Rabbits for Food Read online

  “I know,” Bunny says, which brings them to a lull in the conversation, such as it is a conversation. Jeffrey’s purring fills the void. His purr is unusually loud for a house cat, more like the purr you’d expect from a tiger, but Jeffrey is decidedly not a tiger. He is more like a battery-operated toy. His purr hums warm against Bunny’s hip, the sound waves ripple. His whole body vibrates, including his tail.

  “Four hours is hardly a good night’s sleep,” Albie says. “Maybe we should stay home. Get some rest. Because if you’d rather not go, I’ll call Julian. No big deal.”

  “What time is it?” Bunny asks.

  “Nine twenty-three.” Albie does not point out that she’d asked the same question when it was nine twenty-one because, as if the previous two minutes never happened, he too, although not word for word, repeats himself. “I’d be just as happy to stay home.”

  It’s true. As far as he’s concerned, New Year’s Eve is no big whoop, which might seem out of character if you knew the incident about the odometer flip; about how as a small boy sitting in the passenger’s seat of his father’s infrequently used Volvo while driving to Far Rockaway, the odometer turned from 9,999 miles to 10,000, and Albie nearly passed out from the thrill of it. His father had to pull off to the side of the road for Albie to breathe in and out of a paper bag. But the flipping of the calendar page from one year to the next does not elicit even a remotely similar effect. But neither does New Year’s Eve disturb him the way it disturbs Bunny.

  Second to New Year’s Eve, Bunny’s most loathed holiday is Thanksgiving. She used to loathe Christmas, too, but that changed after she and Albie got married. Although Albie is Jewish, they celebrate Christmas, albeit in their own, irreligious, somewhat screwy way, which has to do with gifts, pancakes, Santa Baby, and old Japanese horror movies. But the only holiday Bunny will claim any real affection for is Arbor Day because it has a purpose, which has value. Also, it’s free of tradition and not burdened with memories. It’s not even celebrated, really.

  Last year, last New Year’s Eve, she’d said to him, “You know, I’d really rather stay at home and drink Clorox.” But that was last year. This year, she would say no such thing. This year, to indulge in the kick of a joke or the pleasure of hyperbole is to risk being taken at her word.

  Yet, despite knowing that she will experience only despair and regret, every year she forges ahead with the New Year’s Eve celebrations as planned. The plans for tonight are the same as they were last year and the same as 2006, 2005, and 2004, too: a vaguely unpleasant dinner with Trudy, Elliot, Julian and Lydia before heading off to the Frankenhoffs’ after-party to watch the ball drop, which is the worst part of the night.

  Dinner out with friends is something they do frequently, which does not mean that it’s easy. First, there is the when of it. They are busy people, their friends, with many dinners on their dance cards. A good amount of back-and-forth is required before they can locate a night mutually free of prior engagements and other obligations. Then, where to go? Where they have dinner is important, important the way a matter of life and death is important because at the next dinner out the previous dinner will be a significant topic of conversation. The dinner itself, the food, will have been either exquisite or overrated and the wine list excellent, although sometimes insufficient, but, always, the conversation is smart and warm and delightful, and what could be bad about that?

  But, still. One night, nearly a year ago, they had dinner with Nathan and Philip. They are very fond of Nathan and Philip, though they were far from keen on the restaurant. Aviary, it was called, because the menu was all about freshly killed birds. The bird Philip ate was served with its feet and head, with the beak attached. On their way home Bunny said, “A fucking beak, and he ate it.” Even Albie, a zoologist at the Museum of Natural History, and therefore no stranger to dead birds with their parts intact, had to admit, “That was a little rough.” After that, nothing, not one word, passed between them until they got home. Then, while hanging up her coat, Bunny said, “If I have one more delightful dinner with delightful people engaging in delightful conversation, I am going to scream. I am going to scream and scream and never stop. I will die screaming.”

  Albie sat on the edge of the bed to take off his shoes. “What’s wrong with a lovely dinner with lovely people?”

  Either there was no explanation or not one that she could articulate. At a loss, she said, “Delightful. I said delightful. Not lovely. Delightful.”

  “And the difference,” Albie asked, “is what?”

  Prompt: A Favorite Song (300 words or less)

  From the kitchen window I could see only an opaque apparition of myself backlit by an unsettling yellow halo from the overhead light. It was like déjà vu. I could not remember when or where I’d encountered this same apparition of myself in a kitchen window before, except that it was now familiar and unsettling, like a memory from a past life. Except I don’t believe in past lives, or after lives, either. I believe that this is it. This is my only life. During the day, from that window there is a view of a courtyard where the trash bins are kept, and there is a bicycle rack, too. I do not have a bicycle. In the summer months, wispy bits of grass and weeds sprout from the cracks in the concrete, but never enough to be inspiring, and it isn’t summer anyway. The trash bins are earmarked: Garbage, Bottles & Cans, and Paper like laundry sorted into Whites, Darks, and Delicates, each to be washed separately. Sorting the trash makes me feel good about myself, as if I were to be lauded for doing my bit to combat global warming, and never mind that sorting the trash is city mandated, nor is global warming the accurate term, or even the preferred term, for climate change. Nonetheless, I call it global warming because I picture it in images of polar bears set adrift on melting ice floes, or birds nesting in the wrong season and then waiting in vain for their eggs to hatch, or migrating butterflies that wind up freezing to death. Global warming is one of the world’s wrongs that I care about deeply, except for times like this when all I care about is sleep, and also there are those times when I care about nothing, nothing at all.

  It could’ve been that I woke up because I had to cry, the same way people wake up when they have to pee.

  Two amber-colored vials from the pharmacy were paired on the kitchen counter like salt and pepper shakers. Lunesta ’n’ Ambien. With the help of one or the other or both, I might’ve dropped off to sleep—not drifted off, but dropped off like a drunk passing out. But I wouldn’t have slept for long. Two or three hours, tops. The Lunesta tablets were blue, and the Ambien were white. I alternated. Two Lunesta on one night; Ambien on the next. I did this to prevent building up tolerance to one or the other of them, but I need not have bothered. Neither of them worked for shit. I decided to take one and a half of each, which made me think of that song, that one about Alice in Wonderland, or maybe it was Through the Looking Glass, whichever, it was about Alice popping pills. It’s not a song from my generation, but I know it was Jefferson Airplane. Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane. Gracie Slick. Imagine having a name like Gracie Slick.

  In the kitchen drawer where we kept scissors, Band-Aids and kitchen matches, we also kept the gizmo for cutting pills down the middle. The gizmo worked like a guillotine.

  And the Red Queen’s off with her head.

  What Is Known

  Tonight, New Year’s Eve 2008, they are going to the Red Monkey for dinner. The same as every year, it was Julian who chose the restaurant, made the reservations, arranged that they get a decent table. A freelance food critic, Julian writes for some reasonably popular magazines, although his reviews are most often sidebars, and he doesn’t always get a byline. Nonetheless, he is afforded what he calls a personal relationship with hotshot chefs and gatekeeping maître d’s. That he gets paid in pennies for his efforts is irrelevant because Lydia, his wife, is rich. No one in Lydia’s family, going back three generations, ever had a job. Instead, they sat on boards for ballet companies and
small museums and they studied things like Chinese brush painting and Sanskrit, and Lydia, holding fast to family tradition, is on the board of an off-Broadway theater that does interpretations of plays by Chekov and Ibsen, and she does a lot of Pilates.

  The Red Monkey, Julian had reminded them, is a known restaurant, which left Bunny no choice, as far as she could help it, but to put the word in air quotes. “Known.” A relic from the era when like-minded uber-snooty restaurants were, for all intents and purposes, closed to the public, until without warning or explanation, poof! over, so over, but the Red Monkey held on. Although hardly what it was in its ’80s heyday—for example, the phone number is now listed—The Monkey, as Julian calls it, remains sufficiently attitudinarian that to score a reservation for New Year’s Eve means that you are famous, in the New York way of famous, which means you’re not necessarily someone recognized on the street, but in certain circles, your name is “known.” That, or else you know the chef.

  Albie can’t imagine this dinner being anything but difficult. At best, difficult. At worst, a scene. A scene. He tries to reason with his wife. “Four hours of sleep? How could you possibly enjoy yourself on four hours of sleep? You’re going to be exhausted.”

  “I want to go.” Bunny enunciates each word emphatically. I. Want. To. Go.

  “But why?” Albie asks. “Why do you want to go?”

  “Because they are our friends, and dinner with them is a New Year’s Eve tradition.” She, who mocks tradition, scoffs at family rituals, hides away in closets from time-honored practices—such a statement is practically aphasic in its incomprehensibility. Even Bunny knows it is a crackpot response. “And I’m trying to be normal.”

  Albie wishes he could tease her, tell her to give it up because she’ll never be normal. He wishes he could say that he loves her just as she is, but he’s not sure if it’s true; not as she is, not as she is now. Instead, he suggests, “Maybe later you can take a nap.”

  Last year, midway through their New Year’s Eve dinner, Bunny, impatient and desperate for a cigarette, got up from the table saying, “Excuse me. I need my fix.” With Albie’s sports jacket draped over her shoulders, she braved the cold for a Camel Light. In the relative quiet of the out-of-doors, relative to the clamor and clatter of the restaurant, it was with the clarity and intensity of hyperrealism that she was struck by a thought: I cannot stomach those people. It was an uncomfortable thought because, except for Stella—Stella who was like a sister had she been able to choose a sister, a sister she loved—those people were her closest friends. It did not feel good to acknowledge that her closest friends were people she could not stomach. But that wasn’t quite right. She did like them. She did. It was only that she wished she liked them more. She wished she liked them a lot. Done with her cigarette, she ground out the remains with the heel of her shoe, and readied herself to return to the restaurant to rejoin her husband and their closest friends for dinner on New Year’s Eve.

  The Embarrassments of Suffering

  The cat stretches his neck, and Albie scratches him under the chin. If only Bunny were more like Jeffrey. Or even a little bit like Jeffrey. “How about some breakfast?” Albie asks. “There are bagels in the freezer. I can scrape the mold off the cream cheese.” He hardly expects Bunny to laugh at what is a pale attempt at humor under any circumstances, yet he has hopes for a droll ha-ha or even a half smile, but Bunny only says, “I’m not hungry.”

  “Coffee, then? What about a cup of coffee?”

  “No,” she says. “Not now. Maybe later.”

  Every day Albie tells her it would be a good thing if she were to get dressed and go out for a walk, and every day she says, “Not now. Maybe tomorrow.”

  Now, seemingly apropos of nothing unless you’re privy to her state of mind, Bunny wants to know, “What’s that animal? The one that curls itself into a ball?” At that, on cue, Jeffrey gets up and does that cat thing, the walking in tight circles, counter-clockwise, a ritualistic three times around, as if taking part in a druid divorce, before he settles down and curls into a ball. Bunny shakes her head. “No, I mean as a defense mechanism. Against predators,” she adds, unnecessarily. Her attempt to remember what surely she knows blinks like a light bulb loose in the socket, and her effort to recollect comes to her in an unrealized image that breaks into particles of dust before it can take form. She is certain that there is such an animal, but she can’t come up with what it’s called or what it looks like except she’s pretty sure it has a tail.

  Intermittent and short-term memory loss is symptomatic of her affliction: facts and dates elude her. She frequently drops the thread that pulls a thought through from beginning to conclusion, and words—not all words, but deeply desired words—vanish in a flash like lantern fish at the bottom of the ocean. She finds she can describe a scene, but the connective tissue needed to tell a story becomes white space, like lines skipped on the page.

  Her affliction. Bunny does not know how else to phrase it, how to articulate what is wrong with her. Not what is wrong with her in the big picture, insofar as what is wrong with her personality. That she knows how to articulate; like a line memorized for the stage, Bunny will often say, “Generally speaking, I am a headache of a person who is not easy to like.” It’s true. Bunny is not easy to like, but it’s possible to love her.

  Although there is no chill in the room, Bunny pulls the blanket up to her chin. The blanket—Adirondack pine-tree green wool, coarse in texture similar to a hair shirt—is a blanket that she associates with the Girl Scouts. Not that Bunny ever was a Girl Scout or a Campfire Girl or a member of any other fascist or neo-fascist organization that requires wearing a uniform with a sash to display medals, ribbons, and badges. Lack of firsthand experience, however, plays no part in her formation of intractable ideas, one of which is that the Girl Scouts, a socially regimented youth group ripe for totalitarian indoctrination, spend their weekends goose-stepping along mountain trails. But, even for Bunny, to connect the Brownies to the Brown Shirts was pushing it, although it’s never stopped her from mentioning—just mentioning, mind you—that brown is a curious choice of color for a uniform for little girls because, as far as children’s tastes are concerned, well, there’s a reason there are no brown balloons.

  Pronouncements such as these are emblematic of problems with her personality. But contrarian disagreeability is irrelevant to this particular iteration of what is wrong with Bunny. Although she cannot bring herself to say so in these words, Bunny is suffering from depression. In reference to herself the inherent theatricality of the verb to suffer embarrasses her. In this context, to suffer, she believes, would be melodramatic and self-aggrandizing, not to mention rendering her a person empathetically stunted when you consider real suffering like starving to death or stage four colon cancer or a baby rhesus monkey given a wire coat hanger to cling to instead of a mother. To refer to herself as suffering would mean that, on top of everything else, she’d also be an asshole.

  Of all the things that can go wrong with your mind, of all of the Oliver Sacks-ian mistaking your husband for a pair of mittens kinds of things, depression, even major depressive disorder, isn’t likely to elicit much more than a yawn or a roll of the eyes. In fact, it could be said that there is nothing wrong with Bunny other than her indulging a penchant for self-pity. But if there isn’t anything really wrong, then what is wrong with Bunny?

  No matter what is wrong with Bunny, whatever you want to call it, one thing is certain—to be sick in the head is not at all the same as being normal sick. If you are normal sick, people will at least pretend to care. If you are normal sick, people will call or even stop by for a visit. They will offer to run errands for you, pick up orange juice and NyQuil; they will offer to bring you soup and banana smoothies; they will offer to walk your dog. They will say, “Please, let me know if there’s anything I can do. Anything at all.” Of course they are counting on you to take them up on none of it, but at least they
go through the motions. Sometimes they send flowers. But no one has come to visit Bunny. No one has offered to bring her hot soup; no one has sent her so much as a Get Well card or a balloon, one of those Mylar balloons with a yellow happy face, and you can forget about a basket of fruit.

  In all fairness, the bit about no one sending her a card, that is not entirely accurate. Although it wasn’t exactly a Get Well card, less than two weeks ago, Lizzie Frank sent her an email:

  Dear Bunny,

  We all have bad days. You’re not special. Pull up your pants and get over it.

  XO Lizzie

  PS Don’t forget. New Year’s Eve. We’re expecting you.

  Also to be fair, people do call Albie to ask how Bunny is feeling; what they won’t do is call when Albie isn’t home. No one wants to talk to Bunny. They are afraid to ask Bunny how she is feeling.

  As to be expected in light of his profession, Albie knows about the ways of animals, their habits and habitats, their mating rituals, what they eat, and which ones have tails. He knows about their defense mechanisms, those that hide, those that run with the wind, and those that curl into a ball as a means of defense. In answer to Bunny’s question he says, “The armored millipede, the hedgehog, the armadillo.” Then, unable to resist, he gets carried away with himself about the armor of the armadillo. Overly effusive in his description of the plates of the dermal bone, he is waxing on about the horn-covered epidermal scales when Bunny cuts him off. “No,” she says. “Not the armadillo.”

  Although Bunny has always been enthused, fascinated even, by what he knows, by what excites him in his field of study, her evident lack of interest now in dermal bones is to be expected. Expected, which doesn’t mean there’s not a nettle-like sting to it. But the sting subsides quickly, and Albie says, “Maybe you’re thinking of the hedgehog. The hedgehog has quills that look like the quills of a porcupine, but they are hollow and don’t easily detach.” Before Albie can explain how the hedgehog curls into a tight ball, the quills, or spines, projecting outward, Bunny asks, “Would you make some coffee?”