Rabbit Redux by John Updike Page A

guess I don't find technology that sexy."
                "Does everything have to be sexy?" Janice asks.
                "It doesn't have to be, it tends to be," Stavros tells her. To Rabbit he says, "Have some souvlakia. You'll love it, and it's quick." And in an admirable potent little gesture, he moves his hand, palm outward as if his fingers had been snapped, without lifting his elbow from the table, and the motherly woman comes running to them.
                "Yasou."
                "Kale spera," she answers.
                While Stavros orders in Greek, Harry studies Janice, her peculiar glow. Time has been gentle to her. As if it felt sorry for her. The something pinched and mean about her mouth, that she had even in her teens, has been relaxed by the appearance of other small wrinkles in her face, and her hair, whose sparseness once annoyed him, as another emblem of his poverty, she now brings down over her ears from a central parting in two smooth wings. She wears no lipstick and in certain lights her face possesses a gypsy severity and the dignity present in newspaper photographs of female guerrilla fighters. The gypsy look she got from her mother, the dignity from the Sixties, which freed her from the need to look fluffy. Plain is beautiful enough. And now she is all circles in happiness, squirming on her round bottom and dancing her hands through arcs of exaggeration quick white in the candelight. She tells Stavros, "If you hadn't shown up we would have starved."
                "No," he says, a reassuring factual man. "They would have taken care of you. These are nice people."
                "These two," she says, "are so American, they're helpless."
                "Yeah," Stavros says to Rabbit, "I see the decal you put on your old Falcon."
                "I told Charlie," Janice tells Rabbit, "I certainly didn't put it there."
                "What's wrong with it?" he asks them both. "It's our flag, isn't it?"
                "It's somebody's flag," Stavros says, not liking this trend and softly bouncing his fingertips together under his sheltered bad eyes.
                "But not yours, huh?"
                "Harry gets fanatical about this," Janice warns.
                "I don't get fanatical, I just get a little sad about people who come over here to make a fat buck -"
                "I was born here," Stavros quickly says. "So was my father."
                "- and then knock the fucking flag," Rabbit continues, "like it's some piece of toilet paper."
                "A flag is a flag. It's just a piece of cloth."
                "It's more than just a piece of cloth to me."
                "What is it to you?"
                "It's -"
                "The mighty Mississippi."
                "It's people not finishing my sentences all the time."
                "Just half the time."
                "That's better than all the time like they have in China."
                "Look. The Mississippi is very broad. The Rocky Mountains really swing. I just can't get too turned-on about cops bopping hippies on the head and the Pentagon playing cowboys and Indians all over the globe. That's what your little sticker means to me. It means screw the blacks and send the CIA into Greece."
                "If we don't send somebody in the other side sure as hell will, the Greeks can't seem to manage the show by themselves."
                "Harry, don't make yourself ridiculous, they invented civilization," Janice says. To Stavros she says, "See how little and tight his mouth gets when he thinks about politics."
                "I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics. I just don't see why we're supposed to