"Didn't Teresa seem sweet?" Janice asks aloud. "It seemed like she'd grown up overnight."
"Yeah," Harry says, "and if she'd fallen down all two flights she'd be older than we are."
"Jesus, Dad," Nelson says. "Who do you like?"
"I like everybody," Harry says. "I just don't like getting boxed in."
The way from St. Joseph's to Mt. Judge is to keep going straight over the railroad tracks and then continue right on Locust past Brewer High and on through Cityview Park and then left past the shopping mall as usual. On a Sunday morning the people out in cars are mostly the older American type, the women with hair tinted blue or pink like the feathers of those Easter chicks before they outlawed it and the men gripping the steering wheel with two hands like the thing might start to buck and bray: with nolead up to a dollar thirteen at some city stations thanks to the old Ayatollah they have to try to squeeze value out of every drop. Actually, people's philosophy seems to be they'll burn it while it's here and when it's fourth down and twenty-seven Carter can punt. The four features at the mall cinema are BREAKING AWAY STARTING OVER RUNNING and "10." He'd like to see "10," he knows from the ads this Swedish-looking girl has her hair in corn rows like a black chick out of Zaire. One world: everybody fucks everybody. When he thinks of all the fucking there's been in the world and all the fucking there's going to be, and none ofit for him, here he sits in this stuffy car dying, his heart just sinks. He'll never fuck anybody again in his lifetime except poor Janice Springer, he sees this possibility ahead of him straight and grim as the known road. His stomach, sour from last night's fun, binds as it used to when he was running to school late. He says suddenly to Nelson, "How the hell could you let her fall, why didn't you keep ahold of her? What were you doing out so late anyway? When your mother was pregnant with you we never went anywhere."
"Together at least," the boy says. "You went a lot of places by yourself the way I heard it."
"Not when she was pregnant with you, we sat there night after night with the boob tube, 1 Love Lucy and all that family comedy, didn't we Bessie? And we weren't snorting any dope, either."
"You don't snort dope, you smoke it. Coke is what you snort."
Ma Springer responds slowly to his question. "Oh I don't know how you and Janice managed exactly," she says wearily, in a voice that is looking out the window. "The young people are different now."
"I'll say they are. You fire somebody to give 'em a job and they knock the product."
"It's an O.K. product if all you want is to get from here to there," Nelson begins.
Harry interrupts furiously, thinking of poor Pru lying there with a snivelling baby burying his head in her side instead of a husband, of Melanie slaving away at the Crépe House for all those creeps from the banks that lunch downtown, of his own sweet hopeful daughter stuck with that big red-faced Jamie, of poor little Cindy having to put on a grin at being fucked from behind so old Webb can have his kicks with his SX-70, of Mim going down on all those wop thugs out there all those years, of Mom plunging her old arms in gray suds and crying the kitchen blues until Parkinson's at last took mercy and got her upstairs for a rest, of all the women put upon and wasted in the world as far as he can see so little punks like this can come along. "Let me tell you something about Toyotas," he calls back at Nelson. "They're put together by little yellow guys in white smocks that work in one plant cradle to grave and go crazy if there's a fleck of dust in the fuel injector system and those jalopies Detroit puts out are slapped together by jigaboos wearing headphones pumping music into their ears and so zonked on drugs they don't know a slothead screw from a lug nut and furthermore are taught by the NAACP -to hate the company. Half the cars come through the Ford assembly line are deliberately sabotaged, I forget where I read all this, it wasn't Consumer Reports."
"Dad, you're so prejudiced. What would Skeeter say?"
Skeeter. In quite another voice Harry says, "Skeeter was killed in Philly last April, did I tell ya?"
"You keep telling me."
"I'm not blaming the blacks on the assembly line, I'm just saying it sure makes for lousy cars."
Nelson is on the attack, frazzled and feeling rotten, poor kid. "And who are you to criticize me and Pru for going out to see some friends when you were off with yours seeing those ridiculous exotic dancers? How could you stand it, Mom?"
Janice says, "It wasn't as bad as I'd thought. They keep it within bounds. It really wasn't any worse than it used to be at the old fairgrounds."
"Don't answer him," Harry tells her. "Who's he to criticize?"
"The funny thing," Janice goes on, "is how Cindy and Thelma and I could agree which girl was the best and the men had picked some girl entirely different. We all liked this tall Oriental who was very graceful and artistic and they liked, Mother, the men liked some little chinless blonde who couldn't even dance."
"She had that look about her," Harry explains. "I mean, she meant it."
"And then that tubby dark one that turned you on. With the feather."
"Olive-complected. She was nice too. The feather I could have done without."
"Mom-mom doesn't want to hear all this disgusting stuff," Nelson says from the back seat.
"Mom-mom doesn't mind," Harry tells him. "Nothing fazes Bessie Springer. Mom-mom loves life."
"Oh I don't know," the old lady says with a sigh. "We didn't have such things when we might have been up to it. Fred I remember used to bring home the Playboy sometimes, but to me it seemed more pathetic than not, these eighteen-year-old girls that are really just children except for their bodies."
"Well who isn't?" Harry asks.
"Speak for yourself, Dad," Nelson says.
"No now, I meant," Ma insists, "you wonder what their parents raised them for, seeing them all naked just the way they were born. And what the parents must think." She sighs. "It's a different world."
Janice says, "I guess at this same place Monday nights they have ladies' night with male strippers. And they say really the young men become frightened, Doris Kaufinann was telling me, the women grab for them and try to get up on the stage after them. The women over forty they say are the worst."
"That's so sick," Nelson says.
"Watch your mouth," Harry tells him. "Your mother's over forty."
"Dad."
"Well I wouldn't behave like that," she says, "but I can see how some might. I suppose a lot of it depends on how satisfying the husband you have is."
"Mo-om," the boy protests.
They have swung around the mountain and turned up Central and by the electric clock in the dry cleaner's window it is three of ten. Harry calls back, "Looks like we'll make it, Bessie!"
The town hall has its flag at half-mast because of the hostages. At the church the people in holiday clothes are still filing in, beneath the canopy of bells calling with their iron tongues, beneath the wind-torn gray clouds of this November sky with its scattered silver. Letting Ma out of the Mustang, Harry says, "Now don't pledge the lot away, just for Soupy's organ."
Nelson asks, "How will you get home, Mom-mom?"
"Oh, I guess I can get a ride with Grace Stuhl's grandson, he generally comes for her. Otherwise it won't kill me to walk."
"Oh Mother," Janice says. "You could never walk it. Call us at the house when the meeting's over if you haven't a ride. We'll be home." The club is down to minimal staff now; they serve only packaged sandwiches and half the tennis court nets are down and already they have relocated the pins to temporary greens. A sadness in all this plucks at Rabbit. Driving home with just Janice and Nelson he remembers the way they used to be, just the three of them, living together, younger. The kid and Janice still have it between them. He's lost it. He says aloud, "So you don't like Toyotas."