Rabbit Remembered

A slender dark-browed girl of startling beauty waits on Janice, such beauty among the middle-aged and pudgy pimpled teen-age other waitresses that Janice's eyes sting. Dark hair, dark eyes, straight nose, firm round chin, soft mouth. Greek, Italian, Armenian even: Janice being herself dark-complected responds to such looks. When the girl speaks, the county's comfortable dragged accent-"So, hon, what can I bring ya?"-tumbles out and with it a vision of her sad future: the marriage, the pregnancies, the heavy meals, the lost looks. The blazing beauty dwindled to a shrill spark, a needle of angry discontent lost in these streets lined with row houses and aluminum awnings and little front porches where the patient inhabitants sit and soak in the evening heat and wonder where it all went. The television slowly goes from selling you perfume and designer jeans to selling you Centrum and denture adhesive as used by aged movie stars. It is a mistake to be beautiful when young and Harry made that mistake but not Janice; she still has what Mother called room to grow, back when she thriftily used to buy her daughter's clothes two sizes too big. She leaves the waitress a dollar tip though the sandwich and Diet Coke came to less than five dollars, counting the quarter she put in the jukebox to hear Patsy Cline's "Crazy" one more time before she dies. Patsy Cline, dead young in a plane crash just like that poor Kennedy boy. And then it's not Patsy Cline's version but that of some young pop "diva," so that's a quarter wasted.

West Brewer is on the way to bridge at Doris Kaufmann's in Penn Park, where the streets get curving and expensive, off the Brewer grid. Her name was Kaufmann when Janice first knew her and then Eberhardt, and a few years ago Eberhardt died and Doris managed to land Henry Dietrich, the grandson of the founder of Dietrich Hosiery, which didn't close its doors until after the war. To get there Janice has to drive on Weiser past Emberly Avenue, which would lead to Emberly Drive and then to Vista Crescent, where she and Harry and Nelson had lived until the house was burned down by racist neighbors because of what was going on inside. She could hardly blame them, it was terrible what Harry permitted to go on, for whatever selfish reason. How utterly selfish he was she had never realized before marrying Ronnie, who was so responsible and methodical. Some men don't think before they jump, and others do. And now this thirty-nine-year-old showing up, acting just like him, cocky and innocent.

Janice likes bridge for the socializing and hearing what real estate is doing in Penn Park but today it gives her a slight headache at the back of her skull. First she overbids, and then in compensation underbids, stopping at three spades when they should have been, it turns out, in small slam. Doris, her partner in that round of Chicago, is not pleased, though with pointed good manners she tries not to show it. "With twelve points in your own hand," she says, shuffling with that ripping sound expert shufflers make, "after I opened, showing at least thirteen in mine, and with four spades including two honors, you might at least have gone to game."

"Your shift to diamonds confused me. I had only two."

"I was showing you a second suit in case. That's called communication," Doris says, slapping down the made deck and picking up a red-filtered Newport she left smoking in her ashtray. She is one of the last women Janice knows who still smoke, though she is close to seventy if not quite there yet; she won't say.

Janice defends herself: "I thought it might be a convention I didn't know." If she has let Doris down in this hand, Doris has let her down lately by becoming old: wrinkled even in the flat of her cheeks like Clint Eastwood, her eyelids drooping down on her lashes, her long brown hands like two claws scrabbling at the cards. Doris's thick bejewelled rings, accumulated residue of her husbands, sit loose on her bony fingers; her bracelets clatter on her wrists. Janice used to admire her knowingness on all subjects but Doris has betrayed her by becoming an irritable, half-deaf know-itall hag. Now she snaps, "I would scarcely be going to a weak two after opening one spade."