Rabbit at rest (21 page)

The redness pulses with a pain spaced like ribs, stripes of pain
with intervals of merciful nothingness between them. Very high up,
slowly, an airplane goes over, dragging its noise behind it. "Judy
got under the sail," he hears his own voice say. "Scared me." He
lies there like a jellyfish washed up, bulging, tremblingly full of
a desire for its lost element. Another complicated warmish thing,
with fingers, is touching his wrist, feeling his pulse.
First-aid training must be part of Gregg's job. To assist him
in his diagnosis Harry volunteers, "Sorry to be such a crump. Out
there I had this terrific desire to lie down."

"You keep lying there, Mr. Angstrom," Gregg says, sounding
suddenly loud and crisp and a touch too authoritative, like his
father adding up the golf scores. "We're going to get you to the
hospital."

In his red blind world this news is such a relief he opens his
eyes. He sees Judy standing huge and sun-haloed above him,
fragments of rainbows confused with her tangled drying hair. Rabbit
tries to smile comfortingly and tells her, "It must have been that
birdfood I ate."

Nelson was still sleeping at eleven, but Janice was in no hurry
for the confrontation. She sat out on the balcony for a while after
Harry and Pru and the children went, coming back twice for things
they forgot and forgetting two flippers and a bottle of sun lotion
anyway, and she discovered there is a place, one step to the left
of where the Norfolk pine gets in the way, from which you can see a
patch, a little squarish sparkling patch between an ornamental
condo turret and a Spanish-tile roof, of blue-green
water, of Gulf. But of course there was no hope of seeing their
sail; from this distance it would take a yacht like the one they
raced off San Diego this September, the Americans outwitting with a
catamaran the New Zealanders in their giant beautiful hopeless
boat. Looking from their balcony always a little saddens her,
reviving something buried within her, the view they had from their
windows in the apartment on Wilbur Street, of all the town, Mt.
Judge's slanting streets busy and innocent below. Then as now,
Harry had gone off, and she was alone with Nelson.

When Nelson finally comes out in his expensive smoky-blue
pajamas he is surprised and annoyed to find her here, though he
does try not to show it. "I thought you'd be with the others. They
sure as hell made a racket getting out of here."

"No," she tells her son, "I get enough sun and wanted to spend a
little time with you before you rush back."

"That's nice," he says, and goes back into his room, and comes
out a minute later wearing his bathrobe, for modesty she supposes,
with his own mother. You think of all the times you changed their
diapers and gave them a bath and then one day you're shut out. It's
a summer-weight robe, a mauve paisley, that reminds her of
what rich people used to wear in movies when she was a girl. Robes,
smoking jackets, top hats and white ties, flowing white gowns if
you were Ginger Rogers, up to your chin in ostrich feathers or was
it white fox? Young people now don't have that to live up to, to
strive toward, the rock stars just wear dirty blue jeans and even
the baseball players, she has noticed looking over Harry's shoulder
at the television, don't bother to shave, like the Arab terrorists.
When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams.

She offers to make Nelson what was once his favorite breakfast,
French toast. Those years on Vista Crescent before they all got
into such trouble she would make a thing of its being Sunday
morning with the French toast, before Nelson went off to Sunday
school. He had really been such a trusting child, so easy to
please, with his little cowlick in his eyebrow and his brown eyes
shuttling so anxiously between her and Harry.

He says, "No thanks, Mom. Just let me get some coffee and don't
hassle me with food. The thought of fried bread full of syrup makes
me want to barf."

"Your appetite does seem poor lately."

"Whaddeyou want, me to get hog fat like Dad? He should lose
fifty pounds, it's going to kill him."

"He's too fond of snacky things, that's where he gets the
weight. The salt attracts water."

There are tarry dregs left in the Aromaster, enough to fill half
a cup. Janice remembers buying that percolator at the K Mart on
Route 41 when she and Harry were new down here; she had been drawn
to the Krups ten-cup Brewmaster but Harry was still sold on
Consumer Reports
and said they said the Braun
twelve-cup Aromaster was better. Nelson makes that face he
used to make as a child with cod-liver oil and pours the
eleventh-and-a-half cup down the sink. He sniffs
prolongedly and picks up the
News-Press
from the
counter under the see-through window. He reads aloud, "City
reduces charge against football star. Lake Okeechobee's cure may be
hard to swallow," but it is clear to both of them that they must
talk really.

Janice says, "You sit in the living room and read the paper a
minute while I make a fresh pot of coffee. Would you like the last
of those Danish we bought? If you don't your father will eat
it."

"No, Mom, like I said. I don't want to eat any junk."

As the water in the percolator comes to a boil, he laughs to
himself in the living room. "Get this," he calls, and reads aloud,
" `The highly commended head of Cape Coral's police narcotics team
will be fired because of an investigation that showed he mishandled
nearly one thousand dollars' worth of cocaine he borrowed from the
Sanibel Police Department. The borrowed cocaine is missing, police
say, and has been replaced with a handful of baking soda in a
department storage box.' " Nelson adds, as if she is too dumb to
get the point, "Everybody's snorting and stealing down here, even
the head of the narc squad."

"How about you?" Janice asks.

He thinks she means coffee and says "Sure" and holds out his cup
without taking his eyes from the newspaper. "Says here southwestern
Florida was the hottest place in the country yesterday."

Janice brings the percolator and sets it on the glass table, on
a section of the newspaper she folds over to make an insulating
pad. She has a superstitious fear of cracking the glass with heat,
though Harry laughs at her and says you couldn't crack it with a
blowtorch. Men laugh about things like this and electricity but
don't always know. Bad things do happen, and then men try to
pretend they didn't, or it was some other man's fault. She settles
firmly on the fold-out sofa next to the wicker armchair
Nelson is in, and spreads her thighs to broaden her lap the way she
often saw her mother do when she was determined to be firm, and
tells him, "No, I meant about you and cocaine. What is the story,
baby?"

When he looks over at her she is reminded of that frightened sly
way he looked that whole summer when he was twelve. Among the
things she can never forgive herself for was the way he would come
over on his bicycle to Eisenhower Avenue and stand outside
Charlie's place hoping to get a glimpse of her, his mother run off
with another man. He asks, "Who says there's a story?"

"Your wife says, Nelson. She says you're hooked and you're
blowing a lot of money you don't have."

"That crazy lying bitch. You know how she'll say anything to
make a dramatic effect. When did she fill you full of this
crap?"

"Don't be so rude in your language. A body can see at a glance
things aren't right. Teresa let a little out the night before last
when you didn't come home till after midnight, and then yesterday
we had more chances to talk, while your father was walking ahead
with the children."

"Yeah, what's he trying to do, anyway, this
great-big-lovable-grandpa routine he's pulling on
my kids? He was never that way with me."

"Don't keep changing the subject. Maybe he's trying to make up
with them for some of his mistakes with you. Anyway your father's
not who concerns me these days. He had a hard time when we were
younger giving up his freedom but he seems to be at peace now.
Which is what I can't say about you. You're jumpy and rude and your
mind isn't on anything that's in this room or has to do with your
family. You're thinking of something else every minute and I can
only think from what I read and see on television that it's drugs.
Pru says it's cocaine, and probably crack now, she believes you've
stayed clear of heroin, though evidently the two go together in
something called speedballing."

"You need to inject that, Ma, and I'll never go near a needle.
That you can count on. Jesus, you can get AIDS that way."

"Yes, well, AIDS. We all have that to worry us now." She closes
her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the
world, with precious little pleasure in compensation. Nelson may
have his weaknesses but her sense of him is that he has never been
crazy about sex like his father - that his generation got
enough of it early enough for the magic to wear off. Her poor
Harry, until he began to slow down, he hopped into bed every night
expecting wonders. And maybe she, too, at a time in her life, was
as foolish. That time she felt she brought Charlie back from the
edge of the grave with it. With sheer love. For a woman it's power,
the only power they let you have until recently.

Nelson takes advantage of her silence to marshal an attack.
"What if I do do a little toot on the weekends? It's no worse than
all that sipping you do. Ever since I can remember you've had a
little glass next to you in the kitchen or wherever. You know, Mom,
alcohol kills, eventually. There are these scientific studies that
show coke is much less harmful to the body than booze."

"Well," she says, tugging her short khaki skirt down over her
thighs, "it may be less harmful but it seems to be a lot more
expensive."

"That's because idiotic laws make it illegal."

"Yes, that's right - whatever bad you can say about
alcohol at least it's legal. When your granddaddy Springer was
young it wasn't and he never developed the taste for it, or he
might not have made such a good thing out of his life for us all to
enjoy." She sees his lips parting to interrupt and lifts her voice
to continue, "And you're a lot like him in a lot of respects,
Nelson. You have his nervous energy, you always have to be figuring
at something, all the time, and I hate to see that energy of yours
wasted on a selfdestructive thing like this." She sees him trying
to break in and concludes, "Now, you must tell me about cocaine,
Nelson. You must help an old lady understand. What makes it worth
it? Pru says your unpaid bills are piling way up, so it must be
worth quite a lot."

Nelson in exasperation slaps his body back into the chair, so
that the wicker creaks; she hears something snap.
"Mom. I
don't want to talk about my private life. I'm thirty-two
years old, for Chrissake."

"Even at eighty-two you'll still be my son," she tells
him.

He tells her, "You're trying to act and talk like your mother
but you and I both know you're not that sharp, you're not that
tough." But saying this makes him feel so guilty he looks away,
toward the bright breezy Florida day beyond the balcony, with its
squeaky birdsong and mufed sounds of golf, the day climbing toward
noon and temperatures in the mid-eighties, the warmest spot
in the entire nation. His mother keeps her eyes on his face. In the
wash of light his skin looks transparent, worn thin by unhealth, by
unnatural consumption. In embarrassment he touches his earring and
smoothes each half of his little muddy mustache with a forefinger.
"It relaxes me," he tells her at last.

Janice waits for more, and prompts, "You don't seem that
relaxed." She adds, "You were a tense child, Nelson. You took
everything very seriously."

He says rapidly, "How else're you supposed to take it? Like a
big joke, like Dad does, as if the fucking world is nothing but a
love letter to yours truly?"

"Let's try to keep talking about you, not your father. As you
say, I'm a simple woman. Not sharp, not tough. I'm very ignorant
about a lot of things. The simplest things about this, like how
much it takes and how much it costs. I don't even know how you take
it - up the nose or smoke it or what you put it in to smoke
it or any of that. All I know about cocaine is what's on
Miami
Vice
and the talk shows and they don't explain very much. It's
just not something I ever thought would make a difference in my
life."

His embarrassment increases, she sees, as when he was six and
sick and she would quiz him about his bowel movements. Or once when
he was fourteen and she mentioned the stains on his bedsheets. But
he wants to talk, she also sees, about these details, to show off
the knowledge his manhood has obtained. He sighs in surrender and
closes his eyes and says, "It's hard to describe. You know that
expression about drunks, `feeling no pain'? After a hit, I feel no
pain. I guess that means I feel pain the rest of the time.
Everything goes from black and white to color. Everything is more
intense, and more hopeful. You see the world the way it was meant
to be. You feel
powerful."
This last confidence is so
intimate the boy bats his eyelids, his lashes long as a girl's, and
blushes.

Janice feels slightly queasy, brought this close to the
something neutral and undecided in her son's sexual nature -
something scared out of him - and brings her legs up on the
sofa under her, the short skirt hiking up above the knees. Her legs
are still firm and trim at fifty-two, her best feature as a
girl and woman, her hair having always been skimpy and her breasts
small and her face nondescript. She especially loves her legs here
in Florida, where they turn brown and compare favorably with those
of the other women, who have let themselves get out of shape or
never had a shape to start with. These Jewish women tend to have
piano legs, and low hips. Letting her son enjoy her ignorance,
Janice asks, "How many of these snorts do you need at a time, to
feel the bright colors?"