Nelson slouches to his feet. His usual troubled expression wears a mountaineer’s tan, and he seems thinner, broader in the shoulders. Less of a puppy, more of a mean dog. At some point in Colorado or at Kent he has had his hair, which in high school used to fall to his shoulders, cut short, to give a punk look. “Dad, this is my friend Melanie. My father. And my mother. Mom, this is Melanie.”
“Pleased to meet you both,” the girl says, keeping the merry red smile as if even these plain words are prelude to a joke, to a little circus act. That is what she reminds Harry of, those somehow unreal but visibly brave women who hang by their teeth in circuses, or ride one-footed the velvet rope up to fly through the spangled air, though she is dressed in that raggy look girls hide in now. A strange wall or glare has instantly fallen between himself and this girl, a disinterest that he takes to be a gesture toward his son.
Nelson and Janice are embracing. Those little Springer hands, Harry remembers his mother saying, as he sees them press into the back of Janice’s tennis dress. Tricky little paws, something about the curve of the stubby curved fingers that hints of sneaky strength. No visible moons to the fingernails and the ends look nibbled. A habit of sullen grievance and blank stubbornness has descended to Nelson from Janice. The poor in spirit.
Yet when Janice steps aside to greet Melanie, and father and son are face to face, and Nelson says, “Hey, Dad,” and like his father Harry wonders whether to shake hands or hug or touch in any way, love floods clumsily the hesitant space.
“You look fit,” Harry says.
“I feel beat.”
“How’d you get here so soon?”
“Hitched, except for a stretch after Kansas City where we took a bus as far as Indianapolis.” Places where Rabbit has never been, restless though his blood is. The boy tells him, “The night before last we spent in some field in western Ohio, I don’t know, after Toledo. It was weird. We’d gotten stoned with the guy who picked us up in this van all painted with designs, and when he dumped us off Melanie and I were really disoriented, we had to keep talking to each other so we wouldn’t panic. The ground was colder than you’d think, too. We woke up frozen but at least the trees had stopped looking like octopuses.”
“Nelson,” Janice cries, “something dreadful could have happened to you! To the two of you.”
“Who cares?” the boy asks. To his grandmother, Bessie sitting in her private cloud in the darkest corner of the porch, he says, “You wouldn’t care, would you Mom-mom, if I dropped out of the picture?”
“Indeed I would,” is her stout response. “You were the apple of your granddad’s eye.”
Melanie reassures Janice, “People are basically very nice.” Her voice is strange, gurgling as if she has just recovered from a fit of laughter, with a suspended singing undertone. Her mind seems focused on some faraway cause for joy. “You only meet the difficult ones now and then, and they’re usually all right as long as you don’t show fear.”
“What does your mother think of your hitchhiking?” Janice asks her.
“She hates it,” Melanie says, and laughs outright, her curls shaking. “But she lives in California.” She turns serious, her eyes shining on Janice steadily as lamps. “Really though, it’s ecologically sound, it saves all that gas. More people should do it, but everybody’s afraid.”
A gorgeous frog, is what she looks like to Harry, though her body from what you can tell in those flopsy-mopsy clothes is human enough, and even exemplary. He tells Nelson, “If you’d budgeted your allowance better you’d’ve been able to take the bus all the way.”
“Buses are boring, Dad, and full of creeps. You don’t learn anything on a bus.”
“It’s true,” Melanie chimes in. “I’ve heard terrible stories from girlfriends of mine, that happened to them on buses. The drivers can’t do anything, they just drive, and ifyou look at all, you know, what they think of as hippie, they egg the guys on it seems.”
“The world is no longer a safe place,” Ma Springer announces from her dark corner.
Harry decides to act the father. “I’m glad you made it,” he tells Nelson. “I’m proud of you, getting around the way you do. If I’d seen a little more of the United States when I was your age, I’d be a better citizen now. The only free ride I ever got was when Uncle sent me to Texas. Lubbock, Texas. They’d let us out,” he tells Melanie, “Saturday nights, in the middle of a tremendous cow pasture. Fort Larson, it was called.” He is overacting, talking too much.
“Dad,” Nelson says impatiently, “the country’s the same now wherever you go. The same supermarkets, the same plastic shit for sale. There’s nothing to see.”
“Colorado was a disappointment to Nelson,” Melanie tells them, with her merry undertone.
“I liked the state, I just didn’t care for the skunks who live in it.” That aggrieved stunted look on his face. Harry knows he will never find out what happened in Colorado, to drive the kid back to him. Like those stories kids bring back from school where it was never them who started the fight.
“Have these children had any supper?” Janice asks, working up her mother act. You get out of practice quickly.
Ma Springer with unexpected complacence announces, “Melanie made the most delicious salad out of what she could find in the refrigerator and outside.”
“I love your garden,” Melanie tells Harry. “The little gate. Things grow so beautifully around here.” He can’t get over the way she warbles everything, all the while staring at his face as if fearful he will miss some point.
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s depressing, in a way. Was there any baloney left?”
Nelson says, “Melanie’s veggy, Dad.”
“Vega?”
“Vegetarian,” the boy explains in his put-on whine.
“Oh. Well, no law against that.”
The boy yawns. “Maybe we should hit the hay. Melanie and I got about an hour’s sleep last night.”
Janice and Harry go tense, and eye Melanie and Ma Springer.
Janice says, “I better make up Nellie’s bed.”
“I’ve already done it,” her mother tells her. “And the bed in the old sewing room too. I’ve had a lot of time by myself today, it seems you two are at the club more and more.”
“How was church?” Harry asks her.
Ma Springer says unwillingly, “It was not very inspiring. For the collection music they had brought out from St. Mary’s in Brewer one of those men who can sing in a high voice like a woman.”
Melanie smiles. “A countertenor. My brother was once a countertenor.”
“Then what happened?” Harry asks, yawning himself. He suggests, “His voice changed.”
Her eyes are solemn. “Oh no. He took up polo playing.”
“He sounds like a real sport.”
“He’s really my half-brother. My father was married before.”
Nelson tells Harry, “Mom-mom and I ate what was left of the baloney, Dad. We ain’t no veggies.”
Harry asks Janice, “What’s there left for me? Night after night, I starve around here.”
Janice waves away his complaint with a queenly gesture she wouldn’t have possessed ten years ago. “I don’t know, I was thinking we’d get a bite at the club, then Mother called.”
“I’m not sleepy,” Melanie tells Nelson.
“Maybe she ought to see a little ofthe area,” Harry offers. “And you could pick up a pizza while you’re out.”
“In the West,” Nelson says, “they hardly have pizzas, everything is this awful Mexican crap, tacos and chili. Yuk.”
“I’ll phone up Giordano’s, remember where that is? A block beyond the courthouse, on Seventh?”
“Dad, I’ve lived my whole life in this lousy county.”
“You and me both. How does everybody feel about pepperoni? Let’s get a couple, I bet Melanie’s still hungry. One pepperoni and one combination.”
“Jesus, Dad. We keep telling you, Melanie’s a vegetarian.”
“Oops.
I’ll order one plain. You don’t have any bad feelings about cheese, do you Melanie? Or mushrooms. How about with mushrooms?”
“I’m full,” the girl beams, her voice slowed it seems by its very burden of delight. “But I’d love to go with Nelson for the ride, I really like this area. It’s so lush, and the houses are all kept so neat.”
Janice takes this opening, touching the girl’s arm, another gesture she might not have dared in the past. “Have you seen the upstairs?” she asks. “What we normally use for a guest room is across the hall from Mother’s room, you’d share a bathroom with her.”
“Oh, I didn’t expect a room at all. I had thought just a sleeping bag on the sofa. Wasn’t there a nice big sofa in the room where we first came in?”
Harry assures her, “You don’t want to sleep on that sofa, it’s so full of dust you’ll sneeze to death. The room upstairs is nice, honest; if you don’t mind sharing with a dressmaker’s dummy.”
“Oh no,” the girl responds. “I really just want a tiny corner where I won’t be in the way, I want to go out and get a job as a waitress.”
The old lady fidgets, moving her coffee cup from her lap to the folding tray table beside her chair. “I made all my dresses for years but once I had to go to the bifocals I couldn’t even sew Fred’s buttons on,” she says.
“By that time you were rich anyway,” Harry tells her, jocular in his relief at the bed business seeming to work out so smoothly. Old lady Springer, when you cross her there’s no end to it, she never forgets. Harry was a little hard on Janice early in the marriage and you can still see resentment in the set of Bessie’s mouth. He dodges out of the sunporch to the phone in the kitchen. While
Giordano’s is ringing, Nelson comes up behind him and rummages in his pockets. “Hey,” Harry says, “what’re ya robbing me for?”
“Car keys. Mom says take the car out front.”
Harry braces the receiver between his shoulder and ear and fishes the keys from his left pocket and, handing them over, for the first time looks Nelson squarely in the face. He sees nothing of himself there except the small straight nose and a cowlick in one eyebrow that sends a little fan of hairs the wrong way and seems to express a doubt. Amazing, genes. So precise in all that coiled coding they can pick up a tiny cowlick like that. That girl had had Ruth’s tilt, exactly: a little forward push of the upper lip and thighs, soft-tough, comforting.
“Thanks, Pops.”
“Don’t dawdle. Nothing worse than cold pizza.”
“What was that?” a tough voice at the other end of the line asks, having at last picked up the phone.
“Nothing, sorry,” Harry says, and orders three pizzas - one pepperoni, one combination, and one plain in case Melanie changes her mind. He gives Nelson a ten-dollar bill. “We ought to talk sometime, Nellie, when you get some rest.” The remark goes with the money, somehow. Nelson makes no answer, taking the bill.
When the young people are gone, Harry returns to the sunporch and says to the women, “Now that wasn’t so bad, was it? She seemed happy to sleep in the sewing room.”
“Seems isn’t being,” Ma Springer darkly says.
“Hey that’s right,” Harry says. “Whaddid you think ofher anyway? The girlfriend.”
“Does she feel like a girlfriend to you?” Janice asks him. She has at last sat down, and has a small glass in her hand. The liquid in the glass he can’t identify by its color, a sickly but intense red like old-fashioned cream soda or the fluid in thermometers.
“Whaddeya mean? They spent last night in a field together. God knows how they shacked up in Colorado. Maybe in a cave.”
“I’m not sure that follows anymore. They try to be friends in a way we couldn’t when we were young. Boys and girls.”
“Nelson does not look contented,” Ma Springer announces heavily.
“When did he ever?” Harry asks.
“As a little boy he seemed very hopeful,” his grandmother says.
“Bessie, what’s your analysis of what brought him back here?”
The old lady sighs. “Some disappointment. Some thing that got too big for him. I’ll tell you this though. If that girl doesn’t behave herself under our roof, I’m moving out. I talked to Grace Stuhl about it after church and she’s more than willing, poor soul, to have me move in. She thinks it might prolong her life.”
“Mother,” Janice asks, “aren’t you missing All in the Family?”
“It was to be a show I’ve seen before, the one where this old girlfriend of Archie’s comes back to ask for money. Now that it’s summer it’s all reruns. I did hope to look at The Jeffersons though, at nine-thirty, before this hour on Moses, if I can stay awake. Maybe I’ll go upstairs to rest my legs. When I was making up Nellie’s little bed, a corner hit a vein and it won’t stop throbbing.” She stands, wincing.
“Mother,” Janice says impatiently, “I would have made up those beds if you’d just waited. Let me go up with you and look at the guest room.”
Harry follows them out of the sunporch (it’s getting too tragic in there, the copper beech black as ink, captive moths beating their wings to a frazzle on the screens) and into the dining room. He likes the upward glimpse of Janice’s legs in the tennis dress as she goes upstairs to help her mother make things fit and proper. Ought to try fucking her some night when they’re both awake. He could go upstairs and give her a hand now but he is attracted instead to the exotic white face of the woman on the cover of the July Consumer Reports, that he brought downstairs this morning to read in the pleasant hour between when Ma went off to church and he and Janice went off to the club. The magazine still rests on the arm of the Barcalounger, that used to be old man Springer’s evening throne. You couldn’t dislodge him, and when he went off to the bathroom or into the kitchen for his Diet Pepsi the chair stayed empty. Harry settles into it. The girl on the cover is wearing a white bowler hat on her white-painted face above the lapels of a fully white tuxedo; she is made up in red, white, and blue like a clown and in her uplifted hand has a dab of gooey white face cleaner. Jism, models are prostitutes, the girls in blue movies rub their faces in jism. Broadway tests, face cleansers it says beneath her, for face cleansers are one of the commodities this month’s issue is testing, along with cottage cheese (how unclean is it? it is rather unclean), air-conditioners, compact stereos, and can openers (why do people make rectangular cans anyway?). He turns to finish with the air-conditioners and reads that if you live in a high-humidity area (and he supposes he does, at least compared to Arizona) almost all models tend to drip, some enough to make them doubtful choices for installation over a patio or walkway. It would be nice to have a patio, along with a sunken living room like Webb Murkett does. Webb and that cute little cunt Cindy, always looking hosed down. Still, Rabbit is content. This is what he ikes, domestic peace. Women circling with dutiful footsteps above him and the summer night like a lake lapping at the windows. He has time to read about compact stereos and even try the piece on car loans before Nelson and Melanie come back out of this night with three stained boxes of pizza. Quickly Harry snatches off his reading glasses, for he feels strangely naked in them.
The boy’s face has brightened and might even be called cheerful. “Boy,” he tells his father, “Mom’s Mustang really can dig when you ask it to. Some jungle bunny in about a ‘69 Caddy kept racing his motor and I left him standing. Then he tailgated me all the way to the Running Horse Bridge. It was scary.”
“You came around that way? Jesus, no wonder it took so long.”
“Nelson was showing me the city,” Melanie explains, with her musical smile, that leaves the trace of a hum in the air as she moves with the flat cardboard boxes toward the kitchen. Already she has that nice upright walk of a waitress.
He calls after her, “It’s a city that’s seen better days.”
“I think it’s beauti-ful,” her answer floats back. “The people paint their houses in these different colors, like something you’d see in the Mediterranean.”
/> “The spics do that,” Harry says. “The spics and the wops.”
“Dad, you’re really prejudiced. You should travel more.”
“Naa, it’s all in fun. I love everybody, especially with my car windows locked.” He adds, “Toyota was going to pay for me and your mother to go to Atlanta, but then some agency toward Harrisburg beat our sales total and they got the trip instead. It was a regional thing. It bothered me because I’ve always been curious about the South: love hot weather.”
“Don’t be so chintzy, Dad. Go for your vacation and pay your way.”
“Vacations, we’re pretty well stuck with that camp up in the Poconos.” Old man Springer’s pride and joy.