Bunny Girl’s Packing
The picture is wrinkled and warn, slipped between the envelopes in the plastic container on his dresser. Inside the envelopes are old credit card agreements, the ones you get when they send you a new card. There are some that are over a decade old and they’re not what I’m looking for; I’m looking for the actual credit card statements, the recent ones, and they’re nowhere to be found. Not in the office, not in the bedroom, not in the basement. It’s like he took them with him when he died and now we have to piece together the assets and obligations like a shattered mirror. He kept the least important part out in the open and hid away the rest.
But in with those envelopes are two pictures, creased and dented. One is a school picture, first or second grade. I have pigtails that someone, probably my mom, has styled into giant red curls. I’m wearing a red and green plaid dress with a white Peter Pan collar. I look washed out, red never having been my color. I’ve seen this picture many times, the larger sized version having been put in a frame and on his desk for many years, too many years, well into my teens. But the other picture, that one is new to me.
It’s been a week of tragedy, discovery, illumination and deep grief. My brothers tell stories about how Saturdays my dad would drop my mom to get her hair done and my dad would come back and play with them for hours. This makes me cry uncontrollably. I have no memories of Saturday play dates with dad. That’s because I would get dropped off with my mom, to sit in the dryer seats in the basement hair salon in Marshall Fields, and drink lemony iced tea into which I put a quarter cup of sugar from the pour jar when nobody was looking. Saturdays for me are not endless fun with dad, they are sitting quietly in those chairs, reading a book or thumbing through a Women’s Day or Family Circle magazine that I am too young to understand. I am jealous of my brothers’ Saturday memories that I don’t have.
Both of my brothers cry over my dad’s dying body. I don’t, though I loved him as much. They tell him that he was their best friend. I don’t. He wasn’t. He was my person, though. The one I wanted when it all was going to shit. The one who would promise me that it would get better, or that he would make it better, or that he would take me on a trip, just us guys, to Paris or the Galapagos Islands. He’d promise me whatever he thought I wanted, just to get me to stop being so bleak. Bleak like he was in his letters from Germany when he was in the army, quoting Philip Wylie’s ‘Generation of Vipers’ about the dangers of capitalism, religion and nationalism. He and I shared that cynicism, even if I didn’t know it at the time.
Those trips my dad promised would never materialize but it never mattered. He believed it when he told me and I did, too. And our annual family road trip down south and week on Sanibel Island was enough to get me through. Our first morning there, I’d wake him at 4am to go seashell hunting with me and he’d always say yes. We’d hold hands and walk on the beach and look for giant conch shells and perfect tiger’s eyes and mollies, starfish and sea cucumbers washed up on the shore. It was all the magic that I needed.
The picture is black and white. I am dressed in a bunny costume sitting on my father’s lap, my brother to his right, dressed as a mouse. My father looks incredibly young, incredibly beautiful, elegantly dressed in a collared shirt and sweater. With his light brown eyes and full lips, he wasn’t so much a handsome man as a beautiful man. Not excessively emotive and yet somehow always gentle and loving, always more concerned about our happiness than our prospects. Elegant but never fastidious. Even as he was dying, his fingernails were perfectly clean and clipped as I kissed his liver spotted hand.
In the picture, my beautiful father is looking down adoringly at the pink bunny baby daughter in his lap. I’m five months old and it’s my first Halloween. Nine weeks later, my mother will hear me wheezing in my crib and walk in to find me turning the same shade of blue as the baby blanket covering me. The one that I liked to pick fuzz off of, throwing the tightly wadded balls through the slats of the crib onto the white shag carpet below. Years later, before I am ready to let it go, my mother will want to throw away that blanket that she says I’ve made so thin you could “read a newspaper through it”. That winter, I will spend a month in the hospital in an oxygen tent with a collapsed lung and only a small stuffed bunny to keep me company.
In the picture my middle brother is four and he has floppy light brown mouse ears and drawn on whiskers. He is looking at me from the side, slightly concerned. My oldest brother is not in the photo, but he is dressed as a cat. The ears on my costume are giant and stick out to the side. They look like the habit on the flying nun. A tuft of my barely-there red hair is sticking out right down the middle of my forehead. My hair was so light and sparse as a baby that my oldest brother was concerned that I might be bald forever.
I am casually leaning back into my father like he’s a Barcalounger, taking up his entire lap. Because of the perspective of the photo and the size of the bunny costume, I look huge, bigger than my brother. Only the size of my dad’s hands wrapped around me show how small and fragile I really am. My tiny fingers are smaller than the John Tierney designed wedding ring he’s wearing, the one with the symbols from the Little Prince that matches my mother’s. It’s a reminder that in those nine months of writing each other letters without ever seeing photographs, despite my father’s sometimes bleak perspective on the world, they fell in love with their hearts rather than their eyes. How could he not fall in love with the brainy valedictorian who recommended that he read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia? How could she not fall in love with the clear-eyed soldier, equally despondent over the continued nationalism of the Germans and the growing authoritarianism of the Russians, who signed off one letter with a Hemingwayesque P.S. “Forgive the lack of commas, I haven’t time for the little bastards”. That they discovered when they finally met in person that they were both quite beautiful was the icing on the cake of a romance built upon words. It’s a lot to live up to.
In the dog-eared and torn picture that my father kept, slipped among the old credit card agreements, I am staring straight to camera, chubby-cheeked and calm. I look like an Eastern European child. I look like if I could speak, I might tell you that I don’t have time for commas or communists or these giant bunny ears. I might calmly tell you - void of drama, void of emotion – that I have a job to do. I might say it in perfect Russian or Lithuanian or Polish. I might tell you about the hit I am about to make because in this kept picture, filed among my father’s unneeded things, in my hands is a very large metal toy gun, my right hand on the trigger side and my left hand caressing the barrel.
