John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

Judy says, "He said he was real sorry afterwards."

Pru has been smoothing Judy's long red hair back from her face and now, just the middle fingers touching her forehead and cheeks, tucks back her own. She has outgrown the Sphinx look; it hangs limp to her shoulders. "He calmed down after I called you. He said, `You called them? I can't believe it. You called my parents?' It was like he was too stunned to be angry. He kept saying this is the end and how sorry he was for everything. He makes no sense." She grimaces and lightly pushes Judy away from her body and tightens the robe around her middle, with a shiver. For a second they all seem to have forgotten their lines. In crises there is something in our instincts which whittles, which tries to reduce the unignorable event back to the ignorable normal. "I could use a cup of coffee," Pru says.

Janice asks, "Shouldn't we go upstairs to Nelson first?"

Judy likes this idea and leads the way upstairs. Following her milky bare feet up the stair treads, Harry feels guilty that his granddaughter has to wear outgrown pajamas while all those Florida acquaintances of theirs have different-colored slacks for every day of the week and twenty sports coats hanging in cleaner's bags. The house, which he remembers from way back in the days of the Springers, when they were younger than he is now, seems rather pathetically furnished, now that he looks, in remnants from the old days, including the battered old brown Barcalounger that used to be Fred Springer's throne, along with nondescript newer stuff from Schaechner's or one of the shabby furniture places that have sprung up along the highways leading out of the city, mingled among the car lots and fast-food joints. The stairs still have the threadbare Turkish runner the Springers had tacked down forty years ago. The house has descended to Nelson and Pru in stages and they never really have taken it on as their own. You try to do something nice for kids, offer them a shortcut in life, a little padding, and it turns out to be the wrong thing, undermining them. This was no house for a young couple.

All the lights being turned on gives the house a panicky overheated air. They ascend the stairs in the order Judy, Harry, Janice, and Pru, who maybe regrets having called them by now and would rather be nursing her face and planning her next move in solitude. Nelson greets them in the hallway, carrying Roy in his. "Oh," he says, seeing his father, "the big cheese is here."

"Don't mouth off at me," Harry tells him. "I'd rather be home in bed."

"It wasn't my idea to call you."

"It was your idea though to go beating up your wife, and scaring the hell out of your kids, and otherwise acting like a shit." Harry fishes in the side pocket of his chinos to make sure the little vial of heart pills is there. Nelson is trying to play it cool, still wearing the black slacks and white shirt he was out on the town in, and having the kid on his arm, but his thinning hair is bristling out from his head and his eyes in the harsh hallway light are frantic, full of reflected sparks like that time outside the burning house at 26 Vista Crescent. Even in the bright light his pupils look dilated and shiny-black and there is a tremor to him, a shiver now and then as if this night nearly in May is icy cold. He looks even thinner than in Florida, with that same unpleasant sore-looking nose above the little half-ass blur of a mustache. And that earring yet.

"Who are you to go around deciding who's acting like a shit?" he asks Harry, adding, "Hi, Mom. Welcome home."

"Nelson, this just won't do."

"Let me take Roy," Pru says in a cool neutral voice, and she pushes past the elder Angstroms and without looking her husband in the face plucks the sleepy child from him. Involuntarily she grunts with the weight. The hall light, with its glass shade faceted like a candy dish, crowns her head with sheen as she passes under it, into Roy's room, which was Nelson's boyhood room in the old days, when Rabbit would lie awake hearing Melanie creep along the hall to this room from her own, the little room at the front of the house with the dress dummy. Now she's some gastroenterologist. In the harsh overhead light, Nelson's face, white around the gills, shows an electric misery and a hostile cockiness, and Janice's a dark confused something, a retreat into the shadows of her mind; her capacity for confusion has always frightened Harry. He realizes he is still in charge. Little Judy looks up at him brightly, titillated by being awake and a witness to these adult transactions. "We can't just stand here in the hall," he says. "How about the big bedroom?"

Harry and Janice's old bedroom has become Nelson and Pru's. A different bedspread – their old Pennsylvania Dutch quilt of little triangular patches has given way to a puff patterned with yellow roses, Pru does like flowered fabrics – but the same creaky bed, with the varnished knobbed headboard that never hit your back quite right when you tried to read. Different magazines on the bedside tables - Racing Cars and Rolling Stone instead of Time and Consumer Reports – but the same cherry table on Harry's old side, with its sticky drawer. Among the propped-up photographs on the bureau is one of him and Janice, misty-eyed and lightly tinted, taken on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in March of 1981. They look embalmed, Rabbit thinks, suspended in that tinted bubble of time. The ceiling light in this room, glass like the hall light, is also burning. He asks, "Mind if I switch that off? All these lights on, I'm getting a headache."

Nelson says sourly, "You're the big cheese. Help yourself."

Judy explains, "Mommy said to turn them all on while Daddy was chasing her. She said if it got worse I should throw a chair through a front window and yell for help and the police would hear."

With the light switched off, Rabbit can see out into the dark gulf of air where the copper beech used to be. The neighbor's house is closer than he ever thought, in his ten years of living here. Their upstairs lights are on. He can see segments of wall and furniture but no people. Maybe they were thinking of calling the police. Maybe they already have. He switches on the lamp on the cherry table, so the neighbors can look in and see that everything is under control.

"She overreacted," Nelson explains, fitfully gesturing. "I was trying to make a point and Pru wouldn't hold still. She never listens to me any more."

"Maybe you don't say enough she wants to hear," Harry tells his son. The kid in his white shirt and dark trousers looks like a magician's assistant, and keeps tapping himself on the chest and back of the neck and rubbing his anus through the white cloth as if he's about to do a trick. The boy is embarrassed and scared but keeps losing focus, Rabbit feels; there are other presences for him in the room besides the bed and furniture and his parents and daughter, a mob of ghosts which only he can see. A smell comes off him, liquor and a kind of post-electrical ozone. He is sweating; his gills are wet.

"O.K., O.K.," Nelson says. "I treated myself to a bender tonight, I admit it. It's been a helluva week at the lot. California wants to have this nationwide Toyotathon to go with a TVcommercial blitz and they expect to see a twenty-per-cent increase of new sales to go with the discounts they're offering. They let me know they haven't been liking our figures lately."

"Them and who else?" Harry says. "Did your buddy Lyle tell ya I was over there the other day?"

"Snooping around last week, yeah, he sure did. He hasn't come to work since. Thanks a bunch. You put Elvira into a snit, too, with all your sexist flirtatious stuff:"

"I wasn't sexist, I wasn't flirtatious. I was just surprised to see a woman selling cars and asked her how it was going. The cunt, I was just as pleasant as I could be."