Free Rabbit, Run by John Updike

amazed that Margaret is just another Janice—that same sallow density, that stubborn smallness. Scarcely moving her lips, she says, “This is Ruth Leonard. Marty Tothero, and you, whatever your name is.” Ruth is fat alongside Margaret, but not that fat. Chunky, more. But tall. She has flat blue eyes in square-cut sockets. Her upper lip pushes out a little, like with an incipient blister, and her thighs fill the front of her dress so that even standing up she has a lap. Her hair, kind of a dirty ginger color, is bundled in a roll at the back of her head.
    “Harry,” Rabbit says. “Or Rabbit.”
    “That’s right!” Tothero cries. “The other boys used to call you Rabbit. I had forgotten.” He coughs.
    “Well you’re a big bunny,” Ruth remarks. Beyond her the parking meters with their red tongues recede along the curb, and at her feet, pinched in lavender straps, four sidewalk squares meet in an x.
    “Just big outside,” he says.
    “That’s me too,” she says.
    “God I’m hungry,” Rabbit tells them all, just to say something. From somewhere he’s got the jitters.
    “Hunger, hunger,” Tothero says, as if grateful for the cue. “Where shall my little ones go?”
    “Here?” Harry asks. He sees from the way the two girls look at him that he is expected to take charge. Tothero is moving back and forth like a crab sideways and bumps into a middle-aged couple strolling along. His face shows such surprise at the collision, and he is so elaborately apologetic, that Ruth laughs; her laugh rings on the street like a handful of change thrown down. At the sound Rabbit begins to loosen up; the space between the muscles of his chest feels filled with warm air. Tothero pushes into the glass door first, Margaret follows, and Ruth takes his arm and says, “I know you. I went to West Brewer High and got out in fifty-one.”
    “That’s my class.” Like the touch of her hand on his arm, her being his age pleases him, as if, even in high schools on opposite sides of the city, they have learned the same things and gained the same view of life. The Class of ‘51 view.
    “You beat us,” she says.
    “You had a lousy team.”
    “No we didn’t. I went with three of the players.”
    “Three at once?”
    “In a way.”
    “Well. They looked tired.”
    She laughs again, the coins thrown down, though he feels ashamed of what he has said, she is so good-natured and maybe was pretty then. Her complexion isn’t good now. But her hair is thick. A young Chinaman in a drab linen coat blocks their way past the glass counter where an American girl in a kimono sits counting threadbare bills. “Please, how many?”
    “Four,” Rabbit says, when Tothero is silent.
    Unexpected, generous gesture, Ruth slips off her short white coat and gives it to Rabbit: soft, bunched cloth. The motion stirs up a smell of perfume on her.
    “Four, yes please this way,” and the waiter leads them to a red booth. The place has just recently reopened as Chinese; pink paintings of Paris are still on the wall. Ruth staggers a little; Rabbit sees from behind that her heels, yellow with strain, tend to slip sideways in the net of lavender straps that pin her feet to the spikes of her shoes. But under the shiny green stretch of her dress her broad bottom packs the cloth with a certain composure. Her waist tucks in trimly, squarely, like the lines of her face. The cut of the dress bares a big V-shaped piece of her fat fair back. In arriving at the booth, he bumps against her; the top of her head comes to his nose. The prickly smell of her hair stitches the store-bought scent behind her ears. They bump because Tothero is ushering Margaret into her seat so ceremoniously, a gnome at the mouth of his cave. Standing there waiting, Rabbit is elated to think that a stranger passing outside the restaurant window, like himself last night outside that West Virginia diner, would see him with a woman. He seems to be that stranger, staring in, envying himself his