Rabbit, Run (Rabbit Angstrom, #1)

by John Updike

He doesn’t want this respect, he wants to tell them there’s nothing to getting old, it takes nothing.

They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.

be what you are. Don’t try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself.

Rabbit freezes, standing looking at his faint yellow shadow on the white door that leads to the hall, and senses he is in a trap.

He accelerates. The growing complexity of lights threatens him. He is being drawn into Philadelphia. He hates Philadelphia. Dirtiest city in the world, they live on poisoned water, you can taste the chemicals. He wants to go south, down, down the map into orange groves and smoking rivers and barefoot women. It seems simple enough, drive all night through the dawn through the morning through the noon park on a beach take off your shoes and fall asleep by the Gulf of Mexico. Wake up with the stars above perfectly spaced in perfect health. But he is going east, the worst direction, into unhealth, soot, and stink, a smothering hole where you can’t move without killing somebody. Yet the highway sucks him on, and a sign says POTTSTOWN 2. He almost brakes. But then he thinks.

For the first time, Harry realizes he is a criminal.

Laws aren’t ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.

“The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you’re going before you go there.”

Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath.

Rabbit catches a whiff of whisky. He says in a level way, “I don’t think so.” The lips and spectacles and black hairs poking out of the man’s tear-shaped nostrils show no surprise. Rabbit pulls out, going straight. Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath.

The farther he drives the more he feels some great confused system, Baltimore now instead of Philadelphia, reaching for him.

This far south the air already feels warmed. Warmth vibrates in brown and purple arcs between the lights of the service station and the moon.

He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?

he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men sitting in zippered jackets in booths three to a girl, the girls with orange hair hanging like wiggly seaweed or loosely bound with gold barrettes like pirate treasure. At the counter middle-aged couples in overcoats bunch their faces forward into the straws of gray ice-cream sodas. In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?

He realizes that the heat on his cheeks is anger; he has been angry ever since he left that diner full of mermaids.

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

At the same time he feels abnormally sensitive on the surface, as if his skin is thinking.

The clangor of the body shop comes up softly. Its noise comforts him, tells him he is hidden and safe. While he hides, men are busy nailing the world down, and toward the disembodied sounds his heart makes in darkness a motion of love.

Standing there waiting, Rabbit is elated to think that a stranger passing outside the restaurant window, like himself last night outside that West Virginia diner, would see him with a woman. He seems to be that stranger, staring in, envying himself his body and his woman’s body.

Standing there waiting, Rabbit is elated to think that a stranger passing outside the restaurant window, like himself last night outside that West Virginia diner, would see him with a woman. He seems to be that stranger, staring in, envying himself his body and his woman’s body. Ruth bends down and slides over. The skin of her shoulders gleams and then dims in the shadow of the booth. Rabbit sits down too and feels her rustle beside him, settling in, the way women do, fussily, as if making a nest.

“You were never in Texas,” she says. He remembers the house on that strange treeless residential street, the green night growing up from the prairie, the flowers in the window, and says, “Absolutely I was.” “Doing what?” “Serving Uncle.” “Oh, in the Army; well that doesn’t count. Everybody’s been to Texas with the Army.” “You order whatever you think is good,” Rabbit tells Tothero.

“You were never in Texas,” she says. He remembers the house on that strange treeless residential street, the green night growing up from the prairie, the flowers in the window, and says, “Absolutely I was.” “Doing what?” “Serving Uncle.” “Oh, in the Army; well that doesn’t count. Everybody’s been to Texas with the Army.” “You order whatever you think is good,” Rabbit tells Tothero.

“the coach is concerned with developing the three tools we are given in life: the head, the body, and the heart.”

“One. The head. Strategy. Most boys come to a basketball coach from alley games and have no conception of the, of the elegance of the game played on a court with two baskets.

second, the body. Work the boys into condition. Make their legs hard.” He clenches his fist on the slick table. “Hard. Run, run, run. Run every minute their feet are on the floor.

Thirdly”—he puts the index finger and thumb of one hand to the corners of his mouth and flicks away the moisture—“the heart. And here the good coach, which I, young lady, certainly tried to be and some say was, has his most solemn opportunity. Give the boys the will to achieve. I’ve always liked that better than the will to win, for there can be achievement even in defeat. Make them feel the—yes, I think the word is good—the sacredness of achievement, in the form of giving our best.”

He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, no bloody slab of cow haunch or hen’s sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of mute vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite’s innocent gusto.

The Chinese food arrives. Eager saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn’t had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, no bloody slab of cow haunch or hen’s sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of mute vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite’s innocent gusto. Candy. Heaped on a smoking breast of rice. Each is given such a tidy hot breast, and Margaret is in a special hurry to muddle hers with glazed chunks; all eat well. Their faces take color and strength from the oval plates of dark pork, sugar peas, chicken, stiff sweet sauce, shrimp, water chestnuts, who knows what else. Their talk grows hearty.

“God, he’s in sad shape.” “Who isn’t?” Ruth asks. “You don’t seem to be.” “I eat, is what you mean.” “No, listen, you have some kind of complex about being big. You’re not fat. You’re right in proportion.” She laughs, catches herself, looks at him, laughs again and squeezes his arm and says, “Rabbit, you’re a Christian gentleman.” Her using his own name enters his ears with unsettling warmth.

“God, he’s in sad shape.” “Who isn’t?” Ruth asks. “You don’t seem to be.” “I eat, is what you mean.” “No, listen, you have some kind of complex about being big. You’re not fat. You’re right in proportion.” She laughs, catches herself, looks at him, laughs again and squeezes his arm and says, “Rabbit, you’re a Christian gentleman.” Her using his own name enters his ears with unsettling warmth.

“What’s this about you being married?” “Well, I was. Still am.” He regrets that they have started talking about it. A big bubble, the enormity of it, crowds his heart. It’s like when he was a kid and suddenly thought, coming back from somewhere at the end of a Saturday afternoon, that this—these trees, this pavement—was life, the real and only thing.

With this Ruth, Rabbit enters the street. On his right, away from the mountain, the heart of the city shines:

It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast.

As they deepen together he feels impatience that through all their twists they remain separate flesh; he cannot dare enough, now that she is so much his friend in this search; everywhere they meet a wall. The body lacks voice to sing its own song.

Nature leads you up like a mother and as soon as she gets her little contribution leaves you with nothing.

She stands by the edge of the bed, baggy in nakedness, and goes off into the bathroom to do her duty. There’s that in women repels him: handle themselves like an old envelope. Tubes into tubes, wash away men’s dirt—insulting, really. Faucets cry. The more awake he gets the more depressed he is. From deep in the pillow he stares at the horizontal strip of stained-glass church window that shows beneath the window shade. Its childish brightness comes from years away.

She has opened the door of the square cave where the cake of ice sits; and there it is, inches from Harry’s eyes, lopsided from melting but still big, holding within its semi-opaque bulk the white partition that the cakes have when they come bumping down the chute at the ice plant. He leans closer into the cold breath of the ice, a tin-smelling coldness he associates with the metal that makes up the walls of the cave and the ribs of its floor, delicate rhinoceros gray, mottled with the same disease the linoleum has. Having leaned closer he sees that under the watery skin are hundreds of clear white veins like the capillaries on a leaf, as if ice too were built up of living cells. And further inside, so ghostly it comes to him last, hangs a jagged cloud, the star of an explosion, whose center is uncertain in refraction but whose arms fly from the core of pallor as straight as long eraser-marks diagonally into all planes of the cube. The rusted ribs the cake rests on wobble through to his eyes like the teeth of a grin. Fear probes him; the cold lump is alive.

The thought of these people having the bold idea of leaving their homes to come here and pray pleases and reassures Rabbit, and moves him to close his own eyes and bow his head with a movement so tiny that Ruth won’t notice. Help me, Christ. Forgive me. Take me down the way. Bless Ruth, Janice, Nelson, my mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Springer, and the unborn baby. Forgive Tothero and all the others. Amen.

“Come here,” he asks. The idea of making it while the churches are full excites him. “No,” Ruth says. She is really a little sore. His believing in God grates against her.

The thing about her is, she’s good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the way her thighs made a lap. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things; they’re a different race. The good ones develop give. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature.

“It’s the truth. It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time.

He must try to stop swearing; he wonders why he’s doing it. To keep them apart, maybe; he feels a dangerous tug drawing him toward this man.

I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.

Do you think God wants a waterfall to be a tree?”

“If you’re telling me I’m not mature, that’s one thing I don’t cry over since as far as I can make out it’s the same thing as being dead.”

Funny, the world just can’t touch you once you follow your instincts.

“It’s the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt.”

Somehow Rabbit can’t tear his attention from where the ball should have gone, the little ideal napkin of clipped green pinked with a pretty flag.

“The truth is,” Eccles tells him with womanish excitement, in a voice embarrassed but determined, “you’re monstrously selfish. You’re a coward. You don’t care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts.”

“I tell you, I know what it is.” “What is it? What is it? Is it hard or soft? Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots?” It hits Rabbit depressingly that he really wants to be told. Underneath all this I-know-more-about-it-than-you heresies-of-the-early-Church business he really wants to be told about it, wants to be told that it is there, that he’s not lying to all those people every Sunday. As if it’s not enough to be trying to get some sense out of this crazy game you have to carry around this madman trying to swallow your soul. The hot strap of the bag gnaws at his shoulder. “The truth is,” Eccles tells him with womanish excitement, in a voice embarrassed but determined, “you’re monstrously selfish. You’re a coward. You don’t care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts.” They reach the tee, a platform of turf beside a hunchbacked fruit tree offering fists of taut ivory-colored buds. “Let me go first,” Rabbit says. “ ’Til you calm down.” His heart is hushed, held in mid-beat, by anger. He doesn’t care about anything except getting out of this tangle. He wants it to rain. In avoiding looking at Eccles he looks at the ball, which sits high on the tee and already seems free of the ground. Very simply he brings the clubhead around his shoulder into it. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn’t heard before. His arms force his head up and his ball is hung way out, lunarly pale against the beautiful black blue of storm clouds, his grandfather’s color stretched dense across the north. It recedes along a line straight as a ruler-edge. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, and Rabbit thinks it will die, but he’s fooled, for the ball makes its hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. “That’s it!” he cries and, turning to Eccles with a grin of aggrandizement, repeats, “That’s it.”

Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.

Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes. In Mrs. Smith’s acres, crocuses break the crust. Daffodils and narcissi unpack their trumpets. The reviving grass harbors violets, and the lawn is suddenly coarse with dandelions and broad-leaved weeds. Invisible rivulets running brokenly make the low land of the estate sing. The flowerbeds, bordered with bricks buried diagonally, are pierced by dull red spikes that will be peonies, and the earth itself, scumbled, stone-flecked, horny, raggedly patched with damp and dry, looks like the oldest and smells like the newest thing under Heaven. The shaggy golden suds of blooming forsythia glow through the smoke that fogs the garden while Rabbit burns rakings of crumpled stalks, perished grass, oak leaves shed in the dark privacy of winter, and rosebush prunings that cling together in infuriating ankle-clawing clumps. These brush piles, ignited soon after he arrives, crusty-eyed and tasting coffee, in the midst of the webs of dew, are still damply smoldering when he leaves, making ghosts in the night behind him as his footsteps crunch on the spalls of the Smith driveway. All the way back to Brewer in the bus he smells the warm ashes.

The simplicity. Getting rid of something by giving it to itself. God Himself folded into the tiny adamant structure, Self-destined to a succession of explosions, the great slow gathering out of water and air and silicon: this is felt without words in the turn of the round hoe-handle in his palms.

When the first blooms came they were like the single big flower Oriental temptresses wear on the sides of their heads on the covers of the paperback spy stories Ruth reads. But when the hemispheres of blossom appear in crowds they remind him of nothing so much as the hats worn by cheap girls to church on Easter.

The bushes puzzled him, they were so big, almost trees, some twice his height, and there seemed so many. They were planted all along the edges of the towering droop-limbed hemlocks that sheltered the place, and in the acres sheltered there were dozens of great rectangular clumps like loaves of porous green bread. The bushes were evergreen. With their zigzag branches and long oval leaves fingering in every direction they seemed to belong to a different climate, to a different land, whose gravity pulled softer than this one. When the first blooms came they were like the single big flower Oriental temptresses wear on the sides of their heads on the covers of the paperback spy stories Ruth reads. But when the hemispheres of blossom appear in crowds they remind him of nothing so much as the hats worn by cheap girls to church on Easter.

A woman once of some height, she is bent small, and the lingering strands of black look dirty in her white hair. She carries a cane, but in forgetfulness, perhaps, hangs it over her forearm and totters along with it dangling loose like an outlandish bracelet. Her method of gripping her gardener is this: he crooks his right arm, pointing his elbow toward her shoulder, and she shakily brings her left forearm up within his and bears down heavily on his wrist with her lumpish and freckled fingers. Her hold is like that of a vine to a wall; one good pull will destroy it, but otherwise it will survive all weathers.

Her face, seen so close, is built of great flats of skin pressed clean of color except for a burnish of yellow that adds to their size mineral weight, the weight of some pure porous stone carted straight from quarries to temples. Words come from this monumental Ruth in the same scale, as massive wheels rolling to the porches of his ears, as mute coins spinning in the light. “You have it pretty good.”

“If you have the guts to be yourself,” he says, “other people’ll pay your price.”

“When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery.” The tears bubble over her lids and the salty taste of the pool-water is sealed into her mouth. “If you have the guts to be yourself,” he says, “other people’ll pay your price.”

Nelson’s face turns up toward the porch and he tries to explain, “Pilly have—Pilly—” But just trying to describe the injustice gives it unbearable force, and as if struck from behind he totters forward and slaps the thief’s chest and receives a mild shove that makes him sit on the ground. He rolls on his stomach and spins in the grass, revolved by his own incoherent kicking. Eccles’ heart seems to twist with the child’s body; he knows so well the propulsive power of a wrong, the way the mind batters against it and each futile blow sucks the air emptier until it seems the whole frame of blood and bone must burst in a universe that can be such a vacuum.