Rabbit, Run - John Updike [3]
Then the commercial shows the seven segments of a Tootsie Roll coming out of the wrapper and turning into the seven letters of “Tootsie.” They, too, sing and dance. Still singing, they climb back into the wrapper. It echoes like an echo chamber. Son of a bitch: cute. He’s seen it fifty times and this time it turns his stomach. His heart is still throbbing; his throat feels narrow.
Janice asks, “Harry, do you have a cigarette? I’m out.”
“Huh? On the way home I threw my pack into a garbage can. I’m giving it up.” He wonders how anybody could think of smoking, with his stomach on edge the way it is.
Janice looks at him at last. “You threw it into a garbage can! Holy Mo. You don’t drink, now you don’t smoke. What are you doing, becoming a saint?”
“Shh.”
The big Mouseketeer has appeared, Jimmy, an older man who wears circular black ears. Rabbit watches him attentively; he respects him. He expects to learn something from him helpful in his own line of work, which is demonstrating a kitchen gadget in several five-and-dime stores around Brewer. He’s had the job for four weeks. “Proverbs, proverbs, they’re so true,” Jimmy sings, strumming his Mouseguitar, “proverbs tell us what to do; proverbs help us all to bee—better—Mouse-ke-tears.”
Jimmy sets aside his smile and guitar and says straight out through the glass, “Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It means, be what you are. Don’t try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself. God doesn’t want a tree to be a waterfall, or a flower to be a stone. God gives to each one of us a special talent.” Janice and Rabbit become unnaturally still; both are Christians. God’s name makes them feel guilty. “God wants some of us to become scientists, some of us to become artists, some of us to become firemen and doctors and trapeze artists. And He gives to each of us the special talents to become these things, provided we work to develop them. We must work, boys and girls. So: Know Thyself. Learn to understand your talents, and then work to develop them. That’s the way to be happy.” He pinches his mouth together and winks.
That was good. Rabbit tries that, pinching the mouth together and then the wink, getting the audience out front with you against some enemy behind, Walt Disney or the MagiPeel Peeler Company, admitting it’s all a fraud but, what the hell, making it likable. We’re all in it together. Fraud makes the world go round. The base of our economy. Vitaconomy, the modern housewife’s password, the one-word expression for economizing vitamins by the MagiPeel Method.
Janice gets up and turns off the set when the six-o’clock news tries to come on. The little star left by the current slowly dies.
Rabbit asks, “Where’s the kid?”
“At your mother’s.”
“At my mother’s? The car’s at your mother’s and the kid’s at my mother’s. Jesus. You’re a mess.”
She stands up and her pregnancy infuriates him with its look of stubborn lumpiness. She wears one of those maternity skirts with a U cut in the belly. A white crescent of slip shows under the hem of her blouse. “I was tired.”
“No wonder,” he says. “How many of those have you had?” He gestures at the Old-fashioned glass.
She tries to explain. “I left Nelson at your mother’s on my way to my mother’s to go into town with her. We went in in her car and walked around looking at the spring clothes in the windows and she bought a nice Liberty scarf at Kroll’s at a sale. Purply Paisley.” She falters; her little narrow tongue pokes between her parted rows of dim teeth.
He feels frightened. When confused, Janice is a frightening person. Her eyes dwindle in their frowning sockets and her little mouth hangs open in a dumb slot. Since her hair has begun to thin back from her shiny forehead, he keeps getting the feeling of her being brittle, and immovable, of