Rabbit, Run - John Updike [110]
The strange thing is she falls asleep soon after he goes; she’s been used to sleeping alone lately and it’s a physical relief not having him in bed kicking his hot legs and twisting the sheets into ropes. That business of his with her bottom made her stitches ache and she sinks down over the small pain all feathers. Around four in the morning Becky cries her awake and she gets up; her nightie taps her body lightly. Her skin feels unnaturally sensitive as she walks about. She changes the baby and lies down on the bed to nurse her. As Becky takes the milk it’s as if she’s sucking a hollow place into her mother’s body; Harry hasn’t come back. By this time if he just went out to cool off he would be back.
The baby keeps slipping off the nipple because she can’t keep her mind on her; a taste like dry toast keeps touching her lips; she keeps listening for Harry’s key to scratch at the door.
Mother’s neighbors will laugh their heads off if she loses him again, she doesn’t know why she should think of Mother’s neighbors except that all the time she was home Mother kept reminding her of how they sneered and there was always that with Mother the feeling she was dull and plain and a disappointment, and she thought when she got a husband it would be all over, all that. She would be a woman with a house on her own. And she thought when she gave this baby her name it would settle her mother but instead it brings her mother against her breast with her blind mouth poor thing and she feels she’s lying on top of a pillar where everyone in the town can see she is alone. She feels cold. The baby won’t stay on the nipple nothing will hold to her.
She gets up and walks around the room with the baby on her shoulder patting to get the air up and the baby poor thing so floppy and limp keeps sliding and trying to dig its little boneless legs into her to hold tight and the nightie blown by the breeze keeps touching her calves the backs of her legs her ass as he called it. Makes you feel filthy they don’t even have decent names for parts of you.
If there would be a scratch at the lock and he would come in the door he could do whatever he wanted with her have any part of her if he wanted what did she care that was marriage. But when he tried tonight it just seemed so unfair, she still aching and him sleeping with that prostitute all those weeks and him just saying Roll over in that impatient voice like it was just something he wanted to have done with and who was she not to let him after she had let him run off what right had she to any pride? Any self-respect. That was just why she had to have some because he didn’t think she dared have any after she let him run off that was the funny thing it was his bad deed yet she was supposed not to have any pride afterwards to just be a pot for his dirt. When he did that to her back it was so practiced and reminded her of all those weeks he was off doing what he pleased and she was just helpless Mother and Peggy feeling sorry for her and everybody else laughing she couldn’t bear it.
And then his going off to church and coming back full of juice. What right did he have to go to church? What did he and God talk about behind the backs of all these women exchanging winks that was the thing she minded if they’d just think about love when they make it instead of thinking about whatever they do think about think about whatever they’re going to do whenever they’ve got rid of this little hot clot that’s bothering them. You can feel in their fingers if they’re thinking about you and tonight Harry was at first and that’s why she let him go on it was like lying there in an envelope of yourself his hands going around you but then he began to be rough and it made her mad to feel him thinking about himself what a good job he was doing sucking her along and not at all any more about how she felt exhausted and aching, poking his thing at her belly like some elbow. It was so rude.
Just plain rude. Here he called her dumb when be was too dumb to have any idea of how she felt any idea of how his going off had