Janice is explaining, “It’s really a whole separate trip, sweetheart. You should fly to Orlando if you want to go. To go from here -“
“‘d be like driving to Pittsburgh,” Harry finishes for her.
“Daddy promised!” the child protests, with such passion that her four-year-old brother, holding a spoon suspended in his fist above a bowl of Total he is mushing without eating, sobs in sympathy. Two drops of milk fall from his slack lower lip.
“Dull driving, too,” Harry continues. “Stoplights all down Route 27. We come that way sometimes, driving down.”
Pru says, “Daddy didn’t mean this time, he meant some other time when we have more days.”
“He said this time,” the child insists. “He’s always breaking promises.”
“Daddy’s very busy earning money so you can have all the things you want,” Pru tells her, taking the prim tone of one woman losing patience with another. She too is wearing a bathrobe, a little quilted shorty patterned with violet morning glories and their vines. Her freckled thighs have that broad bland smoothness of car fenders. Her feet are long and bony, pink in their toe joints and papery-white on top, in cork-soled lipstickred clogs. Her toenail polish is chipped, and Rabbit finds that pretty sexy too.
“Oh, yeahhh,” the child replies, with a furious sarcastic emphasis Harry doesn’t understand. Family life, life with children, is something out of his past, that he has not been sorry to leave behind; it was for him like a bush in some neglected corner of the back yard that gets overgrown, a lilac bush or privet some bindweed has invaded from underneath with leaves so similar and tendrils so tightly entwining it gives the gardener a headache in the sun to try to separate bad growth from good. Anyway he basically had but the one child, Nelson, one lousy child, though he was reading somewhere the other day that a human male produces enough sperm to populate not just the planet Earth but Mars and Venus as well, if they could support life. It’s a depressing thought, too planetary, like that unreachable round object in his dream, that the whole point of his earthly existence has been to produce little Nellie Angstrom, so he in turn could produce Judy and Roy, and so on until the sun burns out.
Now Nelson is stirred up and sucked into the kitchen by the fuss. He must have heard himself being talked about, and comes in from the guest bedroom, barechested and unshaven in rumpled smoky-blue pajama bottoms that look expensive. Unease infiltrates Harry’s abdomen with this observation of Nelson’s expensive tastes, something he is trying to remember about numbers, something he can’t reach. Janice said the boy looked exhausted and he does look thin, with faint shadows flickering between his ribs. There is a touch of aggression about the bare chest, something territorial, taken with Pru’s shorty robe. The pajama game. Dons Day and, who was it, John Raitt? Despite the quality of his pajamas, Nelson looks haggard and scruffy and mean, with the unshaven whiskers and that tufty little mustache like what dead Fred Springer used to wear and his thinning hair standing up in damp spikes. Rabbit remembers how deeply Nelson used to sleep as a child, how hot and moist his skull on the pillow would feel. “What’s this about promises?” the boy asks angrily, staring at a space between Judy and Pru. “I never promised to go up to Orlando this trip.”
“Daddy, there’s nothing to do in this dumb part of Florida. I hated that circus museum last year, and then on the way back the traffic was so miserable Roy threw up in the Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot!”
“Route 41 does a job on you,” Harry admits.
“There’s tons to do,” Nelson says. “Go swim in the pool. Go play shuffleboard.” He runs dry almost immediately and looks in panic at his mother.
Janice says to Judy, “The Village has tennis courts where you and I can go and hit balls.”
“Roy’ll have to come and he always spoils it,” the little girl complains, the vision of it freshening her tears again.
“- and there’s the beach - ” Janice goes on.
Judy replies, just making objections now, “Our teacher says the sun gives you skin damage and the earlier you get it the more cancer you’ll get later on.”
“Don’t be such a fucking smart-ass,” Nelson says to her. “Your grandmother’s trying to be nice.”
His remark makes the child’s tears spill, out through the curved lashes onto her cheeks like the silvery jerking tracks rain makes on windowpanes. “I wasn’t being -” she tries to get out.
At her age, this girl should be happier than she is, Harry thinks. “Sure you were,” he tells her. “And why not? It’s boring, going somewhere with family, away from your friends. We all remember what it’s like, we used to drag your daddy to the Jersey Shore, and then make him go up to the Poconos and have hay-fever up in those Godawful dark pines. Torture! The things we do to each other in the name of fun! O.K. Here’s my plan. Anybody want to hear my plan?”
The little girl nods. The others, even Roy who’s been carefully shaping his Total mush into a kind of pyramid with the back of his spoon, watch him as if he is a conjurer. It’s not so hard, to get back into the swing of family life. You just have to come out of yourself a little. It’s like basketball was, those first two or three minutes, when amid the jamming and yelling and body heat and crowd noise you realized that you were going to have to do it yourself, nobody was going to do it for you. “Today I got to play golf,” he begins.
“Great,” Nelson says. “That’s a big help. You’re not going to make Judy caddy, if that’s your plan. You’ll bend her spine out of shape.”
“Nellie, you’re getting paranoid,” Harry tells him. The boy’s been trying ever since that business with Jill twenty years ago to protect women against his father. His son is the only person in the world who sees him as dangerous. Harry feels the day’s first twinge in the chest, a little playful burning like a child flirting with a lit match. “That wasn’t my plan, no, but why not sometime? She could carry my lightweight bag, I’d take out two of the woods and one of the wedges and she and I could walk a couple holes some late afternoon when the tee times are over. I could show her the swing. But in the foursome, actually, we ride carts. I’d rather we walked, for the exercise, but the other bozos insist. Actually, they’re great guys, they all have grandchildren, they’d love Judy. She could ride in my place.” He can picture it, her sitting there like a slim little princess, Bernie Drechsel with his cigar in his mouth at the wheel of the electric cart.
He is losing his conjurer’s audience, thinking out loud this way. Roy drops his spoon and Pru squats down to pick it up, her shorty robe flaring out over one thigh. A lacy peep of jet-black bikini underpants. A slightly shiny vaccination oval high up. Nelson groans. “Out with it, Dad. I got to go to the bathroom.” He blows his nose on a paper towel. Why is his nose always running? Harry has read somewhere, maybe People on the death of Rock Hudson, that that’s one of the first signs of AIDS.
Harry says, “No more circus museum. Actually, they’ve closed it. For renovations.” He had noticed a story about it in the Sarasota paper a week or so ago, headlined Circus Redux. He hates that word, you see it everywhere, and he doesn’t know how to pronounce it. Like arbitrageur and perestroika. “My plan was this. Today, I got to play golf but tonight there’s Bingo in the dining hall and I thought the kids or at least Judy would enjoy that, and we could all use a real meal for a change. Tomorrow, we could either go to this Lionel Train and Seashell Museum that Joe Gold says is just terrific, or in the other direction, south, there’s the Edison house. I’ve always been kind of curious about it but it may be a little advanced for the kids, I don’t know. Maybe the invention of the telephone and the phonograph doesn’t seem too exciting to kids raised on all this computerized crap they have now.”
“Dad,” Nelson says in his pained voice, sniffing, “it’s not even that exciting to me. Isn’t there someplace out on Route 41 where they could go play video games? Or miniature golf. Or the beach and swimming pool, Jesus. I thought we came down here to relax, and you’re making some kind of educational ordeal o
f it. Come on. Lay off.”
Rabbit is hurt. “Lay off, I was just trying to create a little structure,” he says.
Pru intervenes in his defense. “Nelson, the children can’t spend all day in the pool, they’ll get too much ultraviolet.”
Janice says, “This hot weather is bound to turn cool this time of year. It’s flukey.”
“It’s the greenhouse effect,” Nelson says, turning to go to the bathroom, showing that disgusting rat’s tail at the back of his head, the glint of earring. How queer is the kid? “The greedy consumer society has wrecked the ozone and we’ll all be fried by the year 2000,” Nelson says. “Look!” He points to the Fort Myers News-Press someone has laid on the kitchen table. The main headline is 1988: the dry look, and a cartoon shows a crazed-looking yellow sun wringing out some clouds for a single drop of water. Janice must have brought the paper in from the corridor, though all she cares about is the Lifestyles section. Who’s fucking who, who’s divorcing who. Normally she stays in bed and lets her husband be the one to bring the paper in from the corridor. Lifestyles keeps.
Pru hands back Roy’s spoon to him and takes away his dreadful little bowl of Total mush, congealed like dogfood left out overnight. “Want a ‘nana?” she asks in a cooing coaxing sexy voice: “A nice ‘nana if Mommy peeled and sliced it?”
Janice confesses, “Teresa, I’m not sure we have any bananas. In fact I know we don’t. Harry hates fruit though he should eat it and I meant to do a big shopping yesterday for you and Nelson but the tennis game I was in went to the third set and then it was time to go to the airport.” She brightens; her voice goes up in volume; she tries to become another conjurer. “That’s what we can do this morning while Grandpa plays his golf! We can all go to Winn Dixie and do an enormous shopping!”
“Count me out,” Nelson yells from the bathroom. “I’d like to borrow the car sometime, though.”
What does he want a car for, the little big shot?
Judy’s tears have dried and she has snuck into the living room, where the Today show is doing its last recap of the news and weather. Willard Scott, beamed in from Nome, Alaska, has Jane and Bryant in stitches.
Pru is looking into the cupboards and begging Roy, “How about some Sugar Pops, honey? Grandpa and Grandma have lots of Sugar Pops. And jars of dry-roasted peanuts and cashews. Harry, do you know that nuts are loaded with cholesterol?”
“Yeah, people keep telling me that. But then I read some article said the body needs cholesterol and the whole scare’s been engineered by the chicken lobby.” Janice, in a pink alligator shirt and a pair of magenta slacks like the women wear down here to go shopping in, has wedged herself in at the kitchen table with the News-Press and a sliced-open bagel and plastic container of cream cheese. In her Florida phase she has taken to bagels. Lox, too. She has pulled out the Lifestyles section of the newspaper and Harry, still able to read type in any direction from his days as a Linotyper, sees sideways the headline (they use a “down” style and lots of USA Today-style color graphics)
Manwatchers
name the men
with the most
and in caps at the top HUGE LOSS and `WORKING’ ON ANOTHER WEDDING. He cranks his head to look at the page the right way and sees that they mean Working Girl star Melanie Griffith and the survivors of the Armenian tragedy and their “unique type of grief.” Funny how your wife reading the newspaper makes every item in it look fascinating, and then when you look yourself it all turns dull. The Braun Aromaster percolator, with a little sludgy coffee lukewarm in its glass half, sits at the end of the counter, past where Pru is still standing trying to find something Roy might eat. To let Harry ease his belly by, she goes up on her toes and with a little soft grunt under her breath presses her thighs tight against the counter edge. All this family closeness is almost like an African but where everybody sleeps and screws in full view of everybody else. But, then, Harry asks himself, what has Western man done with all his precious privacy anyway? To judge from the history books, nothing much except invent the gun and psychoanalysis.
Down here it’s necessary to keep bread and cookies in a drawer holding a big tin box to keep out ants, even up on the fourth floor. It’s awkward to pull the drawer out and then lift the lid but he does, finding a couple of empty cookie bags, one for Double-Stuf Oreos and one for Fruit Newtons, which his grandchildren left with nothing but crumbs inside, and one and a half stale sugar doughnuts that even they disdained to consume. Rabbit takes them and his mug full of sludgy coffee and squeezes back past Pru, concentrating on the sensation in his groin as her shorty robe grazes it, and with a wicked impulse gives the kitchen table a nudge with the back of his thighs to get Janice’s full cup of coffee rocking so it will slosh and spill. “Harry,” she says, quickly lifting the newspaper. “Shit.”
The sound ofthe shower running leaks into the kitchen. “Why the hell’s Nelson so jittery?” he asks the women aloud.
Pru, who must know the answer, doesn’t give it, and Janice says, mopping with a Scott Towel Pru hands her, “He’s under stress. It’s a much more competitive car world than it was ten years ago and Nelson’s doing it all himself, he doesn’t have Charlie to hide behind like you did.”
“He could have kept Charlie on but he didn’t want to, Charlie was willing to stay part-time,” he says, but nobody answers him except Roy, who looks at him and says, “Grampa looks ridiculous.”
“Quite a vocabulary,” Harry compliments Pru.
“He doesn’t know what he’s saying, he hears these expressions on television,” she says, brushing back hair from her forehead with a touching two-handed gesture she has developed to go with the hairdo.
The theme of the kitchen decor is aqua, a creamy frigid color that looked a little subtler in the paint chart Janice and he consulted four years ago, when they had the place repainted. He wondered at the time how it would wear but Janice thought it would be lighthearted and slightly daring, like their buying a condominium at all. Even the refrigerator and the Formica countertops are aqua, and looking at it all, with the creatures and flowers of seashells Janice has loaded the open shelves toward the foyer with, makes him feel panicky, shortens his breath. Being underwater is one ofhis nightmares. A simple off-white like the Golds next door have would have been less oppressive. He takes his mug and the doughnut-and-a-half and the rest of the News-Press into the living room and settles on the sofa side of the round glass table, since Judy occupies the wicker armchair that faces the television set. The pictures on the front page are of Donald Trump (Male call: the year’s hottest), the grimacing sun wringing the clouds (Rainfall 33% off average; year is driest since 1927), and Fort Myers’ mayor Wilbur Smith, looking like a long-haired kid younger even than Nelson, quoted saying that football star Deion Sanders’ recent arrest for assault and battery on a police officer could be partially blamed upon the unruly crowd that had gathered to watch the incident. There is a story about an annual government book-length report on automobiles and consumer complaints: in a gray box highlighting The best by the book, under all four categories, subcompacts, compacts, intermediate, and minivans, there isn’t a Toyota listed. He feels a small pained slipping in his stomach.
“Harry, you must eat a solid breakfast,” Janice calls, “if you’re going to play golf right through lunch. Dr. Morris told you coffee on an empty stomach is about the worst thing you can do for hypertension.”
“If there’s anything makes me hypertense,” he calls back, “it’s women telling me all the time what to eat.” As he bites into the stale doughnut the sugar patters down on the paper and dusts the crimson lapels of his seigneurial bathrobe.
Janice continues to Pru, “Have you been giving any thought to Nelson’s diet? He doesn’t look like he’s eating anything.”
“He never did eat much,” Pru says. “He must be where Roy gets his pickiness from.”
Judy has found among all the channels of network and cable an old Lassie movie; Harry moves to the end of the sofa to get an angle
on it. The collie nudges awake the lost boy asleep in the haystack and leads him home, down a dirt road toward a purple Scottish sunset. The music swells like an ache in the throat; Harry smiles sheepishly at Judy through his tears. Her eyes, that did their crying earlier, are dry. Lassie is not part of her childhood past, lost forever.
He tells her when the frog leaves his throat, “I got to go play golf, Judy. Think you can manage here today with these rude folks?”
She studies him seriously, not quite sure of the joke. “I guess so.”
“They’re good people,” he says, not sure this is true. “How would you like to go Sunfishing some time?”
“What’s Sunfishing?”
“It’s sailing in a little boat. We’d go off one of the hotel beaches in Deleon. They’re supposed to be just for the guests but I know the guy who runs the concession. I play golf with his father.”
Her eyes don’t leave his face. “Have you ever done it, Grandpa? Sunfishing.”
“Sure. A coupla times.” Once, actually; but it was a vivid lesson. With Cindy Murkett in her black bikini.that showed the hairs in her crotch. Her breasts slipsloppy in their little black sling. The wind tugging, the water slapping, the sun wielding its silent white hammer on their skins, the two of them alone and nearly naked.