Rabbit, Run - John Updike [61]
She claws at his arm and moves on more heavily and rapidly. The sun is high and she probably feels a need for the house. Bees swim in the foliage; hidden birds scold. The tide of leaf has overtaken the tide of blossom, and a furtively bitter smell breaths from the fresh walls of green. Maples, birches, oaks, elms, and horse-chestnut trees compose a thin forest that runs, at a varying depth, along the far property-line. In the damp shaded fringe between the lawn and this copse, the rhododendrons are still putting forth, but the unsheltered clumps in the center of the lawn have already dropped petals, in oddly neat rows, along the edge of the grass paths. “I don’t like it, I don’t like it,” Mrs. Smith says, hobbling with Rabbit down such a trench of overblown brilliance. “I appreciate the beauty but I’d rather see alfalfa. A woman—I don’t know why it should vex me so—Horace used to encourage the neighbors to come in and see the place in blooming time, he was like a child in many ways. This woman, Mrs. Foster, from down the hill in a little orange shack with a metal cat climbing up the shutters, used to invariably say, turn to me with lipstick halfway up to her nose and say”—she mimics a too-sweet voice with a spirited spite that shakes her frame—“ ‘My, Mrs. Smith, this must be what Heaven is like!’ One year I said to her, I couldn’t hold my tongue any longer, I said, ‘Well if I’m driving six miles back and forth to St. John’s Episcopal Church every Sunday just to get into another splash of rhodies, I might as well save the mileage because I don’t want to go.’ Now wasn’t that a dreadful thing for an old sinner to say?”
“Oh, I don’t know—”
“To this poor woman who was only trying to be civil? Hadn’t a bean of a brain in her head, of course; painting her face like a young fool. She’s passed on now, poor soul; Alma Foster passed on two or three winters back. Now she knows the truth and I don’t.”
“Well, maybe what looks like rhododendrons to her will look like alfalfa to you.”
“Heh! Eh-HA! Exactly! Exactly! You know, Mr. Angstrom, it’s such a pleasure—” She stops them in the walk and caresses his forearm awkwardly; in the sunshine the tiny tan landscape of her face tips up toward his, and in her gaze, beneath the fumbling girlish flirtatiousness and the watery wander, there glitters the edge of an old acuteness, so that Rabbit standing there easily feels a stab of the unkind force that drove Mr. Smith out to the brainless flowers. “You and I, we think alike. Don’t we? Now don’t we?”
“You have it pretty good, don’t you?” Ruth asks him. They have gone on the afternoon of this Memorial Day to the public swimming pool in West Brewer. She was self-conscious about getting into a bathing suit but in fact she looks great, up to her thighs in turquoise water and soaked licks of red hair sneaking out of her bathing cap. She swims easily, her big legs kicking slowly and the water flowing in bubbling transparence over her shoulders and her clean arms lifting and her back and bottom shimmering black under the jiggled green. Sometimes, when she stops and floats a moment, putting her face down in the water in a motion that quickens his heart with its slight danger, her bottom of its own buoyance floats up and breaks the surface—nothing much, just a round black island glistening there, a clear image suddenly in the water wavering like a blooey television set, but the solid sight swells his heart with pride, makes him harden all over with a chill clench of ownership. His, she is his, he knows her as well as the water, like the water has been everywhere on her body. When she does the backstroke the water breaks and pours down her front into her breastcups, flooding her breasts with touch; the arch of her submerged body tightens, thrusting her breasts fitfully into