Rabbit at rest (11 page)

It's not the right question, at least in front of the kids.
Janice and Pru glance toward one another and then Pru volunteers,
"He's out doing a few errands in the car." Down here they only have
one car, the Camry, leaving Harry's Celica back in Penn Park. It
works out, since most everything they need -drugs, magazines,
haircuts, bathing suits, tennis balls - they can find within
the Valhalla complex. The little food commissary in Building C
charges airport prices, so Janice usually does a big shopping once
a week at the Winn Dixie a half-mile down Pindo Palm
Boulevard. About once a week also they visit their bank in downtown
Deleon, on a plaza two blocks back from the beachfront where
elevator music is always playing, both inside the bank and outside;
they must have speakers hidden in the trees. Maybe twice a month
they go to a movie at a cineplex in a giant mall over on Palmetto
Palm Boulevard two miles away. But days at a stretch go by when the
car just sits there in its parking slot, attracting rust and white
splotches of birdshit.

"What kind of errands does he have to do?"

"Oh Harry," Janice says. "People need things. He doesn't like
the kind of beer you buy. He likes a special kind of dental floss,
tape instead of thread. And he likes to drive around; he gets
claustrophobic."

"We all get claustrophobic," he tells her. "Most of us don't go
stealing cars about it."

"You look exhausted. Did you lose?"

"How'd you guess?"

"You always lose. He plays with these three Jewish men," she
explains to her daughter-in-law, "and they always take
twenty dollars off of him."

"Don't be so prejudiced, you sound like your mother. And for
your information I win as often as not."

"I never hear about it when you do. They keep telling you how
good you are, and then take your money."

"You dope, one of them lost twenty dollars
with
me, he
was my partner!"

Serenely she says, just like her mother, addressing nobody in
particular, "They probably give it back to him; they're all in
cahoots."

It occurs to him that she is saying these disagreeable and
absurd things as a distraction from Nelson's rude and mysterious
absence.

Judy says, "Grandpa, come take Roy's hand and play. He doesn't
know how to even hold the cards and he's being fussy."

Roy obligingly proves her point by throwing the cards down on
the round glass table, much as this morning he threw the spoon. "I
hate games," he says, with a curious precision, like one of those
old-fashioned dolls that would say a little speech when you
pulled a string that came out of their backs.

Judy swiftly whomps him, with the hand not holding her cards.
She chops with her fist at his shoulders and neck, and when he
squalls in self-defense explains to him, "You messed up the
trick so now nobody can play. And I was going to shoot the moon!"
Pru neatly fans her hand face down on the table and with the other
arm, a downy arm oflong loving bones, pulls the wailing little boy
against her chest; seeing this, Judy flares into jealousy, goes
pinkeyed the way women do before they decide to cry, and
races off toward Harry and Janice's bedroom.

Pru smiles wanly, looking exhausted herself. "Everybody's tired
and cranky," she sort of sings, over the top of Roy's head so Judy
can hear it too.

Janice stands, a bit wobbly for a second. She knocks the glass
'table with her shin, and next to her abandoned hand of Hearts an
orange juice glass half full of Campari shivers, the scarlet
circlet of it, making him think of the pond when Ed's ball skipped
in. She is back into her tennis dress. Dried sweat-stains on
its side and beneath the arms are outlined like continents on a
very faint map. "Maybe we made them do too much," she explains to
Harry. "We did this enormous shopping, went to lunch at Burger
King, came back here, Pru took them for swimming and shufeboard for
two hours, and then Judy and I went over to the tennis courts and
knocked the ball around."

"How'd she do?" he asks.

Janice laughs as if surprised. "Terrific, actually. She's going
to be a jock, just like you."

Rabbit goes into his bedroom. If nobody but Janice were here, he
would lie on this bed, push his eyes through a few pages of the
history book she gave him for Christmas, close his eyes on the
sound of the bird dryly chirping in the Norfolk pine, and succumb
to the great heaviness of being. But Judy has beat him to his own
king-size bed with its jade-green fitted coverlet. She
is curled up and hiding her face. He lies down close to the edge
and lets her press her knees against his presence. He admires her
hair, the amazing protein perfection of it, the long pale strands
that in sun deepen to a shiny orange. "Better rest up for Bingo
tonight," he says.

"If Roy goes I'm not going," she says.

"Don't be down on Roy," he tells her. "He's a good scout."

"He's
not.
I was going to shoot the moon. I'd already
took the Queen of Spades, and I had the Ace of Hearts and the Jack
and some others and then he ruins it all and Mommy thinks that's so
cute. He gets all the attention and everything ever since he was
born, just because he's a boy!"

He admits, "It's tough. I was in your shoes, except it was
reversed. I had a sister instead of a brother."

"Didn't you hate her?" She removes her face from her folded arms
and stares up at him with rubbed-looking green eyes.

He answers, "No. I guess, to be honest, I loved her. I loved
Mim." The truth of this shocks him: he realizes how few others in
his life he has loved so bluntly, without something of scorn, as
his little wiry Mim. Her face seemed a narrower, harder version of
his, with the same short upper lip, only a brunette, and a girl.
Himself transposed into quite another key, and yet the melody
recognizable. He remembers the sticky grip of her fingers in his
when Mom and Pop would lead them on their Sunday walk, up the
mountain to the Pinnacle Hotel and then back along the edge of the
quarry; Mim hung on and roused protectiveness in him and perhaps
used it up for everybody else, for every other female. Mim as his
own blood sister had a certain unforced claim over him no woman
since has been able to establish.

"Was she younger than you or older?"

"Younger. Younger even than me than Roy is than you. But she was
a girl and girls are less ornery than boys. Though I guess Mim was
ornery in her way. Once she got to be sixteen, she put my parents
through hell."

"Grandpa, what's `ornery'?"

"Oh, you know. Mean. Contrary. Rebellious."

"Like Daddy?"

"I don't think of your daddy as ornery, just, what's the word?
- uptight. People get to him more than they do to most
people. He's sensitive." Formulating even this much thickens his
tongue and blurs his mind. "Judy, let's have a contest. You lie
over there and I'll lie here and we'll see who can fall asleep
soonest."

"Who'll be the judge?"

"Your mother," he says, letting his moccasins fall from his feet
onto the floor over the edge of the bed. He closes his eyes on the
posterlike Florida sunshine and in the intimate red of his brain
envisions swooping on a bicycle down Jackson Road and then Potter
Avenue with Mim on the handlebars of his rattly old blue Elgin, she
maybe six and he twelve, if they hit a rock or pothole she'll go
flying with him and the bike on top of her grinding her into the
asphalt and ruining her pretty face forever, a woman's face is her
fortune, but in her faith in him she sings, he can't remember the
song, just the sensation of snatches of words flicked back into his
ears as her long black hair whips against his eyes and mouth,
making the bicycle ride more dangerous still. He led Mim into
danger but always led her out. Shoo-fly pie. That was one of
the songs she used to sing around the house, day after day until it
drove them all crazy.
Shoo-fly pie and apple pan dowdy,
makes your eyes light up, your tummy say "howdy!"
And then she
would do a thing with her eyes that would make the whole rest of
the family laugh.

He feels Judy ease her weight from his side and with that
exaggerated, creaking stealth of small children move around the
foot of the bed and out of the room. The door clicks, female voices
whisper. Their whispers merge with a dream, involving an enormous
scoop-shaped space, an amphitheater, an audience somehow for
whom he is performing, though there is no other person in the
dream, just this sense of presence, of echoing august dreadfully
serious presence. He wakes frightened, with dribble down from one
comer of his mouth. He feels like a drum that has just been struck.
The space he was dreaming of he now recognizes as his rib cage, as
if he has become his own heart, a huffing puffing pumping man at
mid-court, waiting for the whistle and the highreaching
jump-off. At some point in his sleep his chest began to ache,
a stale sorrowful ache he associates with the pathetically bad way
he played golf this afternoon, unable to concentrate, unable to
loosen up. He wonders how long he has slept. The poster of sunshine
and palm tops and distant pink red-roofed buildings pasted on
the outer skin of the sliding windows has dulled in tint, gone
shadowy, and the sounds of golf, its purposeful concussions
alternating with intent silence and involuntary cries of triumph or
disappointment, have subsided. And in the air outside, like the
fluttering tinsel above a used-car lot, birds of many makes
are calling to each other to wrap up the day. This hour or two
before supper, when play - the last round of Horse at the
basket out by the garage in the alley - used to be most
intense, has become nap time as he slowly sinks toward earth with
his wasting muscles and accumulating fat. He must lose some
weight.

Only Judy is in the living room. She is flicking silently back
and forth between channels. Faces, black in
The
Jeffersons,
white in Family Ties, imploringly pop into
visibility and then vanish amid shots of beer cans plunged into
slow-motion waterfalls, George Bush lugging a gun through
Texas underbrush, a Florida farmer gesturing toward his burnt
fields, a Scotland Yard detective doing a little lecture with a
diagram of an airplane's hold. "What's he saying?" Harry asks, but
even as he asks, the image is gone, replaced by another, of a
manatee being implanted with an electronic tracking device by a
male pony-tailed manatee-conservation freak. An
impatient rage within the child, a gluttony for images, brushes the
manatee away. "Two channels back," Harry begs. "About the Pan Am
plane."

"It was a bomb, silly," Judy says. "It had to be."

Children, they believe that headlines always happen to other
people. "For Chrissake, cool it with the channel-changer.
Lemme get a beer and I'll show you a neat card game. Where is
everybody?"

"Grandma went to her women's group, Mom put Roy down for his
nap."

"Your daddy -?" He thinks midway he shouldn't bring it up,
but the words are out.

Judy shrugs and finishes the sentence. "Hasn't checked in
yet."

It turns out she already knows how to play Rummy. In fact, she
catches him with his hand full of
three-of-a-kinds he was waiting to lay down when
he had gin. Caught. Their laughter brings Pru out of her bedroom,
in little white shorts her widened hips have stretched into
horizontal wrinkles. Her face has taken wrinkles from the pillow,
and seems a bit blurred and bloated by sleep, or a spell of crying.
How suggestible female flesh is. Her feet are long and bare, with
that chipped toenail polish. He asks his
daughter-in-law, "What's up?"

She too shrugs. "I guess we'll go to dinner when Janice comes
back. I'll feed Roy some applesauce to hold him."

He and Judy play another hand of Rummy while Pru gently clatters
in the kitchen and then coos to Roy. Evening down here comes
without much ceremony; suddenly the air beyond the balcony is gray
as if with fine fog, and sea-scent drifts in through the
sliding doors, and the sounds of birds and golf have gone away.
This is peace. He resents it when Janice comes back, with that
aggressive glow her women's group gives her. "Oh Harry, you men
have been so awful! Not only were we considered chattel, but all
those patriarchal religions tried to make us feel guilty about
menstruating. They said we were
unclean."

"Sorry," he says. "That was a crummy thing to do."

"That was Eve's basic sin, the lady professor told us," Janice
goes on, half to Pru. "Something about apples being the color of
blood, I couldn't quite follow it."

Harry interrupts, "By any chance are either of you two Eves like
me, sort of starving?"

"We bought you lots of healthy snacks," Pru says. "Apricots
dried without sulphur, unsalted banana chips."

"Is that what that stuff was in little plastic bags? I thought
it might be for Chinese food and I shouldn't touch it."

"Yes," Janice decides, "let's just go to dinner. We'll leave a
note for Nelson. Pru, any old dress. Evenings, they won't seat
shorts and men without jackets."

The Mead Hall, on the floor of Building B above Club Nineteen,
is a combination restaurant and function room. On the one hand,
there are menus with choices and prices, and waitresses in brief
gold outfits echoing Valhalla's ring-gold theme, that figures
here and there in the decor when the interior decorator remembered
it, and there is even a wine steward in a summer tux and a kind of
bicycle lock around his neck; on the other hand, as you go in a
bulletin board is loaded with announcements and leaflets and tinted
sheets about this or that set of lessons or lecture or concert or
square dance or travelogue you could attend in the area, and all
the time you're eating, on Wednesday and Saturday nights, Bingo
goes on on the other side of the room, run from a stage and
microphone somewhat out of sight behind an enormous flanged pillar
that holds up the room's starry curved ceiling. The ceiling is a
skylight for part of its breadth. That strange, scooping,
personified space in his dream: could it have been simply this
hall, conjured up because his stomach wanted food? Rabbit feels
like Marty Tothero, looking at the menu, faced for the thousandth
time with the same old choices among steak and veal, pork and ham,
shrimps and scallops, swordfish Cajun style and fillets of sole
stuffed with mussels, mushrooms, and artichoke hearts.