What the Rabbit Said
Birthday girl figures it out
The first time I met Peter’s mother, she told me she’d once made him a birthday cake and he’d thrown it on the floor. I assumed he’d been 14 or 15, going through some adolescent rebellion. But no. The cake was for his 26th birthday.
“He’s not one for birthdays,” she said. And so it was that I married a man whose age I didn’t know.
He knew my birthday but made a point of ignoring it. The morning I turned 23, he said he’d spend the night at his mother’s and walked out the door. It was friends who took me out to celebrate, and I walked home looking forward to a relaxed evening without Peter’s elaborate indifference.
But the second I opened our apartment door, I sensed something was wrong. Leaving the lights off, I crept in and saw the silhouette of a man standing frozen in front of the living room window. A burglar! Terrified, I turned and ran back toward the door. Footsteps pounded toward me. Lights went on. A voice screamed, “Stop!”—and I did, bent over and gasping for breath. The intruder was an enormous stuffed rabbit. The screamer was Peter. “It’s your birthday present!” he howled.
The rabbit had dirty feet and smelled like corn dogs. I’m convinced some kid high on cotton candy won it at the state fair, later trashed it, and Peter found it and picked it up. Our apartment was small as a drawer, and now a blue rabbit bigger than both of us loomed over it.
This was no adorable Easter bunny. It had a hostile face that dared me to throw it out. I tried to avoid those beady plastic eyes, but somehow they pulled me in. Eventually, I realized the face was concerned, not combative. “That man’s a bully,” it was transmitting. “Leave him.”
Too afraid to leave, I ignored the rabbit for eight years until, finally, I left my husband. I don't know what became of it, but more than forty years later what the rabbit said is what reminds me how far I’ve come.
