Rabbit At Rest

The teacher, Mr. Lister, is a doleful tall rumpled man with jowls that make him look like a dog. He gave her a B on the last quiz and likes her, she can tell. The other students, even the younger ones, like her too, and lend her cigarettes in the bathroom break at eightthirty and invite her to come out with them for a beer afterward at ten. She hasn't accepted yet but she might some night when things are more normal with Harry, just to show she's not stuck-up. At least she hasn't let herself go to fat like some of the women her age in the class – shocking, really, to see flesh piled up like that, and not doing anything to reduce, just carrying these hundreds of pounds back and forth and scarcely able to squeeze them into the desks. You wonder how long people can live like that. One of the few natural blessings God handed Janice was a tidy figure and that she has tried to keep, for Harry's sake as well as her own. He does seem prouder of her, the older they get. He looks at her sometimes as if she's just dropped down out of the moon.

Even with hurrying this morning, she gets caught in the slow traffic through the thick of the Brewer rush hour. All these cars, where are they going? By the side of the highway as it heads around the side of the mountain you can see erosion from last night's heavy rain – big twisted ditches of red clay washed away, weeds and all. At Joseph Street she parks and goes up the walk scared of what chaos she'll find, but Nelson is dressed in one of those putty-colored suits he has and Pru in brown slacks and a khaki-colored ma

In the kitchen, showing Janice the special peanut-butter-and honey sandwich she has made just the way Roy likes it (otherwise he throws everything on the floor, even the TastyKake for dessert), Pru perhaps thinks the older woman notices something wrong in her ma

But just the fact that she is talking so much, confessing so freely, stroking the lank red hair back from her forehead with a caressing gesture of both hands, with trembling fingertips, indicates to Janice that there has been a chemical event. Her son is poisonous. Everything he touches. With all her maternal effort she's brought destruction into the world.

Nelson has stayed in the front room, sitting on the Barcalounger with Roy in his arms, murmuring to the boy and gently blowing to tickle his ear. He looks up at his mother with resentment written all over his face. He says to her, "You know why I'm doing this, don't you?"

"To save your own life," Janice tells him, lifting the child out of his lap. Roy is growing heavier by the day and she puts him down on his own legs. "Time you start making him walk," she explains to Nelson.

"Just like you're making me go to this stupid useless place," Nelson says. "I want that perfectly clear. I'm going because you're making me and not because I admit I have any problem."

A weight of weariness floods her, as if she is at the end and not the begi

The boy scarcely flinches, but does for an instant lower his eyelids, with their beautiful lashes, a little long for a boy's. She has always found those lashes heartbreaking. "It's just debt," he says. "If Lyle weren't so sick now he'd have explained it to you better. We were just borrowing against future income. It would have all worked out."

Janice thinks of the quiz she must face tonight and of poor Harry with that metal worm they put into his heart and she tells her son, "Darling, you've been stealing, and not just pe

His lips, thin like her own, tighten so as to disappear under his mustache, that seems to be growing out, getting droopier. "I'm a recreational user just like you're a social drinker. We need it. We losers need a lift."

"I'm not a loser, Nelson, and I hope you're not." She feels a tightness growing in her but she tries to keep her voice low and level like Charlie would. "We had this same conversation in Florida and you made promises then you didn't keep. Your problem is too much for me, it's too much for your wife, it's too much for your father – much too much for him."

"Dad doesn't give a damn."

"He does. Don't interrupt. And your problem is too much for you. You need to go to this place where they've developed a method, where they're experienced. Your counsellor wants you to go."

"Ike says it's all a con. He says everything's a con."

"That's just his black way of talking. He got you in, he wants you to go."

"Suppose I can't stand it?" She and Harry never sent him off to summer camp, for fear he couldn't stand it.

"You must stand it, or -"

"Yeah, or what, Mom?"

"Or else."

He tries to mock her: "Oh sure. What are you and Charlie and old Harry going to do to me, put me in jail?" It is a real question; in nervousness he loudly sniffs, and then rubs his pink nostrils.

She tries to give him a real answer, saying in the level soft voice, "We wouldn't be the ones doing it. The Toyota Company and the police would be doing it, if they were called in."

He sniffs again, in disbelief. "Why would you call them in? I'll put the money back. I was always going to put it back. You care more about the dumb lot than you care about me."

His tone is trying for a bantering lightness, but her own mood has hardened; outrage has seized her, and self-righteousness. "You stole from me, never mind that. But you stole from your grandfather. You stole from what he had built."

Nelson's guarded eyes widen; his pallor seems a prisoner's in the murky parlor light. "Granpop always wanted me to run the lot. And what about my kids? What about Judy and Roy if you carry through on all these threats?" Roy has whimpered and collapsed to the floor, and is leaning against her ankles, hoping to distract her, hating the sounds of this conversation.

"You should have been thinking of them before now," Janice says stonily. "You've been stealing from them, too." She takes a weary pride in her stoniness; her head is numb but clear, with the product of her own womb pleading and wriggling beneath her. This numbness she feels must be the power her women's group in Florida talks about, the power men have always had.

Nelson tries outrage of his own. "Ah, fuck, Mom. Don't give me all this, all this `How could you do this to your mother and father?' What about what you did to me, all that mess around when Becky died so I never had a sister, and then that time you ran away with your oily Greek and crazy Dad brought Jill and then Skeeter into the house and they tried to make me take dope when I was just a little kid?"

Janice realizes that with all her stoniness and i

He squirms, retreats a bit. "I don't know," he says. "They let me take a puff of pot now and then. But they were doing worse stuff and didn't try to hide it from me."