Rabbit Test
I didn’t remember until that morning when I was lying on the pull out couch in the living room, my eyes closed, listening to the rain. Lynn had just spent two weeks on that couch, nervous and distant, staring, without so much as a word, at the summer Olympics on the television. I was pretending to still be asleep, but she knew I wasn’t.
“I’m not pregnant anymore,” she said, “I can tell. I can feel it.” Her voice broke and she was crying. The sound of it came into me and ripped whatever is there where the chest ends and the stomach begins. I rolled over and put my arm around her, put my head against hers.
As I held her, it came back to me as clear as a movie. The sun was bright and it was stifling hot for mid-May. We walked up a path to the door of the obstetrician’s office. I was feeling so light, I had almost missed it, but there was a tiny brown rabbit, crouched down against the bricks of the building. It was panting in the heat, and even though I leaned over to see it more closely, it did not bolt. That memory vanished, and as it did, I thought of a part of a novel by Knut Hamsun I had once read where a woman is cursed in childbirth when another woman sends her a hare.
Later that afternoon, in the hospital waiting room, while all trace of the child I had daydreamed about was being scraped away, the two headed memory returned and I smoked three cigarettes over it before pulling myself together. Lynn cried for days after and yelled at me because I didn’t. She had no idea about the times late at night when I stood in the basement, behind the oil burner, with my forehead against the wall.
We put it behind us. Lynn returned to work and I continued studying for my degree. “It happens,” they told us. “There’ll be plenty of opportunities,” they said, and we believed them, because we were new at it and they were old with children who had children. So many people told us stories about themselves and loved ones having similar problems that we assumed it was all part of the deal. Our attitude became, “Well, we’ve gotten that over with.” The geranium in our bedroom produced an enormous pink blossom that year. Then summer ended and by the time the first snow came, we had cast the incident deep inside ourselves where certain chemicals cocoon great sorrow.
In spring, I got off the subway one day and started walking across Marconi plaza in the rain. The field was deep with water, and it sloshed in over the tops of my shoes. A figure came toward me across the deserted field, holding a black umbrella. It was Lynn. Steam came from her mouth as she told me the news. Right there, I decided to give up my studies so that I could get a job and be a better provider. For some reason, I believed self-sacrifice was called for, that my obvious commitment would favorably impress Fate. I figured that once the baby was a few years old, I could return to school and finish. In the meantime, while working, I would study, at night, the Faust myth I had given so many hours to already. She was happy with my decision. After dinner, we lay in bed and made intricate plans that stretched far into the future. I remember hearing the two a.m. trolley rattle by out on Johnston.
I took a job writing automotive manuals for a business school that was going to add Automotive Technician to its list of degrees. The place was totally illegitimate and run by a three hundred pound man named Crouch, whose head was so much flesh and who walked with a metal cane. I had no idea what I was doing, but the pay was 18,000 a year, which I thought was marvelous. Crouch, a native of Indiana, would tell me in his farting-into-a-kazoo twang that my work was “slicker than snot on a door knob, finer than frog’s hair.” It was obvious from the first day that the owners of the school wanted the project to fail so they could keep the government funding. I could have cared less. I thought about Lynn and the baby not yet born and continued to write chapters with titles like “Identification of Component Parts For Disassembled Head.”
In July, we went to visit Lynn’s parents at their beach house one weekend to take a break and make our announcement. I had had a few beers and was lying on the beach on an overcast Sunday afternoon, when I had a curious dream. I dreamt of my dead Grandmother’s house, empty and darkened. The shell collection, the antique painting with its wan, big-eyed children playing piggy-back in a room of long white drapes, the cedar attic where she kept that doll that was so old it had turned black. Then I heard her voice, slipping out of the back room and down the hall, twined with the creak of a rocker, reciting from memory some poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. I saw the moon and suddenly was aware of a rabbit, slipping through a hole in the screen of the back porch.
