Unlike Albie, Bunny does believe in God. Not in any kind of formal or traditional way. More like concept, a theory. But in whatever guise, you might think Bunny’s God doesn’t much like her, either.
The picture of Bunny and Stella, on the day they graduated from college, dressed in their caps and gowns, sticking their tongues out at the camera. Shredded.
Devotion
The same way a scotch on the rocks at the end of a long day does not get you drunk, but rather relieves all the tension and stress of what came before it, that’s what it is like for Albie when he is in Muriel’s bed. “I should get going,” Albie says, and Muriel concurs, but he makes no move in that direction.
It would be wrong to think of Muriel as Albie’s mistress or anything else silly or sordid. Muriel and Albie are the best of friends who, every now and again, go to bed together because it’s a good thing for the both of them. The good it does Albie should be obvious, and despite a general assumption that a single woman is a desperately needy woman who will cling to you like a koala bear to a eucalyptus tree—the same way it’s thought that to be a single man over forty is to wear a sandwich board announcing that you have deeply rooted psychological problems—any pity for Muriel is pity wasted. She adores Albie, but what she wants from him is what she wants from any man she takes to bed, which amounts to, in her words, a happy romp in the hay. She enjoys fucking, but it doesn’t mean anything. A drink, a fuck, it’s all the same to her, which is not to say she is indiscriminate. On the contrary, she’s terrifically picky because both activities require some degree of conversation, and Muriel is easily bored.
What Muriel does not want, what she absolutely, unequivocally, does not want is a husband or a boyfriend or a commitment or any obligation or responsibility to any man or anyone else, either. Muriel doesn’t even have a cat.
If ever Bunny were to have asked, “Are you fucking Muriel?” Albie would’ve said, “Muriel is one of my closest friends.” But before you go passing judgment on passive deceit, consider this: the truth, the whole truth, the cold truth, the hard truth, the ugly truth, the sad truth, and someone else’s idea of the truth which is not necessarily your own—the truth can be a cruel and dangerous weapon; flat out not nice. The truth is not necessarily a welcome addition to a conversation.
But Bunny has never asked Albie if he is fucking Muriel, because who knows where such a question would lead. Bunny has her faults, but—and she’d be the first to say so—there is no one she dislikes more than a sanctimonious hypocrite, and she’s got secrets of her own. What matters is their devotion. Big picture devotion. Should Albie ever find himself in need of something like a kidney, Bunny would, just like that, fork one over. “It’s no big deal,” she’d say. “I’ve got two of them,” and then she’d say no more about it. Not ever again. For Bunny, what matters most is that Albie would never leave her, and all comfort is found in knowing that he won’t ever leave her. Not even now, even though now she wishes he would leave her. More than once over these last weeks, repeated because she didn’t recall having said so before, she’s said, “If I were you, I’d divorce me.”
Albie’s response has been to laugh lightly and say, “I’ll think about it.” Then, just to be sure she understood that he was teasing, he’d kiss her on the top of her head and pretend not to notice when she winced.
Again, Albie says to Muriel, “I should get going.”
Are You Here?
Driver’s license. Shredded.
Passport. Shredded.
All evidence of Bunny. Shredded.
Where Are You?
Bunny pulls the plug from the socket and holds it as if she’s not sure what to do with it or what purpose it has. The opacity of the moment is shattered when she hears Albie’s key in the door, as if the sound of the door opening were the same as the clank of a gate closing behind her.
Albie slips off his coat and drapes it over the back of a chair. “Bunny,” he calls. “Bunny?” When she doesn’t respond, foreboding rises in him like heat. “Bunny, where are you? Bunny? Bunny, are you here?”
Of course Bunny hears Albie calling out for her, and she hears the disturbance in his voice, but she doesn’t know what to say. Is she here? Here, surrounded by Hefty bags filled with the documentation of herself now destroyed; the evidence of her life shredded, and how does she answer the question, Are you here?
Albie’s heart fibrillates madly while Jeffrey rubs against his legs. It’s a cat’s way of saying, “You’re home! You’re home! Don’t ever go away again.” Albie picks Jeffrey up and holds him close. Jeffrey purrs. It’s a well-documented fact that physical contact with a dog or a cat calms anxiety and lowers blood pressure, but at this moment Jeffrey is having no such effect. Albie whispers into the cat’s ear, “Where’s your mother? Where’s Bunny?” And then, as if by magic, magic the way a flock of doves gets produced from thin air, there standing in the living room is Bunny, who says, “You’re home.”
Albie puts Jeffrey down, and asks her, “Didn’t you hear me calling you?”
“No,” she lies. “I was cleaning up.”
“Cleaning up? Cleaning up what?”
“My office.” Bunny takes her place on the couch. She covers her legs with that itchy blanket, and she asks, “Did you have a nice time?”
Albie’s heartbeat has settled into a more measured thump, but it is hardly the heartbeat of a person at rest. “Yes,” he tells Bunny. “I had a nice time.”
“I like Muriel,” Bunny says.
Albie sits in a chair across from her, and says, “I like Muriel, too,” and Bunny suggests to him, “You should marry her.”
As if Bunny were being flippant, Albie says, “Muriel might think otherwise.” Then he asks, “How are you feeling?”
“Okay, I guess,” she says, but without conviction.
“And what about tonight? You still want to go?”
“Yes,” she says. “I still want to go.”
Heeding Muriel’s good counsel, Albie makes no attempt to change her mind. Instead he says, “I’m going to take a nap.”
“What time is it?” Bunny asks.
Albie looks at his watch. “Three fifty-two,” he tells her.
“Three fifty-two,” Bunny repeats. “Three fifty-two,” as if she could hold on to what has, in these few seconds, already passed.
“I’ll wake you in an hour, hour and a half,” Albie says, even though it is he who is going to nap. Bunny won’t sleep, but she will close her eyes.
She will close her eyes.
Prompt: Describe a Landscape (300 words or less)
Picture it like this: I am driving a car on a narrow and lonely mountain road. A narrow and lonely mountain road that winds like ribbon. I am above the tree line. It doesn’t matter what kind of car I am driving, but it definitely is not a new car. It’s an old car, a shit-can of a car. The sky grows dark, but not because it’s nearing night. It’s sometime between two and three in the afternoon. The sky grows dark because storm clouds are gathering, and it gets darker still. A drop of rain splats on the hood of my shit-can car. And then another drop of rain splats and then another and then more. I turn on the windshield wipers, but nothing happens. I turn the windshield wipers off and then on again, but still nothing happens. The windshield wipers don’t work. The windshield wipers are broken. The rain is no longer falling in drops. The rain is falling in puddles that splash against the car windows as if pails of water were being emptied from above. There is no place to pull over. I can’t see the road. I put the car in park, and turn off the ignition. I sit there and watch the rain wash over the windows. I watch the landscape, a world, without definition, and I listen to the rain drumming on the roof of the car.
People who are not easy to like, they have feelings just like nice people do.
While Albie Sleeps
If stock is to be put in the Hippocratic theory of the four humors
as indicators of temperament, it would be safe to say Bunny was born with an extravagance of melaina chole, more commonly known as black bile. Pensive, withdrawn, wary, pragmatic and pessimistic, she was an unhappy child, and to see her now, you might reasonably assume there was never a time when she was happy; an assessment neither accurate nor inaccurate. There have been long stretches of something like happiness. But from the onset of puberty until the end of her first semester at college, there were six seamless years of immaculate misery. Her anguish was pure, her angst a masterwork, and her adolescent rage, like coal over time and under pressure, crystalized; a gem of flawless wretchedness that all too often manifested itself in a desire to make everyone around her wretched, as well.
One night, her father, having reached his limit, having had it “up to here,” told her if she was unable to sit at the table and have a civilized conversation with her family, then perhaps she should take her plate outside and eat dinner in the yard. “Like a wild animal,” he said.
“For your information,” Bunny retorted, “wild animals don’t eat from plates,” and she picked up her plate along with her knife and fork, and went out to the backyard, where she did not eat, but she sat in the grass and pictured her family, choking on guilt and remorse, and how soon her father would come out and apologize. Maybe her mother would come with him, to give her daughter a hug, and later maybe her sisters would come to her room, just to hang out with her. When Bunny was done with this picture, she left her plate and utensils in the yard because wild animals don’t put their dinnerware in the dishwasher, and she went to her room, where she sat at her desk. Her desk was part of her matching bedroom set: bed, chest of drawers and nightstand, all white with a trim of pink flowers. The bedspread and throw pillows were a pink floral print. Pink ruffled curtains, a pink rug shaped and hooked as a rose; it was a room that in no way reflected that which Bunny articulated as the darkness of her soul. Her room, her room, the walls and the ceilings, she argued, ought to be painted matte black.
“Not a chance,” her mother had said. “Not in my house. When you have your own house, you can paint your walls whatever color want.”
“For your information,” Bunny said, “black isn’t a color.”
Bunny was big on the preface “for your information,” a turn of phrase that endeared her to no one.
From her white desk drawer with the hateful pink flowered trim, Bunny took two pens and her notebook, which she opened to a fresh page. To see herself through this time that was unbearable for all concerned, Bunny wrote poems, what she called poems. Anyone who knew anything about poetry would’ve called them drivel, and they’d have been right. Even worse, she was prolific, some nights producing four or even five of these cringeworthy poems; sentences of lugubrious banality, the lines broken at random. Although she remembers having written reams of these things, she can’t recall the specifics of any of them. Except for one, and even then, she can remember only the title, which was Fuck You Everyone, and at that, for the first time in a long time, Bunny laughs. Not a big laugh, it’s more of a snort, but it is a genuine visceral expression of pleasure that propels her up from the couch in search of paper and a pen, which she finds in the kitchen. Without thinking, she opens the refrigerator and gets an apple.
Apple in one hand, the pen in the other, her back resting against the arm of the couch, notepad propped up on her knees, Bunny writes: Fuck You Everyone. Then she bites into the apple, which is perfectly crisp. Fuck You Everyone, the revision. But it can’t be a revision when there is no trace of the original. She crosses out the revision and writes the sequel, which doesn’t sound right, either. Again? Fuck You Everyone, Again, that works for her. She skips a line, the pen poised for words to flow. The pen poised for the words to flow, but the words don’t flow. It’s as if she is physically unable to transmit the impulse from one neuron to another, as if her synaptic system were clogged the way an artery can clog or the way hair and gunk will clog the bathroom sink and the water puddles around the drain with nowhere to go. The words can’t, or won’t, flow, from head to hand, from thought to paper. She takes another bite from the apple. On a fresh sheet of paper she writes Fuck You Everyone, Again. Words bottleneck at the base of her skull. She presses the point of the pen hard into the page, like pressing against an iron door, either locked or too heavy for her to open, but then she writes.
She writes: Fuck You Everyone, Again / Stella, you had no right to die.
Bunny lets go of the apple. It falls to the floor.
Up and Away
Freshly showered and shaved, Albie’s hair is wet and he’s got a towel wrapped around his waist. It appears that Bunny is sleeping. On the floor near the couch, Albie spots the apple. He reaches around the coffee table to pick it up, and Bunny’s eyes open like the snap of a window shade. Where the apple has been eaten, the white flesh has turned brown. Bunny gropes for the notepad, and when she locates it safely hidden under the blanket, she rolls over to look at Albie, and she says, “I slept.”
“And you ate.” Albie holds the apple as if were something to contemplate, like Yorick’s skull.
“What time is it?” Bunny asks.
“It’s getting near six. How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay,” she says. “I’m good.” Then she says, “I should take a shower,” and Albie dares to be hopeful. Maybe Muriel was right, maybe this is the beginning of the end.
The hot shower turns her skin pink, and it feels like a gentle massage. Bunny washes away the grime and sweat with a moisturizing liquid body soap. A facial scrub made with granules of apricot seeds exfoliates, like sandpaper, the dead skin cells on her face and neck. After she shampoos her hair, Bunny reaches for the bottle of all-natural, home-brewed hair conditioner, which was a birthday gift from her sister Nicole. Bunny had feared the conditioner contained something like placenta from farm animals or human breast milk. But now, either she doesn’t care, or else she forgot about the possibility of the gross-out factor, and she combs the conditioner through her wet hair. While she waits the advised two minutes before rinsing it out, she cleans her fingernails with Albie’s nailbrush.
The transformation from rancid to clean, particularly after a stretch of feculence, is like being born again, minus Jesus. Praise is not for the Lord, but for the Hydroluxe showerhead.
With one towel wound around her head like a turban and another towel wrapped around her body sarong-style, Bunny roots around in the cabinet under the bathroom sink for the blow-dryer. It’s possible that after using it at last, she put it away elsewhere. She knows that to continue to look is to risk frustration, and frustration is an accelerant when fire is a metaphor for rage. To quit looking for it, to let her hair dry naturally, could be read as a mentally sound decision, and it will be fine. Although, even when all was well, she rarely bothered with the blow-dryer. Her hair is glossy black and thick with a natural wave, and Bunny has always been lazy.
Albie dresses the way he eats. One bite of fish, then a forkful of mashed potatoes, a sip of wine followed by a Brussels sprout or a julienned carrot, then another bite of fish. Now, Bunny finds him sitting on the edge of the bed about to put on one sock. He’ll put on the second sock after he buttons his shirt.
The top dresser drawer is where Bunny keeps her underthings. She pushes aside the pretty black lace bras, the pink chemise, the stockings that require a garter belt. She does not consider the silk panties for the same reason that, when her towel drops to the floor, Albie averts his gaze and, now that his shirt is buttoned, he busies himself with his second sock.
Thus far dressed in a no-frills beige bra and black tights, Bunny stands at her closet, deliberating. Her favorite clothes are the vintage things she’s found at flea markets and thrift stores. Dresses and jackets and hats and gloves and shawls from the 1920s and ’30s, eras long before she was born, when women’s clothes were unmistakably feminine; clothes made of velvet and lace and silk and chiffon, clothes that
move with a woman’s body like liquid silver.
Albie asks Bunny, as he always does, which tie should he wear, which of his ties would go well with his suit. Bunny goes to his closet where his ties, wild with color and kaleidoscopic in patterns, hang neatly, precisely, according to some kind of crackpot Dewey decimal system he devised, on tie racks in his closet. All his ties go with his suit. Albie’s suit, his only suit, is black, which can’t come as a surprise. Other than the fine weave of the fabric and that it was made in Italy and not ordered from the J. Crew catalog or L.L. Bean, it is an unremarkable suit, which is why he likes it. His shoes and socks are also black. The shirt he is wearing is white. The tie Bunny selects is heavy silk; heavy silk, yellow backdrop to multitudes of cornflower blue hieroglyphic-like birds. After tying his joyful tie into a perfect half-Windsor knot, Albie goes to the living room to read while he waits for Bunny to get ready.
Bunny decides on a dress from the late 1920s, ivory-colored velvet, mid-calf and cut on a bias. The fabric shimmers and shadows like the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons adorning the cuffs of the sleeves. Her shoes are black patent-leather T-straps with French heels. From her jewelry box, she gets her pearl-drop earrings, a gift from Albie for their tenth wedding anniversary, and a strand of pearls, another gift from Albie, but she can’t remember when or for what reason. The only makeup she wears is red lipstick, a matte maraschino-cherry red, and that’s that.
Fully absorbed with a book, something on paleontology, Albie is unaware that Bunny is there in the living room, until she says, “What do you think?” She turns, in place, full circle, like the pink ballerina in a music box.
Rabbits for Food Page 9
