Rabbit At Rest

From far across the river, a siren wails in the heart of Brewer. Above, in a sky gathering its fishscales for a rainy tomorrow, a small airplane rasps as it coasts into the airport beyond the old fairgrounds. What Harry instantly loved about this house was its hidde

Janice pulls in in the pearl-gray Camry wagon. She is fresh from the afternoon class at the Pe

"Poor Mr. Lister seems so sad and preoccupied lately," she says. "His beard has come in all full of gray. We think his wife is leaving. him. She came to class once and acted very snooty, we all thought."

"You all are getting to be a mean crowd. Aren't these classes about over? Labor Day's coming."

"Poor Harry, do you feel I've deserted you this summer? What are you going to do with all this mess you've pruned away? The beauty bush looks absolutely ravaged."

He admits, "I was getting tired and making bad decisions. That's why I stopped."

"Good thing," she says. "There wouldn't have been anything left but stumps. We'd have to call it the ugliness bush."

"Listen, you, I don't see you out here helping. Ever."

"The outdoors is your responsibility, the indoors is mine – isn't that how we do it?"

"I don't know how we do anything any more, you're never here. In answer to your question, I'd pla

"You're pla

"It won't look ugly, it'll look natural, and we won't be here to see it anyway."

Her tongue touches the upper lip of her mouth, which has opened in thought. But she says nothing, just "I guess we won't, if we do things as normal."

"If? "

She doesn't seem to hear, gazing at the fence-high heap of pruned branches.

He says, "If you're so in charge of the indoors, what are we having for di

"Damn," she says. "I meant to stop by at the farm stand there at the end of the bridge and pick up some sweet corn, but then I had so much else on my mind I sailed right by. I thought we'd have the corn with what's left of Tuesday's meatloaf and those di

"Or else we could sprinkle salt and sugar on ice cubes," he says. "One thing I know's in the fridge is ice cubes."

"Harry, it's been on my mind to go shopping, but the IGA is so far out of the way and the prices at the Turkey Hill are ridiculous, and the convenience store over on Pe

"You're a shrewd shopper, all right," Harry tells her. The mackerel sky is forming a solid gray shelf in the southwest; they move together toward the house, away from the shadow of coming dark.

Janice says, "So." Saying "so" is something she's picked up recently, from her fellow-students or her teachers, as the word for begi

"How did you do?"

"Beautifully, really. Mr. Lister gave me a B minus but said it would have been a B plus if I could organize my thoughts better and clean up my spelling. I know it's `i' before `e' sometimes and the other way around some other times, but when?"

He loves her when she talks to him like this, as if he has all the answers. He leans the long-handled clippers in the garage against the wall behind a dented metal trash can and hangs the pruning saw on its nail. Shadowy in her sundress, she moves ahead of him up the back stairs and the kitchen light comes on. Inside the kitchen, she rummages, with that baffled frowning expression of hers, biting her tongue tip, in the refrigerator for edible fragments. He goes and touches her waist in the wheat-colored dress, lightly cups her buttocks as she bends over looking. Tenderly, he complains, "You didn't come home until late last night."

"You were asleep, poor thing. I didn't want to risk waking you so I slept in the guest room."

"Yeah, I get so groggy, suddenly. I keep wanting to finish that book on the American Revolution but it knocks me out every time."

"I shouldn't have given it to you for Christmas. I thought you'd enjoy it."

"I did. I do. Yesterday was a hard day. First Ro

"I'm sure Ro

"I don't mind them."

"To me, they always taste spoiled; but they're all we have. I promise to get to the IGA tomorrow and stock up for the long weekend."

"We going to have Nelson and his tribe over?"

"I thought we might all meet at the club. We've hardly used it this summer."

"He sounded hyper on the phone – do you think he's back on the stuff already?"

"Harry, Nelson is very straight now. That place really has given him religion. But I agree, Yamaha isn't the answer. We must raise some capital and put ourselves on a solvent basis before we start courting another franchise. I've been talking to some of the other women getting their licenses -"

"You discuss our personal financial problems?"

"Not ours as such, just as a case study. It's all purely hypothetical. In real-estate class we always have a lot of case studies. And they all thought it was grotesque to be carrying a mortgage amounting to over twenty-five hundred a month on the lot when we have so much other property."

Rabbit doesn't like the trend here. He points out, "But this place is already mortgaged. What do we pay? Seven hundred a month."

"I know that, silly. Don't forget, this is my business now." She has stripped the Brussels sprouts of their waxpaper box and put them in the plastic safe dish and put it in the microwave and punches out the time – three blips, a peep, and then a rising hum. "We bought this place ten years ago," she tells him, "for seventyeight thousand and put fifteen down and have about ten or fifteen more in equity by now, it doesn't accumulate very fast in the first half of payback, there's a geometric curve they tell you about, so let's say there's still fifty outstanding; in any case, housing prices have gone way up in this area since 1980, it's been flattening out but hasn't started to go down yet, though it might this winter, you'd begin by asking two twenty, two thirty let's say, with the Pe