Shannon Skelton fiction short story An Inventory of Bunnies
Equinox, Nancy Panganiban, 23″ x 23″, Acrylic on birch panel, 2016
An Inventory of Bunnies
On the phone with my daughter, I ask if she has chosen a color scheme or a theme for my grandson’s birthday party, and I can tell that I am aggravating her.
“No,” she says. “He’s six months old.”
“I know,” I say. She doesn’t realize how these things take time.
“Mom,” she says, “I think that the first birthday is something I really want to plan on my own, as his mother.”
“Oh. Yes. I understand,” I say. “But let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.” I don’t mention the ideas for the party I’ve already bookmarked on my computer. I also refrain from reminding her that I have a friend, Barbara, who makes the most adorable cakes. She can create three-dimensional scenes and incorporate all kinds of edible materials. Well, I don’t know if I would call Barbara a friend. She’s more of an acquaintance. We went to the same Ladies’ Service Group before my kids graduated from high school, and then the group lost its luster for whatever reason.
You would think that when my kids left home, I would have had more time than I’d ever had before, but it felt like the opposite. Actually, it felt like everything made me more exhausted than it ever had before. Like just getting up and eating some Special K cereal was enough to call it a day. And each Thursday that fall, when the Ladies’ Service Group took our turn at the elementary school listening to second-graders read aloud from Mouse Soup, the nostalgia of it all made me even more exhausted. Not that this was the only service we did. But it was one of the things I’d most enjoyed, before my kids moved out.
I tell Phillip about my phone conversation with Lara. He is working on some drafts for work.
“Don’t you think that’s normal?” he asks me.
“What’s normal? For her to want me to be absent from my grandson’s life?”
“Did she tell you not to come to the party?” he asks. “Did she ask you not to bring a present?”
“You always take her side,” I tell him. “You always have to go and try to be the good guy, the one who sees things from the other perspective. Well, I see things from the other perspective too, but it just so happens that my perspective is the one that brought her perspective into existence.” I pause and add, “She doesn’t think I can plan a birthday party? Who does she think planned every birthday party she ever had? Who ordered the cake? Who got the matching napkins?”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to have matching napkins,” he says. And then, “How would you have liked it if someone else had tried to intervene in all of those things when you wanted to plan them yourself?”
“Well, I would have loved it!” I practically spit this at him. “But I didn’t have a mother who wanted to help me, did I?” And at that, I punish him by sulking silently.
My mother wasn’t really around when I was raising my kids. Actually, she wasn’t around when she was raising me. She had her own agenda. Getting her nails and her hair done and sneaking around with various men who worked with her. She was an airline stewardess, and I rarely knew which state she was in. My biggest birthday was the year I turned ten and got to choose five friends to take with me to the skating rink. I had one best friend and three close friends, and I didn’t want to pretend to have more, so I invited those four girls, and two of them couldn’t go due to a schedule conflict. If my mother had known me well, she would have known that telling me I could choose five friends to take to the skating rink when I had only four friends, and one dependable one at that, was just embarrassing. But she wasn’t aware. Then, when I wanted to get a glow-in-the-dark necklace, my mother said that it would just burn out in an hour or two and be a waste of money. So I skated around in a melancholy mood to Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle,” which was the romantic song they played for the Couples’ Skate, and I held hands with my two girlfriends because none of us had met any boys to skate with. I imagined birthdays that were festive, birthdays that included a cake—not a lemon pound cake, the kind we had around our house all the time anyway and which my own mother saw as perfectly suitable to also double as a birthday cake—but one with my name on it, my own name, Gloria, curling across it in bright pink frosting.
This is why I saw to it that my children had the best birthdays and the best everything, as far as I could help it; and it was because of this effort, I believe, that they always had plenty of friends to invite to their parties. And I’ll be damned if each of those friends didn’t leave with a carefully put together party favor bag.
♦ ♦ ♦
Five months after I’d asked my daughter about the birthday party, she tells me that she has (finally) begun to plan Grayson’s party, and she wants the guests to donate money to a charity in lieu of bringing a gift. She’s going to put this on the invitation in the form of a little poem. The invitation, it turns out, is an “Evite.”
“How,” I ask her, “am I to save this electronic invitation in the scrapbook I am making for Grayson?” She says that she doesn’t know, that she wasn’t considering that when she made the decision. The poem is this:
No gifts needed.
A donation is best,
to Kids Count Charities,
per Grayson’s request!
“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen,” I tell Phillip. “They could at least not make it out so that it seems like a one-year-old is requesting that his birthday guests donate to a charity instead of giving him toys.”
“I think people will bring gifts anyway,” he says. I take this as his agreeing with me and appreciate the small victory.
“I didn’t ask her directly, but I’m sure she means this is what she wants for the other guests, not for family,” I say. “Of course I’m getting him presents. I’m his grandmother!”
♦ ♦ ♦
We are going to be staying with Lara and my son-in-law for the weekend of the birthday party, so there is only so much I can do from afar, but I plan to do what I can.
“So, would you like us to maybe handle some of the snacks or drinks or something?” I ask her. “Or maybe some decorations?”
“I really think we’ve got it covered, Mom. We just want to see you and spend time with you. We just want to keep it simple.” She says “simple” as though I am too simple to understand what she means.
“As far as decorations,” she says, “Garrett and I are going to use DIY decorations. And I think I might make the cake too.”
“DIY is…”
“Do it yourself.”
“Ah, okay,” I say. “So you mean homemade, like with construction paper or something.”
“Well, probably some poster board or some fabric is what I was thinking,” she says, sounding suddenly smaller.
“Well, okie-dokie then. I hope you have fun with that.”
♦ ♦ ♦
I go downtown to a party supply shop and order a twelve-foot banner that says “Happy First Birthday Grayson!” across the body of a long alligator with a cute, smiling side profile. It looks very professional and like someone cared to spend time and money on it. I pack it in the trunk of the car, along with my gifts and some paper plates and napkins that I also picked up because I saw them in the store and they just so happened to perfectly match the birthday banner I’d ordered—with a “1” and a little alligator on them. I know my daughter has invited a lot of the new friends she has made since she’s been living in Nashville, and I want them to know how much we love our Grayson. I would think this is one of those events in which you would want to really show off what a fabulous mother you are. I imagine the decorations she has described, maybe some paper chains or something, some homemade signs. With what’s available today? Ridiculous.
♦ ♦ ♦
“Do you think Lara and Garrett are having financial problems?” I ask Phillip on Thursday night while we sit out on the deck eating steaks. We have installed some tiki torch citronella candles in various spots on the railing, but they don’t seem to be keeping the fat mosquitos away from my strawberry salad.
“I don’t know that they would mention it if they were,” he says.
“And why not?” I ask.
“Well, would you want your mother to know if we were having financial problems?”
“My mother wouldn’t care to know if we were having financial problems,” I say, “which is one of the reasons I’m so glad we aren’t.” She would care, of course, if it affected her situation at the private beachside retirement community where she is currently living, but other than that.
“Some people just don’t like their parents to be involved in every aspect of their lives.”
He says “some people” and “their parents” like we are talking about some strangers in a magazine advertisement. Like we aren’t talking about the girl that we once gathered from her crib, a little crying lump, and laid between us in our bed, night after night.
♦ ♦ ♦
When we arrive at Lara’s, she is a bit out of breath. She’s wearing a thin gray t-shirt with a stain on the shoulder, and when I hug her I can smell spit-up. I’ve made some suggestions about how to improve Grayson’s reflux situation. He spits up more than any baby I’ve ever seen. But when I make suggestions, Lara treats me the way you treat an old person who’s losing her mind. Or kind of like she treats Grayson. It’s like she’s patting me on the back and saying, “Okay now,” just to shut me up and go on and do whatever she was planning to do anyway. For one thing, I tell her, she could lay him on his stomach to sleep. No, no, no, she’s told me. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises against this.
But everyone knows you lay a baby down on its tummy. How can she sleep, I wonder, when her baby could be choking on his own spit-up? Sometimes I can’t sleep thinking about it myself. But she’s always reading up on everything on the internet, so she doesn’t really need my help. I think she already thinks she is a better mother than me.
The house is not exactly tidy, but then again, it never is. I can tell that Lara is disheveled but attempting not to appear so. I pretend not to notice because I’m not ready to say I-told-you-so just yet.
In the guest bedroom, Phillip and I sit our bags down on the bed, which is covered by a quilt I made for Lara when she went off to college. It’s sewn together with pieces of t-shirts and sweatshirts from all of her high school extracurricular activities and events. I run my hand over it and think of the morning I gave it to her and the afternoon we left her in the dorm room. She had suddenly looked as tiny, sitting on that dormitory bed, as she’d looked as a baby, when she’d first begun sitting up and I would gaze across the living room and see her, sitting on her pink blanket, so small in comparison to the room, concentrating hard on her brightly colored, plastic stackable buckets.
That day in the dorm, she sat there with another kid, a stranger, both on her bed, reading an email. I remember thinking, what is she doing? Does she even know? I worried then that she was just as helpless, just as fragile as the baby chewing on plastic buckets at six months old. I couldn’t sleep for months after we left her at school. I ached in bed at night. “I can’t sleep. I’m in pain,” I would tell Phillip. He would ask me what hurt, and I didn’t know. The thing that hurt wasn’t there. It was like my life had a phantom limb.
Now I tell Phillip, “It’s a good thing I bought the extra banner and such. I think she might need some help.”
“Really,” he says. “You think that’s going to help.”
I can tell by the way he is stating this rather than asking it that he doesn’t think it’s going to help at all. It’s a good thing somebody around here has practiced being a mother and doing things like hosting birthday parties for twenty years or so. My husband and daughter act like it’s something just anybody could do. They think things in life just come together so smoothly, without any behind-the-scenes effort.
“I can’t believe she put Grayson to sleep before we got here,” I say.
♦ ♦ ♦
After organizing my outfits in the guest bedroom, I put on my pajamas and go into the living room to see what I can do to help Lara. She and Garrett are sitting on an oval rug on the floor and cutting circles out of poster board.
“No,” she’s saying to him. “You have to use a circle so that both sides are the same when you fold it over.”
“We are trying to make a paper bunting banner,” she tells me.
“I see,” I say. So far they have folded a few blue and green circles in half over a hairy piece of twine. They are working on cutting out more.
“Hey!” I say. “Let me show you something.” I go into the bedroom and come out with the party supplies I bought. “I know you had something in particular in mind,” I say, “but I picked up a few things to help out with the party. Just in case you got busy and needed them.”
I show her the banner. “Isn’t it cute? I mean, I know you are making a banner, but if you want to be saved the trouble… And I even picked up some plates to match.”
“Well, it’s very cute,” Lara says. “We were planning to use our real dishes. We washed them up.” She motions to the table, which is covered by a light green tablecloth and a burlap table runner. Sitting on it are stacks of dessert plates. Some are white with red trim, others are brown, and then there are some tan ones with yellow stripes.
“But this way everything matches.”
“Yes, it does…”
“And you don’t have to wash anything,” I add.
“Well, I was trying to go for the mismatched look. Like matching but not matching. With primary colors and all. I thought it was cute, but…” she trails off.
“Of course, you don’t have to use any of this stuff,” I say. I start to roll up the banner. “I just brought it in case.”
“You know,” she turns to Garrett with sudden resolve. “I’m tired. Let’s just use the banner Mom brought. She spent the money on it and all.”
He looks at her hesitantly. “Are you sure?”
He’s always asking her what to do. I think it’s because his dad is so passive too. His parents are divorced. Probably his mother couldn’t handle a man who never made any decisions. I hope Lara can.
“Yes, I’m sure,” she says. “And now, I’m going to go and make the cupcake batter.”
“What?” I say. “Cupcakes? No cake?”
“Nope. No cake,” she says. “Cupcakes.”
♦ ♦ ♦
“I was going to take one of those pictures with Grayson smashing up the cake,” I tell Phillip back in the bedroom. “But there isn’t going to be a cake. Just cupcakes!”
“Well, can’t you take a picture of him smashing up a cupcake?”
“But nowadays everyone is doing a smash cake. It’s a little cake, made smaller for the baby since it’s his first cake.”
“Isn’t that what a cupcake is? A little cake?” He can be such an ass sometimes.
“You know,” I say, “I think you love to make me feel stupid. But you don’t see what she’s doing. She’s trying to do everything the opposite of the way I would do it. She’s trying to make a point or something.”
“What point do you think she’s making?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
But I can’t say it out loud for some reason, though it’s obvious to me. Why would someone deliberately do everything opposite of the way you would do it? To prove something. To prove I didn’t get motherhood right, I suppose. She never asks me for advice, for instance. Why would you not ask your own mother for advice? Because you don’t want it, I guess. Because you don’t want to do things the way she did them.
♦ ♦ ♦
On the morning of the party, I wake to the smell of cinnamon. I go straight into Grayson’s room, but he isn’t there. In the kitchen, Lara is wearing the same gray t-shirt from yesterday with new stains. On the cluttered counter is what looks to be a bowl of torn muffins. I realize after a moment that it is a bowl of failed cupcakes. I knew she should have ordered a cake.
She is leaning onto the counter with her weight pressed into her elbows, staring at her laptop screen. The screen is dusted with flour, and flour has landed on the keyboard as well, on and between the keys. Her rear end is sticking out, and for a moment, I think of swatting it, to be silly, which is what I would have done years ago when she still lived at home. But I can’t do it now. For one, she’s probably on edge since her cupcakes aren’t turning out. But even if not for this, something has changed between us, and I don’t know how to be close to her without being all the way close to her. I don’t know how to be her mother anymore, now that I’m not her mother every day.
“Morning,” I say. I pretend not to notice the shreds of cupcakes. “Are you making something cinnamony?”
“I was,” she says.
“Where is Grayson? I haven’t even seen him, and it’s his birthday!”
“Garrett took him to get birthday coffee so I could get everything ready for the party.”
“To get coffee?” I scoff. “Well, I…” Before I can articulate my thoughts on taking a baby out for coffee, she interrupts me.
“Mom!” Lara says. She says it nastily. “Do you really think we take our one-year-old baby to get coffee? Do you? Really? He gets a milk if you must know. We just call it ‘getting coffee’ okay?”
“Wait a minute. I didn’t even say anything!”
“You were about to,” she says. Which is true.
“To be someone who is so sure of how right you got things,” she continues, “I wish you would give yourself a little more credit and not assume that you raised an idiot!” She flails one of her hands toward me when she says “give yourself a little more credit” and then back toward herself when she says “idiot,” and as she does so, she swoops her hand past the counter and knocks it into the computer, which flips onto the kitchen floor and makes a sharp cracking sound as it hits.
I wait for something explosive to come out. Not out of the computer, but out of my daughter. But her reaction is worse than explosive. It’s dead silent.
“Okay then,” she says finally. She says it very softly, and she picks the computer up without inspecting it, closes it, and sets it on the kitchen table. She takes the bowl of cupcake pieces and throws the whole thing in the trash. She takes her arm and sweeps it across the kitchen counter—a bowl of frosting, another mixture of something, some toothpicks with polka-dot flags attached to them, a half-bag of flour—she whisks it all into the trash, including the metal mixing bowls. She wets a rag and starts wiping the counter.
“Mom, I’m just going to clean up in here for a bit. Do you think you could run out and get a cake?” She speaks in an uncomfortably calm tone.
“Well, what kind of cake?”
“Whatever kind you think we ought to have will be perfect, I’m sure. But I need it in an hour and a half.”
Obviously, we won’t be able to get the kind of cake my friend Deb makes, which is a shame. And if Lara had let me help her earlier, we could have done a lot of neat things. But I know I can at least go to Publix and get a nice, traditional birthday cake with Grayson’s name put on it in curling frosting.
“I’m going to get one of those little smash cakes too,” I tell her. “Don’t worry about the cost. I’ve got it covered.”
“Great,” she says. But it sounds like she may start crying. I know she’s holding it in because she doesn’t want me to know that she regrets the way she’s made this party hard on herself. That she probably regrets not planning it months ago like I first suggested.
♦ ♦ ♦
Phillip and I return from the store with the cake. It’s the fanciest cake they have, with the frosting all intertwined around the sides and a fondant number “1” in the center with glitter on it. Confetti sprinkles adorn the frosting border. It says “Happy Birthday” in a semi-circle around the top and “Grayson” in a semi-circle at the bottom. It’s not what I would have picked out if I’d had more time, but it will work. The bakery lady has done a smash cake that looks like a mini of the big one, and of course, I’m happy with that. I set them both on the table.
Things don’t seem quite ready yet, but Lara is sitting on the couch looking at something.
“Is there something I can do to help?” I ask her, getting close enough to see what she’s doing. She’s looking at pictures of Grayson.
“I don’t think so,” she says.
Looking around the house, I think otherwise, but I say, “What have you got there?”
“I was going to use these on the banner I was making. I was going to glue them to the bunting, so it was like a little banner of memories. It’s not an original idea or anything,” she admits. “Some of my friends have done it.”
She begins handing me the pictures. There’s one of Grayson on the day he was born, so tiny and so fresh that his eyes are covered in the shiny goop that the nurses used to clean them off just after he came out. There’s a picture of his first Christmas, one of his first trip to the zoo. There’s one of him sleeping on his dad’s chest on what looks like it might have been just a regular old day. There’s one of him at the beach, chewing on a shovel and wearing baby sunglasses that stayed on his head with an elastic band.
“You know,” I say, “I could have helped you with this. We could have planned it out, for me to help you when we got here. Or I could have come a day early.”
“No,” she says. “You would have thought it was too dumb. You did think it was dumb.” She does not look up but continues flipping through the pictures.
“Well, if you’d told me the whole idea…” I stop. “Well, I would have liked to have helped with my grandson’s birthday party. Is that too much to ask? You don’t always have to hog him to yourself, you know.”
“But you wouldn’t have helped with my ideas! You would have told me about your better ones. You thought the homemade stuff was stupid. It wasn’t impressive enough. You’re too worried about what everyone thinks, which is so weird to me because you don’t even know most of the people who are coming to the party. Are you trying to impress them?”
“Ha!” My thoughts spew out. “You do realize that you are just as worried about what people think as I am!” I say. “You do realize that, I hope. You’re just worried about it in a different way.”
I see a shadow of recognition flow across her face and I go on. “You want everyone to think that you are so humble and simple, so creative and so upright. You would never waste money on a personalized banner, but you probably spent the same amount gathering all your little DIY supplies. You would never go and get a big expensive birthday cake or buy paper plates. That’s too normal, isn’t it? You want to be different and cool and just so laid back. You realize it’s obvious how hard you work to make it look like you don’t work hard!”
“You know what Mom?” she says. “You’re right.”
I’m shocked at how easily this might end. But she continues.
“I do worry too much about what others think,” she says. “I worry the most about what you think, and I’m sick of it. Because no matter how hard I try to plan a cute, simple party, one that is meaningful and focuses more on the celebration and less on the decorations, none of it will ever make you think I’m as good of a mom as you were.”
Meaningful! More on the celebration and less on the decorations. So that’s how she sees it. Her comment is an unexpected blow, and I’m completely knocked out of the conversation. I can’t even stay in the same room with her anymore. I stand up to go, and when I do Grayson comes bobbling unsteadily in through the kitchen door, cheeks red, a stain on his shirt to match his mother’s, and runs straight to Lara. She puts the pictures down and works up a huge smile for him.
“My birthday baby!” She picks him up onto her lap, and he leans over onto her shoulder. She smooths his wispy head. I don’t believe he’s even noticed me standing here.
♦ ♦ ♦
At the party, everything is tense, obviously. At least between Lara and me. But for Grayson she is all smiles and hugs. For which I’m glad, of course. She didn’t even hang the banner I bought, and this bothers me at first, but after I cool down and watch her with my grandson, I start to feel sort of bad about the fact that she didn’t get to hang the banner she had planned to make. Before the party, after Grayson had hugged Phillip and me, Lara snuggled him into her lap and showed him the pictures of himself from over the last year. They just sat on the couch as guests were starting to arrive, no banner up, with Garrett trying a little to arrange the balloons that were haphazardly scattered around, and Lara showing Grayson the pictures and explaining what was happening in each one. How much he understood, I’ve no idea, but afterwards she gave him the pictures to carry around, and now he is holding them up and showing them to the guests, which is pretty cute. They are bent and covered in fingerprints however.
As I watch him enjoying himself and I watch Lara faking happiness for his sake, I feel worse and worse about things. A slow darkness seems to eclipse me, and it is even worse for the light coming from my grandson, and the forced light coming from my daughter. I realize, suddenly, that I cannot give her back this day.
I could have helped her with her ideas, but she wouldn’t let me in. The thing is, I had imagined everything a certain way. I had this beautiful image in my mind of Grayson wearing a party hat and smiling, with smash cake all over his smooth little cheeks, and Lara and I were looking at one another and laughing. It was like a photograph, a photograph I’d hoped someone would take, actually (and if I’d planned the party, I would have hired a photographer to see to it this happened), and in this photograph we would all be radiating happiness. But now Lara won’t look at me at all.
But the worst thing is this. When Lara slides the smash cake in front of Grayson and lights the candle, he gets scared and cries, and she pulls it away from him quickly and picks him up and laughs softly, saying, “It’s okay, little buddy. You don’t have to eat any cake.” Then, she just leaves the cake on the edge of the table, and I watch as a little boy I don’t know with dark curly hair comes by and jabs his fingers into it before I can even set it aside so I’ll be able to take Grayson’s picture with it later—with the cake that I picked out for him. His first birthday cake.
I stare at the mashed smash cake, and my despair becomes too heavy. The curly-haired boy’s mother comes behind him and scolds him.
“Turner! That’s a no-no!” But I can tell she’s only scolding him for my sake, as I stand there staring in shock at the finger holes jabbed through the icing and into the fluffy cake. She turns to me apologetically. “I’m so sorry!” she says. “You’d think I could keep this little guy under control!”
“It’s no problem,” is what she’s expecting me to say. It’s what I should say, what any normal person should say. But I just can’t. I can’t say it. Because it is a problem. There is a problem.
Instead I say, “Yes. You’d think you could keep him under control.”
The woman, holding her kid, who is happily licking his frosting-topped fingertips, says, “Excuse me?”
And I go on: “I’m just saying, you’d think parents today could control their children. You would think people could make sure their kids don’t stick their grubby little fingers in another kid’s first birthday cake! Don’t you realize I paid twenty extra dollars to have this smash cake? Don’t you realize I spent twenty years of my life doing things no one appreciated?”
The woman is staring at me, and it is almost like looking in a mirror, since I am feeling the same shocked disapproval toward myself that she is expressing on her face. If I were looking at myself, in fact, I would probably be wearing this same look. But I’m not looking at myself. I’m in myself. Which is a hard place to be sometimes.
I turn my head, really not wanting to, in the direction of Lara, and I see that she is still comforting Grayson, who was apparently traumatized by the fact that his family has had the audacity to present him with a beautiful, individual-sized birthday cake, all to himself, and light a candle in his honor. He is sniffling and pouting, and Lara is patting and rubbing his back and staring at me, not really like I’m a lunatic, but more like I’m acting exactly as she expected, which brings all my hot rage even further up into my throat.
I take the smash cake off the table and grab a fork, and I take them over to Lara and Grayson.
I slice into the cake, cut a big fluffy bite with finger holes already in it, and I slide it into my mouth. “Mmm, Grayson, it’s so good!” I say. I dip my fork in again. “Don’t you want some of this yummy cake?” I say, but with my mouth full it sounds like I’m playing that marshmallow game that my kids played at youth group events—Chubby Bunny. I try to “airplane” the cake to his mouth. “Zoomy zoom zoom!” I say, trying to sound sweet, flying the fork toward him, a few cake crumbs spewing out of the corners of my mouth as I do.
“Mom!” Lara says.
“I’m just showing him how good it is!” I say, my own cheeks filled with cake, “So he won’t be scared. You didn’t even try to get him to eat it!”
“No,” Grayson says. “No cate. No no cate.”
“Well, at least I tried,” I say, though it sounds like I said “cried,” but crying is not at all what I feel like doing, nor do I feel like trying anymore, and I lift the cake up over my head, balancing it on my palm like a waiter might, and I head right outside with it. Some of the other guests, who have all been watching me (as I’ve been getting a bit loud), step out of my way as I pass by. The screen door clatters shut behind me. I collapse onto one of the deck chairs with the cake. I set it in my lap like a kitten and hold it. I look at it. And then I begin to eat it, slicing into it with the edge of my plastic fork and shoveling in big, satisfying bites.
“Mmm,” I say, letting out a deep breath and looking out at the beautiful day, the gorgeous pink rhododendrons in front of the house quivering in the breeze, a shiny white Honda Odyssey my own daughter couldn’t afford driving slowly past, leaving or entering this little neighborhood of new families, with their lives of wee-ball games and birthday parties and school fundraisers and beach trips and all-night laser tag lock-ins before them. I stuff the cake in, making myself sick with satisfaction. I think, how delicious is store-bought cake? The gritty, artificial sugar! The dyed frosting! The little, round, pastel confetti discs! Delicious. A thousand times better than lemon pound cake. Not even better actually, just different. Just for something so much different. This cake, I think, savoring the flavor, was meant for a special occasion.
♦ ♦ ♦
That evening, I pack my things. I haven’t said a word to Lara or Phillip, and I don’t plan to. What’s there to say?
I open the closet in the extra bedroom, where I’ve hung my clothes. On the bottom shelf, which is built into the side of the closet, there is a big plastic box labeled “bunnies.” I squat down and unclasp the lid.
On Lara’s first birthday, her birthday is April 5, we got her a wooden bunny teether toy with her name engraved on it. We bought it at one of those outdoor craft festivals—Spring Fling is what this one was called, and it was held every year in March. Phillip and Lara and I went the March after she was born, when she was almost a year old. I remember carrying her around this craft fair on one of the first warm days of the year, just feeling so proud that she was my daughter. Almost every person that passed us stopped to tell us how adorable she was, and I felt so much pride in having produced this sweet, smiling little girl. I’d been at home, indoors with her almost all winter, and being out, showing her off on a beautiful early spring day brought this new addictive feeling. Several people that day told me they thought she looked like me, and I could have just burst with my new motherhood. At one of the booths, they were selling wooden teethers in the shapes of little animals, and we bought Lara the bunny-shaped one and had her name engraved on it while we ate lunch. I still remember how the woman slipped it into a small, cotton bag with a drawstring, and I carried it around carefully for the rest of the afternoon like a little secret. I couldn’t wait to tell my mother about the gift I’d gotten for my baby. I had a baby! I was a mother who bought a gift for her baby! When I showed it to my mother, she said, “Well, you know that Lara won’t remember any of the gifts she gets at this age.”
I wrapped it up anyway, in pink floral paper, and we had a big party that my mother said was “absurdly expensive,” and we invited all of our neighbors and friends and even the little “friends” Lara had made at circle time at the public library. I don’t know if Lara understood at the time that the big party and the gifts were for her, but I think she enjoyed it. The balloons I know she liked. I had said, “Lara! Wow!” And I’d made my eyes big. “Look at your presents!” I took each one out and showed it to her, and she reached for her gifts and put them in her mouth. “That’s Lara’s bunny!” I told her when she opened it. “Mommy and Daddy got that just for you!” And I remember even now that this made her excited. She had jiggled her feet and smiled this intoxicating smile at me, a smile like there was something between us. And wasn’t there?
She carried that bunny teether around for almost a year, and I think it mattered—whether she remembers doing it or not. And here it is, the bunny teether, with her name, and an array of other bunnies—stuffed ones, plastic ones. After that first year, Phillip and I decided to start the tradition of getting a special bunny for Lara on every birthday, some of them even falling on Easter. Some were cream, some chocolate-colored, some pink; one of my favorites was a stuffed, plum-colored bunny with floral ears and palms.
And here, she has saved them all in this box. I’d not noticed it before, and I wonder now if I just missed it or if she’s gotten it out to look through it for some reason. There are a few bunnies missing from the box—the glass ones which I have seen sitting on the shelf in her kitchen, and two stuffed ones that are in Grayson’s room. There is a piece of steno-pad paper folded up on top of the bunnies. I carefully unfold it. It is a list, in Lara’s writing: “1 yr–wooden teether bunny, 2yrs.– yellow beanie bunny, 3yrs.– pink ballerina bunny.” And it goes on. She has listed them all out—an inventory of bunnies.
I remember Phillip asking me when we were planning our tradition, “Do you think that’s too many bunnies? Eighteen bunnies at least…” But we bought her bunnies even after she went to college. We bought her one this year. It is a little glass figurine of two bunnies, actually, a mother and her baby. I had been thinking I would start a similar tradition with Grayson. I had hoped I might take him shopping on this birthday trip.
But I think now that maybe this is something Lara should do. Maybe she doesn’t even want to go with bunnies. Maybe she wants to get him bears. Or hats. Or maybe she has already started something I don’t even know about.
I told Phillip twenty-five years ago that eighteen bunnies would not be too many. And it wasn’t. It wasn’t enough, really. Because how many bunnies is enough to equal the love you feel for another person who comes from you but is not you? How much cake? How many cupcakes? I’d pick them all out and buy them all again, of course. I’d buy thousands of bunnies.
Shannon Skelton lives with her family in Birmingham, Alabama, where she teaches first-year writing at Samford University. She holds an MFA in fiction from Georgia College and State University and an MAE in English education from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Her work has been published in the Flannery O’Connor Review, Image, Relief, and Ruminate.
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