56 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
said. “Eat your cereal. It’s getting lumpy.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“How do I know that you think?” I
said. “I can’t hear you think.”
“I’m telling you I do.”
“But I can’t hear you doing it.”
“You can hear me talk,” she said.
“What I’m saying is the sound of what
I’m thinking.”
“How do I know that?”
“Because I’m telling you.”
“That doesn’t mean ... that doesn’t
make sense.”
“Calm down,” she said.
“I can hear the puppet talk.”
“Calm down,” she said.
“I can hear the puppet talk and the
puppet isn’t thinking!”
“I’m not a puppet, Adam. I’m real.”
“I can’t hear you think!”
“Baby, come on, calm down,” she
said, and hugged me close. I don’t know
what happened next. I assume I calmed
down, but I don’t remember.
THERABBITS, 1982
I
discovered a rabbit hole in our yard.
I looked inside and I saw a baby rab-
bit. I watched it blink its eyes and
wanted it.
I’d been told by my mother never
to touch a baby rabbit or the hole it
lived in, because the rabbit’s mother
would smell me, fear predators, and
never return. I didn’t want the baby
rabbit to die, so instead of touching it
I lied to my mother. I told my mother
I’d touched the rabbit, and as I lied I
imagined I had touched the rabbit, in-
suring its abandonment and infantile
death, and I began to cry.
My mother, in order to calm me
down, and because she liked rabbits,
said we could try to save the baby rab-
bit, and she put on some yellow rub-
ber gloves from by the sink and re-
moved a yellow bucket from under the
sink. We went outside to the rabbit
hole together.
She reached into the hole and re-
moved the rabbit. It sat in her hand. It
was smaller than my sister Rachel’s foot.
As my mom set the rabbit in the
bottom of the bucket, I saw shiny eyes
in the hole and told her. She reached
into the hole and removed a second
rabbit, which she put in the bucket,
next to the first. I looked in the hole
and saw more shiny eyes. My mother
reached in and removed a third rab-
bit. This continued to happen until we
had eleven rabbits in a bucket, all of
them shaking.
My father came home from work and
saw the bucket. He didn’t like it. He
chewed his lip and dragged his feet.
The rabbits needed milk, but we
didn’t know that. We gave them car-
rots, because of Bugs Bunny. We gave
them lettuce, because lettuce went
with carrots. They needed warmth,
because they weren’t getting milk, but
they may have had rabies, so we
couldn’t hold them.
- By morning, two of the eleven were
alive. One was sniffing at the lettuce,
like things might work out if only he
knew how to get it inside him. The other
one kept trying to bury her face in the
pile of her siblings’ corpses for warmth.
My mother called a pet shop for ad-
vice. The owner told her to bring him
the rabbits, both the dead and the liv-
ing, that they’d make good food for
some of the snakes. He said this over
speakerphone—speakerphone was new
then, at least in houses, and we used
ours a lot, because the novelty excited
us—and my mom hung up on him.
“We will not,” she told me, “feed the
rabbits to snakes.”
We took a drive along the road that
ran beside the forest preserve, the two
living rabbits in the bucket in my lap,
the nine dead ones in a large brown
bag at my feet. My mom pulled the car
over. She said, “I’ll keep a lookout.”
I left the bag of dead rabbits in the
ditch beside the road, then ran to the
tree line, bucket in hand. I heaved the
two living rabbits as deeply into the
forest as I could, and whispered, “Be
strong,” or maybe “Good luck,” and
ran back to the car, and asked to go
to McDonald’s.
CONSONANTTROUBLE, 1983
W
hen I changed my mind about
which sister belonged to me,
they’d been speaking in sentences for a
couple of months, and, for a while after
that, neither one had been able to say
her “R”s or “L”s—they turned them into
“W”s. But then Paula figured out how
to speak correctly, whereas Rachel got
worse, and I determined she was faking.
Adults found her cute for the way
she’d say her own name, “Waychoo,”
and so she held on to it. That’s what I
thought. And I thought she was milk-
ing it, hamming it up. I thought she
was manipulative. Still, Rachel was
mine, so I pushed the thoughts down.
Except then I saw Paula cry on the
driveway. She’d fallen down and scraped
her knee and the tears bubbled over
her lower lashes. My mom was inside
with Rachel, getting juices.
“My knee,” Paula said. “Adam. My
knee.”
“It’s no big deal,” I said. “It just stings.
Soon it won’t.”
“O.K.,” she said. “Thank you.” She
wiped her eyes with her sleeves and
stopped crying.
TURTLEANDSENSEI, 1984
M
ergatroid was the perfect name
for the turtle at the pet store,
and I knew that instantly, but by the
time my mother asked me what I
wanted to name it we were in the car
on our way to McDonald’s and, on top
of having just been given a pet, I was
minutes away from apple pie in a box.
I was so excited that I lost my grasp
on the name. I knew that an “R” was
near a “T” and a “D,” and I tried to
combine the sounds in various ways to
get to the name, except all I was able
to come up with was Gertrude, which
didn’t feel right, but I was sick of try-
ing and failing to remember, so I told
my mom “Gertrude,” and my mom said
she loved that name and repeated it.
It sounded even worse than when
I’d said it, only now my mom loved it,
and I hated to disappoint my mom, so
I said I loved it, too, and the turtle’s
