Rabbit at rest (3 page)

"You better ask Mom first."

Harry turns and lets the two mothers, walking hip to hip and
heads bowed in consultation, catch up. "Pru," he says, "will it rot
any teeth if I buy Judy a candy bar?"

She looks up, distracted, but remembers to smile at him. "I
guess it won't kill her this once, though Nelson and I try to
discourage junk in their diet."

"Whatever you get her, Harry," Janice adds, "you ought to get
Roy."

"But Roy's asleep and half her size."

"He'll know, though," Pru says, "ifyou play favorites. He's just
now coming out from under her shadow."

Little Judy, casting a shadow? Did he cast a shadow over Mim?
Mim certainly got far enough away from Diamond County, if that was
a statement. Got into the fast lane in Las Vegas and stayed.

"Don't be forever," Janice tells Harry. "Or else give me the
keys so we can get into the car. They have two more bags they made
them check in Newark. Nelson's probably down there already."

"Yeah, what's his idea, rushing on ahead like that? Who's he
sore at?"

"Probably me," Pru says. "I've given up trying to figure out
why."

Harry digs into one pocket of his plaid golf slacks, comes up
with only a few tees and a plastic ball marker with two blue Vs on
it, for Valhalla Village, and then into the other to find the
knobbly notched bunch of keys on the ring. Saying "Heads up," he
tosses them toward Janice. Her hands jump together in a womanly
panic and the keys sail past them and hit her in the stomach. Just
this little effort, the search and the toss, leaves him weary, as
if the arm he lifted was soggy wash. The spontaneity and fun have
been taken out of buying his granddaughter a treat. She chooses not
a Planter's Peanut Bar as he had envisioned but a Sky Bar, which he
thinks might be truly bad for her teeth, those five different gooey
fillings in the five humped segments of pure chocolate. He digs
into the hip pocket of his pants, so old their plaid is
sun-faded and the hem of each pocket is darkened by the sweat
off his hands over the years, and pulls out his wallet and hangs
for a while over the candy rack, uncertain whether or not to get
himself another sugary rectangle of stuck-together nuts,
wondering if this time he would be lucky enough to get one not
broken in the wrapper, deciding against it because he eats too
much, too much junk as Pru said, Pru and his doctor down here, old
Dr. Morris, and then at the last possible split-second, with
the black woman at the counter within the octagonal shop already
counting out his change from a dollar for the Sky Bar, deciding to
buy the peanut brittle after all. It is not so much the swallowing
and ingesting he loves as the gritty-edgy feeling of the
first corner in his mouth, the first right-angled fragment,
slowly dissolving. To his surprise and indignation not only does he
now receive no change from the dollar but owes the black woman
- a severe matte undiluted color you rarely see in the U.S.,
dull as slate, must be a Haitian or Dominican, Florida is full of
these boat people - a nickel more, for the state tax. Airport
prices, they nail you where there's no competition. Without
competition, you get socialism and everybody free-loading and
economies like they have in Cuba and Haiti. He pauses to glance at
the magazines on the rack. The top row holds the skin mags, sealed
in plastic, pieces of printed paper hiding details of the
open-mouthed girls, open-mouthed as if perpetually
astonished by their own tangible assets,
Hustler, Gallery,
Club, Penthouse, Oui, Live, Fox.
He imagines himself buying
one, braving the Haitian woman's disapproval - all these
Caribbean types are evangelical fundamentalists, tin-roofed
churches where they shout for the world to end now - and
sneaking the magazine home and while Janice is asleep or cooking or
out with one of her groups studying to satiety the spread shots and
pink labia and boosted tits and buttocks tipped up from behind so
the shaved cunt shows, with its sad little anatomy like some
oyster, and sadly foreseeing that he will not be enough aroused,
boredom will become his main feeling, and embarrassment at the
expenditure. Four dollars twenty-five they are asking these
days, promising
Sexy Sirens in the Sauna
and
Cara Lott
Gets Hot
and Oral
Sex: A Gourmet's Guide.
How
disgusting we are, when you think about it - disposable meat,
but hell-bent on gratification.

"Come
on,
Grandpa - what's taking so long?"

They hurry after the others, who have vanished. Judy's shiny
beribboned head makes him nervous, popping up first on one side of
him and then the other, like the car keys he was a little slow to
find, Janice calls him doddery when she can't even catch, the
clumsy mutt. If their granddaughter gets kidnapped from his side
she'll really call him doddery. "Easy does it," he tells Judy at
the top of the escalator, "pick a step and stay on it. Don't get on
a crack," and at the bottom, "O.K., step off, but not too soon,
don't panic, it'll happen, O.K., good."

"I go on escalators all the time at the malls," she tells him,
making up at him a little pinched rebuking mouth with beads of
melted chocolate at the corners.

"Where the hell is everybody?" he asks her, for amid all the tan
loud presences that throng the lower, higher-ceilinged floor
of the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, less ductlike and
cryptlike but still echoing with a muffled steely doom that worries
at his stomach, there is nobody he knows, strangers as total as if
he has descended into Hell.

"Are we lost, Grandpa?"

"We can't be," he tells her.

In their sudden small plight he is newly aware of her
preciousness, the jewel-cut of her eyes and eyelashes, the
downy glaze in front of her ears and the gleam of each filament of
her luxuriant hair, pulled taut into a thick pigtail adomed with an
unreal stiff white ribbon. For the first time he sees she is also
wearing symmetrical white barrettes, shaped like butterflies. Judy
looks up toward his face and fights crying at the vagueness she
sees there. "This coat is too hot," she complains.

"I'll carry it," he says. He folds its cloth weight over his arm
and she is like a butterfly herself now, in her pink dress. Her
green eyes have gone wide in this gray airport's bustling limbo,
under reddish-brown eyebrows one of which near the flat bulge
of her little freckled nose has a little cowlick fanning the hairs
the wrong way; Nelson has that cowlick, and inherited it from
Harry, who used to lick his middle finger and try to slick it down
in the highschool boys' lavatory mirror. Amazing, that a thing so
tiny could pass on. Maybe the only immortality we get, a little
genetic quirk going on and on like a computerized number in your
monthly bank statement. Ghostly empty shapes, people he doesn't
know, push and stream past the two of them. They are an island
surrounded by jokes and noisy news and embraces; people tanned that
deep settled mahogany that comes only from months and months of
Florida embrace newcomers the color of wallpaper paste. Harry says,
so Judy will hear her grandfather say something and not just stand
there numbly, "They must be over at the baggage."

He looks up and sees above their heads the sign saying BAGGAGE
and takes her moist little hand and tugs her toward the crowd
around the baggage belt, which is already moving. But neither Pru
nor Janice nor Nelson nor Roy is there, as far as they can see.
Face after face refuses to cohere into a known face. His eyes,
always good, trouble him now in artificially lit places. The blue
shoulder bag Pru let him carry for her is heavier than he would
have thought; she must have packed bricks. His shoulder and eyes
burn.

"I guess," he ventures, though it seems unlikely, "they're
already at the car." He taps his pocket for the lump of keys,
doesn't feel it, begins to panic, then remembers how he tossed them
to Janice. Of course. Confidently now he approaches the brown glass
exit doors, but the wrong one pops its seal and slides open when
his body trips the electric eye. The wrong one as far as he is
concerned; Judy was pulling him in the right direction, where a
slice of hot outdoor air swiftly widens. Sun has broken through the
milky stratocirrus. It bounces off the waxy leaves of the nameless
tropical plants flourishing near his knees. It winks blindingly
from a mass of moving cars, a brutal river of them rushing along
the access strip just beyond the curb. He holds Judy's hand
tighter, in case she decides to jump off the curb, we're all full
of crazy impulses. They cross to a lake of shimmering cars, the lot
where he parked. Where, exactly? He finds he's forgotten. He is
utterly empty of the car's location.

A Camry Deluxe wagon, pearl-gray metallic, with the more
potent 24-valve 2.5-liter V-6 engine. He was
still so sore at being tailgated by that red Camaro and at Janice
criticizing his driving that he wasn't paying any attention to
where they parked. He remembers the zebra crosswalk, and the little
landscaped mound of center strip where some sun-starved
college kid had propped his knapsack and pillowed his head on it to
soak up a few rays, and the fussy old guy who thought he was in
charge gesturing at you which way the exit and the booth where you
pay was, putting too much into it like that husband at the airport
gabbing at his wife, Grace, as if she had no sense, meeting that
frizzy-haired longtoothed smiling Jewish princess taller than
either of them, but he doesn't remember which of these rows he
parked the car in. He parked it in the patch of dead blank brain
cells like all of our brains will be when we're dead unless the
universe has cooked up some truly elaborate surprise.
The
National Enquirer
which Janice sometimes brings home from the
Winn Dixie keeps reporting people's near-death experiences,
but for Harry they're too close to the little green men in the
UFOs. Even if they're true it's not much comfort. Judy's hand has
slipped out of his as he stands puzzling on the strip of grass on
the edge of the parking lot, that broad-bladed grass that
grows everywhere down here, watered by sprinklers, they call it St.
Augustine. It doesn't feel like real grass to him, too matted and
broad, kind of crunchy underfoot. His chest begins to hurt. A sly
broad pain, a kind of band under the skin, tightly sewn there.

Judy's voice floats up to him like a thin lifeline. "What color
is the car, Grandpa?"

"Oh, you know," he says, keeping his sentences short, so as not
to stir up his pain. "Pale gray. Metallic finish. The same color as
about half the cars in the world. Don't you panic. It'll come to me
where I left it."

The poor kid is losing it, in her fight not to cry. "Daddy'll
drive off!" she blurts out.

"Leaving you and me? Why would he do that? He won't do that,
Judy."

"He gets real mad sometimes, for no real reason."

"He probably has some reason he doesn't tell you. How about you?
You ever get mad?"

"Not like Daddy. Mom says he should see a doctor."

"I guess we all should, now and then." Rabbit's sense of doom is
trickling like cold water through his stomach. Doctors. His own
doctor is bringing his son into the practice, so if he drops dead
the kid will take right over, won't miss a Medicare form. You fill
a slot for a time and then move out; that's the decent thing to do:
make room. He scans the ranks of glinting metal in their slots for
a strip of gray that will ring a bell, and wonders if he is
misremembering the color - he has owned so many cars in his
life, and sold so many more. He announces, "I think I left it over
on the left. In about the third row. What happened, Judy, was there
was this old guy kind of directing things, waving which way
everybody should go, and the bastard distracted me. Don't you hate
bossy people like that, who know everything better than you
do?"

The little girl's glossy red head mutely nods at his side, too
worried for words.

Rabbit rattles on, to chase their clouds away, "Whenever
somebody tells me to do something my instinct's always to do the
opposite. It's got me into a lot of trouble, but I've had a lot of
fun. This bossy old guy was pointing one direction so I went the
other and found a space." And for a second, in a kind of window
between two tightenings of the band across his chest, he
sees
the space: next to a cream-colored van, a Ford
Bivouac with those watery-blue Minnesota plates, parked
sloppily over the white line, another cause for irritation. He had
to ease in carefully so as to leave Janice room enough to open her
door on the right and not rub fenders with the maroon Galaxy on the
left. And now he sees from far off in the shimmering Florida heat a
strip of cream risen above the other metallic rooftops. Third row,
about a wedge shot in. He says in triumph, "Judy, I
see
it. Let's go," and takes her hand again, lest her small perfection
be crushed by one of the automobiles cruising the rows looking for
a spot. In some of these big white Caddys and Oldses the tiny old
driver can hardly see over the hood out the windshield, just
clinging to the wheel, body all shrunk and bent by osteoporosis; it
hasn't got him yet, he's still six feet three as far as he knows,
at least his pants don't drag on the floor, but he hears Janice
talk about it, it's been on TV a fair amount, that commercial with
the two women on the train, it affects women more than men, their
smaller bones, she takes calcium pills along with all the other
vitamin pills next to her orange juice at breakfast. God, is she
healthy. She'll live forever just to spite him.

He and little Judith arrive across the hazardous hot asphalt at
the pearl-gray Camry, which is his, he knows, from Janice's
tennis racket and cover on the back seat, flung in there separately
the dumb mutt, what's the use of a cover if you don't put the
racket in it? But nobody is here and the car is locked and Harry
threw away the keys. The little girl begins to cry. Luckily he has
a handkerchief in the hip pocket of his faded plaid golf pants. He
lowers Pru's blue bag with its load of bricks to the asphalt and
puts the little winter coat he has been carrying on top of the car
roof, as if to stake a claim, and kneels down and wipes the bits of
melted Sky Bar from Judy's lips and then the tears from her cheeks.
He too wouldn't mind having a cry, squatting here next to the car's
sunstruck metallic flank, his knees complaining on top of
everything else, and the small girl's hot panicked breath adding to
the heat. In her distress her freckled nose has begun to run and
her mouth taken on a hardness, a stiffness in the upper lip he
associates with Nelson when the boy is frightened or angry.