He asks her, "What did you and the kid do today?"

 

"Oh, nothing much. Hung around the house in the morning, took a drive in the afternoon."

 

"Where to?"

 

"Up to Mt. Judge."

 

"The town?"

 

"The mountain. We had a Coke in the Pinnacle Hotel and watched a softball game in the park for a while."

 

"Tell me the truth. Do you have the kid smoking pot?"

 

"Whatever gave you that idea?"

 

"He's awfully fascinated with you, and I figure it's either pot or sex."

 

"Or the car. Or the fact that I treat him like a human being instead of a failed little athlete because he's not six feet six. Nelson is a very intelligent sensitive child who is very upset by his mother leaving."

 

"I know he's intelligent, thanks, I've known the kid for years."

 

"Harry, do you want me to leave, is that it? I will if that's what you want. I could go back to Babe except she's having a rough time."

 

"What kind of rough time?"

 

"She's been busted for possession. The pigs came into the Jimbo the other night and took about ten away, including her and Skeeter. She says they asked for a bigger payoff and the owner balked. The owner is white, by the way."

 

"So you're still in touch with that crowd."

 

"You don't want me to be?"

 

"Suit yourself. It's your life to fuck up."

 

"Somebody's been bugging you, haven't they?"

 

"Several people."

 

"Do whatever you want to with me, Harry. I can't be anything in your real life."

 

She is standing before him in the living room, in her cutoff jeans and peasant blouse, her hands held at her sides slightly lifted and open, like a servant waiting for a tray. Her fingers are red from washing his dishes. Moved to gallantry, he confesses, "I need your sweet mouth and your pearly ass."

 

"I think they're beginning to bore you."

 

He reads this in reverse: he bores her. Always did. He attacks: "O.K., what about sex, with you and the kid?"

 

She looks away. She has a long nose and long chin, and that dry moth mouth that he feels, seeing it in repose, when she is not watching him, as absentmindedly disdainful, as above him and wanting to flutter still higher. Summer has put only a few freckles on her, and these mostly on her forehead, which bulges gently as a milk pitcher. Her hair is twisty from being so much in those little tiny braids hippies make. "He likes me," she answers, except it is no answer.

 

He tells her. "We can't do that trip to Valley Forge tomorrow. Janice wants Nelson to go shopping with her for school clothes, ?and I should go see my mother. You can drive me if you want, or I can take the bus."

 

He thinks he is being obliging, but she gives him her rich?girl sneer and says, "You remind me of my mother sometimes. She thought she owned me too."

 

Saturday morning, she is gone. But her clothes still hang like rags in the closet. Downstairs on the kitchen table lies a note in green magic marker: Out all day. Will drop Nelson at the lot. (heart & peace symbols), So he takes the two bus rides all the way across Brewer. The lawns in Mt. Judge, patches of grass between cement walks, are burned; spatterings of leaves here and there in the maples are already turned gold. There is that scent in the air, of going back to school, of beginning again and reconfirming the order that exists. He wants to feel good, he always used to feel good at every turning of the year, every vacation or end of vacation, every new sheet on the calendar: but his adult life has proved to have no seasons, only changes of weather, and the older he gets, the less weather interests him.

 

The house next to his old house still has the FOR SALE sign up. He tries his front door but it is locked; he rings, and after a prolonged shuffle and rumble within Pop comes to the door. Rabbit asks, "What's this locked door business?"

 

"Sorry, Harry, there've been so many burglaries in town lately. We had no idea you were coming."

 

"Didn't I promise?"

 

"You've promised before. Not that your mother and I can blame you, we know your life is difficult these days."

 

"It's not so difficult. In some ways it's easier. She upstairs?"

 

Pop nods. "She's rarely down anymore."

 

"I thought this new stuff was working."

 

"It does in a way, but she's so depressed she lacks the will. Nine?tenths of life is will, my father used to say it, and the longer I live the more I see how right he was."

 

The disinfected scent of the house is still oppressive, but Harry goes up the stairs two at a time; Jill's disappearance has left him vigorous with anger. He bursts into the sickroom, saying, "Mom, tell me your dreams."

 

She has lost weight. The bones have shed all but the minimum connective tissue; her face is strained over the bones with an expression of far?seeing, expectant sweetness. Her voice emerges from this apparition more strongly than before, with less hesitation between words.

 

"I'm tormented something cruel at night, Harry. Did Earl tell you?"

 

"He mentioned bad dreams."

 

"Yes, bad, but not so bad as not being able to sleep at all. I know this room so well now, every object. At night even that innocent old bureau and that ?poor shapeless armchair they."

 

They what?" He sits on the bed to take her hand, and fears the swaying under his weight will jostle and break her bones.

 

She says, "They want. To suffocate me."

 

"Those things do?"

 

"All things ? do. They crowd in, in the queerest way, these simple homely bits of furniture I've. Lived with all my life. Dad's asleep in the next room, I can hear him snore. No cars go by. It's just me and the streetlamp. It's like being ?under water. I count the seconds I have breath left for. I figure I can go forty, thirty, then it gets down to ten."

 

"I didn't know breathing was affected by this."

 

"It isn't. It's all my mind. The things I have in my mind, Hassy, it reminds me of when they clean out a drain. All that hair and sludge mixed up with a rubber comb somebody went and dropped down years ago. Sixty years ago in my case."

 

"You don't feel that about your life, do you? I think you did a good job."

 

"A good job at what? You don't even know what you're trying to do, is the humor of it."

 

"Have a few laughs," he offers. "Have a few babies."

 

She takes him up on that. "I keep dreaming about you and Mim. Always together. When you haven't been together since you got out of school."

 

"What do Mim and I do, in these dreams?"

 

"You look up at me. Sometimes you want to be fed and I can't find the food. Once I remember looking into the icebox and. A man was in it frozen. A man I never knew, just one. Of those total strangers dreams have. Or else the stove won't light. Or I can't locate where Earl put the food when he came home from shopping, I know he. Put it somewhere. Silly things. But they become so important. I wake up screaming at Earl."

 

"Do Mim and I say anything?"

 

"No, you just look up like children do. Slightly frightened but sure I'll save. The situation. This is how you look. Even when I can see you're dead."

 

"Dead?"

 

"Yes. All powdered and set out in coffins. Only still standing up, still waiting for something from me. You've died because I couldn't get the food on the table. A strange thing about these dreams, come to think of it. Though you look up at me from a child's height. You look the way you do now. Mim all full of lipstick, with one of those shiny miniskirts and boots zippered up to her knee."

 

"Is that how she looks now?"

 

"Yes, she sent us a publicity picture."

 

"Publicity for what?"

 

"Oh, you know. For herself. You know how they do things now. I didn't understand it myself. It's on the bureau."

 

The picture, eight by ten, very glossy, with a diagonal crease where the mailman bent it, shows Mim in a halter and bracelets and sultan pants, her head thrown back, one long bare foot ? she had big feet as a child, Mom had to make the shoe salesmen go deep into the stockroom ? up on a hassock. Her eyes from the way they've reshaped them do not look like Mim at all. Only something about the nose makes it Mim. The kind of lump on the end, and the nostrils: the way as a baby they would tuck in when she started to cry is the way they tuck in now when they tell her to look sexy. He feels in this picture less Mim than the men posing her. Underneath, the message pale in ballpoint pen, she had written, Miss you all Hope to come East soon Love Mim. A slanting cramped hand that hadn't gone past high school. Jill's message had been written in splashy upright private?school semi?printing, confident as a poster. Mim never had that.

 

Rabbit asks, "How old is Mim now?"

 

Mom says, "You don't want to hear about my dreams."

 

"Sure I do." He figures it: born when he was six, Mim would be thirty now: she wasn't going anywhere, not even in harem costume. What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more. He says to his mother: "Tell me the worst one."

 

"The house next door has been sold. To some people who want to put up an apartment building. The Scranton pair have gone into partnership with them and then. These two walls go up, so the house doesn't get any light at all, and I'm in a hole looking up. And dirt starts to come down on me, cola cans and cereal boxes, and then. I wake up and know I can't breathe."

 

He tells her, "Mt. Judge isn't zoned for high?rise."

 

She doesn't laugh. Her eyes are wide now, fastened on that other half of her life, the night half, the nightmare half that now is rising like water in a bad cellar and is going to engulf her, proving that it was the real half all along, that daylight was an illusion, a cheat. "No," she says, "that's not the worst. The worst is Earl and I go to the hospital for tests. All around us are tables the size of our kitchen table. Only instead of set for meals each has a kind of puddle on it, a red puddle mixed up with crumpled bedsheets so they're shaped like. Children's sandcastles. And connected with tubes to machines with like television patterns on them. And then it dawns on me these are each people. And Earl keeps saying, so proud and pleased he's brainless, `The government is paying for it all. The government is paying for it.' And he shows me the paper you and Mim signed to make me one of?you know, them. Those puddles."

 

"That's not a dream," her son says. "That's how it is."

 

And she sits up straighter on the pillows, stiff, scolding. Her mouth gets that unforgiving downward sag he used to fear more than anything ? more than vampires, more than polio, more than thunder or God or being late for school. "I'm ashamed of you," she says. "I never thought I'd hear a son of mine so bitter."

 

"It was a joke, Mom."

 

"Who has so much to be grateful for," she goes on implacably.

 

"For what? For exactly what?"

 

"For Janice's leaving you, for one thing. She was always. A damp washrag."

 

"And what about Nelson, huh? What happens to him now?" This is her falsity, that she forgets what time creates, she still sees the world with its original four corners, her and Pop and him and Mim sitting at the kitchen table. Her tyrant love would freeze the world.

 

Mom says, "Nelson isn't my child, you're my child."

 

"Well, he exists anyway, and I have to worry about him. You just can't dismiss Janice like that."

 

"She's dismissed you."

 

"Not really. She calls me up at work all the time. Stavros wants her to come back."

 

"Don't you let her. She'll. Smother you, Harry."

 

"What choices do I have?"

 

"Run. Leave Brewer. I never knew why you came back. There's nothing here any more. Everybody knows it. Ever since the hosiery mills went south. Be like Mim."

 

"I don't have what Mim has to sell. Anyway she's breaking Pop's heart, whoring around."

 

"He wants it that way, your father has always been looking. For excuses to put on a long face. Well, he has me now, and I'm excuse enough. Don't say no to life, Hussy. Let the dead bury the dead. Bitterness never helps. I'd rather have a postcard from you happy than. See you sitting there like a lump."

 

Always these impossible demands and expectations from her. These harsh dreams. "Hussy, do you ever pray?"

 

"Mostly on buses."

 

"Pray for rebirth. Pray for your own life."

 

His cheeks flame; he bows his head. He feels she is asking him to kill Janice, to kill Nelson. Freedom means murder. Rebirth means death. A lump, he silently resists, and she looks aside with the comer of her mouth worse bent. She is still trying to call him forth from her womb, can't she see he is an old man? An old lump whose only use is to stay in place to keep the lumps leaning on him from tumbling.

 

Pop comes upstairs and tunes in the Phillies game on television. "They're a much sounder team without that Allen," he says. "He was a bad egg, Harry, I say that without prejudice; bad eggs come in all colors."

 

After a few innings, Rabbit leaves.

 

"Can't you stay for at least the game, Harry? I believe there's a beer still in the refrigerator, I was going to go down to the kitchen anyway to make Mother some tea."

 

"Let him go, Earl."

 

To protect the electrical wires, a lot of the maples along Jackson Road have been mutilated, the center of their crowns cut out. Rabbit hadn't noticed this before, or the new sidewalk squares where they have taken away the little surface gutters that used to trip you roller skating. He had been roller skating when Kenny Leggett, an older boy from across the street, who later became a five?minute miler, a county conference marvel, but that was later, this day he was just a bigger boy who had hit Rabbit with an icy snowball that winter ?could have taken out an eye if it had hit higher ? this day he just tossed across Jackson Road the shout, "Harry, did you hear on the radio? The President is dead." He said "The President," not "Roosevelt"; there had been no other President for them. The next time this would happen, the President would have a name: as he sat at the deafening tall machine one Friday after lunch his father sneaked up behind him and confided, "Harry, it just came over the radio, engraving had it on. Kennedy's been shot. They think in the head." Both charmers dead of violent headaches. Their smiles fade in the field of stars. We grope on, under bullies and accountants. On the bus, Rabbit prays as his mother told him to do: Make the L?dopa work, give her pleasanter dreams, keep Nelson more or less pure, don't let Stavros turn too hard on Janice, help Jill find her way home. Keep Pop healthy. Me too. Amen.

 

A man in a pink shirt drops down beside him with a stagey sigh, after a stop on the side of the mountain, by the gas station with the Day?Glo spinner. The man's face, turned full, clings to the side of Rabbit's vision; after a while he defiantly returns the stare. The other man's cheeks are like his shirt pink, smooth as a boy's though his hair is gray, and his long worried eyebrows are lifted with an effort of recognition. "I do beg your pardon," he says, with an emphasis that curls back into his voice purringly, "but aren't you Harry ??"

 

"Hey, and you're Eccles. Reverend Eccles."

 

"Angstrom, yes? Harry Angstrom. How very wonderful. Really." And Eccles takes his hand, in that plump humid grip that feels as if it will never let go. In the clergyman's eyes there is some?thing new, a hardened yet startled something, naked like the pale base of his throat, which lacks a clerical collar. And the shirt, Rabbit sees, is a fancy shirt, with a fine white stitch?stripe and an airy semi?transparent summer weave: he remembers how the man wore not black but a subtly elegant midnight blue. Eccles still has hold of his hand. Harry pulls it free. "Do tell me," Eccles says, with that preening emphasis again, which Rabbit doesn't remember from ten years ago, "how things have gone for you. Are you still with ??"

 

"Janice."

 

"She didn't seem quite up to you, I can say now, frankly."

 

"Well, or vice versa. We never had another child." That had been Eccles' advice, in those first months of reconciliation, when he and Janice were starting fresh and even going to the Episcopal church together. Then Eccles had been called to a church nearer Philadelphia. They had heard a year or two later, by way of Janice's mother, that he had run into some trouble in his new parish; then nothing. And here he was again, grayer but looking no older: if anything, younger, slimmer through the middle, in self?consciously good condition, hard and tan in a way few in Brewer bother to cultivate, and with that young, startled look to his eyes. His hair is long, and curls at the back of his shirt collar. Rabbit asks him, "And what about things with you?" He is wondering where Eccles could have been, to board the bus at the side of the mountain. Nothing there but the gas station, a diner, a view of the viaduct, and some rich men's homes tucked up among the spruces, behind iron fences.

 

"Ca va. It goes. I've been buried; and yet I live. I've parted company with the ministry." And his jaw stays open, propped as if to emit a guffaw, though no sound comes, and those strangely purified eyes remain watchful.

 

"Why'd you do that?" Rabbit asks.

 

Eccles' chuckle, which always had something exploratory and quizzical about it, has become impudent, mocking, if not quite unafraid. "A variety of reasons. I was rather invited to, for one. I wanted to, for another."

 

"You no longer believe it?"

 

"In my fashion. I'm not sure I believed it then."

 

"No?" Rabbit is shocked.

 

"I believed," Eccles tells him, and his voice takes on an excessive modulation, a self?caressing timbre, "in certain kinds of human interrelation. I still do. If people want to call what happens in certain relationships Christ, I raise no objection. But it's not the word I choose to use anymore."

 

"How'd your father feel about this? Wasn't he a bishop?"

 

"My father ? God rest his, et cetera ? was dead when my decision was reached."

 

"And your wife? She was nifty, I forget her name."

 

"Lucy. Dear Lucy. She left me, actually. Yes, I've shed many skins." And the mouth of this pale?throated, long?haired man holds open on the possibility of a guffaw, but silently, watchfully.

 

"She left ya?"

 

"She fled my indiscretions. She remarried and lives in Wilmington. Her husband's a painfully ordinary fellow, a chemist of some sort. No indiscretions. My girls adore him. You remember my two girls."

 

"They were cute. Especially the older one. Since we're on the subject, Janice has left me, too."

 

Eccles' pale active eyebrows arch higher. "Really? Recently?"

 

"The day before the moon shot."

 

"She seemed more the left than the leaving type. Look, Harry, we should get together in a more, ah, stationary place and have a real conversation." In his leaning closer for emphasis, as the bus sways, his arm touches Rabbit's. He always had a certain surprising muscularity, but Eccles has become burlier, more himself. His fluffed?up head seems huge.

 

Rabbit asks him, "Uh, what do you do now?"

 

Again, the guffaw, the held jaw, the watchfulness. "I Eve in Philadelphia, basically. For a while I did youth work with the Y. M. C. A. I was a camp supervisor three summers in Vermont. Some winters, I've chosen just to read, to meditate. I think a very exciting thing is happening in Western consciousness and, laugh if you will, I'm making notes toward a book about it. What I think, in essence, is that, at long last, we're coming out of Plato's cave. How does `Out from Plato's Cave' strike you as a title?"

 

"Kind of spooky, but don't mind me. What brings you back to this dirty old burg then?"

 

"Well, it's rather curious, Harry. You don't mind my calling you Harry? That all is beginning to seem as if it were only yesterday. What curious people we were then! The ghosts we let bedevil us! Anyway, you know the little town called Oriole, six miles south of Brewer?"

 

"I've been there." With his high?school basketball team, a dozen years ago. Junior year. He had one of his great nights there.

 

"Well, they have a summer theater, called the Oriole Players."

 

"Sure. We run their ads."

 

"That's right ? you're a printer. I've heard that."

 

"Linotyper, actually."

 

"Good for you. Well, a friend of mine, he's an absurd person, very egotistical, but nevertheless a wonderful man, is with them as co?director, and has talked me into helping with their P.R. Public relations. It's really being a fund raiser. I was in Mt. Judge just now seeing this impossible old Mahlon Youngerman, that's Sunflower Beer of course, for a donation. He said he'd think about it. That's code for he won't think about it."

 

"It sounds a little like what you used to do."

 

Eccles glances at him more sharply; a defensive sleepiness masks his face. "Pearls before swine, you mean? Pushing stumblingblocks at the Gentiles. Yes, a little, but I only do it eight hours a day. The other sixteen, I can be my own man."

 

Harry doesn't like the hungry way he says man, like it means too much. They are jerking and trembling down Weiser Street; Eccles looks past Harry out the window and blinks. "I must get off here. Could I ask you to get off with me and have me buy you a drink? There's a bar here on the corner that's not too depressing." "No, Jesus, thanks. I got to keep riding. I got to get home. I have a kid there alone."

 

"Nelson."

 

"Right! What a memory! So thanks a lot. You look great."

 

"Delightful to see you again, Harry. Let's do make a more leisurely occasion sometime. Where are you living?"

 

"Over in Penn Villas, they put it up since you were here. Things are a little vague right now. . ."

 

"I understand," Eccles says, quickly, for the bus is chuffing and groaning to a stop. Yet he finds time to put his hand on Harry's shoulder, up near the neck. His voice changes quality, beseeches, becomes again a preacher's: "I think these are marvellous times to be alive in, and I'd love to share my good news with you at your leisure."

 

To put distance between them, Rabbit rides the 16A six blocks further, to where it toms up Greely, and gets off there, walking back to the roasted?peanut place on Weiser to catch the bus to Penn Villas. PIG ATROCITIES STIR CAMDEN says a headline on a rack, a radical black paper out of Philly. Harry feels nervous, looking north along Weiser for a pink shirt coming after him. The place on his bare neck where Eccles touched tickles: amazing how that guy wants to cling, after all these years, with both their lives turned upside down. The bus number 12 comes and pulls him across the bridge. The day whines at the windows, a September brightness empty of a future: the lawns smitten flat, the black river listless and stinking. HOBBY HEAVEN. BUTCH CSSDY & KID. He walks down Emberly toward Vista Crescent among sprinklers twirling in unison, under television aerials raking the same four?o'clock garbage from the sky.

 

The dirty white Porsche is in the driveway, halfway into the garage, the way Janice used to do it, annoyingly. Jill is in the brown armchair, in her slip. From the slumped way she sits he sees she has no underpants on. She answers his questions groggily, with a lag, as if they are coming to her through a packing of dirty cotton, of fuzzy memories accumulated this day.

 

"Where'd you go so early this morning?"

 

"Out. Away from creeps like you."

 

"You drop the kid off?"

 

"Sure."

 

"When'd you get back?"

 

"Just now."

 

"Where'd you spend all day?"

 

"Maybe I went to Valley Forge anyway."

 

"Maybe you didn't."

 

"I did."

 

"How was it?"

 

"Beautiful. A gas, actually. George was a beautiful dude."

 

"Describe one room."

 

"You go in a door, and there's a four?poster bed, and a little tasselled pillow, and on it it says, `George Washington slept here.' On the bedside tables you can still see the pills he took, to make himself sleep, when the redcoats had got him all uptight. The walls have some kind of lineny stuff on them, and all the chairs have ropes across the arms so you can't sit down on them. That's why I'm sitting on this one. Because it didn't. O.K.?"

 

He hesitates among the many alternatives she seems to be presenting. Laughter, anger, battle, surrender. "O.K. Sounds interesting. I'm sorry we couldn't go."

 

"Where did you go?"

 

"I went to visit my mother, after doing the housework around here."

 

"How is she?"

 

"She talks better, but seems frailer."

 

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry she has that disease. I guess I'll never meet your mother, will I?"

 

"Do you want to? You can see my father any time you want, just be in the Phoenix Bar at four?fifteen. You'd like him, he cares about politics. He thinks the System is shit, just like you do."

 

"And I'll never meet your wife."

 

"Why would you want to? What is this?"

 

"I don't know, I'm interested. Maybe I'm falling for you."

 

"Jesus, don't do that."

 

"You don't think much of yourself, do you?"

 

"Once the basketball stopped, I suppose not. My mother by the way told me I should let Janice screw herself and leave town."

 

"What'd you say to that?"

 

"I said I couldn't."

 

"You're a creep."

 

Her lack of underpants and his sense that she has already been used today, and his sense of this unique summer, this summer of the moon, slipping away forever, lead him to ask, blushing for the second time this afternoon, "You wouldn't want to make love, would you?"

 

"Fuck or suck?"

 

"Whichever. Fuck." For he has come to feel that she gives him the end of her with teeth in it as a way of keeping the other for some man not yet arrived, some man more real to her than himself.

 

"What about Nelson?" she asks.

 

"He's off with Janice, she may keep him for supper. He's no threat. But maybe you're too tired. From all that George Washington."

 

Jill stands and pulls her slip to her shoulder and holds it there, a crumpled bag containing her head, her young body all there below, pale as a candlestick, the breasts hardened drippings. "Fuck me," she says coolly, tossing her slip toward the kitchen, and, when under him and striving, continues, "Harry, I want you to fuck all the shit out of me, all the shit and dreariness of this shitdreary world, hurt me, clean me out, I want you to be all of my insides, sweetheart, right up to my throat, yes, oh yes, bigger, more, shoot it all out of me, sweet oh sweet sweet creep." Her eyes dilate in surprise. Their green is just a rim, around pupils whose pure black is muddied with his shadow. "You've gotten little."

 

It is true: all her talk, her wild wanting it, have scared him down to nothing. She is too wet; something has enlarged her. And the waxen solidity of her young body, her buttocks spheres too perfect, feels alien to him: he grasps her across a distance clouded with Mom's dry warm bones and Janice's dark curves, Janice's ribs crescent above where the waist dipped. He senses winds playing through Jill's nerve?ends, feels her moved by something beyond him, of which he is only a shadow, a shadow of white, his chest a radiant shield crushing her. She disengages herself and kneels to tongue his belly. They play with each other in a fog. The furniture dims around them. They are on the scratchy carpet, the television screen a mother?planet above them. Her hair is in his mouth. Her ass is two humps under his eyes. She tries to come against his face but his tongue isn't that strong. She rubs her clitoris against his chin upside down until he hurts. Elsewhere she is nibbling him. He feels gutted, silly, limp. At last he asks her to drag her breasts, the tough little tips, across his genitals, that lie cradled at the join of his legs. In this way he arouses himself, and attempts to satisfy her, and does, though by the time she trembles and comes they are crying over secrets far at their backs, in opposite directions, moonchild and earthman. "I love you," he says, and the fact that he doesn't makes it true. She is sitting on him, still working like some angry mechanic who, having made a difficult fit, keeps testing it.

 

In the small slipping sound they make he hears their mixed liquids, imagines in the space of her belly a silver machine, spidershaped, spun from the threads of their secretions, carefully spinning. This links them. He says, surrendering, "Oh cry. Do." He pulls her down to him, puts their cheeks together, so their tears will mix.

 

Jill asks him, "Why are you crying?"

 

"Why are you?"

 

"Because the world is so shitty and I'm part of it."

 

"Do you think there's a better one?"

 

"There must be."

 

"Well," he considers, "why the hell not?"

 

By the time Nelson comes home, they have both taken baths, their clothes are on, the lights are on. Rabbit is watching the sixo'clock news (the round?up tally on summer riots, the week's kill figures in Vietnam, the estimate of traffic accidents over the coming Labor Day weekend) and Jill is making lentil soup in the kitchen. Nelson spreads over the floor and furniture the unwrapped loot of his day with Janice: snappy new jockey shorts, undershirts, stretch socks, two pairs of slacks, four sports shirts, a corduroy jacket, wide neckties, even cufflinks to go with a lavender dress shirt, not to mention new loafers and basketball sneakers.

 

Jill admires: "Groovy, groovier, grooviest. Nelson, I just pity those eighth?grade girls, they'll be at your mercy."

 

He looks at her anxiously. "You know it's square. I didn't want to, Mom made me. The stores were disgusting, all full of materialism."

 

"What stores did she go to?" Rabbit asked. "How the hell did she pay for all this junk?"

 

"She opened charge accounts everywhere, Dad. She bought herself some clothes too, a really neat thing that looks like pajamas only it's O.K. to wear to parties if you're a woman, and stuff like that. And I got a suit, kind of grayey?green with checks, really cool, that we can pick up in a week when they make the alterations. Doesn't it feel funny when they measure you?"

 

"Do you remember, who was the name on the accounts? Me or Springer?"

 

Jill for a joke has put on one of his new shirts and tied her hair in a tail behind with one of his wide new neckties. To show herself off she twirls. Nelson, entranced, can scarcely speak. At her merry.

 

"The name on her driver's license, Dad. Isn't that the right one?"

 

"And the address here? All those bills are going to come here?"

 

"Whatever's on the driver's license, Dad. Don't go heavy on me, I told her I just wanted blue jeans. And a Che Guevara sweatshirt, only there aren't any in Brewer."

 

Jill laughs. "Nelson, you'll be the best?dressed radical at West Brewer Junior High. Harry, these neckties are silk!"

 

"So it's war with that bitch."

 

"Dad, don't. It wasn't my fault."

 

"I know that. Forget it. You needed the clothes, you're growing."

 

"And Mom really looked neat in some of the dresses."

 

He goes to the window, rather than continue to be heavy on the kid. He sees his own car, the faithful Falcon, slowly pull out. He sees for a second the shadow of Janice's head, the way she sits at the wheel hunched over, you'd think she'd be more relaxed with cars, having grown up with them. She had been waiting, for what? For him to come out? Or was she just looking at the house, maybe to spot Jill? Or homesick. By a tug of tension in one cheek he recognizes himself as smiling, seeing that the flag decal is still on the back window, she hasn't let Stavros scrape it off.