John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

"Who wants coffee besides me?" she asks, all eyes upon her, like an actress who must come up with some line.

"And there's some butter-pecan ice cream for dessert if anybody wants," Pru says, her flat Ohio voice having fallen over the years into the local locutions, that considerate Pennsylvania way of speaking as if to make things clear in a stupefying haze. She has taken off the cardigan and folded back the cuffs of her mannish khaki shirt so that half her downy freckled forearms show, there at the kitchen table, under the faceted-glass light fixture overhead.

"My favorite flavor," Harry says, pitying his wife, wanting to help her out of the brightly lit center of the stage; even little Roy with his inky eyes is staring at Janice, sensing something strange, a curse nobody mentions.

"Harry, that's the worst possible thing for you," Janice says, grateful for this opportunity he has given her for a quarrel, a scene. "Ice cream and nuts both."

Pru says, "I got some frozen yogurt with Harry in mind. Peach and banana I think are the flavors."

"It's not the same," Harry says, clowning to keep the attention of both women. "I want butter-pecan. With something. How about some good old-fashioned apple strudel, with all that sort of wallpaper paste inside? Or some sticky buns? Or shoo-fly pie? Yum: huh, Roy?"

"Oh, Harry, you're going to kill yourself!" Janice cries, excessively, her grief centered elsewhere.

"There's something called ice milk," Pru is saying, and he feels that her heart too is elsewhere, that throughout the meal she has been maneuvering around the covered-up hole of Nelson's absence, which no one has mentioned, not even the wide-eyed children.

"Shoo-fly pie," Roy says, in an oddly deep and mannish voice, and when they explain to him that there isn't really any, that it was just a joke of Grandpa's, he feels he has made a mistake, and in his weariness at learning all day to be more independent he begins to whimper.

"Makes your eyes light up," Rabbit sings to him, "and your tummy say `howdy."'

Pru takes Roy upstairs while Janice serves Judy butter-pecan ice cream and stacks the dishes into the dishwasher. Harry kept his spoon and digs into Judy's dish while Janice's back is turned. He loves that second when the tongue flattens the ice cream against the roof of the mouth and the fragments of pecan emerge like stars at evening. "Oh Grandpa, you shouldn't," Judy says, looking at him with genuine fright, though her lips want to smile.

He touches his own lips with a finger and promises, "Just one spoonful," while going for another.

The child calls for help: "Grandma!"

"He's just teasing," Janice says, but asks him, "Would you like your own dish?"

This gets him up from the table. "I shouldn't have ice cream, that's the worst thing for me," he tells her, and scolds, seeing the jumble of plates she has stacked in the dishwasher, "My God, you have no system – look at all the space you're wasting!"

"You stack it, then," she says, a modern woman, and while he does, fitting the dishes closer together, in harrowlike rows, she gathers together her papers and book and purse from the diningroom table. "Damn," she says, and comes to the kitchen to tell Harry, "All my planning this morning what to wear and I forget to bring a raincoat." The rain has settled in outside, sheathing the house in a loud murmur.

"Maybe Pru could lend you one."

"It would fall off me," she says. But she goes upstairs to where Pru is putting Roy to bed and after a conversation Harry can't hear comes down in a cherry-red waterproof plastic coat, with wide lapels and a belt too long and gleaming zigzags under the light. "Do I look ridiculous?"

"Not exactly," he tells her. It excites him, this transposition: you follow the zigzagging creases up expecting to see red-haired Pru staring back and instead it's Janice's middle-aged face, framed in a splashy bandanna not hers either.

"Also, damn, I'm so mad at myself, I left my lucky pen on the upstairs table back home. And there's no time to drive back for it, in all this rain."

"Maybe you're taking all this too seriously," he says. "What're you trying to prove to the teacher?"

"I'm trying to prove something to myself," she says. "Tell Pru I've left and that I'll be back at ten-thirty, maybe eleven if we decide to go out for beers afterward. You go to bed and rest. You look tired, honey." She gives him in parting a pointed little fingering kiss, grateful for something. Glad to go. All these other male advisers she suddenly has – Charlie, Mr. Lister, the new accountant – seem an invasion as devious as that televised catheter nudging forward into his shadowy webbed heart.

The murmur around the house sounds louder after Janice's footsteps on the porch and the sound of the Camry starting up. She has a panicky way of racing the engine before she puts a car in gear, and usually jumps off like a drag-racer. Janice is wrapped in Pru's cherry raincoat, and he is the man of Pru's house.

On the set in the living room, he and Judy watch the end of ABC news on Channel 6 (that Peter Jennings: here he is telling Americans all about America and he still says "aboot" for "about," he's so Canadian) and then, with Judy punching the remote control, they skip back and forth between jeopardy! and Simon and Simon and the seven-o'clock syndicated reruns of Cosby and Cheers. Pru drifts downstairs, having put Roy down, and into the kitchen to tidy up totally after Janice's half-ass job and then through the dining room checking that all the windows are shut against the rain and into the sun room where she picks a few dead leaves off the plants on Ma Springer's old iron table there. Finally she comes into the living room and sits on the old sofa beside him, while Judy in the Barcalounger channel-surfs. On the Cosby Show rerun, the Huxtables are having one of those child-rearing crises bound to dissolve like a lump of sugar in their warm good humor, their mutual lovingness: Vanessa and her friends get all excited about entering a local dance contest, with lip synching, and get instruction from an old black nightclub pianist and when the time comes to demonstrate for their parents in their living room they bump and grind with a sexuality so startling and premature that Mrs. Huxtable, Claire, in real life the terrific Phylicia Rashad, married to the frog-eyed black sports commentator, restores decency, stopping the record and sending the girls back upstairs, yet with that smile of hers, that wide white slightly lippy black woman's smile, implying that indecency is all right, in its place, its wise time, as in one of those mutually ogling Huxtable snuggles that end many a Cosby Show. Beside him on the sofa Pru is staring at the screen with a jewel, a tear glittering in a comer of the eye toward him. From the Barcalounger Judy snaps the channel to a shot of tropical sky and a huge mottled turtle turning its head slowly while a Godlike voiceover intones, "… determined to defend its breeding grounds."

"Goddamn it, Judy, put it back to the Cosbys right now," Harry says, furious less for himself than for Pru, to whom the show seemed to be a vision of lost possibilities.

Judy, startled just like the girls on the show, does put it back, but by now it's a commercial, and she cries, as the insult sinks in, "I want Daddy back! Everybody else is mean to me!"

She starts to cry, Pru rises to comfort her, Rabbit retreats in disgrace. He circles the house, listening to the rain, marvelling that he once lived here, remembering the dead and the dead versions of the living who lived here with him, finding a half-full jar of dry-roasted cashews on a high kitchen shelf and, on the kitchen television set, a cable rerun of last night's playoff game between the Knicks and the Bulls. He hates the way Michael Jordan's pink tongue rolls around in his mouth as he goes up for a dunk. He has seen Jordan interviewed, he's an intelligent guy, why does he swing his tongue around like an imbecile? The few white players there are on the floor look pathetically naked, their pasty sweat, their fuzzy armpit hair; it seems incredible to Harry that he himself was ever out there in this naked game, though in those days the shorts were a little longer and the tank-top armholes not quite so big. He has finished off the jar of cashews without noticing and suddenly the basketball-Jordan changing direction in midair not once but twice and sinking an awkward fall-back jumper with Ewing's giant hand square in his face -pains him with its rubbery activity, an extreme of bodily motion his nerves but not his muscles can remember. He needs a Nitrostat from the little bottle in the coat jacket in that shallow closet upstairs. The hauntedness of the downstairs is getting to him. He turns off the kitchen light and holds his breath passing Ma Springer's old breakfront in the darkened dining room, where the wallpaper crawls with the streetlight projections of rain running down the windows.