John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

She gives Gregg Silvers her crooked wry grin and shifts her weight, as if the closeness of this man her own age makes her awkwardly aware of her near-nakedness. She is wearing a tie-dyed brown dashiki over her one-piece white suit with those high sides that expose leg up to the hipbone. The cut means you have to shave the sides off your pussy. What women go through. There's even a kind of wax job you can have done to make it permanent. But suppose bathing-suit fashions change again? Rabbit preferred that pre-Reagan look of the two-piece bikini with the lower half like a little skimpy diaper slung under the belly, like Cindy Murkett used to slosh around in. Still, this new style nicely lengthens Pru's already long legs and keeps her thickening middle in. "He's going to stay with me right on the beach," she tells Gregg Silvers, and by way of emphasis bows down, so her red hair flings forward, and pulls off her dashiki, revealing string straps and white wide shoulders mottled with pale freckles.

"How long do I have it for?" Harry, feeling ignored, asks Ed's son. Those tight little European-style bathing trunks definitely show the bump of a prick.

"One hour, sir." The "sir" just popped in absentmindedly and the boy tries to revert to friendly casualness. "No sweat if you don't bring it in on the dot. There's not much action today, a lot of people don't like taking them out in this much wind. Take number nineteen, on the end there."

As Harry moves off, he hears Gregg ask Pru, "Where're you folks from up north?"

"Pennsylvania. Actually, I'm from Akron, Ohio."

"Hey! You'll never guess where I was raised – Toledo!"

The boats are up on the dry sand in a line, along with some other big water toys – those water bikes, and squarish paddleboats. Harry pulls at the nylon painter attached to the bow and the hull is heavier than he thought; by the time he's dragged it forty feet through the sand his breathing feels shallow and that annoying binding pain has begun to flicker on the left side of his ribs. He gives the boat one more heave and sits down in the sand, near where Pru is settling herself on a beach chaise Gregg has dragged down from the stack for her. Another beachgoer has momentarily called him away. "You like those?" Rabbit pants. "Don't you like feeling the sand under your – you know, like sort of a nest?"

She says, "It gets into the bathing suit, Harry. It gets in everywhere."

This needless emphasis, when he had got the picture, excites him, here in the bewildering brightness. He dimly remembers an old joke in high school about women making pearls. Cunts like Chesapeake oysters. That sly old Fred. He tells Judy, "Give me a second to get my breath, couldja honey? Go for a quick swim in the water so it won't be a shock when we're out on it. I'll be with you in one minute."

He should try to talk to Pru about Nelson. Something rotten there. Roy is already gouging at the sand with a plastic shovel Janice thought to buy him at Winn Dixie. Frowningly the child dumps the sand into a bucket shaped like an upside-down Garfield. Pru says, since Harry seems unable to begin, "You're awfully nice to have arranged all this. I was astonished, how much he charged."

"Well," he says, feeling slowly better as his bare legs absorb heat from the top layer of sand, "you're only a grandfather once. Or twice, in my case. You and Nelson plan any more?" This feels forward, but not in a class with the sand getting in everywhere.

"Oh no, my God," she too swiftly answers, in a trough of silence as one long low wave follows another in and breaks in a frothy cresting of glitter and a mechanical scurrying of sandpipers. "We're not ready for any more."

"You're not, huh?" he says, not sure where to take this.

She helps him, her voice in his ear as he gazes out into the Gulf. He doesn't dare turn his head to look at her bare feet, their pink toe joints and cracked nail polish, and her long legs lifted on the chaise, exposing contrasting white pieces of spandex crotch and soft flesh underside. These new bathing suits don't do much to hold a woman's ass in. She confesses to Harry, "I don't think we're doing justice to the two we've got, with Nelson how he is."

"Yeah, how is he? He seems jumpy, and only half here."

"That's right," she says, too enthusiastically agreeing. That's all she says. Another wave collapses and shooshes up the sand. She has pulled back. She is waiting for him to make an inspired guess.

"He hates Toyotas," he offers.

"Oh, he'd complain if they were jaguars," Pru says. "Nothing would satisfy him, the way he is now."

The way he is. The secret seems to be in that phrase. Was the poor kid with his white-around-the-gills look dying of something, of leukemia like that girl in Love Story? Of AIDS he caught somehow – how, Harry can't bear to think -hanging around that faggy Slim crowd Lyle the new accountant is part of. But it all seems distant, like those islands where pirates hid gold and rich men caught tarpon, mere thickenings of the horizon from this angle three feet above sea level. He can't focus on it, with the sun on his head. He maybe should have brought a hat, to protect his Swedish complexion. His suspicion has always been he looks foolish in a hat, his head too big already. Roy has filled the bucket and pretty carefully, considering he's only four, dumps it upside down and lifts it off. He expects to have a sand Garfield but the shape is too tricky and crumbles on one side. A bad principle, fancy shapes. Stick with simple castles and let the kids use their imaginations. Harry volunteers, speaking into the air, not quite daring to turn his head and face Pru's crotch, and those nameless bits exposed by the way her legs are up, "He was never what you'd call a terrifically happy child. I guess me and Jan are to blame for that."

"He's willing to blame you," Pru admits in her flat Ohio voice. "But I don't think you should reinforce him by blaming yourself." Her language here, as when she spoke about cholesterol the other night, seems to him disagreeably specific, like a pet's fur that is coarse and more prickly than you expect when you touch it. "I'd refuse," she says firmly, "to let a child of mine send me on a guilt trip."

"I don't know," Harry demurs. "We put him through some pretty wild scenes back there in the late Sixties."

"That's what the late Sixties were for everybody, wild scenes," Pru says, and goes back into that coarse semi-medical talk. "By continuing to accept the blame he's willing to assign you, you and Janice continue to infantilismon him. After thirty, shouldn't we all be responsible for our own lives?"

"Beats me," he says, "I never know who was responsible for mine," and he pushes himself up from the trough his body has warmed in the sand, but not before flicking his eyes back to that strip of stretched spandex flanked by soft pieces of Pru that have never had enough sun to freckle. Little Judy has come back from swimming, her red hair soaked tight to her skull and her navy-blue bathing suit adhering to the pinhead bumps of her nipples.

"You promised a minute," she reminds him, water running down her face and beaded in her eyelashes like tears.

"So I did," he agrees. "Let's go Sunfishing!" He stands, and the Florida breeze catches in every comer of his skin, as if he is the kite down the beach. He feels tall under the high blue sky; the elements poured out all around him -water and sand and air and sun's fire, substances lavished in giant amounts yet still far from filling the limitless space – reawaken in him an old animal recklessness. His skin, his heart can never have enough. "Put your life jacket on," he tells his granddaughter.

"It makes me feel fat," she argues. "I don't need it, I can swim for miles, honest. At camp, way across the lake and back. When you're tired, you just turn on your back and float. It's easier in saltwater, even."