Rabbit At Rest

Judy says, "Grandpa, come take Roy's hand and play. He doesn't know how to even hold the cards and he's being fussy."

Roy obligingly proves her point by throwing the cards down on the round glass table, much as this morning he threw the spoon. "I hate games," he says, with a curious precision, like one of those old-fashioned dolls that would say a little speech when you pulled a string that came out of their backs.

Judy swiftly whomps him, with the hand not holding her cards. She chops with her fist at his shoulders and neck, and when he squalls in self-defense explains to him, "You messed up the trick so now nobody can play. And I was going to shoot the moon!" Pru neatly fans her hand face down on the table and with the other arm, a downy arm oflong loving bones, pulls the wailing little boy against her chest; seeing this, Judy flares into jealousy, goes pinkeyed the way women do before they decide to cry, and races off toward Harry and Janice's bedroom.

Pru smiles wanly, looking exhausted herself. "Everybody's tired and cranky," she sort of sings, over the top of Roy's head so Judy can hear it too.

Janice stands, a bit wobbly for a second. She knocks the glass 'table with her shin, and next to her abandoned hand of Hearts an orange juice glass half full of Campari shivers, the scarlet circlet of it, making him think of the pond when Ed's ball skipped in. She is back into her te

"How'd she do?" he asks.

Janice laughs as if surprised. "Terrific, actually. She's going to be a jock, just like you."

Rabbit goes into his bedroom. If nobody but Janice were here, he would lie on this bed, push his eyes through a few pages of the history book she gave him for Christmas, close his eyes on the sound of the bird dryly chirping in the Norfolk pine, and succumb to the great heaviness of being. But Judy has beat him to his own king-size bed with its jade-green fitted coverlet. She is curled up and hiding her face. He lies down close to the edge and lets her press her knees against his presence. He admires her hair, the amazing protein perfection of it, the long pale strands that in sun deepen to a shiny orange. "Better rest up for Bingo tonight," he says.

"If Roy goes I'm not going," she says.

"Don't be down on Roy," he tells her. "He's a good scout."

"He's not. I was going to shoot the moon. I'd already took the Queen of Spades, and I had the Ace of Hearts and the Jack and some others and then he ruins it all and Mommy thinks that's so cute. He gets all the attention and everything ever since he was born, just because he's a boy!"

He admits, "It's tough. I was in your shoes, except it was reversed. I had a sister instead of a brother."

"Didn't you hate her?" She removes her face from her folded arms and stares up at him with rubbed-looking green eyes.

He answers, "No. I guess, to be honest, I loved her. I loved Mim." The truth of this shocks him: he realizes how few others in his life he has loved so bluntly, without something of scorn, as his little wiry Mim. Her face seemed a narrower, harder version of his, with the same short upper lip, only a brunette, and a girl. Himself transposed into quite another key, and yet the melody recognizable. He remembers the sticky grip of her fingers in his when Mom and Pop would lead them on their Sunday walk, up the mountain to the Pi

"Was she younger than you or older?"

"Younger. Younger even than me than Roy is than you. But she was a girl and girls are less ornery than boys. Though I guess Mim was ornery in her way. Once she got to be sixteen, she put my parents through hell."

"Grandpa, what's `ornery'?"

"Oh, you know. Mean. Contrary. Rebellious."

"Like Daddy?"

"I don't think of your daddy as ornery, just, what's the word? – uptight. People get to him more than they do to most people. He's sensitive." Formulating even this much thickens his tongue and blurs his mind. "Judy, let's have a contest. You lie over there and I'll lie here and we'll see who can fall asleep soonest."

"Who'll be the judge?"

"Your mother," he says, letting his moccasins fall from his feet onto the floor over the edge of the bed. He closes his eyes on the posterlike Florida sunshine and in the intimate red of his brain envisions swooping on a bicycle down Jackson Road and then Potter Avenue with Mim on the handlebars of his rattly old blue Elgin, she maybe six and he twelve, if they hit a rock or pothole she'll go flying with him and the bike on top of her grinding her into the asphalt and ruining her pretty face forever, a woman's face is her fortune, but in her faith in him she sings, he can't remember the song, just the sensation of snatches of words flicked back into his ears as her long black hair whips against his eyes and mouth, making the bicycle ride more dangerous still. He led Mim into danger but always led her out. Shoo-fly pie. That was one of the songs she used to sing around the house, day after day until it drove them all crazy. Shoo-fly pie and apple pan dowdy, makes your eyes light up, your tummy say "howdy!" And then she would do a thing with her eyes that would make the whole rest of the family laugh.

He feels Judy ease her weight from his side and with that exaggerated, creaking stealth of small children move around the foot of the bed and out of the room. The door clicks, female voices whisper. Their whispers merge with a dream, involving an enormous scoop-shaped space, an amphitheater, an audience somehow for whom he is performing, though there is no other person in the dream, just this sense of presence, of echoing august dreadfully serious presence. He wakes frightened, with dribble down from one comer of his mouth. He feels like a drum that has just been struck. The space he was dreaming of he now recognizes as his rib cage, as if he has become his own heart, a huffing puffing pumping man at mid-court, waiting for the whistle and the highreaching jump-off. At some point in his sleep his chest began to ache, a stale sorrowful ache he associates with the pathetically bad way he played golf this afternoon, unable to concentrate, unable to loosen up. He wonders how long he has slept. The poster of sunshine and palm tops and distant pink red-roofed buildings pasted on the outer skin of the sliding windows has dulled in tint, gone shadowy, and the sounds of golf, its purposeful concussions alternating with intent silence and involuntary cries of triumph or disappointment, have subsided. And in the air outside, like the fluttering tinsel above a used-car lot, birds of many makes are calling to each other to wrap up the day. This hour or two before supper, when play – the last round of Horse at the basket out by the garage in the alley – used to be most intense, has become nap time as he slowly sinks toward earth with his wasting muscles and accumulating fat. He must lose some weight.

Only Judy is in the living room. She is flicking silently back and forth between cha