"Well," Janice says, swinging so her body taps the nightie from within, "maybe he's got what he can out of it."
"I don't get all this. There's something fishy going on. The kid comes home with no explanation and his girlfriend goes out with Charlie Stavros while he sits here hinting to me I should can Charlie so I can hire him instead."
"Well," Ma Springer pronounces peacefully, "Nelson's of an age. Fred made space for you, Harry, and I know if he was here he'd make space for Nelson."
In on the dining-room sideboard, dead Fred Springer listens to the rain, misty-eyed.
"Not at the top he wouldn't," Harry says. "Not to somebody who quits college a few lousy credits short of graduating."
"Well Harry," Ma Springer says, as calm and mellow as if the TV show had been a pipe of pot, "some would have said you weren't so promising when Fred took you on. More than one person advised him against it."
Out in the country, under the ground, old Farmer Byer mourns his fleet of school buses, rotting in the rain.
"I was a forty-year-old man who'd lost his job through no fault of his own. I sat and did Linotype as long as there was Linotype."
"You worked at your father's trade," Janice tells him, "and that's what Nelson's asking to do."
"Sure, sure," Harry shouts, "when he gets out of college if that's what he wants. Though frankly I'd hoped he'd want more. But what is the rush? What'd he come home for anyway? If I'd ever been so lucky at his age to get to a state like Colorado I'd sure as hell have stayed at least the summer."
Sexier than she can know, Janice drags on a cigarette. "Why don't you want your own son home?"
"He's too big to be home! What's he running from?" From the look on their faces he may have hit on something, he doesn't know what. He's not sure he wants to know what. In the silence that answers him he listens again to the downpour, an incessant presence at the edge of their lamplight domain, gentle, insistent, unstoppable, a million small missiles striking home and running in rivulets from the face of things. Skeeter, Jill, and the Kent State Four are out there somewhere, bone dry.
"Forget it," Nelson says, standing up. "I don't want any job with this creep."
"What's he so hostile for?" Harry beseeches the women. "All I've said was I don't see why we should fire Charlie so the kid can peddle convertibles. In time, sure. In 1980, even. Take over, young America. Eat me up. But one thing at a time, Jesus. There's tons of time."
"Is there?" Janice asks strangely. She does know something. Cunts always know something.
He turns to her directly. "You. I'd think you'd be loyal to Charlie at least."
"More than to my own son?"
"I'll tell you this. I'll tell you all this. If Charlie goes, I go." He -struggles to stand, but the Barcalounger has a sticky grip.
"Hip, hip hooray," Nelson says, yanking his denim jacket from the clothes tree inside the front door and shrugging it on. He looks humpbacked and mean, a rat going out to be drowned.
"Now he's going out to wreck the Mustang." Harry struggles to his feet and stands, taller than them all.
Ma Springer slaps her knees with open palms. "Well this discussion has ruined my mood. I'm going to heat up water for a cup of tea, the damp has put the devil in my joints."
Janice says, "Harry, say goodnight to Nelson nicely."
He protests, "He hasn't said goodnight nicely to me. I was down here trying to talk nicely to him about college and it was like pulling teeth. What's everything such a secret for? I don't even know what he's majoring in now. First it was pre-med but the chemistry was too hard, then it was anthropology but there was too much to memorize, last I heard he'd switched to social science but it was too much bullshit."
"I'm majoring in geography," Nelson admits, nervous by the door, tense to scuttle.
"Geography! That's something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography."
"Apparently it's a great specialty out there," Janice says.
"Whadde they do all day, color maps?"
"Mom, I got to split. Where's your car keys?"
"Look in my raincoat pocket."
Harry can't stop getting after him. "Now remember the roads around here are slippery when wet," he says. "If you get lost just call up your geography professor."
"Charlie's taking Melanie out really bugs you, doesn't it?" Nelson says to him.
"Not at all. What bugs me is why it doesn't bug you."
"I'm queer," Nelson tells him.
` Janice, what have I done to this kid to deserve this?"
She sighs. "Oh, I expect you know."
He is sick of these allusions to his tainted past. "I took care of him, didn't I? While you were off screwing around who was it put his breakfast cereal on the table and got him off to school?"
"My daddy did," Nelson says in a bitter mincing voice.
Janice intervenes. "Nellie, why don't you go now if you're going to go? Did you find the keys?"
The child dangles them.
"You're committing automotive suicide," Rabbit tells her. "This kid is a car killer."
"It was just a fucking dent," Nelson cries to the ceiling, "and he's going to make me suffer and suffer." The door slams, having admitted a sharp gust of the aroma of the rain.
"Now who else would like some tea?" Ma Springer calls from the kitchen. They go in to her. Moving from the stuffy overfurnished living room to the kitchen with its clean enamelled surfaces provides a brighter perspective on the world. "Harry, you shouldn't be so hard on the boy," his mother-in-law advises. "He has a lot on his mind."
"Like what?" he asks sharply.
"Oh," Ma says, still mellow, setting out plates of comfort, Walton-style, "the things young people do."
Janice has on underpants beneath her nightie but no bra and in the bright light her nipples show inside the cloth with their own pink color, darker, more toward wine. She is saying, "It's a hard age. They seem to have so many choices and yet they don't. They've been taught by television all their lives to want this and that and yet when they get to be twenty they find money isn't so easy to come by after all. They don't have the opportunities even we had."
This doesn't sound like her. "Who have you been talking to?" Harry asks scornfully.
Janice is harder to put down than formerly; she tidies her bangs with a fiddling raking motion of her fingers and answers, "Some of the girls at the club, their children have come home too and don't know what to do with themselves. It even has a name now, the back-to-the-nest something."
"Syndrome," he says; he is being brought round. He and Pop and Mom sometimes after Mim had been put to bed would settle like this around the kitchen table, with cereal or cocoa if not tea. He feels safe enough to sound plaintive. "If he'd just ask for help," he says, "I'd try to give it. But he doesn't ask. He wants to take without asking."
"And isn't that just human nature," Ma Springer says, in a -spruced-up voice. The tea tastes to her satisfaction and she adds as if to conclude, "There's a lot of sweetness in Nelson, I think he's just a little overwhelmed for now."
"Who isn't?" Harry asks.
In bed, perhaps it's the rain that sexes him up, he insists they make love, though at first Janice is reluctant. "I would have taken a bath," she says, but she smells great, deep jungle smell, of precious rotting mulch going down and down beneath the ferns. When he won't stop, crazy to lose his face in this essence, the cool stem fury of it takes hold of her and combatively she comes, thrusting her hips up to grind her clitoris against his face and then letting him finish inside her beneath him. Lying spent and adrift he listens again to the rain's sound, which now and then quickens to a metallic rhythm on the window glass, quicker than the throbbing in the iron gutter, where ropes of water twist.
"I like having Nelson in the house," Harry says to his wife. "It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses."
Murmurously beyond their windows, yet so close they might be in the cloud of it, the beech accepts, leaf upon leaf, shelves and stairs of continuous dripping, the rain.