John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

"Nice," he says. "How about `Mary Had a Little Lamb'? Do they still teach you that at school? What the hell do they teach you at school these days?" Being laid so low has loosened his language, his primal need to curse and his latent political indignation. He goes on, thinking it will make him seem less alarming to his grandchild, and humorously alive, "I know we're sucking hind titty in science education, the papers keep telling us that. Thank God for the Orientals. Without these Chinese and Vietnam refugees we'd be a nation of total idiots."

Judy does know "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and "Three Blind Mice," and the verses of "Farmer in the Dell" up to the wife takes a cow, but then they both lose track. "Let's do `Three Blind Mice' again," he orders her. "See how they run. The mice ran after the farmer's wife…"

She does not take up the verse and his voice dies away. Their tack is taking them far out toward the north, toward Sarasota and Tampa and the rich men's islands where the pirates once were, but the people on the beach do look a little less like gray string, the colors of their bathing suits twinkle a bit closer, and he can make out the darting tormented flight of a volleyball. A pressure in the center of his chest has intensified and to his nausea has been added an urgent desire to take a crap. In trying to picture his real life, the life of simple comforts and modest challenges that he abandoned when his foot left the sand, he now envisions foremost the rosecolored porcelain toilet bowl in the condo, with matching padded seat, and the little stack of Consumer Reports and Times that waited on the bottom shelf of the white-painted bamboo table Janice kept her cosmetics on top of, next to the rose-tinted bathroom basin. It seems to have been a seat in paradise.

"Grandpa, I can't think of any more songs." The child's green eyes, greener than Pru's, have a watery touch of panic.

"Don't stop," he grunts, trying to keep everything in. "You're making the boat go."

"No I'm not." She manages a blurred smile. "The wind makes it go."

"In the wrong fucking direction," he says.

"Is it wrong?" she asks with the quickness of fear.

"No, I'm just kidding." It was like that sadistic squeeze he gave her hand yesterday. Must stop that stuff. When you get children growing under you, you try to rise to the occasion. "We're fine," he tells her. "Let's come about. Ready? Duck your head, honey." No more sailor talk. He yanks the tiller, the boat swings, sail sags, sun shines down through the gap of silence, hammering the water into sparks. The bow drifts across a certain imaginary line, the sail hesitantly and then decisively fills, and they tug off in another direction, south, toward the remotest glass hotel and Naples and the other set of rich men's islands. The small effort and anxiety of the maneuver wring such pain from his chest that tears have sprung into his own eyes. Yet he feels good, down deep. There is a satisfaction in his skyey enemy's having at last found him. The sense of doom hovering over him these past days has condensed into reality, as clouds condense into needed rain. There is a lightness, a lightening, that comes along with misery: vast portions of your life are shorn off, suddenly ignorable. You become simply a piece of physical luggage to be delivered into the hands of others. Stretched out on the Fiberglas deck he is pinned flat to the floor of reality. The sensation of pressure, of unbearable fullness, within him now has developed a rhythm, an eccentric thrust as if a flywheel has come unconnected from its piston. Pain you can lift your head above, for a little; he minds more the breathing, the sensation that his access to the air has been narrowed to a slot that a fleck of mucus would clog, and worse even than the breathing, which if you can forget it seems to ease, is the involvement of his guts, the greasy gray churning and the desire to vomit and shit and yet not to, and the clammy sweating, which chills him in the wind and the sun's quick drying.

"Splish, splash, I was takin' a bath," Judy's faint voice sings, little feathers of music that fly away, "along about Saturday night…" She has moved from nursery rhymes to television commercials, the first few lines of them until she forgets. "The good times, great taste, of McDonald's…" "I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener. That is what I'd truly like to be. 'Cause if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener, everyone would be in love with me." And the one the toilet paper sings, and the "Stand by Me" imitation by those California raisins, and the "Mack the Knife" by Ray Charles as the man in the moon, and the reassurance that if you want it, we've got it, "Toy-o-to… Who could ask for anything more?" It is like switching channels back and forth, her little voice lifting and blowing back into his face, his eyes closed while his mind pays furtive visits in the dark to the grinding, galloping, lopsided maladjustment in his chest and then open again, to check their bearings and the tension in the sail, to test the illusion of blue sky and his fixed belief that her voice is powering the Sunfish toward the shore. "Coke is it,"Judy sings, "the most refreshing taste around, Coke is it, the one that never lets you down, Coke is it, the biggest taste you ever found!"

He has to tack twice more, and by then his granddaughter has discovered within herself the treasure of songs from videos she has watched many times, of children's classics Rabbit saw when they were new, the first time in those old movie theaters with Arabian decors and plush curtains that pulled back and giant mirrors in the lobby, songs of departure, "We're off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz" and "Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work we go," and sad songs of something in the sky to distract us from the Depression, "Somewhere over the Rainbow," and "When You Wish upon a Star," little Jiminy Cricket out there with his top hat and furled umbrella on that moon-bathed windowsill. That Disney, he really packed a punch.

"Nice, Judy," Rabbit grunts. "Terrific. You were really getting into it."

"It was fun, like you said. Look, there's Mommy!"

Harry lets the sheet and tiller go. The Sunfish bobs in the breaking waves of shallow water, and Judy pulls up the centerboard and jumps off into water up to her shiny hips and pulls the boat like a barge through the last yards before the bow scrapes sand. "We tipped over and Grandpa got sick!" she shouts.

Not just Pru and Roy but Gregg Silvers have come to meet them, about a good six-iron shot up the beach from where they set out. Gregg's too-tan face gives a twitch, seeing the way Harry keeps stretched out beside the useless tiller, and seeing something Harry can't, perhaps the color of his face. How bad is he? He looks at his palms; they are mottled with yellow and blue. Swiftly Gregg takes the painter from Judy and asks Harry, "Want to stay where you are?"

Harry waits until a push of pain passes and says, "I'm getting off this fucking tub if it kills me."

But the action of standing and easing off the tipping Sunfish and wading a few feet does bad things to his slipped insides. He feels himself wade even through air, on the packed sand, against pronounced resistance. He lies down on the sand at Pru's feet, her long bare feet with chipped scarlet nails and their pink toe joints like his mother's knuckles from doing the dishes too many times. He lies face up, looking up at her white spandex crotch. Little Roy, thinking Harry's posture playful, toddles over and stands above his grandfather's head, shedding grains of sand down into Rabbit's ears, his clenched mouth, his open eyes; his eyes squeeze shut.

The sky is a blank redness out of which Pru's factual Ohio voice falls with a concerned intonation. "We saw you go over but Gregg says it happens all the time. Then it seemed to take so long he was just about to come out in the launch."