seat. “Yet we love them, Harry, don’t we? Harry, why do we love them? Answer that, and you’ll answer the riddle of life.” He is squirming around, crossing and uncrossing his legs, leaning over and tapping Rabbit’s shoulder and jerking back and glancing out the side window and turning and tapping again. “I am a hideous person, Harry. A person to be abhorred. Harry, let me tell you something.” As a coach he was always telling you something. “My wife calls me a person to be abhorred. But do you know when it began? It began with her skin. One day in the spring, in nineteen forty-three or four, it was during the war, without warning it was hideous. It was like the hides of a thousand lizards stitched together. Stitched together clumsily. Can you picture that? That sense of it being in pieces horrified me, Harry. Are you listening? You’re not listening. You’re wondering why you came to me.”
“What you said about Janice this morning kind of worries me.”
“Janice! Let’s not talk about little mutts like Janice Springer, Harry boy. This is the night. This is no time for pity. The real women are dropping down out of the trees.” With his hands he imitates things falling out of trees. “Plippity, plippity.”
Even discounting the man as a maniac, Rabbit becomes expectant. They park the car off Weiser Avenue and meet the girls in front of a Chinese restaurant.
The girls waiting under crimson neon have a floral delicacy; like a touch of wilt the red light rims their fluffy hair. Rabbit’s heart thumps ahead of him down the pavement. They all come together and Tothero introduces Margaret, “Margaret Kosko, Harry Angstrom, my finest athlete, it’s a pleasure for me to be able to introduce two such wonderful young people to one another.” The old man’s manner is queerly shy; his voice has a cough waiting in it.
After Tothero’s build-up, Rabbit is amazed that Margaret is just another Janice—that same sallow density, that stubborn smallness. Scarcely moving her lips, she says, “This is Ruth Leonard. Marty Tothero, and you, whatever your name is.” Ruth is fat alongside Margaret, but not that fat. Chunky, more. But tall. She has flat blue eyes in square-cut sockets. Her upper lip pushes out a little, like with an incipient blister, and her thighs fill the front of her dress so that even standing up she has a lap. Her hair, kind of a dirty ginger color, is bundled in a roll at the back of her head.
“Harry,” Rabbit says. “Or Rabbit.”
“That’s right!” Tothero cries. “The other boys used to call you Rabbit. I had forgotten.” He coughs.
“Well you’re a big bunny,” Ruth remarks. Beyond her the parking meters with their red tongues recede along the curb, and at her feet, pinched in lavender straps, four sidewalk squares meet in an x.
“Just big outside,” he says.
“That’s me too,” she says.
“God I’m hungry,” Rabbit tells them all, just to say something. From somewhere he’s got the jitters.
“Hunger, hunger,” Tothero says, as if grateful for the cue. “Where shall my little ones go?”
“Here?” Harry asks. He sees from the way the two girls look at him that he is expected to take charge. Tothero is moving back and forth like a crab sideways and bumps into a middle-aged couple strolling along. His face shows such surprise at the collision, and he is so elaborately apologetic, that Ruth laughs; her laugh rings on the street like a handful of change thrown down. At the sound Rabbit begins to loosen up; the space between the muscles of his chest feels filled with warm air. Tothero pushes into the glass door first, Margaret follows, and Ruth takes his arm and says, “I know you. I went to West Brewer High and got out in fifty-one.”
“That’s my class.” Like the touch of her hand on his arm, her being his age pleases him, as if, even in high schools on opposite sides of the city, they have learned the same things and gained the same view of life. The Class of ‘51 view.
“You beat us,” she says.
“You had a lousy team.”
“No we didn’t. I went with three of the players.”
“Three at once?”
“In a way.”
“Well. They looked tired.”
She laughs again, the coins thrown down, though he feels ashamed of what he has said, she is so good-natured and maybe was pretty then. Her complexion isn’t good now. But her hair is thick. A young Chinaman in a drab linen coat blocks their way