Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,96
like he’s visiting a silly girl friend. Nelson and Billy Fosnacht are inside the house playing quietly. They’re too quiet. Mrs. Springer wants to see what’s happening but doesn’t want to move her legs; in her torment she starts to complain about what a crude child little Billy Fosnacht is, and from this shifts over to the kid’s mother. Mrs. Springer doesn’t like her, doesn’t trust her around the corner; it isn’t just the sunglasses, though she thinks that’s a ridiculous affectation; it’s the girl’s whole creepy manner, the way she came cozying around to Janice just because it looked like juicy gossip. “Why, she came around here so much that I had more charge of Nelson than Janice did, with those two off to the movies every day like high-school girls that don’t have the responsibility of being mothers.” Now Rabbit knows from school that Peggy Fosnacht, then Peggy Gring, wears sunglasses because she is freakishly, humiliatingly walleyed. And Eccles has told him that her company was a great comfort to Janice during the trying period now past. But he does not make either of these objections; he listens contentedly, pleased to be united with Mrs. Springer, the two of them against the world. The cubes in the iced tea melt, making the beverage doubly bland; his mother-in-law’s talk leaves his ears like the swirling mutter of a brook. Lulled, he lets his lids lower and a smile creeps into his face; he sleeps badly at nights, alone, and drowses now on the grassy breadth of day, idly blissful, snug on the right side at last.
It is quite different at his own parents’ home. He and Nelson go there once. His mother is angry about something; her anger hits his nostrils as soon as he’s in the door, like a lining of dust on everything. This house looks shabby and small after the Springers’. What ails her? He assumes she’s always been on his side and tells her in a quick gust of confiding how terrific the Springers have been, how Mrs. Springer is really quite warmhearted and seems to have forgiven him everything, how Mr. Springer kept up the rent on their apartment and now has promised him a job selling cars in one of his lots. He owns four lots in Brewer and vicinity; Rabbit had no idea he was that much of an operator. He’s really kind of a jerk but a successful jerk at least; at any rate he thinks he, Harry Angstrom, has gotten off pretty easily. His mother’s hard arched nose and steamed spectacles glitter bitterly. Her disapproval nicks him whenever she turns from the sink. At first he thinks it’s that he never got in touch with her but if that’s so she should be getting less sore instead of more because he’s in touch with her now. Then he thinks it’s that she’s disgusted he slept with Ruth, and committed adultery; she’s getting religious as she gets older and probably thinks of him as around twelve years old anyway, but out of a clear sky she explodes that by asking abruptly, “And what’s going to happen to this poor girl you lived with in Brewer?”
“Her? Oh, she can take care of herself. She didn’t expect nothing.” But he tastes his own saliva saying it. It makes his life seem cramped, that Ruth can be mentioned out of his mother’s mouth.
Her mouth goes thin and she answers with a smug flirt of her head, “I’m not saying anything, Harry. I’m not saying one word.”
But of course she is saying a great deal only he doesn’t know what it is. There’s some kind of clue in the way she treats Nelson. She as good as ignores him, doesn’t offer him toys or hug him, just says, “Hello, Nelson,” with a little nod, her glasses snapping into white circles. After Mrs. Springer’s warmth this coolness seems brutal. Nelson feels it and acts hushed and frightened and leans against his father’s legs. Now Rabbit doesn’t know what’s eating his mother but she certainly shouldn’t take it out on a two-year-old kid. He never heard of a grandmother acting this way. It’s true, just the poor kid’s being there keeps them from having the kind of conversation they used to have, where his mother tells him something pretty funny that happened in the neighborhood and they go on to talk about him, the way he used to be as a kid, how he dribbled the basketball