Rabbit at rest (16 page)

"Which state would you work in?"

"Pennsylvania, obviously. Florida is for vacations."

He doesn't like the idea. It has something fishy and
uncomfortable about it, like that batch of November stats from
Springer Motors. "What work would you do?"

"I don't know. Not work at the lot, Nelson hates us to get in
his way. Sell something, maybe. My father was one and my son is one
so why shouldn't I be one? A salesperson."

Rabbit doesn't know what to answer. After all these years of his
grudgingly sticking with her, he can't imagine him begging her to
stick with him, though this is his impulse. He changes
conversational partners. "Judy. How did the movie come out?"

"Good. The man from the wedding believed her story and she got
an office of her own with a window and her nasty boss broke her leg
and lost the man they both liked."

"Poor Sigourney," Harry says. "She should have stuck with the
gorillas." He stands way above his own little herd in the theater
lobby, where the ushers move back and forth with green garbage bags
and red velvet ropes, getting ready for the five-o'clock
shows. "So, guys. What shall we do next? How about miniature golf?
How about driving up to St. Petersburg, over this fantastic long
bridge they have?"

Roy's lower lip starts to tremble, and he has such trouble
getting his words out that Judy translates for him. "He says he
wants to go home."

"Who doesn't?" Janice concurs. "Grandpa was just teasing.
Haven't you learned that about your grandfather yet, Roy? He's a
terrible tease."

Is he? Harry has never thought of himself that way. He sometimes
says a thing to try it out, like a head fake, to open up a little
space.

Judy smiles knowingly. "He pretends to be mean," she says.

"Grrr," Grandpa says.

Forty minutes of southwestern Florida rush-hour traffic
bring them to the Deleon exit and Pindo Palm Boulevard and the
nicely guarded entrance of Valhalla Village. Up in 413, Pru and
Nelson look bathed and refreshed and act as if nothing has ever
happened. They listen to the travellers' tales, foremost the
incredible story of how Grandpa ate the grungy birdfood, and Pru
sets about making dinner, telling Janice to take the weight off her
legs, and Nelson settles on the sofa with a child on each knee in
front of the local evening news, giving Harry a pang of jealousy
and a sensation of injustice. The surly kid spends the whole day
balling this big redhead and then is treated like a hero by these
two brats Harry went and knocked himself out for.

Rabbit sits in the chair across the glass table from the sofa
and delicately needles his son. ` Ja catch up finally on your
sleep?" he asks.

Nelson gets the dig and looks over at him with his dark swarmy
eyes a little flat across the top, like a cross cat's. "I went into
a place to get a bite to eat last night and stayed at the bar too
long," he tells his father.

"Ya do that often?"

With a roll of his eyeballs Nelson indicates the children's
heads right under his face, watching television but perhaps also
listening. Little pitchers. "Naa," he allows. "Just when I'm tense
it helps to take off once in a while. Pru understands. Nothing
happens."

Rabbit holds up a generous hand. "None of my business, right?
You're twenty-one plus. It's just you could have called. I
mean, a considerate person would have called. None of us could
enjoy dinner, not knowing what had happened to you. We could hardly
eat."

"I tried
to call, Dad, but I don't have your number
down here memorized and the place I was in some sleazeball had
stolen the phone book."

"That's your story this evening? This morning your mother told
me you did call here but we were down to dinner."

"That, too. I tried once from a phone along the highway and then
in this place there was no phone book."

"Where was the place? Think I'd know it?"

"No idea where," Nelson says, and smiles into the television
flicker. "I get lost down here, it's like one big business strip.
One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look
unspoiled."

The local news commentator is giving the manatee update.
"Manatee herds continue to populate both warm-weather feeding
areas and traditional winter refuges as fair weather and
eightydegree temperatures continue. A general waterways alert is
out: boaters, cut your throttle to half-speed. Throughout the
weekend, encounters with manatees remain likely in widely varied
habitats around Southwest Florida."

"They say that," Rabbit says, "but I never encounter one."

"That's because you're never on the water," Nelson says. "It's
stupid, to be down here like you are and not own a boat."

"What do I want a boat for? I hate the water."

"You'd get to love it. You could fish all over the Gulf. You
don't have enough to do, Dad."

"Who wants to fish, ifyou're halfway civilized? Dangling some
dead meat in front of some poor brainless thing and then pulling
him up by a hook in the roof of his mouth? Cruellest thing people
do is fish."

The blond newscaster, with his hair moussed down so it's stiff
as a wig, tells them, "An adult manatee with calf was reported at
midday on Wednesday heading inland along Cape Coral's Bimini Canal
about one-half mile from the Bimini Basin. Sightings like
this indicate that while a large number of the Caloosahatchee herd
have moved back out into the open waters of the river and back
bays, some animals may still be encountered in and near sheltered
waterways. To report dead or injured manatees, call
1-800-3421821."
The number rolls across some
footage of a manatee family sluggishly rolling around in the water.
"And," he concludes in that sonorous way television announcers have
when they see the commercial break coming, "to report a manatee
sighting, call the Manatee Hotline at
332-3092."

To refresh his rapport with Judy, Rabbit calls over, "How'd you
like to have a single big tooth like that mamma manatee?" But the
girl doesn't seem to hear, her fair little face radiantly riveted
on one of those ads with California raisins singing and dancing
like black men. In a row like the old Mousketeers. Where are they
now? Middle-aged parents themselves. Jimmie died years ago,
he remembers reading. Died young. It happens. Roy is sucking his
thumb and nodding off against Nelson's chest. Nelson is still
wearing the white-collared, pink-striped shirt he wore
down in the plane, as if he doesn't own anything as foolish as a
shortsleeved shirt.

"Tomorrow," Rabbit loudly promises he doesn't know who, "I'll
get out on the water. Judy and I will rent a Sunfish. I have it all
set up with Ed Silberstein's son over at the Bayview Hotel."

"I don't know," Nelson says. "How safe are those things?"

Rabbit is insulted. "They're like toys, for Chrissake. If they
tip over, you just stand on the centerboard and up they come. Kids
ten, eleven years old race them over in the Bay all the time."

"Yeah, but Judy's not even nine yet, not for a couple weeks. And
no offense, Dad, you're way into double digits. And no sailor, from
what you just said."

"O.K., you do something with your kids tomorrow. You entertain
'em. I spent over eight hours at it today and dropped around eighty
bucks."

Nelson tells him, "You're supposed to want to do things like
that. You're their dear old
grandfather, remember?"
He
softens, slightly. "Sunfishing's a nice idea. Just make sure she
wears a life jacket."

"Why don't you all come along? You, Pru, Sleeping Beauty here.
It's a helluva beach. They keep it clean."

"Maybe we will, if I can. I'm expecting a call or two."

"From the -lot? Can't they even manage for half a
week?"

Nelson is drifting away, hiding behind the distraction of
television. One of the new Toyota ads is playing, with the
blackwoman car salesman. At the end, she and the customer jump into
the air and are frozen there. "No," Nelson is saying, so softly
Rabbit can hardly hear. "It's a contact I made down here."

"A contact? What about?"

Nelson puts his finger to his lip, to signal they should not
wake Roy.

Rabbit gets out his needle again. "Speaking of digits, I keep
trying to remember what seemed off about that November statement.
Maybe the number of used seemed down for this time of year. Usually
it's up, along with the new models."

"Money's scared, with Reagan going out," Nelson answers, ever so
softly. "Also, Lyle's put in a new accounting system, maybe they
were deferred into the next month and will show up in the December
stats. Don't worry about it, Dad. You and Mom just enjoy Florida.
You've worked hard all your life. You've earned a rest."

And the boy, as if to seal in the possibility of irony, kisses
little Judy ón the top of her shiny-sleek,
carrot-colored head. The blue light from the set penetrates
the triangular patch of thinning hair between Nelson's deepening
temples. A hostage he's given to fortune. Your children's losing
battle with time seems even sadder than your own.

"Dinner, guys and gals," Pru calls from Janice's aqua
kitchen.

Her meal is a more thought-out affair than Janice's ever
are, with a spicy clear sort of minestrone soup to begin, and a
salad on a separate plate, and a fresh white fish, broiled on the
stove grill attachment that Janice never takes the trouble to use.
Janice has become a great warmer-up of leftovers in the
microwave, and a great buyer over at Winn Dixie of frozen
meatloaves and stuffed peppers and seafood casseroles in their
little aluminum pans that can be tossed into the trashmasher dirty.
She was always a minimal housewife and now the technology has
caught up with her. The vegetables Pru serves, wild rice and little
tender peas and baby onions, have a delicate pointed taste that
Harry feels is aimed at him, a personal message the others consume
without knowing. "Delicious," he tells Pru.

Janice explains to Harry, "Pru went into this little narrow fish
store behind Eckerd's where I never thought to go. Our generation,"
she explains to Pru, "didn't have that much to do with fish. Except
I remember Daddy used to bring home a quart of shucked Chesapeake
oysters as a treat for himself sometimes."

Pru tells Harry in her personally aimed, slightly scratchy Ohio
voice, "Oily deepwater fish, bluefish especially, have lots of EPA
in their oil, that's a kind of acid that actually thins your blood
and lowers the triglyceride level."

She would take care of me,
Harry thinks. Pleasurably he
complains, "What's everybody always worried about my cholesterol
level for? I must look awful."

"You're a big guy," Pru says, and the assessment pierces him
like a love dart, "and as we all age the proportion of fat in our
bodies goes up, and the amount of LDL, that's low-density
lipoprotein, the bad kind of fat, goes up and that of the
highdensity, good kind stays the same, so the ratio goes up, and
the danger of Apo B attaching to your arteries goes up with it. And
we don't exercise the way people used to, when everybody had farms
so the fats don't get burned up."

"Teresa, you know so
much,"
Janice says, not quite
liking being upstaged and using Pru's baptismal name as a tiny
check, to keep her in place.

The other woman lowers her eyes and drops her voice. "You
remember, I took that course at the Brewer Penn State extension. I
was thinking, when Roy gets into school full-time, I should
have something to do, and thought-maybe nutrition, or
dietetics . . ."

"I want to get a job, too," Janice says, annoying Harry with her
intrusion into Pru's demure lecture about his very own, he felt,
fatty insides. "The movie we saw this afternoon, all these women
working in New York skyscrapers, made me so
jealous."
Janice didn't use to dramatize herself. Ever since her mother died
and they bought this condo, she has been building up an irritating
confidence, an assumption that the world is her stage and her
performance is going pretty well. Around Valhalla Village, she is
one of the younger women and on several committees. Just not being
senile is considered great down here. When they went to the
Drechsels' seder, she turned out to be the youngest and had to ask
the four questions.

Harry jealously asks Pru, "Does Nelson get the benefit of all
this nutrition?"

Pru says, "He doesn't need it, really - he hardly ever
eats, and he has all this nervous energy. He could use more lipids.
But the children - they say now that after two in most
American children the cholesterol level is too high. When they did
autopsies on young men killed in the Korean War,
three-quarters of them had too much fat in their coronary
arteries."

Harry's chest is beginning to bind, to ache. His insides are
like the sea to him, dark and wet and full of things he doesn't
want to think about.

Nelson has done nothing to contribute to this conversation but
sniff occasionally. The kid's nose seems to run all the time, and
the line of bare skin above his mouse-colored mustache looks
chafed. Now he pushes back from his half-eaten fish and
announces complacently, "The way I figure, if one thing doesn't
kill you, another will." Though he rests his palms on the edge of
the table, his hands are trembling, the nerves snapping.

"It's not
what
we worry about, it's
when,"
his
father tells him.

Janice looks alarmed, her eyes shuttling from one to the other.
"Let's all be cheerful," she says.

For dessert, Pru serves them frozen yogurt - much better
for you than ice cream, with no cholesterol at all. When the meal
is done, Harry hangs around the kitchen counter long enough to dig
into the cookie drawer and stuff himself with three quick vanilla
Cameos and a broken pretzel. Down here they don't have the variety
of pretzels you get in Brewer but Sunshine sells a box of thick
ones that are not too tasteless. He has an impulse to help Janice
with the dishes and suppresses it; it's just throwing plates into
the dishwasher and what else did she contribute to the meal? His
feet hurt from all that walking they did today; he has a couple of
toes that over the years have twisted enough in his shoes to dig
their nails into each other if he doesn't keep them cut close. Pru
and Roy and Nelson retreat into their room and he sits a while and
watches while Judy, the remote control in hand, bounces back and
forth between
The Cosby Show,
some ice capades, and a
scare documentary about foreigners buying up American businesses,
and then between
Cheers
and a drama about saving a
fourteenyear-old girl from becoming a prostitute like her
mother. So many emergencies, Harry thinks, so much canned laughter,
so many actors' tears, all this effort to be happy, to be brave, to
be loved, all this wasted effort. Television's tireless energy
gnaws at him. He sighs and laboriously rises. His body sags around
his heart like a tent around a pole. He tells Judy, "Better pack it
in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we're going to go to the
beach and sailing." But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps
that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement
about anything. These four guests are a strain; he looks forward to
their departure Saturday, the last day of 1988.