John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

"He wants, he wants," Harry says.

"He told her we're all stealing from him."

"Ha," Harry says, meaning it's the reverse.

Janice says, "How can you laugh when it's your own son?"

Who is this woman, this little nut-hard woman, to chasten him? Yet he feels chastened. He doesn't answer but instead says in a measured, mature manner, "Well, it's probably good this is coming to a head, if we all survive it. It gets it out in the open at least."

She puts on what she never wears in the daylight up north, her salmon running suit with the powder-blue sleeves and stripe. He opts for a pair of pressed chinos fresh from the drawer and the khaki shirt he puts on to do light yard chores, and his oldest jacket, a green wide-wale corduroy with leather buttons: kind of a casual Saturday-afternoon look. Retirement has made them both more clothes-conscious than before; in Florida, the retirees play dress-up every day, as if they've become their own paper dolls.

They take the slate-gray Celica, the more Batmobilelike and steely car, on this desperate mission in the dead of the night. Along the stilled curving streets of Penn Park, the oaks are just budding but the maples are filling in, no longer red in tint but dense with translucent tender new leaves. The houses have an upstairs night light on here and there, or a back-porch light to keep cats and raccoons away from the garbage, but only the streetlamps compete with the moon. The trimmed large bushes of the groomed yards, the yews and arborvitae and rhododendrons, look alert by night, like jungle creatures come to the waterhole to drink and caught in a camera's flash. It seems strange to think that while we sleep these bushes are awake, exhaling oxygen, growing; they do not sleep. Stars do not sleep, but above the housetops and trees crowns shine in a cold arching dusty sprinkle. Why do we sleep? What do we rejoin? His dream, the way it fit him all around. At certain angles the lit asphalt feels in the corners of his eyes like snow. Penn Park becomes West Brewer and a car or two is still awake and moving on blanched deserted Penn Boulevard, an extension of Weiser with a supermarket parking lot on one side and on the other a low brick row of shops from the Thirties, little narrow stores selling buttons and bridal gowns and pastry and Zipf Chocolates and Sony TVs and hobby kits to make model airplanes with – they still manufacture and sell those in this era when all the kids are supposedly couch potatoes and all the planes are these wallowing wide-body jets with black noses like panda bears, not sleek killing machines like Zeros, Messerschmitts, Spitfires, Mustangs. Funny to think that with all that world-war effort manufacturers still had the O.K. to make those little models, keeping up morale in the kiddie set. All the shops are asleep. A flower shop shows a violet growing light, and a pet store a dimly lit aquarium. The cars parked along the curbs display a range of unearthly colors, no longer red and blue and cream but cindery lunar shades, like nothing you can see or even imagine by daylight.

Harry pops a nitroglycerin pill and tells Janice accusingly, "The doctors say I should avoid aggravation."

"It wasn't me who woke us up at two in the morning, it was your daughter-in-law."

"Yeah, because your precious son was beating up on her."

"According to her," Janice states. "We haven't heard Nelson's side of it."

The underside of his tongue bums. "What makes you think he has a side? What're you saying, you think she's lying? Why would she lie? Why would she call us up at two in the morning to lie?"

"She has her agenda, as people say. He was a good bet for her when she got herself pregnant but now that he's in a little trouble he's not such a good bet and if she's going to get herself another man she better move fast because her looks won't last forever."

He laughs, in applause. "You've got it all figured out." Discreetly, distantly, his asshole tingles, from the pill. "She is good-looking, isn't she? Still."

"To some men she would seem so. The kind that don't mind big tough women. What I never liked about her, though, was she makes Nelson look short."

"He is short," Harry says. "Beats me why. My parents were both tall. My whole family's always been tall."

Janice considers in silence her responsibility for Nelson's shortness.

There are any number of ways to get to Mt. Judge through Brewer but tonight, the streets all but deserted and the stoplights blinking yellow, he opts for the most direct, going straight over the Running Horse Bridge, that once he and Jill walked over in moonlight though not so late at night as this, straight up Weiser past the comer building that used to house JIMBO's Friendly LOUNGE until trouble with the police finally closed it and that now has been painted pastel condo colors and remodelled into a set of offices for yuppie lawyers and financial advisers, past Schoenbaum Funeral Directors with its stately building of white brick on the left and the shoeshine parlor that sells New York papers and hot roasted peanuts, the best peanuts in town, still selling them all those years since he was a kid not much older than Judy now. His idea then of the big time was to take the trolley around the mountain and come into downtown Brewer on a Saturday morning and buy a dime bag of peanuts still warm from the roaster and walk all around cracking them and letting the shells fall where they would, at his feet on the sidewalks of Weiser Square. Once an old bum grumbled at him for littering; even the bums had a civic conscience then. Now the old downtown is ghostly, hollow in lunar colors and closed to traffic at Fifth Street, where the little forest planted by the city planners from Atlanta to make a pedestrian mall looms with ghostly branches under the intense blue lights installed to discourage muggings and sex and drug transactions beneath these trees which grow taller every year and make the downtown gloomier. Rabbit turns left on Fifth, past the post office and the Ramada Inn that used to be the Ben Franklin with its grand ballroom, which always makes him think of Mary Ann and her crinolines and the fragrance between her legs, and over to Eisenhower Avenue, above number 1204 where Janice hid out with Charlie that time, and takes an obtuse-angled turn right, heading up through the Hispanic section, which used to be German working-class, across Winter, Spring, and Summer streets with the blinding lights and occasional moving shadow, spics out looking for some kind of a deal, the nights still a little cool to bring out all the street trash, to Locust Boulevard and the front of Brewer High School, a Latin-inscribed Depression monument, ambitious for the common good like something Communists would put up, the whole country close to Communism in the Thirties, people not so selfish then, built the year Harry was born, 1933, and going to outlast him it looks like. Of pale-yellow brick and granite quoins, it clings to the greening mountainside like a grand apparition.

"What do you think she meant," he asks Janice, " `gone crazy'? How crazy can you go from cocaine?"

"Doris Kaufmann, I mean Eberhardt, has a brother-in-law whose stepson by his wife's first marriage had to go to a detox center out near the middle of the state. He got to be paranoid and thought Hitler was still alive and had agents everywhere to get just him. He was Jewish."

"Did he beat up his wife and children?"

"He didn't have a wife, I think. We don't know for sure Nelson's threatened the children."

"Pru said he did."

"Pru was very upset. It's the money I think upsets her, more than anything."

"It doesn't upset you?"

"Not as much as it seems to you and Pru. Money isn't something I worry about, Harry. Daddy always said, `If I don't have two nickels to rub together, I'll rub two pennies.' He had faith he could always make enough, and he did, and I guess I inherited his philosophy."