Ma's front door sticks and yields with a shove. The living room is dark and duffel bags have been added to its clutter of padded furniture. A shabby plaid suitcase, not Nelson's, sits on the stair landing. The voices come from the sunporch. These voices lessen Harry's gravity, seem to refute the world's rumors of universal death. He moves toward the voices, through the dining room and then the kitchen, into the porch area conscious of himself as slightly too drunk to be cautious enough, overweight and soft and a broad target.
Copper-beech leaves crowd at the porch screen. Faces and bodies rise from the aluminum and nylon furniture like the cloud of an explosion with the sound turned down on TV. More and more in middle age the world comes upon him like images on a set with one thing wrong with it, like those images the mind entertains before we go to sleep, that make sense until we look at them closely, which wakes us up with a shock. It is the girl who has risen most promptly, a curly-headed rather sturdy girl with shining brown eyes halfway out of her head and a ruby-red dimpling smile lifted from a turn-of-the-century valentine. She has on jeans that have been through everything and a Hindu sort of embroidered shirt that has lost some sequins. Her handshake surprises him by being damp, nervous.
Nelson slouches to his feet. His usual troubled expression wears a mountaineer's tan, and he seems thinner, broader in the shoulders. Less of a puppy, more of a mean dog. At some point in Colorado or at Kent he has had his hair, which in high school used to fall to his shoulders, cut short, to give a punk look. "Dad, this is my friend Melanie. My father. And my mother. Mom, this is Melanie."
"Pleased to meet you both," the girl says, keeping the merry red smile as if even these plain words are prelude to a joke, to a little circus act. That is what she reminds Harry of, those somehow unreal but visibly brave women who hang by their teeth in circuses, or ride one-footed the velvet rope up to fly through the spangled air, though she is dressed in that raggy look girls hide in now. A strange wall or glare has instantly fallen between himself and this girl, a disinterest that he takes to be a gesture toward his son.
Nelson and Janice are embracing. Those little Springer hands, Harry remembers his mother saying, as he sees them press into the back of Janice's tennis dress. Tricky little paws, something about the curve of the stubby curved fingers that hints of sneaky strength. No visible moons to the fingernails and the ends look nibbled. A habit of sullen grievance and blank stubbornness has descended to Nelson from Janice. The poor in spirit.
Yet when Janice steps aside to greet Melanie, and father and son are face to face, and Nelson says, "Hey, Dad," and like his father Harry wonders whether to shake hands or hug or touch in any way, love floods clumsily the hesitant space.
"You look fit," Harry says.
"I feel beat."
"How'd you get here so soon?"
"Hitched, except for a stretch after Kansas City where we took a bus as far as Indianapolis." Places where Rabbit has never been, restless though his blood is. The boy tells him, "The night before last we spent in some field in western Ohio, I don't know, after Toledo. It was weird. We'd gotten stoned with the guy who picked us up in this van all painted with designs, and when he dumped us off Melanie and I were really disoriented, we had to keep talking to each other so we wouldn't panic. The ground was colder than you'd think, too. We woke up frozen but at least the trees had stopped looking like octopuses."
"Nelson," Janice cries, "something dreadful could have happened to you! To the two of you."
"Who cares?" the boy asks. To his grandmother, Bessie sitting in her private cloud in the darkest corner of the porch, he says, "You wouldn't care, would you Mom-mom, if I dropped out of the picture?"
"Indeed I would," is her stout response. "You were the apple of your granddad's eye."
Melanie reassures Janice, "People are basically very nice." Her voice is strange, gurgling as if she has just recovered from a fit of laughter, with a suspended singing undertone. Her mind seems focused on some faraway cause for joy. "You only meet the difficult ones now and then, and they're usually all right as long as you don't show fear."
"What does your mother think of your hitchhiking?" Janice asks her.
"She hates it," Melanie says, and laughs outright, her curls shaking. "But she lives in California." She turns serious, her eyes shining on Janice steadily as lamps. "Really though, it's ecologically sound, it saves all that gas. More people should do it, but everybody's afraid."
A gorgeous frog, is what she looks like to Harry, though her body from what you can tell in those flopsy-mopsy clothes is human enough, and even exemplary. He tells Nelson, "If you'd budgeted your allowance better you'd've been able to take the bus all the way."
"Buses are boring, Dad, and full of creeps. You don't learn anything on a bus."
"It's true," Melanie chimes in. "I've heard terrible stories from girlfriends of mine, that happened to them on buses. The drivers can't do anything, they just drive, and ifyou look at all, you know, what they think of as hippie, they egg the guys on it seems."
"The world is no longer a safe place," Ma Springer announces from her dark corner.
Harry decides to act the father. "I'm glad you made it," he tells Nelson. "I'm proud of you, getting around the way you do. If I'd seen a little more of the United States when I was your age, I'd be a better citizen now. The only free ride I ever got was when Uncle sent me to Texas. Lubbock, Texas. They'd let us out," he tells Melanie, "Saturday nights, in the middle of a tremendous cow pasture. Fort Larson, it was called." He is overacting, talking too much.
"Dad," Nelson says impatiently, "the country's the same now wherever you go. The same supermarkets, the same plastic shit for sale. There's nothing to see."
"Colorado was a disappointment to Nelson," Melanie tells them, with her merry undertone.
"I liked the state, I just didn't care for the skunks who live in it." That aggrieved stunted look on his face. Harry knows he will never find out what happened in Colorado, to drive the kid back to him. Like those stories kids bring back from school where it was never them who started the fight.
"Have these children had any supper?" Janice asks, working up her mother act. You get out of practice quickly.
Ma Springer with unexpected complacence announces, "Melanie made the most delicious salad out of what she could find in the refrigerator and outside."
"I love your garden," Melanie tells Harry. "The little gate. Things grow so beautifully around here." He can't get over the way she warbles everything, all the while staring at his face as if fearful he will miss some point.
"Yeah," he says. "It's depressing, in a way. Was there any baloney left?"
Nelson says, "Melanie's veggy, Dad."
"Vega?"
"Vegetarian," the boy explains in his put-on whine.
"Oh. Well, no law against that."
The boy yawns. "Maybe we should hit the hay. Melanie and I got about an hour's sleep last night."
Janice and Harry go tense, and eye Melanie and Ma Springer.
Janice says, "I better make up Nellie's bed."
"I've already done it," her mother tells her. "And the bed in the old sewing room too. I've had a lot of time by myself today, it seems you two are at the club more and more."
"How was church?" Harry asks her.
Ma Springer says unwillingly, "It was not very inspiring. For the collection music they had brought out from St. Mary's in Brewer one of those men who can sing in a high voice like a woman."