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by Kristi Petersen Schoonover
Mainstream, 15 pages.
Originally Published in Citizen Culture Magazine, Issue 4, 2005
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Bunny—that’s my wife’s name—falls in love with the thing at a tag sale.
It’s one of those plastic lawn rabbits—you know, like the knee-high Santas with the holes in the middles of their backs just wide enough for one of those frosted Christmas bulbs. You plug it in, and Santa’s cheeks glow peach-orange. Except this one’s a bunny, so I guess it’s for Easter, and when you plug it in the ears glow pig-pink. Noxious thought.
“Please?”
“You don’t like rabbit.” Once we went to a pot luck game dinner, and she refused to taste the rabbit stew. (We had contributed potato chips and corn on the cob.)
“We had one just like it when I was a kid. Look.” She touches the plastic that forms the bunny’s blue coat. On the “elbow,” a small blur of white-yellow light bleeds through scratches. “Ours was even worn in the same spot!”
Her brown eyes sparkle and plead beneath the brim of her grey flannel cap, the one with the hugging penguins on it. “Come on! It’s only fifty cents.”
I have visions of it glowing as an embarrassing beacon of Midwestern tack on our front stoop. But fifty cents it is, because she works at a zoo and loves animals, even plastic electric ones, and because it’s my week to pay for our night out. Besides, maybe I’ll get lucky, and the wiring’ll fry out.
When she gets it home, she sets it on the kitchen counter next to the empty wine glasses from last night, a stack of plastic fish-shaped dishes and a spinach-encrusted pot from last week.
“I need to clean him up. He’s pretty full of gunk,” she says putting the headset for her cordless phone on her ear and pushing buttons on the hand unit. “Could you get the rest of the stuff out of the car, honey?”
Like all the china dishes a dime each, the fake Japanese black orchids in a pink vase, the scarf peppered with cartoon-style colonial men, the butterfly candelabra and other stuff that is far more interesting and didn’t leer at me in the rearview mirror the entire ride home.
“Suzi! I have to tell you about what I just got!” she squeals into the phone. She pulls dirty dishes from one side of the sink and clanks them in the other side and turns on the water.
After she cleans behind its ears with cotton swabs and shines it with glass cleaner so it looks as new as a thirty-year-old electric Easter Bunny can look, we start the ritual of finding the place he would work best with our décor. I had never thought of an Easter Bunny as a year-round thing, especially in rooms with gilded-edge mirrors and velvet couches, eggplant-colored walls and Canadian Goose bookends on mahogany shelves. But when I say, “I had thought we’d only leave him out a couple of weeks out of the year, at Easter,” she gets that look on her face, the same one she got last year after the plumber gave her the estimate on repairing the upstairs john. And of course she wants my opinion on how it looks next to the leopard-print floor cushions or on the marble vanity in the guest bath.
I suggest the trash can, but she won’t hear of that. The thing’s sardonic grin brightens a little when she says, “Oh, don’t you just have such a sense of humor?”
The project stops when she gets a phone call from her fashion-designer friend Maureen. She goes and sits on the bed with the phone on her ear and sips her wine like she always does, and I am glad to have a break from finding a home for Demon Bunny (that’s what I’ve decided to call him).
I settle in the overstuffed leather chair and flip channels, and of course it’s right there, next to me. Staring.
I hear the water in the kitchen sink running again, hear the bong-bang of heavy pots being pulled from their cabinets. Making dinner. She’ll be awhile.
Classic movie channel.
Damn I wish that thing would take its blue plastic ass and walk away with disinterest—
—Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby. A rather strange choice for the beginning of August since everybody thinks this is a Christmas film, which it isn’t really, and also because August doesn’t have any holidays (well, at least not one Crosby would find worth singing about—who ever heard of United Nations Day)?
Astaire is doing that dance with the firecrackers. At least, in the film, it’s July.
I glance at Demon Bunny. “You like this?” I settle back, and put my feet up on the ottoman. My bare heels stick to it. We should close the windows and put on the air conditioning. “It’s called Fourth of July. Not one of the holidays with which you’re familiar. You’re away by then. This is when we eat lots of dead cows we compress into patties and pig guts compressed into long tubes.”
Hissing from the kitchen. Obviously my wife is making something—oh, shit I hope it’s not those veggie burgers. I’d rather eat a whole box of Steak-Umms than those things.
Just when I think he should have a name—(Demon Bunny is too cliché, yet too strong, and it reminds me of movi -- [End of Preview.]