Rabbit At Rest

"I like the teachers and all but I can't stand the other kids. They're all assholes."

"Don't say that. Such language. What's the matter, do they ignore you?"

"I wish they would. They tease me about my freckles. They call me Carrottop." Her little voice breaks.

"Well, then. They like you. They think you're terrific. Just don't wear too much lipstick until you're fifteen. Remember what I told you last time we talked?"

"You said don't force it."

"Right. Don't force it. Let nature do its work. Do what your mommy and daddy tell you. They love you very much."

She wearily sighs, "I know."

"You're the light of their lives. You ever hear that expression before, `the light of their lives'?"

"No."

"Well then, you've learned something. Now go do your thing, honey. Could you put Roy on?"

"He's too dumb to talk."

"No he's not. Put him on. Tell him his grandpa wants to give him some words of wisdom."

The phone clatters down and in the background there is a kind of shredded wheat of family noises – he thinks he even hears Janice's voice, sounding decisive the way Ma Springer's used to. Footsteps approach through the living room he knows so well – the Barcalounger, the picture windows with the drawn curtains, the piecrust-edged knickknack table, though the green glass egg, with the teardrop of emptiness inside, that used to sit on it is now on the shelves here, a few feet from his eyes. Pru's voice says, "Janice says she doesn't want to talk to you, Harry, but here's Roy."

"Hi, Roy," Harry says.

Silence. God on the line again.

"How's it going up there? I hear it rained all day."

More silence.

"Are you being a good boy?"

Silence, but with a touch of breathing in it.

"You know," Harry says, "it may not feel like much to you right now, but these are important years."

"Hi, Grandpa," the child's voice at last pronounces.

"Hi," Harry has to respond, though it puts him back to the begi

Silence.

"A little birdie comes to the balcony every morning and asks, `Where's Roy? Where's Roy?"'

Silence, which is what this lie deserves. But then the child comes out with the other thing he's perhaps been coached to say: "I love you, Grandpa."

"Well, I love you, Roy. Happy Birthday, by the way, for next month. Five years old! Think of it."

"Happy Birthday," the child's voice repeats, in that oddly deep, manlike way it sometimes has.

Harry finds himself waiting for more but then realizes there is no more. "O.K.," he says, "I guess that does it, Roy. I've loved talking with you. Give everybody my love. Hang up now. You can hang up."

Silence, and then a clumsy soft clatter, and the buzz of a dead line. Strange, Rabbit thinks, hanging up his own receiver, that he had to make the child do it first. Chicken in a suicide pact.

Alone, he is terrified by the prospect of an entire evening in these rooms. It is seven-thirty, plenty of time to still make the buffet, though his mouth feels tender from all that hot lasagna and the bagful of onion potato chips, full of sharp edges and salt. He will just go down and pick a few low-cal items off the buffet table. Talking to his family has exhilarated him; he feels them all safely behind him. Without showering, he puts on a shirt, coat, and tie. Mrs. Zabritski isn't at the elevator. In the half-empty Mead Hall, under the berserk gaze of the Viking warriors in the big ceramic mural, he helps himself generously to, among other items, the scallops wrapped in bacon. The mix of textures, of crisp curved bacon and rubbery yielding scallops, in his sensitive mouth feels so delicious his appetite becomes bottomless. He goes back for more, and more creamed asparagus and potato pancakes, then suddenly is so full his heart feels squeezed. He takes a Nitrostat and skips dessert and coffee, even decal Carefully he treads back across the alien texture of that Florida grass and the carpeted traffic island beneath the warm dome of stars, really a deep basin we are looking down into, he saw that this afternoon when he did the upside-down set shot, we are stuck fast to the Earth like flies on a ceiling. He feels stuffed and dizzy. The air is thick, the Milky Way just barely shows, like the faint line of fair hair up the middle of some women's bellies.

He gets back into the condo in time for the last fifteen minutes of Grouting Pains, the only show on TV where every member of the family is repulsive, if you count Rosea

He brushes his teeth, taking care to floss and rinse with Peridex. Without Janice here he is becoming staid in his habits, another old-fogey bachelor fussing with his plumbing and nostril hairs. Nostril hairs: he never wants to look like Dr. Morris. His double di