“Well, they shouldn’t make rabbits so cute or we wouldn’t care if dogs ate them. Why are rabbits made so cute? What is nature’s purpose in that one?”
He beamed. “So you’re a philosopher!”
“No, not really,” she murmured as if in fact she thought she might be.
“I think the rabbits are probably only accidentally cute to us. Mostly they’re cute to each other. The purpose? The new urban pest made palatable: more rabbit stew for everybody.”
“I see. So you’re a sort of Mr. McGregor kind of guy. I was always scared of Mr. McGregor!” She smiled.
“Nothing to be scared of. But it does seem of late that there is some kind of apocalyptic plague of rabbits. Biblical bunnies! Would you like to come and finish your coffee inside?”
She didn’t know what to make of this invitation. Was it creepy or friendly? Who could tell anymore? Very few people had been friendly to them since they’d moved here two months ago. The man’s tea-stained teeth made a sepia smile — a dental X-ray from the nineteenth century.
“Oh, thanks, I really should be going.” This time the leash caught and Cat came trotting toward her, bored and ready to move on.
“Well, good to meet you,” the old man said and turned and walked back toward his house, with its portico and porch and two stone chimneys, its wings that stretched east and west and one out back smaller and south-facing, with a long double sleeping porch, she could barely see. Over here on Princeton Place things seemed bigger than they were on Wellesley Way. She hated money! though she knew it was like blood and you needed it. Still, it was also like blood in that she often couldn’t stand the sight of it. This whole privileged neighborhood could use a neat little guillotine or some feed-capped crowds with pitchforks.
“Good to meet you,” she said, though he hadn’t given her his name.
“Here’s your coffee,” she said to Dench, who was still in bed.
“Yum. Tepid backwash.”
“Hey, don’t complain. You can go next time and bring me back half.”
“I’m not complaining,” he said in a sleepy stretch. “But it’s like it took you longer this time.”
She took a brush sharply to her scalp and began brushing. If she waited longer with her hair she might get twelve hundred. She threw it back and arched from her waist. Only in the mirror could she see her Decatur tattoo, put there one night in Linotype Gotharda in the crook of her neck, when they were playing in Decatur and she wanted to be reminded never to play there again. “That’s a strange way to be reminded,” Dench had said, and KC had said, “What better?”
“Was there a big line at the coffee shop?” Dench asked, smacking his lips.
“No. I stopped and talked to some guy. Cat is going up every driveway that ever had a squirrel or rabbit dash over it.”
“Some guy?”
“Geezer.”
“Hey, this backwash is good. There’s something new in it. Were you wearing cherry ChapStick or something?”
“Have you noticed that there are a lot of people with money around here?”
“We should meet them. We need producers.”
“You go meet them.” She would look up guillotine on the Internet on her next trip to the library.
“You’re cuter. Of course, time is of the essence in these matters.”
She loved Dench. She was helpless before the whole emotional project of him. But it didn’t preclude hating him and everything around him, which included herself, the sound of her own voice — and the sound of his, which was worse. The portraits of hell never ceased and sometimes were done up in raucous, gilded frames to console. Romantic hope: From where did women get it? Certainly not from men, who were walking caveat emptors. No, women got it from other women, because in the end women would rather be rid of one another than have to endure themselves on a daily basis. So they urged each other into relationships. “He loves you! You can see it in his eyes!” they lied.
“Casey!” the old man shouted the next morning. He was out in his front yard pounding together something that looked like a bird feeder on a post.
“Hi!” she said.
“You know my name?”
“Pardon me?”
“Old family joke.” He still seemed to be shouting. “Actually my name is Milton Theale.”
“Milton.” She repeated the name, a habit people with good memories supposedly relied on. “They don’t name kids Milton anymore.”
“Too bad and thank God! My father’s name was Hi, short for Hiram, and now that I’m old I find my head filled up with his jokes and stories rather than very many of my own, which apparently I’ve forgotten.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, as long as you don’t actually come to believe you are your dad, I suppose all is well.”
“Well, that may be next.”
“Probably that’s always next. For all of us.”
He squinted to study her, seemed to be admiring something about her again, but she was not sure what. No doubt something that was a complete mirage.
“Nice to see you again,” he said. “And you, too,” he said to the dog. “Though you are a strange-looking thing. It’s like he’s been assembled by Nazi veterinarians — a shepherd’s head, a dachshund’s body, a—”
“Yeah, I know. Sometimes he reminds me of the dog in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
“Hmmm?”
“The remake.”
“The remake of what?”
“Frankenstein!” she yelled. His deafness would give her a heart attack. Perhaps this was nature’s plan for old people to kill each other in an efficient if irritating fashion.
She could feel the heat leaving the coffee and entering her hand. “He’s like a dog made in Frankenstein’s lab!” Sometimes she hated the dog. His obliviousness to the needs of others, his determined, verbally challenged conversation about his own desires — in a human this would indicate a severe personality disorder.
“Oh, he’s not that bad,” said Milt. “And wouldn’t we like his energy. In tablet form.”
“That would be fantastic.”
“But you’re young; you wouldn’t need something like that.”
“I need something.” Was she whining? She had never made such an announcement to a stranger before.
“In lieu of that, come on in and have a blueberry muffin with me.” Again, the line between neighborliness and flirtation was not clear to her here. She knew in this community you had to do an extroverted kind of meet and greet, but she had heard of soccer parents wandering off from their children’s games and having sex in far parking lots. So the guidelines were murky and breachable. “And while you’re at it you can help me with the crossword puzzle.”
“Oh, I can’t. I have to get home. Lot of things to tend to.”
“Well, it’s not ten to. It’s ten past.”
“To tend to,” KC repeated. Perhaps his deafness had exhausted all the other neighbors and this accounted for his friendliness to her. On the other hand, no one seemed to walk around here. Either they jogged, their ears stuffed with music, or they drove their cars at murderous speeds. One old man could not have single-handedly caused that. Or could he have?
“Hmmm?”
“Gotta get home.”
“Oh, OK,” he said and waved her on.
“Maybe tomorrow,” she said out of kindness.
He nodded and went back to work.
She stopped and turned. “Are you making a bird feeder?”
“No, it’s a book nook! I’ll put books inside and people can help themselves. Like a little library. Now that the bookstore is closed. I’m just adjusting the clasp.”
“How lovely.” It was a varnished pine angled to look like the ski chalet of a doll.