Rabbit Remembered

He wouldn't have dared ask a week ago, but moving out has given him a fresh footing with not only his stepfather but his estranged wife. Pru is a year older than he and that year has figured in their relationship from the start, making her seem a greater prize when they dated at Kent State, enlarged by adult features like a secretary's salary and a car (a salt-rotted tan Valiant) and an apartment of her own up in Stow and knowing how to fuck, muscling her clitoris against his pelvic bone and coming matter-offactly as if it was her woman's plain right. But then once they were married that year's difference became an embarrassment, as if he had just switched mothers. No wonder she and Dad got together. Then in recent years the year's difference had swung back to mattering less, a slightly awkward fact like her also being left-handed, once they outgrew the year when she was forty and he only thirty-nine. He was forty-one when she left him, leaving in the muggy heat of August to enroll the children in Akron schools. She had complained for years about living with his mother and Ronnie and about his dead-end job babysitting these pathetic dysfunctionals, boosting his own ego at their expense, caring more about them than he did about his own wife and children, but what it boiled down to in his baffled mind was something she once shouted, her green eyes bright as broken glass in her reddened face: My life with you is too small! Too small. As if being a greaseball lawyer's input organizer and easy lay was bigger. But the size of a life is how you feel about it. Pru was one of seven children and, though her father, a former steamfitter, is dead of too many Buds and her wispy little lace-curtain-Irish-Catholic mother sits in assisted-living housing, she has six siblings and their broods to give her a big noisy theatre to do an aunt act in. Whereas Aunt Mim had only him. And now Annabelle.

"It's great, Mr. Nosy," says Pru. "Actually, I've given Gekopoulos notice, beginning next year. I'd like something more having to do with people, maybe in public relations. Slapping up injury claims and divorce settlements out of glossarized boilerplate isn't exactly non-repetitive."

He suppresses the insight that life as a whole isn't exactly non-repetitive. "It doesn't sound as if the job uses all your abilities."

"Well, thanks, but what abilities? somebody might ask. Still I have this crazy idea I must be good for something. I mean, I can be pleasant. People like me, at least at first. Maybe I should enlist with Judy in stewardess school. Except my palms get all sweaty whenever I fly. I hate how long it takes to land, skimming in over all these highways and cemeteries."

She is spending Christmas with her mother and siblings and then driving to him, all the way across the great Commonwealth, its mountains and quarries, its mills and farms, along the Turnpike for eight or nine hours, Judy spelling her at the wheel, Roy playing video games at every rest stop. "When you come here after Christmas, where do you all want to sleep?" he asks. "I have only this one room. You could stay with Mom and Ronnie and I'll have the kids here in sleeping bags. Or is Judy too old for that?"

"Let's think about it," Pru says. "The basic thing is they see their father."

"Right. But can I say something? It'll be nice for me to see you, too."

"Uh-huh," she says, her tone Akron tough-girl flat.

"Let's try to have some fun when you come," he urges. "Life is too short."

"I'll put on Roy," she says. "Judy's out."

"How's it going?" he asks his son.

"O.K., good," is the guarded answer. Roy has always had this strange deep voice that takes Nelson by surprise. Judy he had no trouble loving from the start-her solemn hazel gaze, little square feet, her ankles flexible as wrists, the little split bun between her legs. Roy with his stern stare and upjutting button of a penis had a touch of the alien invader, the relentless rival demanding space, food, attention.

"You got my e-mail, I guess."

"Yeah. Thanks."

"How's school going?"

"Good."

"Are you learning anything exciting?"

"Not really. The teacher in Computer Skills showed us some faulty programming in Windows 98. He thinks Bill Gates is holding the Net-surfing technology back at this point and the government is right."

This may have been the longest utterance he has ever heard from Roy. He says, "Well, you're way ahead of me. You're more at home with this stuff than I'll ever be."

"It's easy. It's all Boolean logic."

"Is there anything you want to do in Diamond County? Shop at the outlets? Eat at the restaurant on top of Mt. Judge? Go visit that limestone cave again? They may close it in the winter, actually." As he runs through this bleak list it occurs to him that there is nothing to do in Diamond County-just be born, live, and die.