Rabbit, Run - John Updike [76]
This pink tremor takes the weight off Ruth’s face. She sits across from him. He tries to picture the kind of life she was leading; a creepy place like this probably seems as friendly to her as a locker room would to him. But just the thought of it that way makes him nervous; her sloppy life, like his having a family, is something he’s tried to keep behind them. He was happy just hanging around her place at night, her reading mysteries and him running down to the delicatessen for ginger ale and some nights going to a movie but nothing like this. That first night he really used that Daiquiri but since then he didn’t care if he ever had another and hoped she was the same way. For a while she was but lately something’s been eating her; she’s heavy in bed and once in a while looks at him as if he’s some sort of pig. He doesn’t know what he’s doing different but knows that somehow the ease has gone out of it. So tonight her so-called friend Margaret calls up. It scares him out of his skin when the phone rings. He has the idea lately it’s going to be the cops or his mother or somebody; he has the feeling of something growing on the other side of the mountain. A couple times after he first moved in, the phone rang and it was some thick-voiced man saying “Ruth?” or just hanging up in surprise at Rabbit’s voice answering. When they hung on, Ruth just said a lot of “No’s” into the receiver and they never had any trouble luckily. She knew how to handle them and anyway there were only about five that ever called. Like the past was a vine hanging on by just these five shallow roots and it tore away easily, leaving her clean and blue and blank. But tonight it’s Margaret out of this past and she wants them to come down to the Castanet and Ruth wants to and Rabbit goes along. Anything for a little change. He’s bored.
He asks her, “What do you want?”
“A Daiquiri.”
“You’re sure? You’re sure now it won’t make you sick?” He’s noticed that, that she seems a little sick sometimes, and won’t eat, and sometimes eats the house down.
“No, I’m not sure but why the hell shouldn’t I be sick?”
“Well I don’t know why you shouldn’t. Why shouldn’t anybody?”
“Look let’s not be a philosopher for once. Just get me the drink.”
A colored girl in an orange uniform that he guesses from the frills is supposed to look South American comes and he tells her two Daiquiris. She flips shut her pad and walks off and he sees her back is open halfway down her spine. So a little bit of black bra shows. Compared with this her skin isn’t black at all, just a nice thick soft color that brings a little honest life into here. Purple shadows swing on the flats of her back where the light hits. She has a pigeon-toed way of sauntering, swinging those orange frills. She doesn’t care about him; he likes that, that she doesn’t care. The thing about Ruth is lately she’s been trying to make him feel guilty about something.
“Don’t fall in,” she tells him.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re right you’re not doing anything.”
If this is a threat, he doesn’t like threats.
Margaret comes and the guy with her, he isn’t very happy to see, is Ronnie Harrison. Margaret says to him, “Hello, you. Are you still hanging on?”
“Hell,” Harrison says, “it’s the great Angstrom,” as if he’s trying to take Tothero’s place in every way. “I’ve been hearing about you,” he adds slimily.
“Hearing what?”
“Oh. The word.”
Harrison was never one of Rabbit’s favorites and has not improved. In the locker room he was always talking about making out and playing with himself under his little hairy pot of a belly and that pot has really grown. Harrison is fat. Fat and half bald. His kinky brass-colored hair has thinned and the skin of his scalp shows, depending on how he tilts his head. This pink showing through seems obscene to Rabbit, like the pink bald idea that is always showing through Harrison’s talk. Still, he remembers one night when Harrison came back into the game after losing