Giordano's is ringing, Nelson comes up behind him and rummages in his pockets. "Hey," Harry says, "what're ya robbing me for?"
"Car keys. Mom says take the car out front."
Harry braces the receiver between his shoulder and ear and fishes the keys from his left pocket and, handing them over, for the first time looks Nelson squarely in the face. He sees nothing of himself there except the small straight nose and a cowlick in one eyebrow that sends a little fan of hairs the wrong way and seems to express a doubt. Amazing, genes. So precise in all that coiled coding they can pick up a tiny cowlick like that. That girl had had Ruth's tilt, exactly: a little forward push of the upper lip and thighs, soft-tough, comforting.
"Thanks, Pops."
"Don't dawdle. Nothing worse than cold pizza."
"What was that?" a tough voice at the other end of the line asks, having at last picked up the phone.
"Nothing, sorry," Harry says, and orders three pizzas – one pepperoni, one combination, and one plain in case Melanie changes her mind. He gives Nelson a ten-dollar bill. "We ought to talk sometime, Nellie, when you get some rest." The remark goes with the money, somehow. Nelson makes no answer, taking the bill.
When the young people are gone, Harry returns to the sunporch and says to the women, "Now that wasn't so bad, was it? She seemed happy to sleep in the sewing room."
"Seems isn't being," Ma Springer darkly says.
"Hey that's right," Harry says. "Whaddid you think ofher anyway? The girlfriend."
"Does she feel like a girlfriend to you?" Janice asks him. She has at last sat down, and has a small glass in her hand. The liquid in the glass he can't identify by its color, a sickly but intense red like old-fashioned cream soda or the fluid in thermometers.
"Whaddeya mean? They spent last night in a field together. God knows how they shacked up in Colorado. Maybe in a cave."
"I'm not sure that follows anymore. They try to be friends in a way we couldn't when we were young. Boys and girls."
"Nelson does not look contented," Ma Springer announces heavily.
"When did he ever?" Harry asks.
"As a little boy he seemed very hopeful," his grandmother says.
"Bessie, what's your analysis of what brought him back here?"
The old lady sighs. "Some disappointment. Some thing that got too big for him. I'll tell you this though. If that girl doesn't behave herself under our roof, I'm moving out. I talked to Grace Stuhl about it after church and she's more than willing, poor soul, to have me move in. She thinks it might prolong her life."
"Mother," Janice asks, "aren't you missing All in the Family?"
"It was to be a show I've seen before, the one where this old girlfriend of Archie's comes back to ask for money. Now that it's summer it's all reruns. I did hope to look at The Jeffersons though, at nine-thirty, before this hour on Moses, if I can stay awake. Maybe I'll go upstairs to rest my legs. When I was making up Nellie's little bed, a corner hit a vein and it won't stop throbbing." She stands, wincing.
"Mother," Janice says impatiently, "I would have made up those beds if you'd just waited. Let me go up with you and look at the guest room."
Harry follows them out of the sunporch (it's getting too tragic in there, the copper beech black as ink, captive moths beating their wings to a frazzle on the screens) and into the dining room. He likes the upward glimpse of Janice's legs in the tennis dress as she goes upstairs to help her mother make things fit and proper. Ought to try fucking her some night when they're both awake. He could go upstairs and give her a hand now but he is attracted instead to the exotic white face of the woman on the cover of the July Consumer Reports, that he brought downstairs this morning to read in the pleasant hour between when Ma went off to church and he and Janice went off to the club. The magazine still rests on the arm of the Barcalounger, that used to be old man Springer's evening throne. You couldn't dislodge him, and when he went off to the bathroom or into the kitchen for his Diet Pepsi the chair stayed empty. Harry settles into it. The girl on the cover is wearing a white bowler hat on her white-painted face above the lapels of a fully white tuxedo; she is made up in red, white, and blue like a clown and in her uplifted hand has a dab of gooey white face cleaner. Jism, models are prostitutes, the girls in blue movies rub their faces in jism. Broadway tests, face cleansers it says beneath her, for face cleansers are one of the commodities this month's issue is testing, along with cottage cheese (how unclean is it? it is rather unclean), air-conditioners, compact stereos, and can openers (why do people make rectangular cans anyway?). He turns to finish with the air-conditioners and reads that if you live in a high-humidity area (and he supposes he does, at least compared to Arizona) almost all models tend to drip, some enough to make them doubtful choices for installation over a patio or walkway. It would be nice to have a patio, along with a sunken living room like Webb Murkett does. Webb and that cute little cunt Cindy, always looking hosed down. Still, Rabbit is content. This is what he ikes, domestic peace. Women circling with dutiful footsteps above him and the summer night like a lake lapping at the windows. He has time to read about compact stereos and even try the piece on car loans before Nelson and Melanie come back out of this night with three stained boxes of pizza. Quickly Harry snatches off his reading glasses, for he feels strangely naked in them.
The boy's face has brightened and might even be called cheerful. "Boy," he tells his father, "Mom's Mustang really can dig when you ask it to. Some jungle bunny in about a '69 Caddy kept racing his motor and I left him standing. Then he tailgated me all the way to the Running Horse Bridge. It was scary."
"You came around that way? Jesus, no wonder it took so long."
"Nelson was showing me the city," Melanie explains, with her musical smile, that leaves the trace of a hum in the air as she moves with the flat cardboard boxes toward the kitchen. Already she has that nice upright walk of a waitress.
He calls after her, "It's a city that's seen better days."
"I think it's beauti-ful," her answer floats back. "The people paint their houses in these different colors, like something you'd see in the Mediterranean."
"The spics do that," Harry says. "The spics and the wops."
"Dad, you're really prejudiced. You should travel more."
"Naa, it's all in fun. I love everybody, especially with my car windows locked." He adds, "Toyota was going to pay for me and your mother to go to Atlanta, but then some agency toward Harrisburg beat our sales total and they got the trip instead. It was a regional thing. It bothered me because I've always been curious about the South: love hot weather."
"Don't be so chintzy, Dad. Go for your vacation and pay your way."
"Vacations, we're pretty well stuck with that camp up in the Poconos." Old man Springer's pride and joy.
"I took this course in sociology at Kent. The reason you're so tight with your money, you got the habit of poverty when you were a child, in the Depression. You were traumatized."
"We weren't that bad off. Pop got decent money, printers were never laid off like some of the professions. Anyway who says I'm tight with my money?"
"You owe Melanie three dollars already. I had to borrow from her."
"You mean those three pizzas cost thirteen dollars?"
"We got a couple of sixpacks to go with them."
"You and Melanie can pay for your own beer. We never drink it around here. Too fattening."
"Where's Mom?"
"Upstairs. And another thing. Don't leave your mother's car out front with the top down. Even if it doesn't rain, the maples drop something sticky on the seats."
"I thought we might go out again."
"You're kidding. I thought you said you got only an hour's sleep last night."