Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,122

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