The Unmaking of Rabbit (2 page)

“You can run a couple of errands for me in a bit. I need a loaf of bread and some margarine.”

“Sure,” Paul agreed. He got the mop and vacuum cleaner out of the closet and dragged them into the spare room off the kitchen that his mother used when she spent the night.

After he'd got the dust out from under the bed and balanced it in a neat pile in the middle of the thin rug, he thought of something.

“What does ‘ne'er-do-well' mean, Gran?” he asked, going back into the kitchen.

She looked up at him from last night's paper, where she was rereading the obituaries in case she might have missed somebody.

“It means a no-good,” she said sternly. “It means a person who is just no good.”

“I thought so.” Paul nodded. “I just wanted to make sure.”

2

Paul's father was a ne'er-do-well. He had disappeared, flown the coop, when Paul was two. After all this time, Gran still got furious when she thought of him “just taking off, leaving a wife and baby. A man like that has got to be lower than low.”

“I was two. That's not a baby,” Paul had protested the first few times he'd heard the story. But Gran, once on her way, was not to be deflected.

“And not one red cent has he contributed, not one. Not too many get away with that, I'll tell you. It's a wonder I don't have a seizure, I get so mad every time I think about it.”

Paul's mother had brought him to live with Gran then because she was so upset she didn't know what to do. Plus she had no money so she had to get a job, and there was no one else to take care of him. Plus she wasn't able to cope with him. He had looked up
cope
in the dictionary, but even when he knew what it meant, things weren't any easier for him.

For about five years now Paul had kept a bag packed under his bed, at the ready for the time his mother might call and say, “I'm all set for you, darling. Come live with me.” She never said it. Paul pestered her unmercifully, but still she never said it.

“When can I come, Mom?” he asked every time she called or came to see him. “When can I come live with you?”

Invariably she cried, “Not in this dinky apartment! You'd hate it! I haven't got an elevator or even a TV set. It's much better for you to stay with Gran—in the country with all your friends and all that marvelous fresh air and flowers and yards to play in.”

And then she'd say, “Besides, what would Gran do without you? She needs someone to look after her, a man in the house. I couldn't take you away from her.”

When he was small, he'd fallen for that. Not now. He knew better. He'd never told his mother that he didn't have any friends to speak of and that on the block where his grandmother lived there weren't that many flowers and trees, and that people didn't like kids playing in their yards, or even cutting through them. Besides, Gran could get along by herself with absolutely no trouble at all.

Once he had found a snapshot of his mother and father when he was rummaging through Gran's desk, looking for a piece of paper to draw on. He knew it was them because on the back it said
Anne and Doug
—
on their honeymoon
. He took the picture over to the window and squinted at it the way Gran did when she wanted to see better. She wore glasses only in the privacy of the home because they were disfiguring, she said. The man who was his father was slim and dark and smiling, and the girl standing next to him looked like his mother, only younger.

At night, when he lay in bed watching the shadows move on the ceiling, he sometimes thought he could hear his father's voice. It was deep and pleasant and said, “That's some report card, son” or “How about going fishing, son?” No matter what he said, his father always called him “son.”

This had happened less and less frequently, and during the past year Paul could only remember having heard his father's voice once. And then he couldn't remember what he had said.

It wasn't exactly that Paul was ashamed of other kids' finding out he lived with Gran. It wasn't even the way she looked. If only she wouldn't wear those space shoes. But they had cost the earth, she said, and they were comfortable. She looked all right around the house; it was when she got dressed up to go out that she wasn't so good. The black satin suit she had made for herself was what she usually wore, and even that wasn't too bad. But she insisted on putting on her “face,” as she called the two bright circles of rouge and the crooked mouth she drew on with lipstick. Then she soaked a handkerchief in perfume and stuffed it in the front of her dress. You could smell her a long way off.

What made Paul ashamed was the fact that he couldn't go to school on Mondays and say, “You see that game yesterday? My father took me. That was some game. You catch that play in the last quarter?”

That was the way most of the guys talked. Or they'd say, “Hey, my mother says you can sleep over Friday, if you want.”

It was no good pretending, Paul had decided. His life wasn't like other kids'. Even if it was just that his parents were divorced, it wouldn't have been so bad. He knew plenty of kids who lived with their mother, and whose father took the kids on week ends and summers and beat his brains out trying to make up for all the times he wasn't around, doing nice things to prove he really liked his kids. But Paul was different. He had been deserted, walked out on. His father never sent him a birthday card or even a Christmas card. He didn't care whether Paul was alive or dead. That was what made Paul different. He knew it, the other kids knew it, and that was that.

“I should never have married him,” Paul's mother told him when he had asked about his father. “But he was so handsome I fell in love with him, snap!” and she snapped her fingers to show how easy it had been to fall in love. “All the girls were crazy about him. He was spoiled. You're going to look just like him, I'm afraid.”

Gran had an expression she used when they passed someone on the street she considered ugly or funny looking. “There's a face only a mother could love,” she would say after the person had gone by. Paul figured his mother thought he was handsome because she was his mother. That was the way mothers were. His ears stuck out, his nose, which was faintly pink, dripped even when he didn't have a cold. And when he was nervous, which was pretty often, he not only blinked, he stuttered. At school they called him Rabbit.

“Hey, Rabbit, how come you stutter? Hey, Rabbit, how come you got such big ears?” or “Hey, Rabbit, come out of your burrow and do some tricks! Rabbit, Rabbit, had a habit, lost his mind and couldn't grab it.”

To top it off, he was the shortest, weakest kid in the class. Paul walked with his head drawn down and his shoulders hunched. He knew every crack in the sidewalk, every curve in the road, every curb and gutter in town.

Looking sideways at himself in the mirror, Paul asked himself, What is handsome, anyway? Handsome is as handsome does, Gran says, and if his father was a ne'er-do-well who flew the coop leaving a wife and baby behind, what difference did it make if his father was handsome or ugly? Will I be no good too, when I grow up?

“Little monsters!” Gran ranted and raved the third time he brought his lunch box home from school loaded with shavings from the pencil sharpeners. “Why do they do things like that? Why can't the teacher control them? They'll wind up in jail,” she stormed.

And Paul shuddered, not so much because some unknown enemy felt that mean about him, but because this meant another trip to school for Gran. She had had more conferences with the principal and the teacher than all the other kids' mothers combined.

“He has a rough enough time as it is,” Gran once said to Miss Olah, who was young and pretty and saving her money to take a trip to see the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, in the summer. Paul did not quite believe in the Acropolis, any more than he believed in the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but he was keeping an open mind until Miss Olah returned with the slides she had promised.

“I will do what I can,” Miss Olah had said, “but you know how children are. They are like little savages sometimes. I can't promise miracles, but I will try.”

If Paul's mother did get married again, he would go to live with her and visit Gran on week ends. If Gran got lonely, she always had Mrs. Tuttle for a friend. Paul thought Mrs. Tuttle was a pain, but Gran liked her. He wouldn't go off and just leave Gran alone. He'd make plans.

If he had a proper family, with a father and mother and maybe a brother or sister, then he'd have friends he could ask over to make papier-mâché masks or to go to the movies with or to go trick or treating with on Halloween.

Last Halloween he'd gone out alone because there was no one to go with. He'd rung three bells and three people had said, “All alone? That's a shame. That's no way to be traveling tonight.” Then they'd loaded him up with candy, giving him extra to make up for being alone. He'd quit and gone home with eight candy bars and two lousy apples.

3

Gran sat at the table making up her shopping list. When she started out by saying she needed a loaf of bread and a pound of margarine, she usually ended by sending him for a load of stuff he had difficulty carrying home.

“You tell Mr. Barker I want the thin noodles,” she said. “If he doesn't have the thin kind, I don't want any. And if they're more than thirty cents, don't buy them. If he wasn't so convenient, I wouldn't set foot inside his place. That man would just as soon rob his own mother as look at her.”

Paul took the list and tucked it into his pocket.

“I like Mr. Barker,” he said.

“I didn't say you couldn't like him,” Gran snapped. “I simply said he's a robber, the prices he charges. And you tell him that last piece of round steak he gave me was tough as an old billy goat.” She handed Paul some money. “You tell him for me if that was round steak, I'm Marilyn Monroe.”

Paul escaped into the half-dark day. Thunder grumbled in the distance like an empty stomach. He scuffed through the cast-off candy wrappers and bits and pieces of trash by the curb looking for money. Once he had found a dime, and it seemed to him that on that day his luck had changed for the better. He had passed an arithmetic test he had expected to fail, and a new kid down the street had asked him over to play checkers. He didn't like the boy much, and he'd never been invited back, to play checkers or anything else, but finding the dime had been nothing but luck.

Although he kept his head down the whole way, except when a car blew an angry horn at him and the driver leaned out the window and shouted, “Watch it, kid. You wanna get killed?” he didn't find anything but a rusty beer-can opener.

Boy Wanted
, the sign in Mr. Barker's window read.
From 3-6 weekdays, Saturdays all day. Inquire within
. Paul read the sign two or three times. He closed his eyes and made a wish. He hadn't made too many wishes lately, so he figured his credit was good. He promised God that if he got the job, God could count on him for all kinds of things, like not forgetting to brush his teeth, which were usually fairly green around the gums, and also taking trouble with the margins on his homework papers.

A bell tinkled as he opened the shop door. Two ladies with hats on were pinching the tomatoes, although there was a sign in front of them which clearly said:
Please don't pinch the tomatoes. They might pinch back
.

That was Mr. Barker for you. He had a really good sense of humor. When Paul told his grandmother that, she sniffed and answered, “If I had as much money in the bank as he does, I'd be laughing and joking too.” When Gran got down on somebody, she really went all the way.

“Hey, Paul, how's the boy?” Mr. Barker's long, droopy mustache lifted at either end as he smiled. That mustache made him look as if he'd lost his last friend. It wasn't until you noticed how his eyes shone and sparkled that you knew that here was a man who took life in his stride, a man who bounced back when Fate dealt him a right to the jaw.

Mr. Barker had confided to Paul that Fate had dealt him not only plenty of rights to the jaw, but also its share of lefts. If it hadn't been for Mrs. Barker, he never would have made it, he said. Mrs. Barker was a dried-up little raisin of a woman with a long, pointy nose which made her look like a witch. A good witch. She always had her head in the oven, bringing out trays of brownies, cookies, pies, and goodies of all sorts. The Barkers lived above the store and sometimes invited Paul up to share their plenty. It was a constant source of wonder to him that Mr. and Mrs. Barker weren't both big and fat, with all the food they had to tempt them.

“How you doing, sir?” Paul said. He would wait until the ladies left before he asked Mr. Barker about the job. After one of the ladies screamed when Mr. Barker said, “That'll be ninety cents” for two hothouse tomatoes, the other practically made him sign a piece of paper swearing the grapefruits were fresh. With a wink at Paul, Mr. Barker held his hand over his heart and said, “I promise they're fresh as a daisy. Brought 'em up just yesterday from Florida.”

Sour, unsmiling, the two ladies creaked out the door.

“What can I do for you?” Mr. Barker asked Paul, who read from his grandmother's list while Mr. Barker assembled the groceries.

“I see you're l-l-looking for a b-b-b-boy to help you,” Paul said. He almost never stuttered when he was with Mr. Barker. “I-I-I sure would like the job.”

He put his head down and stared at the floor, embarrassed because he knew he had put Mr. Barker on the spot.

“There's nothing I'd like better than to hire you,” he said, and Paul's heart did a couple of flips in his chest, “but there's one thing against it, and it's an important thing. There's a law,” he said slowly, putting the margarine and stuff into a bag. “They have this law against hiring anyone under sixteen. Now I know you're a responsible boy and a hard worker”—Mr. Barker wordlessly held out a stick of gum and Paul took it, nodding his thanks—“but I also know you're not anywheres near sixteen, right?”