Rabbit Remembered

Chapter 3

From: Roy Angstrom [royson@buckeyemedia.com]Sent: Friday, October 22, 1999 8:04 PMTo: nelsang.harrison@qwikbrew.comSubject: Happy birthday jokes

Dad have a great party with whoever!!! Heres an oldie but new to me and it struck me as pretty droll. President Clinton was visiting Oklahoma City after the may 3rd tornado and a man whose house was demolished put up a sign: HEY BILL HOWS THIS FOR A BLOW JOB? The Secret Service made the man take it away. I guess this is a true story what do you think?

Nelson, sitting in the little upstairs front room staring at the computer screen, shifts in his swivel chair, pained. If this is the only way his son can communicate, it's better than nothing, but he wonders how much the kid knows about blow jobs. Though after this Lewinsky business even kindergarten kids know about it, it's right at the top of the news hour. Pru used to do it to him at first, especially before they got married, but as the marriage went on did it less and less, even when both were high on something or when he went down on her, her fuzzy little redhead's pussy, skimpy compared to, say, curly-haired Melanie's. One such time he got into position for her to reciprocate and she confessed outright that she hated the smell. What smell? he had said, feeling himself beginning to wilt. I wash.

You can't help it, she had said. It's a smell that won't wash off. It's kind of acidy. Anyway, I'm afraid you'll come in my mouth.

Why, honey? Why are you afraid? That's so nice, once in a while For you it is.

You used to like it.

I don't remember that. I just said it because I knew you wanted me to.

You lied to me?

People can get AIDS, you know, that way.

Well my God. If I have AIDS you'll get it anyway. How could I have AIDS? I haven't been with anybody but you for ages.

So you say. What about those coke whores, before you got clean?

Coke whores, there are no coke whores. There are just women who aren't as uptight as others, is all. It was true, back before he was clean, when he was a regular at the Laid-Back, the girls who hung around there looking for drugs and action liked to give blow jobs because it was a quick way to bring a guy off and less fuss and muss for them. They didn't even have to take off their pantyhose in the car. Their mouths did smell afterwards and when he was stoned he liked to kiss them even though they resisted and said he was sick, basically queer. Those girls for all their being whorish had very little imagination, very narrow parameters. If I was going to get AIDS it would have showed up by now.

Not necessarily. I read where the virus can be dormant for fifteen years. It hides around the base of the spine.

Well my God. And this is supposed to be a marriage.

You can fuck me though.

Now there's a rational woman for you. What about AIDS?

Nelson, I said you can fuck me. Take it or leave it.

I'll leave it. I've lost interest.

So you have. What a baby.

And it was lovely to have a woman's head down there, all that hair under your hands, the tips of her ears and back of her neck, you can't see her face but her shoulders tense up when you come, and some have said it excited them too, but according to Pru they were lying because they wanted something else. Women lie the way blacks lie. If you're a slave face telling the truth gets you very little. They forget how. He sees that all the time at the Center. Only for the powers that be does knowing things pay off. Only they can afford to know the truth. He doesn't like Roy knowing what a blow job is. The boy is fourteen, masturbation should be enough. The lightness of it, the newness, the feeling of leaning up against a tall white closed door, the sensation Nelson used to get of standing on his head for a second, the tiny muscles going into spasm: the sensation moves you into another world, up and out, chilly like ice cream, private like thought, a metallic taste in the mouth afterwards, the taste of having been somewhere different. But he wants the images in the boy's head to be innocent, bridal, the girl who sits next to him in an Ohio classroom lying under him all lace and crushed flowers in his mind as he comes in his bed's safety. Not this juvenile filth off the Internet. Who would have thought the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?

And Dad heres another one. A guys wife on there honeymoon begs off making love and she- goes to sleep and gets up at 3am to get a glass of water and sees hes still awake and asks why. He says his dick is so hard their isnt enough skin left to close his eyes with.

This is more like it, Nelson supposes. Straight married sex, at least. Judy has gone off the deep end with boys, he doesn't know when she lost her virginity, it must have been in Pennsylvania, when they all still lived in this house, Judy in the front bedroom, there were some pretty late dates, he remembers, coming in that sticky front door, whose pop woke him up, footsteps slithering up the stairs, when she was just sixteen, seventeen, and still had her freckles. Pru would know. Pru would't talk about it with him. Well why not? she asked back one time. Your Aunt Mim's a tart, all you Angstroms are like rabbits.

And she herself, with Dad, in this very room he sat in now, his face lit by a computer screen. He could never quite wrap his mind around it. Which was healthy. There is such a thing as healthy denial. Children use it to keep the image of the caregiver benign despite abuse. Pru when he got after her about it would say she didn't understand it either. It just happened, Nelson. Things just happen. Not everything happens for some deep reason, like you were taught at social work school.

Oh, is that what I was taught?

Yes, and to keep asking questions, instead of trying to give answers.

I should have answers? What's your question?

Why do you keep bugging me about what happened once between me and your father, when we were both half out of our minds, me with your druggy stunts and him with his poor beat-up heart? He's dead, Nelson, your father is dead, he and I won't do anything again even if we wanted to. Which we don't. Didn't.

Nelson looks out across Joseph Street at the neighbor's second-story windows, hoping to see the woman of the house undressed. There are three windows, the middle one holding a plastic pumpkin with a light bulb in it, the two flanking it dim-lit, the one on the right probably a hall landing but the others giving on the bedroom, which he guesses is a child's bedroom. That semidetached house for years was occupied by an elderly couple who lived toward the back of it, in the kitchen and TV den, but this young couple with their two little children have different living arrangements and once in a while you see the wife moving around in her bathrobe or underwear, black bikini pants and two beige cups as snug as skin, the kind of bra advertised in the Brewer Standard illustrated by models, names like Secret Shaper, Seamless Charmer, Lace 'n Smooth, Nearly Nude. Pru used to wear bikini underpants but as her bottom broadened she went in for old-lady white cotton panties with enough fabric for a truck-driver's T-shirt. You can fuck me, though. He needs a woman. Doing a job and coming back to his mother and stepfather and TV comedies made for twentysomethings in New York City isn't a life. He sleeps badly: not enough skin left to close his eyes. But at his age as of today forty-three he would feel silly in single bars or the party circuit, if he could find it. The action that used to exist at the Laid-Back up at Ninth and Weiser was ages ago-other lifestyles, other drugs in fashion. Cold War worries, Japan worries. With the century ending all this is sinking into the history books. And he's afraid getting back into circulation might get him back into coke, or Ecstasy if that's the thing, or the ever-cheaper heroin; it's so easy to slip back when you don't feel you have much to lose. Talking to the substance abusers at Fresh Start, he can't much argue when they argue for it. Happiness is feeling happy. Maybe it shortens your life but when you're dead what's the diff? Living to the next hit, the next scrounged blow-out, gives their lives a point. Being clean exposes you to life's having no point.

Things are pretty cool here Dad. 10th grade is organised not much differnt than the 9th except that you are a sophmore and get more respect then lowley freshmen. There are a lot of American African students at North High but you can get along if you mind your own busness and don't make slurs and the courses are pretty easy. First quarter I got four As and a B in biology but the biology teacher Mr. Pedersen says he knows I can do even better.

Judy is driving mom crazy out most nights and some mornings her bed not even slept in but she is thinking of signing up for training to become a flight attendent for USAirways, there hub is in Pittsburg. Mom is working longer hours for this lawyer Mr Gekoppolos (spelling close) downtown on Buchtel Ave but says to tell you we still need your check and its late.

Thats pretty much it for now Dad I want to play one game of TOMB RAIDERS and then study hard for a biology quizz. TTFN (ta ta for now) luv u:-) ROY.

Nelson's eyes sting, reading this in the tiny print the Windows 98 gives you. Even the print and tiny icons are made for very young eyes. The boy is smart, if the grown-ups over him don't fuck up his head. And Judy, maybe she knows what she's doing. She has evidently no fear of flying, though doesn't like the idea of his daughter in the sky all the time. Dad used to be nervous about flying too.

From: Dad [nelsang.harrison@qwikbrew.com]Sent: Sunday, October 24, 1999 9:31 PMTo: royson@buckeyemedia.comSubject: paternal affection

Roy-Great grades, congratulations. Keep it up. Great jokes, though don't they ever have any clean ones? Sex can be funny but it's also damn serious, about the most serious thing we do. It's good Judy is meeting lots of people but tell your sister not to cheapen herself. Other people tend to take us at the valuation we put on ourselves and a woman is always more vulnerable to a bad opinion. I'm glad she is thinking of a vocation even if it's not the one I would have chosen for her. Our family has been pretty earthbound up to now. Tell your mother I will get the check off but Ronnie thinks I should be contributing more to the household expenses since he is retired and on his pension plan and Social Security, meanwhile the cost of everything including real estate taxes goes up.

The big news here, in my mind at least, is that you have an aunt none of us knew about-a girl your grandfather had by another woman when I was a tiny child. Her name is Annabelle Byer. Nobody knew about her until she showed up some weeks ago and told her story to your grandmother. I took her out to lunch last month and we got along very well. We talked as if we had known each other all our lives. She is a nurse just like I work in mental health-how's that for a coincidence? Grandma is going to have her here for Thanksgiving and maybe you can meet her when your mother brings you east for Christmas. I can hardly wait to see you all. August in the Poconos was nice but it was too long ago.

Everybody's health here is good. The drought this summer has been washed away by a lot of rain this fall but it's too late for the farmers. The only thing close to a joke that I've heard is from one of the black clients at the Center, who has a lot of "Yo momma's so fat" jokes. The only ones I can remember are: She can sell shade, she puts mayonnaise on aspirin, and when she goes to the movies she sits next to everybody. We have a very fat lady at the Center and he never tells these jokes around her.

I am very proud of you, Roy, and love you very much. Dad.

P.S.: Notice how when I use a contraction, I put in an apostrophe. Haven't they taught you that yet at school? Also, "there" is a location and "their" is a possessive pronoun.

He pushes the SEND key without rereading it. He sounds like the kind of prissy father he never had but didn't especially want, either. His father used to say, Whenever anybody tells me what to do, my instinct is to do the exact opposite. But order and organization must be kept in the world. Ties of affection must be expressed, or nothing holds. Nelson shuts down the computer, gingerly. Sometimes the machine for no reason freezes, with a rebuking message: This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. The only glow from across the street now is the electric pumpkin grin. The time he did see the woman across the street in her underwear, her stomach looked stark white, and wonderfully long, dented by its belly button, deep like the doctors do them now.

"Aunt Mim? It's Nelson. Your nephew."

"I know you're my nephew, doll-how many others you think I got? Sweetie, what's up? How's life in the old country?"

Her voice is dry and crackled, parched by cigarettes like the desert from the sun, but nice, with family warmth rushing into its old veins at what she takes to be an emergency. Otherwise, why would he be calling? She is six years younger than Dad so she would be sixty now, not old for some professions but in hers ancient, long out of it, even with face-lifts and ass-tucks and the marvels of modern dentistry. Nelson wonders when she turned her last trick. You get the occasional sex-worker at the Center and some of them keep on with a few old customers almost like a marriage. Now, without her brother or her parents to link her to the region, Aunt Mim never comes back. The last time was Dad's funeral. There wasn't a body, just a square, lidded urn made of a composition substance like pressed bran flakes. Mom had him cremated down in Florida because it was easiest transportationwise. She and Nelson, taking turns at the wheel, brought him back north in the slate-gray Celica in which he had made his last run. Pru had flown down with the kids the day after he and Mom had caught a night flight from Philly but by the time she landed Dad was already gone. Gone and his body, six foot three and two hundred fifty-five pounds, whipped from the hospital to the crematorium. Pru was in disgrace because of having confessed, having been raised as a Catholic to confess everything, that she and Dad had committed- what would you call it?-double-barrelled adultery. Incest of a sort, one night only. She and the kids were scrunched into the two-door sports car's inadequate back seat, and the thick composition box, like a Styrofoam cooler but smaller and dense with its distilled contents, rode in the trunk among all their suitcases. It had been a tough tight packing job to get everything in and Nelson had not been especially gracious when little Judy, who was nine then, burst into tears, their first night's stop at a motel outside Savannah, because she couldn't bear to think of Grandpa all alone out there in the cold dark trunk. The two motel rooms didn't have too many high safe surfaces for such a sacred and ominous thing- surprisingly light, baked bone flakes, Harold C. Angstrom concentrate-so they settled on the top of the mock-wood cabinet holding the television set that slid in and out. Mom and the kids slept in that room, and she had to keep talking them out of climbing up and opening the box and looking inside. He and Pru were so upset with each other they couldn't sleep and finally fucked in an effort to get relaxed, which made them both madder and sadder than ever. The next night, in a Comfort Inn beyond Raleigh, Mom and Pru took one room and he and the kids the other. They fell asleep before he did, they were watching Roseanne on television, but in the morning he was still groggy, and after he and Pru had some words at breakfast that left everybody feeling they were tiptoeing on broken glass they all drove off leaving the ashes in their big square bran-colored cookie jar on the spare-blankets shelf of a Comfort Inn closet.

It was Judy who remembered, about two exits up the road. Though Nelson floored the accelerator, it seemed to take forever getting to the next exit and reversing their direction on 95. His whole body went watery with guilt and hurry. The black desk clerk, who had just come on duty, looked dubious at Nelson's panting explanation, but let them have the key again. It was strange to be let back in, as if into an empty tomb-as if they all had died or been abducted. The beds were still unmade, the towels wet outside the shower stall. They found a child's toothbrush in the bathroom as well as Grandpa's remains sitting docilely on the cabinet shelf, the square urn blending in like one of those combination safes motels sometimes give you. Nelson felt this tremendous rush of reunion at the time, taking the canister into his arms, a bliss of wiped-out sins. Afterwards, with schooled hindsight, he saw that there had been a certain unconscious vengeance in their leaving Dad behind, as he had more than once left them behind.

Nelson doesn't remember if they all laughed about it, forgetting the head of their family like that, but he does remember that Aunt Mim wore too much black at the funeral, all black, gloves and hat and big sunglasses, more a style statement than a proclamation of mourning. She stood out like a swish vampire among the quiet orderly rows of the hillside cemetery, on the back slope of Mt. Judge, where Earl W. (1905-1976) and Mary R. (1904-1974) Angstrom rested beneath a rose-colored polished double headstone one grassy stride away from the smaller, older, duller dove-colored stone saying.

REBECCA JUNE ANGSTROM

1959

His sister. He has always blamed himself somehow. If he had been more pleasing to Dad he wouldn't have left and Mom wouldn't have gotten drunk and it wouldn't have happened. At Dad's funeral Aunt Mim seemed an animated, irreverent slash of black among the dowdy mourners (there were some aging male strangers, even, who showed up, having worked with the deceased at Verity Press or the Toyota agency or played with or against the dead man in his teen-age prime and who felt enough connection to take a morning out of their own remaining lives) but Dad had loved her, and she him, with the heavy helplessness of blood, that casts us into a family as if into a doom.

"The funniest thing, Aunt Mim," Nelson says over the phone. "It turns out Dad had a baby by the woman he lived with that time and she's showed up. It was a girl baby, and she's thirty-nine, and a nurse living right here in Brewer. She grew up on a farm. I had lunch with her. She looks a little like Dad before he got really fat but when his face was turning round-kind of, you know, sleepy-eyed, with very white skin. So as well as a nephew you have a niece."

"Damn," the phone crackled after a pause. "I'll have to rewrite my will. How come she showed up now? Did Harry know she existed?"

"He guessed, I guess, but didn't know for sure. Her mother wouldn't tell him. She died this summer and told Annabelle before she did. She came to us."

"Who's us?"

"The family. Me and Mom and Ronnie."

"I bet Ronnie's just thrilled. And Janice even more so. I think it was you she came to, Nelson. So what's your thought?"

"Well, it's not as if she's not managing, she makes better money than I do, but she seems awfully alone. I think she should get to meet some people. But I don't know so many people since I kicked coke, except for the clients at work."

At her end of the line, Aunt Mim considers. "How long since you've known about this girl?"

"Since September."

"And you're just calling to tell me now?"

"I've been sitting on it, I guess."

"You're embarrassed," the woman concludes. "Don't be embarrassed, kid. Your father didn't understand birth control. You were born some months early, as I remember. It's not your funeral. Want some advice from your old aunt, whose life is no model for anybody?"

"Sure."

"This little nursie's not your problem. At thirty-nine, everybody's their own problem. You have a family-how are they?"

This is getting to be a disappointing conversation. If there was anybody he thought would see with him the wonder of his having a sister it was Aunt Mim, his father's sister. "They're good, I guess. Pru finally had enough of me and a year and a half ago took the kids back to Akron. She works for a Greek lawyer downtown, near the old Goodrich factory."

"Oh, those Greeks," says Aunt Mim. "They invented democracy,they'll tell you."

"And Judy's out of school and thinking of becoming an airline stewardess."

"flight attendant, they like to be called. Some of them, the way they carry on is legal only in Nevada."

"I know. She worries me. She's kind of wild."

"You worry too much. Life is wild. When it isn't a total bore."

"And my little boy, Roy, is almost fifteen. We communicate by e-mail. He's bright, it turns out."

"You sound surprised. Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid. So. And now a sister to fill in the gaps. You're quite a family man, Nelson, I don't know where you get it from. The

Springer side, I guess. They were good Germans. The Angstroms never quite fit in."

"I thought you might have some ideas."

"Ideas about what?"

"What I should do, about having a sister."

"Well, your father used to hold my hand crossing the street, and he liked to watch me pee, but maybe she's beyond that. What's her name, did you say?"

"Annabelle. Annabelle Byer."

"Who was Byer?"

"Her stepdad. He was the farmer."

"He's dead, too."

"Right."

"More and more is dead, are you old enough to notice? Vegas is dead, the way it was-a sporting town. The people used to come here had a little class-the gangsters, the starlets. A little whiff of danger, glamour, you name it. Class. The guys used to pay cash for everything, off a big roll of fifties. Now it's herds. Herds and herds of Joe Nobodies. Bozos. The hoi polloi, running up credit-card debt. Gambling is legal in half the states so they've built these huge moron-catchers along the Strip, all the way to the airport. A Pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, Venice-it's all here, Nelson, all for the morons. It's depressing as hell. Sometimes I think of going back east, but where would I fit in?"

"You'd fit in here, Aunt Mim," he hears himself saying. "The house is too big as it is."

She laughs, then coughs, then laughs again. "I never had the figure for it, Diamond County life. I was skinny, the other girls hated me. What shape is your sister in?"

"She's a little plump, but not, you know, overboard. Some of our clients at the Center-"

"There you have it," Aunt Mim interrupts. "She's letting herself go. You can't afford in life to do that if you're gonna contend." He has used up her patience. She can only give so much time to the past. She lives in a hustling world. "Come on out and see me, Nellie. Bring your sister if you want. They've got the airfares down to nothing, to keep the moron-catchers booked up. If you want to wait till Judy flies the skies, it'll be cheaper yet. I'll keep. I never smoked except for show. Charlie Stavros still above ground?"

So it falls to him to break the news. "No, I'm sorry to say. He had this triple bypass, and there was a murmur or something, a bad valve, and they opened him up again, but this time an infection set in-"

"You're scaring me, kid. He was a good guy. He had a touch of it. Class. You, you're lovable. Your Aunt Mim loves you, and don't you forget it." And she hangs up, without saying goodbye or seeing if he had a last word. He hadn't even asked her how her beauty parlor was doing, or if she had a husband.

One night in early November, Nelson dreams he is lying in his bedroom, which is true, although it is somehow smaller, like the little front room where Ron's computer sits. He gets out of bed when he hears a distant clicking noise. He goes to the window and sees out in the back yard a tall man practicing chip shots in the moonlight. The man is bent over and intent and a certain sorrow emanates from him in the gray-blue light. His back is turned and he doesn't turn his head to look up at Nelson though Nelson dreads that this will happen-a staring white mask in moonlight. Instead there is just that patient concentration, as if on a task he has been assigned for eternity-the little studied half-swing, a slump-shouldered contemplation of the result, a disconsolate trundling another ball with the face of the club into position at the man's feet, and another studied swing. Nelson feels indignation that this mournful tall middle-aged stranger, in nondescript trousers and a long-sleeved blue-gray shirt, should have wandered into their yard from Joseph Street and be trespassing so brazenly, making that irritating, repeating noise in the middle of the night. Neither in his dream nor when woken by it does Nelson announce to himself who the homeless man is.

He has passed into wakefulness. The door to the hallway, the latch not quite seated, has been swinging back and forth as if at a ghostly touch, clicking, nudged by the drafts that circulate through the house now that the cooling weather has turned on the furnace. Ronnie is always trying to turn the thermostat down; he says the lousy Arabs are putting the screws on oil again and the price of a barrel has more than doubled in a year.

Nelson forces himself from the warm bed, glancing out the window to see if a tall man is really there practicing chipping, and pushes the door so the latch decisively clicks. The sharp noise rings through the silent house. Not quite silent: the furnace sighs, the refrigerator throbs. His mother in the next room sleeps with a man not his father. It used to be his parents' room, he used to hear them cutting up some nights, making more noise than they thought. The two front bedrooms are empty, staring out at a Joseph Street bare of traffic. Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong-you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.

Next morning he calls Annabelle at her apartment. She sounds sleepy; he guesses she had been on night duty and he woke her up. Apologetically, he asks her to have lunch with him again, at the same place if that was all right with her. "Oh yes," she says, "that was a lovely place," in the overly sincere voice of someone who is groping to remember. Had she been failing to think of him as much as he had been thinking of her?

This time, The Greenery is crowded. They have to wait for a booth, and his head jangles with the angry, forlorn, earnest voices of a Relationships group he had led at the Center at ten this morning. The motherly waitress is not here, replaced by a girl young enough to be a clumsy, overworked teen-aged child of their own. Annabelle wears an outfit, blue jeans and a purple turtleneck, that seems to announce to him a new, careless, on-my-own side of her. Maybe she hadn't been up recovering from late duty when she sounded sleepy. She has never claimed to have no men friends.

The fall has turned cooler. On top of the turtleneck she wears an embroidered red jacket from India or someplace. No hurricane sweeps Elm Street with its drizzling fringe; the sun shines weakly, a white blur in a hazed sky above the city's cornices, but enough leaves are down in the Bradford pear trees for a bald light to strike off the macadam, gleaming where the surface was patched by dribbles of tar. The overworked waitress settles them in a front booth that is still uncleared from the last customers, with him facing the window this time. His face feels lit up so that all its imperfections and wormy nerves show. Nelson is used to the Center twilight, the half-windows giving on street level, and the cluttered gloom of 89 Joseph Street. He says, "I dreamed of my father last week. Our father. I think it was him."

"You're not sure?"

"I never saw his face. But the, the affect"-she has to know the word, any nurse would-"was his. His toward the end. Before he ran south and died."

"Is that what he did?"

"Didn't you know? Yes, basically-he got in the car and drove to his condo in Deleon, that's on the Gulf side, rather than face my mother."

"I can see why. She has a mind of her own."

"Funny, that was just the thing he thought she didn't have."

"What was his affect? You started to say."

Nelson thinks back. "Discouraged. But dogged. Going through the motions. He was practicing golf in our backyard, which was something he never did. There wasn't room-there was a vegetable garden, and a swing set. In fact he never practiced his golf at all. He just got up on the tee and expected to be terrific."

"And was he?"

"Not very, actually. But in his mind he had all this potential."

"He sounds dear. Like a little boy who's always been somebody's pet."

"That was him. Do you think it means anything, the dream?"

"You tell me, Nelson. You're the shrink."

"I'm not a shrink. I keep telling the clients that. They keep looking to me to have answers-all the world wants a guru. A savior. I'm nobody's savior."

"Not even mine?" She smiles-he thinks she smiles, her face is in shadow, the big window bright behind her, with the sidewalk trees going bare. "In the dream, did he say anything to you? Did he- did he give you any instructions?"

"None. He never did. Almost never. He didn't even look at me. I think I made him too sad."

"Why was that?"

"Maybe I reminded him of his other child, the one that died. My sister Becky. Also, he hated my being so short, taking after my mother."

"Did he, or did you just think that? You're as tall as I am, and I'm not short. Five seven."

"Really?" He is thinking about something else; he is rattled enough to tell her. "I tried to run my Relationships group this morning, we discussed how to make it through the holidays-everything goes up in the holidays, suicides, psychotic breaks, acting out; the expectations are too much-and it got away from me, onto the meaning of life. Glenn, this suicidal gay with diamond studs all over his face, gets his kicks telling everybody how there is no meaning, the universe is an accident, a hiccup in empty space, and our existence is a cruel joke evolution has played on us, and he'd just as soon be out of it as not but he has too much contempt for the whole farce even to give it the satisfaction of pulling the trigger. This sends Rosa off the deep end, she's a bipolar who in her manic phase says Jesus talks to her personally through various systems He has. She tells Glenn he's going straight to Hell and won't get any pity from her; she'll look down at him and laugh.

This gets Shirley, she's a three-hundred-pound binger with a history' of ECT for depression, this gets her riled up and she says Glenn is a very kind and considerate person and that the meaning of life for her is in small acts of kindness, not in some remote God in Heaven."

"How did empty space hiccup? Did Glenn explain it?"

"Sort of. Virtual particles, I think he said. Empty space isn't really empty but full of virtual particles that come and go in nanoseconds. They somehow got together and made the Big Bang. He keeps up with all this stuff."

"That's interesting. He doesn't sound suicidal to me."

"Me neither! He just says he is so he won't have to leave us. We're his family. Then Michael-have I told you about Michael?"

"Just a little. He's the pretty boy with the rich self-made parents."

"Exactly." At times talking to Annabelle is like talking to himself, they are in such accord. "Michael gets very angry and says he'd like to know how people who think they talk to Jesus know it's not the Devil pretending to be Jesus and that the voices that talk to him use dirty words he would never use, that's how he knows they're from outside his head. I'm pleased he can come out with all this, he tends to stay above it all when he even bothers to show up. He was in his first year at Penn when he broke. Then Jim-you want to hear all this garbage? You don't."

"Finish, Nelson. I do. But we must get the waitress and order. She hasn't even cleared the table and I have a dental appointment at two."

"You do? I never schedule the dentist after lunch."

"I brought floss and a toothbrush in my purse," Annabelle says primly, complacently. Her hair with its fluffy ragged cut makes a halo against the window, her face in shadow round like a solar eclipse. She suddenly seems a total stranger, an angel of blankness, and he wonders what he is doing here; she is too much for him to take on. The same gnawing he wakes to at night attacks his stomach and robs him of appetite at the very moment when the waitress, flushed and overwhelmed, comes to their booth, stacks the used plates on her arm, and asks for their order.

"We never got a menu," Nelson tells her.

But before the girl can retreat to get them one, Annabelle says, "We're in a hurry. Just bring me a hamburger."

Nelson looks at the specials blackboard above the counter and says, "O.K., I'll have the split-pea soup and the half a bean-sprouts sandwich."

"To drink?"

"Coffee."

"A medium Sprite," Annabelle says.

He accuses her, when the waitress leaves, "Your teeth look perfect."

"No, actually they need a lot of care. My molars are full of fillings and may have to be crowned. I've always had a sweet tooth. Then Jim," she prompted.

"Then Jim-Jim is an addict. You name it, he's addicted. He has a beer belly from booze and yellow fingers from cigarettes and he's been on methadone for years. But he'll do uppers, downers, he'd get hooked on M amp;Ms if there was nothing else."

"Yum," says Annabelle.

"Jim decides to tell us, maybe just to rile us all up, that the meaning of life is sex, and he starts to describe a sexual adventure he just had, with all the words in place, in this sort of eye-rolling philosophizing way, a girl he met in a Third Street bar…"

"Go on."

"She did this, he suggested that, she said why not, dude, the earth began to shudder and shake-I had to cut him off, which I hate to do, but it was pure exhibitionism, Rosa actually walked out, it was SO inappropriate-"

"I know," Annabelle says. "I get that with my Alzheimer's patients. They de-inhibit."

"Your father," Nelson says, thinking the subject needed a change. "The man you thought was your father. Did he ever look at you?"

Her eyes lose their sleepy look; a stonewashed-denim blue, they widen like a doll's when you sit it erect.

"I mean," Nelson hastens to explain, "unlike my father, who didn't look around at me in the dream, even though I know he knew I was there."

"Yes," she says. "Frank did look at me. Especially-"

"Especially after you were sixteen," Nelson supplies.

"He died when I was sixteen. He began to look earlier than that. When I was fourteen." Her eyes regain their unimpeachable calm. "But, you know, nothing. He was a wonderful, generous man. My mother wasn't always easy. She had a temper, and wasn't really a country person. She couldn't talk to the other farm women, Mennonite some of them."

More capable than she looks, the waitress brings his pea soup with the frothy half-sandwich and Annabelle's hamburger with chips and a slice of pickle, cut the long way. The smell of ground grilled meat travels to him across the Formica, reminding him of high school-its cafeteria lunches, its aimless car rides that ended with Whoppers at Burger King. Since his father's death of sludgy arteries he has been careful to watch his diet; his blood pressure is high for his age, and so is his cholesterol. It was aggressive of Annabelle, he feels, to order a hamburger, just as her outfit is aggressive, the purple turtleneck stretched by the push of her breasts. He wonders if as with the woman across the street her bra is beige, a clinging silky Olga or lacy Bali or satiny Barelythere. Her innocence feels learned, a layer. After two bites of her hamburger she confesses, "I dread Thanksgiving. I don't know what you expect of me."

"Expect? I don't expect much, just you to be yourself and the others to be polite."

"See, that's it. Why should they have to make an effort to be polite? A girlfriend of mine from when I worked at St. Joe's has invited me to spend the holiday with her family, over in Brewer Heights. Wouldn't that be better? Easier for everybody?"

He goes into counsellor mode; his voice slows, each word weighed. "Easier isn't necessarily better. You're family to me and I'd like you to be there with me."

"Family to you but not to them. To your mother I'm just a reminder of old misery."

"The misery of the world," he says, reaching into himself to overcome her resistance. "That's what I kept thinking during my group this morning-the pity of everything, all of us, these confused souls trying so pathetically hard to break out of the fog- to see through our compulsions, our needs as they chew us up. I got panicky and let it get out of control. The group ran me."

"Several of the old men I look after," she says, trying to join in his drift, "think they're married to me. They want to hold my hand. They think I'm the right age for them, they forget how old they are, when they don't look into the mirror."

"That Egyptian plane that went down," he goes on. "One of the pilots decided to commit suicide and take everybody with him. Children and everybody. Because he couldn't pay his daughter's medical bills. People are crazy. At times when I'm with the clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little."

"So why do you want me to come with your family to Thanksgiving?"

"The same reason you showed up at the house," Nelson says. "Without your mother, you're stuck. You're not going anywhere. You're under a spell, and we've got to break it."

"My savior." She picks up the limp pickle slice with a dainty grip and before biting it with her deceptively pretty teeth gives him a challenging, sisterly look. "Nelson, are you sure it's my spell you're trying to break?"

He is nervous on behalf of his mother and sister and his own self, but things at Thanksgiving go pretty well until the four bottles of California sauterne have been drunk and people are restless and irritable from sitting so long at the table, the Springers' polished mahogany dining-room table, two overlapping tablecloths needed to cover it with its extra leaves inserted. The day is unseasonably warm and spotted with fits of rain, showers that come and go. The summer's drought has been forgotten. They need frost now. Daffodil and crocus shoots are coming up and the lilac buds have the fullness they should have in April. Some cog has slipped in the sky, clogged as it is with emissions from all our heedless cars.

Of the Harrison boys, nerdy, divorced Alex has come up from Virginia, and Georgie from New York, still unmarried and no great mystery why, and Ron Junior with his wife, pudgy Margie, and three children from where they live, in a new development off the old pike to Maiden Springs. That makes eleven with Nelson and Annabelle, but because she owes her so much hospitality and fortifying advice over the years Mom invited Doris Dietrich, as she now is, and her elderly rich husband, Henry, whom Doris calls Deet. Janice never dreamed Doris would accept but she did, loftily saying they had given the cook the holiday off and she was dreading trying to whip up an elaborate meal just for Deet. He is eighty, at least, and even deafer than Doris. Still, he holds himself erect and looks distinguished, a Diamond County aristocrat, a living reminder of the days when the vast old hosiery mills were still mills and not discount clothing outlets. After much dithering and debate, it was decided to put him at Janice's right and Annabelle next to him and Georgie, in Nelson's estimation the least menacing of the Harrisons, on her right.

And the old gent did appreciate-the thin red skin on his cheekbones glowed-being seated beside the best-looking youngish woman there. Margie, Annabelle's only competitor, was one of those local girls who with their chunky sturdy legs in white bobby socks and big boobs in the bulky letter sweater are knockouts as seventeen-year-old cheerleaders but don't carry it past thirty, sinking into fat with their mothers. Ron Junior had put on weight, too, and a construction worker's permanent tan. His mother's mouth, with her slightly shy but welcoming smile, had acquired in his face the stubborn closed set of a man who had settled for less than he might have. His two years up at Lehigh had gone into nailing two-by-fours into tacky house frames, rows of them on half-acre lots. He had become a version of his father, meaty and balding and potentially pugnacious, though without an insurance salesman's pallor. Alex, the oldest and tallest, now looked most like their mother-stringy and wry, the way she became in her long illness, and intelligent and prim in his wire-rimmed glasses. Was it working with miniature circuits that had made his mouth the size of a tight buttonhole? He had done the best of the three boys, moving out to the West Coast and back, climbing the computer programmer's zigzag ladder, though since it was a field where the brightest and luckiest made millions before thirty perhaps he felt like a failure; at any rate, he had a slight apologetic stoop, which was also like his mother as her life had wound down.

Nelson does not remember when he realized that his father and Mrs. Harrison were having an affair. He had his own family and problems back then and his parents' friends to him were a bunch of aging crocks who hung out at the Flying Eagle and thought having a third g-and-t was a real trip and saying "fuck" in mixed company a real break-through. Buddy Inglefinger was the worst asshole, but Webb Murkett and his zaftig little child bride were right up there for repulsiveness. Mrs. Harrison he hardly ever looked at, she was so drab, so quiet, so naggingly ill. Yet, when made extra alert by coke, Nelson could feel currents-just the way the grown-ups grouped when he saw them together, Mom standing next to gawky Mr. Murkett or maybe stocky Mr. Harrison and Dad and Mrs. Harrison just hanging back a half-step together, talking so nobody else could hear, a funny tingling sort of extra peacefulness between them. She was nice to Nelson, too, a little too nice, as if to a much discussed problem child. This sallow, schoolmarmy, calm-voiced woman knew too many things about him, and liked him a shade more than on his own he deserved. It was eerie, the way she was already under his skin. The Murketts split up and the Inglefingers moved away-Buddy had found a woman as flaky as he-but the Harrisons and the Angstroms still would see one another, the six months when Mom and Dad were back from Florida, going out to a movie or a Blasts game, though Dad always said he couldn't stand Ronnie and never had, not since Ronnie was a tough kid from Wenrich Alley. And Nelson would notice that in this quartet his father was less noisy than usual, less frisky and skittish in the way he put on to annoy Mom, more subdued and contented: he seemed more grown-up. It was hard to associate this different man with Mrs. Harrison, but what else would explain it? And then she died. And his father showed less grief than he should have, even scrapped with the grieving widower at the funeral. What a hard-hearted thick-skinned showboat his father had been, just as Ronnie said.

The fact of the affair has long since leaked out and poisons any get-together with his stepbrothers. Not that they say anything. But they know, and they see him as heir to his father's guilt, to the pollution of their otherwise perfect mother.

"Alex, it's great to see you up here," Nelson lies. "Are you getting a Southern accent yet?"

"It's infectious," agrees the former computer whiz, now a middle-management tool. "Virginia's a funny state-half hillbilly and half megalopolis, at the Washington end."

"Like Pennsylvania and Philly," Nelson offers.

"It has a better sense of itself than Pennsylvania. It had all those Presidents, and the Confederate capital, and now the economy is taking off. The skyscrapers they can't build over in the District are being built across the river in Virginia." His words issue from his little mouth grudgingly, as if his brain is being made to perform an uncongenial function.

"Have you met my sister Annabelle? Half-sister, actually."

"I heard she would be here. How do you do?"

"Hi," says Annabelle, wondering if this is the brother Nelson wants her to get to know. It must be: of the other two, one is gay and the other already married, she can see. But why does Nelson assume that if she had wanted to marry she wouldn't have, ages ago? It's insulting, for him to think she couldn't have landed a doctor for herself, back when she was younger. This pale man in bifocals, the pride of the Harrisons, reminds her of a doctor-the same chilly neatness, the same superior air of having mastered a language only a few can speak.

"And what do you do?" he asks her, as if everybody knows what he does.

"Oh, hang out," she says, to tease, he seems so prissy, so glassily impervious.

Nelson at her side intervenes: "She's a licensed practical nurse, in private practice for now, mostly the elderly."

"Mmm, impressive," Alex says. "The geriatric is a real growth sector."

"They're more lonely than sick, a lot of them," she offers, not sure whether he is being hostile or merely thinks in terms of sectors.

"You wonder how much dead weight society can carry," he goes on. "At some point in the next millennium, governments will have to establish a cut-off point. Eskimos did it, when they were a viable population. Native American tribes did it. In Sicily, they used to make a party of it-everybody piled on with pillows, so when the old person smothered there was no single person who had, so to speak, 'done it.'"

He is hostile, she decides. She says, "I don't know, there's always something worthwhile there, even when they can't remember from one minute to the next. They're easy to make contact with. Maybe the shame they can't express, about being useless, opens them up." His mouth tightens, his glasses glint. He has taken her meaning, that he is not open or easy to make contact with. All this probing and grappling we must do, out in society: how much easier, Annabelle thinks, it is to stay in rooms you know as well as your own body, having a warm meal and an evening of television, where it's all so comfortably one-way.

Seated at the table, she feels comfortable next to Mr. Dietrich, with his handsome long head and little fake-flesh hearing aid and sharp high cheekbones blotched by a stately excitement. He tells her about his travels-the bulky souvenirs his wife insists on buying, the number of times they have been cheated-in Mexico, in Egypt, in Sri Lanka. He conveys his pleasure in being able to support an acquisitive wife and legions of cheats. "Most of these foreigners are rascals," he says, "but you can't blame them, since they labor under the misfortune of not being Americans." And he looks down at her sideways slyly, to see how she takes that, and turns to Nelson's mother on his other side, asking, "Isn't that right, Janice? Did you hear what I said to the delightful young lady?"

"No, Deet darling, say it again to me!"

Mrs. Harrison is tense. Her dark eyes-like Nelson's, but moister, female, and less lashy, shrunken by age-have been shuttling up and down the table, watching all those faces connected to her. With a stepgrandson on her other side, she has lurched at the old man's overture. They know each other; they have between them that toothless intimacy of the more-than-middle-aged-they can banter without any chance of follow-up.

"I said, my dear, that you can't blame foreigners for being rascals since they labor under the misfortune of not being Americans!"

Janice puzzles. "I'm not sure I get it. If they're foreigners, of course they're not Americans."

"Of course! Exactly!" Deet in deaf triumph rests his big mottled hand on her forearm and fondly squeezes.

On Annabelle's other side, Georgie asks her about Broadway shows. He cannot believe she's never seen Cats or Miss Saigon. But he obliges her with a description of a show called Keep Bangin' that consists of nothing but men playing drums. He offers to get her and Nelson tickets: "People here really live so much closer to New York than they realize. The drive takes less than three hours, and if you don't want to bother with a car to park there's a perfectly usable bus. If you and Nelson don't want to hear all that drumming I know one of the dance coaches for the revival of Kiss Me, Kate that's going to open next week. The most amazing production I've seen lately has the rather embarrassing title The Vagina Monologues, a one-woman show by Eve Ensler, and it's really more serious than it sounds. It's about us and our bodies. All of us. Men, women, and in-between."

"Nelson and I don't really go around together like that," she must point out. "We discovered each other just recently."

"What a remarkable thing," he says, eager to follow any lead she gives him. She makes him uneasy, she realizes. A grin is held on his face like a firecracker ready to go off. His face is theatrically large-featured, and sun-wrinkled like a farmer's-from beaches and vacations, she supposes. He has a marathoner's unnatural leanness, to go with his mobile full lips, big beaky nose, and long, ropily veined hands. He asks, "You grew up around here?"

"Sure did."

"And you don't want to get away? I was always dying to. I wanted to dance and did make a few chorus lines, but never in shows that had long runs, that was just my luck. What I do now, to make ends meet-the city has become ridiculously expensive, even the neighborhoods that used to be grungy-I facilitate sales at a ticket agency. To put it baldly, I take orders over the phone. My brothers and father think it's a grotesque career for a man past his fortieth birthday, but long ago I decided that they and the good folk of greater Brewer weren't going to live my life for me. My agency sets up out-of-town theatre tours, so there are some executive and negotiative skills involved-really, I don't see why I should be apologizing, I get free tickets to any show I want and still do my jetés and pliés for an hour every day. I haven't given up on dancing; there are more and more good roles for males well past puberty. The producers are waking up to the audience demographics. The graying of America-we're all part of it."

Annabelle looks around, afloat in this family simmer. Her own family, in her recollection, took life from her brothers as they grew and brought back pieces of the world-games played, skills mastered, sayings and songs-but her mother was an overweight recluse and Frank stingy with his words, running his buses to bring in cash, like all farmers feeling left behind and exploited. Their holiday occasions had something furtive about them, and half meant. The families of her girlfriends at the regional high school had longer, more exotic summer vacations than she and bigger Christmas trees, more presents, a keener and lighter-hearted will to celebrate. It was a relief to her when this moment of holiday exposure-like the baby Jesus in his manger naked to the starry sky-was over and they could again blend into the safe, laborious routines of everyday, the new year begun. A boy called Jamie, the only boy she really knew for years, asked her to the senior prom, and her dress, peach chiffon with a satin bodice, seemed a piece of her parents' flesh she was wearing, carved from their scanty budget, hot and sticky on her skin. She felt stiff as a doll, tarted up, even though her mother, in her jeans and flannel shirt, tried to see her off with a blessing: "My beautiful baby girl," she said. Annabelle had not felt entitled to be the expense her brothers were-their sports equipment, their field trips, their memberships-as if she sensed, in her mother's ruefully loving touch, the hidden truth that she was only her mother's child. She watches this other family with interest, her brother a lamb among his stepkin.

Nelson sits at the far end of the table, between Mrs. Dietrich and the plump, short, opinionated Margie. Between Margie and Janice the two older children, restless boys, sit and stare with undisguised curiosity across at Annabelle. On the other side of Georgie are his two brothers, Alex and then Ron Junior, in turn next to his youngest child, a girl in a high chair, and next to her her grandfather, who as the wine bottle in front of him empties becomes increasingly cozy with Mrs. Dietrich. Her leathery form is adorned with lots of draggy metal jewelry, as if for some other occasion, a gaudier and more fashionable one than this family observance. The Dietrichs bring to the meal the grace of money, the wealth of honest material industry, its machinery sold south, its employees long dismissed and dead of lint and toxic relaxants, but its invested profits still working for the happiness of the founder's heirs, to the third generation.

Janice sits at the table's foot, opposite her husband and beside the courtly Deet, but she has the air less of the hostess than of a guest lucky to be there, increasingly light-headed as her wineglass is refilled and the meal she has struggled to prepare is dutifully consumed. The turkey was dry and the gravy a little thick and cold but the stuffing, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce all came out of a box and were excellent, save for that last fillip of taste, tart or peppery, that only a fond and confident cook can impart. Janice's bearing breathes relief that she will not have to do this for another year. She sits nodding at Deet's description of the myriad temples of Myanmar, once known as Burma, the country in Southeast Asia least spoiled by Western tourists thanks to its tough little generals, while resting her glazed eyes on the sight of her husband's head nudging ever closer to Doris's dangling copper earring. Yet even thus engaged Ronnie now and then darts toward Annabelle a look that feels like a thrust; it makes her uneasy, it touches her depths.

"And now the bitch is going to run," Doris's harsh, seldom contradicted voice leaps from her tête-à-tête. "They have no shame, those two."

The pair of little boys, ten and eight and bored beyond endurance, have been excused until dessert and can be heard banging about in the sunporch beyond the kitchen. Annabelle watches Janice to see when she will get up to clear the dishes away, so she can offer to help her. The hostess makes no move except to sip from her glass, though Mr. Dietrich's braying survey of his adventures abroad has momentarily ceased. His wife's voice, overheard by all but him, has stilled the table.

Nelson studies his untidy plate. Cranberry sauce has stained the mashed potatoes. Frowning down at it, he asks, "What does she have to be ashamed of?"

"Well, she's a crook, for one thing," Ron Junior volunteers, in case Doris Dietrich has no ready answer.

"And for another she's no more a New Yorker than I am," Alex adds with a surprising quickness, punching in his data.

The third brother has to chime in. "What's a New Yorker?" Georgie asks. "We're all immigrants there."

"You going to vote for her?" Ron Junior asks him.

Annabelle feels Georgie at her side cringe but muster mettle to reply, "Probably. If it's Giuliani she runs against. He's an uptight control freak who really blew it with this Brooklyn Museum flap. He tried to withhold city funds, it's as bad as art under Communism."

Doris says, the bracelets on her arm jingling as she props her elbow and pulls a smoking cigarette from her mouth, "The city is safer to visit than it's been for twenty years. Deet and I used to be scared to go there and now we're not."

"Maybe that's just demographics," Nelson says. "There are fewer young black men. And thanks to Clinton's boom more of them have jobs."

Alex announces, "Clinton in my book gets no credit whatsoever for the prosperity. It's all due to the American electronics industry. If anything his taxes have held it back. And now the Department of Justice is going after Microsoft-talk about killing the goose that lays the golden eggs."

"And Alan Greenspan," Deet announces, having caught some of the drift.

"Nelson is defending Clinton, dear," Doris calls down the length of the table to him.

"And Mrs. Clinton, too," Nelson says. He has a defiant streak, Annabelle sees-a disregard that might be their father in him.

"I think they're both disgusting," Ron Junior's chubby wife puts it, having returned from the direction of the kitchen to check on her two noisy sons. "I blame her as much as him for the Monica mess."

"How so?" Nelson asks.

"Don't play naive, Nelson. She's been enabling his affairs for years -without her defending him over Gennifer Flowers he wouldn't have ever got elected."

"She keeps him hard up," their host says at the head of the table. There is a flushed pinkness to Ronnie's head, in the scalp that shows through his skimpy hair, in the tint of his tender-looking eyelids, in the color that glows through his protuberant ears. "Like they used to do for prizefighters." It's another generation speaking, Annabelle thinks. A coarser, more physical, rust-belt mentality. This man knew her biological father-played the same auditorium-gyms, inhaled the same coal-smoky air.

"And what about her and Vince Foster?" Ron Junior asks. "Don't think that's not going to come up again if she runs."

"The king and queen of sleaze," his wife goes on in a kind of rapture. "I can't stand them!" This is marriage, Annabelle sees, this joint rapture.

"Yes,"Georgie breaks in, his voice tense, having been coiled within him, "I will vote for her. She has her heart in the right place, unlike all you Republicans. She's for choice, for freedom of expression, for g-giving the p-poor a break." He is starting to stammer in his excitement; the other Harrisons narrow their eyes and sigh in an old reflex of pity and contempt; he is not the scapegoat they want today.

"Like the poor Palestinians. Like Mrs. Arafat. They loved that in New York. 'Here, honey, have a hug,'" Ron Junior runs on.

"You New Yorkers," Alex says to his brother loftily, "you're all-" He hangs on what seems to be an "f," and Georgie jumps in:

"Fags, you're trying to say."

"Full of shit, I was going to say, and then thought better of it. We have ladies and a little girl at this table." He pinches his mouth smaller yet.

"He has no coat-tails," Ron Senior says, still thinking practically. "The jerk should have been impeached and we all know it."

"He was impeached," Nelson says to his stepfather. "What he shouldn't have been was convicted, and he wasn't, if you'll recall."

But Nelson isn't the scapegoat they want either. His stepfather says patiently, "Nellie, he lied to us, the American people. He said right out on television, 'I did not have sex with that woman, what's-hername.'"

Annabelle feels compelled to speak up. "I think he's an excellent President," she says.

Her voice, though shy, is clean and pure, startling. The agitated table, smelling of food eaten and uneaten, falls into a hush. She is their guest, just barely. Who is she, come back from nowhere with her pale round face?

"How so, dear?" Doris Dietrich asks, from the other corner of the table. Her gaudy earrings, strips of copper, twitter as she brings her head forward to hear the answer.

Annabelle fights the blush she feels beginning. She elongates her neck to spread the heat. She loves Clinton, she realizes, from all those hours at the television set, letting his A-student earnestness wash over her, his lip-biting pauses for the judicious word, his gently raspy hillbilly accent. "Oh, the usual things people say," she says. "He really does make you feel he cares-that he sees you. He's been there, poor in a crummy town, with an abusive stepfather. And his cleverness, knowing all those facts, and being always right. All those experts on television like George Will saying bombing Kosovo would never work and then it did. And the way he went into Haiti. And has brought peace to Ireland."

"He's a draft dodger!" Ron Junior cannot keep in. "If I was a soldier I'd tell him to stuff his orders. Don't send me to Bosnia!"

"She was asked a question, let her answer," Nelson says; he is used to running groups.

She goes on, hating making a speech, blushing hotly now, but- having handled the mortally ill so often, knowing what waits for us, all of us, including all of us here at this table-not afraid of speaking her mind, when after all her President had kept going doing his job with the entire country full of cheap and ugly cracks, "He loves people, he truly does. And he has nerve. He knows when to gamble and when to hold back. And he doesn't hold a grudge, even against those in the Congress who hated him and tried to ruin him. Yes, it was too bad about-about his needing a little affection, but maybe he was entitled to some. Aren't we all?"

"A blow job is a little affection?" the host asks, giving her again one of those looks, a thrust from some past where she didn't exist.

"Well-"

"Of course," Nelson intervenes. "That's just what it is."

"That right, Georgie?" Alex asks his younger brother.

"Drop dead, Lex. Go back to the Bible Belt. Though as a matter of fact I agree with Annabelle, I think it's pathetic that this idiotic puritanical nation reduced its President to acting like a sneaky teen-ager. Any other country in the world, he could have a harem if he does the job."

Deet has heard enough to know they are talking about Clinton. He says in that commanding deaf voice, "The man may have his good intentions, but he is too extreme, giving all this government money to those who refuse to work. Raising taxes on the rich hurts the economy over all, history shows time and time again."

"He's for workfare," Nelson says, almost suffocated by the ignorance around him. "The liberals hate him for it."

"He makes me ashamed of being an American," Margie volunteers. Something in her akin to sexual passion has been tripped; her face shows spots of outgrown acne. "He makes America look ridiculous, drowning us in sleaze and then flying around all over the world as if nothing whatsoever has happened.

It's so brazen."

Her little girl, two or so, is too big to be penned into a high chair this long; hearing her mother's voice strain, feeling her mother's blood boil, she begins to kick and whimper. With an irritable backhand she flicks her peas and cut-up turkey off the tray onto the floor. "Hey, take it easy, Alice," says Ron Junior, who has been hit in his necktie by some of the peas.

"Well," his father says, "I'll say this for Slick Willie, he's brought the phrase out in the open. When I was young you had to explain to girls what it was. They could hardly believe they were supposed to do it."

Janice thinks Ronnie looks tired-blue below the eyes, his hair just a gauze up top, his ears feverish. Having lost one husband prematurely, she is watchful of this one, with his silky skin, his steady ways.

Nelson says to Margie, softly, between them, "Brazen, he's still President, for Chrissake," and to Deet, loudly, "Actually, Mr. Dietrich, fiscally he's about as conservative as a Democrat can get. We're feeling the pinch at the treatment center, I can tell you."

"Face it, Nellie, the guy stinks," says Ron Junior, while his daughter wriggles in his lap, glad to be out of the chair but not wishing to be confined by her father's embrace either. "He's dead meat. He's a leftover going fuzzy at the back of the fridge."

Alex opines primly, "He makes Nixon look like a saint. At least Nixon had the decency to get out of our faces. He could feel shame."

"Nixon? I never heard him admit anything except how sorry he felt for himself," Nelson says.

"It's the sleaze!" Margie cries in a kind of orgasm, visibly quivering. Alice starts to whimper in sympathy. Her mother gestures toward her. "What are children supposed to think? What do you tell Boy Scouts?"

"Boy Scouts!" Georgie exclaims, a big grin creasing his face. "Keep your mind out of the gutter, that's what our scoutmaster used to tell us. But none of us did. Boy Scouts are no saints. He was no saint either, it turned out."-

"A much-maligned man," Deet announces, having heard the word "Nixon." "What he did then would be shrugged off now."

"Like Reagan shrugged off Iran-Contra," Nelson says. "Not that he had a clue what they were talking about. Talk about senile dementia!"

"He made the Russkies bite the dust, I'll tell you. He brought the damn Wall down," says Ron Senior, lifting the bottle in front of him and finding that it is empty. "Janice, is there any more wine? Is it all drunk up at your end?"

Doris Dietrich beside him also calls down to Janice. "Janice, what do you think? What do you think about Hillary's running?"

Janice tries to focus. She had been thinking of how much like Harry Nelson was, defending Presidents. Her son has that expression on his face Harry used to call "white around the gills." Why do they do it, care so about those distant men? They identify. They think the country is as fragile as they are. Her father, who hated Roosevelt to the day he died, would get so excited, saying the Democrats were giving the country away. She tells the expectant table, "Oh…she should run if it makes her feel better. Let her get it out of her system. Ronnie, you've had enough wine. It's time to clear, but everybody except Annabelle stay sitting. She may help me."

Her attempt to protect the girl fails, for everybody except the Dietrichs and Margie and Alice picks up dirty dishes and crowds into the kitchen. Ron Junior's two boys, Angus and Ron III, have taken Ron Senior's golf clubs out of his closet to the sunporch and set up a kind of putting course among overturned summer furniture. They are taking fuller and fuller swings, and their father gets to them just before something is broken-the rippled glass table where they sometimes eat in the summer, or a panel of screening he has just fitted with new Fiberglas mesh. "We're going to have pies, boys," Janice promises them, and then remembers that she should have been warming the apple and mince in the oven instead of just sitting there listening to them all argue.

There is a milling about at the kitchen counter as the guests deposit the plates and glasses and silver. Annabelle starts rinsing the plates into the Disposall and stacking them in the dishwasher, whose baby-blue interior is new to her. Her host comes over to help, which is his right, it being his kitchen. But it brings him very close, his sports jacket off and his sleeves rolled up so the blond-white fur of forearm hair shows; he lightly bumps her aside and takes the wet plates into his hands. There is a density to him, a fullness of blood that her own veins feel. "We'll load all the big plates into the lower rack and save the saucers for the next load."

"I can move away, Mr. Harrison, if you'd like to do it."

"Why? This works. You rinse, I load." He is close enough that she smells the sweet sauterne around his red-eared head. "So," he says, "a blow job's just a way of showing affection."

"That's what I said." She has dealt in her life with so many older men coming on to her that she feels calm with it, confident she can fend.

"You're your mother's daughter, all right."

"I am?"

"I knew your mother, once. Before she got involved with that jerk Angstrom."

"Oh?" Fear and fascination twitter together inside her. Her hand trembles, setting the delicate old wineglasses, family treasures with etched designs, into the upper rack. He takes them from her two at time, and rearranges those she has set in place.

"Otherwise, they rattle around and break," he explains.

"What was she like then?" She asks this but has already decided she doesn't want the conversation to continue. She half turns away from him, looking for a towel to dry her hands.

Ronnie keeps his voice low, so Janice, putting her pies belatedly into the oven, doesn't hear. "She'd fuck anybody," he says softly into the fine hair at the side of Annabelle's neck.

"Why didn't you do that before?" Nelson is whining at his mother.

"Oh, it slipped my mind," she says, "everybody getting so excited about Clinton. Isn't his term about up, in any case?"

"Not soon enough," Ron Junior shouts from the sunporch, where he is trying to restore order.

"It must feel funny," Ronnie murmurs to Annabelle, "being the illegitimate daughter of a hooer and a bum."

Tears spring to her eyes as if at the lash of a twig while walking in the woods. Nelson sees the change in her face, sees her wheel from the sink with her wet hands still up in the air, and in two steps is at her side. "What happened?" he asks, his breath hot, his eyes sunk deeper into his skull.

"Nothing," she gasps, struggling not to sob."What did he say?"He didn't say anything."I asked her," Ronnie tells his stepson conversationally, "how it felt being the bastard kid of a whore and a bum. I didn't ask her for a blow job, though."

"Ronnie!" Janice exclaims, letting the oven door slam."Well, shit," he says, only a bit abashed, "what's she doing here anyway, telling us what a great guy Clinton is?"

Nelson squares up to him, though he is a bit shorter and was neveran athlete. "You told Mom she could come. You said you wanted to see how Ruth Leonard's daughter turned out."

"Now I know. Looks just like her, without the ginger in her hair. And cunt, my guess is." Buried years of righteous resentment surface in the cool guess.

"You couldn't stand it, could you?" Nelson says. "My father beating you out every time. Every time you went up against him, he beat you out. That's how he was, Ronnie. A winner. You, you're a loser."

"You'd know," Ronnie says.

Others have pushed into the kitchen, the older two Harrison sons."What's going on?" Georgie asks.

"Mom," Nelson asks his mother. "Why did you marry him? How could you do that to us?" The "us," he realizes, must include his dead father.

Janice looks as though she has had this conversation with her son before, and is weary to death of it. "He's good to me," she explains. "He's had too much to drink. Haven't you, Ron?"

"No," he says. "Not quite enough in fact. You drank it all at your end."

"Please forget whatever he said," she says to Annabelle. "Let's go for a walk, some of us. While the pies warm up."

"The rain has started up again," Alex points out.

Ron Junior wants to defend his father but doesn't quite know from what. "You squirt," he says to Nelson. "This was all your crazy idea, bringing her."

"It's thrown him for a loop," Georgie offers to explain, from his New York angle, seeing his father with a detachment the other two haven't managed yet, as an old man getting older. "She got him stirred up, remembering." His young-old face with its exaggerated big features reveals, in the tug of a smile crease at a corner of his lips, what he shares with his brothers, satisfaction that at last some sort of counterblow has been struck for Rabbit Angstrom's leading their mother into adultery.

"I am not stirred up," Ronnie says, with the oblivious stolidity of the insurance agent who will not go away, who will not leave the house until a policy has been sold. "This is my house and I like to have some control over who comes into it."

"Well, we're going," Nelson tells him. "This is it. Mom, I'll come by for my things when this pig isn't here."

"Nelson, you have no place to stay!"

"I'll find one. Come on, Annabelle. Here," and he dodges around Ronnie, startlingly, and rips a generous length of paper towel from the rack under the old-fashioned wooden cabinets and hands it to his sister, to dry her wet and soapy hands with.

Numb, heaped with disgrace, she follows him back into the dining room, past the tall breakfront where Ma Springer's precious Koerner china trembles at their double retreat. Annabelle has to hurry with her choppy small steps to keep up. She dressed for this occasion in a white cashmere cardigan and cinnamon-brown skirt, perhaps a little tight and short for the company. But that's how skirts come now, from New York via the buyers for the malls.

Only Margie, little Alice, and the Dietrichs are left at the Thanksgiving table. A cloud of Doris's cigarette smoke lies up against the ceiling, around the brass-plated dome fixture. Nelson stops to bend down and say loudly, "Mr. Dietrich, I'm sorry, but something has come up and we must run before the pies. Happy Thanksgiving. You too, Mrs. Dietrich. Keep being a friend to Mom, she needs you. Margie, I guess we don't agree entirely about Clinton but that's a very cute little girl you have there."

"Goodbye," Annabelle says to the table in a scarcely audible croak, her throat sore from her choked-down sobs. She dabs at her wet cheeks with the paper towel, held in the hand that Nelson isn't squeezing as he pulls her along. The two small boys have made their way ahead of them into the living room and have turned on the Zenith television. A football game: green-and-white uniforms deploy on a bright-green ground with a yellow ten-yard line supplied by computer graphics. The top of the set is crammed with knickknacks, including a heavy pale-green glass egg that since his earliest childhood seemed miraculous to Nelson. How did they get that tear-shaped bubble in there? He has no coat and her jacket hangs in the hall. The front door with its thin panes of ornamentally frosted glass sticks in the dampness of the day, but with a screech pops open, releasing them to the porch and its fresh air. It is raining; the air is chilly, alive. As a child he always loved this porch, his Springer grandparents' porch, where there was a cushioned glider that squeaked and smelled like the oilcloth mattress in his playpen. And there had been an armchair of unpainted wicker. People don't use their porches any more; the furniture was taken to the Mt. Judge dump, now closed, in some decade when he wasn't paying much attention. Being adult, it seems, consists of not paying much attention. The wicker smelled to his childish nostrils of its vegetable origin, of a willow tree in a storybook, leaning beside a pond, trailing its drooping branches and feathery leaves in the crystal-pure water. His senses feel clean again, the rain sharp on his face, the patter in the maple leaves overhead distinct, each drop, as he tugs his sister toward the tired white Corolla he brought her in. The house across the street, where the pumpkins and the woman in her bra have shone forth, is dark, empty. The neighbors are away for the holiday, and thus miss seeing the heir leave 89 Joseph Street for good.