Free Rabbit, Run by John Updike Page A

body and his woman’s body. Ruth bends down and slides over. The skin of her shoulders gleams and then dims in the shadow of the booth. Rabbit sits down too and feels her rustle beside him, settling in, the way women do, fussily, as if making a nest.
    He discovers he has held on to her coat. Pale limp pelt, it sleeps in his lap. Without rising be reaches up and hangs it on the coat-pole hook above him.
    “Nice to have a long arm,” she says, and looks in her purse and takes out a pack of Newports. “Tothero says I have short arms.”
    “Where’d you meet that old bum?” This so Tothero can hear if he cares.
    “He’s not a bum, he’s my old coach.”
    “Want one?” A cigarette.
     He wavers. “I’ve stopped.”
    “So that old bum was your coach,” she sighs. She draws a cigarette from the turquoise pack of Newports and hangs it between her orange lips and frowns at the sulphur tip as she strikes a match, with curious feminine clumsiness, away from her, holding the paper match sideways and thus bending it. It flares on the third scratch.
    Margaret says, “ Ruth .”
    “Bum?” Tothero says, and his heavy face looks unwell and lopsided in cagey mirth, as if he’s started to melt. “I am, I am. A vile old bum fallen among princesses.”
    Margaret sees nothing against her in this and puts her hand on top of his on the table and in a solemn dead voice insists, “You’re nothing like a bum.”
    “Where is our young Confucian?” Tothero asks and looks around with his free arm uplifted. When the boy comes he asks, “Can we be served alcoholic beverages here?”
    “We bring in from next door,” the boy says. Funny the way the eyebrows of Chinese people look embedded in the skin instead of sticking out from it. Their faces look washed always.
    “Double Scotch whisky,” Tothero says. “My dear?”
    “Daiquiri,” Margaret says; it sounds like a wisecrack.
    “Children?”
    Rabbit looks at Ruth. Her face is caked with orange dust. Her hair, her hair which seemed at first glance dirty blond or faded brown, is in fact many colors, red and yellow and brown and black, each hair passing in the light through a series of tints, like the hair of a dog. “Hell,” she says. “I guess a Daiquiri.”
    “Three,” Rabbit tells the boy, thinking a Daiquiri will be like a limeade.
    The waiter recites, “Three Daiquiri, one double whisky Scotch on the rocks,” and goes.
    Rabbit asks Ruth, “When’s your birthday?”
    “August. Why?”
    “Mine’s April,” he says. “I win.”
    “You win.” As if she knows how this makes him feel warmer; you can’t feel master, quite, of a woman who’s older.
    “If you recognized me,” he asks, “why didn’t you recognize Mr. Tothero? He was coach of that team.”
    “Who looks at coaches? They don’t do any good, do they?”
    “Don’t do any good? A high-school team is all coach; isn’t it?”
    Tothero answers, “It’s all boy, Harry. You can’t make gold out of lead. You can’t make gold out of lead.”
    “Sure you can,” Rabbit says. “When I came out in my freshman year I didn’t know my feet from my, elbow.”
    “Yes you did, Harry, yes you did. I had nothing to teach you; I just let you run.” He keeps looking around. “You were a young deer,” he continues, “with big feet.”
    Ruth asks, “How big?”
    Rabbit tells her, “Twelve D. How big are yours?”
    “They’re tiny,” she says. “Teeny weeny little.”
    “It looked to me like they were falling out of your shoes He pulls his head back and slumps slightly, to look down past the table edge, into the submarine twilight where her fore-shortened calves hang like tan fish. They dart back under the seat.
    “Don’t look too hard, you’ll fall out of the booth,” she says, ruffled, which is good. Women like being mussed. They never say they do, but they do.
    The waiter comes with the drinks and begins laying their places with paper placemats and lusterless silver. He does Margaret and is