Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,8

went angry and flat and words flew, it was as if a pane of glass were put in front of him; cutting off air; his strength drained away and he had to go to a far corner of the house. This time there was no fight. His father shocked him by simply lying, and doubled the shock by winking as he did. He told her the Methodist had at last broken down and cut the strip of grass himself. Mother believed it but wasn’t pleased; she talked all the rest of the day and off and on all week about suing the old holy-roller. In a way she had come to think it was her flowerbed. From cement to cement the strip is not much more than a foot across. Walking along it feels slightly precarious to Harry, like treading the top of a wall.

He walks back as far as the lit kitchen window and steps onto the cement without the sole of his shoe scraping and on tiptoe looks in one bright corner. He sees himself sitting in a high chair, and a quick strange jealousy comes and passes. It is his son. The boy’s little neck gleams like one more clean object in the kitchen among the cups and plates and chromium knobs and aluminum cake-making receptacles on shelves scalloped with glossy oilcloth. His mother’s glasses glitter as she leans in from her place at the table with a spoon of smoking beans at the end of her fat curved arm. Her face shows none of the worry she must be feeling about why nobody comes for the boy and instead is narrowed, her nose a faceted beak, into one wish: that the boy eat. Her mouth is focused into white crinkles. They smooth in a smile; Nelson’s lips, hidden from Rabbit’s angle, must have taken the beans. The others around the table express praise, blurred syllables from his father, piercing from his sister, something thin about both voices. Rabbit, with the intervening glass and the rustle of blood in his head, can’t hear what they say. His father, fresh from work, is in an ink-smeared blue shirt and, when his face lapses from applauding his grandson, looks old: tired and grizzled. His throat a loose bundle of cords. The new teeth he got a year ago have changed his face, collapsed it a fraction of an inch. Miriam, dolled up in gold and jet for Friday night, picks at her food indifferently and offers a spoonful to the kid; the reach of her slender white braceleted arm across the steaming table rings a barbaric chord into the scene. She makes up too much; at nineteen she would be good enough without green eyelids. Because she has buck teeth she tries not to smile. Nelson’s big whorly head dips on its bright neck and his foreshortened hand, dots of pink, dabbles toward the spoon, wants to take it from her. Pop’s face lurches into laughter above his plate, and Mim’s lips leap in a grin that cracks her cautious wised-up squint and breaks through to the little girl Rabbit used to ride on his handlebars, her streaming hair tickling his eyes as they coasted down the steep Mt. Judge streets. She lets Nelson take her spoon and he drops it. The kid cries “Peel! Peel!”: this Rabbit can hear, and understand. It means “spill.” Pop and Mim smile and make . remarks but Mom, mouth set, comes in neatly with her spoon. Harry’s boy is being fed, this home is happier than his, he glides a pace backward over the cement and rewalks the silent strip of grass.

His acts take on decisive haste. In darkness he goes down another block of Jackson. He cuts up Joseph Street, runs a block, strides another, and comes within sight of his car, its grid grinning at him, parked the wrong way on this side of the street. He taps his pocket and fear hits him. He doesn’t have the key. Everything depends, the whole pure idea, on which way Janice was sloppy. Either she forgot to give him the key when be went out or she never bothered to take it out of the ignition. He tries to imagine which is more likely and can’t. He doesn’t know her that well. He never knows what the hell she’ll do. She doesn’t know herself. Dumb.

The back but not the front of the big Springer house is lit up. He moves cautiously in