The Rabbit Hutch, page 8
“Maybe it was before your time.”
“I’ve worked here since it opened.”
“Well, it’s a real shame you’re not serving it today.” The man scowls. “A real shame. What’s on offer?”
Blandine turns to the blackboard at the front and reads, “Lavender lamb, avocado rhubarb, black mold, strawberry tomato vinegar, banana charcoal, and broccoli peach.”
It’s as though she told him that their pies are stuffed with shredded human thighs. Horror fills the man’s face, rapidly setting into rage. Sensing danger, the woman busies herself with a tissue, unsuccessfully exhorting the child to blow her nose.
“Is that some kind of joke?” asks the man.
Blandine clenches her jaw. “I am dead serious, sir.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Look at the chalkboard.”
He does. “Black mold?”
“It’s a sour cream pie with black licorice powdered on the—”
“No pie for me. No pie. Jesus.” The man crosses his arms and shakes his head. The universal performance of moral disgust. “This place has gone downhill since I left.”
After placing their orders, Blandine resumes her perch at the register, studying the family bitterly. Neither parent wears a ring. The mother collapses further and further into herself as she chatters about her hair and skin, then the child’s hair and skin. “Doesn’t she look so cute, today?” she asks repeatedly. “In her pigtails? And her pretty white dress? I wish I wore a white dress, kind of. To match.” The father remains taciturn, but occasionally tries to pet the child, who flinches away from him. This continues for some time.
Blandine retrieves and delivers their meals.
“Thanks, sweetheart,” says the father, eyes on her chest again, and Blandine is glad she sneezed on his eggs. The child guzzles her juice as soon as she receives it, as though she’s been stranded in the desert for days.
“I used to get really tan, you know,” the mother says as she transfers two of her three pancakes to the child’s plate. “But now my skin is so sensitive to the sun that I can’t even be outside for more than like fifteen minutes without SPF. It’s crazy. We were at the Dunes over the weekend—because you know, I’m teaching her how to swim and stuff?—and I had to keep applying and applying and applying and she had to help put it on my back and I still got burnt like all over, maybe you can tell, you probably can, but I don’t know, it’s been a while since you’ve seen me so maybe not.” Her speech tumbles to a halt, and she blushes. The daughter gives her a stern look, appearing disproportionately huge for a moment, like Jesus in paintings of Madonna and Child.
“Syrup,” commands the daughter.
The woman applies syrup to each point the child indicates.
“It’s just crazy,” concludes the woman in a small voice. “Because I used to get so tan.”
“And yet you still talk too much.” The man slices himself a quarter of the woman’s remaining pancake.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, folding her arms and legs to her core, compressing herself limbless. She examines the father as he chews her pancake. A frothy laugh. “It’s funny.”
“What is funny?”
“I just—I thought you were so big.”
Please Just
Noise pollution triggers a feeling best described as murderous rage within Joan Kowalski. This reaction is especially violent at libraries, at work, and during the week before her period. Lately, the noise above her apartment—where that pack of teenagers lives, including the spooky white-haired girl from the laundromat—has become unbearable. Furniture crashing. Boys yelling. Bongos.
Three months ago, on a train to visit her aunt Tammy in Gary, Indiana, Joan sat a few seats away from a man who snored louder than she thought possible. Joan felt, for the first time, that she was capable of killing someone. It was spitty and gross, the snoring—indescribably gross. Joan had already transferred from the café car because a young man who looked fresh out of a fraternity spent an hour joyriding from one phone call to the next. She stood from her seat to confront the snoring man, shaking from the fear of confrontation and the anger at having to confront.
“Excuse me,” she said, but the man snored on. She tapped his shoulder. “Excuse me.” Nothing. “Excuse me!” When he snorted awake, he looked so embarrassed and fatherly that most of Joan’s anger retreated into apology. “I’m sorry, but, um, I’m trying to read?” she began gingerly. “And I’m very sensitive to noise? And I was wondering if there was a way you could maybe, um, stop snoring? I’m really sorry. If not, that’s okay. I know it’s an unreasonable request. It’s just that I have trouble focusing when there’s…noise.”
The man flushed and nodded. “I didn’t realize I was,” he said. “Snoring. I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I’ve got sleep apnea, so I normally don’t sleep too well, but last night my son was sick, so I didn’t sleep at all. He’s got the flu, we think. I guess I must’ve dozed off. I’m really sorry about that—I’m so embarrassed. I’ll try to keep it under control.”
Joan apologized three more times, then returned to her seat, feeling evil. As usual, when she confronted the world about one of its problems, the world suggested that the problem was Joan. She vowed to pry herself out of her misophonia and be a better person, from then on.
But on the evening of Tuesday, July sixteenth, as Joan Kowalski attempts to read on the tram home from work, she is tested again. The tram is red and flashy, brand-new but nostalgic, evocative of early locomotives and vintage American optimism. Normally, Joan drives an inherited station wagon to and from work, but her tank is empty, and she doesn’t get paid until Friday. Recently, the preparatory stage of Vacca Vale’s revitalization effort spawned the tram and its artery of tracks. To encourage transit use, the city has provided every denizen with one free monthly pass. The promotion worked, and now, during rush hour, there are at least ten people in every car.
Despite the severe air-conditioning, the interior is cheerful. Joan grips a Venetian detective novel that her aunt Tammy mailed to her, still stinging from her earlier interaction with Anne Shropshire, hoping to distract herself from lingering shame, but the cackles and squaws of three tween girls overthrow the words on the page, infuriating her. They sound like chimpanzees. Just when Joan thinks the tween cackling will stop, it gets louder, engulfing her flammable peace along with the compartment. The tweens screech like they can’t see anyone else. Joan is confident that nothing in the world is that funny.
After shooting a glare at the girls, Joan transfers tram cars, running between them to make sure she doesn’t get left behind, feeling ridiculous. The next car is quiet until three people in their thirties start to yell.
“Just you wait!” shouts a very tall man. “Males will bear children, soon enough!”
“It’s only a matter of time!” adds a second, sunburnt man.
“I hope you do!” declares a woman in a camouflage jumpsuit. “I really hope you and all your balls get pregnant!”
Joan can’t tell if they are outraged or thrilled.
She transfers cars.
The quiet in the next compartment lasts nearly two stops. Then, a child pulls his sweatshirt on backward, conceals his face in the hood, and stalks like a zombie, screaming. His father stares at his phone, noise-canceling headphones clamped over his ears.
The last of the tram’s cars is empty but for a woman and her service dog. Both the woman and the dog are beige. Don’t pet me, reads the dog’s vest.
Joan steps inside and clears her throat. “Mind if I—”
“Please shut up,” says the woman, her eyes closed. “Please just shut up and leave me alone.”
My First Was a Fish
Just a lousy, half-dead fish I found by the river. Bronze and thin, no longer than my hand, base of palm to fingertip. Almost cute. When I found it in the frozen mud, it was only an inch or so from the water, but there was no tide to pull it back in. I swear it saw me. Witnessed me. For a minute it was just the fish, a couple opossums, a load of rabbits, and me. Silent besides a look-how-big-my-dick-is motorcycle revving on the road. Frigid, too, since this was back in February, and my coat was shit, so I was shivering a bit. The fish’s gills were pumping like they still had water to breathe. I took it by the tail and carried it a mile back to the Rabbit Hutch. Pinched its scales between my fingers. Slimy. The fish sort of flailed once or twice, but then it died for real.
I know that it was only a fish, and I know that most people wouldn’t feel bad about its death, but that night—bear with me—it was like the fish was teaching me something about my soul. Teaching me that my soul was faulty. I know this is stupid, but it’s what I thought, and I wasn’t even high. I thought the fish was saying: Yes, Jack, you are wicked. Something went wrong inside your machinery, maybe in vitro, maybe in childhood, and now you’re wound to the wrong moral time zone, maybe even to the wrong solar system. You, Jack, are coldhearted. And you have no excuse. You may have been trapped in the system, the fish said to me, but you got lucky—nobody hurt you. They put you with Cathy and Robert, those older Catholic folks, when you were eleven, and you honestly can’t remember much before that, when you lived with your grandma, but you’re pretty sure you were fine. Not great, but fine. Your grandma worked a lot, but she took care of you, didn’t she?
When I was still in the system, therapists were always trying to extract pre-eleven memories from my mind, but I never had any to offer. Nothing specific, at least. Just vague things—Grandma would smoke in the car; Grandma had a gumball machine that she kept stocked; Grandma wore hot pink lipstick; Grandma used a perfume that smelled like nothing from the natural world. When we were driving somewhere far away, the smoke-and-perfume combo would make me carsick, but instead of changing her habits, she just rolled down the windows, even in the dead of winter. I remember I had to cross some old train tracks to get to the bus for school, and they were always flooded with rabbits. Grandma made me Cream of Wheat in the mornings when it was cold, and even though the utilities would sometimes go off, we always had enough to eat. In the winter, she’d pile three blankets on me as I slept. She was a cashier at the grocery store.
One psychologist suggested I was repressing traumatic memories, maybe dissociating, and I wanted to believe him. It would explain how fake everything felt, how lonely and digital. How often I wanted to hurt somebody, just to see if either of us was real, just to move someone’s face around, just for the fucking thrill of it. But two other psychologists told me my childhood passed the smell test. There was no record of abuse in my file. It didn’t sound easy, they assured me, but it didn’t sound so bad. One therapist suggested that I couldn’t remember anything because I smoked too much pot.
I talk big and flex like the next foster kid when I have to, but Cathy and Robert were good to me. They were gone a lot, hoarded angel figurines, kept creepy parrots in the sunroom, and almost never looked me in the eye. But they cared, in their way. Paid for my jujitsu out of pocket. Rarely went into the basement, definitely not into my bedroom, so it was easy to sneak girls over, when I could convince them—mostly Anna, this curvy chick a couple years older, from the community college, who actually enjoyed having sex with me, bless her soul. Sex with Anna was the brightest thing in my whole overcast life. She had these freckles on her shoulders that I loved. During sex, she liked to take control, always telling me exactly how to touch her and what to say. She said her parents hated her, said I was lucky I didn’t have any. The miracle of Anna got me through junior year of high school, until she met a full-time boyfriend in a class called Money, Banking, and Capital Markets. Then she cut things off. If Cathy and Robert knew about Anna, they never said a word. Cathy taught me stick shift, Robert grilled three different meats on my birthday, they never criticized my grades, never forced me to read or pray, never hurt me, never turned a blind eye to somebody who might. Gave me freedom. A reasonable curfew. A phone. What I’m trying to say is, Cathy and Robert never subjected me to the kind of shit that mutates your life forever, the kind that basically every foster kid I know has to take. A girl like Blandine would have faced it from Day One. It’s hard to believe that our hands were dealt from the same deck of cards.
Cathy and Robert hosted two other kids, but they weren’t from the system—they were exchange students from China, sent to Vacca Vale by some godforsaken program that mistook Vacca Vale for a worthy American place. The students were named Wang Wei and Li Jun, but in Indiana they went by Tyler and Chip.
Tyler and Chip stayed in the basement, but I barely interacted with them. They saw Anna all the time, but never acknowledged or reported her. We had an understanding: live and let live. On Christmas one year, Tyler left a box in red paper outside my door. It was a handmade notebook with some royal-ass pattern on the front in blue, and even though I knew I would never be caught dead with that fruity notebook, as I held it, I felt like Tyler was my brother. It sounds dopey. It felt dopey. But it also felt real. I opened the cover, my hands hot. Inside was a notecard that said: for your writing.
Which is when I remembered the dinner where Cathy and Robert asked each of us what we wanted to be when we grew up. Chip said aerospace engineer. Tyler said, “A judge for children.” After some questioning, we figured out that Tyler wanted to be a child advocate attorney. When it came to me, I shrugged, took a big bite of potatoes, but Robert pressed. The English teacher liked me, said I had a gift for essays, kept leaving books on my desk. “Writer,” I said on an impulse. “Screenplays. I don’t know.” It sufficed. And then everyone went back to their barbecued chicken.
On Christmas, after receiving the notebook, I ran out and bought Tyler a pack of cigarettes because he was always smoking “secretly” in the alley behind the garage. Bought Chip a bottle of General Tso’s sauce because he said it was his favorite American food, and it seemed wrong—creepy—to buy a gift for Tyler alone. Wrote Merry Xmas in Sharpie on the front of both. Left them outside their doors in the basement. Fled the scene.
But despite all that, life with Cathy and Robert never felt realer than a video game to me. Despite their natural clove mouthwash, Robert’s mustache trim in the sink, the classical station they played while they cleaned, their tendency to purchase too many condiments, the growth on Cathy’s eyelid—despite all this proof of them, I never believed in them, or the parrots, or myself. Definitely not Tyler or Chip, who only stayed for two years. I believed in Anna while we were fucking, but otherwise she was unreal, too. I spent six years between the same walls as Cathy and Robert, and still we were strangers. I had a recurring dream that I stood in front of a burning house, and I knew they were inside, and I felt nothing. If I was evil, I had no one to blame.
As I carried the dead fish back to the Rabbit Hutch, I was coming to terms with all this. Well, I thought, it’s settled. It turns out I’m the kind of guy who’ll pluck a dying fish from the mud to make his friends feel crappy about themselves. I’m officially fucked up, and no one can tell me why.
The fish was super-dead by the time I reached our door. I was starting to doubt my choices, but the uncertainty made me double down. When I walked inside, the apartment was cloudy, and I noticed the smoke detector gutted on the counter. Malik was sitting at the ping-pong table, which doubled as a dining table. He’d set it with a sad stubby candle, napkins, two glasses of blue Gatorade, and two plates of food. I’d been gone about half an hour.
“Where the hell did you get cloth napkins?” I asked.
Staring at Blandine’s door, his posture was stiff, his expression bewildered and hurt. The expression that all widely adored men wear when they get rejected for the first time. Malik was no virgin. Everywhere he went, he charmed girl after girl. It’s important for a charismatic, handsome, lucky person to catch a glimpse of normal life every now and then. It’s like when celebrities have to use public transit. I’d never seen such a desperate look on his face—Malik is the one who keeps people waiting. Todd was still watching television. Todd hadn’t moved. In all our time living together, I can’t recall him blinking, not even once. I know that’s not possible. I’m just telling you what I remember.
I held up the fish. “Killed it.”
“A fish,” said Malik, no life in his voice. “That’s the best you got?”
“Told you I’d kill for her,” I said, losing my nerve.
Malik stress-rubbed his eyes. “Fuck if I care.”
“Sleepwalker could kill a fish,” added Todd. “Baby could kill a fish. Cucumber could kill a fish. That’s not impressive, Jack. Are you impressed, Malik?”
“I am not, Todd,” said Malik, his attention still bound to Blandine’s door.
“Just proving I’d do it, is all,” I said defensively. “Told you I would.”
Todd changed the channel, glancing at Malik for approval. “Whoop-de-fuckin’-do, Jack.”
For a moment, Malik studied the fish in my hand, his eyes unblinking and unfocused, then he got up from the table and marched over to Blandine’s room. He banged on the door. Real macho knocks. “Blandine? Yo, Blandine? You there? I made you something. I know you said you weren’t hungry, but I just—I made too much food, and I thought we could maybe—”
“Not hungry,” came her low voice behind the door.
“Maybe if you just saw it, you’d get hungry, or—”
“Not hungry,” she said, a few notches louder.
“Or just smelled it,” he pressed. “You know how that happens? You think you’re not hungry, or that you don’t have to piss, but then you smell some popcorn shrimp, or you hear a fountain, and you realize—”
“I’m going to bed good night,” she said in one breath.
Malik’s back flexed. Todd had muted the television. Malik turned to us, head down. “Whatever,” he mumbled.
