I am standing at the kitchen counter opening a can of solid white albacore.
Tweak: “Seriously. Are you slaughtering manatees?”
Me: “Perish the thought. My tuna is dolphin-safe.”
Tweak: “What are we talking about?”
I hold the freshly severed lid against the pink meat puck and pour the juice down the sink.
Me: “You can’t have any of this nectar.”
Tweak: “What kind of cretin eats tuna juice?”
Me: “It’s very popular on Craigslist.”
Tweak: “What are we talking about?”
I fork some tightly-packed fish tiles into a white bowl.
Me: “You’re a freak, Tweak. Most cats beg for this stuff, and it’s not a pretty transaction. I’ve seen gentler come-ons from crack whores.”
Tweak: “The other white meat.”
Me: “I killed a cat with tuna once.”
Tweak scooches back on the floor.
Me: “Oh, I didn’t mean to! It was horrible, actually. I decanted tuna juice onto his nurdles once a month for 7 years. He lapped it up like cocaine. At the time I didn’t understand that the salts in the fish brine were slowly forming oysters inside his kidneys and clogging his internal organs like asphalt on an anthill.”
Tweak covers her ears with her hands. And some whimpering.
Me: “Eventually the toxins built up in his brain and he went insane. He banged his head against walls, lost vision in one eye, and required fluid injections between his shoulder blades while screaming for encores of ‘FREE BIRD!’.”
I rinse out the can and throw it in the recycle bin. It hits the side and spins out onto the floor. Tweak sniffs it like a crime scene.
Tweak: “What are you playing? Some kind of funeral dirge?”
Tweak leaps up next to me on the piano bench.
Me: “Well, yes, actually.”
Tweak: “I don’t even know what a ‘funeral dirge’ is. I read it on the internet.”
[I switch to the “Addams Family” theme song.]
Me: “A ‘dirge’ is a sad song they play at funerals.”
Tweak: “What’s a ‘funeral’?”
Me: “Hmmm… A funeral is when people get together to celebrate, I mean, remember… It means somebody died.”
[I arpeggiate a D-minor chord.]
Tweak: “What happens when people die?”
Me: “They don’t talk as much.”
Tweak: “Then they get flushed down the toilet?”
Me: “That’s mostly for fish. And some Italians.”
[Left hand, octave E-flats, two eighth notes.]
Tweak: “So what happens after people die?”
Me: “That sure is an easy question! You know what ‘sarcasm’ is, Tweak?”
Tweak: “Whenever your lips move?”
Me: “Good. Let’s proceed. What a person believes about dying seems to depend mostly on the holy accident of where they were born. Some people believe in eternal paradise, some people believe in rebirth and trying to ‘get it right’ in the next life, and some people believe that in death we are nothing more than a maggot’s wet dream. An opportunity to feed insects and Darwin.”
Tweak: “Death sounds like a game show.”
Me: “Give us time. It will be.”
[Ragtime intro to Joplin’s “Entertainer.”]
Me: “Some people believe that a person does not die until the last story told is told about them.”
Tweak: “Then I’m going to live forever.”
Me: “Nine times forever.”
Tweak: “That ought to feed the panda.”
[“Come and listen to a story about a man named ‘Jed’…”]
Me: “It’s Monday, Tweak. You know what that means.”
Tweak: “You feed me? Finally?”
Me: “I feed you every day, Tweak. You are short-minded and thankless.”
Tweak: “You have a screw loose.”
Me: “I haven’t a screw of any kind.”
Tweak: “You should tell the world!”
Me: “Same thing we do every Monday.”
Tweak: “Your Alzheimer’s is setting in. Shall I start putting labels on things? ‘Table.’ ‘Chair.’ ‘Self-respect.’”
Me: “Monday is a day for fresh starts. An opportunity to wipe clean the fouled white boards. An occasion to scrape fresh the undergarments. A chance to puncture the calcified guilt-sausage in the meat-core of one’s stinking arteries with the Roto-Rooter of Remorse.”
Tweak: “And you’re single… why?”
Me: “Hey, Tweak, how many FINGER am I holding up?”
When I was a tween, somebody brought me six baby bunnies. We didn’t have the word “tween” back then, but I was somewhere between young and old, meaning I was half kid and half bitch. You remember those years? Lasted about three decades?
But this story isn’t about me. It’s about raising babies. From scratch. And whether some people should be parents or not.
When I say “somebody brought me baby bunnies” what that really means is this: some little neighbor kid whispered to my younger brother: “Hey, your sister’s old and smart. Let’s show her this thing we found.” I don’t know WHICH little neighbor kid it was. They all looked alike: buzz cut, bruised knees, shirtless. It was summer, so they’d all been playing outside 16 hours a day. The lesions from their sunburns had almost healed.
This kid, let’s call him “Kevin,” Kevin peeked his dirty face into my bedroom door one morning. He was terrified of my maturity, but he was made brave by the five or six clones who shadowed him, a comet trail of identical Kevins fidgeting behind him in the hallway. Kevin and his column of Kevins had justification for their terror. My sister and I were deep inside a discussion about the relative comedic value of Bugs Bunny versus Daffy Duck when we were interrupted. And, according to Kevin, it was rabbit season.
The words tumbled out of him fast like he’d been saving them up.
“There’s a pile of baby bunnies. The mother is dead. She got hit by a car. You should come quick.” Then Kevin scratched his ear with his hind foot.
The old-bitch in me scowled at the audacity of this intrusion, but the young-kid in me was desperately curious. The kid won. I got up and put shoes on.
Kevin and his trail of Kevins led me down a dirt road that sliced through woods on each side. The main Kevin pointed to a mangled place in the grass. He veered right and parted the reeds. Under the weeds was a cluster of baby bunnies.
“Well, shit,” I declared wisely. Six Kevins tried not to giggle.
The bunnies were tiny – walnuts with ears. There were six of them huddled together in a grass bowl. They were covered with what I determined to be rabbit fur (I was so wise!). Their eyes were open, but just barely. It was a snugly armload of cute. Or tragedy. Depending.
“Where’s the mother?” I asked, scanning the deserted road.
Five of the Kevins shrugged. The main Kevin pointed vaguely along the length of ditch into the sunlight. We both squinted.
“Did you actually SEE her?” Six Kevins shook their heads and stared at the ground.
My first great act of wisdom was deciding whether or not to assume the mother was gone forever. My second great act of wisdom was how to get the bunnies back to my house. (I ignored the first act. OF COURSE I was going to take them home. LOOK AT THEM! The bunnies were incalculably hypnotic. They were an abundance of “aw.” I was as helpless as if the Kevins had found gold.)
I picked up one baby. It was warm and wiggly and bumpy with young bones. The bunny did not squeal exactly, but it did peep. If the mother was nearby, she should have been able to hear this. I scanned the ditch.
Nothing.
I made the impossible declaration that these babies were orphans.
I assigned each Kevin the privilege of carrying one bunny back to my house. The Kevins did not squeal exactly, but they did peep. (For the rest of their lives these men-not-boys would tell the story of this important task, of their volunteerism to “help that older girl down the street,” without ever once mentioning how their young faces gushed with tenderness the moment they palmed a baby bunny.) I led the parade home and sent the Kevins on their way.
Now what.
Good grief, now what. What do you DO with a pile of baby bunnies??
A snugly armload of cute on a 70s carpet.
Google was a thousand years in the future. The only way we could “look things up” was to ask a parent or to go to the library (although I had no idea what you did once you GOT to the library. Ask another parent?) Our family owned a set of Encyclopedia Britannicas, but the only thing I ever studied in those heavy books were the color overlays of human anatomy. (Is that a nipple??)
I clicked in my head through snippets of knowledge gleaned from years of watching wildlife documentaries. Aha! All I needed was an eyedropper and some milk. There were four Waugh kids and at least six Kevins at our house. We always had milk. And the eyedropper? My father had five junk drawers labeled “miscellaneous.” I had faith. These babies would live!
I filled up a glass with milk and carried it to the make-shift “pen” (a cardboard box lined with a towel pilfered from the “rag bag”). I sucked milk up into the eyedropper and lowered the tip to one bunny’s mouth. I squirted the milk. It went everywhere. It went up the bunny’s nose. It dripped on his ears. Milk flew onto the fur of every bunny in the box. They writhed at my ineptitude for mothering. I realized that the milk was cold and likely unpleasant. (Are you in, genius?)
Back upstairs. I slammed the glass of milk into the microwave. (We may not have had internet yet, but we had a prehistoric microwave that ran on gerbils.) I heated the milk to “wrist temperature” and headed back downstairs. This time I was careful. Each bunny licked the end of the eyedropper with his adorable pink tongue like it was mother’s milk. From a cow.
The bunnies were ravenous. One drop, another drop, six drops. Back to the beginning of the line. The bunnies started climbing over each other. I couldn’t get to each mouth fast enough. This was taking too long.
Wait a second… GRASS!! Bunnies eat grass! Deep in my compendium of wildlife facts I remembered that rabbits as a species were particularly precocious. They “grew up” fast. Maybe I could supplement their diet with grass!!
I raced outside. I ran around plucking different kinds of grass from the edge of the house: long grass, short grass, fat grass, thin grass. Some of each! They shall want for nothing!
I baled my little harvest into a fat tuft and dropped it into the bunny box. They loved it! The bunnies gnawed mouthfuls of grass. Long, short, fat, thin. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw. A bunny eats grass long ways, sucking it up like a Disney dog eating spaghetti. Unless they’re starving, in which case they eat grass in every direction, like a real dog eating spaghetti. Like maybe Shrek.
They ate their fill and got sleepy, as all babies do. By now it was full dark. I left a few strands of grass in the box so they could snack during the night. I put a lid on their cardboard home and made myself a sandwich, satisfied. I went to bed, worn out from feedings.
I got up the second day to find the six babies making starving sounds, peeping, scrabbling, and crawling on top of each other. Every single morsel of grass was gone. I went outside and plucked up more grass, long, short, fat, thin. I dropped it in the box. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw. Repeat. Bunnies eat a lot! I abandoned the eyedropper altogether figuring that what they really needed to grow strong was more grass. Pluck, toss, gnaw. Bedtime. Exhaustion.
I woke up the third day and found five of the bunnies making starving sounds. The sixth bunny was jittering back and forth. His whole body was shaking. The sixth bunny would not eat. I fed the five. Pluck, gnaw, bedtime.
I got up the fourth day to find two bunnies making starving noises, three bunnies shaking uncontrollably, and one bunny dead.
On the fifth day, four bunnies were dead and two were on their sides, jittering, dying.
“Well, shit.” Nobody giggled.
Here’s what you don’t know, and what had just occurred to me: I had just poisoned six baby bunnies. I didn’t mean to. I was just doing my job.
My “job” as a tween in the 1970s was to rid our home of ants. Ants were allowed to live outside the house, but not in. This was a reasonable détente that the ants unfortunately never agreed to. Our house was next to an enormous woods and we ate cereal, therefore we had ants. The way we kept ants out of our Cap’n Crunch was to spray the perimeter of the house with a chemical called “chlordane.” You sprayed this toxin on the seams around the outside of your house. You know… where the grass grows long? Short, fat, thin? Chlordane would kill the ants by disrupting their nervous systems. I guess by now you can connect the dots, or in this case, the baby bunnies. All the way to their communal grave in the woods.
And when I say that YOU sprayed the perimeter, I mean, of course, that I sprayed the perimeter. With nerve toxin. Me. That was my job. And it worked. Really, really well.
It was sad. It was horrifying. It was avoidable. Except that it wasn’t. If the mother rabbit hadn’t disappeared, if the Kevins hadn’t found the nest, if my father had not owned an eyedropper, if stupid ants didn’t try to invade our stupid Crunch Berries. If the bunny hadn’t stopped to bark at the moon.
“Survival of the fittest” dictates that two of the babies would have been eaten by hawks, two would have been ravaged by feral cats, and one would have been hit by a car and then pecked to shreds by a vulture. Nature is miserable, man. I knew that. I’d seen the encyclopedias.
But I’m not nature. And it shouldn’t have been me killing bunnies.
Then I realized that, yes, I was absolutely nature.
Bugs Bunny and bowls of cereal are part of the circle of life. Ants, grass, Kevins, and baby rabbits. The circle of life includes a circle of grief, and sometimes the circle shakes apart. It just does, and sometimes you’re the one holding the snow globe. It is Duck Season and it is Rabbit Season. Both. Always.
I am wrapped around a body pillow. Tweak leaps onto my back from what feels like the top of a cliff.
Tweak: “WHY ARE YOU STILL IN BED?!?”
Her cannonball knocks the air out of my lungs. My eyes pop open. The clock is a Stephen King clown.
Me: “Good grief, Tweak. It’s only 6:08. I’ve slept for eight extra minutes.”
Tweak: “Do you know how much damage I can do in eight minutes?”
Me: “To what – your sleep study?”
Tweak chews my hair.
Me: “Besides, it’s my day off.”
Tweak: “Off?? As opposed to…?”
I roll over, not gently. Tweak’s claws are still hooked to the quilt and she plops sideways on the mattress like a balloon full of potato salad.
I chortle before I can stop myself and she extracts vengeance by raking a claw down my back.
Me: “OW!”
Tweak: “We. Don’t. Chortle.”
She rearranges her dignity and sits beside me, curling her feet under herself like a breakfast loaf.
Tweak: “So, what are you doing on your day off?”
Me: “I’m not sure yet. What do YOU usually do?”
Tweak: “HAHA!! Good one.”
I reach for my phone on the night stand and pull up a list called “Things to Do When I Have Eight Damn Minutes.” The last item is: “Don’t take any more shit.” I close the phone and set it on the pillow next to me. Tweak crawls on top of it.
Tweak: “I’m on the list. HAHA!”
I roll my eyes so hard they rattle. The commotion summons a ruiner.
Bowie bursts into the room, the Kramer of dogs.
Bowie: “Hey! You guys having fun in here without me?”
Bowie-dog’s happy tongue smiles and she paws the pillow, a kind of dog fist-bump. Tweak dives off and digs a nail into my thigh. My phone crashes to the floor.
