Rabbit, Run - John Updike [79]
Harrison’s I’ve-got-your-number-buddy grin grows fixed; his reflexes aren’t quick enough to take this sudden turn. “Biting? I don’t know.”
“Well he couldn’t have given it much thought. A good big bloody bite: nothing better. Of course I can see how you’re handicapped, with those two false teeth.”
“Do you have false teeth, Ronnie?” Margaret cries. “How exciting! You’ve never told.”
“Of course he does,” Rabbit tells her. “You didn’t think those two piano keys were his, did you? They don’t even come close to matching.”
Harrison presses his lips together but he can’t afford to give up that forced grin and it sharply strains his face. His talking is hampered too.
“Now there was this place we used to go to in Texas,” Rabbit says, “where there was this girl whose backside had been bitten so often it looked like a piece of old cardboard. You know, after it’s been out in the rain. It’s all she did. She was a virgin otherwise.” He looks around at his audience and Ruth shakes her head minutely, one brief shake, as if to say, “No, Rabbit,” and it seems extremely sad, so sad a film of grit descends on his spirit and muffles him.
Harrison says, “It’s like that story about this whore that had the biggest—ah—you don’t want to hear it, do you?”
“Sure. Go ahead,” Ruth says.
“Well, this guy, see, was making out and he loses his, ahem, device.” Harrison’s face bobbles in the unsteady light. His hands start explaining. Rabbit thinks the poor guy must have to make a pitch five times a day or so. He wonders what he sells; ideas, he guesses; nothing as tangible as the MagiPeel Peeler. “… up to his elbow, up to his shoulder, then he gets his whole head in, and his chest, and starts crawling along this tunnel …” Good old MagiPeel, Rabbit thinks, he can almost feel one in his hand. Its handle came in three colors, turquoise, scarlet, and gold. The funny thing about it, it really did what they said, really took the skin off turnips and stuff as neat and quick—“… sees this other guy and says, ‘Hey, have you seen …’ ” Ruth sits there resigned and with horror be believes it’s all the same to her in her mind there’s no difference between Harrison and him and for that matter is there a difference? The whole interior of the place muddles and runs together red like the inside of a stomach in which they’re all being digested “… and the other guy says, ‘Stripper, hell. I’ve been in here three weeks looking for my motorcycle!’ ”
Harrison, waiting to join the laughter, looks up in silence. He’s failed to sell it. “That’s too fantastic,” Margaret says.
Rabbit’s skin is clammy under his clothes; this makes the breeze from the door opening behind him chilling. Harrison says, “Hey, isn’t that your sister?”
Ruth looks up from her drink. “Is it?” He makes no sign and she says, “They have the same horsy look.”
One glance told Rabbit. Miriam and her escort luckily walk a little into the place, past their table, and wait there to see an empty booth. The place is shaped like a wedge and widens out from the entrance. The bar is in the center, and on either side there is an aisle of booths. The young couple heads for the opposite aisle. Mim wears bright white shoes with very high heels. The boy with her has woolly blond hair cut just long enough to comb, and a self-consciously brown face, a somehow bought tan. I went south this winter, it says.
“Is that your sister?” Margaret says. “She’s attractive. You and her must take after different parents.”
“How do you know her?” Rabbit asks Harrison.
“Oh—” His hand flicks diffidently, as if his fingertips slide across a streak of grease in the air. “You see her around.”
Rabbit’s instinct was to freeze at first but this suggestion of Harrison’s that she’s a tramp makes him get up and walk across the orange tile floor and around the bar.
“Mim.”
“Well, hi.”
“What are you doing here?”
She tells the boy with her,