Rabbit Remembered

Even then, woozy on Purple Jesus and embarrassed to think somebody from the bonfire party might come up over the dune to pee, she had liked being on her back, supporting the world in the form of this boy's hard-breathing body, knowing she was built to take it, his painful thrusts, his whimper as he came. Men are surprisingly touching when they come, so grateful for a minute. There had been a boyfriend or two after that, while she worked in the office of Daddy's used-car business, filing and keeping accounts, before he got the Toyota franchise and anybody had heard of a Japanese car, but away from the beach sun she seemed to lose something, what little glamour she had, which was why she had liked Florida eventually. To get away from her parents, she was turning twenty and nothing was happening, she took the job at Kroll's, behind the nut-and-candy counter, the white smock they gave her had "Jan" stitched on the pocket when her parents had always called her her full name "Janice," pronouncing it juicily, decisively, their only child, prized, protected. At Kroll's there turned out to be, working at the most menial job, in shipping and receiving, this tall beautiful guy she remembered from Mt. Judge High, where he had been the star of the basketball team when she had been a runty freshman with skinned-back hair bangs couldn't hide. He also ran the 440 and the mile relay for track but it was for basketball that people remembered him by then, those that did. He seemed lost and funny, apologetic almost, after his two years in the Army and a few dead-end jobs. It was with him for the first time, thinking about it all day behind the counter, that she knew, just as certain as falling asleep, as plain as taking a meal or inserting a Tampax, that she was going to make love, fuck and be fucked, instead of just letting it happen against her better judgment the way it usually was. With everybody else on the street doing everyday things, they would drive down Warren Avenue in Harry's old Nash toward Linda Hammacher's pipe-frame bed, which squeaked and jerked back and forth so much they got to laughing sometimes and had to finish on the floor, her back pressed on the threadbare carpet and all the dust mice under the bed a few feet from her face, plus a single flesh-colored forgotten slipper. Harry was less methodical and steady a lover than Ronnie is, less big, not that it matters the way men think, but she was so excited by his shining torso naked above her and her memory of how heroic he had been on the court gleaming with sweat that she would come, pushing up shamelessly once he was rooted inside her. It helped to be down there in the floor grit. She was slow at some things but not at coming. Even now at the age of sixty-three she gets compliments from Ronnie. She smiles to herself at this secret of hers.

Everybody passes. Doris glances around suspiciously and says, "There must have been some points out there. I had only three, a jack and a queen."

While Norma redeals the cards Janice dares ask her, "Norma, are you by any chance a relation of a Linda Hammacher? She and I worked at Kroll's together, back in the Fifties."

Norma pauses, the cards freezing in her hands. "I had a second cousin Linda."

"Where is she now?"

"She died."

"Oh no! Well, I guess we're getting to that age."

"It was years ago. She was young, relatively. It was rather mysterious."

"How so?" Janice asks.

"Some said of AIDS, though the paper said just of a long illness. Her family didn't like to talk about it. She had been married and divorced."

"Oh dear," Janice says, truly shocked; a piece of remembered happiness has been poisoned.

"It was very tragic," Norma pronounces. "Damn. Count your cards. I should have the last one, and I don't."

As if to comfort Janice for having distracted the dealer, Amy during the next deal fills her in on the latest twist in the saga of a great parcel of land in the east of Diamond County, six thousand acres once held by Bethlehem Steel for its low-grade iron content and now sold to a Canadian developer who, tired of battling his farmer neighbors on every proposed development, had, all legally, turned this bit of William Penn's woods into a borough, with forty voting citizens, all but three of them company employees. Already they had voted in a managed landfill that would take four hundred tons a day of Philadelphia's garbage, trucked up the Turnpike in caravans of garbage trucks, and a water park involving a pool the size of a football field and a hundred-fifty-foot-high rubber-raft ride and an illuminated par-three golf course. "Now they're talking of a ten-story retirement-home complex and a half-mile racetrack for these little miniature racing cars that apparently are all the rage in Maryland," Amy says.

"Well," Janice says, "I guess it's the future."

Doris didn't quite hear and crabbily says, "Are you talking about the Y2K bug? Deet says it's all been overblown, to whip up more income for the computer companies."