Rabbit at rest (18 page)

At the water's slapping, hissing, frothing edge sandpipers
scurry. and halt, stab. the foam for some morsel, and scurry on.
Their feet and heads are so quick they appear mechanical. Roy
cannot catch them, though they seem like toys. When Harry takes off
his unlaced Nikes, the sand bites his bare feet with an unexpected
chill - the tide of night still cold beneath the sunny top
layer of grains. The tops of his feet show wormy blue veins, and
his shins are all chalky and crackled, as if he is standing up to
his knees in old age. A tremor of flight comes alive in his legs.
The sea, the sun are so big: cosmic wheels he could be ground
between. He is playing with fire.

Gregg is waiting for them at a but of corrugated Fiberglas on
the beach, back from the water near some palms with their roots
exposed. He has taken from the but a rudder, a centerboard, and two
life jackets of black foam rubber. Rabbit doesn't like the color,
the texture; he wants old-fashioned Day-Glo kapok from
Thomas Edison's kapok trees. Gregg asks him, "You've done this
before?"

"Sure."

But something in Harry's tone leads Gregg to be instructive:
"Push the tiller away from the sail. Watch the tips of the waves
for the direction of the wind. When the wind gets behind you, hold
the mainsheet loose."

"O.K.., sure," Harry says, having not quite listened, thinking
instead, resentfully, of Ed Silberstein's bogey on the first hole
yesterday and how its being enough for a win got the whole round
off to a lousy start.

Gregg turns to Pru and asks, "Your little girl can swim?"

"Oh, sure," she says, picking up Harry's lazy word. "She was the
champion in her swimming class at summer camp."

"Mom," the girl pleads. "I came in
second."

Gregg looks down at Judy, the sun at his back so bright that the
shadow on his face has a blue light ofits own. "Second's pretty
close to champ." Still needing to talk to Pru, Gregg says, "I
wouldn't advise your little boy to go. There's an offshore breeze
today, you can't feel it in the lee of the hotel here, but it takes
you out there pretty fast. There's no cockpit, it's easy to slip
off."

She gives Gregg Silvers her crooked wry grin and shifts her
weight, as if the closeness of this man her own age makes her
awkwardly aware of her near-nakedness. She is wearing a
tie-dyed brown dashiki over her one-piece white suit
with those high sides that expose leg up to the hipbone. The cut
means you have to shave the sides off your pussy. What women go
through. There's even a kind of wax job you can have done to make
it permanent. But suppose bathing-suit fashions change again?
Rabbit preferred that pre-Reagan look of the two-piece
bikini with the lower half like a little skimpy diaper slung under
the belly, like Cindy Murkett used to slosh around in. Still, this
new style nicely lengthens Pru's already long legs and keeps her
thickening middle in. "He's going to stay with me right on the
beach," she tells Gregg Silvers, and by way of emphasis bows down,
so her red hair flings forward, and pulls off her dashiki,
revealing string straps and white wide shoulders mottled with pale
freckles.

"How long do I have it for?" Harry, feeling ignored, asks Ed's
son. Those tight little European-style bathing trunks
definitely show the bump of a prick.

"One hour, sir." The "sir" just popped in absentmindedly and the
boy tries to revert to friendly casualness. "No sweat if you don't
bring it in on the dot. There's not much action today, a lot of
people don't like taking them out in this much wind. Take number
nineteen, on the end there."

As Harry moves off, he hears Gregg ask Pru, "Where're you folks
from up north?"

"Pennsylvania. Actually, I'm from Akron, Ohio."

"Hey! You'll never guess where I was raised - Toledo!"

The boats are up on the dry sand in a line, along with some
other big water toys - those water bikes, and squarish
paddleboats. Harry pulls at the nylon painter attached to the
bow and the hull is heavier than he thought; by the time he's
dragged it forty feet through the sand his breathing feels shallow
and that annoying binding pain has begun to flicker on the
left side of his ribs. He gives the boat one more heave and sits
down in the sand, near where Pru is settling herself on a beach
chaise Gregg has dragged down from the stack for her. Another
beachgoer has momentarily called him away. "You like those?" Rabbit
pants. "Don't you like feeling the sand under your - you
know, like sort of a nest?"

She says, "It gets into the bathing suit, Harry. It gets in
everywhere."

This needless emphasis, when he had got the picture, excites
him, here in the bewildering brightness. He dimly remembers an old
joke in high school about women making pearls. Cunts like
Chesapeake oysters. That sly old Fred. He tells Judy, "Give me a
second to get my breath, couldja honey? Go for a quick swim in the
water so it won't be a shock when we're out on it. I'll be with you
in one minute."

He should try to talk to Pru about Nelson. Something rotten
there. Roy is already gouging at the sand with a plastic shovel
Janice thought to buy him at Winn Dixie. Frowningly the child dumps
the sand into a bucket shaped like an upside-down Garfield.
Pru says, since Harry seems unable to begin, "You're awfully nice
to have arranged all this. I was astonished, how much he
charged."

"Well," he says, feeling slowly better as his bare legs absorb
heat from the top layer of sand, "you're only a grandfather once.
Or twice, in my case. You and Nelson plan any more?" This feels
forward, but not in a class with the sand getting in
everywhere.

"Oh no, my God," she too swiftly answers, in a trough of silence
as one long low wave follows another in and breaks in a frothy
cresting of glitter and a mechanical scurrying of sandpipers.
"We're not ready for any more."

"You're not, huh?" he says, not sure where to take this.

She helps him, her voice in his ear as he gazes out into the
Gulf. He doesn't dare turn his head to look at her bare feet, their
pink toe joints and cracked nail polish, and her long legs lifted
on the chaise, exposing contrasting white pieces of spandex crotch
and soft flesh underside. These new bathing suits don't do much to
hold a woman's ass in. She confesses to Harry, "I don't think we're
doing justice to the two we've got, with Nelson how he is."

"Yeah, how is he? He seems jumpy, and only half here."

"That's
right,"
she says, too enthusiastically
agreeing. That's all she says. Another wave collapses and shooshes
up the sand. She has pulled back. She is waiting for him to make an
inspired guess.

"He hates Toyotas," he offers.

"Oh, he'd complain if they were jaguars," Pru says. "Nothing
would satisfy him, the way he is now."

The way he is. The secret seems to be in that phrase. Was the
poor kid with his white-around-the-gills look
dying of something, of leukemia like that girl in
Love
Story?
Of AIDS he caught somehow - how, Harry can't bear
to think -hanging around that faggy Slim crowd Lyle the new
accountant is part of. But it all seems distant, like those islands
where pirates hid gold and rich men caught tarpon, mere thickenings
of the horizon from this angle three feet above sea level. He can't
focus on it, with the sun on his head. He maybe should have brought
a hat, to protect his Swedish complexion. His suspicion has always
been he looks foolish in a hat, his head too big already. Roy has
filled the bucket and pretty carefully, considering he's only four,
dumps it upside down and lifts it off. He expects to have a sand
Garfield but the shape is too tricky and crumbles on one side. A
bad principle, fancy shapes. Stick with simple castles and let the
kids use their imaginations. Harry volunteers, speaking into the
air, not quite daring to turn his head and face Pru's crotch, and
those nameless bits exposed by the way her legs are up, "He was
never what you'd call a terrifically happy child. I guess me and
Jan are to blame for that."

"He's willing to blame you," Pru admits in her flat Ohio voice.
"But I don't think you should reinforce him by blaming yourself."
Her language here, as when she spoke about cholesterol the other
night, seems to him disagreeably specific, like a pet's fur that is
coarse and more prickly than you expect when you touch it. "I'd
refuse," she says firmly, "to let a child of
mine
send me
on a guilt trip."

"I don't know," Harry demurs. "We put him through some pretty
wild scenes back there in the late Sixties."

"That's what the late Sixties were for everybody, wild scenes,"
Pru says, and goes back into that coarse semi-medical talk.
"By continuing to accept the blame he's willing to assign you, you
and Janice continue to infantilismon him. After thirty, shouldn't
we all be responsible for our own lives?"

"Beats me," he says, "I never know who was responsible for
mine," and he pushes himself up from the trough his body has warmed
in the sand, but not before flicking his eyes back to that strip of
stretched spandex flanked by soft pieces of Pru that have never had
enough sun to freckle. Little Judy has come back from swimming, her
red hair soaked tight to her skull and her navy-blue bathing
suit adhering to the pinhead bumps of her nipples.

"You promised a
minute,"
she reminds him, water running
down her face and beaded in her eyelashes like tears.

"So I did," he agrees. "Let's go Sunfishing!" He stands, and the
Florida breeze catches in every comer of his skin, as if he is the
kite down the beach. He feels tall under the high blue sky; the
elements poured out all around him -water and sand and air
and sun's fire, substances lavished in giant amounts yet still far
from filling the limitless space - reawaken in him an old
animal recklessness. His skin, his heart can never have enough.
"Put your life jacket on," he tells his granddaughter.

"It makes me feel fat," she argues. "I don't need it, I can swim
for miles, honest. At camp, way across the lake and back. When
you're tired, you just turn on your back and float. It's easier in
saltwater, even."

"Put it on, honey," he repeats serenely, pleased that blood of
his has learned ease in an element that has always frightened him.
He puts his own jacket on, and feels armored, and female, and as
the kid says fat. His legs and arms have never gained much weight,
only his abdomen and his face, strangely; shaving each morning, he
seems to have acres of lather to remove, and catching himself
sideways in a reflecting surface in glassy downtown Deleon he is
astonished by this tall pale guy stuffed with kapok. "You keep an
eye an us," he tells Pru, who has risen to solemnize this
launching. Near-naked as she is, she helps pull the hull to
the water's agitated slipslopping edge. She quiets the flapping
sail, which wants to swing the boom, while he sorts out the lines,
more complicated than he remembers from the time he went Sunfishing
in the Caribbean years ago with Cindy Murkett and her black bikini,
and clips in the rudder. He lifts Judy up and on. Little Roy, when
he sees his sister about to go somewhere without him, screams and
stalks into a wave that knocks him down. Pru picks him up and holds
him on her hip. The air is so bright everything seems to be in
cutout, with that violet halo you see in movies where the scenery
is faked. Harry wades in up to his waist to walk the boat out, then
heaves himself aboard, barking his shin on a cleat, and grabs at
the line attached to the aluminum boom. What did Cindy call it,
that piece of nylon rope? The sheet. Sweet Cindy, what a doll she
once was. He steadies the rudder and pulls the sail taut. The boat
is dipping and patting the waves one by one as the offshore breeze,
in the dreamlike silence that comes within the wind, moves the boat
away from the solidity of land, of beach, of Pru in her
high-sided white suit holding screaming Roy on her hip.

Judy is stationed on this side of the mast, poised to push the
centerboard down its slot; Harry sits awkwardly on the wet
Fiberglas with his legs bent and one hand behind him on the tiller
and the other clutching the sheet. His mind begins to assemble a
picture of directional arrows, the shining wind pressing on the
sail's straining striped height. Certain tense slants begin in his
hands and fan out to the horizon and zenith.
Like a
scissors,
Cindy had said, and a sensation of funnelled
invisible power grows upon him. "Centerboard down," he commands, a
captain at last, at the mere age of fifty-five. His scraped
shin stings and his buttocks in his thin wet bathing suit resent
the pressure of bald Fiberglas. His weight is so much greater than
Judy's that the hollow hull tips upward in front. The waves are
choppier, the tugs on the sail ruder, and the water a dirtier green
than in his enhanced memory of that Caribbean adventure at the very
beginning of this decade.

Still, his companion is happy, her bright face beaded with
spray. Her thin little arms stick gooseburnped out of her
matte-black rubber vest, and her whole body shivers with the
immersion in motion, the newness, the elemental difference. Rabbit
looks back toward land: Pru, the sun behind her, is a forked
silhouette against the blaze of the beach: Her figure in another
minute will be impossible to distinguish from all the others
tangled along the sand, the overprinted alphabet of silhouettes.
Even the hotel has shrunk in the growing distance, a tall slab
among many, hotels and condos for as far as he can see in either
direction along this stretch of the Florida coast. The power he
finds in his hands to change perspectives weighs on his chest and
stomach. Seeing the little triangular sails out here when he and
Janice drove the shore route or visited their bank in downtown
Deleon had not prepared him for the immensity of his perspectives,
any more than the sight of men on a roof or scaffold conveys the
knee-grabbing terror of treading a plank at that height.
"Now, Judy," he says, trying to keep any stiffness of fear from his
voice, yet speaking loudly lest the dazzling amplitudes of space
suck all sense from his words, "we can't keep going forever in this
direction or we'll wind up in Mexico. What I'm going to do is
called coming about. I say - I know it seems silly -
`Coming about, hard alee,' and you duck your head and don't slide
off when the boat changes direction. Ready? Coming about, hard
alee."