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The motions of Grace, the hardness of the heart; external circumstances. —Pascal, Pensée 507
So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy.
It drops into the circle of the rim, whipping the net with a ladylike whisper.
That old stretched-leather feeling makes his whole body go taut, gives his arms wings. It feels like he’s reaching down through years to touch this tautness.
but their tongues are still held. He doesn’t want this respect, he wants to tell them there’s nothing to getting old, it takes nothing.
You’re out, and sort of melt, and keep lifting, until you become like to these kids just one more piece of the sky of adults that hangs over them in the town, a piece that for some queer reason has clouded and visited them.
They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.
Naturals know. It’s all in how it feels.
The month is March. Love makes the air light. Things start anew;
His downstairs neighbor’s door across the hall is shut like a hurt face.
She is a small woman whose skin tends toward olive and looks tight, as if something swelling inside is straining against her littleness.
and her hair has thinned, so he keeps thinking of her skull under it.
Janice and Rabbit become unnaturally still; both are Christians. God’s name makes them feel guilty.
She opens her brown eyes and tears fill them and break over the lower lids and drop down her cheeks, pink with injury,
her tear-hot breath, the blood-tinged white of her eyes.
“You’re supposed to look tired. You’re a modern housewife.”
Nerves like new thread. Skin smelled like fresh cotton.
yet they left it slow as swimming.
seems to him he’s the only person around here who cares about neatness.
the continual crisscrossing
He hated it when his mother went on like that; maybe she did it just to kid him, but he couldn’t take her lightly, she was somehow too powerful, at least with him.
in a normal voice that says everything is forgiven, everything is the same.
The Norway maples exhale the smell of their sticky new buds and the broad living-room windows along Wilbur Street show beyond the silver patch of a television set the warm bulbs burning in kitchens, like fires at the backs of caves.
He now and then touches with his hand the rough bark of a tree or the dry twigs of a hedge, to give himself the small answer of a texture.
Alcohol and cards Rabbit both associates with a depressing kind of sin, sin with bad breath, and he was further depressed by the political air of the place.
Your fear trills like an alarm bell you cannot shut off, the louder the faster you run, hunchbacked,
view of Brewer spread out below like a carpet, a red city, where they paint wood, tin, even red bricks red, an orange rose flowerpot red that is unlike the color of any other city in the world yet to the children of the county is the only color of cities, the color all cities are.
and then as the neighbors listened old wounds opened like complicated flowers in the night.
He dreaded their quarrels: when their faces went angry and flat and words flew, it was as if a pane of glass were put in front of him, cutting off air; his strength drained away and he had to go to a far corner of the house.
Laws aren’t ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.
Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath.
His problem is to get west and free of Baltimore-Washington, which like a two-headed dog guards the coastal route to the south.
his image is of himself going right down the middle, right into the broad soft belly of the land, surprising the dawn cottonfields with his northern plates.
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?
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
His brain flutters with fatigue behind sandy eyelids;
The last quarter of a basketball game used to carry him into this world; you ran not as the crowd thought for the sake of the score but for yourself, in a kind of idleness. There was you and sometimes the ball and then the hole, the high perfect hole with its pretty skirt of net.
the crowd then seemed right inside you, your liver and lungs and stomach.
His brain feels like a frail but alert invalid with messengers bringing down long corridors all this music and geographical news. At the same time he feels abnormally sensitive on the surface, as if his skin is thinking.
Today is Saturday, and the sky has that broad bright blunt Saturday quality Rabbit remembers from boyhood, when the sky of a Saturday morning was the blank scoreboard of a long game about to begin. Roofball, box hockey, tether ball, darts …
Cotton and gulls in half-light and the way she’d come on the other girl’s bed, never as good on their own.
Rabbit adjusts his position and returns his mind to its dark socket:
Tothero is silent before replying. His great strength is in these silences; he has the disciplinarian’s trick of waiting a long moment while his words gather weight.
The skin of his eyelids shudders as his eyeballs turn, surveying the inner wall of vision. Otherwise he is as dead, beyond harm. The slash of sun on the wall above him slowly knifes down, cuts across his chest, becomes a coin on the floor, and vanishes.
settling in, the way women do, fussily, as if making a nest.
funny how plump women have that delicate touch.
is her heart he wants to grind into his own, to comfort her completely.
He moves his lips into one eye socket, gently, trying to say this night has no urgency in it, trying to listen through his lips to the timid pulse beating in the bulge of her lid.
“Damn men,” she continues, “either want to hurt somebody or be hurt.”
The cool hollow his hand finds in the small of her back mixes in his mind with the shallow shadows of the stretch of skin that slopes from the bones of her shoulders. He kisses this expanse.
