“Her husband’s been wonderful,” she says. “He seems to love everybody.”
“He’s O.K.,” Rabbit says. “He makes me nervous.”
“Oh, everybody makes you nervous.”
“No now that’s not true. Marty Tothero never made me nervous. I just saw the poor old bastard, stretched out in a bed up the hall. He can’t say a word or move his head more than an inch.”
“He doesn’t make you nervous but I do, is that right?” “I didn’t say that.”
“Oh no. Ow. These damn stitches they feel like barbed wire. I just make you so nervous you desert me for two months. Over two months.”
“Well Jesus Janice. All you did was watch television and drink all the time. I mean I’m not saying I wasn’t wrong, but it felt like I had to. You get the feeling you’re in your coffin before they’ve taken your blood out. On that first night, when I got in the car in front of your parents’ place, even then I might just as easy have gone down to get Nelson and driven it home. But when I let the brake out—” Her face goes into that bored look again. Her head switches from side to side, as if to keep flies from settling. He says, “Shit.”
This gets her. She says, “I see your language hasn’t been improved by living with that prostitute.”
“She wasn’t a prostitute, exactly. She just kind of slept around. I think there are a lot of girls like her around. I mean if you’re going to call everybody who isn’t married a prostitute—”
“Where are you going to stay now? Until I get out of the hospital.”
“I thought Nelson and me would move into our apartment.”
“I’m not sure you can. We didn’t pay any rent on it for two months.”
“Huh? You didn’t?”
“Well my goodness, Harry. You expect a lot. You expect Daddy to keep paying rent? I didn’t have any money.”
“Well did the landlord call? What happened to our furniture? Did he put it out on the street?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Well what do you know? What have you been doing all this time? Sleeping?”
“I was carrying your baby.”
“Well hell, I didn’t know you had to keep your whole mind on that all the time. The trouble with you, kid, is you just don’t give a damn. Really.”
“Well listen to you.”
He does listen to what he’s been sounding like, remembers how he felt last night, and after a pause tries to begin all over again. “Hey,” he says, “I love you.”
“I love you,” she says. “Do you have a quarter?”
“I guess. I’ll look. What do you want it for?”
“If you put a quarter in that”—she points toward a small television set on a high stand, so patients can see it over the foot of their beds—“it’ll play for an hour. There’s a silly program on at two that Mother and I got to watching when I was home.”
So for thirty minutes he sits by her bed watching some curly-haired M.C. tease a lot of elderly women from Akron, Ohio, and Oakland, California. The idea is all these women have tragedies they tell about and then get money according to how much applause there is, but by the time the M.C. gets done delivering commercials and kidding them about their grandchildren and their girlish hairdos there isn’t much room for tragedy left. Rabbit keeps thinking that the M.C., who has that way of a Jew of pronouncing very distinctly, no matter how fast the words, is going to start plugging the MagiPeel Peeler but the product doesn’t seem to have hit the big time yet. It’s not too bad; a pair of peroxide twins with twitchy tails push the women around to various microphones and booths and applause areas. It even makes for a kind of peace; he and Janice hold hands. The bed is almost as high as his shoulders when he sits down, and he enjoys being in this strange relation to a woman. As if he’s carrying her on his shoulder but without the weight. He cranks her bed up and pours her a drink of water and these small services suit some need he has. The program isn’t over when some nurse comes and says, “Mr. Angstrom, if you want to see your baby the nurse is holding them to the window now.”
He goes down the hall after her; her square hips swing under the starched white. From just the thickness of her neck he figures her for a