"Everybody seemed cheerful," she reports, "including Baby."
"Baby have a name yet?"
"Pru asked Nelson about Rebecca and he said absolutely not. Now she's thinking of Judith. That's her mother's name. I told them to forget Janice, I never much liked it for myself."
"I thought she hated her mother."
"She doesn't hate her, she doesn't much respect her. It's her father she hates. But he's been on the phone to her a couple of times and been very, what's the word, conciliatory."
"Oh great. Maybe he can come and help run the lot. He can do our steam fitting. How does Pru feel about Nelson's running off, just on the eve?"
Janice takes off her hat, a fuzzy violet loose-knit beret she wears in winter and that makes her look with the sheepskin coat like some brown-faced boy of a little soldier off to the wars. Her hair stands up with static electricity. In the empty living room she has nowhere to drop her hat, and throws it onto a white windowsill. "Well," she says, "she's interesting about it. For just now she says she's just as glad he isn't around, it would be one more thing to cope with. In general she feels it's something he had to do, to get his shit together -that's her expression. I think she knows she pushed him. Once he gets his degree, she thinks, he'll be much more comfortable with himself. She doesn't seem at all worried about losing him for good or anything."
"Huh. Whaddeya have to do to get blamed for something these days?"
"They're very tolerant of each other," Janice says, "and I think that's nice." She heads upstairs, and Harry follows her up, closely, afraid of losing her in the vast newness of their house.
He asks, "She gonna go out there and live with him in an apartment or what?"
"She thinks her going out there with the baby would panic him right now. And of course for Mother it'd be much nicer if she stayed."
"Isn't Pru at all miffed about Melanie?"
"No, she says Melanie will watch after him for her. They don't have this jealousy thing the way we do, if you can believe them."
"If."
"Speaking of which." Janice drops her coat on the bed and bends over, ass high, to unzip her boots. "Thelma had left a message with Mother about whether or not you and I wanted to come over to their house for a light supper and watch the Super Bowl. I guess the Murketts will be there."
"And you said?"
"I said No. Don't worry, I was quite sweet. I said we were having Mother and Pru over here to watch the game on our brand-new Sony. It's true. I invited them." In stocking feet she stands and puts her hands on the hips of her black church suit as if daring him to admit he would rather go out and be with that racy crowd than stay home with his family.
"Fine," he says. "I haven't really seen -"
"Oh, and quite a sad thing. Mother got it from Grace Stuhl, who's good friends apparently with Peggy Fosnacht's aunt. While we were down there Peggy went into her doctor's for a check-up and by nighttime he had her in the hospital and a breast taken off."
"My God." Breast he had sucked. Poor old Peggy. Flicked away by God's fmgemail. Life is too big for us, in the end.
"They of course said they got it all but then they always say that.
"She seemed lately headed for something unfortunate."
"She's been grotesque. I should call her, but not today."
Janice is changing into dungarees to do housecleaning. She says the people have left the place filthy but he can't see it, except for the Playboys. She has never been much of a neatness freak wherever they have lived before. Uncurtained winter light bouncing off the bare floors and blank walls turns her underwear to silver and gives her shoulders and arms a quick life as of darting fish before they disappear into an old shirt of his and a moth-eaten sweater. Behind her their new bed, unmade, hasn't been fucked on yet, they were too drunk and exhausted last night. In fact they haven't since that night on the island. He asks her irritably what about his lunch.
Janice asks, "Oh, didn't you find something in the fridge?"
"There was one orange. I ate it for breakfast."
"I know I bought eggs and sliced ham but I guess Buddy and what's-her-name -"
"Valerie."
"Wasn't her hair wild? do you think she takes drugs? – ate it all up in that omelette they made after midnight. Isn't that a sign of drugs, an abnormal appetite for food? I know there's some cheese left, Harry. Couldn't you make do with cheese and crackers until I go out and buy something for Mother later? I don't know what's open Sundays around here, I can't keep running back to the Mt. Judge Superette and using up gas."
"'No," he agrees, and makes do with cheese and crackers and a Schlitz that is left over from the three sixpacks Ronnie and Thelma brought over. Webb and Cindy brought the brandy and champagne. All afternoon he helps Janice clean, Windexing windows and wiping woodwork while she mops floors and even scours the kitchen and bathroom sinks. They have a downstairs bathroom here but he doesn't know where to buy toilet paper printed with comic strips. Janice has brought her mother's waxing machine in the Mustang along with some Butcher's paste and he wipes the wax on the long blond living-room floor, each whorl of wood grain and slightly popped-up nail and old scuff of a rubber heel his, his house. As he lays the wax on with circular swipes Rabbit keeps chasing the same few thoughts in his brain, stupid as brains are when you do physical work. Last night he kept wondering if the other two couples had gone ahead and swapped, Ronnie and Cindy doing it the second time, after he and Janice had left and they did act cozy, as if the four of them made the innermost circle of the party and the Angstroms and poor Buddy and that hungry Valerie were second echelon or third worlders somehow. Thelma got pretty drunk for her, her sallow skin gleaming to remind him of Vaseline, though when he thanked her for sending the clipping about the goose she stared at him and then sideways at Ronnie and then back at him as if he had rocks in his head. He guesses it'll all come out, what happened down there afterwards, people can't keep a good secret, but it pains him to think that Thelma would let Webb do to her everything the two of them did or that Cindy really wanted to go with Ronnie again and would lift up her heavy breast with a motherly hand so that loudmouthed jerk could suck and tell about it, with his scalp bare like that he's such a baby, Harrison. No point in keeping secrets, we'll all be dead soon enough, already we're survivors, the kids are everywhere, making the music, giving the news. Ever since that encounter with Ruth he's felt amputated, a whole world half-seen in the comer of his eye snuffed out. Janice and the waxing machine are whining and knocking behind him and the way his brain is going on reminds him of some article he read last year in the paper or Time about some professor at Princeton's theory that in ancient times the gods spoke to people directly through the left or was it the right half of their brains, they were like robots with radios in their heads telling them everything to do, and then somehow around the time of the ancient Greeks or Assyrians the system broke up, the batteries too weak to hear the orders, though there are glimmers still and that is why we go to church, and what with all these jigaboos and fags roller-skating around with transistorized earmuffs on their heads we're getting back to it. How at night just before drifting off he hears Mom's voice clear as a whisper from the corner of the room saying Hassy, a name as dead as the boy that was called that is dead. Maybe the dead are gods, there's certainly something kind about them, the way they give you room. What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand. Mom, Pop, old man Springer, baby Becky, good old Jill (maybe -that dream had to do with the time he took her in so suddenly, except her hair wasn't dark, it was so intense, the dream, there's nothing like a new relationship), Skeeter, Mr. Abendroth, Frank Byer, Mamie Eisenhower just recently, John Wayne, LBJ, JFK, Skylab, the goose. With Charlie's mother and Peggy Fosnacht cooking. And his daughter Annabelle Byer snuffed out with that whole world he was watching in the corner of his eye like those entire planets obliterated in Star Wars. The more dead you know it seems the more living there are you don't know. Ruth's tears, when he was leaving: maybe God is in the universe the way salt is in the ocean, giving it a taste. He could never understand why people can't drink saltwater, it can't be any worse than mixing Coke and potato chips.