Rabbit, Run (11 page)

Light from behind the closed bathroom door tints the air in the bedroom. The splashing sounds are like the sounds his parents would make when as a child Rabbit would waken to realize they had come upstairs, that the whole house would soon be dark, and the sight of morning would be his next sensation. He is asleep when like a faun in moonlight Ruth, washed, creeps back to his side, holding a glass of water.

During this sleep he has an intense dream. He and his mother and father and some others are sitting around their kitchen table. It’s the old kitchen. A girl at the table reaches with a very long arm weighted with a bracelet and turns a handle of the wood icebox and cold air sweeps over Rabbit. She has opened the door of the square cave where the cake of ice sits; and there it is, inches from Harry’s eyes, lopsided from melting but still big, holding within its metal-black bulk the white partition that the cakes have when they come bumping down the chute at the ice plant. He leans closer into the cold breath of the ice, a tin-smelling coldness he associates with the metal that makes up the walls of the cave and the ribs of its floor, delicate rhinoceros gray, mottled with the same disease the linoleum has.

Having leaned closer he sees that under the watery skin are hundreds of clear white veins like the capillaries on a leaf, as if ice too were built up of living cells. And further inside, so ghostly it comes to him last, hangs a jagged cloud, the star of an explosion, whose center is uncertain in refraction but whose arms fly from the core of pallor as straight as long eraser-marks diagonally into all planes of the cube. The rusted ribs the cake rests on wobble through to his eyes like the teeth of a grin. Fear probes him; the cold lump is alive.

His mother speaks to him. “Close the door.”

“I didn’t open it.”

“I know.”

“She did.”

“I know. My good boy wouldn’t hurt anyone.” The girl at the table fumbles a piece of food and with terrible weight Mother turns and scolds her. The scolding keeps on and on, senselessly, the same thing over and over again, a continuous pumping of words like a deep inner bleeding. It is himself bleeding; his grief for the girl distends his face until it feels like a huge white dish. “Tart can’t eat decently as a baby,” Mother says.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Rabbit cries, and stands up to defend his sister. Mother rears away, scoffing. They are in the narrow place between the two houses; only himself and the girl; it is Janice Springer. He tries to explain about his mother. Janice’s head meekly stares at his shoulder; when he puts his arms around her he is conscious of her eyes being bloodshot. Though their faces are not close he feels her breath hot with tears. They are out behind the Mt. Judge Recreation Hall, out in back with the weeds and tramped-down bare ground and embedded broken bottles; through the wall they hear music on loudspeakers. Janice has a pink dance dress on, and is crying. He repeats, numb at heart, about his mother, that she was just getting at
him
but the girl keeps crying, and to his horror her face begins to slide, the skin to slip slowly from the bone, but there is no bone, just more melting stuff underneath; he cups his hands with the idea of catching it and patting it back; as it drips in loops into his palms the air turns white with what is his own scream.

The white is light; the pillow glows against his eyes and sunlight projects the flaws of the window panes onto the drawn shade. This woman is curled up under the blankets between him and the window. Her hair in sunlight sprays red, brown, gold, white, and black across her pillow. Smiling with relief, he gets up on an elbow and kisses her solid slack cheek, admires its tough texture of pores. He sees by faint rose streaks how imperfectly he scrubbed her face in the dark. He returns to the position in which he slept, but he has slept too much in recent hours. As if to seek the entrance to another dream he reaches for her naked body across the little distance and wanders up and down broad slopes, warm like freshly baked cake. Her back is toward him; he caresses her in an idle trance during which, without moving a muscle but those in her unseen eyelids, she awakes. Not until she sighs heavily and stretches and turns toward him does he know she has felt him.

Again, then, they make love, in morning light with cloudy mouths, her tits silky sacs of milk floating shallow on her ridged rib cage. The nipples sunken brown buds. Her bush a froth of tinted metal. It is almost too naked; his climax seems petty in relation to the wealth of brilliant skin, and he wonders if she pretends. She says not; no, it was different but all right. Really all right. In his shame he goes back under the covers while she pads around on bare feet getting dressed. Funny how she puts on her bra before her underpants. Her putting on her underpants makes him conscious of her legs as separate things, thick pink liquid twists diminishing downward into her ankles. Taking pink light from the reflection of each other as she moves. Her accepting his watching her flatters him, shelters him. They have become domestic.

Church bells ring loudly. He moves to her side of the bed to watch the crisply dressed people go into the limestone church across the street, whose lit window had lulled him to sleep. He reaches and pulls up the shade a few feet. The rose window is dark now, and above the church, above Mt. Judge, the sun glares in a façade of blue. It strikes a shadow down from the church steeple, a cool stumpy negative in which a few men with flowers in their lapels stand and gossip while the common sheep of the flock stream in, heads down. The thought of these people having the bold idea of leaving their homes to come here and pray pleases and reassures Rabbit, and moves him to close his own eyes and bow his head with a movement so tiny Ruth won’t notice.
Help me, Christ. Forgive me. Take me down the way. Bless Ruth, Janice, Nelson, my mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Springer, and the unborn baby. Forgive Tothero and all the others. Amen.

He opens his eyes to the day and says, “That’s a pretty big congregation.”

“Sunday morning,” she says. “I could throw up every Sunday morning.”

“Why?”

She just says, “Fuh,” as if he knows the answer. After thinking a bit, and seeing him lie there looking out the window seriously, she says, “I once had a guy in here who woke me up at eight o’clock because he had to teach Sunday school at nine-thirty.”

“You don’t believe anything?”

“No. You mean you do?”

“Well, yeah. I think so.” Her rasp, her sureness, makes him wince; he wonders if he’s lying. If he is, he is hung in the middle of nowhere, and the thought hollows him, makes his heart tremble. Across the street a few people in their best clothes walk on the pavement past the row of worn brick homes; are they walking on air? Their clothes, they put on their best clothes: he clings to the thought giddily; it seems a visual proof of the unseen world.

“Well, if you do what are you doing here?” she asks.

“Why not? You think you’re Satan or somebody?”

This stops her a moment, standing there with her comb, before she laughs. “Well you go right ahead if it makes you happy.”

He presses her. “Why don’t you believe anything?”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Doesn’t it ever, at least for a second, seem obvious to you?”

“God, you mean? No. It seems obvious just the other way. All the time.”

“Well now if God doesn’t exist, why does anything?”

“Why? There’s no why to it. Things just are.” She stands before the mirror, and her comb pulling back on her hair pulls her puffy upper lip up so her wet teeth show grayly.

“That’s not the way I feel about you,” he says, “that you just are.”

“Hey, why don’t you get some clothes on instead of just lying there giving me the Word?”

This, and her turning, hair swirling, to say it, stir him. “Come here,” he asks. The idea of making it while the churches are full excites him.

“No,” Ruth says. She is really a little sore. His believing in God grates against her.

“You don’t like me now?”

“What does it matter to you?”

“You know it does.”

“Get out of my bed.”

“I guess I owe you fifteen more dollars.”

“All you owe me is getting the hell out.”

“What! Leave you all alone?” He says this as with comical speed, while she stands there startled rigid, he jumps from bed and gathers up some of his clothes and ducks into the bathroom and closes the door. When he comes out, in underclothes, he says, still clowning, “You don’t like me any more,” and moves sadly to where his trousers are neatly laid on the chair. While he was out of the room she made the bed.

“I like you enough,” she says in a preoccupied voice, tugging the bedspread smooth.

“Enough for what?”

“Enough.”

“Why do you like me?”

“ ‘Cause you’re bigger than I am.” She moves to the next corner and tugs. “Boy that used to gripe hell out of me, the way these little women everybody thinks are so cute grab all the big men.”

“They have something,” he tells her. “They seem easier to get to.”

She laughs and says, “I guess that’s right.”

He pulls up his trousers and buckles the belt. “Why else do you like me?”

She looks at him. “Shall I tell you?”

“Tell me.”

“ ‘Cause you haven’t given up. ‘Cause in your stupid way you’re still fighting.”

He loves hearing this; pleasure spins along his nerves, making him feel very tall, and he grins. But the American protest of modesty is instinctive with him, and “The will to achievement” glides out of his mouth mockingly.

“That poor old bastard,” she says. “He really is a bastard too.”

“Hey, I’ll tell you what,” Rabbit says. “I’ll run out and get some stuff at that grocery store you can cook for our lunch.”

“Say, you settle right in, don’t you?”

“Why? Were you going to meet somebody?”

“No, I don’t have anybody.”

“Well, then. You said last night you liked to cook.”

“I said I used to.”

“Well, if you used to you still do. What shall I get?”

“How do you know the store’s open?”

“Isn’t it? Sure it is. Those little stores make all their money on Sundays, what with the supermarkets.” He goes to the window and looks up at the corner. Sure, the door of the place opens and a man comes out with a newspaper.

“Your shirt’s filthy,” she says behind him.

“I know.” He moves away from the windowlight. “It’s Tothero’s shirt. I got to get some clothes. But let me get food now. What shall I get?”

“What do you like?” she asks.

The thing about her is, she’s good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they’re a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature. The pavement kicks under his feet as he runs to the grocery store in his dirty shirt. What do you like? He has her. He knows he has her.

He brings back eight hot dogs in cellophane, a package of frozen lima beans, a package of frozen French fries, a quart of milk, a jar of relish, a loaf of raisin bread, a ball of cheese wrapped in red cellophane, and, on top of the bag, a Ma Sweitzer’s shoo-fly pie. It all costs $2.43. As she brings the things out of the bag in her tiny stained kitchen, Ruth says, “You’re kind of a bland eater.”

“I wanted lamb chops but he only had hot dogs and salami and hash in cans.”

While she cooks he wanders around her living-room and finds a row of pocketbook mysteries on a shelf under a table beside a chair. The guy in the bunk beside his at Fort Hood used to read those all the time. Ruth has opened the windows, and the cool March air is sharpened by this memory of baking Texas. Ruth’s curtains of dingy dotted Swiss blow; their gauze skin gently fills and they lean in toward him as he stands paralyzed by a more beautiful memory: his home, when he was a child, the Sunday papers rattling on the floor, stirred by the afternoon draft, and his mother rattling the dishes in the kitchen; when she is done, she will organize them all, Pop and him and baby Miriam, to go for a walk. Because of the baby, they will not go far, just a few blocks maybe to the old gravel quarry, where the ice pond of winter, melted into a lake a few inches deep, doubles the height of the quarry cliff by throwing its rocks upside down into a pit of reflection. But it is only water; they take a few steps further along the edge and from this new angle the pond mirrors the sun, the illusion of inverted cliffs is wiped out, and the water is as solid as ice with light. Rabbit holds little Mim hard by the hand. “Hey,” he calls to Ruth. “I got a terrific idea. Let’s go for a walk this afternoon.”

“Walk! I walk all the time.”

“Let’s walk up to the top of Mt. Judge from here.” He can’t remember having ever gone up the mountain from the Brewer side; gusts of anticipation sweep over him, and as he turns, exalted, away from the curtains stiff and leaning with the breeze, huge church bells ring. “Yeah let’s,” he calls into the kitchen. “Please.” Out on the street people leave church carrying wands of green absent-mindedly at their sides.

When Ruth serves lunch be sees she is a better cook than Janice; she has boiled the hot dogs somehow without splitting them. With Janice, they always arrived at the table torn and twisted, cracked from end to end in wide pink mouths that seemed to cry out they’d been tortured. He and Ruth eat at a small porcelain table in the kitchen. As he touches his fork to his plate he remembers the cold feel in his dream of Janice’s face dropping into his hands, and the memory spoils his first bite, makes it itself a kind of horror. Nevertheless he says, “Terrific,” and gamely goes ahead and eats, and does regain some appetite. Ruth’s face across from him takes some of the white crudity of the table-top; the skin of her broad forehead shines and the two blemishes beside her nose are like spots something spilled has left. She seems to sense that she has become unattractive, and eats obsequiously, with quick little self-effacing bites.

“Hey,” he says.

“What?”

“You know I still have that car parked over on Cherry Street.”