Relief comes like the release of a coil. Albie springs up from the couch. “Colombian?” he offers her a choice. “Or French Mocha Java? We might still have some of that Sumatran blend left.”
“I don’t care,” Bunny says, and when Albie is out of earshot, she says it again. “I don’t care.” And then softer, “I don’t care,” and softer still, I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. Idon’tcareIdon’tcareIdon’tcare. The words take on a perpetual motion of their own like Newton’s pendulum, or the flow of a river, or the om of some pretend-Buddhist yahoo fraud. Bunny lacks the decency of tolerance when it comes to converts to Buddhism because her older sister is a pretend-Buddhist yahoo fraud. Bunny doesn’t much care for her older sister, and she doesn’t much care for her younger sister either, and the lack of affection is returned in kind.
Coffee Mugs
I don’t care, and then without any warning or preamble, no lump in her throat, no twitch of her lip, not the single sob that heralds the onset of a good cry, Bunny is weeping in the curious way she’s been weeping as of late. Without sound, without so much as a sniffle, her face is impassive, her eyes open and her stare as blank as that of a glass-eyed doll. The tears come, not in teardrops that roll down her cheeks like raindrops on a windowpane, but like water when a faucet is turned on all the way. The copiousness of her tears is remarkable, and equally remarkable is how, snap! just like that, the tears stop. By the time Albie returns from the kitchen with two mugs of coffee, it’s all over, as if there had been a sun shower, except without any sun.
“You made coffee?” Bunny says.
“You said you wanted coffee. Three minutes ago, you said you wanted coffee.”
“I did? What time is it?”
Before he can check his watch, Albie sets the two coffee mugs on the coffee table, which isn’t really a coffee table. It’s an old steamer trunk that serves as a coffee table. “It’s nine minutes past ten,” he says, and he slides the ashtray, filled with tar-stained filters and ash and one cigarette that is broken in half, to the far end of the trunk. One of the mugs, the one Albie sets closest to Bunny, is a souvenir mug from St. Thomas, white industrial ceramic adorned with a blue sailboat. As if she were about to reach for it, which she is not, Albie says, “Be careful. It’s hot.”
Instead of seating himself again on the edge of the couch, Albie sits on the other side of the coffee table in one of two mismatched chairs that are arranged for easy conversation; not that he harbors any illusions of engaging in easy conversation. Hanging on the wall to his left is a professionally framed black-and-white photograph of children in ballet costumes that is, in fact, quite brilliant. Bunny got the photograph at the same thrift store as the pair of paint-by-numbers—swans on a lake—that hang vertically alongside the photograph. Also hanging on that wall are the two paintings—both bright swirls of textured colors—they bought years ago at a small gallery because the artist is a friend, which is to say they don’t like the paintings, but they don’t hate them, either. They also own a cuckoo-looking collage—a chicken drawn with crayon on a torn sheet of old newspaper, bits of fabric and string for feathers—which hangs in her office. Her office is the second bedroom in their two-bedroom, fourth-floor apartment. The other walls in the living room, floor to ceiling, are lined with bookshelves. Behind the chair where Albie is seated are three windows. The sheer white curtains are no longer bright white. They never bought anything like a bedroom set or a dining room table with matching chairs. All of their furniture and household goods—dishes and silverware—were things picked up piecemeal at flea markets and junk shops or low-end antique stores. Except for the fact that it’s a co-op, which they now own outright, having long since paid off the mortgage, their apartment is emblematic of the lack of maturity in the way that Bunny and Albie live their lives. Bunny is forty-three years old; Albie is forty-five, but there is little to indicate that adults live here, and not graduate students. They don’t own a car or a summerhouse or have children. These deprivations, such as they are deprivations, are by choice, and not the result of frugality. So what, then, do they do with their money? They pay their bills; they make monthly charitable donations; and after that, they pretty much just piss it away.
Although she makes no move to reach for the coffee mug emblazoned with the blue sailboat, Bunny eyeballs it with suspicion, hostility even, as if to say, “What is that doing on our coffee table?” Neither she nor Albie—neither together nor apart—have ever been to St. Thomas. For starters, Bunny has a thing, a big thing, against sand, and Albie prefers not to go anywhere if to go includes staying overnight or flying. When Bunny travels, sometimes for work, to give readings, to sit on panels, or for pleasure because Bunny likes to see the world, she would go with Stella or alone. Albie has always encouraged Bunny to travel because he likes her to do whatever she wants to do, and because he doesn’t at all mind time to himself. Now, she asks about the coffee mug. “Where did that come from?”
In yet another attempt, needless to say in vain, to get Bunny to lighten up, Albie says, “St. Thomas.” As if there were any light left in her, which there’s not. Or, at least none in evidence.
“I meant here. Where was it?”
“I don’t know,” Albie says. “It was in the cabinet.”
“Which cabinet?”
“The cabinet with all the other coffee mugs.”
“Have we had it a long time?”
“I don’t know.” Albie is good man, but he is not a saint. He gets exasperated the same as anyone would. “It’s a coffee mug. Who cares?”
It’s a coffee mug. Who cares? There’s no need to reply to what is a rhetorical question, but for the record—he cares, to the degree that his coffee mug is his coffee mug. Albie’s coffee mug was a gift from Bunny, a Valentine’s Day gift, a Valentine’s Day gift from so long ago that the bright red hearts have faded to a pale pink, but he’s been known to wander around the kitchen asking, “Where’s my coffee mug? Did you see my coffee mug?” When Bunny would then take it from the dishwasher, Albie would be visibly relieved as if it were a critical document or something of great value that he thought he’d lost. Albie has no disdain for cheap sentiment when it’s sincere.
Albie’s a little nuts in his own right. But isn’t everyone?
Bunny used to have her own coffee mug, one that was hers alone. One of those personalized ones, with your name on it. Wildflowers against an all-black background except for the block of white where Francine was written in calligraphy with red glaze.
The Francine mug had been a birthday gift from her friend Stella. It came with a card that read: You put the fun in dysfunctional. Stella gave her this gift at least eight or nine years ago. Maybe even more. It broke one day in August. This past August, it broke.
To try to read the look on Bunny’s face is like trying to figure out what a napkin is thinking.
“Dawn,” Bunny says. “It was Dawn.”
“What was Dawn? What about her?” Albie asks. Dawn is Bunny’s sister. The younger one.
“They go to places like that, places with sand,” Bunny says. “Family resorts,” she emphasizes.
Although Bunny cannot remember what time it was six seconds ago, or what she had for lunch yesterday or the word “parachute” or the difference between a simile and a metaphor or her wedding anniversary or what year she graduated from high school or how old she was when her father died or who wrote Of Time and the River or the title of that Martin Amis novel that she adores, she somehow has managed to remember that it was Dawn who gave her the coffee mug from St. Thomas. Dawn and her husband have two children, a boy and a girl. Her husband owns a small surgical supply company, which is like a gift to Bunny who never tires of saying, “My sister’s husband sells bedpans.”
“Dawn gave me that coffee mug,” Bunny says, and Albie responds, “It’s the French Mocha Java.”
Gift Giving
&
nbsp; In the dinky St. Thomas airport, not all that long ago, but when her children were still young enough to be excited by family vacations, it hit Dawn like a conk on the head: Although she remembered, as she always did, to get Nicole a gift, as sometimes happened, she clear forgot to get one for Bunny.
“Fuck Bunny,” her husband said.
“Fuck Bunny, fuck Bunny,” the kids chanted, rocking in their seats as if Fuck Bunny had an irrepressible beat to it.
The gift Dawn bought for Nicole, selected in deference to Nicole’s worship of Planet Earth, was a bracelet made of sea glass. Chances were good that neither Dawn nor Nicole knew that sea glass is the by-product of littering. For Nicole’s wife, Dawn bought a pair of sea glass earrings, and a sand dollar for their kid who was gravely disappointed to discover it was not a cookie, which was totally understandable because only twice in what, at that time, had been all of four years of life, had their kid ever had a cookie, both times at birthday parties not his own. At his birthday party, the kids got pita chips and hummus, which elicited, from Bunny, a surge of pity for the little boy. Nicole is a devoted mother, but she is similarly devoted to the folly that all things derived from the soil and the sea are healthy, exuberant with nutrients. Provided it was organically farmed, Nicole would drink a hemlock smoothie.
Bunny once let it drop that the lesbian couple who live next door to her also have a little boy, and that little boy is allowed to eat cookies. “I once saw the kid eating ice cream,” Bunny said, and Nicole shook her head. “Not all lesbians are good mothers.”
“You’re missing the point,” Bunny had said. “What I’m trying to say is that it’s unlikely their kid will develop an eating disorder.”
Bunny might’ve been lacking in sensitivity in the way she put it, but she did have evidence, clinical studies, to support the point she was trying to get across.
“Let it go,” Albie had advised. “Science can’t convert a true believer.”
And Nicole is a true believer, as well as, according to Bunny, a true hypocrite, one who doesn’t have time or money to spare for the Environmental Defense Fund or Greenpeace, to actively engage with the same issues that she will rail on about, because, according to Nicole, she is busy raising a child and climbing the ladder to Personal Enlightenment, which, as she describes it, sounds no different from a Scientologist reaching OT Level VIII. Nicole’s claim is that her own spiritual growth, and that of her son and her Wiccan princess wife, will result in a better world for everyone.
“Right,” Bunny had said. “You’ll be in Nirvana and the rest of us will be munching on Soylent Green.”
“Soylent Green?” Nicole didn’t know about Soylent Green, and Bunny told her, “Kale. It’s a kind of kale.”
Because Dawn is a mother of two children, she’s done with her contributions to society. Moreover, she has a lesbian sister whom she loves and whose approval she seeks, and isn’t that proof enough that she is a good person?
The St. Thomas airport gift shop was bountiful with an array of trinkets that no one could possibly want: St. Thomas–embossed shot glasses, pencil boxes, souvenir spoons and thimbles. Dawn did think the Christmas tree ornaments—swordfish and dolphins wearing Santa hats—were kind of cute, but Bunny could get very snide when it comes to things that are cute. Dawn shelled out $14.98 for a two-dollar coffee mug, and fuck Bunny if she doesn’t like it.
On those odd occasions when one or the other of her sisters would come to the city, Bunny would disrupt her day, an irritation unto itself, to meet Nicole at the Tea Retreat or to have coffee with Dawn at whichever Starbucks was most handy to where Dawn had parked her car. To sit down long enough to have a meal with either of her sisters would be to push the boundaries of tolerance, on both sides of the table. At the Starbucks on Sixth Avenue at Seventeenth Street, when Dawn was nearly done with her skim-milk latte and Bunny was swirling the dregs of her black coffee in the paper cup, the conversation running on fumes, both sisters eagerly anticipating their goodbyes, Dawn fished a cube-shaped box from her tote bag. “We got you a little something when we were in St. Thomas.”
“When were you in St. Thomas?”
“Right after Christmas. I told you we were going. Don’t you remember?”
“Apparently not.” Bunny opened the white box. “A coffee mug,” she said.
Other gifts from Dawn and her bedpan salesman husband included a set of wine glasses with a note To Dawn and Michael, Happy Anniversary, Love, Melissa and Stephan tucked inside the box. There were mezcal-flavored lollipops from Mexico. Last Christmas they gave Albie two books: Secrets from the Egyptian Tombs, and Dangerous Dan: Memoirs of a Snake Trainer. Bunny also got two books: Fifty Strategies for Creating Characters and So, You Want to Write a Novel?
“She meant well.” Albie made excuses for her sister. “It’s not malicious.”
But what did Albie know? He was an only child and he was loved.
Bunny took the St. Thomas coffee mug from the box and said, “How thoughtful of you.”
Dawn’s smile was brittle, as if you could snap it in half, like a dry twig or a chicken bone. “I remembered that you drink coffee,” she said.
“Yes,” Bunny said. “We’re in Starbucks. I do drink coffee.” She turned the mug over in her hands, holding it out for her sister to see the sticker on the bottom. “Look at that. You bought it in St. Thomas, but it’s made in China.”
Dawn wasn’t looking at the coffee mug; she was looking straight on at Bunny when she said, “And you wonder why we don’t like you.”
“Actually,” Bunny said, “I don’t wonder. Not at all.”
Dawn grabbed her coat off the back of her chair, leaving Bunny alone at the table where, tearing off bits of her Starbucks paper cup, she stayed long enough for the sting to subside, and the need for Albie’s comfort to pass. On those occasions when the last thing Bunny wants to hear is the truth, Albie does not equivocate. Bunny knew perfectly well what he’d say. He’d say, “Come on, Bunny. You asked for it.”
No shit. Obviously she asked for it. That much she could admit. What she did not want to hear from Albie was why, why did she ask for it?
At home, the St. Thomas mug went in the cabinet with all the other coffee mugs, and until now, it had been forgotten. And you wonder why we don’t like you.
Prompt: A Shoebox (300 words or less)
Erma Bombeck or Ann Landers, Dear Abby, Miss Manners, Garfield, Madame Blavatsky, Charlie Brown—one of those purveyors of wisdom in a can—whichever of them wrote this treacle in print, my mother clipped the column from the newspaper and left it on my bed, as if a newspaper clipping were a piece of foil-wrapped chocolate.
It was not unusual for my mother to cut columns from the newspaper or an article from some idiotic magazine to leave on my bed. Articles or pamphlets about Girl Scouting or quilting bees for teens, but I was not one for group activities. Then there was that spate of straight-from-the-heart-of-Hallmark greeting cards left there for no occasion other than Just Because I Love You or I Love You Thiiiiiiisss Much. I never knew what to say about those cards, and so I said nothing.
The title of this newspaper clipping read “To the Middle Child.”
Although titled “To the Middle Child,” it opened with the part To the Firstborn:
To the Firstborn—I’ve always loved you best because you were our first miracle. You were the fulfillment of young love. With you, we became a family. Nothing was ever as thrilling as your first smile and your first words. We cheered your first steps but we were afraid to let go of your hand. Your Baby Book was an encyclopedia, fully illustrated and annotated. You had more clothes than a Barbie doll.
There was more, but it was more of the same.
To the Middle Child—I’ve always loved you best because you drew the dumb spot in the family, and it made you stronger for it. You cried less. You had more patience. You wore faded clothes that were hand-me-do
wns. You were forgiving. You never in your life did anything “first” but it only made you more special. The world would not come to an end if you went to bed with dirty feet.
To the Baby—I’ve always loved you best because you will always be my sweetest baby, even when you’re all grown up with children of your own. You are the joy that gives . . .
I read and I re-read: the first miracle, the dumb spot, the sweetest baby, the sweetest baby, the first miracle, the dumb spot, the dumb spot.
I read this again and again until the words melted into each other, like a spill on the floor. Then, I flushed the newspaper clipping down the toilet, and stayed in the bathroom until it—whatever it was—went away.
There was another clipping also dedicated to the plight of the middle child that my mother left on my bed. This one was a poem that had to have been transcendent, something I could not yet comprehend, but, over time, with the wisdom I was sure I’d acquire—because, fundamentally, I was sure that I was deep—it would become clear. In light of the anticipated epiphany, I put the poem in the shoebox where I’d kept ticket stubs, postcards, notes passed in class, a dried flower, all of which, I imagined, would someday be a box filled with memories; ones I’d actually want to remember. Lots of people keep that sort of box. The difference being that, even at the time, I knew that my box contained pretty much nothing but evidence of my desperation. Nevertheless, for quite a few years, I kept the box of good times that never happened with the hope that posterity could be duped. In whatever way I’d wished my life might be imagined after my death, I was unable to deceive myself on such a grand scale. I had no desire to sift through my scraps of humiliation. Other than the poem that my mother had left for me on my bed, I never took a second look at anything secreted away in that particular shoebox of memories. The poem I returned to many, many times.
Rabbits for Food Page 3
