John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

Benny is blushing. He's not used to talking this way with a woman. "Maybe so," he admits. "If it's not a mortal sin, you don't have to confess it unless you want to."

"That saves the priest a lot of embarrassment," Elvira tells him. "Suppose no matter what you two use Maria kept getting knocked up, what would you do? You don't want that precious little girl of yours to feel crowded, you can give her the best the way things are. What's more important, quality of life for the family you already have, or a little knot of protein the size of a termite?"

Benny has a kind of squeaking girlish voice that excitement can bring out. "Lay off, Ellie. Don't make me think about it. You're offending my religion. I wouldn't mind a couple more kids, what the hell. I'm young."

Harry tries to help him out. "Who's to say what's the quality of life?" he asks Elvira. "Maybe the extra kid is the one that's going to invent the phonograph."

"Not out of the ghetto he isn't. He's the kid that mugs you for crack money sixteen years later."

"You don't have to get racist about it," Harry says, having been mugged in a sense by a white kid, his own son.

"It's the opposite of racist, it's realistic," Elvira tells him. "It's the poor black teenage mother whose right to abortion these crazy fundamentalist jerks are trying to take away."

"Yeah," he responds, "it's the poor black teenage mother who wants to have the baby, because she never had a doll to play with and she loves the idea of sticking the taxpayer with another welfare bill. Up yours, Whitey – that's what the birth statistics are saying."

"Now who's sounding racist?"

"Realistic, you mean."

Relaxed in the aftermath of love, and grateful to be still alive, he had asked Pru how queer she thought Nelson was, with all this palling around with Lyle and Slim. Her breath, in the watery light from the window, was made visible by fine jets of inhaled cigarette smoke as she thoughtfully answered, only a little taken aback by the question, "No, Nelson likes girls. He's a mamma's boy but he takes after you that way. They just look bigger to him than to you." Coming into the room less than an hour later, Janice had sniffed the cigarette smoke but he had pretended to be too sleepy to discuss it. Pru took the second butt away with the condom but the first one, drowned over on the windowsill, was by next morning so saturated and flattened it could have been there for ages, a historical relic of Nelson and Melanie. Rabbit sighs and says, "You're right, Elvira. People should have a choice. Even if they make bad ones." From the room he was in with Pru his mind moves to the one he had shared with Ruth, one flight up on Summer Street, and the last time he saw it: she told him she was pregnant and called him Mr. Death and he begged her to have the baby. Have it, have it you say: how? Will you marry me? She mocked him, but pleaded too, and in the end, yes, to be realistic, probably did have the abortion. If you can't work it out, I'm dead to you; I'm dead to you and this baby of yours is dead too. That nurse with the round face and sweet disposition in St. Joseph's had nothing to do with him, just like Ruth told him the last time he saw her, in her farmhouse ten years ago. He had had one daughter and she died; God didn't trust him with another. He says aloud, "Schmidt did what Rose is too dumb to: quit, when you've had it. Take your medicine, don't prolong the agony with all these lawyers."

Benny and Elvira look at him, alanned by how his mind has wandered. But he enjoys his sensation, of internal roaming. When he first came to the lot as Chief Sales Rep, after Fred Springer had died, he was afraid he couldn't fill the space. But now as an older man, with his head so full of memories, he fills it without even trying.

Through the plate glass he sees a couple in their thirties, maybe early forties, everybody looks young to him now, out on the lot among the cars, stooping to peek into the interiors and at the factory sticker on the windows. The woman is plump and white and in a halter top showing her lardy arms, and the man darker, much darker – Hispanics come in all these shades – and skinny, in a grape-colored tank top cut off at the midriff: Their ducking heads move cautiously, as if afraid of an Indian ambush out in the prairie of glittering car roofs, a pioneer couple in their way, at least in this part of the world where the races don't much mix.

Benny asks Elvira, "You want 'em, or do I?"

She says, "You do. If the woman needs a little extra, bring her in and I'll chat her up. But don't aim it all at her, just because she's white. They're both going to be miffed if you snub the man."

"Whaddeya think I am, a bigot?" Benny says mock-comically, but his demeanor is sad and determined as he walks out of the air-conditioning into the June humidity and heat.

"You shouldn't ride him about his religion," Harry tells Elvira.

"I don't. I just think that damn Pope he's got ought to be put in jail for what he does to women."

Peggy Fosnacht, Rabbit remembers, before she had a breast cut off and then upped and died, had been wild with anger toward the Pope. Anger is what gives you cancer, he has read somewhere. If you've been around long enough, he reflects, you've heard it all, the news and the commentary both, churned like the garbage in a Disposall that doesn't drain, the media every night trying to whip you up into a frenzy so you'll run out and buy all the depressing stuff they advertise, laxatives and denture adhesive cream, Fixodent and Sominex and Tylenol and hemorrhoid medicine and mouthwash against morning mouth. Why does the evening news assume the people who watch it are in such decrepit plugged-up shape? It's enough to make you switch the channel. The commercials revolt him, all that friendly jawing among these folksy crackerbarrel types about rectal itching and burning, and the one of the young/old beautiful woman in soft focus stretching so luxuriously in her white bathrobe because she's just taken a shit and all those people in the Ex-Lax ad saying "Good morning" one after the other so you can't help picturing the world filling up with our smiling American excrement, we'll have to pay poor third-world countries to dump it pretty soon, like toxic waste. "Why pick on the Pope?" Harry asks. "Bush is just as bad, anti-choice."

"Yes, but he'll change when the women start voting Republicans out. There's no way to vote the Pope out."

"Do you ever get the feeling," he asks her, "now that Bush is in, that we're kind of on the sidelines, that we're sort of like a big Canada, and what we do doesn't much matter to anybody else? Maybe that's the way it ought to be. It's a kind of relief, I guess, not to be the big cheese."

Elvira has decided to be amused. She fiddles with one of her Brazil-nut earrings and looks up at him slantwise. "You matter to everybody, Harry, if that's what you're hinting at."

This is the most daughterly thing she has ever said to him. He feels himself blush. "I wasn't thinking of me, I was thinking of the country. You know who I blame? The old Ayatollah, for calling us the Great Satan. It's like he put the evil eye on us and we shrank. Seriously. He really stuck it to us, somehow."

"Don't live in a dream world, Harry. We still need you down here."

She goes out to the lot, where a quartet of female teenagers have showed up, all in jackets of stone-washed denim. Who knows, even teenagers these days have money enough for a Toyota. Maybe it's an all-girl rock band, shopping for a van to tour in. Harry wanders in to the office where the visiting accountants are nesting, day after day, in piles of paper. The one in charge has a rubbery tired face with dark rings under his eyes, and the assistant seems to be a kind of moron, a simpleton at speaking anyway, with not enough back to his head. As if to make up for any deficiency he always wears a clean white shirt with a tight necktie, pinned to his chest with a tieclip.