Rabbit At Rest

He turns his head and looks her full in the face. "I'll give it up, sure. I was just thinking out loud."

"But, baby, can you?"

"Cinchy. I often go days without a hit. There's no withdrawal, is one of the beautiful things – no heaves, no DTs, nothing. It's just a question of making up your mind."

"But is your mind made up? I don't get the feeling it is."

"Sure it is. Like you say, I can't afford it. You and Dad own the lot, and I'm your wage slave."

"That's a way of putting it. Another way might be that we've bent Over backwards to give you a responsible job, heading things up, without our interference. Your father's very bored down here. Even I'm a little bored."

Nelson takes an abrupt new tack. "Pru's no help, you know," he says.

"She isn't?"

"She thinks I'm a wimp. She always did. I was the way out of Akron and now she's out. I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife."

"What are those?" Janice is truly interested; she has never heard a man spell them out.

He makes a cross evasive face. "You know – don't play naive. Reassurance. Affection. Make the guy think he's great even if he isn't. "

"I may be naive, Nelson, but aren't there things we can only do for ourselves? Women have their own egos to keep up, they have their own problems." She hasn't been attending a weekly women's discussion group down here for nothing. She feels indignant enough, independent enough, to get up and march into the kitchen and open the cabinet doors and pull down the Campari bottle and an orange juice glass. The aqua-enamelled clock on the stove says 12:25. The phone right beside her on the wall rings, startling her so that the bottle jumps in her hand and some of the Campari spills, watery red on the Formica counter, like thi

"Yes… yes… oh my God…" Nelson, sitting in the wicker chair pla

The Deleon Community General Hospital is a modern set of low white buildings added onto a bisque-colored core, dating from the Thirties, with a Spanish-tile roof and curved grillework at the windows. The complex fills two blocks on the southern side of Tamarind Avenue, which runs parallel to Pindo Palm Boulevard about a mile to the north. Janice spent most of yesterday here, so she knows the way into the parking garage, and which arrows painted on the floor to follow out of the parking garage, across a glass-enclosed second-story pedestrian bridge, which takes them above the parking-garage ticket booths and a breadth ofbusy asphalt and a hexagonal-tiled patio with arcs of oleander hedge and of convalescents in glinting steel wheelchairs, and down a halfflight of stairs into a lobby where street-people, multiracial but the whites among them dyed on hands and face a deep outdoorsy brown, doze beside the neatly tied bundles and plastic garbage bags containing all their possessions. The lobby smells of oleander, urine, and air freshener.

Janice, wearing a soft salmon-colored ru

The children are frightened. Roy and Judy don't know what they will see in this visit. Perhaps their grandfather has been monstrously transformed, as by a wicked witch in a fairy story, into a toad or a steaming puddle. Or perhaps a monster is what he has been all along, underneath the friendly kindly pose and high coaxing voice he put on for them like the wolf in grandmother's clothes who wanted to eat Little Red Riding Hood. The sugary antiseptic smells, the multiplicity of elevators and closed doors and directional signs and people in white smocks and white stockings and shoes and plastic badges, the hollow purposeful sound their own crowd of feet makes on the linoleum floors, scrubbed and waxed so shiny they hold moving ripples like water, widens the ominous feeling in their childish stomachs, their suspicion of a maze there is no escaping from, of a polished expensive trap whose doors and valves only open one way. The world that grownups construct for themselves seems such an extravagant creation that malice might well be its motive. Within a hospital you feel there is no other world. The palm trees and jet trails and drooping wires and blue sky you can see through the windows seem part of the panes, part of the trap.

The vaulted lobby holds two murals – at one end, happy people of many colors work in orange groves above which the sun seems one more round orange and, at the other, bearded Spaniards in armor woodenly exchange obscure gifts with nearly naked Indians, one of whom crouches with a bow and arrow behind a spiky jungle bush. This Indian scowls with evil intent. The explorer will be killed.

A ski

Their floor is the fourth, the topmost. Janice is struck by how much less elaborate the nurses' station is here than in the intensive cardiac-care unit. There, the uniformed women sat barricaded behind a bank of heart monitors each giving in a twitching orange line the imperfect beats from the rows of individual rooms, on three sides, with glass front walls, some doors open so you could see a dazed patient sitting up under his spaghetti of tubes, some of them closed but the curtains not drawn so you can see the two dark nostrils and triangular dying mouth of an unconscious head, and yet others with the curtains ominously drawn, to hide some desperate medical procedure in progress. She has home two babies and escorted both of her parents into the grave so she is not a total stranger to hospitals. Here, on Floor Four, there is just a single high counter, and a few desks, and a waiting area with a hard wood settee and a coffee table holding magazines titled Modern Health and Woman's Day and The Watchtower and The Monthly Redeemer. A big black woman, with waxy tight-woven corn rows looped beneath her white cap, stops the anxious herd of Angstroms with a smile. "Only two visitors in the room at a time, please. Mr. Angstrom came out of the ICCU this morning and he's still not ready for too much fuh