John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

She says, slangily, to mask the initial awkwardness when they meet, "You're lookin' good, Harry. The sunny South agrees with you."

What did that frontal kiss mean? Its slight urgency. Some sad message there. She and Nelson never did quite fit.

"Nobody else thinks so," he says, and grabs at her shoulder bag. "Lemme help you carry some of this stuff I'll take the bag." He begins to pull it off.

Pru shifts the coat and toys to extend her arm to let him take it but at the same time asks him, "Should you?"

Harry asks, "Why does everybody treat me like some Goddamn kind of invalid?" but he is asking the air; Pru and Janice are hugging with brisk false enthusiasm and Nelson is plodding ahead down the long gray corridor with Roy back to sleep on his shoulder. Harry is irritated to see that though Nelson has a careful haircut that looks only a few days old the barber left one of those tails, like a rat's tail, uncut and hanging down over the boy's collar, under the spreading bald spot. How old does he think he is, seventeen? Little Judy trails her father but Nelson is not waiting or looking back. The girl is just old enough to sense that in her nice proper airplane outfit she should not sacrifice all dignity and run to catch up. She wears a navy-blue winter coat over a pink summer dress; its pink hem shows below the coat, and then her bare legs, which look long, longer than when he saw her last in early November. But it is the back of her head that kills him, her shiny carrot-colored hair braided into a pigtail caught into a showy stiff white ribbon. Something of her mother's Catholic upbringing in that ribbon, decking out the Virgin or the baby Jesus or Whoever to go on parade, to go on a ride in the sky. The sleek back of Judy's head, the pigtail bouncing as she tries not to run, so docilely, so unthinkingly wears the showy ribbon her mother put there that Harry smiles. Hurrying his stride, he catches up and reaches down and says, "Hey there, good-lookin'," and takes the hand she with a child's reflex lifts to be taken. Her hand is as surprisingly moist as her mother's lips were warm. Her head with its bone-white parting is higher than his waist. She complains to her mother, Harry has heard from Janice, about being the tallest girl in her section of the third grade. The mean boys tease her.

"How's school going?" he asks.

"I hate it,"Judy tells him. "There are all these kids think they're big shots. The girls are the absolute worst."

"Do you ever think you're a big shot?"

She ponders this. "Some boys are always getting after me but I tell them to fuck off."

He clucks his tongue. "That's pretty rough language for the third grade."

"Not really," she says. "Even the teacher says `damn' sometimes when we get her going."

"How do you get her going?"

Judy smiles upward, her mother's quick wide-mouthed smile without the crimp. "Sometimes we all hum so she can't see our mouths move. A couple weeks ago when she tried to make us all sing Christmas carols one of these big-shot boys I told you about said it was against his parents' religion and his father was a lawyer and would sue everybody."

"He sounds like a pain in the ass," Rabbit says.

"Grandpa. Don't talk dirty."

"That's not dirty, that's just saying where it hurts. If you say somebody's a pain in the bottom it sounds dirtier. Hey. Here's the place I bought that peanut candy you smelled. Want some?"

"You better ask Mom first."

Harry turns and lets the two mothers, walking hip to hip and heads bowed in consultation, catch up. "Pru," he says, "will it rot any teeth if I buy Judy a candy bar?"

She looks up, distracted, but remembers to smile at him. "I guess it won't kill her this once, though Nelson and I try to discourage junk in their diet."

"Whatever you get her, Harry," Janice adds, "you ought to get Roy."

"But Roy's asleep and half her size."

"He'll know, though," Pru says, "ifyou play favorites. He's just now coming out from under her shadow."

Little Judy, casting a shadow? Did he cast a shadow over Mim? Mim certainly got far enough away from Diamond County, if that was a statement. Got into the fast lane in Las Vegas and stayed.

"Don't be forever," Janice tells Harry. "Or else give me the keys so we can get into the car. They have two more bags they made them check in Newark. Nelson's probably down there already."

"Yeah, what's his idea, rushing on ahead like that? Who's he sore at?"

"Probably me," Pru says. "I've given up trying to figure out why."

Harry digs into one pocket of his plaid golf slacks, comes up with only a few tees and a plastic ball marker with two blue Vs on it, for Valhalla Village, and then into the other to find the knobbly notched bunch of keys on the ring. Saying "Heads up," he tosses them toward Janice. Her hands jump together in a womanly panic and the keys sail past them and hit her in the stomach. Just this little effort, the search and the toss, leaves him weary, as if the arm he lifted was soggy wash. The spontaneity and fun have been taken out of buying his granddaughter a treat. She chooses not a Planter's Peanut Bar as he had envisioned but a Sky Bar, which he thinks might be truly bad for her teeth, those five different gooey fillings in the five humped segments of pure chocolate. He digs into the hip pocket of his pants, so old their plaid is sun-faded and the hem of each pocket is darkened by the sweat off his hands over the years, and pulls out his wallet and hangs for a while over the candy rack, uncertain whether or not to get himself another sugary rectangle of stuck-together nuts, wondering if this time he would be lucky enough to get one not broken in the wrapper, deciding against it because he eats too much, too much junk as Pru said, Pru and his doctor down here, old Dr. Morris, and then at the last possible split-second, with the black woman at the counter within the octagonal shop already counting out his change from a dollar for the Sky Bar, deciding to buy the peanut brittle after all. It is not so much the swallowing and ingesting he loves as the gritty-edgy feeling of the first corner in his mouth, the first right-angled fragment, slowly dissolving. To his surprise and indignation not only does he now receive no change from the dollar but owes the black woman – a severe matte undiluted color you rarely see in the U.S., dull as slate, must be a Haitian or Dominican, Florida is full of these boat people – a nickel more, for the state tax. Airport prices, they nail you where there's no competition. Without competition, you get socialism and everybody free-loading and economies like they have in Cuba and Haiti. He pauses to glance at the magazines on the rack. The top row holds the skin mags, sealed in plastic, pieces of printed paper hiding details of the open-mouthed girls, open-mouthed as if perpetually astonished by their own tangible assets, Hustler, Gallery, Club, Penthouse, Oui, Live, Fox. He imagines himself buying one, braving the Haitian woman's disapproval – all these Caribbean types are evangelical fundamentalists, tin-roofed churches where they shout for the world to end now – and sneaking the magazine home and while Janice is asleep or cooking or out with one of her groups studying to satiety the spread shots and pink labia and boosted tits and buttocks tipped up from behind so the shaved cunt shows, with its sad little anatomy like some oyster, and sadly foreseeing that he will not be enough aroused, boredom will become his main feeling, and embarrassment at the expenditure. Four dollars twenty-five they are asking these days, promising Sexy Sirens in the Sauna and Cara Lott Gets Hot and Oral Sex: A Gourmet's Guide. How disgusting we are, when you think about it – disposable meat, but hell-bent on gratification.

"Come on, Grandpa – what's taking so long?"