John Updike - Rabbit At Rest

Rabbit At Rest

By John Updike

Rabbit basks above that old remembered world, rich, atrest.

-Rabbit Is Rich

Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance.

-Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

I. FL

STANDING amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at theSouthwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funnysudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floatingin unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson anddaughterin-law Pru and their two children but somethingmore ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely likean airplane. The sensation chills him, above and beyond theterminal airconditioning. But, then, facing Nelson has madehim feel uneasy for thirty years.

The airport is relatively new. You drive to it of Exit 21 ofInterstate 75 down three miles of divided highway that for all theskinny palms in rows and groomed too-green flat-bladedgrass at its sides seems to lead nowhere. There are no billboardsor selfadvertising roadside enterprises or those low houseswith cooling white-tile roofs that are built by the acre downhere. You think you've made a mistake. An anxious red Camaroconvertible is pushing in the rearview mirror.

"Harry, there's no need to speed. We're early if anything."

Janice, Rabbit's wife, said this to him on the way in. Whatrankled was the tolerant, careful tone she has lately adopted, asif he's prematurely senile. He looked over and watched her tuckback a stubborn fluttering wisp of half-gray hair from hersuntoughened little brown nut of a face. "Honey, I'm beingtailgated," he explained, and eased back into the right laneand let the speedometer needle quiver back below sixty-five.The Camaro convertible passed in a rush, a .cocoa-brown blackchick in a gray felt stewardess's cap at the wheel, her chin andlips pushing forward, not giving him so much as a sidewaysglance. This rankled, too. From the back, the way they've designedthe trunk and bumper, a Camaro seems to have a mouth, two fat metallips parted as if to hiss. So maybe Harry's being spooked beganthen.

The terminal when it shows up at last is a long low whitebuilding like a bigger version of the sunstruck clinics -dental, chiropractic, arthritic, cardiac, legal,legal-medical - that line the boulevards of this statededicated to the old. You park at a lot only a few steps away fromthe door of sliding brown glass: the whole state babies you.Inside, upstairs, where the planes are met, the spaces are long andlow and lined in tasteful felt gray like that cocky stewardess'scap and filled with the kind of music you become aware of only whenthe elevator stops or when the dentist stops drilling. Pluckedstrings, no vocals, music that's used to being ignored, a kind ofcarpet in the air, to cover up a silence that might remind you ofdeath. These long low tasteful spaces, as little cluttered byadvertisements as the highway, remind Rabbit of something.Air-conditioning ducts, he thinks at first, and then crypts.These are futuristic spaces like those square tunnels in moviesthat a trick of the camera accelerates into spacewarp to show we'regoing from one star to the next. 2001, will he be alive? He touchesJanice at his side, the sweated white cotton of her tennis dress atthe waist, to relieve his sudden sense of doom. Her waist isthicker, has less of a dip, as she grows into that barrel body ofwomen in late middle age, their legs getting skinny, their armsgetting loose like cooked chicken coming off the bone. She wearsover the sweaty tennis dress an open-weave yellow cardiganhung unbuttoned over her shoulders against the chill of airportairconditioning. He is innocently proud that she looks, in herdress and tan, even to the rings of pallor that sunglasses haveleft around her eyes, like these other American grandmothers whocan afford to be here in this land of constant sunshine and eternalyouth.

"Gate A5," Janice says, as if his touch had been a technicalquestion. "From Cleveland by way of Newark," she says, with thatbusinesswoman efficiency she has taken on in middle age, especiallysince her mother died seven years ago, leaving her the lot,Springer Motors and its assets, one of only two Toyota agencies inthe Brewer, Pennsylvania, area: the family all still speak of it as"the lot," since it began as a used-car lot owned and run byFred Springer, dead Fred Springer, who is reincarnated, his widowBessie and daughter Janice have the fantasy, in Nelson, both beingwiry shrimps with something shifty about them. Which is why Harryand Janice spend half the year in Florida - so Nelson canhave free run of the lot. Harry, Chief Sales Representative forover ten years, with him and Charlie Stavros managing it allbetween them, wasn't even mentioned in Ma Springer's will, for allthe years he lived with her in her gloomy big house on JosephStreet and listened to her guff about what a saint Fred was and hercomplaining about her swollen ankles. Everything went to Janice, asif he was an unmentionable incident in the Springer dynasty. Thehouse on Joseph Street, that Nelson and his family get to live injust for covering the upkeep and taxes, must be worth three hundredthousand now that the yuppies are moving across the mountain fromnortheast Brewer into the town of Mt. Judge, not to mention thecottage -in the Poconos where even the shacks in the woodshave skyrocketed, and the lot land alone, four acres along Route111 west of the river, might bring close to a million from one ofthe hi-tech companies that have come into the Brewer areathis last decade, to take advantage of the empty factories, theskilled but depressed laboring force, and the old-fashionedlycheap living. Janice is rich. Rabbit would like to share with herthe sudden chill he had felt, the shadow of some celestialairplane, but a shell she has grown repels him. The dress at herwaist when he touched it felt thick and unresponsive, a damp hide.He is alone with his premonition.

A crowd of welcomers has collected this Tuesday after Christmasin this last year of Ronald Reagan's reign. A little man with thathunched back and awkward swiftness Jews often seem to have dodgesaround them and shouts behind him to his wife, as if the Angstromsweren't there, "Come on, Grace!"

Grace, Harry thinks. A strange name for a Jewish woman. Or maybenot. Biblical names, Rachel, Esther, but not always: Barbra, Bette.He is still getting used to the Jews down here, learning from them,trying to assimilate the philosophy that gives them such a grip onthe world. That humpbacked old guy in his pink checked shirt andlipstick-red slacks racing as if the plane coming in was thelast train out of Warsaw. When Harry and Janice were planning themove down here their advisers on Florida, mostly Charlie Stavrosand Webb Murkett, told them the Gulf side was the Christian coastas opposed to the Jewish Atlantic side but Harry hasn't noticedthat really; as far as his acquaintanceship goes all Florida is asJewish as New York and Hollywood and Tel Aviv. In their condobuilding in fact he and Janice are pets of a sort, being gentiles:they're considered cute. Watching that little guy, seventy if he'sa day, breaking into a run, hopping zigzag through the paddedpedestal chairs so he won't be beaten out at the arrival gate,Harry remorsefully feels the bulk, two hundred thirty pounds thekindest scales say, that has enwrapped him at the age of fiftyfivelike a set of blankets the decades have brought one by one. Hisdoctor down here keeps telling him to cut out the beer and munchiesand each night after brushing his teeth he vows to but in thesunshine of the next day he's hungry again, for anything salty andeasy to chew. What did his old basketball coach, Marty Tothero,tell him toward the end of his life, about how when you get old youeat and eat and it's never the right food? Sometimes Rabbit'sspirit feels as if it might faint from lugging all this bodyaround. Little squeezy pains tease his ribs, reaching into hisupper left arm. He has spells of feeling short of breath andmysteriously full in the chest, fill of some pressing essence. Whenhe was a kid and had growing pains he would be worried and thegrownups around him laughed them off on his behalf; now he isunmistakably a grownup and must do his own laughing off.