Rabbit, Run Read Free

prevents him. He stands to his full height above her and says, “O.K. You bought a bathing suit.”
    Sheltered by his chest and arms she says with unexpected earnestness, “Don’t run from me, Harry. I love you.”
    “I love you . Now come on, you bought a bathing suit.”
    “Red,” she says, rocking sadly against him. But her body when tipsy has a brittleness, an unconnectedness, that feels disagreeable in his arms. “With a strap that ties behind your neck and a pleated skirt you can take off in the water. Then my varicose veins hurt so much Mother and I went into the basement of Kroll’s and had chocolate sodas. They’ve redone the whole luncheonette section, the counter isn’t there any more. But my legs still hurt so Mother brought me home and said you could pick up the car and Nelson.”
    “Your legs hell, they were probably her legs.”
    “I thought you’d be home before now. Where were you?”
    “Oh, clowning around. I played ball with some kids down the alley.” They have parted.
    “I tried to take a nap but I couldn’t Mother said I looked tired.”
    “You’re supposed to look tired. You’re a housewife.”
    “And meanwhile you’re off playing like a twelve-year-old?”
    He is indignant that she didn’t see his crack about being a housewife, based on the “image” the MagiPeel people tried to have their salesmen sell to, as ironical and at bottom pitying and fond. There seems no escaping it: she is dumb. He says, “Well what’s the difference if you’re sitting here watching a program for kids under two?”
    “Who was shushing a while ago?”
    “Ah, Janice.” He sighs. “Screw you. Just screw you.” She looks at him clearly a long moment. “I’ll get supper,” she at last decides.
    He is all repentance. “I’ll run over and get the car and bring the kid back. The poor kid must think he has no home. What the hell makes your mother think my mother has nothing better to do than take care of other people’s kids?” Indignation rises in him again at her missing the point of why he wanted to watch Jimmy, for professional reasons, to earn a living to buy oranges for her to put into her rotten Old-fashioneds.
    She moves into the kitchen, angry but not angry enough. She should be really sore, or not sore at all, since all he had said was what he had done a couple hundred times. Maybe a thousand times. Say, on the average once every three days since 1956. What’s that? Three hundred. That often? Then why is it always an effort? She used to make it easier before they got married. She could be sudden then. Just a girl. Nerves , like new thread. Skin smelled like fresh cotton. Her girl friend at work had an apartment in Brewer they used. Pipe-framed bed, silver medallions in the wallpaper; a view westward of the great blue gas tanks by the edge of the river. After work, working both at Kroll’s then, she selling candy and cashews in a white smock with “Jan” stitched on her pocket and he lugging easy chairs and maple end tables around on the floor above, hammering apart packing crates from nine to five, the itch of the packing excelsior getting into his nose and eyes and making them burn. That filthy black crescent of bins behind the elevators, the floor covered with bent nails, his palms black and Chandler the dandy mincing in every hour on the hour telling him to wash his hands so he wouldn’t foul the furniture. Lava soap. It’s lather was gray. His hands grew yellow calluses from using the crowbar. After 5:30, the dirty day done, they would meet by the doors, chained to keep customers out, a green-glass-paved chamber of silence between the two sets of doors, in the shallow side windows the bodiless mannequin heads in their feathered hats and necklaces of pink pearls eavesdropping on the echoing farewell gossip. Every employee hated Kroll’s; yet they left it slow as swimming. Janice and Rabbit would meet in this chamber, with the dim light and green floor like something