Rabbit Remembered

"Listen, I feel rotten about the way I spoke to Annabelle."

His using her name offends Nelson, but he listens.

"I must have been drunk," Ronnie goes on.

"Were you that drunk? Mentioning her mother's cunt?" The clients at the Center may be dysfunctional but they have rabbit ears. Through the open door of his tiny office Nelson sees several heads out in the milieu turn, including that of Rosa, who talks to Jesus. She is with a new client, a forty-seven-year-old female obsessive-compulsive. During the intake he was struck by the new client's hands, so painfully scrubbed and chapped, and the fingernails nibbled down to the pink parts. Pru had had such long red hands, he remembers-gawky in the wrists, tender at the tips.

"Look," Ronnie's voice presses on, "I'm calling to say I'm sorry, you're not supposed to make it harder."

"I'm not? Some would say that you owe the apology not to me but to Annabelle."

"I don't trust myself to talk to her. Her being such a bleeding heart for Clinton still pisses me off."

"Was it really Clinton that pissed you off? Tell me, Ronnie, when you looked at her, what did you see?"

"I saw a bleeding-heart broad too big for her miniskirt."

"Anything else? Come on. Help yourself. Think."

"I saw Ruth Leonard back in the Fifties. She'd fuck anybody."

"More. Who else did you see?"

Ronnie is silent, but his silence conveys less animosity than an attempt to think. This is the best conversation Nelson has ever had with Ronnie. His moving out has done that, in just four days. For the first lime, Ronnie owes him some respect. "You want me to say your father," he comes up with.

"Only if it's true."

"It's true. She has more of him in her than you do. Stop asking all these questions trying to make me spill my guts. You're sore at me and always have been because I ball your mother."

"Are you sure about that? Maybe I like you for it; I can't do it. The fact is, I don't dislike you, Ronnie. You don't threaten me the way you did Dad, for some reason. I like you. I like the way you take care of Mom and care about that big homely barn of a house. You're a caring guy. Insurance salesmen are caring guys, worrying about the loved ones when the breadwinner packs it in. You try to make the dead effective just like I try to make the crazy effective. We're not hotshots but we're responsible citizens. What bugs you about Clinton is that he seems to get away with everything. The same with my father. Let me tell you something, Ronnie, something I've observed: nobody gets away with anything. Those that escape punishment inflict it on themselves. We all do it. We keep our own accounts."

Ronnie is silent, weighing this, looking for the hook. "What b.s.," he says at last. "Nellie, you've become a bullshit artist."

"Another reason I like you, Ronnie," Nelson rushes on, the insight having just come to him with a force that needs to be vented, "is that you and I are about the last people left on earth my father still bugs. He bugs us because we wanted his good opinion and didn't get it. He was worse than we are but also better. He beat us out. You look at Annabelle and see living proof that he beat you out- you may have fucked Ruth but he knocked her up and he stares out of her face at you. Right?"

"You've lost me," Ronnie admits. "Tell me, what does this kid do for you?"

"Me, it's like she's something my father left me to take care of, and I don't have a clue how to do it. Thanksgiving wasn't the answer. Your sons sure weren't the answer."

Ron Harrison's voice becomes pious. "Nellie, I'm going to speak the truth in love. What I say is going to help you. She's a slick little twat and can take care of herself. Let me tell you something that will shock you. Back in the kitchen, I turned her on. She wanted me to ball her. I felt it, and I had to get ugly, for everybody's sake. I sacrificed myself."

"Talk about bullshit," Nelson says, and hangs up. While he has been on the phone so long, Rosa and the new client have been scared off, horrified by what they have overheard. He ventures out into the milieu after them, to find out what they wanted, and to show them how sane and normal and trustworthy he basically is.

From: Dad [[email protected]]Sent: Friday, December 10, 1999 5:11 PMTo: [email protected]: change of address

Dear Roy-Sorry to let your messages and jokes accumulate. The one about how many Texas A & M students does it take to screw in a light bulb is funny but it seems a little heartless, seeing that twelve young people were killed making that bonfire pile and most were freshmen who had just been told to do this by people who should have known better. Remember when you get to college to trust your own judgment. I wasted a lot of time at beery frat foolishness at Kent State until your mother took me in hand. She was a little older than I and had more of a realistic upbringing.