doctors and trapeze artists. And He gives to each of us the special talents to become these things, provided we work to develop them. We must work, boys and girls. So: Know Thyself. Learn to understand your talents, and then work to develop them. That’s the way to be happy.” He pinches his mouth together and winks.
That was good. Rabbit tries that, pinching the mouth together and then the wink, getting the audience out front with you against some enemy behind, Walt Disney or the MagiPeel Peeler Company, admitting it’s all a fraud but, what the hell, making it likable. We’re all in it together. Fraud makes the world go round. The base of our economy. Vitaconomy, the modern housewife’s password, the one-word expression for economizing vitamins by the MagiPeel Method.
Janice gets up and turns off the set when the six-o’clock news tries to come on. The little star left by the current slowly dies.
Rabbit asks, “Where’s the kid?”
“At your mother’s.”
“At my mother’s? The car’s at your mother’s and the kid’s at my mother’s. Jesus. You’re a mess.”
She stands up and her pregnancy infuriates him with its look of stubborn lumpiness. She wears one of those maternity skirts with a U cut in the belly. A white crescent of slip shows under the hem of her blouse. “I was tired.”
“No wonder,” he says. “How many of those have you had?” He gestures at the Old-fashioned glass.
She tries to explain. “I left Nelson at your mother’s on my way to my mother’s to go into town with her. We went in in her car and walked around looking at the spring clothes in the windows and she bought a nice Liberty scarf at Kroll’s at a sale. Purply Paisley.” She falters; her little narrow tongue pokes between her parted rows of dim teeth.
He feels frightened. When confused, Janice is a frightening person. Her eyes dwindle in their frowning sockets and her little mouth hangs open in a dumb slot. Since her hair has begun to thin back from her shiny forehead, he keeps getting the feeling of her being brittle, and immovable, of her only going one way, toward deeper wrinkles and skimpier hair. He married relatively late, when he was twenty-four and she was two years out of high school, still scarcely adult, with soft small breasts that when she lay down flattened against her pliant body that was like a soft smooth boy’s. Nelson was born seven months after the Episcopal service, in prolonged labor: this pang of memory turns Rabbit’s fright to tenderness. “What did you buy?”
“A bathing suit.”
“A bathing suit! Chh. In March?”
She closed her eyes for a moment; he can feel the undertow of liquor sweep over her and is disgusted. “It made it seem closer to when I could fit into it.”
“What the hell ails you? Other women like being pregnant. What’s so damn fancy about you? Just tell me. What is so frigging fancy?”
She opens her brown eyes and tears fill them and break over the lower lids and drop down her cheeks, pink with injury, while she looks at him and says “You bastard” with drunken care.
Rabbit goes to his wife and, putting his arms around her, has a vivid experience of her, her tear-hot breath, her bloodshot eyes. In an affectionate reflex he dips his knees to bring his loins against hers, but her belly prevents him. He stands to his full height above her and says, “O.K. You bought a bathing suit.”
Sheltered by his chest and arms she says with unexpected earnestness, “Don’t run from me, Harry. I love you.”
“I love you. Now come on, you bought a bathing suit.”
“Red,” she says, rocking sadly against him. But her body when tipsy has a brittleness, an unconnectedness, that feels disagreeable in his arms. “With a strap that ties behind your neck and a pleated skirt you can take off in the water. Then my varicose veins hurt so much Mother and I went into the basement of Kroll’s and had chocolate sodas. They’ve redone the whole luncheonette section, the counter isn’t there any more. But my legs still hurt so Mother brought me home and said you could pick up the car and Nelson.”
“Your legs hell, they were probably her legs.”
“I thought you’d be home before now. Where were you?”
“Oh, clowning around. I played ball with some kids down the alley.” They have parted.
“I tried to take a nap but I couldn’t Mother said I looked tired.”