Rabbit Remembered

"You should call and apologize." This incident has given her an edge, and anger enough to use it. He had seen in the girl this dead woman he had fucked, and moved toward her, and made an assault in his frustration. This did not speak well of what his wife meant to him. What she meant, she saw when she cleared her head, was a kind of revenge on Harry, and the possession of this house. This is my house, he had said, but it was not, it was her house, the house she had been raised in, the house her mother's pride had cleaned and polished and her father's money had maintained. They were surrounded by Koerner and Springer things; the Angstroms and the Harrisons had contributed hardly a stick of furniture, they were nobodies in the county, they would leave nothing behind but their headstones.

"I'm not ready," Ronnie tells her. "I can't trust myself to do the right thing. She's a Clinton-lover, for Chrissake. She must hang around with a bunch of North Brewer weirdos."

He wanted to fuck the girl, Janice perceives, and is wife enough to feel sorry for him, thinking of his burdensome prick that hangs at such loose ends below his furry pot belly, a prick with a flat upper side, a heavy mournful club, circumsized, unlike Harry's. Nowhere to hide its head. "Then call Nelson at least," she says.

"We don't know where he is, do we?" He is correctly guessing that she knows more than he. A long weekend has gone by since Thanksgiving. Nelson came over while Ronnie was at church Sunday. Ronnie faithfully goes to that no-name fundamentalist church beyond Arrowdale that he and Thelma used to attend. Once when Janice asked him why he bothered, he snapped, "The same reason anybody goes. Because we're all sinners." Janice felt this as a slap in her face. Harry would never have said it; he never thought he sinned. She tries not to hate Thelma now that she is dead but she shouldn't have to share both husbands with her. Janice has inherited Episcopalianism from her mother but without Bessie Springer's habit of attendance. There has been for years too much to do on a Sunday morning, her women's tennis group at the Flying Eagle in the summer and in the winter her sessions on the Stepmaster at the Fitness Center at the dying mall on the way to Brewer. She is determined not to get fat like Mother. Her trim little figure is the thing she likes best about herself. Anyway, Mother had friends to go with after Daddy was gone-Grace Stuhl, Amy Gehringer-and Janice has none. So she stays home Sunday mornings with the Brewer Standard in all its color-printed sections while her husband communes with the dead.

Knowing this, Nelson called five minutes after Ronnie stepped out the door and was there in his car fifteen minutes later. He took away two armfuls of clothes and said he'd be back for one of the television sets and a couple of upstairs chairs when he had a place of his own. He was sleeping on Annabelle's floor over on East Muriel Street until he could begin to look for a room on Monday. She was fine, just cried a lot because all of the Harrisons hated her. He had told her that Georgie didn't hate her, and the others were out of touch with their true feelings. Anyway, it had been his mistake. Another mistake, he realized, had been hanging on in this house so long, for lack of a better idea and having the delusion that his mother needed him. "You don't need me, Mom. You're doing fine. Ronnie's fine, for being a fat-headed bozo. Tell him sometime that he was good to put up with me so long."

She couldn't argue, really. She loved Nelson for all they had been through together but she was past the age when she could oblige his neediness. She and Ronnie left alone tended to each other's needs, one of which, never stated, was getting ready for death, which could start any time now. A pain in the night, a sour number on the doctor's lab tests, and the skid would begin. They had seen their spouses go that way. She had felt her baby slip from her soapy hands and for some few seconds be unfindable in the tub's opaque gray water. If there was any truth in what the churches said she would be reunited with her baby, not so far from now. Death had that to offer her.

She had given Nelson a piece of mince pie that she had saved in the freezer for him and said how sorry she was about what had happened. Everybody felt terrible about it, except Deet and the three children, she guessed. "No," Nelson said, "it was clarifying. It showed me what a pipsqueak leech I tend to be. There was no reason to drag you all in, my sister is something that concerns Dad and me, not you."

That was yesterday. She tells Ronnie now, "You could call him at work." He understands it as a command, for his having overstepped.

It is not an easy call to make, but no worse than hounding a prospect into buying insurance. You construct a shell for yourself, and speak from within it. "Nelson, got a minute?"

"A minute, yes." He has the Relationships group in ten minutes.