Rabbit Remembered

They are all, including Billy Fosnacht, bunched awkwardly in the living room, crowded in the insufficient space between the cut-plush sofa and cobbler's-bench coffee table on one side and the Christmas tree and the Zenith television with its jumbly crown of knickknacks on the other. Pru and Annabelle have shaken hands like two big cats brushing whiskers, and Ronnie and Mom have been excessively friendly to this round-faced girl who first appeared at the door in September. Annabelle is wearing a short red dress with a high collar and a diagonal zipper across the bosom, and dark net stockings on her prominent legs-all a little whorish, Nelson thought when he picked her up in his Corolla on East Muriel Street. Maybe Ronnie sensed something. Pru has found a dove-colored shot-silk dress with a boxy jacket that makes her hips look not too wide and sends out zigzags of shimmer; the gray goes from silver to a kind of purple when she moves. She has thickened in the waist and jaw and has crow's feet and tiny creases on her cheeks and even chin that come and go when she smiles her crooked, dissatisfied smile. Nelson can't remember if her nose was always so hooked, with so sharp a point. The long-limbed, green-eyed beauty he and his father had both desired is cobwebbed over with a certain gauze of age and disappointment yet those who remember can see through it; he thinks for forty-four she is holding up pretty well. Her hair, once lank and long and carrot-colored, wears a tint now that looks suspiciously even and shiny next to Annabelle's many-colored shaggy do, which she is letting grow out, making her solid white neck look less naked. Pru sees Billy as one of the gang who nearly ruined Nelson back in the Laid-Back days and greets him coolly, though in fact Billy was never a big user; his parents had crumped out early and he had had to take care of himself. Mom in her nervousness and maybe boosted by some tipple before dinner squeals "Billy Fosnacht!" and embraces him almost in tears, blurting, "I loved your dear mother so!"

Roy is taller than his grandmother and about the same height as Nelson and Ronnie and Pru and Annabelle, but he will get taller; at fifteen his growth spurt has years to go. The dark Springer genes have overruled the Angstrom pallor in the boy's hair and brows and the long curved eyelashes, like his father's but without the deepset wary look. His upper lip is fuzzy and his ears stick out and his eyes are bright; the new century is his. He puts his knuckly hand in Annabelle's competent soft one and tells her, "My sister is sorry not to meet you this time. She had a message I was to give you: your father was a doll."

"A doll?" Annabelle smiles.

"A neat guy, I think she meant. He died when she was eight so she has a lot more memories of him than I do."

Nelson interposes, "She remembers Dad's saving her life once in Florida, in a Sailfish that capsized. Another way to frame it would be that he nearly killed her."

"Nelson," Pru says in half-hearted wifely rebuke.

Roy volunteers, "I remember going to visit him in the hospital once, the high white bed and all these tubes going in and out of him. Also how when there was any candy or nuts around you had to compete with him for them-he'd steal a candy bar right out from under your nose."

This is a success; everyone laughs. Roy gives his mother's slightly lopsided grin, and Annabelle says, "Thank you so much, Roy. You've helped make him real to me."

"We'll have to have you over for dinner in the new year," Ronnie tells her, in a rehearsed voice, not quite looking at her. "I got a ton of Rabbit stories even Janice hasn't heard."

"We have a reservation at the Lookout," Nelson intervenes. To his elders he explains, "That's the fancy new restaurant in the old Pinnacle Hotel. When I called at first they said they were full up. But Billy got us into the first sitting, at seven."

"The maître d's upper-right bicuspid is all mine," Billy explains. "We had to go back in; the first didn't take. Some people burst into tears when that happens."

"Oh, how beautiful you all look!" Janice exclaims, as something in the occasion, the sudden clumping here of strands going back deep into her time on earth, brims over for her. "You all go and have a gorgeous time!" The teariness conjured by remembering Peggy Fosnacht, earnest wall-eyed clumsy Peggy, who had been Peggy Gring when Janice and she were young, blurs her survey of the four adult children, her son among them, and the mother of her grandchildren, all so touching, dressed up to greet this particular calendrical doom, with Harry and Fred and Mother and little Becky all squeezed inside them somehow, the DNA. "Just think," she says, "the next time we see each other, the year will have all those zeros in it! I can't stand it!"

"O.K., Mom," Nelson says nervously.