The Rabbits Knew

By Ann Calandro

/ Nonfiction /      

In July and August we stayed with my mother’s parents in their white summer house with green shutters, fifty miles west of the city. The house had four small bedrooms, one bathroom, five acres of weedy grass, and a large kitchen in which my grandmother Evelyn baked bread and pies, made jam, and canned fruit. Outside smelled like lilacs, planted by a previous owner. Inside smelled like burning sugar.

The summer I was nine, my father went out to buy green paint for the shutters and came back with two white rabbits in one cage.

“I thought you’d like a pet,” he said. “They’re brothers.” I hadn’t asked for rabbits. I wanted a cat. Every summer my mother said no.

“What will we do with the cat when we go back to the city?”

“Take it with us.”

“We can’t have a cat in the apartment. You know that.”

My father bought me the rabbits because his older sister and her children weren’t staying with us this summer. As an only child who wanted a sister or a brother, I was sad Jenny and Daniel weren’t coming. They were twins, five years older but still willing to be my friends. The three of us ran races in the yard and played board games in the house. In the evenings we’d go outside in our pajamas to catch fireflies in old jelly jars. Nanny, my other grandmother, lived with them, above Uncle Harry’s dry-cleaning store in the Bronx. My father said Nanny lived with them and not us because they needed her help more than we did.

“Also, you have a grandmother and grandfather nearby all year around.” My mother’s parents had a one-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment near our two-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment.

During the summer, Nanny stayed in the Bronx to cook dinner for Uncle Harry, who said he couldn’t be away from his dry-cleaning store for a whole summer.

“People don’t want to starch their own shirts,” he told me. “I stay open all year long for my customers.” He always let me flick the switch to the plastic-wrapped clothes around the track.

“Why can’t they come this summer?” I asked my father.

“Something came up,” my father said.

“What?”

“Grown-up stuff. Go see if Grandma has finished those blueberry pies. We’re lucky she likes to bake so much.” Although Nanny could occasionally be convinced to make apple strudel, which involved furiously banging the dough on the counter until it was thin as paper, she preferred to crochet, read books on British royalty, and grow African violets.

I named the rabbits Sunbeam and Snowball and planned to cuddle them all day and let them sleep in my bed every night. They had other plans, which included biting, kicking, and scratching. They fought hard with each other, drawing blood, and my father quickly bought a second cage. Every day I talked softly to them, admired their long ears, and put my finger through the cages to stroke their fur, which they tolerated and perhaps even enjoyed. My mother agreed we could keep them for the summer if the pet store took them back before we went home.

“You have to be friends because you’re brothers,” I told them. “So stop fighting.” My father cleaned the two cages constantly, forever commenting on how much poop rabbits produced, and my mother walked around with an “I told you this was a dumb idea” expression.

I felt lonely without my cousins, even though my mother took me to the pool most afternoons and to a morning camp at the elementary school. There we played circle games and made lanyards.

“I don’t want to hold your hand because you’re from the city and it’s dirty there,” a girl told me. I looked at my hand. It looked like her hand, maybe lighter because I was pale like my father and Nanny. It wasn’t dirty. If my cousins were here, I wouldn’t be at camp. At the pool I swam alone to avoid the big boys. They splashed too hard and tried to pull down girls’ bathing suits underwater. I was happy at the library. Sometimes I read the big dictionary on its wooden stand. I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. At dinner I told my parents and grandparents what new words I learned. That summer I was on the Ds.

Some evenings my father talked to his sister on the phone, softly so nobody could hear. July became August. My grandmother continued baking. My father repaired things. Camp was over. I didn’t want to swim anymore. My mother took me on errands with her and to the library. I helped her in the garden or sat outside, reading books. My grandfather mowed everything that was green and growing.

“I think he mowed down the raspberry plants,” my father told my mother. “I heard him muttering that they were marijuana.”

My mother laughed. “Let it be,” she said. “You’re busy cleaning rabbit poop.” I liked to hear my parents laugh. Some evenings we went to Dairy Queen. I loved the hardened chocolate shell that never dripped.

“How does it do that?” I asked my parents and grandparents.

  “Eat your ice cream,”  they replied.

By Labor Day I was ready to go back to the city. I’d be in fifth grade. I missed my city friends. I wanted to see my cousins.

“Can I see my cousins in the city?” I asked my father. During the school year we drove up from Manhattan to visit them. They didn’t have a car.

“I hope so,” my father said. “I don’t know yet. We’ll see. How about I bat the blue beach ball really high, and you catch it, and we let your mother pack?”

Right before we loaded the car, my father took the rabbits and their cages back to the pet store. I wasn’t upset to see them go. Despite my daily admonishments to them to stop fighting and become friends, they snarled at each other from their separate cages. Sometimes I took one or the other out of his cage and tried to hold him, but right away he kicked so frantically that I put him back.

“OK, be that way,” I told the rabbits. “I don’t care. If I had a brother or sister, I’d be friends with them, not fight all the time. Anyway, I want a cat, not rabbits.” I vowed to ask my mother for pierced ears once we were home. If I couldn’t have a cat, maybe she would let me have pierced ears.

I didn’t see my cousins that year. Letters from Aunt Sheryl arrived. My father read them, tore them in pieces, and threw them in the trash. In the winter the letters stopped. In the spring, my father drove up to the Bronx and brought Nanny back to live with us. She slept on the sofa, which pulled out into a bed. During the day she sat in the rocking chair and crocheted a blanket for the sofa. She told me stories about growing up in Hungary.

“We had a cook, and sometimes she would make roast goose. It was delicious. Whenever she did, a neighbor or two would show up at our door, looking hungry and hopeful. We always invited them inside." One night she made jelly donuts for our dinner. My mother did not approve. She was more a three-vegetable and salad person, with some whole wheat toast and a little cottage cheese thrown in.

“Donuts are called fank in Hungarian,” Nanny told me, arranging the oil and the flour and the raspberry jam on the counter. My mother reminded me that first came salad and vegetables. At breakfast, although Nanny sprinkled lots of sugar on her grapefruit half and added three teaspoons of sugar to her coffee, my mother wouldn’t let me add sugar to anything or drink more than a splash of coffee in my milk.

In June we took Nanny and her African violets to a single, sunny room in a nursing home on the Upper West Side. That year, and in the years that followed, my parents and I, then my parents, and then my father, visited Nanny often, not so often, and rarely. My father called her once or twice a week and sometimes gave me the phone. Over the years Nanny seemed happy, or happy enough, first showing and then telling me how well her African violets grew on the room’s sunny windowsill. She asked me about school.

“I’m still reading the dictionary, but not as often,” I told her. “I’m up to the letter H. I use new words in my papers, and I get As.”

“You’re still reading the dictionary?” my father asked. “Here are three words for when you get up to I: infuriating, ingratitude, and internecine. They’re the story of my life.” He reached over and smoothed my hair.      “Look, Mom, she has your red hair.”

“I know what those words mean, Dad,” I told my father, even though I wasn’t sure about internecine. I figured I’d learn it when I got to the Is. Maybe it had something to do with internal medicine and vaccines. That sounded possible because of the int- and the -cine.

Then I was in junior high and high school, becoming aware of strange and beautiful creatures called boys. I stopped reading the dictionary. My mother finally agreed to let me get my ears pierced.

While I was halfway across the country at college, Nanny died. Then my grandfather and my grandmother Evelyn.

“There’s no need for you to come home for the funeral,” my parents told me each time.

As far as I knew, there were no more calls or letters between my father and Aunt Sheryl. I stopped asking my father when I would see my cousins again. I had other friends. I had a boyfriend. My cousins were probably working and living somewhere else. Maybe they were married. They probably didn’t remember me. This was before the Internet and texting and e-mail. Even if I wanted to find them, I didn’t know how.

When I was a senior in college, I asked my mother what happened that summer. It was easier to ask her over the phone than to ask my father at the dinner table. In high school I had asked my father many times, but he would never elaborate. He just shook his head, his mouth compressed in a straight line, so different from his usual crooked, disarming smile. My mother sighed.

“Uncle Harry had an affair with a woman in his building, and Nanny found out. One day she picked up the phone to call your father, and Uncle Harry was talking to this woman, Janine. Nanny could tell from the conversation what was going on. She hung up quickly, but I guess Uncle Harry heard the click of the phone. He came into her room and told her that she’d better not tell Aunt Sheryl or he’d make her move out. Move out? She hadn’t lived alone in years. She had such a hard time after her husband died that your father and his sister practically brought themselves up. That’s why they were so close. Do you know Nanny was a teacher in Hungary before she and Dad’s father emigrated here? She spoke three languages fluently. She said, and maybe it’s true, that she was descended from Hungarian royalty on her father’s side. She’s not able to live alone. She didn’t even come to America and learn English until she was almost thirty. She was pregnant with your aunt on the boat over. Your father was born here. I don’t think Nanny told Aunt Sheryl about Uncle Harry and Janine. Apparently Harry had an eye for the ladies. Most likely Janine wasn’t the first and I doubt she was the last. And Nanny wasn’t someone who ever rocked the boat. So she didn’t tell Aunt Sheryl. But she told your father, and you know your father. He told Aunt Sheryl.” Did I know my father? I knew that he was fair and honest but that he was critical of people. He had high standards for behavior, and he expected other people to follow them if he did. “After your father told Aunt Sheryl, he warned her and Uncle Harry not to kick Nanny out,” my mother continued. “All those years of free babysitting she did for them? Why do you think they wanted her to live with them? In the smallest of the three bedrooms, the one without much sunlight, so she couldn’t even grow more than one or two little plants? For the free babysitting! Anyway, before they could kick her out, Nanny decided she couldn’t stay. She told us she wanted to go into a nursing home and not live with any family. We didn’t have enough room anyway. Remember she slept on the sofa for a few months?” I remembered. “So that’s what happened. Don’t tell your father I told you. He right away put Nanny on the waiting list for the nursing home, and she lived with us until it opened up. He paid extra for that single room because she didn’t want a roommate. He gave your aunt and uncle money for Nanny’s room and board all the years she lived there. Nanny never knew. She didn’t know that they didn’t want to spend a penny on her.” My mother sighed. “Families. It’s always something.”

                                                            _________

I have my own family now, and my mother was right. It’s always something. They’re all gone now. I never saw my aunt and her family again. I still have boxes of my parents’ and grandparents’ belongings to sort through. I did become  a writer, after many years of being an editor. Along the way “editor” came to mean “editor, writer, proofreader, and backup graphic artist,” so I was everything. I knew it was time to retire when an account executive half my age asked me to change the semicolons to commas in a marketing brochure.

“The dot over the comma looks unfriendly,” she said, one long acrylic nail tapping her heavily lipsticked mouth. “I like the way the commas look. I think the semicolons interfere with our messaging.” Our messaging? The brochure was heavy on color and photographs of young smiling people with perfect teeth and gelled hair, with a few words like “treatment journey” and “ask your doctor” sprinkled throughout. I didn’t see semicolons as interfering with anything, and they were grammatically correct.

“Commas are better,” she continued. “They just look more, like, you know, social. Regular. Like ordinary people can identify with them."

“I’ll rewrite the text and use commas,” I said. In earlier years I would have explained the reason for using semicolons, or gotten angry, or complained to my boss. He or she would have understood and commiserated and agreed with me and then told me to do what the client and the account executive wanted. There was no point in talking about grammar with anyone. It was always a problem between the creative people and the account people. It was time to retire.

I sorted through the boxes. of my parents’ and grandparents’ belongings. I donated some things, threw others away, and kept a few. I found faded photographs from those family summers, including some of nine-year-old me looking at the rabbits. Snowball and Sunbeam! Even in the faded photographs they looked angry. Holding the photographs, I remembered my cousins. I decided to search for them online. Maybe we could reconnect. Maybe they’d like some photographs. Maybe we could meet for coffee. Maybe they, too, had returned to the city to live.

It was easy to find them. I sent each cousin an email, asking if they wanted some photographs from our long-ago summers. Daniel never responded. Jenny wrote back quickly. “I remember the good times we had in the country, but I’ll never forgive your father. It wasn’t his business to tell my mother to leave my father. She didn’t want to leave my father. She loved him, and he promised to stop seeing the other woman.” Had my father told his sister to leave her husband? Maybe he had, although I couldn’t see him doing that. Maybe he just criticized Uncle Harry’s behavior. That I could see him doing. He wouldn’t have condoned Uncle Harry's throwing Nanny out of the apartment.  “Being in touch with you means betraying my parents,” Jenny's email continued. “I assume you took and still take your father’s side. Well, I still take my parents’ side. They passed away a few years ago, and they were still married when they died. Please don’t email me again.” Immediately I wanted to write back and say that of course I took my father’s side, because he was a more honorable person than her father was. I didn’t write back. As with grammatical discussions at ad agencies, there was no point in saying anything and therefore nothing to say. As I looked again at the photographs of the rabbits, I remembered reading the dictionary when I was young. What were the words my father told me were the story of his life? “Ingratitude, infuriating, and internecine.” I took my well-thumbed pocket dictionary from the living room bookcase and flipped to “internecine.” I hadn’t known what it meant after all. But my father knew, and apparently the rabbits did too.

The most painful struggles are internecine.