Rabbit, Run (30 page)

She’s been walking around patting the baby until her wrists and ankles hurt and poor tiny Rebecca is asleep with her legs around the breast that still has its milk in it. She wonders if she should try to make her take some and thinks no if she can sleep let her sleep. She lifts the poor tiny thing weighing nothing off the sweaty place on her shoulder and lays her down in the cool shadows of the crib. Already the night is dimming, dawn comes early to the town facing east on its mountainside. Janice lies down on the bed but the sense of light growing beside her on the white sheets keeps her awake. Pleasantly awake at first; the coming of morning is so clean and makes her feel like she did through the second month Harry was hiding. Mother’s great Japanese cherry tree blooming below her window and the grass coming up and the ground smelling wet and ashy and warm. She had thought things out and was resigned to her marriage being finished. She would have her baby and get a divorce and never get married again. She would be like a kind of nun she had just seen that beautiful picture with Audrey Hepburn. And if he came back it would be equally simple: she would forgive him everything and stop her drinking which annoyed him so though she didn’t see why and they would be very nice and simple and clean together because he would have gotten everything out of his system and love her so because she had forgiven him and she would know now how to be a good wife. She had gone to church every week and talked with Peggy and prayed and had come to understand that marriage wasn’t a refuge it was a sharing and she and Harry would start to share everything. And then, it was a miracle, these last two weeks had been that way.

And then Harry had suddenly put his whore’s filthiness into it and asked her to love it and the unfairness makes her cry aloud softly, as if startled by something in the empty bed with her.

The last hours are like some narrow turn in a pipe that she can’t force her thought through. Again and again she comes up to the sound of him saying “Roll over” and can’t squeeze through it, can’t not feel panicked and choked. She gets out of bed and wanders around with her one tight breast the nipple stinging and goes into the kitchen in her bare feet and sniffs the empty glass Harry made her drink whisky out of. The smell is dark and raw and soft and deep, and she thinks maybe a sip will cure her insomnia. Make her sleep until the scratch at the door awakens her and she sees his big white body ramble in sheepishly and she can say Come to bed, Harry it’s all right, do me, I want to share it, I really want it, really.

She puts just an inch of whisky in, and not much water because it would take too long to drink, and no ice cubes because the noise of the tray might wake up the children. She takes this dose to the window and stands looking down past the three tar roofs at the sleeping town. Already a few kitchen and bedroom lights show pale here and there. A car, its headlights dull disks that do not throw beams into the thinning darkness, eases down Wilbur toward the center of town. The highway, half-hidden by the silhouettes of houses, like a river between banks of trees, this early swishes with traffic. She feels the workday approaching like an army of light, feels the dark ridged houses beneath her as potentially stirring, waking, opening like castles to send forth their men, and regrets that her own husband is unable to settle into the nationwide rhythm of which one more beat is about to sound. Why him? What was so precious about him? Anger at Harry begins to bloom, and to stifle it she drains the glass and turns in the dawn; everything in the apartment is a shade of brown. She feels lopsided; the pressure in the unused breast pulls her.

She goes into the kitchen and makes another drink, stronger than the first, thinking that after all it’s about time she had a little fun. She hadn’t had a moment to herself since she came back from the hospital. The thought of fun makes her movements quick and airy; she fairly runs in her bare feet across the gritty carpet back to the window, as if to a show arranged just for her. Mounted in her white gown above everything she can see, she touches her fingers to her tight breast so that the milk starts to leak, stains the white cloth with slow warmth.

The wetness slides down her front and turns cold in the air by the window. Her varicose veins ache from standing. She goes and sits in the moldy brown armchair and is sickened by just the angle at which the mottled wall meets the pasty ceiling. The angle tips her, muddles up and down. The pattern on the wallpaper swarms; the flowers are brown spots that swim in the murk and chase each other and merge hungrily. It’s hateful. She turns her face away and studies the calm green globe of the dead television set. The front of her nightie is drying; the crusty stiffness scratches her. Baby book said keep nipples clean, soap gently: germs enter scratches. She sets the drink on the round chair arm and stands up and pulls her nightgown over her head and sits down again. It gives her nakedness a mossy hug. She puts the bunched nightgown in her lap on top of her Modess pad and belt and pulls the footstool over cleverly with her toes and rests her ankles on it and admires her legs. She always thought she had good legs. Straight small nice even thighs. She does have good legs. Their tapering wavering silhouettes are white against the deep shadow of the rug. The dim light erases the blue veins left from carrying Becky. She wonders if her legs are going to go as bad as Mother’s: She tries to imagine the ankles as thick as the knees and they do seem to swell. She reaches down to reassure herself by feeling the ankles’ hard narrow bones and her shoulder knocks the whisky glass off the chair arm. She jumps up, startled to feel the air embrace her bare skin, cool space sweep around her wobbly, knobbed body. She giggles. If Harry could see her now. Luckily there wasn’t much in the glass. She tries to walk boldly into the kitchen with no clothes on like a whore but the sense of somebody watching her, which began when she stood at the window and made her milk flow, is too strong; she ducks into the bedroom and wraps the blue bathrobe around her and then mixes the drink. There is still a third of the bottle left. Tiredness makes the rims of her lids dry but she has no desire to go back to bed. She has a horror of it because Harry should be there. This absence is a hole that widens and she pours a little whisky into it but it’s not enough and when she goes to the window for the third time it is now light enough to see how drab everything is. Someone has smashed a bottle on one of the tar roofs. The gutters of Wilbur Street are full of mud that washes down from the new development. While she looks the streetlights, great pale strings of them, go off in patches. She pictures the man at the power plant pulling the switches, little and gray and hunchbacked and very sleepy. She goes to the television set and the band of light that suddenly flares in the green rectangle sparks joy in her breast but it’s still too early, the light is just a speckling senseless brightness and the sound is nothing but static. As she sits there watching the blank radiance a feeling of some other person standing behind her makes her snap her head around several times. She is very quick about it but there is always a space she can’t see which the other person could dodge into if he’s there. It’s the television has called him into the room but when she turns off the set she starts to cry immediately. She sits there with her face in her hands, her tears crawling out between her fingers and her sobs shaking through the apartment. She doesn’t stifle them because she wants to wake somebody; she is sick of being alone. In the bleaching light the walls and furniture are clear and regain their colors and the merging brown spots have gone into herself.

She goes and looks at the baby, the poor thing lying there snuffling the crib sheet, its little hands twitching up by its ears, and reaches down and strokes its hot membranous head and lifts it out its legs all wet and takes it to nurse in the armchair that looks toward the window. The sky beyond is a pale smooth blue that looks painted on the panes. There is nothing to see but sky from this chair, they might be a hundred miles up, in the basket of a great balloon. A door on the other side of the partition slams and her heart leaps but then of course it’s just another tenant maybe grumpy Mr. Cappello going off to work, the stairs rumbling reluctantly. This wakes Nelson and for a time her hands are full. In making breakfast for them she breaks an orange-juice glass, it just drifts away from her thumb into the brittle sink. When she bends over Nelson to serve him his Rice Krispies he looks up at her and wrinkles his nose; he smells sadness and its familiar odor makes him timid with her. “Daddy go away?” He’s such a good boy saying this to make it easy on her, all she has to do is answer “Yes.”

“No,” she says. “Daddy went out to work early this morning before you got up. He’ll be home for supper like he always is.”

The child frowns at her and then parrots with sharp hope, “Like always is?”

Worry has stretched his head high, so his neck seems a stem too thin to support the ball of his skull with its broad whorl of pillow-mussed hair. “Daddy will be home,” she repeats. Having taken on herself the burden of lying, she needs a little more whisky for support. There is a murk inside her which she must tint a bright color or collapse. She takes the dishes out to the kitchen but they slide so in her hands she doesn’t try to wash them. She thinks she must change out of her bathrobe into a dress but in taking the steps into the bedroom forgets her purpose and begins making the bed. But something whose presence she feels on the wrinkled bed frightens her so that she draws back and goes into the other room to be with the children. It’s as if in telling them Harry would be back as normal she’s put a ghost in the apartment. But the other person does not feel like Harry, it feels like a burglar, a teasing burglar dancing from room to room ahead of her.

When she picks up the baby again she feels its wet legs and thinks of changing it but cleverly realizes she is drunk and might stab it with the pins. She is very proud of thinking this through and tells herself to stay away from the bottle so she can change the baby in an hour. She puts good Becky in her crib and, wonderfully, doesn’t hear her cry once. She and Nelson sit and watch the tail end of Dave Garroway and then a program about Elizabeth and her husband entertaining a friend of his who is always going away on camping trips being a bachelor and turns out to be a better cook than Elizabeth. For some reason watching this makes her so nervous that just out of television-watching habit she goes to the kitchen and makes herself a little drink, mostly ice cubes, just to keep sealed shut the great hole that is threatening to pull open inside of her again. She takes just a sip and it’s like a swallow of blue light that makes everything clear. She must just arch over this one little gap and at the end of the day after work Harry will be back and no one will ever know, no one will laugh at Mother. She feels like a rainbow arching protectively over Harry, who seems infinitely small under her, like some children’s toy. She thinks how good it would be to play with Nelson; it is bad for him to watch television all morning. She turns it off and finds his coloring book and crayons and they sit on the rug and color opposite pages.

Janice repeatedly hugs him and talks to make him laugh and is very happy doing the actual coloring. In high school, art was the one subject she wasn’t afraid of and she always got a B. She smiles in the delight of coloring her page, a barnyard, so well, of feeling the little rods of color in her fingers make such neat parallel strokes and her son’s small body intent and hard beside hers. Her bathrobe fans out on the floor around her and her body seems beautiful and broad. She moves to get her shadow off the page and sees that she has colored one chicken partly green and not stayed within the lines at all well and her page is ugly; she starts to cry; it is so un
fair
, as if someone standing behind her without understanding a thing has told her her coloring is ugly. Nelson looks up and his quick face slides wide and he cries, “Don’t! Don’t, Mommy!” She prepares to have him pitch forward into her lap but instead he jumps up and runs with a lopsided almost crippled set of steps into the bedroom and falls on the floor kicking.

She pushes herself up from the floor with a calm smile and goes into the kitchen, where she thinks she left her drink. The important thing is to complete the arch to the end of the day, to be a protection for Harry, and it’s silly not to have the one more sip that will make her long enough. She comes out of the kitchen and tells Nelson, “Mommy’s stopped crying, sweet. It was a joke. Mommy’s not crying. Mommy’s very happy. She loves you very much.” His rubbed stained face watches her. Like a stab from behind the phone rings. Still carrying that calmness she answers it. “Hello?”

“Darling? It’s Daddy.”

“Oh, Daddy!” Joy just streams through her lips.

He pauses. “Baby, is Harry sick? It’s after eleven and he hasn’t shown up at the lot yet.”

“No, he’s fine. We’re all fine.”

There is another pause. Her love for her father flows toward him through the silent wire. She wishes the conversation would go on forever. He asks, “Well, where is he? Is he there? Let me speak to him, Janice.”

“Daddy, he’s not here. He went out early this morning.”

“Where did he go? He’s not at the lot.” She’s heard him say the word “lot” a million times it seems; he says it like no other man; it’s dense and rich from his lips, as if all the world is concentrated in it. All the good things of her growing up, her clothes, her toys, their house, came from the “lot.”

She is inspired; car-sale talk is one thing she knows. “He went out early, Daddy, to show a station wagon to a prospect who had to go to work or something. Wait. Let me think. He said the man had to go to Allentown early this morning. He had to go to Allentown and Harry had to show him a station wagon. Everything’s all right, Daddy. Harry loves his job.”

The third pause is the longest. “Darling. Are you sure he’s not there?”

“Daddy, aren’t you funny? He’s not here. See?” As if it has eyes she thrusts the receiver into the air of the empty room. It’s meant as a daughter’s impudent joke but unexpectedly just holding her arm out makes her feel sick. When she brings the receiver back to her ear be is saying in a remote ticky voice, “darling. All right. Don’t worry about anything. Are the children there with you?”