Rabbit, Run - John Updike [63]
“Quit it,” he says. “I don’t care. Sit around all day reading mysteries. I’ll support ja.”
“You’ll support me. If you’re so big why don’t you support your wife?”
“Why should I? Her fathers’ rolling in it.”
“You’re so smug, is what gets me. Don’t you ever think you’re going to have to pay the price?” She looks at him now, squarely with eyes bloodshot from being in the water. She shades them with her hand. These aren’t the eyes he met that night by the parking meters, flat pale disks like a doll might have. The blue of her irises has deepened inward and darkened with a richness that, singing the truth to his instincts, disturbs him.
These eyes sting her and she turns her head away to hide the tears, thinking, That’s one of the signs, crying easily. God, at work she has to get up from the typewriter and rush into the john like she had the runs and sob, sob, sob. Standing there in a booth looking down at a toilet laughing at herself and sobbing till her chest hurts. And sleepy. God, after coming back from lunch it’s all she can do to keep from stretching out in the aisle right there on the filthy floor between Lilly Orff and Rita Fiorvante where that old horse’s neck Honig would have to step over her. And hungry. For lunch an ice-cream soda with the sandwich and then a doughnut with the coffee and still she has to buy a candy bar at the cash register. After she’s been trying to slim down for him and had lost six pounds, at least one scale said. For him, that was what was rich, changing herself for him when he was worth nothing, less than nothing, he was a menace, for all his mildness. He had that mildness. The others didn’t. The thing was, when they knew you were one, they didn’t think you were human, and thought they were entitled. Which they were, but still, some of the things. It was like they hated women and used her. But now she forgives them because it all melts, the next day is the next day and you’re still the same and there, and they’re away. The older they were, the more like presidents they looked, the wiser they should have been, the worse they were. Then they wanted some business their wives wouldn’t give, in from the back which she didn’t mind it was like being a hundred miles away once you get adjusted, or with the mouth. That. What do they see in it? It can’t be as deep, she doesn’t know. After all it’s no worse than them at your bees and why not be generous, the first time it was Harrison and she was drunk as a monkey anyway but when she woke up the next morning wondered what the taste in her mouth was. But that was just being a superstitious kid there isn’t much taste to it a little like seawater, just harder work than they probably think, women are always working harder than they think. The thing was, they wanted to be admired there. They really did want that. They weren’t that ugly but they thought they were. That was the thing that surprised her in high school how ashamed they were really, how grateful they were if you just touched them there and how quick word got around that you would. What did they think, they were monsters? If they’d just thought they might have known you were curious too, that you could like that strangeness there like they liked yours, no worse than women in their way, all red wrinkles, my God, what was it in the end? No mystery. That was the great thing she discovered, that it was no mystery, just a stuck-on-looking bit that made them king and if you went along with it could be good and anyway put you with them against those others, those little snips running around her at hockey in gym like a cow in that blue uniform like a baby suit she wouldn’t wear it in the twelfth grade and took the demerits. God she hated some of those girls. But she got it back at night, taking that urgency they didn’t know existed like a queen. Boy, there wasn’t any fancy business then,