"But not much, huh?"
"I don't like sports as much as you do, Dad. It's all so competitive."
"That's life. Dog eat dog."
"You think? Why can't things just be nice? There's enough stuff for everybody to share."
"You think there is? Why don't you start then by sharing this lawnmowing? You push it for a while."
"You owe me my allowance." As Rabbit hands him a dollar bill and two quarters, the boy says, "I'm saving for a mini-bike."
"Good luck."
"Also, Dad -?"
"Yeah?"
"I think I should get a dollar twenty-five an hour for work. That's still under the federal minimum wage."
"See?" Rabbit tells him. "Dog eat dog."
As he washes up inside, pulling grass bits out of his cuffs and putting a Band-aid on the ball of his thumb (tender place; in high school they used to say you could tell how sexy a girl was by how fat she was here), Janice comes into the bathroom, shuts the door, and says, "I've decided to tell him. While you're at the ball game I'll tell him." Her face looks taut but pretty dried-out; patches of moisture glisten beside her nose. The tile walls amplify her sniffs. Peggy Gring's car roars outside in leaving.
"Tell who what?"
"Tell Charlie. That it's all over. That you know."
"I said, keep him. Don't do anything for today at least. Calm down. Have a drink. See a movie. See that space movie again, you slept through the best parts."
"That's cowardly. No. He and I have always been honest with each other, I must tell him the truth."
"I think you're just looking for an excuse to see him while I'm tucked away at the ball park."
"You would think that."
"Suppose he asks you to sleep with him?"
"He wouldn't."
"Suppose he does, as a graduation present?"
She stares at him boldly: dark gaze tempered in the furnace of betrayal. It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere. "I would," she says.
"Where are you going to find him?"
"At the lot. He stays on until six summer Saturdays."
"What reason are you going to give him? For breaking it off" "Why, the fact that you know."
"Suppose he asks you why you told?"
"It's obvious why I told. I told because I'm your wife."
Tears belly out between her lids and the tension of her face breaks like Nelson's when a hidden anxiety, a D or a petty theft or a headache, is confessed. Harry denies his impulse to put his arm around her; he does not want to feel wooden again. She teeters, keeping her balance while sobbing, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, while the plastic shower curtain rustles at her shoulder.
"Aren't you going to stop me?" she brings out at last.
"Stop you from what?"
"From seeing him!"
Given this rich present of her grief, he can afford to be cruel. Coolly he says, "No, see him if you want to. Just as long as I don't have to see the bastard." And, avoiding the sight of her face, he sees himself in the cabinet mirror, a big pink pale man going shapeless under the chin, his little lips screwed awry in what wants to be a smile.
The gravel in the driveway crackles again. From the bathroom window he sees the boxy dun top of Springer's spandy new Toyota wagon. To Nelson he calls, "Grandpa's here. Let's go-o." To Janice he murmurs, "Sit tight, kid. Don't commit yourself to anything." To his father-in-law, sliding in beside him, across a spaghetti of nylon safety straps, Rabbit sings, "Buy me some peanuts and crack-er jack .. ."
The stadium is on the northern side of Brewer, through a big cloverleaf, past the brick hulks of two old hosiery mills, along a three-lane highway where in these last years several roadside restaurants have begun proclaiming themselves as Pennsylvania Dutch, with giant plaster Amishmen and neon hex signs. GENUINE "Dutch" COOKING. Pa. Dutch Smorgasbord. Trying to sell what in the old days couldn't be helped. Making a tourist attraction out of fat-fried food and a diet of dough that would give a pig pimples. They pass the country fairgrounds, where every September the same battered gyp stands return, and the farmers bring their stinking livestock, and Serafina the Egyptian Temptress will take off all her clothes for those yokels who put up a dollar extra. The first naked woman he saw was Serafma or her mother. She kept on her high heels and a black mask and bent way backwards; she spread her legs and kept a kind of token shimmy rhythm as she moved in a semi-circle so every straining head (luckily he was tall even then) could see a trace of her cleft, an exciting queasy-making wrinkle shabbily masked by a patch of hair that looked to him pasted-on. Rubbed threadbare? He didn't know. He couldn't imagine.
Springer is shaking his head over the York riots. "Sniper fire four nights in a row, Harry. What is the world coming to? We're so defenseless, is what strikes me, we're so defenseless against the violent few. All our institutions have been based on trust."
Nelson pipes up. "It's the only way they can get justice, Grandpa. Our laws defend property instead of people."
"They're defeating their own purposes, Nellie. Many a white man of good will like myself is being turned against the blacks. Slowly but surely he's being turned against them. It wasn't Vietnam beat Humphrey, it was law and order in the streets. That's the issue that the common man votes upon. Am I right or wrong, Harry? I'm such an old fogey I don't trust my own opinions any more."
One old geezer, Harry is remembering, at the side of the little stage, reached from behind and put his hand up on her pussy, shouting, "Aha!" She stopped her dance and stared out of the black mask. The tent went quiet; the geezer, surprisingly, found enough blood in himself to blush. Aha. That cry of triumph, as if he had snared a precious small animal, Harry never forgot. Aha. He slouches down and in answer to Springer says, "Things go bad. Food goes bad, people go bad, maybe a whole country goes bad. The blacks now have more than ever, but it feels like less, maybe. We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world .isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything."
Old man Springer laughs; he snorts and snarls so his little gray mouse of a mustache merges with his nostril hairs. "Did you hear about Teddy Kennedy this morning?"
"What about him? No."
"Shut your ears, Nellie. I forgot you were in the car or I wouldn't have mentioned it."
"What, Grandpa? What did he do? Did somebody shoot him?"
"Apparently, Harry" – Springer talks out of the side of his mouth, as if to shield Nelson, yet so distinctly the child can easily hear– "he dumped some girl from Pennsylvania into one of those Massachusetts rivers. Murder as plain as my face." Springer's face, from the side, is a carving of pink bone, with rosy splotches where the cheekbones put most pressure, and a bump of red on the point where the nose turns. An anxious sharp face creased all over by a salesman's constant smile. One thing at least about setting type, there's a limit on how much ass you must kiss.
"Did they get him? Is he in jail, Grandpa?"
"Ah, Nellie, they'll never put a Kennedy in jail. Palms will be greased. Evidence will be suppressed. I call it a crying shame."
Rabbit asks, "What do you mean, dumped some girl?"
"They found her in his car upside down in the water beside some bridge, I forget the name, one of those islands they have up there. It happened last night and he didn't go to the police until they were about to nab him. And they call this a democracy, Harry, is the irony of it."
"What would you call it?"
"I'd call it a police state run by the Kennedys, is what I would call it. That family has been out to buy the country since those Brahmins up in Boston snubbed old Joe. And then he put himself in league with Hitler when he was FDR's man in London. Now they've got the young widow to marry a rich Greek in case they run out of American money. Not that she's the goodie-gumdrop the papers say; those two were a match. What's your opinion, Harry? Am I talking out of line? I'm such a back number now I don't trust to hear myself talk." Aha.