The thready lawn behind their little limestone house at 14Vz Franklin Drive has the dry kiss of autumn on it: brown patches and the first few fallen leaves, cast off by the weeping cherry, his neighbor's black walnut, the sweet cherry that leans close to the house so he can watch the squirrels scrabble along its branches, and the willow above the empty cement fish pond with the bluepainted bottom and rim of real seashells. These trees still seem green and growing but their brown leaves are accumulating in the grass. Even the hemlock toward the neighboring house of thin yellow bricks, and the rhododendrons along the palisade fence separating the Angstroms' yard from the property of the big mockTudor house of clinker bricks, and the shaggy Austrian pines whose cast?off needles clutter the cement pond, though all evergreen, are tinged by summer's end, dusty and sweetly dried?out like the smell that used to come from the old cedar hope chest where Mom kept spare blankets and their good embroidered linen tablecloth for Thanksgiving and Christmas and the two old crazy quilts she had inherited from the Renningers. It was family legend that these quilts were fabulously valuable but when, in some family crunch when Harry was in his early teens, they tried to sell them, the best offer they could get was sixty dollars apiece. After much talk around the porcelain kitchen table, they took the offer, and now authentic old quilts like that bring thousands if in good condition. When he thinks about those old days and the amounts of money they considered important it's as if they were being cheated, getting by on slave wages, eating bread that cost eleven cents a loaf. They were living in a financial dungeon, back there on Jackson Road, and the fact that everybody else was in it too only makes it sadder. Just thinking about those old days lately depresses him; it makes him face life's constant depreciation. Lying awake at night, afraid he will never fall asleep or will fall asleep forever, he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.
The forsythia and beauty bush both have been getting out of hand during this wet summer and Harry, on this cloudy cool Thursday before the Labor Day weekend, has been trying to prune them back into shape for the winter. With the forsythia, you take out the oldest stem from the base, making the bush younger and thinner and more girlish suddenly, and then cut back the most flagrant skyward shoots and the down?drooping branches on their way to reroot in among the day lilies. It doesn't do to be tenderhearted; the harder you cut back now, the more crammed with glad yellow blossoms the stubby branches become in the spring. The beauty bush poses a tougher challenge, an even tighter tangle. Any attempt to follow the tallest stems down to their origin gets lost in the net of interwoven branchlets, and the bottom thicket of small trunks is so dense as to repel a clipper or pruning saw; there is not a knife's?width of space. The bush in this season of neglect has grown so tall he really should go to the garage for the aluminum stepladder. But Rabbit is reluctant to face the garage's grimy tumble of cast?aside tires and stiff hoses and broken flowerpots and rusted tools inherited from the previous owners, who failed to clean out the garage the same way they left a stack of Playboys in an upstairs closet. In ten years he and Janice have added their own stuff to the garage, so that gradually there wasn't space for one car let alone two in it; it has become a cave of deferred decisions and sentimentally cherished junk so packed that if he tries to extract the ladder several old paint cans and a lawn sprinkler bereft of its washers will come clattering down. So he stretches and reaches into the beauty bush until his chest begins to ache, with the sensation of an inflexible patch stitched to the inner side of his skin. His nitroglycerin pills got left in the sweat?rimmed pocket of his plaid golf slacks last night when he went to bed early, alone, having fed himself a beer and some Corn Chips after that match with Ronnie ended so sourly.
To placate the pain, he switches to weeding the day lilies and the violet hosta. Wherever a gap pennits light to activate the sandy soil, chickweed and crabgrass grow, and purslane with its hollow red stems covers the earth in busy round?leaved zigzags. Weeds too have their styles, their own personalities that talk back to the gardener in the daze of the task. Chickweed is a good weed, soft on the hands unlike thistles and burdock, and pulls easily; it knows when the jig is up and comes willingly, where wild cucumber keeps breaking off at one of its many joints, and grass and red sorrel and poison ivy spread underground, like creeping diseases that cannot be cured. Weeds don't know they're weeds. Safe next to the trunk of the weeping cherry a stalk of blue lettuce has grown eight feet tall, taller than he. Those days he spent ages ago being Mrs. Smith's gardener among her rhododendrons, the one time he ever felt rooted in a job. Fine strong young man, she had called him at the end, gripping him with her claws.
A block and a half away, the traffic on Penn Boulevard murmurs and hisses, its purr marred by the occasional sudden heave and grind of a great truck shifting gears, or by an angry horn, or the wop?wop?wopping bleat of an ambulance rushing some poor devil to the hospital. You see them now and then, driving down a side street, these scenes: some withered old lady being carried in a stretcher down her porch stairs in a slow?motion sled ride, her hair unpinned, her mouth without its dentures, her eyes staring skyward as if to disown her body; or some red?faced goner being loaded into the double metal doors while his abandoned mate in her bathrobe snivels on the curb and the paramedics close around his body like white vultures feeding. Rabbit has noticed a certain frozen peacefulness in such terminal street tableaux. A certain dignity in the doomed one, his or her moment come round at last; a finality that isolates the ensemble like a spotlit créche. You would think people would take it worse than they do. They don't scream, they don't accuse God. We curl into ourselves, he supposes. We become numb bundles of used?up nerves. Earthworms on the hook.
From far across the river, a siren wails in the heart of Brewer. Above, in a sky gathering its fishscales for a rainy tomorrow, a small airplane rasps as it coasts into the airport beyond the old fairgrounds. What Harry instantly loved about this house was its hiddenness: not so far from all this traffic, it is yet not easy to find, on its macadamized dead end, tucked with its fractional number among the more conspicuous homes of the Penn Park rich. He always resented these snobs and now is safe among them. Pulling into his dead?end driveway, working out back in his garden, watching TV in his den with its wavery lozenge?paned windows, Rabbit feels safe as in a burrow, where the hungry forces at loose in the world would never think to find him.
Janice pulls in in the pearl?gray Camry wagon. She is fresh from the afternoon class at the Penn State extension on Pine Street: "Real Estate Mathematics ?Fundamentals and Applications." In a student outfit of sandals and wheat?colored sundress, with a looseknit white cardigan thrown over her shoulders, her forehead free of those Mamie Eisenhower bangs, she looks snappy, and brushed glossy, and younger than her age. Everything she wears these days has shoulders; even her cardigan has shoulders. She walks to him over what seems a great distance in the little quarter?acre yard, their property expanded by what has become a mutual strangeness. Unusually, she presents her face to be kissed. Her nose feels cold, like a healthy puppy's. "How was class?" he dutifully asks.
"Poor Mr. Lister seems so sad and preoccupied lately," she says. "His beard has come in all full of gray. We think his wife is leaving. him. She came to class once and acted very snooty, we all thought."
"You all are getting to be a mean crowd. Aren't these classes about over? Labor Day's coming."
"Poor Harry, do you feel I've deserted you this summer? What are you going to do with all this mess you've pruned away? The beauty bush looks absolutely ravaged."
He admits, "I was getting tired and making bad decisions. That's why I stopped."
"Good thing," she says. "There wouldn't have been anything left but stumps. We'd have to call it the ugliness bush."
"Listen, you, I don't see you out here helping. Ever."
"The outdoors is your responsibility, the indoors is mine ? isn't that how we do it?"
"I don't know how we do anything any more, you're never here. In answer to your question, I'd planned to stack what I cut over behind the fish pond to dry out and then burn it next spring when we're back from Florida."
"You're planning ahead right into 1990; I'm impressed. That year is still very unreal to me. Won't the yard look ugly all winter then, though?"
"It won't look ugly, it'll look natural, and we won't be here to see it anyway."
Her tongue touches the upper lip of her mouth, which has opened in thought. But she says nothing, just "I guess we won't, if we do things as normal."
"If ? "
She doesn't seem to hear, gazing at the fence?high heap of pruned branches.
He says, "If you're so in charge of the indoors, what are we having for dinner?"
"Damn," she says. "I meant to stop by at the farm stand there at the end of the bridge and pick up some sweet corn, but then I had so much else on my mind I sailed right by. I thought we'd have the corn with what's left of Tuesday's meatloaf and those dinner rolls in the breadbox before they get moldy. There was a wonderful tip in the Standard about how to freshen stale bread in the microwave, I forget what exactly, something to do with water. There must be a frozen veg in the freezer part we can have instead of sweet corn."
"Or else we could sprinkle salt and sugar on ice cubes," he says. "One thing I know's in the fridge is ice cubes."
"Harry, it's been on my mind to go shopping, but the IGA is so far out of the way and the prices at the Turkey Hill are ridiculous, and the convenience store over on Penn Boulevard has those surly kids behind the counter who I think punch extra figures into the cash register."
"You're a shrewd shopper, all right," Harry tells her. The mackerel sky is forming a solid gray shelf in the southwest; they move together toward the house, away from the shadow of coming dark.
Janice says, "So." Saying "so" is something she's picked up recently, from her fellow?students or her teachers, as the word for beginning to strike a deal. "You haven't asked me how I did on my last quiz. We got them back."
"How did you do?"
"Beautifully, really. Mr. Lister gave me a B minus but said it would have been a B plus if I could organize my thoughts better and clean up my spelling. I know it's `i' before `e' sometimes and the other way around some other times, but when?"
He loves her when she talks to him like this, as if he has all the answers. He leans the long?handled clippers in the garage against the wall behind a dented metal trash can and hangs the pruning saw on its nail. Shadowy in her sundress, she moves ahead of him up the back stairs and the kitchen light comes on. Inside the kitchen, she rummages, with that baffled frowning expression of hers, biting her tongue tip, in the refrigerator for edible fragments. He goes and touches her waist in the wheat?colored dress, lightly cups her buttocks as she bends over looking. Tenderly, he complains, "You didn't come home until late last night."
"You were asleep, poor thing. I didn't want to risk waking you so I slept in the guest room."
"Yeah, I get so groggy, suddenly. I keep wanting to finish that book on the American Revolution but it knocks me out every time."
"I shouldn't have given it to you for Christmas. I thought you’d enjoy it."
"I did. I do. Yesterday was a hard day. First Ronnie tied me on the last hole when I had the bastard all but beaten, and then he snubbed my invitation to play again. And then Nelson called all jazzed up with some crazy scheme about water scooters and Yamaha."
"I'm sure Ronnie has his reasons," Janice says. "I'm surprised he played with you at all. How do you feel about Brussels sprouts?"
"I don't mind them."
"To me, they always taste spoiled; but they're all we have. I promise to get to the IGA tomorrow and stock up for the long weekend."
"We going to have Nelson and his tribe over?"
"I thought we might all meet at the club. We've hardly used it this summer."
"He sounded hyper on the phone ? do you think he's back on the stuff already?"
"Harry, Nelson is very straight now. That place really has given him religion. But I agree, Yamaha isn't the answer. We must raise some capital and put ourselves on a solvent basis before we start courting another franchise. I've been talking to some of the other women getting their licenses -"
"You discuss our personal financial problems?"
"Not ours as such, just as a case study. It's all purely hypothetical. In real?estate class we always have a lot of case studies. And they all thought it was grotesque to be carrying a mortgage amounting to over twenty?five hundred a month on the lot when we have so much other property."
Rabbit doesn't like the trend here. He points out, "But this place is already mortgaged. What do we pay? Seven hundred a month."
"I know that, silly. Don't forget, this is my business now." She has stripped the Brussels sprouts of their waxpaper box and put them in the plastic safe dish and put it in the microwave and punches out the time ? three blips, a peep, and then a rising hum. "We bought this place ten years ago," she tells him, "for seventyeight thousand and put fifteen down and have about ten or fifteen more in equity by now, it doesn't accumulate very fast in the first half of payback, there's a geometric curve they tell you about, so let's say there's still fifty outstanding; in any case, housing prices have gone way up in this area since 1980, it's been flattening out but hasn't started to go down yet, though it might this winter, you'd begin by asking two twenty, two thirty let's say, with the Penn Park location, and the seclusion, the fact that it has real limestone walls and not just facing, it has what they call historic value; we certainly wouldn't settle for less than two hundred, which minus the fifty would give us one fifty, which would wipe out two?thirds of what we owe Brewer Trust!"
Rabbit has rarely heard this long an utterance from Janice, and it takes him a few seconds to understand what she has been saying. "You'd sell this place?"
"Well, Harry, it is very extravagant to keep it just for the summer essentially, especially when there's all that extra room over at Mother's."
"I love this place," he tells her. "It's the only place I've ever lived where I felt at home, at least since Jackson Road. This place has class. It's us."
"Honey, I've loved it too, but we must be practical, that's what you've always been telling me. We don't need to own four prop-erties, plus the lot."
"Why not sell the condo, then?"
"I thought of that, but we'd be lucky to get out of it what we paid for it. In Florida, places are like cars ? people like them brand new. The new malls and everything are to the east."
"What about the Poconos place?&............