Rabbits for Food Page 5

  “Read this.” Dr. Stine gave Bunny a copy of a paper she’d written called “Too Much Mother Too Close to Home,” one she just happened to have on hand, in which, based on his story “So Much Water So Close to Home,” she psychoanalyzed Raymond Carver as if his story and his life were one and the same. Goodbye Dr. Stine.

  The Effexor/Zoloft cocktail wore thin.

  Unlike the others, Dr. Lowenstein neither gave her advice nor spoke in platitudes. Mostly, he said nothing, which might’ve provoked Bunny to ask, “What am I paying you for? I can talk to myself for free,” except it seemed that he rarely spoke because he was listening. Moreover, he was the one who found the best mix of drugs for her to date and the only side effect was a dry mouth. In mid-November, at the onset of the holiday season and after approximately eight months of weekly sessions with Dr. Lowenstein, at the end of their hour, which, as with all psychologists, was fifty minutes, Dr. Lowenstein took a moment, and then he clasped his hands together and leaned forward. “Bunny,” he said, “this is something important for you to know. So listen carefully to what I am saying.” He waited for her to nod, and then, his Bronx accent as thick and dark as history, he continued. “In the eyes of the world, Bunny, people such as yourself are the same as the mentally retarded. You’re both at the far ends of the spectrum. You’re not the norm. People in the norm, they can’t relate to what’s at either end. There’s nothing you can do to change that. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  When Bunny was six years old, her grandfather, a world-class misanthrope who loved only his wife and one of his granddaughters, came and sat beside Bunny under the willow tree in his backyard. “You’re smarter than all of them put together,” he said. “And I’m including your parents in that. They’re not even smart enough to know how smart you are.” When Bunny was seven, he died.

  All that prevented Bunny from staying on with Dr. Lowenstein from then until forever was a massive stroke that forced him to retire, for which Bunny has yet to forgive him. He’s probably dead by now.

  The woman who took over Dr. Lowenstein’s practice had elephantine ankles, and she responded to Bunny’s stories by scrunching her face. When, for the fourth time in three months, she analogized Bunny’s profound lack of confidence to some boring story about her kid learning to brush his teeth, Bunny moved on to Dr. Rodgers.

  Dr. Rodgers upped her dosage of Wellbutrin to 450 mg. Dr. Rodgers was massively empathetic. He felt Bunny’s pain far more than she did, which she thought to be unfair.

  Dr. Manfrid, the psychiatrist who followed Dr. Rodgers, was the one she disliked most of all, and for good reason. Yet, she stayed with him for more years than any of the others because, as she said to him, “It’s sort of like a hostage situation here.”

  “Do you want to explain what you mean by that?” he asked.

  “This,” she gestured, her hand moving like a flipper, “this, me, you, here, this is a waste of time. But if I don’t come here, then you won’t write me the prescription.”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “So, that’s what I meant. It’s like you’re holding me hostage.”

  As if he were issuing her a challenge or a dare, he said, “You’re free to leave any time you want.”

  “You’ve got a point,” Bunny said, and then, neglecting to close the door behind her, she left. You could read into her neglecting to close the door behind her, something about wanting to keep the door between them open. But you’d be wrong. It was only Bunny being rude.

  Hence, the psychopharmacologist. Once every three months, he took her blood pressure, asked how she was feeling and wrote out her prescription. Over time he raised the 450 mg of Wellbutrin XL to 600 mg, which is the maximum dose. Eventually, he threw in some Lexapro.

  When it was becoming evident to Albie that the drugs were failing, and Bunny was slipping, he suggested she might want to go back into therapy.

  “I’ve been talking to those people for more than half my life,” she said. “And what good has it done me? What? I’m going to start in with someone new, and they’ll ask about my childhood, and I’ll tell them those same stories I told all the others? There’s only so many times you can tell the same stories.”

  Albie suggested that perhaps she tell some different stories, some other stories, but Bunny said, “I don’t have any other stories.”

  The People, They Come and Go

  Even more than he worries over what could go wrong at dinner, Albie fears what could go wrong at the Frankenhoffs’ after-party. The Frankenhoffs are Lizzie Frank and Jack Hoffman. Yes, the same Lizzie Frank who sent Bunny the Get-Well-Quit-Sniveling email. Everyone calls them the Frankenhoffs. The origin of the portmanteau is long forgotten, except Bunny remembers because she was the one who coined it. But to make mention of that, no matter how off the cuff, would be embarrassing, like bragging about a big nothing, and she might not even be believed, like when Al Gore said he invented the Internet, and everyone laughed at him.

  “If we do go to the dinner,” Albie ventures, “let’s at least skip the party.”

  “What party?” Bunny asks.

  “The Fankenhoffs’ party,” he reminds her.

  The Frankenhoffs live on the forty-fourth floor of a vacuous building in an apartment with walls that are mostly windows. It was the sunlight and the view that the windows offered that convinced the Frankenhoffs to buy an apartment too easily mistaken for a suite in the Park Lane Hotel. The bedroom windows look out over the river, which is nice enough, but from the wall-to-wall living room window, although a dozen blocks uptown and two avenues west, they have a panoramic view of the eyesore that is Times Square, which is why every year beginning in 1998, when they first moved into their over-priced Trump Dump, the Frankenhoffs have hosted an after-party. What better place for all their friends to gather together to watch the ball drop?

  Their friends. Again, Bunny would make quotation marks with her fingers. Their “friends.” Bunny is a fan of air quotes. Air kisses, too.

  Bunny and Albie go to the Frankenhoffs’ after-party because Elliot and Trudy and Julian and Lydia go, and they feel obligated to go with them; a reason which is sufficiently inane and made worse by the insufferable tedium of being there. The Frankenhoffs’ party mixes their old friends with their new friends, which means an interminable hour or two of making small talk with exclusive people who are, and will remain, strangers, and catching up with people they’ve not seen since the New Year’s Eve before because who would want to see these people by choice? Catching up boils down to verbal updates of curricula vitae. The Frankenhoffs’ friends, old and new, are people who define themselves by their professions: film producers, editors, architects, professors in theory-dominated English departments, neuroscientists, museum curators, something-in-the-theater, and administrators for non-profit organizations, none of which get Bunny’s charitable contributions because she tends to give to organizations dedicated to the reduction of suffering.

  This year, Bunny defines herself as nothing.

  The Frankenhoffs’ new friends are people with whom they became acquainted throughout the year, people they cultivate like winter annuals in the hope that a friendship will bloom, people whom Bunny refers to as ornamental cabbage. Ornamental cabbage cycles, from germination to death, in a mere eight weeks of the growing season.

  “Not always,” Albie had told her. “Mostly it does. But often, the ornamental cabbage winds up as a biennial.”

  Bunny shrugged. It is the same with the Frankenhoffs’ new friends. With particularly rich fertilizer, some of them will hang in there for another year, which is why they fuss and fawn over their new friends, compliment their clothes or hair color or the brilliance of their accomplishments, while keeping a watchful eye, taking care that their glasses are full, and have they tried the pastries? Lizzie baked them herself. Lizzie bakes pastries that span the globe. Tacked to her kitchen wall is a map of the world
. Each year she bakes pastries of a different nation, noted with a push-pin. The pastries of some nations taste like Silly Putty.

  Because what’s to be gained by gushing over friends you’ve had for years? Friends you’ve had for years are practically losers. Inevitably, Bunny was to be found standing alone in a corner of the Frankenhoffs’ minimalistically furnished living room, sipping her wine, her pastry wrapped in a napkin until she could locate a trash can. Eventually someone would approach her, someone like that filmmaker who had a mustache, one that arched like an eyebrow, which was sufficiently disturbing. He wanted to know what she had written, had she written something he might’ve read, or something he might’ve heard about.

  “Probably not,” Bunny said.

  “Are you someone I should know?” he asked.

  “Probably not,” Bunny said, to which he said, “Well, good luck to you.”

  Good luck to you.

  Equally predetermined would be the conversation about her name, such as it was a conversation and not a prosecutorial inquiry: On your birth certificate, it says Bunny? For real, your parents named you Bunny? As if, if the question were reworded and asked often enough, she’d be tricked into confessing that her real name is Amanda or Jeanne. “Why would they name you Bunny?”

  “Because,” Bunny would say, “they raised rabbits. For food.”

  An irritating but harmless exchange, except for last year’s after-party when Bunny was approached by a professor of Gender Studies at Yale—“at Yale,” she emphasized. “Bunny?” she asked. “That can’t be your real name. What is your given name?”

  “Bunny is my given name. It’s on my birth certificate. Any other questions?”

  The professor wore black-framed eyeglasses to announce her fierce intelligence, and her haircut was as sharp and ugly as her tone of voice. “Bunny is a pet name for a child. How can you expect anyone to take you seriously when you have a child’s name? I strongly urge you to change it,” she said.

  Bunny thanked the professor of Gender Studies at Yale for her advice, and then offered up some of her own. “A mint. Or a piece of gum. Something. Because it’s bad. Offensive, really.”

  The professor of Gender Studies at Yale recoiled as if Bunny were the one in need of a mint, and asked, “What exactly is your problem?” Then, she brushed at her shoulder as if she thought she might have dandruff, too, as if bad breath and dandruff go hand in hand. “Because something is wrong with you,” she said. “Very wrong.”

  Now, Albie again urges they don’t go to the party. “Let’s do ourselves a favor and skip it. It’s not as if we want to watch the ball drop.” In fact, Bunny has never seen the ball drop. Not on television, and she’d have scooped out an eyeball rather than go, in person, on the ground, to Times Square on New Year’s Eve. And in previous years at the Frankenhoffs’ parties, in those few minutes before midnight, when everyone crowded by the window, the anticipation gathering like static electricity, rising in preparation to assuredly fall, just the same as the ball will drop in its sixty calibrated seconds, Bunny would slip away and lock herself in the bathroom, where she’d sit on the edge of the tub, light a cigarette, and wait for it to be over.

  Prompt: A Movie (300 words or less)

  To dismiss the traditions and rituals and holidays is to mock what is sacred to others, to insult their beliefs, and to ruin the pleasure for everyone else because you are a difficult and disagreeable person.

  “I’m not mocking Thanksgiving,” I said. “I just don’t want to go.”

  Why? Why wouldn’t I want to spend a day with family. Extended family. Uncles and aunts and cousins, and last year there was an infant, a cheesy-stinking font of spit-up, and everyone carrying on as if the parents had actually done something extraordinary like publish a book or win the lottery, until I broke in and said, “The earthworm is impressive because it impregnates itself.” After that, they all gave me the cold shoulder except Natalie, my nine-year-old nose-picking booger-wiping-on-walls cousin with the mouse ears: circular ears set nearer to the top of her head than where you’d expect to find human ears; ears I could only hope were genetically recessive.

  “You want to stay home,” my mother gave up the argument, “then stay home. Alone,” she added with emphasis, as if alone were a state of being that I’d come to deeply regret soon enough.

  Positioned at the living room window, I watched the car pull out of the driveway and down the road until it went beyond my range of vision, and then I went to the kitchen to make a feast of my own. In the refrigerator was a packet of Oscar Mayer bologna and another of sliced ham, which had a pig for a logo. A cartoon pig wearing a chef’s hat, which was cruelty all on its own. I made myself a cheese sandwich. Three individually wrapped slices of Kraft American cheese on Arnold’s Bakery White garnished with two slices of a grainy-textured tomato, grainy-textured like wet sand, and topped off with dollop of mayonnaise. For side dishes I chose a can of Diet Dr. Pepper and a stack of Oreo cookies, and I carried the tray to the family room, where I sat, cross-legged, on the floor in front of the television and ate my Thanksgiving dinner while watching Miracle on 34th Street, a movie I’d seen a trillion and a half times before. Yet, still I was not prepared for how nearly unbearable it was to watch the movie to its very end, to that last scene when young Natalie Wood’s wish comes true, when we see the ordinary house with a backyard swing under a patch of sunlight, an image that foreshadowed the inevitability of the excruciating ache of wistful regret that comes with a perfectly nice life.

  Already, it was dark outside. The kitchen light glowed with a yellow halo, and I caught sight of my reflection in the window, faint and opaque; there, but not there. I contemplated giving myself the finger, but didn’t bother. Taking the box of Oreos with however many cookies were left, I went to the living room where I cozied up in one of the two matching armchairs to read Peyton Place, yet again. Peyton Place was one of the half-dozen books in our house, all hardcover, navy-blue cloth bound, a shade of navy blue that was a near-enough match to the navy-blue upholstery of the couch, which matched the armchairs. The books filled the small shelf built into a corner table where my mother would’ve preferred to put geranium plants, but this shelf was not positioned for sunlight. I’d read the other five books a bunch of times too; they stunk even worse than Peyton Place. The one about the cattle drive in the Old West was the one that stunk the most.

  As if an Oreo were a Communion wafer or a tab of acid, I popped a cookie into my mouth, whole, where it was ablated, creamy on my tongue. I opened Peyton Place at random. Despite having it practically memorized word for word, I was sufficiently engaged with Peyton Place not to hear the car pull into the driveway. Instead, I heard the absence, the absence of sound of the motor turned off. Then came the muffled basso click of the car doors opening followed by the satisfied clap when shut.

  The four of them—my parents and my sisters—like the four cups of milk to a quart, the four quarters to a dollar, the four seasons in a year, four people to make a family—were in the foyer unwinding scarves, taking off their coats—the faw-yay, my mother called it, to which I’d said right, the faw-yay because we live in France—when Dawn, the youngest of us and already showing signs of the twat she would become, made a beeline for the living room to where I pretended to be deeply engrossed in my reading, as if I were oblivious to Dawn who was right there in front of me doing the little bouncy-dance of someone who really has to pee; really, really has to pee but, for whatever reason, is holding it in. Except Dawn didn’t have to pee. She was holding in words, words that she was desperate to utter, restraining herself only to sweeten the release, until she could contain it no longer. “Bunny, you won’t believe it, but I swear to you,” Dawn said, “the entire day, and no one, not one person, not even Natalie, asked where you were. It was like, Bunny who?”

  On that first Thanksgiving without me there, my extended family regenerated seamlessly, a Darwinian adaptation of
evolution that, among other improvements, allowed for more elbow room around the table.

  Even now, looking back, in retrospect, that was my happiest Thanksgiving ever.

  There Has to Be a Reason

  The ring of the phone comes at Bunny like a bomb gone off and, as if debris were about to fall, she grips the edge of the blanket, ready to pull it over her head. When the phone rings for a second time, Albie gets up to answer it, and Bunny has recovered well enough to say, “If it’s one of my sisters, I’m not here.”

  “I’ll say you’re out shopping. For confetti,” he adds and instantly regrets it. You never know what will set her off, but Bunny smiles. A sad little smile, nostalgic, almost, for the time when “for confetti” would’ve genuinely amused her. Still, it’s a smile and not a crying jag or an enraged fit, which it could’ve been because how she responds to jokes, quips, expressions of love or the last drop of patience—there’s no way to predict.

  As of late, her sisters call often. Or rather, they call often compared to how rarely they called before, and despite Albie’s periodic urging, Bunny never calls her sisters. Albie puts value on family, on the idea of family, but, as Bunny has pointed out, as an only child, he has no practical experience in the field.

  Albie’s childhood was a good one; happy, if you believe there is such a thing. He’d wanted for nothing except an older brother to pal around with, or even better, a baby sister to care for, to keep from harm. If he’d grown up anywhere other than New York City, Albie would’ve been the kind of kid who’d bring home a squirrel with a broken jaw or a baby sparrow fallen from its nest; a creature to rescue and protect, which is, not inconceivably, what drew him to Bunny in the first place.