Rabbit, Run - John Updike [69]
“Elsie snaps,” Mrs. Springer says, “because you and Billy tease her.”
“Naughty Elsie,” Nelson says.
“Naughty Nelson,” Mrs. Springer corrects. She lifts her face to Eccles and continues in the same correcting voice, “Yes well she’s a week due now and I don’t see him running in.”
His moment of fondness for her has passed; he leaves her on the porch. Love never ends, he tells himself, using the Revised Standard Version. The King James has it that it never fails. Mrs. Springer’s voice carries after him into the house, “Now the next time I catch you teasing Elsie you’re going to get a whipping from your grandmom.”
“No, Mom-mom,” the child begs coyly, fright gone.
Eccles thought he would find the kitchen and take a drink of water from the tap but the kitchen slips by him in the jumbled rooms. He makes a mouth that works up saliva and swallows it as he leaves the stucco house. He gets into his Buick and drives down Joseph Street and then a block along Jackson Road to the Angstroms’ address.
Mrs. Angstrom has four-cornered nostrils. Lozenge-shape, they are set in a nose that is not so much large as extra-anatomical; the little pieces of muscle and cartilage and bone are individually emphatic and divide the skin into many facets in the sharp light. Their interview takes place in her kitchen amid several burning light bulbs. Burning in the middle of day; their home is the dark side of a two-family brick house. She came to the door wearing suds on her red forearms and returns with him to a sink full of bloated shirts and underwear. She plunges at these things vigorously while they talk. She is a vigorous woman. Mrs. Springer’s fat, soft, aching excess, had puffed out from little bones, the bones once of a slip of a girl like Janice; Mrs. Angstrom’s is packed on a great harsh frame. Harry’s size must come from her side. Eccles is continually conscious of the long faucets, heraldic of cool water, shielded by her formidable body; but the opportunity never arises for a request so small.
“I don’t know why you come to me,” she says. “Harold’s one and twenty. I have no control over him.”
“He hasn’t been to see you?”
“No sir.” She displays her profile above her left shoulder. “You’ve made him so ashamed I suppose he’s embarrassed to.”
“He should be ashamed, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know why. I never wanted him to go with the girl in the first place. Just to look at her you know she’s two-thirds crazy.”
“Oh now, that’s not true, is it?”
“Not true! Why the first thing that girl said to me was Why don’t I get a washing machine? Comes into my kitchen, takes one look around, and starts telling me how to manage my life.”
“Surely you don’t think she meant anything?”
“No, she didn’t mean anything. All she meant was, What was I doing living in such a run-down half-house when she came from a great big barn on Joseph Street with the kitchen full of gadgets, and Wasn’t I lucky to be fobbing off my boy on such a well-equipped little trick? I never liked that girl’s eyes. They never met your face full-on.” She turns her face on Eccles and, warned, he returns her stare. Beneath her misted spectacles—an old-fashioned type, circles of steel-rimmed glass in which the bifocal crescents catch a pinker tint of light—her arrogantly tilted nose displays its meaty, intricate underside. Her broad mouth is stretched slightly by a vague expectation. Eccles realizes that this woman is a humorist.