Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,123

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