Pop says, "Well I've kept my trap shut throughout this mess, don't think Harry there wasn't a temptation to meddle but I kept my peace, but a lover in my book is somebody who loves somebody through thick and thin and from all I hear this smooth operator is just after the ass. The ass and the Springer name. Pardon the expression."
"I think," Mom says, faltering though her face still shines. "It's nice. To know Janice has."
"An ass," Mim finally completes for her. And it seems to Rabbit wicked that these two, Pop and Mim, are corrupting Mom on the edge of the grave. Coldly he asks Mim, "What'd you and Chas talk about?"
"Oh," Mim says, "things." She shrugs her knitted hip off the kitchen table, where she has been perched as on a bar stool. "Did you know, he has a rheumatic heart? He could kick off at any minute."
"Fat chance," Rabbit says.
"That type of operator," Pop says, snarling his teeth back into place, "lives to be a hundred, while they bury all the decent natural Americans. Don't ask me why it works that way, the Lord must have His reasons."
Mim says, "I thought he was sweet. And quite intelligent. And much nicer about you all than you are about him. He was very thoughtful about Janice, he's probably the first person in thirty years to give her some serious attention as a person. He sees a lot in her."
"Must use a microscope," Rabbit says.
"And you," Mim says, turning, "he thinks you're about the biggest spook he's ever met. He can't understand why if you want Janice back you don't come and get her back."
Rabbit shrugs. "Too proud or lazy. I don't believe in force. I don't like contact sports."
"I did tell him, what a gentle brother you were."
"Never hurt a fly if he could help it, used to worry me," Pop says. "As if we'd had a girl and didn't know it. Isn't that the truth, Mother?"
Mom gets out, "Never. All boy."
"In that case, Charlie says," Mim goes on.
Rabbit interrupts: " `Charlie' yet."
" `In that case,' he said, `why is he for the war?"'
"Fuck," Rabbit says. He is more tired and impatient than he knew. "Anybody with any sense at all is for the damn war. They want to fight, we got to fight. What's the alternative? What?"
Mim tries to ride down her brother's rising anger. "His theory is," she says, "you like any disaster that might spring you free. You liked it when Janice left, you liked it when your house burned down."
"And I'll like it even more," Rabbit says, "when you stop seeing this greasy creep."
Mim gives him the stare that has put a thousand men in their place. "Like you said. He's my type."
"A gangster, right. No wonder you're out there screwing yourself into the morgue. You know where party chicks like you wind up? In coroners' reports, when you take too many sleeping pills when the phone stops ringing, when the gangsters find playmates in not such baggy condition. You're in big trouble, Sis, and the Stavroses of the world are going to be no help. They've put you where you are."
"Maa-om," Mim cries, out of old instinct appealing to the frail cripple nodding at the kitchen table. "Tell Harry to lay off:" And Rabbit remembers, it's a myth they never fought; they often did.
When Pop and Harry return from work the next day, Harry's last day on the job, the Toronado with New York plates is not in front of the house. Mim comes in an hour later, after Rabbit has put the supper chops in the oven; when he asks her where she's been, she drops her big stripey bag on the old davenport and answers, "Oh, around. Revisiting the scenes of my childhood. The downtown is really sad now, isn't it? All black-topped parking lots and Afro-topped blacks. And linoleum stores. I did one nice thing, though. I stopped at that store on lower Weiser with the lefty newspapers for sale and bought a pound of peanuts. Believe it or not Brewer is the only place left you can get good peanuts in the shell. Still warm." She tosses him the bag, a wild pass; he grabs it left-handed and as they talk in the living room he cracks peanuts. He uses a flowerpot for the shells.
"So," he says. "You see Stavros again?"
"You told me not to."
"Big deal, what I tell you. How was he? Still clutching his heart?"
"He's touching. Just the way he carries himself."
"Boo hoo. You analyze me some more?"
"No, we were selfish, we talked about ourselves. He saw right through me. We were halfway into the first drink and he looks me up and down through those tinted glasses and says, `You work the field don't you?' Gimme a peanut."
He tosses a fistful overhanded; they pelt her on the chest. She is wearing a twitchy little dress that buttons down the front and whose pattern imitates lizardskin. When she puts her feet up on the hassock he sees clear to the crotch of her pantyhose. She acts lazy and soft; her eyes have relented, though the makeup shines as if freshly applied. "That's all you did?" he asks. "Eat lunch."
"Th-that's all, f-f-folks."
"What're you tryin' to prove? I thought you came East to help Mom."
"To help her help you. How can I help her, I'm no doctor."
"Well, I really appreciate your help, fucking my wife's boyfriend like this."
Mim laughs at the ceiling, showing Harry the horseshoe curve of her jaw's underside, the shining white jugular bulge. As if cut by a knife the laugh ends. She studies her brother gravely, impudently. "If you had a choice, who would you rather went to bed with him, her or me?"
"Her. Janice, I can always have too, I mean it's possible; but you, never.
"I know," Mim gaily agrees. "Of all the men in the world, you're the only one off bounds. You and Pop."
` And how does that make me seem?"
She focuses hard on him, to get the one-word answer. "Ridiculous."
"That's what I thought. Hey, Jesus. Did you really give Stavros a bang today? Or're you just getting my goat? Where would you go? Wouldn't Janice miss him at the office?"
"Oh – he could say he was out on a sale or something," Mim offers, bored now. "Or he could tell her to mind her own business. That's what European men do." She stands, touches all the buttons in the front of her lizardskin dress to make sure they're done. "Let's go visit Mom." Mim adds, "Don't fret. Years ago, I made it a rule never to be with a guy more than three times. Unless there was some percentage in getting involved."
That night Mim gets them all dressed and out to dinner, at the Dutch smorgasbord diner north toward the ball park. Though Mom's head waggles and she has some trouble cutting the crust of her apple pie, she manages pretty well and looks happy: how come he and Pop never thought of getting her out of the house? He resents his own stupidity, and tells Mim in the hall, as they go in to their beds – she is back in her old room, Nelson sleeps with him now – "You're just little Miss Fix-It, aren't you?"
"Yes," she snaps, "and you're just big Mister Muddle." She begins undoing her buttons in front of him, and closes her door only after he has turned away.
Saturday morning she takes Nelson in her Toronado over to the Fosnachts; Janice has arranged with Mom that she and Peggy will do something all day with the boys. Though it takes twenty minutes to drive from Mt. Judge to West Brewer, Mim is gone all morning and comes back to the house after two. Rabbit asks her, "How was it?"
"What? "
"No, seriously. Is he that great in the sack, or just about average in your experience? My theory for a while was there must be something wrong with him, otherwise why would he latch on to Janice when he can have all these new birds coming up?"
"Maybe Janice has wonderful qualities."
"Let's talk about him. Relative to your experience." He imagines that all men have been welded into one for her, faces and voices and chests and hands welded into one murmuring pink wall, as once for him the audience at those old basketball games became a single screaming witness that was the world. "To your wide experience," he qualifies.
"Why don't you tend your own garden instead of hopping around nibbling at other people's?" Mim asks. When she turns in that clown outfit, her lower half becomes a gate of horizontal denim stripes.