Rabbit, Run (33 page)

He has a vivid dream. He is alone on a large sporting field, or vacant lot, littered with small pebbles. In the sky two perfect disks, identical in size but the one a dense white and the other slightly transparent, move toward each other slowly; the pale one is directly above the dense one. At the moment they touch he feels frightened and a voice like over a loudspeaker at a track meet announces, “The cowslip swallows up the elder.” The downward gliding of the top one continues steadily until the other, though the stronger, is totally eclipsed, and just one circle is before his eyes, pale and pure. He understands: “the cowslip” is the moon, and “the elder” the sun, and that what he had witnessed is the explanation of death: lovely life eclipsed by lovely death. With great excitement he realizes he must go forth from this field and found a new religion. There is a feeling of the disks, and the echo of the voice, bending over him importunately, and he opens his eyes. Janice stands by the bed in a brown skirt and a pink sleeveless blouse. There is a drab thickness of fat under her chin he has never noticed before. He is surprised to be on his back; he almost always sleeps on his stomach. He realizes it was a dream, that he has nothing to tell the world, and the knot regathers in his chest. In getting out of bed he kisses the back of her hand, which is hanging by her side helpless and raw.

She makes him breakfast, the cereal drowned in milk, the coffee scalded in her style. With Nelson they walk over to the apartment to get clothes for the funeral. Rabbit resents her being able to walk; resents her not dying of remorse and shame. What kind of grief is it that permits them to walk? The sense of their thick bodies just going on, wrapping their hearts in numbness and small needs, angers him. They walk with their child through streets they walked as children. The gutter along Potter Avenue where the slime-rimmed ice-plant water used to run is dry. The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here, why is this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, coastlines, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of “any place,” prelude to the ultimate, “Why am I me?”—starts panic in his heart. Coldness spreads through his body and he feels detached, as if at last he is, what he’s always dreaded, walking on air. The details of the street—the ragged margin where the pavement and grass struggle, the tarry scarred trunks of the telephone poles—no longer speak to him in a child’s intimate, excited voice. He is no one; it is as if he stepped outside of his body and brain a moment to watch the engine run and stepped into nothingness, for this “he” had been merely a refraction, a vibration within the engine, and now can’t get back in. He feels be is behind the windows of the houses they walk by, watching this three-cornered family walk along solidly with no sign that their universe has convulsed other than the woman’s quiet tears. Janice’s tears have come as gently as dew comes; the sight of the morning-fresh streets seems to have sprung them.

When they get inside the apartment she gives a sharp sigh and collapses against him. Perhaps she didn’t expect the place to be full of sunshine; buttresses of dust drifting in milky light slant from the middle of the floor to the tops of the windows and touch everything with innocence and newness and hopefulness. The door to his closet is near the entry door so they needn’t go very deep into the apartment at first. He opens the closet door as far as he can without bumping the television set and reaches far in and unzips a plastic zippered storage bag and takes out his blue suit, a winter suit made of wool, but the only dark one he owns. Nelson ranges through the apartment, going wee-wee in the bathroom, finding an old rubber panda in his bedroom that he wants to take along. His exploring drains enough of the menace from the rooms for them to go into their bedroom, where Janice’s clothes hang. On the way she indicates a chair. “Here I sat,” she says, “yesterday morning, watching the sun come up.” Her voice is lifeless; he doesn’t know what she wants him to say and says nothing. He is holding his breath.

In the bedroom there is a pretty moment. She takes off her skirt and blouse to try on an old black suit she has, and as she moves about in her slip, barefoot on the carpet, she reminds him of the girl he knew, with her narrow ankles and wrists and small shy head. The black suit, bought when she was in high school, doesn’t fit; her stomach is still too big from having the baby. And maybe her mother’s plumpness is beginning. Standing there trying to get the waist of the suit skirt to link at her side, the tops of her breasts pushing above her bra as she bends into the effort, the space between them dimpling into a dark crease, she does have a plumpness, a sweet plumpness that pleases him. He thinks
Mine, my woman
, but then she straightens up and her smeared frantic face blots out his pride of possession. She becomes a liability that painfully weights the heaviness already below his chest. This is the wild woman he must steer with care down a lifelong path, away from yesterday. “It won’t
do
it!” she screams, and jerks her legs out of the skirt and flings it, great twirling bat, across the room.

“You have nothing else?”

“What am I going to
do
?”

“Come on. Let’s get out of here and go back to your place. This place is making you nervous.”

“But we’re going to have to
live
here!”

“Yeah, but not today. Come on.”

“We
can’t
live here,” she says.

“I know we can’t.”

“But where
can
we live?”

“We’ll figure it out. Come on.”

She stumbles into her skirt and puts her blouse over her arms and turns away from him meekly and asks, “Button my back.”

Buttoning the pink cloth down her quiet spine somehow makes him cry; the hotness in his eyes works up to a sting and he sees the little babyish buttons through a cluster of disks of watery light like petals of apple blossoms. Water hesitates on his lids and then runs down his cheeks; the wetness is delicious. He wishes he could cry for hours, for just this tiny spill relieves him. But a man’s tears are rare and his stop before they are out of the apartment. As he closes the door he feels he has already spent his whole dry life opening and closing this door.

Nelson takes the rubber panda along and every time he makes it squeak it makes Rabbit’s stomach ache. The town now is bleached by a sun nearing the height of noon.

Mrs. Springer, when Janice tells what happened, bustles around and finds an old black dress of hers that, with skillful pinning and a little sewing, she thinks will do. She and Janice go upstairs and after half an hour Janice comes down wrapped in black. “Harry. Does it look all right?”

“What in hell do you think this is going to be? A fashion show?” The idea that she can wear her mother’s clothes infuriates him. He adds regretfully, “You look fine,” but the damage is done. Janice is wounded and collapses upstairs and Mrs. Springer revokes the small measure of tolerance she had extended to him. The house again fills with the unspoken thought that he is the murderer. He accepts the thought gratefully; it’s true, he is, he is, and hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate he doesn’t have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidity of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.

He reads Nelson a Little Golden Book about a little choochoo who was afraid of tunnels but finally became courageous. Mrs. Springer comes in and bites off the word “Lunch.” Harry says he doesn’t want any but, taking courage from the storybook, goes into the kitchen to supervise and guard Nelson. Mrs. Springer manages to keep her back to him all the time. When Nelson is finished with his soup and raw carrots and Lebanon balony sandwich Harry takes him upstairs and settles him in bed and then resumes sitting in the living-room chair. Janice has fallen asleep and the sound of Mrs. Springer’s sewing machine spins out into the birdsong and murmur of the early afternoon. Janice wakes up and comes down to the refrigerator and then goes up again and her voice and her mother’s mingle. Mr. Springer comes home, comes in and tries to talk about nothing, and senses that Harry’s status in the house has gone down again. He trots upstairs to the women. Footfalls pad above. Fancy dishes in the glass-fronted cupboard behind Harry vibrate.

He wonders if the pain in his stomach comes from eating so little in the last two days and goes out to the kitchen and eats two crackers. He can feel each bite hit a scraped floor inside. The pain increases. The bright porcelain fixtures, the steel doors, all seem charged with a negative magnetism that pushes against him and makes him extremely thin. He goes into the shadowy living-room and at the front window watches two teen-age girls in snug shorts shuffle by on the sunny sidewalk. Their bodies are already there but their faces are still this side of being good. Funny about girls about fourteen, their faces have this kind of eager bunchy business. Too much candy, sours their skin. They walk as slowly as the time to the funeral passes. Daughters, these are daughters, would June—he chokes the thought. The girls’ long legs and slow, developed motions seem distasteful and unreal. He himself, watching them behind the window, seems a smudge on the glass. He wonders why the universe doesn’t just erase a thing so dirty and small. He looks at his hands and they seem fantastically ugly.

He goes upstairs and with intense care washes his hands and face and neck. He doesn’t dare use one of their fancy towels. Coming out with wet hands he meets Springer in the muted hallway and says, “I don’t have a clean shirt.” Springer says “Wait” and brings him a shirt and black cuff links. Harry dresses in the room where Nelson sleeps. Sunlight under the drawn shades; the boy’s heavy breath. It takes less time to dress than he hoped it would. The wool suit is uncomfortably hot, but something stubborn in him refuses to take off the coat. He sits, immaculately dressed, the shirt too tight, in the living-room looking at the tropical plants on the glass table, moving his head so that now this leaf eclipses that, now that this, and wondering if he is going to throw up. His insides are a clenched mass of dread, a tough bubble that can’t be pricked.

Of the things he dreads, he is most conscious of seeing his parents. He hasn’t had the courage to call them or see them since the thing happened; Mrs. Springer called Mom Monday night and asked her to the funeral. The silence from his home since then has frightened him. It’s one thing to get hell from other people and another from your own parents. Ever since he came back from the Army Pop had been nibbling at a grudge because he wouldn’t go to work in the shop and in a way had nibbled himself right into nothing in Harry’s heart. All the mildness and kindness the old man had ever shown him had faded into nothing. But his mother was something else; she was still alive, and was still attached to the cord of his life. If she comes in and gives him hell he thinks he’ll die rather than take it. And of course what else is there to give him? Whatever Mrs. Springer says he can slip away from because in the end she has to stick with him and anyway he feels somehow she wants to like him but with his mother there’s no question of liking him they’re not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself. Of all the people in the world he wants to see her least. He wishes she’d die.

At last they’re ready, Mr. Springer in a spiffy dark gray drip-and-dry and Nelson in a sissy suit with straps and
Mrs. in
a black felt hat with a veil and a stem of purple berries and Janice all pinned and hemmed in but still looking broad and sooty in her mother’s fat dress. She doesn’t wear a hat. The undertaker’s black Cadillac comes and takes them to the funeral parlor. It was once a house but now is carpeted the way no house ever was, pale green carpets that deaden your steps like an inch of dust on the floor. Little silver tubes on the wall shield a yellowish light and the colors everywhere, on all the walls and curtains you can see, are colors no one would live with, salmon and aqua and the violet that kills germs on toilet seats. They come up a flagstone walk in the sunshine past frothy green bushes into this, and wait in a little pink side-room. Harry can see into the main room; on a few rows of auditorium chairs about six people sit, five of them women. The only one be knows is Peggy Gring. Her little boy wriggling beside her makes seven. It was meant to be at first nobody but the families, but the Springers then asked a few close friends. His parents are not here. Somewhere someone’s boneless hands trail up and down the keys of an electric organ. The unnatural coloring of the interior comes to a head in the hothouse flowers arranged around a little white coffin. The coffin, with handles of painted gold, rests on a platform covered with a deep purple curtain; he thinks the curtain might draw apart and reveal, like a magician’s trick, the living baby underneath. Janice looks in and yields a startled whimper and an undertaker’s man, blond and young with an unnaturally red face, conjures a bottle of spirits of ammonia out of his side pocket. Her mother holds it under her nose and she suppresses a face of disgust; her eyebrows stretch up, showing the bumps her eyeballs make under the thin membrane. Harry takes her arm and turns her so she can’t see into the next room.

The side-room has a window through which they can look at the street, where children and cars are running. “Hope the minister hasn’t forgotten,” the young red-faced man says, and to his own embarrassment chuckles. He can’t help being at his ease here.

“Does that happen often?” Mr. Springer asks. He is standing behind his wife, and his face tips forward with curiosity, a birdy black gash below his pale mustache. Mrs. Springer has sat down on a chair is pressing her palms against her face through the veil. The purple berries tremble in their stem of wire.

“About twice a year,” is the answer.