Rabbit Remembered

Janice at first had tried to give Ronnie real meals, but something always dried out or was underdone, and her attempts at seasoning, though she thought she followed the recipe exactly, miscarried into a funny suspicious taste. With the yuppifying of greater Brewer, all these vague industries coming in that didn't make anything you could handle or drive or put in a box really-'the information industry,' they said-there were more and more pleasant and not very expensive restaurants to eat out at; you didn't have to go downtown any more as Daddy and Mother used to for a little celebration, usually in one of the two big hotels downtown, the Conrad Weiser or the Thad Stevens. And otherwise the supermarkets sold wonderful frozen meals and sealed salads.

'Well, I forgot, if truth be known,' Janice confesses. 'I just got back five minutes ago. I've been doing so much else, and this morning, what a shock, Ronnie, this girl shows up at the door-'

Ronnie is not listening, he is opening the refrigerator door and peering in. 'There's still some chicken salad from two nights ago, I don't suppose it's turned yet. And those Japanese noodles Nelson likes. Oh, yeah, and way back behind the wilted lettuce a container of three-bean salad we never got to-should it have that cloudy look? I guess we can make do. They say eating less is better for you.' He moves to the counter to turn on the Sony. 'Lemme just catch the news, for the weather. The radio wants rain tomorrow, I'll believe it when I see it. La Nina has screwed up the jet stream so it thinks we're the Sahara.'

'Ronnie, please don't turn on TV. Pay attention, this is serious. This girl-'woman' I should say, Nelson's age more or less-rang the doorbell, which still needs fixing by the way, and said she was Harry's daughter. Her mother died this summer and told her before she died. Ruth sicced her on us.'

Now she does have Ronnie's attention. He has lost thirty pounds since Janice first knew him, and he has that deflated, slumped look of people you remember as fatter. His hair, which was kinky and brass-colored, is almost all gone, even over his ears, so they stick out as rubbery red flesh. His pale eyelashes are almost invisible now, which makes his eyelids look pink and rubbed. Like Doris Kaufmann's, his face has become pruny, but the wrinkles aren't as deep as in her leathery skin. Ronnie, though Harry always spoke of him as a crude plug-ugly, in fact has thin babyish skin that makes physical contact with him a little silky surprise, which is something Harry couldn't have known. Now the man fastens on what to Janice had been the least interesting of the morning's revelations. 'So Ruth Leonard is dead,' he says.

Janice remembers that Ronnie knew this Ruth back in the period when Harry did, that he had fucked her in fact, which Harry always resented, which seemed strange to Janice since in this period a lot of people evidently had. Janice had never met Ruth but there had been this slutty kind of girl in high school, their names got written on lavatory Walls, SUSIE PETROCELLI SUCKED MY BOYFRIEND'S COCK, and CAROLE STICHTER IS A MORON WHORE, from bad families on the lower side of town usually; no special looks, overweight and quiet in class, they had existed even under Eisenhower when everybody was supposed to be so pure. She cannot believe a forty-year- old fuck could mean much to Ronnie but from the stunned, slumped way he stands there in his sweated-up knit polo shirt and plaid golf pants it does. 'On that farm of hers,' he says. 'The drought killed her.' He is trying to joke away that trance men get into trying to remember what it was like entering a certain woman's space. Now that space is nowhere on earth and he will never get back into it.

'Wake up, honey. According to the girl she hadn't lived on the farm for years, she lived in Brewer with this daughter and worked for some shady investments outfit in that glass building across from where Kroll's used to be. Anyway, why do you care?'

'I don't, much. It was Rabbit that got stuck on her. To me she was just a hooer. What proof did this girl have that she was his kid?'

'None-just some confusing facts only she would know, about how her mother lied to her about when she and this man Byer were married so it would seem he was the father instead of somebody earlier. There's more of that went on than we think, back before abortions were easy.'

'They're too easy, if you ask me. These black and Hispanic kids have one like an annual check-up. Nobody cares.'

'Ronnie, that's not the point! We need to discuss this girl before Nelson comes home!'

Harry always thought Ronnie was terribly obtuse-called him an enforcer, a deliberate-foul artist-but Janice doesn't find him obtuse so much as on occasion having a quality of being in the way, of not letting anything just glide past if he doesn't absolutely agree with every detail. He has sat in too many living rooms refusing to leave until the man of the house sees the necessity of buying insurance, it's that blunt thereness he has. Harry was fascinated by Ronnie's big prick and it is big, flat along the top as if you could rest a wineglass on it at half-mast, but what struck Janice the first time was the relatively little difference between it erect and not. Whereas with Harry it was like night and day, between being curled asleep like a baby and being wide-eyed and six feet tall and up and at it.

'O.K.,' Ronnie says in his plodding, relentless voice, 'the point is

Ruth did a lot of screwing back then-who's to say it was Hotshot that knocked her up? Did the girl look like him?'

She tries to be honest. 'It's awful to say this, but I've forgotten exactly what Harry looked like. There was something about her, a kind of, I don't know, pale glow, and a way she couldn't quite sit still, that rang a bell, I thought.'

'You thought. You'll have to do better than that before you owe her anything.'

'She didn't say I did owe her anything. What she did say was her mother told her to come see us because she'd be alone in the world.'

'We're all alone in the world, it turns out,' he says. Janice doesn't know quite what he means but it hurts. Harry may have felt it but he would never have said that to her. She wonders sometimes if Ronnie married her just to score somehow on Harry. His lashless, pink-lidded eyes shift in embarrassment past her face, which she knows looks shocked, toward the clock on the microwave, worried about dinner or Nelson arriving home. He tells her, 'There'll be money in it at the end, believe me, if you have anything more to do with this bimbo.'

'She works as a nurse, and her mother must have left her something, there was all that money from selling the farm.'

'I bet. How'd you leave it in the end?'

'We'd get in touch with her. She won't with us.'

'Good. Don't. To me, it smells like a scam.'

'But I was here. When you were a child, did your parents ever tell you the stranger at the door might be an angel in disguise?'

'No,' he says. 'They never said that. They said the person at the door probably wants to pull a fast one. Suppose you concede that old Fuckbunny was her dad, she may figure she can sue us for hundreds of thousands in back child support.'

Janice takes a step forward to touch his shoulder and to offer herself to be touched. 'Ronnie, honey, why are you so rude about Harry? He's dead. He can't bother us now.'

'He bothers me. He screwed my wife. Twice he screwed my wife,' he adds, meaning Thelma then and her now, as a softening joke, and she rests her body against his, its comforting blocky golf-sweaty hereness. His hands find their habitual places on her. She would never have believed in her teens what an innocent homely comfort it could be, after sixty, to have your bottom groped. He weighs her two buttocks as if they are precious. It occurs to her they should do more in bed, while they're still alive. But at their age there is so much to do, all these errands going nowhere, all these little commitments.

Footsteps sound on the back porch, the screened sun porch. Nelson must have parked his car, a '94 ivory-white Corolla he traded Janice's Camry in on-she had given it to him when she married Ronnie and wanted to rid herself of her last link with the Toyota franchise-out back in the garage, seeing his mother's Le Baron out front. Guiltily she and Ronnie break apart in the kitchen. Nelson sees that something has been up, his stepfather has been pawing his mother. To cover her embarrassment she tells him, Ronnie interrupting to correct where she tells it differently the second time, about the strange girl's-woman's-visit this morning.

Nelson's deep-socketed, distrustful eyes dart back and forth as he listens. Listening is part of what he does for a living, and he lets them talk while he fishes a Coors from the refrigerator. He is forty-two. He has put on weight, but nothing like Harry did; Nelson learned the lesson there. His thinning hair, dark but with his father's fineness- Harry's blond hair would just lift off his head when it dried from being combed-is cut so short his skull and face are naked in their angles, like a convict's. He wears a kind of social worker's uniform-khaki pants and a white shirt with necktie but no jacket. A jacket would overstate the distance between him and the clients at the Fresh Start Adult