Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,2

he repeats, but bends down to kiss her glossy forehead nevertheless. She is a small woman with a tight dark skin, as if something swelling inside is straining against her littleness. Just yesterday, it seems to him, she stopped being pretty. With the tiny addition of two short wrinkles at the corners, her mouth had become greedy; and her hair has thinned, so he keeps thinking of her skull under it. But he keeps hoping that tomorrow she’ll be his girl again. “Watcha fraid of? Who do you think’s gonna come in that door?”

Expecting no answer, he carefully unfolds his coat and goes to the closet with it and takes out a wire hanger. The closet is in the living-room and the door only opens halfway, since the television set is in front of it. He is careful not to kick the wire, which is plugged into a socket on the side of the door. One time Janice, who is especially clumsy when pregnant or drunk, got the wire wrapped around her foot and nearly pulled the set, a hundred and forty-nine dollars, down smash on the floor. Luckily he got to it while it was still rocking in the metal cradle and before Janice began kicking out in one of her panics. What made her get that way? What was she afraid of? With loving deftness, a deftness as complimentary to the articulation of his own body as to the objects he touches, he inserts the corners of the hanger into the armholes of the coat and with his long reach hangs it on the printed pipe with his other clothes. He presses the door shut and it clicks but then swings open again an inch or two. Locked doors. It rankles: his hand trembling in the lock like some old man and her sitting in here listening to the scratching.

He turns and asks her, “If you’re home where’s the car? It’s not out front.”

“It’s in front of my mother’s. You’re in my way.”

“In front of your mother’s? That’s terrific. That’s just the God-damn place for it.”

“What’s brought this on?”

“Brought what on?” He moves out of her line of vision and stands to one side.

She is watching a group of children called Mouseketeers perform a musical number in which Darlene is a flower girl in Paris and Cubby is a cop and that smirky squeaky tall kid is a romantic artist. He and Darlene and Cubby and Karen (dressed as an old French lady whom Cubby as a cop helps across the street) dance.

Then the commercial shows the seven segments of a Tootsie Roll coming out of the wrapper and turning into the seven letters of “Tootsie.” They, too, sing and dance. Still singing, they climb back into the wrapper. It echoes like an echo chamber. Son of a bitch: cute. He’s seen it fifty times and this time it turns his stomach. His heart is still throbbing; his throat feels narrow.

Janice asks, “Harry, do you have a cigarette? I’m out.”

“Huh? On the way home I threw my pack into a garbage can. I’m giving it up.” He wonders how anybody could think of smoking, with his stomach on edge the way it is.

Janice looks at him at last. “You threw it into a garbage can! Holy Mo. You don’t drink, now you don’t smoke. What are you doing, becoming a saint?”

“Shh.”

The big Mouseketeer has appeared, Jimmy, an older man who wears circular black ears. Rabbit watches him attentively; he respects him. He expects to learn something from him helpful in his own line of work, which is demonstrating a kitchen gadget in several five-and-dime stores around Brewer. He’s had the job for four weeks. “Proverbs, proverbs, they’re so true,” Jimmy sings, strumming his Mouseguitar, “proverbs tell us what to do; proverbs help us all to bee—better—Mouse-ke-tears.”

Jimmy sets aside his smile and guitar and says straight out through the glass, “Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It means, be what you are. Don’t try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself. God doesn’t want a tree to be a waterfall, or a flower to be a stone. God gives to each one of us a special talent.” Janice and Rabbit become unnaturally still; both are Christians. God’s name makes them feel guilty. “God wants some of us to become scientists, some of us to become artists, some of us to become firemen and