Rabbit at rest (7 page)

Rabbit listens for the lower younger voice of the children's
mother to chime in but instead hears, close to his head, a bird
cheeping in the Norfolk pine whose branches can be touched from
their balcony. He still can't get over Norfolk pines, the way they
look like the plastic trees you buy for Christmas, the branches
spaced like slats and each one of them a plume perfect as a bird's
feather and the whole tree absolutely conical in shape. The bird's
cheeping sounds like a piece of moist wood being rhythmically made
to squeak against another. Most nature in Florida has a
manufactured quality. Wall-to-wall carpet, green
outdoor carpeting on the cement walks, crunchy St. Augustine grass
in the space between the walks, all of it imposed on top of the
sand, the dirty-gray sand that sprays over your shoes when
you take a divot down here.

Today is Wednesday, he has a golf date, his usual foursome,
tee-off time at nine-forty: the thought gives him a
reason to get out of bed and not just lie there forever, trying to
remember his dream. In his dream he had been reaching out toward
something his sleeping eyes didn't let him see through his lids,
something round and shadowy and sad, big-bellied with the
vague doom he tries to suppress during the daytime.

Up, Rabbit examines the phony-looking branches of the
Norfolk pine to see if he can see the noisy bird. He expects from
the self-importance of the sound a cockatoo or toucan at
least, a squawky tropical something with foot-long
tailfeathers hanging down, but all he sees is a small brown bird
such as flicker all around in Pennsylvania. Maybe it is a
Pennsylvania bird, a migrant down here just like him. A
snowbird.

He goes into the bathroom and brushes his teeth and urinates.
Funny, it used to make a throaty splash in the toilet bowl, now a
kind of grudging uncertain stream comes out, he has to rise once
and sometimes even twice in the night, sitting on the toilet like a
woman; what with the foreskin folded over sleepily he can never be
sure which direction it will come out in, bad as a woman, they
can't aim either. He shaves and weighs himself. He's gained a
pound. Those Planter's Peanut Bars. He moves to leave the bedroom
and realizes he can't. In Florida he sleeps in his underwear;
pajamas get twisted around him and around two in the morning feel
so hot they wake him up, along with the pressure in his bladder.
With Pru and the kids here he can't just wander into the kitchen in
his underwear. He hears them out there, bumping into things. He
either should put on his golf pants and a polo shirt or find his
bathrobe. He decides on the bathrobe, a burgundy red with gray
lapels, as being more -what's that word that keeps coming up
in medieval history? - seigneurial. Hostly. Grandpatemal. It
makes a statement, as Nelson would say.

By the time Rabbit opens the door, the first fight of the day
has begun in the kitchen. Precious little Judy is unhappy; salt
tears redden the rims of her lids though she is trying,
shaky-voiced, not to cry. "But half the kids in my school
have been. Some of them have even been twice, and they don't even
have grandparents living in Florida!" She can't reach Disney
World.

Janice is explaining, "It's really a whole separate trip,
sweetheart. You should fly to Orlando if you want to go. To go from
here -"

"'d be like driving to Pittsburgh," Harry finishes for her.

"Daddy promised!" the child protests, with such passion that her
four-year-old brother, holding a spoon suspended in his
fist above a bowl of Total he is mushing without eating, sobs in
sympathy. Two drops of milk fall from his slack lower lip.

"Dull driving, too," Harry continues. "Stoplights all down Route
27. We come that way sometimes, driving down."

Pru says, "Daddy didn't mean this time, he meant some other time
when we have more days."

"He said
this
time," the child insists. "He's always
breaking promises."

"Daddy's very busy earning money so you can have all the things
you want," Pru tells her, taking the prim tone of one woman losing
patience with another. She too is wearing a bathrobe, a little
quilted shorty patterned with violet morning glories and their
vines. Her freckled thighs have that broad bland smoothness of car
fenders. Her feet are long and bony, pink in their toe joints and
papery-white on top, in cork-soled lipstickred clogs.
Her toenail polish is chipped, and Rabbit finds that pretty sexy
too.

"Oh,
yeahhh,"
the child replies, with a furious
sarcastic emphasis Harry doesn't understand. Family life, life with
children, is something out of his past, that he has not been sorry
to leave behind; it was for him like a bush in some neglected
corner of the back yard that gets overgrown, a lilac bush or privet
some bindweed has invaded from underneath with leaves so similar
and tendrils so tightly entwining it gives the gardener a headache
in the sun to try to separate bad growth from good. Anyway he
basically had but the one child, Nelson, one lousy child, though he
was reading somewhere the other day that a human male produces
enough sperm to populate not just the planet Earth but Mars and
Venus as well, if they could support life. It's a depressing
thought, too planetary, like that unreachable round object in his
dream, that the whole point of his earthly existence has been to
produce little Nellie Angstrom, so he in turn could produce Judy
and Roy, and so on until the sun burns out.

Now Nelson is stirred up and sucked into the kitchen by the
fuss. He must have heard himself being talked about, and comes in
from the guest bedroom, barechested and unshaven in rumpled
smoky-blue pajama bottoms that look expensive. Unease
infiltrates Harry's abdomen with this observation of Nelson's
expensive tastes, something he is trying to remember about numbers,
something he can't reach. Janice said the boy looked exhausted and
he does look thin, with faint shadows flickering between his ribs.
There is a touch of aggression about the bare chest, something
territorial, taken with Pru's shorty robe. The pajama game. Dons
Day and, who was it, John Raitt? Despite the quality of his
pajamas, Nelson looks haggard and scruffy and mean, with the
unshaven whiskers and that tufty little mustache like what dead
Fred Springer used to wear and his thinning hair standing up in
damp spikes. Rabbit remembers how deeply Nelson used to sleep as a
child, how hot and moist his skull on the pillow would feel.
"What's this about promises?" the boy asks angrily, staring at a
space between Judy and Pru. "I never promised to go up to Orlando
this trip."

"Daddy, there's nothing to do in this dumb part of Florida. I
hated that circus museum last year, and then on the way back the
traffic was so miserable Roy threw up in the Kentucky Fried Chicken
parking lot!"

"Route 41 does a job on you," Harry admits.

"There's tons to do," Nelson says. "Go swim in the pool. Go play
shuffleboard." He runs dry almost immediately and looks in panic at
his mother.

Janice says to Judy, "The Village has tennis courts where you
and I can go and hit balls."

"Roy'll have to come and he always spoils it," the little girl
complains, the vision of it freshening her tears again.

"- and there's the beach - " Janice goes on.

Judy replies, just making objections now, "Our teacher says the
sun gives you skin damage and the earlier you get it the more
cancer you'll get later on."

"Don't be such a fucking smart-ass," Nelson says to her.
"Your grandmother's trying to be nice."

His remark makes the child's tears spill, out through the curved
lashes onto her cheeks like the silvery jerking tracks rain makes
on windowpanes. "I wasn't being -" she tries to get out.

At
her age,
this girl should be happier than she is,
Harry thinks. "Sure you were," he tells her. "And why not? It's
boring, going somewhere with family, away from your friends. We all
remember what it's like, we used to drag your daddy to the Jersey
Shore, and then make him go up to the Poconos and have
hay-fever up in those Godawful dark pines. Torture! The
things we do to each other in the name of fun! O.K. Here's my plan.
Anybody want to hear my plan?"

The little girl nods. The others, even Roy who's been carefully
shaping his Total mush into a kind of pyramid with the back of his
spoon, watch him as if he is a conjurer. It's not so hard, to get
back into the swing of family life. You just have to come out of
yourself a little. It's like basketball was, those first two or
three minutes, when amid the jamming and yelling and body heat and
crowd noise you realized that you were going to have to do it
yourself, nobody was going to do it for you. "Today I got to play
golf," he begins.

"Great," Nelson says. "That's a big help. You're not going to
make Judy caddy, if that's your plan. You'll bend her spine out of
shape."

"Nellie, you're getting paranoid," Harry tells him. The boy's
been trying ever since that business with Jill twenty years ago to
protect women against his father. His son is the only person in the
world who sees him as dangerous. Harry feels the day's first twinge
in the chest, a little playful burning like a child flirting with a
lit match. "That wasn't my plan, no, but why not sometime? She
could carry my lightweight bag, I'd take out two of the woods and
one of the wedges and she and I could walk a couple holes some late
afternoon when the tee times are over. I could show her the swing.
But in the foursome, actually, we ride carts. I'd rather we walked,
for the exercise, but the other bozos insist. Actually, they're
great guys, they all have grandchildren, they'd love Judy. She
could ride in my place." He can picture it, her sitting there like
a slim little princess, Bernie Drechsel with his cigar in his mouth
at the wheel of the electric cart.

He is losing his conjurer's audience, thinking out loud this
way. Roy drops his spoon and Pru squats down to pick it up, her
shorty robe flaring out over one thigh. A lacy peep of
jet-black bikini underpants. A slightly shiny vaccination
oval high up. Nelson groans. "Out with it, Dad. I got to go to the
bathroom." He
blows his nose on a paper towel. Why is his
nose always running? Harry has read somewhere, maybe
People
on the death of Rock Hudson, that that's one of the
first signs of AIDS.

Harry says, "No more circus museum. Actually, they've closed it.
For renovations." He had noticed a story about it in the Sarasota
paper a week or so ago, headlined Circus
Redux.
He hates
that word, you see it everywhere, and he doesn't know how to
pronounce it. Like arbitrageur and perestroika. "My plan was this.
Today, I got to play golf but tonight there's Bingo in the dining
hall and I thought the kids or at least Judy would enjoy that, and
we could all use a real meal for a change. Tomorrow, we could
either go to this Lionel Train and Seashell Museum that Joe Gold
says is just terrific, or in the other direction, south, there's
the Edison house. I've always been kind of curious about it but it
may be a little advanced for the kids, I don't know. Maybe the
invention of the telephone and the phonograph doesn't seem too
exciting to kids raised on all this computerized crap they have
now."

"Dad," Nelson says in his pained voice, sniffing, "it's not even
that exciting to
me.
Isn't there someplace out on Route 41
where they could go play video games? Or miniature golf. Or the
beach and swimming pool, Jesus. I thought we came down here to
relax, and you're making some kind of educational ordeal of it.
Come on. Lay off."

Rabbit is hurt. "Lay off, I was just trying to create a little
structure," he says.

Pru intervenes in his defense. "Nelson, the children can't spend
all day in the pool, they'll get too much ultraviolet."

Janice says, "This hot weather is bound to turn cool this time
of year. It's flukey."

"It's the greenhouse effect," Nelson says, turning to go to the
bathroom, showing that disgusting rat's tail at the back of his
head, the glint of earring. How queer is the kid? "The greedy
consumer society has wrecked the ozone and we'll all be fried by
the year 2000," Nelson says. "Look!" He points to the Fort Myers
News-Press
someone has laid on the kitchen table.
The main headline is 1988:
the dry
look, and a cartoon
shows a crazed-looking yellow sun wringing out some clouds
for a single drop of water. Janice must have brought the paper in
from the corridor, though all she cares about is the
Lifestyles
section. Who's fucking who, who's divorcing
who. Normally she stays in bed and lets her husband be the one to
bring the paper in from the corridor.
Lifestyles
keeps.

Pru hands back Roy's spoon to him and takes away his dreadful
little bowl of Total mush, congealed like dogfood left out
overnight. "Want a 'nana?" she asks in a cooing coaxing sexy voice:
"A nice 'nana if Mommy peeled and sliced it?"

Janice confesses, "Teresa, I'm not sure we have any bananas. In
fact I know we don't. Harry hates fruit though he should eat it and
I meant to do a big shopping yesterday for you and Nelson but the
tennis game I was in went to the third set and then it was time to
go to the airport." She brightens; her voice goes up in volume; she
tries to become another conjurer. "That's what we can do this
morning while Grandpa plays his golf! We can all go to Winn Dixie
and do an enormous shopping!"

"Count me out," Nelson yells from the bathroom. "I'd like to
borrow the car sometime, though."

What does he want a car for, the little big shot?

Judy's tears have dried and she has snuck into the living room,
where the Today show is doing its last recap of the news and
weather. Willard Scott, beamed in from Nome, Alaska, has Jane and
Bryant in stitches.