The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

Changing her tone, Emma gravely points to a bottle of pain reliever. “You know when something shows the ‘actual size’ on the label?” she whispers to Tiffany. “That really freaks me out.”

The wealth that Tiffany has seen before ensures that everything is storyless and new, but James’s wealth ensures that everything is storied and old. It contains art and history. It possesses Tiffany.

Before going to bed, the children ask Tiffany to cut the tags from their pajamas, claiming the itch keeps them awake. Tiffany recognizes this as an innovative form of stalling, but their sensitivity, she thinks, indicates that they are geniuses.

She wants to be his kid and she wants to be his wife and she wants to be him. He’s showing his life to me, Tiffany realizes, so that I don’t murder it.

She feels more alive than she thought possible, and she understands that she has finally graduated from an imitation of life. Now, she stands inside her real one for the very first time.

The piano was a wedding gift from his wife’s family, a product of their evergreen wealth, and no one has ever associated it with James as intimately as Tiffany does that night. His wife’s fortune, once so alluring, now repels him like a funhouse reflection. It makes him feel misshapen, carsick, malnourished. Increasingly, he has felt like a tourist in this house. But in Tiffany’s eyes, all of this is his.

“You are beautiful,” he says, shocking them both.

As they sip crema from ceramic, they speak of weather, favorite types of oatmeal, the personal histories of his cats. One is black, the other white, both longhaired and agitated. Through narrowed eyes and accusatory body language, they watch Tiffany as though they know exactly what she’s done. When James feeds them rabbit pâté, Tiffany wonders aloud why their interactions are so consistently plagued by the odor of pet food. He doesn’t laugh, doesn’t seem to hear her at all. She smiles. “What do you think it means?” “Probably nothing,” he snaps, his attention on his phone. “Not everything means something.”

“We’ll be in touch,” he says to the windshield. He hasn’t looked her in the eye since last night. “Sure,” she replies, a sob building in her throat. When Tiffany vomits her scone into a toilet at St. Philomena’s, what upsets her most is the waste of money.

She tries to feel indignant, as she’s supposed to feel, but instead she begins to weep. It would be a blinding relief to believe him. She replies: Can we talk?

“Hello?” “Hi.” “Hey.” Their hearts pound on separate acres. This wasn’t his idea, and he wasn’t hers, but here he is, in a cliché he especially hates, and there she is, in a cliché she especially hates, and what can you do.

“How are you?” “Nothing.” She flushes. “I mean—” “Yeah.” He smiles. She hears it. It hurts her. “I know.”

James is a child but different, both of them children but different, so in the static they say nothing.

Whomever she’s speaking to speaks back like they want to, and Tiffany envies her. She wonders if there’s a word for the opposite of solipsism, wonders if such a term could accurately describe her psychological disorder. It’s Sunday but it feels like Wednesday. It’s spring but it feels like fall. It’s warm but Tiffany shivers. She feels drunk.

“I should’ve called sooner,” James says. “You don’t owe me anything.” But neither of them means it.

“Still, I’m sorry,” he says. “What for?” “Well.” He sighs. “Pretty much all of it.” He is trying to do the right thing, but instead he is pulverizing her.

Imperfect body perfect because it was his.

He looked undressed, but he did not look nude until he removed his glasses and placed them, gingerly, on a nightstand.

He traced the outline of her breasts and told her that she was brilliant, otherwordly, important.

“Listen, Tiffany. I want you to know that I respect you tremendously.” He touched her neck like she was fragile and valuable. A cracked iPhone. She couldn’t tell what was more alarming: his sincerity or his formality.

What I love most about you, she wants to say, is your piano. Weren’t we safe until you got your shiny, pricey Bösendorfer involved? Yes, I wanted to touch your stubble, drink your coffee, and wear your glasses. Yes, I wanted your mind and your words and your face and your sadness and your sensitivity and your power and your talent and your age and your imagination and your hair and your music, but ultimately—ultimately—I wanted to fuck your piano.

But it’s not what she wants, after all. Now, in James’s voice, her name isn’t held; it’s diagnosed. Tears fill her eyes, but she feels detached from them, the way she feels detached from the behavior of her knees when the pediatrician taps them to test her reflexes.

How could a dad like him invade a kid like her? Like that? A dad in no glasses and absolutely no condom?

“Well, I’m seventeen.” She wants to arrest him, and chiropract his guilt, and marry him, and beat him up.

When he speaks again, his voice is gentle. “You should expect more from people.” “You should expect more from yourself.”

What did they choose? What was chosen for them? Who undressed whom? Had it been pinot noir? He entered her, he exited her, but what happened in between?

She wanted, and he wanted, but what exactly did they want?

When a handsome guy named Malik stops Blandine after class and asks if she wants to live with him and two other boys in a four-bedroom apartment near the river, Blandine says sure. Later, she’ll wonder what made her accept his offer so swiftly: an investment in her life, or an indifference to it? She’s got to live somewhere, she reasons, and boys don’t scare her. Men don’t scare her. Nobody scares her. Nobody can break into you if you break out of your body first.

“Cool.” Malik smiles. He looks like an actor. Not a specific one—all of them.

Blandine forbids self-pity, but she permits rage. When she takes inventory, she grants that many aspects of her Situation were enraging: in the end, she was insignificant to the person who was most significant to her; she freely entered a power dynamic that was prematurely fucked; she allowed herself to participate in the fracturing of a family, even if they remained together; her behavior was surely anti-feminist, although she hasn’t worked out the particulars of this, yet; she invited one person in the world to see her, and as soon as he did, he fled;

She knows that not contacting James is the right thing to do, but God—how much like a sneeze unsneezed it feels.

It was the fact that this was always going to mean infinitely more to me than it meant to you, and you fucking knew it from the start.

Which means that a human being must look to the living height without being obscured by love or by the weakness of faith, which the aerial humour of the earth can have only for a short period of time. You always already mattered. I did not. A man should not wait upon a person of high rank who fails him like a flower that withers; but I broke this rule in my love for a certain noble human being.

As dread pulses in her stomach like a war drum, some animal part of her knows the content of the message before she reads it. No subject. So he got you, too?

“How does this sound to you, Todd?” Malik cleared his throat and started to sing, striking the same three chords over and over in different patterns. And you know what? Motherfucker has an excellent voice. Makes you think of apple cider and somebody else’s childhood.

“It’s just…” he began in a weak voice. “It’s a baby.” Malik pulled a beer from the fridge, cracked it, and walked over to Todd. Clapped him on the back. “Proud of you, son,” said Malik. He placed the beer in Todd’s trembling hands. “You did it for Blandine.” It’s fair to say that things got a little out of hand from there.

The person would say: Reminded me of you. In the fantasy, the person knows Blandine better than she knows herself, and their message sinks through her skin like a poem, asserting its truth before revealing its meaning. It is not a normal fantasy, she understands. But who could call “normal” good, anymore? Who could call it anything?

Of drought. Of lifeless dirt that no machine, chemical, company, or person can defibrillate. This future is already materializing, and so now, when the land can sprout nothing else, it sprouts suburbia.

Suburbanites can now buy their clothes at an enclosed shopping mall, buy their groceries at a supermarket that smells of imported turmeric and new paint. Deer keep stumbling into yards, confused and hungry. Drinking from the sprinklers.

Taken in sum, the graffiti on the Zorn factories looks just like the internet. Look at me, everyone says when no one’s looking.

The factories pollute the air with their history, just as they once polluted it with dark chemical smoke. The price of overabundance.

Blandine doesn’t need medical students to open her body to know that her city lives inside it.

She doesn’t need anyone else to hear the factories to know that the factories are addressing her, addressing everyone. We will invade you with all of our nothing, the factories say, because it’s all we have left.

In the beginning, there was a mother and a baby. But the mother was not much mother and the baby was too baby. He needed everything; he was raging id. The baby would die without her, and the mother did not like to look at him. She needed everything, too.

She was the nation’s supply of sugar in the acrid years following World War II. A time of traumatized fathers, economic prosperity, and an international deficit of psychological health. Her job never allowed her to be a child, so her psychology never allowed her to age. It was not advisable for a child to have a child, but she, so childish, liked to disobey.

Sometimes, she’d sit in front of the Pacific and try to feel something, but her heart was too landlocked. Too Midwestern. All she felt, when she looked at the ocean, was the presence of the absence of awe. She was too afraid of it to swim.

Elsie liked keeping the secrets of powerful men—it made the patriarchy more inclusive, palatable, and funny.

Nobody—not her friends or her mother, not doctors or books or television—had warned her about the rest. One day, she stopped being a soprano.

When she got home from the hospital, Elsie stowed the baby in her mansion’s only sunless room and told the nannies to keep language away from him, for now. She didn’t want to deal with the repercussions of language. She needed to gather her wits, her whereabouts, her preferences. She needed to order new contact lenses.

Every year, Elsie imported bands from around the world—her only stipulation was that the bands could not be American. There is nothing more patriotic, she believed, than importing another country’s talent.