Rabbit At Rest

"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 of 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 te

"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." Fu

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 ru

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 a

"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."