Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,111
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 unfair, 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?”
Feeling dizzy, she hangs up. This is a mistake, but she thinks on the whole she’s been clever enough. She thinks she deserves a drink. The brown liquid spills down over the smoking ice cubes and doesn’t stop when she tells it to; she snaps the bottle angrily and blot-shaped drops topple into the sink. She goes into the bathroom with the glass and comes out with her hands empty and a taste of toothpaste in her mouth. She remembers looking into the mirror and patting her hair and from that she went to brushing her teeth. With Harry’s toothbrush.
She discovers herself making lunch, like looking down into a food advertisement in a magazine, bacon strips sizzling in a pan at the end of a huge blue arm. She sees the BB’s of fat flying in the air like the pretty spatter of a fountain in a park and wonders at how quick their arcs are. They prick her hand on the handle and she turns the purple gas down. She pours a glass of milk for Nelson and pulls some leaves off of a head of lettuce and sets them on a yellow plastic plate and eats a handful herself. She thinks she won’t set a place for herself and then thinks she will because maybe this trembling