Rabbit Redux (45 page)

            "Well I was nursemaid to this machine but now they've retired the machine. I was nursemaid to Janice but she upped and left."

            "We'll get her back."

            "Don't bother. Then I was nursemaid to Nelson and he hates me because I let Jill die."

            "She let herself die. Speaking of that, that's what I do like about these kids: they're trying to kill it. Even if they kill themselves in the process."

            "Kill what?"

            "The softness. Sex, love; me, mine. They're doing it in. I have nó playmates under thirty, believe it. They're burning it out with dope. They're going to make themselves hard clean through. Like, oh, cockroaches. That's the way to live in the desert. Be a cockroach. It's too late for you, and a little late for me, but once these kids get it together, there'll be no killing them. They'll live on poison.

            Mim stands; he follows. For all that she was a tall girl and is enlarged by womanhood and makeup, her forehead comes to his chin. He kisses her forehead. She tilts her face up, slime-blue eyelids shut, to be kissed again. Pop's loose mouth under Mom's chiselled nose. He tells her, "You're a cheerful broad," and pecks her dry cheek. Perfumed stationery. A smile in her cheek pushes his lips. She is himself, with the combination jiggled.

            She gives him a sideways hug, patting the fat around his waist. "I swing," Mim confesses. "I'm no showboat like Rabbit Angstrom, but in my quiet way I swing." She tightens the hug, and linked like that they walk to the foot of the stairs, to go up and console their parents.

            Next day, Thursday, when Pop and Harry come home, Mim has Mom and Nelson downstairs at the kitchen table, having tea and laughing. "Dad," Nelson says, the first time since Sunday morning he has spoken to his father without first being spoken to, "did you know Aunt Mim worked at Disneyland once? Do Abraham Lincoln for him, please do it again."

            Mim stands. Today she wears a knit dress, short and gray; in black tights her legs show skinny and a little knock-kneed, the same legs she had as a kid. She wobbles forward as to a lectern, removes an imaginary piece of paper from a phantom breast pocket, and holds it wavering a little below where her eyes would focus if they could see. Her voice as if on rustling tape within her throat emerges: "Fow-er scow-er and seven yaars ago -"

            Nelson is falling off the chair laughing; yet his careful eyes for a split second check his father's face, to see how he takes it. Rabbit laughs, and Pop emits an appreciative snarl, and even Mom: the bewildered foolish glaze on her features becomes intentionally foolish, amused. Her laughter reminds Rabbit of the laughter of a child who laughs not with the joke but to join the laughter of others, to catch up and be human among others. To keep the laughter swelling Mim sets out two more cups and saucers in the jerky trance of a lifesize Disney doll, swaying, nodding, setting one cup not in its saucer but on the top of Nelson's head, even to keep the gag rolling pouring some hot water not in the teacup but onto the table; the water runs, steaming, against Mom's elbow. "Stop, you'll scald her!" Rabbit says, and seizes Mim, and is shocked by the tone of her flesh, which for the skit has become plastic, not hers, flesh that would stay in any position you twisted it to. Frightened, he gives her a little shake, and she becomes human, his efficient sister, wiping up, swishing her lean tail from table to stove, taking care of them all.

            Pop asks, "What kind of work did Disney have you do, Mim?"

            "I wore a little Colonial get-up and led people through a replica of Mt. Vernon." She curtseys and with both hands in artificial unison points to the old gas stove, with its crusty range and the crazed mica window in the oven door. "The Fa-ther of our Country," she explains in a sweet, clarion, idiot voice, "was himself nev-er a fa-ther."

            "Mim, you ever get to meet Disney personally?" Pop asks.

            Mim continues her act. "His con-nu-bi-al bed, which we see before us, measures five feet four and three-quarter inches from rail to rail, and from head-board to foot-board is two inch-es under sev-en feet, a gi-ant's bed for those days, when most gentle-men were no bigger than warming pans. Here" -she plucks a plastic fly swatter off the fly-specked wall - "you see a warm-ing pan."

            "If you ask me," Pop says to himself, having not been answered, "it was Disney more than FDR kept the country from going under to the Commies in the Depression."

            "The ti-ny holes," Mim is explaining, holding up the flyswatter, "are de-signed to let the heat e-scape, so the fa-ther of our coun-try will not suf-fer a chill when he climbs into bed with his be-lov-ed Mar-tha. Here" - Mim gestures with two hands at the Verity Press giveaway calendar on the wall, turned to October, a grinning jack-o-lantern - "is Mar-tha."

            Nelson is still laughing, but it is time to let go, and Mim does. She pecks her father on the forehead and asks him, "How's the Prince of Pica today? Remember that, Daddy? When I thought pica was the place where they had the leaning tower."

            "North of Brewer somewhere," Nelson tells her, "I forget the exact place, there's some joint that calls itself the Leaning Tower of Pizza." The boy waits to see if this is funny, and though the grown-ups around the table laugh obligingly, he decides that it wasn't, and shuts his mouth. His eyes go wary again. "Can I be excused?"

            Rabbit asks sharply, "Where're you going?"

            "My room."

            "That's Mim's room. When're you going to let her have it?"

            "Any rime."

            "Whyncha go outdoors? Kick the soccer ball around, do something positive, for Chrissake. Get the self-pity out ofyour system."

            "Let. Him alone," Mom brings out.

            Mim intercedes. "Nelson, when will you show me your famous mini-bike?"

            "It's not much good, it keeps breaking down." He studies her, his possible playmate. "You can't ride it in clothes like that."

            "Out West," she says, "everybody rides motorcycles in trendy knits."

            "Did you ever ride a motorcycle?"

            "All the time, Nelson. I used to be den mother for a pack of Hell's Angels. We'll ride over and look at your bike after supper."

            "It's not the kid's bike, it's somebody else's," Rabbit tells her.

            "It'll be dark after supper," Nelson tells Mim.

            "I love the dark," she says. Reassured, he clumps upstairs, ignoring his father. Rabbit is jealous. Mim has learned, these years out of school, what he has not: how to manage people.

            Shakily, Mom lifts her teacup, sips, sets it down. A perilous brave performance. She is proud of something; he can tell by the way she sits, upright, her neck cords stretched. Her hair has been brushed tight about her head. Tight and almost glossy. "Mim," she says, "went calling today."

            Rabbit asks, "On who?"

            Mim answers. "On Janice. At Springer Motors."

            "Well." Rabbit pushes back from the table, his chair legs scraping. "What did the little mutt have to say for herself?"

            "Nothing. She wasn't there."

            "Where was she?"

            "He said seeing a lawyer."

            "Old man Springer said that?" Fear slides into his stomach, nibbling. The law. The long white envelope. Yet he likes the idea of Mim going over there and standing in one of her costumes in front of the Toyota cutout, a gaudy knife into the heart of the Springer empire. Mim, their secret weapon.

            "No," she tells him, "not old man Springer. Stavros."

            "You saw Charlie there? Huh. How does he look? Beat?"

            "He took me out to lunch."

            "Where?"

            "I don't know, some Greek place in the black district."

            Rabbit has to laugh. People dead and dying all around him, he has to let it out. "Wait'll he tells her that."

            Mim says, "I doubt he will."

            Pop is slow to follow. "Who're we talking about, Mim? That slick talker turned Janice's head?"

            Mom's face gropes; her eyes stretch as if she is strangling while her mouth struggles to frame a droll thought. In suspense they all fall silent. "Her lover," she pronounces. A sick feeling stabs Rabbit.

            Pop says, "Well I've kept my trap shut throughout this mess, don't think Harry there wasn't a temptation to meddle but I kept my peace, but a lover in my book is somebody who loves somebody through thick and thin and from all I hear this smooth operator is just after the ass. The ass and the Springer name. Pardon the expression."

            "I think," Mom says, faltering though her face still shines. "It's nice. To know Janice has."

            "An ass," Mim finally completes for her. And it seems to Rabbit wicked that these two, Pop and Mim, are corrupting Mom on the edge of the grave. Coldly he asks Mim, "What'd you and Chas talk about?"

            "Oh," Mim says, "things." She shrugs her knitted hip off the kitchen table, where she has been perched as on a bar stool. "Did you know, he has a rheumatic heart? He could kick off at any minute."

            "Fat chance," Rabbit says.

            "That type of operator," Pop says, snarling his teeth back into place, "lives to be a hundred, while they bury all the decent natural Americans. Don't ask me why it works that way, the Lord must have His reasons."

            Mim says, "I thought he was sweet. And quite intelligent. And much nicer about you all than you are about him. He was very thoughtful about Janice, he's probably the first person in thirty years to give her some serious attention as a person. He sees a lot in her."

            "Must use a microscope," Rabbit says.

            "And you," Mim says, turning, "he thinks you're about the biggest spook he's ever met. He can't understand why if you want Janice back you don't come and get her back."

            Rabbit shrugs. "Too proud or lazy. I don't believe in force. I don't like contact sports."

            "I did tell him, what a gentle brother you were."

            "Never hurt a fly if he could help it, used to worry me," Pop says. "As if we'd had a girl and didn't know it. Isn't that the truth, Mother?"

            Mom gets out, "Never. All boy."

            "In that case, Charlie says," Mim goes on.

            Rabbit interrupts: " `Charlie' yet."

            " `In that case,' he said, `why is he for the war?"'

            "Fuck," Rabbit says. He is more tired and impatient than he knew. "Anybody with any sense at all is for the damn war. They want to fight, we got to fight. What's the alternative? What?"

            Mim tries to ride down her brother's rising anger. "His theory is," she says, "you like any disaster that might spring you free. You liked it when Janice left, you liked it when your house burned down."

            "And I'll like it even more," Rabbit says, "when you stop seeing this greasy creep."

            Mim gives him the stare that has put a thousand men in their place. "Like you said. He's my type."

            "A gangster, right. No wonder you're out there screwing yourself into the morgue. You know where party chicks like you wind up? In coroners' reports, when you take too many sleeping pills when the phone stops ringing, when the gangsters find playmates in not such baggy condition. You're in big trouble, Sis, and the Stavroses of the world are going to be no help. They've put you where you are."

            "Maa-om," Mim cries, out of old instinct appealing to the frail cripple nodding at the kitchen table. "Tell Harry to lay off:" And Rabbit remembers, it's a myth they never fought; they often did.

            When Pop and Harry return from work the next day, Harry's last day on the job, the Toronado with New York plates is not in front of the house. Mim comes in an hour later, after Rabbit has put the supper chops in the oven; when he asks her where she's been, she drops her big stripey bag on the old davenport and answers, "Oh, around. Revisiting the scenes of my childhood. The downtown is really sad now, isn't it? All black-topped parking lots and Afro-topped blacks. And linoleum stores. I did one nice thing, though. I stopped at that store on lower Weiser with the lefty newspapers for sale and bought a pound of peanuts. Believe it or not Brewer is the only place left you can get good peanuts in the shell. Still warm." She tosses him the bag, a wild pass; he grabs it left-handed and as they talk in the living room he cracks peanuts. He uses a flowerpot for the shells.

            "So," he says. "You see Stavros again?"

            "You told me not to."

            "Big deal, what I tell you. How was he? Still clutching his heart?"

            "He's touching. Just the way he carries himself."

            "Boo hoo. You analyze me some more?"

            "No, we were selfish, we talked about ourselves. He saw right through me. We were halfway into the first drink and he looks me up and down through those tinted glasses and says, `You work the field don't you?' Gimme a peanut."

            He tosses a fistful overhanded; they pelt her on the chest. She is wearing a twitchy little dress that buttons down the front and whose pattern imitates lizardskin. When she puts her feet up on the hassock he sees clear to the crotch of her pantyhose. She acts lazy and soft; her eyes have relented, though the makeup shines as if freshly applied. "That's all you did?" he asks. "Eat lunch."

            "Th-that's all, f-f-folks."

            "What're you tryin' to prove? I thought you came East to help Mom."

            "To help her help you. How can I help her, I'm no doctor."

            "Well, I really appreciate your help, fucking my wife's boyfriend like this."

            Mim laughs at the ceiling, showing Harry the horseshoe curve of her jaw's underside, the shining white jugular bulge. As if cut by a knife the laugh ends. She studies her brother gravely, impudently. "If you had a choice, who would you rather went to bed with him, her or me?"