OCR Text |
Show Having lost out to a briefcase, Xavier had developed a quirk. Night after night, my father sat at the phone in his study, the briefcase open on his desk, and made appointments. Night after night, Xavier, having been told to beat it by my father, climbed into the bathtub and howled. It became my job to keep the dog quiet while my father sweet-talked potential clients with stories of sudden, unexpected deaths. I accomplished my task with dog biscuits. I sat on the toliet seat and tossed Xavier Milk-bones. In a few weeks, Xavier had put -on considerable pounds. Soon, he would be so fat that I would have to lift him into the tub. My mother's response to all this was to peroxide her hair. "No you can't have rabbits. They proliferate." "I'll clean it up every day." On the television, a sweet elderly couple had just discovered that their tomato plants were eating the neighbors' children. "You have a dog." "That's not a dog. It's a four-legged basket case." "Rabbits are messy, smelly, and stupid. They reproduce." I pointed out to him that this was exactly what I wanted, for them to reproduce. I was going into the fur business." "Whose going to buy this fur?" "Greasers for upholstery." The sweet, elderly couple decided that maybe the tomato plants weren't such a horrible thing after all. "I want you to quit thinking about that car, that house, and that woman." "I was thinking about rabbits." "It's the same thing." My mother, the blonde, came in from the kitchen. In one hand she held a sponge, a real one from the ocean, and, in the other, a Nelson Algren paperback, The Neon Wilderness. "I wish I could grow tomato plants like that." The elderly gentleman tried to pluck a tomato and was plucked himself. "Angora rabbits cost an arm and a leg," he said glancing back at his chart. My mother held the sponge lightly, so it would not drip. Later that evening, I joined Xavier in the tub. Dust and crumbs from |