Pru tells Harry in her personally aimed, slightly scratchy Ohio voice, "Oily deepwater fish, bluefish especially, have lots of EPA in their oil, that's a kind of acid that actually thins your blood and lowers the triglyceride level."
She would take care of me, Harry thinks. Pleasurably he complains, "What's everybody always worried about my cholesterol level for? I must look awful."
"You're a big guy," Pru says, and the assessment pierces him like a love dart, "and as we all age the proportion of fat in our bodies goes up, and the amount of LDL, that's low-density lipoprotein, the bad kind of fat, goes up and that of the highdensity, good kind stays the same, so the ratio goes up, and the danger of Apo B attaching to your arteries goes up with it. And we don't exercise the way people used to, when everybody had farms so the fats don't get burned up."
"Teresa, you know so much," Janice says, not quite liking being upstaged and using Pru's baptismal name as a tiny check, to keep her in place.
The other woman lowers her eyes and drops her voice. "You remember, I took that course at the Brewer Penn State extension. I was thinking, when Roy gets into school full-time, I should have something to do, and thought-maybe nutrition, or dietetics…"
"I want to get a job, too," Janice says, annoying Harry with her intrusion into Pru's demure lecture about his very own, he felt, fatty insides. "The movie we saw this afternoon, all these women working in New York skyscrapers, made me so jealous." Janice didn't use to dramatize herself. Ever since her mother died and they bought this condo, she has been building up an irritating confidence, an assumption that the world is her stage and her performance is going pretty well. Around Valhalla Village, she is one of the younger women and on several committees. Just not being senile is considered great down here. When they went to the Drechsels' seder, she turned out to be the youngest and had to ask the four questions.
Harry jealously asks Pru, "Does Nelson get the benefit of all this nutrition?"
Pru says, "He doesn't need it, really – he hardly ever eats, and he has all this nervous energy. He could use more lipids. But the children – they say now that after two in most American children the cholesterol level is too high. When they did autopsies on young men killed in the Korean War, three-quarters of them had too much fat in their coronary arteries."
Harry's chest is beginning to bind, to ache. His insides are like the sea to him, dark and wet and full of things he doesn't want to think about.
Nelson has done nothing to contribute to this conversation but sniff occasionally. The kid's nose seems to run all the time, and the line of bare skin above his mouse-colored mustache looks chafed. Now he pushes back from his half-eaten fish and announces complacently, "The way I figure, if one thing doesn't kill you, another will." Though he rests his palms on the edge of the table, his hands are trembling, the nerves snapping.
"It's not what we worry about, it's when," his father tells him.
Janice looks alarmed, her eyes shuttling from one to the other. "Let's all be cheerful," she says.
For dessert, Pru serves them frozen yogurt – much better for you than ice cream, with no cholesterol at all. When the meal is done, Harry hangs around the kitchen counter long enough to dig into the cookie drawer and stuff himself with three quick vanilla Cameos and a broken pretzel. Down here they don't have the variety of pretzels you get in Brewer but Sunshine sells a box of thick ones that are not too tasteless. He has an impulse to help Janice with the dishes and suppresses it; it's just throwing plates into the dishwasher and what else did she contribute to the meal? His feet hurt from all that walking they did today; he has a couple of toes that over the years have twisted enough in his shoes to dig their nails into each other if he doesn't keep them cut close. Pru and Roy and Nelson retreat into their room and he sits a while and watches while Judy, the remote control in hand, bounces back and forth between The Cosby Show, some ice capades, and a scare documentary about foreigners buying up American businesses, and then between Cheers and a drama about saving a fourteenyear-old girl from becoming a prostitute like her mother. So many emergencies, Harry thinks, so much canned laughter, so many actors' tears, all this effort to be happy, to be brave, to be loved, all this wasted effort. Television's tireless energy gnaws at him. He sighs and laboriously rises. His body sags around his heart like a tent around a pole. He tells Judy, "Better pack it in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we're going to go to the beach and sailing." But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything. These four guests are a strain; he looks forward to their departure Saturday, the last day of 1988.
Judy continues to stare at the screen and ply her channel changer. "Just the first part of L.A. Law," she promises, but flicks instead to an ABC news special about "American Kids – Their Diet of Danger." In their bedroom Janice is reading Elle, looking at the pictures, of superslim models looking stoned.
` Janice," he says. "I have something to ask you."
"What? Don't get me stirred up, I'm reading to make myself sleepy."
"Today," he says. "In that crowd going through the Edison place: Did I look as though I fit in?"
It takes her a while to shift her focus; then she sees what he wants. "Of course not, Harry. You looked much younger than the other men. You looked like one of their sons, visiting."
He decides this is as much reassurance as he dare ask for. "At least," he agrees with her, "I wasn't in a wheelchair." He reads a few pages of history, about the fight between the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis, and how when amid the bloody explosions his chief gunner cried out "Quarter! quarter! for God's sake!" John Paul Jones hurled a pistol at the man, felling him. But the cry had been heard by Pearson, the Serapis' commander, who called, "Do you ask for quarter?" Through the clash of battle, gunshot and crackle offire the famous reply came faintly back to him: "I have not yet begun to fight!" The victorious American ship was so damaged it sank the next day, and Jones took the captured Serapis, shorn of its mast, into Holland, exacerbating the British resentment that already existed. All this fury and bravery seems more wasted effort. Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colorful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind. He settles the book on the night table and switches off the lamp. The bar of light beneath the door transmits distant shots and shouts from some TV show, any TV show. He falls asleep with unusual speed, with scarcely a turn into his pillow. His arms, which usually get in the way, fold themselves up like pieces of blanket. His dreams include one in which he has come to a door, a door with a round top to it, and pushes at it. The glass door at McDonald's except that one you could see the hamburger head through. In his dream he knows there is a presence on the other side, a presence he dreads, hungry and still, but pushes nevertheless, and the dread increases with the pressure, so much that he awakes, his bladder aching to go to the bathroom. He can't get through the night any more. His prostate or his bladder, losing stretch like goldenrod rubber. His mistake was drinking a Schhtz while channel-surfing with Judy. Falling asleep again is not so easy, with Janice's deep breathing now and then dipping into a rasping snore just as he begins to relax and his brain to generate nonsense. The luminous bar beneath the door is gone but a kind of generalized lavender light, the light that owls and other animals of the night see to kill by, picks out the planes and big objects of the bedroom. A square bureau holds the glassy rectangle of Nelson's high-school graduation photo; a fat pale chair holds on one arm Harry's discarded linen trousers, the folds of cloth suggesting a hollow-eyed skull stretched like chewing gum. Air admitted from the balcony under the folds of the drawn curtain grazes his face. A way of going to sleep is to lie on your back and try to remember the dream you were having. Unease seizes him like a great scalyfooted parrot claw and puts him down again on his face. The next thing he knows he is hearing the mowing machines on the golf course, and the stirred-up seagulls weeping.