Rabbit Remembered

"That doesn't exactly make a life, does it though?" Annabelle asks, lifting the first forkful of salad to her face. She has a slightly eager way of eating, keeping her mouth closed in a satisfied smile as she chews, her upper lip shiny with salad oil.

"That's what everybody kept telling him all his life," says Nelson. "But I don't know. At least it was something, to remember about yourself. I have nothing like that to remember about myself."

"What about your family?" she asks, before taking the next bite, being careful to keep the bacon bits balanced on the piece of spinach.

"They left me. My wife, Pru, who you saw pregnant that time at the party that you've forgotten all about, left me over a year ago and took the kids. Back to Ohio, where she's from. Akron. I met her when I was a student at Kent State." He doesn't say she was a secretary, and older than he; he is embarrassed about that. "My girl, Judy, is nineteen, twenty next January, and off everybody's hands except a bunch of boyfriends', and the boy, Roy, and I keep in touch by e-mail. He's fourteen and knows more about computers than I ever will."

"Why did she leave? Pru."

"I don't know. I guess I disappointed her. She thinks I'm a pipsqueak."

She waits to finish chewing and says urgently, "Nelson, you're not. You're a caring, intelligent man."

"Yeah, well. You can be that and a pipsqueak too. I can be frustrating. Pru always wanted us to get a house of our own and I could never see the point, my mother sitting on all those rooms over in Mt. Judge. I didn't want to leave her alone. My mother."

"But now she's married."

"Yeah. But then I didn't want to leave her alone with my pretty awful stepfather. Hey-do I sound normal, or do I sound sick? When I'm over with my sickos I don't have to listen to myself. I just let them talk. Boy, do some of them babble! Everybody thinks their little story is the story of the universe."

The waitress comes back from the kitchen and puts an unlit candle in a pottery holder on the booth table and lights it. "You didn't have to do that," Nelson tells her. "We're about to go."

"Why go?" The waitress saunters to the door and looks out its half-window at the whipped, glistening city. "Pitch black in the east," she says. "Over behind the courthouse." A cardboard sign tucked into the molding says on this side in Day-Glo letters CLOSED. She takes this sign and reverses it so that CLOSED faces the street. The couple in the booth hear the lock click. "The stove and grill are out," the waitress explains.

Nearer, Nelson hears this other female voice, as soft, as transparent as the voice inside his head, say, "Tell me more about your father, as you saw him." The girl is trying so hard to be sweet. Maybe she is sweet. But Nelson dislikes talking about his father. It pulls something too obscure and precious out of him. When he tries to think back to what it was like growing up he keeps getting a picture of his father and him in the front seat of a car, both of them having nothing to say but the silence comfortable, the shared forward motion satisfying. Nelson is being driven somewhere. To the piano lessons that gave him butterflies because he never practiced enough during the week, as Mr. Schiffner with his lavender shirts and tiny Hitler mustache always detected. To soccer practice when he was in that weekend league of middle teens and had hopes of being a star, small but agile. To Billy Fosnacht's or some other friend's, there weren't that many, for a sleepover. Meanwhile his father's big head was happy with his daydreams and his hands were light and pale on the steering wheel, with big translucent moons on the nails, usually one hand while the other absent-mindedly patted and stroked the back of his head in a gesture that maybe went back to the days when teenagers had wet ducktails, like Sal Mineo or James Dean in the old rebel movies Nelson could watch on TV. His father had been a rebel of a sort, and a daredevil, but as he got older and tame he radiated happiness at just the simplest American things, driving along in an automobile, the radio giving off music, the heater giving off heat, delivering his son somewhere in this urban area that he knew block by block, intersection by intersection. At night, in the underlit ghostliness of the front seat, their two shadows were linked it seemed forever by blood. To Nelson as a child his own death seemed possible in so perilous a world but he didn't believe his father would ever die.

"I saw him, eventually," Nelson says, "as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. Mom-mom-my grandmother on my mother's side, the Springers-would always say how I resembled Fred, her husband. He was on the shortish side like me, and sharp at business stuff, and bouncy. But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way."