John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

"But it's cut too short for Uncle Sam. I would have let it grow out if I'd known."

"Well," she says, "why wouldn't Uncle Sam have a modern haircut? He's not dead, is he?"

He tests the hat without the wig and says, "It does feel better, actually."

"And frankly, Harry, the wig on you is somehow alarming. It makes you look like a very big red-faced woman."

"Look, I'm doing this for our granddaughter, there's no need to get insulting."

"It's not insulting, it's interesting. I never saw your female side before. I bet you would have made a nicer woman than either your mother or Mim. They should have been men, both of them."

Mom was mean to Janice from the moment he first brought her home from Kroll's, and Mim once stole Charlie Stavros from her, or so Janice interpreted it. "I'm getting hot and itchy in this outfit," Harry says. "Let's try the goatee."

The goatee in place, Janice says, "Oh, yes. It slims your face right down. I wonder why you never grew a beard." There is this subtle past tense that keeps creeping into her remarks about him. "Mr. Lister is growing a beard now, and it makes him look a lot less doleful. He has these sagging jowls."

"I don't want to hear about that creep." He adds, "When I talk, the stickum doesn't feel like enough."

"It must be, it's gone through a lot of other parades."

"That's its problem, you dope. Is there any way to renew the stickum?"

"Just don't move your chin too much. I could call up Doris Eberhardt; when she was married to Kaufmann they were big into amateur theatricals."

"Don't get that pushy bitch on my case. Maybe somebody at the parade will have some spare stickum."

But the mustering of the parade is a confused and scattered business, held on the grounds of the old Mt. Judge High School, now the junior high school and slated to be torn down because of the asbestos in it everywhere and the insurance rates on the wooden floors. When Harry went there, they all just breathed the asbestos and took their chances on the floors catching fire. There are marching bands and antique cars and 4-H floats and veterans in their old uniforms all milling around on the asphalt of the parking lot and the brown grass of the baseball outfield, with the only organizing principle provided by men and women in green T-shirts stencilled MT. JUDGE INDEPENDENCE DAY COMMITTEE and those plastic truck-driver caps with a bill in front and a panel of mesh at the back. Looking to be told where to go, Rabbit wanders in this area where long ago he had roamed with wet-combed duck-tailed hair and a corduroy shirt tight across his back, the sleeves folded back and, out of basketball season, a cigarette pack squaring the shirt pocket. He expects to come across his old girlfriend, Mary Ann, as she had been then, in saddle shoes and white socks and a short pleated cheerleader's skirt, her calves straight and smooth and round-muscled between the skirt and the socks, and her face, with the dimple in one cheek and the touch of acne on her forehead, springing into joyful recognition at the sight of him. Instead, strange people with puzzled Eighties faces keep asking directions, because he is dressed as Uncle Sam and should know. He has to keep telling them he doesn't know anything.

The old high school, built in the Twenties of orange brick, had a tall windowless wall at the back, across from a board-and-tarpaper equipment shed long since torn down, and this black and gravelly area has profound associations for him, a power in its mute bricks and secluding space, for it was here after school and until twilight called you home that the more questing and footloose of the town's children tended to gather, girls as well as boys, hanging out, shooting baskets at the hoop attached to the blank brickwork (flat on the wall like those in the gym in Oriole), necking against the torn-tarpaper boards of the equipment shed, talking (the girls held by the boys' braced arms as in a row of soft cages), teasing, passing secrets, feeling their way, avoiding going home, so that the gritty leftover space here behind the school was charged with a solemn excitement, the questing energy of adolescents. Now in this area, repaved and cleaned up, the shed and backboards gone, Rabbit comes upon Judy's Girl Scout troop, some of them in uniform and some posed in costume on a flatbed truck, a float illustrating Liberty, the tallest and prettiest girl in a white bedsheet and spiked crown holding a big bronze book and gilded torch, and others grouped around her cardboard pedestal with their faces painted red and brown and black and yellow to represent the races of mankind, the faces painted because there aren't any Indian or Negro or Asian little girls in Mt. Judge, at least any that have joined the Girl Scouts.

Judy is one of those in badged and braided khaki uniform around the truck, and she is so amazed to see her grandfather in his towering costume that she takes his hand, as if to tie him to the earth, to reality. He has difficulty bending his head to see her, for fear that his top hat might fall off. As if addressing the distant backstop of the baseball diamond, he asks her, "How does the goatee look? The little beard, Judy."

"Fine, Grandpa. You scared me at first. I didn't know who you were."

"It feels to me like it might fall off any second."

"It doesn't look that way. I love the big stripy pants. Doesn't the vest squeeze your tummy?"

"That's the least of my problems. Judy, listen. Think you could do me a favor? It just occurred to me, they make a Scotch tape now that's sticky on both sides. If I gave you a couple dollars think you could run over to the little store across Central and get me some?" Always, under names and managements that shift with the years, there has been a store across from the school to sell its students bubble gum and candy and cap-guns and caps and tablets and cigarettes and skin magazines and whatever else young people thought they had to have. With difficulty, keeping his head stiffly upright, he digs through the layers of his costume to his wallet in a pouchy side pocket of the striped pants and, holding it up to his face, digs out two one-dollar bills. Just in case, he adds another. Things these days always cost more than he expects.

"Suppose it's not open because of the holiday!"

"It'll be open. It was always open."

"Suppose the parade starts; I got to be on the truck!"

"No it won't, the parade can't start without me. Come on, Judy. Think of all I've done for you. Think of how I saved you on the boat that time. Who got me into this damn parade in the first place? You did!"

He doesn't dare look down, lest his hat come off, but he can hear from her voice she is near tears. Her hair makes a reddish blur in the bottom of his vision. "O.K., I'll try, but…"

"Remember," he says, and as his chin stiffens in admonishment. he feels his goatee loosen, "sticky on both sides. Scotch makes it. Run, honey!" His heart is racing; he gropes through his clothes to make sure he remembered to bring the little bottle of nitroglycerin. He finds its life-giving nugget deep in the pouchy pocket. When he brings his fingers to his face, to tamp down the goatee, he sees they are trembling. If his goatee doesn't stick, he won't be Uncle Sam, and the entire parade will flounder; it will jam up here on the school grounds forever. He walks around with little steps, ignoring everybody, trying to quiet his heart. This is aggravating.

When Judy at last comes back, panting, she tells him, "They were dumb. They mostly sell only food now. Junky things like Cheez Doodles. The only Scotch tape they have is sticky on one side only. I got some anyway. Was that O.K.?"

Drum rolls sound on the parking lot, scattered at first, a few kids impatiently clowning around, and then in unison, gathering mass, an implacable momentum. The motors of antique cars and trucks bearing floats are starting up, filling the holiday air with blue exhaust. "O.K.," Harry says, unable to look down at his granddaughter lest his hat fall off, pocketing the tape and the change from three dollars, pressed upon him from below. Estranged from his costumed body, he feels on stilts, his feet impossibly small.