He likes motel rooms – the long clammy slot of hired space, the two double beds, the television set with its invitation to buy an R-rated movie, the shag carpet, the framed prints of big birds, the sanitized towels, the hush of anonymity, the closeted echo of old sex. He sleeps well, as if he has slipped off his body with its troubles and left it lying on the other double bed. In his dream he is back at the lot, with a young woman who seems to be in charge. She wears a white cap and dangly earrings but when he leans close and tries to explain himself to her, to convey his indispensable usefulness to the enterprise, contrary to what she may have heard from Janice, she makes a wry mouth and her face melts under his eyes in a kind of visual scream.
For breakfast, he succumbs to the temptation and has two fried eggs, though the yolks are terrible for your arteries, with bacon on the side. Rabbit likes the very American moment of packing up his car in sleepy unspeaking companionship with the other motel guests, elderly couples, cranky families, as they drift from the breakfast room across the parking lot with its long milky morning shadows. On the road again, with the radio again. The same news as the night before, amplified by the final baseball scores (Phils lost, five to one) and the news from Asia, where it is already afternoon for the busy Japanese currency speculators, the restive Chinese students, the doll-like Filipino hookers, the unhappily victorious Vietnamese, the up-and-coming although riotous Koreans, the tottering Burmese socialists, the warring Cambodian factions including the mindless Khmer Rouge minions of the most atrocious national leader since Hitler and Stalin, the infamous Pol Pot. Like, wow! Wake up, songbirds! The d.j., not last night's but just as crazy and alone with himself, plays some rockabilly song Rabbit likes, about getting down, "make a little love, get down tonight." It occurs to Harry he didn't even jerk off last night, though motel rooms usually excite him. Boy, is he showing his age.
As Baltimore nears, the condominiums multiply, thicken, entire hills and valleys loaded with them, pastel gingerbread staircases containing invisible people. 83 ends seamlessly at 695 and with all the commuters in their neckties he drones around the Beltway, jostling for his space in the world as if he still deserves it. Then he takes up 95, which will be his home all the way to Florida. There are two ways around Washington, he and Janice have tried them both, the boringly expert travellers down in the condo like the Silbersteins say 495 passing to the north and west is actually quicker, but he likes the little glimpse of the monuments you get by staying east on 95 and crossing the Potomac on a broad bridge into Alexandria. The frozen far heart, ice-cream white, of the grand old republic.
After all that megalopolis, Virginia feels bucolically vacant. The fields look bigger than those in Pennsylvania, the hills gentler and more open, with meadows and horses, a gracious mist in the air, once in a while a pillared manse on a pale-green rise like something embroidered on a sampler by a slaveowner's spinster daughter. A military tinge: Fort Belvoir Engineer Proving Ground, Quantico Marine Corps Base. Harry thinks of his Army time and it comes back as a lyric tan, a translucent shimmer of aligned faceless men, the curious peace of having no decisions to make, of being told entirely what to do. War is a relief in many ways. Without the Cold War, what's the point of being an American? Still, we held them off. We creamed those oafs. Hitler, Stalin, and now Gorby. History will remember that, if not thank us. There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog. It becomes hard now to find stations on the radio that are not country music or religion. "Pray for difficult marriages," one preacher says, his grainy molasses-brown voice digging so deep into himself you can picture his shut eyes, the sweat on his temples, "pray for Christian husbands under stress, for Christian wives worried about their men; pray for all hostages, for prisoners in prison, for victims of the ghetto, for all those with AIDS." Rabbit switches the station and resolves to call home when he stops for lunch.
How many rivers there are! After the Potomac, the Accotink, the Pohick, the Occoquan, the Rappahannock, the Pamunkey, the Ni, the Po, the Matta, the South Anna. The bridges thus marked are mere moments of the highway. Unseen towns are named: Massaponax, Ladysmith, Cedar Forks. North of Richmond, shacks in a thickening scatter mark the beginning of the true South, of rural blacks. Harry pulls into a Howard Johnson's on the Richmond outskirts. His ears ring, the ankle of his accelerator foot aches, his neck is stiff; the heat has gone up several notches since the motel parking lot this morning. Inside the air-conditioned restaurant, salesmen with briefcases are at all the pay phones. He eats too much lunch, consuming the last French fry that came with his tasteless hamburger, mopping up salt with it in his fingers like his grandson Roy does, and then ordering apple pie to see if it's any different in Virginia. It's sweeter and gluier; it lacks that cinnamon they sprinkle on in Pennsylvania. A phone is available after he pays the check and with three dollars' worth of quarters ready he dials not the gray limestone house on Franklin Drive but the house where he used to live, the Springer house in Mt. Judge.
A little girl answers. The operator breaks in and Rabbit inserts three n-linutes' worth of quarters. He says, "Hi, Judy. It's Grandpa."
"Hi, Grandpa," she says, very calmly. Perhaps nothing of last night's revelation has filtered down to her yet. Or perhaps children this young are so innocent of what adulthood involves that nothing surprises them.
"How's it going?" he asks.
"O.K."
"You looking forward to school starting next week?"
"Kind of. Summer gets kind of boring."
"How's Roy? Is he bored by summer too?"
"He's so stupid he doesn't know what boring is. He's been put down for his nap now but is still bawling. Mommy's flipping out." Since Harry seems stuck for a response, she volunteers, "Daddy's not here, he's over at the lot."
"That's O.K., I'd just as soon talk to your mommy actually. Could you get her for me? Judy," he impulsively adds, before the child can leave the phone.
"Yeah?"
"You study hard, now. Don't you worry about those kids who think they're so much. You're a very lovely girl and everything will come to you if you wait. Don't force it. Don't force growing up. Everything will be fine."
This is too much to try to cram into her. She is only nine. Ten more years before she can go west like Mim and break out. "I know," Judy says, with a sigh, and perhaps she does. After a rattle of thereceiver on wood and voices in the background and footsteps hastily enlarging, Pru arrives at the telephone, breathless.