Rabbit Remembered

"Several of the old men I look after," she says, trying to join in his drift, "think they're married to me. They want to hold my hand. They think I'm the right age for them, they forget how old they are, when they don't look into the mirror."

"That Egyptian plane that went down," he goes on. "One of the pilots decided to commit suicide and take everybody with him. Children and everybody. Because he couldn't pay his daughter's medical bills. People are crazy. At times when I'm with the clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little."

"So why do you want me to come with your family to Thanksgiving?"

"The same reason you showed up at the house," Nelson says. "Without your mother, you're stuck. You're not going anywhere. You're under a spell, and we've got to break it."

"My savior." She picks up the limp pickle slice with a dainty grip and before biting it with her deceptively pretty teeth gives him a challenging, sisterly look. "Nelson, are you sure it's my spell you're trying to break?"

He is nervous on behalf of his mother and sister and his own self, but things at Thanksgiving go pretty well until the four bottles of California sauterne have been drunk and people are restless and irritable from sitting so long at the table, the Springers' polished mahogany dining-room table, two overlapping tablecloths needed to cover it with its extra leaves inserted. The day is unseasonably warm and spotted with fits of rain, showers that come and go. The summer's drought has been forgotten. They need frost now. Daffodil and crocus shoots are coming up and the lilac buds have the fullness they should have in April. Some cog has slipped in the sky, clogged as it is with emissions from all our heedless cars.

Of the Harrison boys, nerdy, divorced Alex has come up from Virginia, and Georgie from New York, still unmarried and no great mystery why, and Ron Junior with his wife, pudgy Margie, and three children from where they live, in a new development off the old pike to Maiden Springs. That makes eleven with Nelson and Annabelle, but because she owes her so much hospitality and fortifying advice over the years Mom invited Doris Dietrich, as she now is, and her elderly rich husband, Henry, whom Doris calls Deet. Janice never dreamed Doris would accept but she did, loftily saying they had given the cook the holiday off and she was dreading trying to whip up an elaborate meal just for Deet. He is eighty, at least, and even deafer than Doris. Still, he holds himself erect and looks distinguished, a Diamond County aristocrat, a living reminder of the days when the vast old hosiery mills were still mills and not discount clothing outlets. After much dithering and debate, it was decided to put him at Janice's right and Annabelle next to him and Georgie, in Nelson's estimation the least menacing of the Harrisons, on her right.

And the old gent did appreciate-the thin red skin on his cheekbones glowed-being seated beside the best-looking youngish woman there. Margie, Annabelle's only competitor, was one of those local girls who with their chunky sturdy legs in white bobby socks and big boobs in the bulky letter sweater are knockouts as seventeen-year-old cheerleaders but don't carry it past thirty, sinking into fat with their mothers. Ron Junior had put on weight, too, and a construction worker's permanent tan. His mother's mouth, with her slightly shy but welcoming smile, had acquired in his face the stubborn closed set of a man who had settled for less than he might have. His two years up at Lehigh had gone into nailing two-by-fours into tacky house frames, rows of them on half-acre lots. He had become a version of his father, meaty and balding and potentially pugnacious, though without an insurance salesman's pallor. Alex, the oldest and tallest, now looked most like their mother-stringy and wry, the way she became in her long illness, and intelligent and prim in his wire-rimmed glasses. Was it working with miniature circuits that had made his mouth the size of a tight buttonhole? He had done the best of the three boys, moving out to the West Coast and back, climbing the computer programmer's zigzag ladder, though since it was a field where the brightest and luckiest made millions before thirty perhaps he felt like a failure; at any rate, he had a slight apologetic stoop, which was also like his mother as her life had wound down.