"Her? Oh, she can take care of herself. She didn't expect anything." But as he says this he tastes the lie in it. Nobody expects nothing. It makes his life seem cramped, that Ruth can be mentioned out of his mother's mouth.

Her mouth goes thin and she answers with a smug flirt of her head, "I'm not saying anything, Harry. I'm not saying one word."

But of course she is saying a great deal only he doesn't know what it is. There's some kind of clue in the way she treats Nelson. She as good as ignores him, doesn't offer him toys or hug him, just says, "Hello, Nelson," with a little nod, her glasses snapping into white circles. After Mrs. Springer's warmth this coolness seems brutal. Nelson feels it and acts hushed and frightened and leans against his father's legs. Now Rabbit doesn't know what's eating his mother but she certainly shouldn't take it out on a two—yearold kid. He never heard of a grandmother acting this way. It's true, just the poor kid's being there keeps them from having the kind of conversation they used to have, where his mother tells him something pretty funny that happened in the neighborhood and they go on to talk about him, the way he used to be as a kid, how he dribbled the basketball all afternoon until after dark and was always looking after Mim. Nelson's being half Springer seems to kill all that. For the moment he stops liking his mother; it takes a hard heart to snub a tiny kid that just learned to talk. He wants to say to her, What is this, anyway? You act like I've gone over to the other side. Don't you know it's the right side and why don't you praise me?

But he doesn't say this; he has a stubbornness to match hers. He doesn't say much at all to her, after telling her what good sports the Springers are falls flat. He just hangs around, him and Nelson rolling a lemon back and forth in the kitchen. Whenever the lemon wobbles over toward his mother's feet he has to get it; Nelson won't. The silence makes Rabbit blush, for himself or for his mother he doesn't know. When his father comes home it isn't much better. The old man isn't angry but he looks at Harry like there isn't anything there. His weary hunch and filthy fingernails annoy his son; it's as if he's willfully aging them all. Why doesn't he get false teeth that fit? His mouth works like an old woman's. But one thing at least, his father pays some attention to Nelson, who hopefully rolls the lemon toward him. He rolls it back. "You going to be a ballplayer like your Dad?"

"He can't, Earl," Mom interrupts, and Rabbit is happy to hear her voice, believing the ice has broken, until he hears what she says. "He has those little Springer hands."

"For Chrissake, Mom, lay off," he says, and regrets it, being trapped. It shouldn't matter what size hands Nelson has. Now he discovers it does matter; he doesn't want the boy to have Springer hands, and, if he does – and if Mom noticed it he probably does – he likes the kid a little less. He likes the kid a little less, but he hates his mother for making him do it. It's as if she wants to pull down everything, even if it falls on her. And he admires this, her willingness to have him hate her, so long as he gets her message. But he rejects her message: he feels it poking at his mind and rejects it. He doesn't want to hear it. He doesn't want to hear her say another word. He just wants to get out with a little piece of his love of her left.

At the door he asks his father, "Where's MIM?"

"We don't see much of Mim any more," the old man says. His blurred eyes sink and he touches the pocket of his shirt, which holds two ballpoint pens and a little soiled packet of cards and papers. just in these last few years his father has been making little bundles of things, cards and lists and receipts and tiny calendars that he wraps rubber bands around and tucks into different pockets with an elderly fussiness. Rabbit leaves his old home depressed, with a feeling of his heart having slumped off center.

The days go all right as long as Nelson is awake. But when the boy falls asleep, when his face sags asleep and his breath drags in and out of helpless lips that deposit spots of spit on the crib sheet and his hair fans in fine tufts and the perfect skin of his fat slack cheeks, drained of animation, lies sealed under a heavy flush, then a dead place opens in Harry, and he feels fear. The child's sleep is so heavy he fears it might break the membrane of life and fall through to oblivion. Sometimes he reaches into the crib and lifts the boy's body out, just to reassure himself with its warmth and the responsive fumbling protest of the tumbled limp limbs.

He rattles around in the apartment, turning on all the lights and television, drinking ginger ale and leafing through old Lifes, grabbing anything to stuff into the emptiness. Before going to bed himself he stands Nelson in front of the toilet, running the faucet and stroking the taut bare bottom until wee—wee springs from the child's irritated sleep and jerkily prinkles into the bowl. Then he wraps a diaper around Nelson's middle and returns him to the crib and braces himself to leap the deep gulf between here and the moment when in the furry slant of morning sun the boy will appear, resurrected, in sopping diapers, beside the big bed, patting his father's face experimentally. Sometimes he gets into the bed, and then the clammy cold cloth shocking Rabbit's skin is like retouching a wet solid shore. The time in between is of no use to Harry. But the urgency of his wish to glide over it balks him. He lies in bed, diagonally, so his feet do not hang over, and fights the tipping sensation inside him. Like an unsteered boat, he keeps scraping against the same rocks: his mother's ugly behavior, his father's gaze of desertion, Ruth's silence the last time he saw her, his mother's oppressive not saying a word, what ails her? He rolls over on his stomach and seems to look down into a bottomless sea, down and down, to where crusty crags gesture amid blind depths. Good old Ruth in the swimming pool. That poor jerk Harrison sweating it out Ivy—League style the ass—crazy son of a bitch. Margaret's weak little dirty hand flipping over into Tothero's mouth and Tothero lying there with his tongue floating around under twittering jellied eyes: No. He doesn't want to think about that. He rolls over on his back in the hot dry bed and the tipping sensation returns severely. Think of something pleasant. Basketball and cider at that little school down at the end of the county Oriole High but it's too far back he can't remember more than the cider and the way the crowd sat up on the stage. Ruth at the swimming pool; the way she lay in the water without weight, rounded by the water, slipping backwards through it, eyes shut and then out of the water with the towel, him looking up her legs at the secret hair and then her face lying beside him huge and burnished and mute. No. He must blot Tothero and Ruth out of his mind both remind him of death. They make on one side this vacuum of death and on the other side the threat of Janice coming home grows: that's what makes him feel tipped, lopsided. Though he's lying there alone he feels crowded, all these people troubling about him not so much their faces or words as their mute dense presences, pushing in the dark like crags under water and under everything like a faint high hum Eccles' wife's wink. That wink. What was it? Just a little joke in the tangle at the door, the kid coming down in her underpants and maybe she conscious of him looking at her toenails, a little click of the eye saying On your way Good luck or was it a chink of light in a dark hall saying Come in? Funny wise freckled piece he ought to have nailed her, that wink bothering him ever since, she wanted him to really nail her. The shadow of her bra. Tipped bumps, in a room full of light slips down the shorts over the child—skin thighs sassy butt two globes hanging of white in the light Freud in the white—painted parlor hung with watercolors of canals; come here you primitive father what a nice chest you have and here and here and here. He rolls over and the dry sheet is the touch of her anxious hands, himself tapering tall up from his fur, ridges through which the thick vein strains, and he does what he must with a tight knowing hand to stop the high hum and make himself slack for sleep. A woman's sweet froth. Nails her. Passes through the diamond standing on his head and comes out on the other side wet. How silly. He feels sorry. Queer where the wet is, nowhere near where you'd think, on the top sheet instead of the bottom. He puts his cheek on a fresh patch of pillow. He tips less, Lucy undone. Her white lines drift off like unraveled string. He must sleep; the thought of the far shore approaching makes a stubborn lump in his glide. Think of things pleasant. Out of all his remembered life the one place that comes forward where he can stand without the ground turning into faces he is treading on is that lot outside the diner in West Virginia after he went in and had a cup of coffee the night he drove down there. He remembers the mountains around him like a ring of cutouts against the moon—bleached blue of the night sky. He remembers the diner, with its golden windows like the windows of the trolley cars that used to run from Mt. Judge into Brewer when he was a kid, and the air, cold but alive with the beginnings of spring. He hears the footsteps tapping behind him on the asphalt, and sees the couple running toward their car, hands linked. One of the red—haired girls that sat inside with her hair hanging down like wiggly seaweed. And it seems right here that he made the mistaken turning, that he should have followed, that they meant to lead him and he should have followed, and it seems to him in his disintegrating state that he did follow, that he is following, like a musical note that all the while it is being held seems to travel though it stays in the same place. On this note he carries into sleep.