Still, he cannot dislike this brown-eyed woman who has been his indifferent wife for twenty-three years this past March. He is rich because of her inheritance and this mutual knowledge rests adhesively between them like a form of sex, comfortable and sly. "Salad and baloney, my favorite meal," he says, resigned. "Lemme have a drink first. Some window-shoppers came in to the lot today just as I was leaving. Tell me what postcard."
As he stands by the refrigerator making a gin-and-bitter-lemon, knowing these sugary mixers add to the calories in the alcohol and help to keep him overweight but figuring that this Saturday evening meal in its skimpiness will compensate and maybe he'll jog a little afterwards, Janice goes in through the dark dining room into the musty front parlor where the shades are drawn and Ma Springer's sulking spirit reigns, and brings back a postcard. It shows a white slope of snow under a stark blue wedge of sky; two small dark hunched figures are tracing linked S's on the slanted snow, skiing. GREETINGS FROM COLORADO red cartoon letters say across the sky that looks like blue paint. On the opposite side a familiar scrawled hand, scrunched as if something in the boy had been squeezed too tight while his handwriting was coming to birth, spells out:
Hi Mom amp; Dad amp; Grandmom:
These mts. make Mt. Judge look sick! No snow tho, just plenty of grass (joke). Been learning to hang glide. Job didn't work out, guy was a bum. Penna. beckons. OK if I bring Melanie home too? She could get job and be no troble. Love,
Nelson
"Melanie?" Harry asks.
"That's what Mother and I have been fighting about. She doesn't want the girl staying here."
"Is this the same girl he went out there with two weeks ago?"
"I was wondering," Janice says. "She had a name more like Sue or Jo or something."
"Where would she sleep?"
"Well, either in that front sewing room or Nelson's room."
"With the kid?"
"Well really, Harry, I wouldn't be utterly surprised. He is twenty-two. When have you gotten so Puritanical?"
"I'm not being Puritanical, just practical. It's one thing to have these kids go off into the blue and go hang gliding or whatever else and another to have them bring all their dope and little tootsies back to the nest. This house is awkward upstairs, you know that. There's too much hall space and you can't sneeze or fart or fuck without everybody else hearing; it's been bliss, frankly, with just us and Ma. Remember the kid's radio all through high school to two in the morning, how he'd fall asleep to it? That bed of his is a little single, what are we supposed to do, buy him and Melody a double bed?"
"Melanie. I don't know, she can sleep on the floor. They all have sleeping bags. You can try putting her in the sewing room but I know she won't stay there. We wouldn't have." Her blurred dark eyes gaze beyond him into time. "We spent all our energy sneaking down hallways and squirming around in the back seats of cars and I thought we could spare our children that."
"We have a child, not children," he says coldly, as the gin expands his inner space. They had children once, but their infant daughter Becky died. It was his wife's fault. The entire squeezed and cut-down shape of his life is her fault; at every turn she has been a wall to his freedom. "Listen," he says to her, "I've been trying to get out of this fucking depressing house for years and I don't want this shiftless arrogant goof-off we've raised coming back and pinning me in. These kids seem to think the world exists to serve them but I'm sick of just standing around waiting to be of service."
Janice stands up to him scarcely flinching, armored in her country-club tan. "He is our son, Harry, and we're not going to turn away a guest of his because she is female in sex. If it was a boyfriend of Nelson's you wouldn't be at all this excited, it's the fact that it's a girlfriend of Nelson's that's upsetting you, a girlfriend of Nelson's. If it was a girlfriend of yours, the upstairs wouldn't be too crowded for you to fart in. This is my son and I want him here if he wants to be here."
"I don't have any girlfriends," he protests. It sounds pitiful. Is Janice saying he should have? Women, once sex gets out in the open, they become monsters. You're a creep ifyou fuck them and a creep if you don't. Harry strides into the dining room, making the glass panes of the antique breakfront shudder, and calls up the dark stained stairs that are opposite the breakfront, "Hey Bessie, come on down! I'm on your side!"
There is a silence as from God above and then the creak of a bed being relieved of a weight, and reluctant footsteps slither across the ceiling toward the head of the stairs. Mrs. Springer on her painful dropsical legs comes down talking: "This house is legally mine and that girl is not spending one night under a roof Janice's father slaved all his days to keep over our heads."
The breakfront quivers again; Janice has come into the dining room. She says in a voice tightened to match her mother's, "Mother, you wouldn't be keeping this enormous roof over your head if it weren't for Harry and me sharing the upkeep. It's a great sacrifice on Harry's part, a man of his income not having a house he can call his own, and you have no right to forbid Nelson to come home when he wants to, no right, Mother."
The plump old lady groans her way down to the landing three steps shy of the dining-room floor and hesitates there saying, in a voice tears have stained, "Nellie I'm happy to see whenever he deems fit, I love that boy with all my soul even though he hasn't turned out the way his grandfather and I had hoped."
Janice says, angrier in proportion as the old lady makes herself look pathetic, "You're always bringing Daddy in when he can't speak for himself but as long as he was alive he was very hospitable and tolerant of Nelson and his friends. I remember that cookout Nelson had in the back yard for his high-school graduation when Daddy had had his first stroke already, I went upstairs to see if it was getting too rowdy for him and he said with his wry little smile" -tears now stain her own voice too – " `The sound of young voices does my old heart good."'
That slippery-quick salesman's smile of his, Rabbit can see it still. Like a switchblade without the click.
"A cookout in the back yard is one thing," Mrs. Springer says, thumping herself in her dirty aqua sneakers down the last three steps of the stairs and looking her daughter level in the eye. "A slut in the boy's bed is another."
Harry thinks this is pretty jazzy for an old lady and laughs aloud. Janice and her mother are both short women; like two doll's heads mounted on the same set of levers they turn identically chocolateeyed, slot-mouthed faces to glare at his laugh. "We don't know the girl is a slut," Harry apologizes. "All we know is her name is Melanie instead of Sue."
"You said you were on my side," Mrs. Springer says.
"I am, Ma, I am. I don't see why the kid has to come storming home; we gave him enough money to get him started out there, I'd- like to see him get some kind of grip on the world. He's not going to get it hanging around here all summer."
"Oh, money," Janice says. "That's all you ever think about. And what have you ever done except hang around here? Your father got you one job and my father got you another, I don't call that any great adventure."
"That's not all I think about," he begins lamely, of money, before his mother-in-law interrupts.
"Harry doesn't want a home of his own," Ma Springer tells her daughter. When she gets excited and fearful of not making herself understood her face puffs up and goes mottled. "He has such disagreeable associations from the last time you two went out on your own."
Janice is firm, younger, in control. "Mother, you know nothing about it. You know nothing about life period. You sit in this house and watch idiotic game shows and talk on the phone to what friends you have that are still alive and then sit in judgment on Harry and me. You know nothing of life now. You have no idea."