz along on top of the water, plastic paddleboats, and inflated rafts dot the near water with colors gaudy as a supermarket's. A distance down the beach, in front of another hotel, someone is flying a kite -a linked pair of box kites that dip and dive and climb again in unison, trailing glittering orange ribbons. For a mile in either direction, a twinkling party of tan flesh and cloth patches is assembling itself, grainlike live bodies laid on top of the beach of sand.

Pru and Judy come out of the hotel to join them and they descend concrete steps. The hour has passed ten o'clock, and at their backs the tall hotel, shaped like an S fifteen stories high, fringed at each story with balconies like fine-toothed red combs, still has its face in shadow, though its shadow has shrunk back to the innermost of its pools. The sand is freshly raked underfoot; yesterday's footprints and plastic glasses and emptied lotion bottles have been taken away and the wooden beach chaises stacked. Today's sunbathers are arranging themselves and their equipment, their towels and mystery novels (Ruth used to read those, and what she got out of them was another mystery) and various colorcoded numbers of sunscreen. Couples are greasing each other. Old smoothies already the color of leather are rubbing oil into their bald heads, the hair of their chests pure white. The smell of lotion rises to intertwine with the odor of salt air, of dead crab, of seaweed. As he leads his group across the sand Harry feels heads lift and eyes behind sunglasses slide; he feels proud and strange to be seen with this much younger woman and two small children. His second family. Or his third or fourth. Life moves through us family after family.

At the water's slapping, hissing, frothing edge sandpipers scurry. and halt, stab. the foam for some morsel, and scurry on. Their feet and heads are so quick they appear mechanical. Roy cannot catch them, though they seem like toys. When Harry takes off his unlaced Nikes, the sand bites his bare feet with an unexpected chill – the tide of night still cold beneath the sunny top layer of grains. The tops of his feet show wormy blue veins, and his shins are all chalky and crackled, as if he is standing up to his knees in old age. A tremor of flight comes alive in his legs. The sea, the sun are so big: cosmic wheels he could be ground between. He is playing with fire.

Gregg is waiting for them at a but of corrugated Fiberglas on the beach, back from the water near some palms with their roots exposed. He has taken from the but a rudder, a centerboard, and two life jackets of black foam rubber. Rabbit doesn't like the color, the texture; he wants old-fashioned Day-Glo kapok from Thomas Edison's kapok trees. Gregg asks him, "You've done this before?"

"Sure."

But something in Harry's tone leads Gregg to be instructive: "Push the tiller away from the sail. Watch the tips of the waves for the direction of the wind. When the wind gets behind you, hold the mainsheet loose."

"O.K…, sure," Harry says, having not quite listened, thinking instead, resentfully, of Ed Silberstein's bogey on the first hole yesterday and how its being enough for a win got the whole round off to a lousy start.

Gregg turns to Pru and asks, "Your little girl can swim?"

"Oh, sure," she says, picking up Harry's lazy word. "She was the champion in her swimming class at summer camp."

"Mom," the girl pleads. "I came in second."

Gregg looks down at Judy, the sun at his back so bright that the shadow on his face has a blue light ofits own. "Second's pretty close to champ." Still needing to talk to Pru, Gregg says, "I wouldn't advise your little boy to go. There's an offshore breeze today, you can't feel it in the lee of the hotel here, but it takes you out there pretty fast. There's no cockpit, it's easy to slip off."