Rabbit At Rest

During those spring months with Ruth on Summer Street, he used to wonder what it would be like to run to the end of the street, straight as far as the eye could see. In the thirty years since, he has often driven this way, to Brewer's northwestern edge and beyond, where the highway with its motels (Economy Lodge, Coronet, Safe Haven) melts into farmland and signs pointing the way to Harrisburg and Pittsburgh begin to appear. One by one the farms and their stone buildings, the bank bams put together with pegs and beams and the farmhouses built square to the compass with walls two feet thick, are going under to real-estate developments. Two miles beyond the pike to Maiden Springs, where the Murketts used to live before they got divorced, there is a fairly new development called Arrowdale after the old Arrowhead Farm that was sold off by the nieces and nephews of the old spinster who lived there so many years and had wanted to leave it to some television evangelist as a kind of salvation park, a holy-roller retreat, but whose lawyers kept talking her out of it. Rabbit as these recent years have gone by has watched the bulldozed land lose its raw look and the trees and bushes grow up so it almost seems houses have always been here. The streets curve, as they did in the Murketts' development, but the houses are more ordinary – ranch houses and split levels with sides of aluminum clapboards and fronts of brick varied by flagstone porchlets and unfunctional patches of masonry facing. Cement walks traverse small front yards with azaleas not quite in bloom beneath the picture windows. Bark mulch abounds, and matching porch furniture, and a tyra

Ro

Thelma's disease, systemic lupus erythematosus, has cost a fortune over the years, even with the benefits from Ro

She seems smaller, and her hair grayer. Her prim, rather plain face always had a sallow tinge, and this jaundice has deepened, he can observe through the makeup she uses to soften her butterfly rash, a reddening the disease has placed like a soreness across her nose and beneath her eyes. Nevertheless, her deeply known presence stirs him. They lightly kiss, when she has closed the door, a long light-blocking green shade pulled down over its central pane of bevelled glass. Her lips are cool, and faintly greasy. She stays a time within his embrace, as if expecting something more to happen, her body relaxed against his in unspeakable confession.

"You're thin," she says, drawing at last away.

"A little less fat," he tells her. "I've a long way to go before I satisfy the doctors and Janice." It seems only natural to mention Janice, though he had to make his tongue do it. Thelma knows the score, and did from the start. The whole affair was her idea, though he grew used to it over the years, and built it in. Her walk as she moves away from him into the living room seems stiff, a bit of a waddle; arthritis is part of the lupus.

"Janice," she repeats. "How is Wonder Woman?" Once he confided that he called Janice that and Thelma has never forgotten. Women don't forget, especially what you wish they would.

"Oh, no different. She keeps busy in Florida with all these different groups, she's kind of the baby of our condo, and a shiksa besides. You'd hardly know her, she's so on the ball. Her te

"You never told us about your heart attack." That "us" is a little payback for his mentioning Janice right off: You trail your spouses after you like shadows, right into bed; they becloud the sheets.

"It didn't seem worth bragging about."

"We heard about it from little Ron, who knows a boy who knows Nelson. The kiddie network. Imagine how I felt, learning about it that way. My lover nearly dies and never tells me."

"How would we, I, whoever, tell you? It's not the kind of thing they have cards for in the drugstore."

In recent years he and Janice have seen less and less of the Harrisons. Rabbit and Ron were Mt. Judge boys together and played on the high-school basketball varsities that, coached by Marty Tothero, were league champions for two out of their three years in senior high. But he has never liked Ro

"What can I offer you?" Thelma asks. "Coffee. A beer?"

"Both are no-nos for the new me. Do you have anything like a Diet Coke or Pepsi?" He remembers Judy's little quavering voice singing Coke is it on that long zigzag ride into shore.

"Sure. We don't drink much any more ourselves, now that we've resigned from the Flying Eagle."

"You ever coming back?"

"I don't think so. We heard the fees went up again, as you maybe didn't notice, you're so rich, plus the assessment for repairs to the two greens close to the road that are always being vandalized. Even three years ago Ro