Rabbit, Run

“IF THE POWER TO SHOCK MAY

BE TAKEN AS A YARDSTICK OF

FICTION, JOHN UPDIKE HAS

WRITTEN ONE OF THE YEAR’S

MOST IMPORTANT NOVELS …

THE SUREST WRITING IN YEARS.”

—Time Magazine

RABBIT, RUN
is a shocking novel—not only because of its sexual candor, but because it challenges an image of life still cherished in America.

Original, graphic, and merciless,
RABBIT, RUN
will be admired and hated with equal intensity. That it cannot be ignored or read with indifference is a tribute to the author’s insight and great gift as a novelist.

“UPDIKE’S PUNCH IS POWERFUL”

—Newsweek

The Crest imprint on outstanding books is your

guarantee of informative and entertaining reading

1

BOYS are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he’s twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.

His standing there makes the real boys feel strange. Eyeballs slide. They’re doing this for their own pleasure, not as a demonstration for some adult walking around town in a double-breasted cocoa suit. It seems funny to them, an adult walking up the alley at all. Where’s his car? The cigarette makes it more sinister still. Is this one of those going to offer them cigarettes or money to go out in back of the ice plant with him? They’ve heard of such things but are not too frightened; there are six of them and one of him.

The ball, rocketing off the crotch of the rim, leaps over the heads of the six and lands at the feet of the one. He catches it on the short bounce with a quickness that startles them. As they stare hushed he sights squinting through blue clouds of weed smoke, a suddenly dark silhouette like a smokestack in the afternoon spring sky, setting his feet with care, wiggling the ball with nervousness in front of his chest, one widespread pale hand on top of the ball and the other underneath, jiggling it patiently to get some adjustment in air itself. The moons on his fingernails are big. Then the ball seems to ride up the right lapel of his coat and comes off his shoulder as his knees dip down, and it appears the ball is not going toward the backboard. It was not aimed there. It drops into the circle of the rim, whipping the net with a ladylike whisper. “Hey!” he shouts in pride.

“Luck,” one of the kids says.

“Skill,” he answers, and asks, “Hey. O.K. if I play?”

There is no response, just puzzled silly looks swapped. Rabbit takes off his coat, folds it nicely, and rests it on a clean ashcan lid. Behind him the dungarees begin to scuffle again. He goes into the scrimmaging thick of them for the ball, flips it from two weak white hands, has it in his own. That old stretched leather feeling makes his whole body go taut, gives his arms wings. It feels like he’s reaching down through years to touch this tautness. His arms lift of their own and the rubber ball floats toward the basket from the top of his head. It feels so right he blinks when the ball drops short, and for a second wonders if it went through the hoop without riffling the net. He asks, “Hey whose side am I on?”

In a wordless shuffle two boys are delegated to be his. They stand the other four. Though from the start Rabbit handicaps himself by staying ten feet out from the basket, it is still unfair. Nobody bothers to keep score. The surly silence bothers him. The kids call monosyllables to each other but to him they don’t dare a word. As the game goes on he can feel them at his legs, getting hot and mad, trying to trip him, but their tongues are still held. He doesn’t want this respect, he wants to tell them there’s nothing to getting old, it takes nothing. In ten minutes another boy goes to the other side, so it’s just Rabbit Angstrom and one kid standing five. This boy, still midget but already diffident with a kind of rangy ease, is the best of the six; he wears a knitted cap with a green pompom well down over his ears and level with his eyebrows, giving his head a cretinous look. He’s a natural. The way he moves sideways without taking any steps, gliding on a blessing: you can tell. The way be waits before he moves. With luck he’ll become in time a crack athlete in the high school; Rabbit knows the way. You climb up through the little grades and then get to the top and everybody cheers; with the sweat in your eyebrows you can’t see very well and the noise swirls around you and lifts you up, and then you’re out, not forgotten at first, just out, and it feels good and cool and free. You’re out, and sort of melt, and keep lifting, until you become like to these kids just one more piece of the sky of adults that hangs over them in the town, a piece that for some queer reason has clouded and visited them. They’ve not forgotten him; worse, they never heard of him. Yet in his time Rabbit was famous through the county; in basketball in his junior year he set a B-league scoring record that in his senior year he broke with a record that was not broken until four years later, that is, four years ago.

He sinks shots one-handed, two-handed, underhanded, flatfooted, and out of the pivot, jump, and set. Flat and soft the ball lifts. That his touch still lives in his hands elates him. He feels liberated from long gloom. But his body is weighty and his breath grows short. It annoys him, that he gets winded. When the five kids not on his side begin to groan and act lazy, and a kid he accidentally knocks down gets up with a blurred face and walks away, Rabbit quits readily. “O.K.,” he says. “The old man’s going.”

To the boy on his side, the pompom, he adds, “So long, ace.” He feels grateful to the boy, who continued to watch him with disinterested admiration after the others grew sullen, and who cheered him on with exclamations: “God. Great. Gee.”

Rabbit picks up his folded coat and carries it in one hand like a letter as he runs. Up the alley. Past the deserted ice plant with its rotting wooden skids on the fallen loading porch. Ashcans, garage doors, fences of chickenwire caging crisscrossing stalks of dead flowers. The month is March. Love makes the air light. Things start anew; Rabbit tastes through sour aftersmoke the fresh chance in the air, plucks the pack of cigarettes from his bobbling shirt pocket, and without breaking stride cans it in somebody’s open barrel. His upper lip nibbles back from his teeth in self-pleasure. His big suede shoes skim in thumps above the skittering litter of alley gravel.

Running. At the end of this block of the alley he turns up a street, Wilbur Street in the town of Mt. Judge, suburb of the city of Brewer, fifth largest city in Pennsylvania. Running uphill. Past a block of big homes, fortresses of cement and brick inset with doorways of stained and beveled glass and windows of potted plants, and then halfway up another block, which holds a development built all at once in the Thirties. The frame homes climb the hill like a single staircase. The space of six feet or so that each double house rises above its neighbor contains two wan windows, wide-spaced like the eyes of an animal, and is covered with composition shingling varying in color from bruise to dung. The fronts are clapboards, weathered and white except for those gaps which individual owners have painted green and barn-red and wheat-color. There are a dozen three-story homes, and each has two doors. The seventh door is his. The wood steps up to it are worn; under them there is a cubbyhole of dirt where a lost toy molders. A plastic clown. He’s seen it there all winter but he always thought some kid would be coming back for it.

He pauses in the sunless vestibule, panting. Overhead, a daytime bulb burns dustily. Three tin mailboxes hang empty above a brown radiator. His downstairs neighbor’s door across the hall is shut like an angry face. There is that smell which is always the same but that he can never identify; sometimes it seems cabbage cooking, sometimes the furnace’s rusty breath, sometimes something soft decaying in the walls. He climbs the stairs to his home, the top floor.

The door is locked. In fitting the little key into the lock his hand trembles, pulsing with unusual exertion, and the metal scratches. But when he opens the door he sees his wife sitting in an armchair with an Old-fashioned, watching television turned down low.

“You’re
here
,” he says. “What’s the door locked for?”

She looks to one side of him with vague dark eyes reddened by the friction of watching. “It just locked itself.”

“Just locked itself,” he repeats, but bends down to kiss her glossy forehead nevertheless. She is a small woman with a tight dark skin, as if something swelling inside is straining against her littleness. Just yesterday, it seems to him, she stopped being pretty. With the tiny addition of two short wrinkles at the corners, her mouth had become greedy; and her hair has thinned, so he keeps thinking of her skull under it. But he keeps hoping that tomorrow she’ll be his girl again. “Watcha fraid of? Who do you think’s gonna come in that door?”

Expecting no answer, he carefully unfolds his coat and goes to the closet with it and takes out a wire hanger. The closet is in the living-room and the door only opens halfway, since the television set is in front of it. He is careful not to kick the wire, which is plugged into a socket on the side of the door. One time Janice, who is especially clumsy when pregnant or drunk, got the wire wrapped around her foot and nearly pulled the set, a hundred and forty-nine dollars, down
smash
on the floor. Luckily he got to it while it was still rocking in the metal cradle and before Janice began kicking out in one of her panics. What made her get that way? What was she afraid of? With loving deftness, a deftness as complimentary to the articulation of his own body as to the objects he touches, he inserts the corners of the hanger into the armholes of the coat and with his long reach hangs it on the printed pipe with his other clothes. He presses the door shut and it clicks but then swings open again an inch or two. Locked doors. It rankles: his hand trembling in the lock like some old man and her sitting in here listening to the scratching.

He turns and asks her, “If you’re home where’s the car? It’s not out front.”

“It’s in front of my mother’s. You’re in my way.”

“In front of your mother’s? That’s terrific. That’s just the God-damn place for it.”

“What’s brought this on?”

“Brought what on?” He moves out of her line of vision and stands to one side.

She is watching a group of children called Mouseketeers perform a musical number in which Darlene is a flower girl in Paris and Cubby is a cop and that smirky squeaky tall kid is a romantic artist. He and Darlene and Cubby and Karen (dressed as an old French lady whom Cubby as a cop helps across the street) dance.

Then the commercial shows the seven segments of a Tootsie Roll coming out of the wrapper and turning into the seven letters of “Tootsie.” They, too, sing and dance. Still singing, they climb back into the wrapper. It echoes like an echo chamber. Son of a bitch: cute. He’s seen it fifty times and this time it turns his stomach. His heart is still throbbing; his throat feels narrow.

Janice asks, “Harry, do you have a cigarette? I’m out.”

“Huh? On the way home I threw my pack into a garbage can. I’m giving it up.” He wonders how anybody could think of smoking, with his stomach on edge the way it is.

Janice looks at him at last. “You threw it into a garbage can! Holy Mo. You don’t drink, now you don’t smoke. What are you doing, becoming a saint?”

“Shh.”

The big Mouseketeer has appeared, Jimmy, an older man who wears circular black ears. Rabbit watches him attentively; he respects him. He expects to learn something from him helpful in his own line of work, which is demonstrating a kitchen gadget in several five-and-dime stores around Brewer. He’s had the job for four weeks. “Proverbs, proverbs, they’re so true,” Jimmy sings, strumming his Mouseguitar, “proverbs tell us what to do; proverbs help us all to
bee
—better—Mouse-ke-tears.”

Jimmy sets aside his smile and guitar and says straight out through the glass, “Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It means, be what you are. Don’t try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself. God doesn’t want a tree to be a waterfall, or a flower to be a stone. God gives to each one of us a special talent.” Janice and Rabbit become unnaturally still; both are Christians. God’s name makes them feel guilty. “God wants some of us to become scientists, some of us to become artists, some of us to become firemen and doctors and trapeze artists. And He gives to each of us the special talents to become these things,
provided we work to develop them
. We must
work
, boys and girls. So: Know Thyself. Learn to understand your talents, and then work to develop them. That’s the way to be happy.” He pinches his mouth together and winks.

That was good. Rabbit tries that, pinching the mouth together and then the wink, getting the audience out front with you against some enemy behind, Walt Disney or the MagiPeel Peeler Company, admitting it’s all a fraud but, what the hell, making it likable. We’re all in it together. Fraud makes the world go round. The base of our economy. Vitaconomy, the modern housewife’s password, the one-word expression for economizing vitamins by the MagiPeel Method.

Janice gets up and turns off the set when the six-o’clock news tries to come on. The little star left by the current slowly dies.

Rabbit asks, “Where’s the kid?”

“At your mother’s.”

“At
my
mother’s? The car’s at your mother’s and the kid’s at my mother’s. Jesus. You’re a mess.”

She stands up and her pregnancy infuriates him with its look of stubborn lumpiness. She wears one of those maternity skirts with a U cut in the belly. A white crescent of slip shows under the hem of her blouse. “I was tired.”

“No wonder,” he says. “How many of those have you had?” He gestures at the Old-fashioned glass.

She tries to explain. “I left Nelson at your mother’s on my way to my mother’s to go into town with her. We went in in her car and walked around looking at the spring clothes in the windows and she bought a nice Liberty scarf at Kroll’s at a sale. Purply Paisley.” She falters; her little narrow tongue pokes between her parted rows of dim teeth.

He feels frightened. When confused, Janice is a frightening person. Her eyes dwindle in their frowning sockets and her little mouth hangs open in a dumb slot. Since her hair has begun to thin back from her shiny forehead, he keeps getting the feeling of her being brittle, and immovable, of her only going one way, toward deeper wrinkles and skimpier hair. He married relatively late, when he was twenty-four and she was two years out of high school, still scarcely adult, with soft small breasts that when she lay down flattened against her pliant body that was like a soft smooth boy’s. Nelson was born seven months after the Episcopal service, in prolonged labor: this pang of memory turns Rabbit’s fright to tenderness. “What did you buy?”