Rabbit at rest (46 page)

He protests, "Being people too!"

She tells him: "You know, Nelson, when you're little you think
your parents are God but now you're old enough to face the fact
that they're not. Your father isn't well and I'm trying to make
something of what little life I have left and we just can't focus
on you and your misbehavior as much as you think we should. You're
of an age now to take responsibility for your own life. It's plain
to everybody who knows you that your only chance is to stick with
this program in Philadelphia. We're all going to try to hold the
fort here for three months but when you come back in August you'll
be on your own. You won't get any favors at least from me."

He sneers. "I thought mothers were supposed to love their kids
no matter what." As if to challenge her physically he pushes up out
of his grandfather's Barcalounger and stands close. He is three
inches taller than she.

She feels the rawness in her throat and the heat in her eyes
beginning again. "If I didn't love you," she says, "I'd let you go
on destroying yourself." Her store of words is exhausted; she
launches herself toward the white sneering face and embraces the
boy, who grudgingly, after a resistant wriggle, responds and hugs
her back, patting her shoulder blade with what Harry's mother used
to call "those little Springer hands." Now,
there,
Janice
thinks, was a hateful mother, who never said No to her son in all
her life.

Nelson is saying in her ear that he'll be fine, everything will
be fine, he just got a little overextended.

Pru comes downstairs carrying two big suitcases. "I don't know
how often they wear suits," she says, "but I thought they must have
a lot of physical therapy so I packed all the shorts and athletic
socks I could find. And blue jeans, for when they make you scrub
the floors."

"Bye bye Daddy," Roy is saying down among their legs. Since Pru
has her hands full, Janice hoists him up, heavy and leggy though he
is getting to be, for his father's farewell kiss. The child hangs
on to Nelson's ear in parting and she wonders where Roy got this
idea of inflicting pain to show affection.

When his parents have gone off in the burgundy-red Celica
Supra that Nelson drives, Roy leads his grandmother into the back
yard where Harry's old vegetable garden with the little chickenwire
fence he could step over has been replaced with a swing-and
slide set bought five years ago for Judy and pretty well gone to
rust and disuse. Already, though the summer is young, tall weeds
flourish around the metal feet of it. Janice thinks she recognizes
the ferny tops of carrots and kohlrabi among the plantain and
dandelions, the dandelions' yellow flowers now seedy white pompons
that fly apart at the swat of the broken hockey stick whose tapedup
handle little Roy swings like a samurai sword. The Springers moved
to this house when Janice was eight and from the back yard the big
house looks naked to her without the copper beech. The sky is full
of puffy scudding clouds with those purely-dark centers that
can bring rain. The weatherman this morning had called for more,
though not as violent as last night's showers. She takes Roy for a
little walk over the sidewalk squares of Joseph Street, some of
them replaced but here and there a crack she remembers still
unmended and two slabs still tilted up by a sycamore root in a way
that made a treacherous bump for a girl on roller skates. She tells
Roy some of this, and the names of families that used to live in
the houses of the neighborhood, but he gets cranky and tired within
the block; children now don't seem to have the physical energy, the
eagerness to explore, that she remembers, girls as well as boys,
her knees always skinned and dirty, her mother always complaining
about the state of her clothes. Roy's interest during their walk
flickers up only when they come to a string of little soft anthills
like coffee grounds between two sidewalk cracks. He kicks them open
and then stamps the scurrying armies suddenly pouring out to defend
the queen. Such slaughter wearies him, the ants keep coming, and
she finally has to pick the lummox up and carry him back to the
house, his sneakers drumming sluggishly against her belly and
pleated skirt.

One of the cable channels has cartoons all morning. Gangs of
outlined superheroes, who move one body part at a time and talk
with just their lower lips, do battle in space with cackling
villains from other galaxies. Roy falls asleep watching, one of
Pru's oatbran low-sugar cookies broken in two wet crumbling
halves in his hands. This house where Janice lived so long -
the potted violets, the knickknacks, the cracked brown Barcalounger
Daddy loved to relax on, to wait with closed eyes for one of his
headaches to subside, the dining-room table Mother used to
complain was being ruined by the lazy cleaning women who like to
spray on Pledge every time and ruin the finish with gummy wax
build-up deepens her guilt in regard to Nelson. His pale
frightened face seems still to glow in the dark living room: she
pulls up the shade, surprising the sleepy wasps crawling on the
sill like arthritic old men. Across the street, at what used to be
the Schmehlings' house, a pink dogwood has grown higher than the
porch roof its shape in bloom drifts sideways like those old photos
of atomic bomb-test clouds in the days when we were still
scared of the Russians. To think that she could be so cruel to
Nelson just because of money. The memory of her hardness with him
makes her shake, chilling the something soft still left in the
center of her bones, giving her a little physical convulsion of
self-disgust such as after you vomit.

Yet no one will share these feelings with her. Not Harry, not
Pru. Pru comes back not at noon but after one o'clock. She says
traffic was worse than anyone would imagine, miles of the Turnpike
reduced to one lane, North Philadelphia enormous, block after block
of row houses. And then the rehab place took its own sweet time
about signing Nelson in; when she complained, they let her know
that they turned down three for every one they admitted. Pru seems
a semi-stranger, taller in stature and fiercer in expression
than Janice remembered as a mother-in-law. The link
between them has been removed.

"How did he seem?" Janice asks her.

"Angry but sane. Full of practical instructions about the lot he
wanted me to pass on to his father. He made me write them all down.
It's as if he doesn't realize he's not running the show any
more."

"I feel so terrible about it all I couldn't eat any lunch. Roy
fell asleep in the TV chair and I didn't know if I should wake him
or not."

Pru pokes back her hair wearily. "Nelson kept the kids up too
late last night, running around kissing them, wanting them to play
card games. He gets manicky on the stuff, so he can't let anybody
alone. Roy has his play group at one, I better quick take him."

"I'm sorry, I knew he had the play group but didn't know where
it was or if Wednesday was one of the days."

"I should have told you, but who would have thought driving to
Philadelphia and back would be such a big deal? In Ohio you just
zip up to Cleveland and back without any trouble." She doesn't
directly blame Janice for missing Roy's play group, but her
triangular brow expresses irritation nevertheless.

Janice still seeks absolution from this younger woman, asking,
"Do you think I should feel so terrible?"

Pru, whose eyes have been shuttling from detail to detail of
what is, after all, as far as use and occupancy go, her house, now
for a moment focuses on Janice a look of full cold clarity. "Of
course not," she says. "This is the only chance Nelson has. And
you're the only one who could make him do it. Thank God you did.
You're doing exactly the right thing."

Yet the words are so harshly stated Janice finds herself
unreassured. She licks the center of her upper lip, which feels
dry. There is a little crack in the center of it that never quite
heals. "But I feel so - what's the word? -mercenary. As
if I care more about the company than my son."

Pru shrugs. "It's the way things are structured. You have the
clout. Me, Harry, the kids - Nelson just laughs at us. To him
we're negligible. He's sick, Janice. He's not your son, he's a
monster con artist who used to be your son."

And this seems so harsh that Janice starts to cry; but her
daughter-in-law, instead of offering to lend comfort,
turns and sets about, with her air of irritated efficiency, waking
up Roy and putting him in clean corduroy pants for play school.

"I'm late too. We'll be back," Janice says, feeling dismissed.
She and Pru have previously agreed that, rather than risk leaving
Harry alone in the Penn Park house while she does her three hours
at the Penn State extension, she will bring him back here for his
first night out of the hospital. As she drives into Brewer she
looks forward to seeing him on his feet again, and to sharing with
him her guilt over Nelson.

But he disappoints her just as Pru did. His five nights in St.
Joseph's have left him self-obsessed and lackadaisical. He
seems brittle and puffy, suddenly; his hair, still a dull blond
color, has been combed by him in the same comb-ridged
pompadour he used to wear coming out of the locker room in high
school. His hair has very little gray, but his temples are higher
and the skin there, in the hollow at the corner of the eyebrows,
has a crinkly dryness. He is like a balloon the air just slowly
goes out of over days it wrinkles and sinks to the floor. His
russet slacks and blue cotton sports coat look loose on him; the
hospital diet has squeezed pounds of water out of his system.
Drained of spirit as well, he seems halting and blinky the way her
father became in his last five years, closing his eyes in the
Barcalounger, waiting for the headache to pass. It feels wrong: in
their marriage in the past Harry's vitality always towered over
hers - his impulsive needs, his sense of being generally
cherished, his casual ability to hurt her, his unspoken threat to
leave at any moment. It feels wrong that she is picking him up in
her car, when he is dressed and wet-combed like the boy that
comes for you on a date. He was sitting meekly in the chair by his
bed, with his old gym bag, holding medicine and dirty underwear,
between his feet in their big suede Hush Puppies. She took his arm
and with cautious steps he moved to the elevator, as the nurses
called goodbye. One plump younger one seemed especially sad to see
him go, and the Hispanic culinary aide said to Janice with flashing
eyes, "Make him eat right!"

She expects Harry to be more grateful; but a man even slightly
sick assumes that women will uphold him, and in this direction, men
to women, the flow of gratitude is never great. In the car, his
first words are insulting: "You have on your policeman's
uniform."

"I need to feel presentable for my quiz tonight. I'm afraid I
won't be able to concentrate. I can't stop thinking about
Nelson."

He has slumped down in the passenger seat, his knees pressed
against the dashboard, his head laid back against the headrest in a
conceited way. "What's to think?" he asks. "Did he wriggle out of
going? I
thought
he'd run."

"He didn't run at all, that was one of the things that made it
so sad. He went off just the way he used to go to school. Harry, I
wonder if we're doing the right thing."

Harry's eyes are closed, as if against the battering of sights
to see through the car windows - Brewer, its painted brick
buildings, its heavy sandstone churches, its mighty courthouse, its
new little green-glass skyscraper, and the overgrown park
where Weiser Square had once been and which is now the home of drug
addicts and the homeless who live in cardboard boxes and keep their
clothes in stolen shopping carts. "What else can we do?" he asks
indolently. "What does Pru think?"

"Oh, she's for it. It gets him off her hands. I'm sure he's been
a handful lately. You can see in her mind she's single already, all
independent and brisk and a little rude to me, I thought."

"Don't get touchy. What does Charlie think? How was your
Vietnamese dinner last night?"

"I'm not sure I understand Vietnamese food, but it was nice.
Short but sweet. I even got home in time to catch the end of
thirtysomething.
It was the season finale - Gary
tried to protect Susannah from a magazine exposé being written
by Hope, who found out that Susannah was stealing from the
social-service center." All this in case he thinks she slept
with Charlie, to show there wasn't time. Poor Harry, he doesn't
believe you can grow beyond that.

He groans, still keeping his eyes shut. "Sounds awful. Sounds
like life."

"Charlie's real proud of me," she says, "for standing up to
Nelson. We had a grim little talk this morning, Nelson and me,
where he said I loved the company more than him. I wonder if he
isn't right, if we haven't become very materialistic since you
first knew me. He seemed so little, Harry, so hurt and defiant,
just the way he was the time I went off to live with Charlie.
Abandoning a twelve-year-old like that, I'm the one
should have been put in jail, what was I thinking of? It's true
what he says, who am I to lecture him, to send him off to this
dreary place? I was just about the age he is now when I did it,
too. So
young,
really." She is crying again; she wonders
ifyou can become addicted to tears like everything else. All the
darkness and fumbling and unthinkable shames ofher life feel
regurgitated in this unstoppable salty outpour. She can hardly see
to drive, and laughs at her own snufing.

Harry's head rolls loosely on the headrest, as if he is basking
in an invisible sun. The clouds are crowding out the hazy sky,
their dark hearts merging into an overcast. "You were trying
something out," Harry tells her. "You were trying to live while you
were still alive."