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."
"Dad, lay off the crap. I'm going on twenty-three."
"Twenty-three, and no sense. Give me the keys. I'll put the Mustang out back in the garage."
"Mo-om," the boy shouts upwards. "Dad won't let me drive your car!"
Janice is coming down. She has put on her peppermint dress and looks tired. Harry tells her, "All I asked was for him to put it in the garage. The maple sap gets the seats sticky. He says he wants to go out again. Christ, it's nearly ten o'clock."
"The maples are through dripping for the year," Janice says. To Nelson she merely says, "If you don't want to go out again maybe you should put the top up. We had a terrible thunderstorm two nights ago. It hailed, even."
"Why do you think," Rabbit asks her, "your top is all black and spotty? The sap or whatever it is drips down on the canvas and can't be cleaned off"
"Harry, it's not your car," Janice tells him.
"Piz-za," Melanie calls from the kitchen, her tone bright and pearly. "Mangiamo, prego!"
"Dad's really into cars, isn't he?" Nelson asks his mother. "Like they're magical, now that he sells them."
Harry asks her, "How about Ma? She want to eat again?"
"Mother says she feels sick."
"Oh great. One of her spells."
"Today was an exciting day for her."
"Today was an exciting day for me too. I was told I'm a tightwad and think cars are magical." This is no way to be, spiteful. "Also, Nelson, I birdied the eighteenth, you know that long dogleg? A drive that just cleared the creek and kept bending right, and then I hit an easy five-iron and then wedged it up to about twelve feet and sank the damn putt! Still have your clubs? We ought to play." He puts a paternal hand on the boy's back.
"I sold them to a guy at Kent." Nelson takes an extra-fast step, to get out from under his father's touch. "I think it's the stupidest game ever invented."
"You must tell us about hang gliding," his mother says.
"It's neat. It's very quiet. You're in the wind and don't feel a thing. Some of the people get stoned beforehand but then there's the danger you'll think you can really fly."
Melanie has sweetly set out plates and transferred the pizzas from their boxes to cookie sheets. Janice asks, "Melanie, do you hang glide?"
"Oh no," says the girl. "I'd be terrified." Her giggling does not somehow interrupt her lustrous, caramel-colored stare. "Pru used to do it with Nelson. I never would."
"Who's Pru?" Harry asks.
"You don't know her," Nelson tells him.
"I know I don't. I know I don't know her. If I knew her I wouldn't have to ask."
"I think we're all cross and irritable," Janice says, lifting a piece of pepperoni loose and laying it on a plate.
Nelson assumes that plate is for him. "Tell Dad to quit leaning on me," he complains, settling to the table as if he has tumbled from a motorcycle and is sore all over.
In bed, Harry asks Janice, "What's eating the kid, do you think?"
"I don't know."
"Something is." – "Yes."
As they think this over they can hear Ma Springer's television going, chewing away at Moses from the Biblical sound of the voices, shouting, rumbling, with crescendos of music between. The old lady falls asleep with it on and sometimes it crackles all night, if janice doesn't tiptoe in and turn it off. Melanie had gone to bed in her room with the dressmaker's dummy. Nelson came upstairs to watch The Jeffersons with his grandmother and by the time his parents came upstairs had gone to bed in his old room, without saying goodnight. Sore all over. Rabbit wonders if the young couple from the country will come into the lot tomorrow. The girl's pale round face and the television screen floating unwatched in Ma Springer's room become confused in his mind as the exalted music soars. Janice is asking, "How do you like the girl?"
"Melanie baby. Spooky. Are they all that way, of that generation, like a rock just fell on their heads and it was the nicest experience in the world?"
"I think she's trying to ingratiate herself. It must be a difficult thing, to go into a boyfriend's home and make a place for yourself. I wouldn't have lasted ten minutes with your mother."
Little she knows, the poison Mom talked about her. "Mom was like me," Harry says. "She didn't like being crowded." New people at either end of the house and old man Springer's ghost sittirig downstairs on his Barcalounger. "They don't act very lovey," he says. "Or is that how people are now? Hands off."
"I think they don't want to shock us. They know they must get around Mother."
"Join the crowd."
Janice ponders this. The bed creaks and heavy footsteps slither on the other side of the wall, and the excited cries of the television set are silenced with a click. Burt Lancaster just getting warmed up. Those teeth: can they be his own? All the stars have them crowned. Even Harry, he used to have a lot of trouble with his molars and now they're snug, safe and painless, in little jackets of gold alloy costing four hundred fifty each.
"She's still up," Janice says. "She won't sleep. She's stewing." In the positive way she pronounces her s's she sounds more and more like her mother. We carry our heredity concealed for a while and then it pushes through. Out of those narrow DNA coils.