“Sweet, what would I do?”

“You could call your mother.”

“I can’t. She and Stepdaddy would make a thing. They’d come for me.”

“Maybe that’s a good idea.”

“Stepdaddy’s a creep.” She moves past him, not focusing, into the kitchen. She looks into the refrigerator. “You didn’t shop.”

“That’s your job.”

“Without a car?”

“Christ, you can walk up to the Acme in five minutes.”

“People would see Skeeter.”

“They see him anyway. He’s outside horsing around with Nelson. And evidently you’ve been letting him drive all around Pennsylvania.” His anger recharges itself: lead gut. “Goddammit, how can you just run an expensive car like that into the ground and just let it sit? There’s people in the world could live for ten years on what that car cost.”

“Don’t, Harry. I’m weak.”

“O.K. I’m sorry.” He tugs her into his arms. She rocks sadly against him, rubbing her nose on his shirt. But her body when dazed has an absence, an unconnectedness, that feels disagreeable against his skin. He itches to sneeze.

Jill is murmuring, “I think you miss your wife.”

“That bitch. Never.”

“She’s like anybody else, caught in this society. She wants to be alive while she is alive.”

“Don’t you?”

“Sometimes. But I know it’s not enough. It’s how they get you. Let me go now. You don’t like holding me, I can feel it. I just remembered, some frozen chicken livers behind the ice cream. But they take forever to thaw.”

Six-o’clock news. The pale face caught behind the screen, unaware that his head, by some imperfection in reception at 26 Vista Crescent, is flattened, and his chin rubbery and long, sternly says, “Chicago. Two thousand five hundred Illinois National Guardsmen remained on active duty today in the wake of a day of riots staged by members of the extremist faction of the Students for a Democratic Society. Windows were smashed, cars overturned, policemen assaulted by the young militants whose slogan is”—sad, stern pause; the bleached face lifts toward the camera, the chin stretches, the head flattens like an anvil—“Bring the War Home.” Film cuts of white-helmeted policemen flailing at nests of arms and legs, of long-haired girls being dragged, of sudden bearded faces shaking fists that want to rocket out through the television screen; then back to clips of policemen swinging clubs, which seems balletlike and soothing to Rabbit. Skeeter, too, likes it. “Right on!” he cries. “Hit that honky snob again!” In the commercial break he turns and explains to Nelson, “It’s beautiful, right?”

Nelson asks, “Why? Aren’t they protesting the war?”

“Sure as a hen has balls they are. What those crackers protesting is they gotta wait twenty years to get their daddy’s share of the pie. They want it now.”

“What would they do with it?”

“Do, boy? They’d eat it, that’s what they’d do.”

The commercial—an enlarged view of a young woman’s mouth—is over. “Meanwhile, within the courtroom, the trial of the Chicago Eight continued on its turbulent course. Presiding Judge Julius J. Hoffman, no relation to Defendant Abbie Hoffman, several times rebuked Defendant Bobby Seale, whose outbursts contained such epithets as”—again, the upward look, the flattened head, the disappointed emphasis—“pig, fascist, and racist.” A courtroom sketch of Seale is flashed.