The Rabbit Story

By Adam Kaz

It’s such a good story though, really. 

It goes my ex-girlfriend grew up poor; like actually poor; poor as in one pair of clothes; homeless, really; with five siblings; in a literal van literally down by the river. Her parents were occultists, which she never talked about much, their cult, outside of it being prolog for “The Rabbit Story,” which is what this is: “The Rabbit Story.” 

But the prolog is her parents were members of some New Age hippie cult that, before they imploded, believed their leader was born to be the President of the United States. They also thought you should never name animals, which is important to the story because it explains how Rabbit got to be called Rabbit. But to hear her tell it you’d think this family was on some great homeless adventure, that they were the Swiss Family Robinson of living in a van, when in reality I suspect it was unbelievably boring and stressful, which might explain why my ex-girlfriend was so attached to Rabbit as a kid. I met some of her weirdo siblings, by the way, three out of the five, and if I were stuck with them I’d probably fall in love with a ham sandwich.

The story takes place post-cult-implosion, and my ex-girlfriend, eight years-old back then, is living her idyllic homeless life with Rabbit by her side. And he’s hippity-hopping, playing rabbit-themed games, and treating my ex-girlfriend with an adoration I don’t think she ever got anywhere else, including and especially in our relationship, at least not toward the end. Rabbit is white and adorable and is missing a patch of fur on his left side. It’s spring, I think, or at least I always imagined it was spring, and Mom and Dad tell the kids they should go loiter around a mall for awhile because the grown-ups need to talk. And my ex-girlfriend distinctly remembers Mom told her she couldn’t take Rabbit along, though I wonder why the point was even in question. 

So the kids come home after being homeless in public for a bit, and Mom and Dad have cooked something over the camping stove. It’s mystery meat, which is sort of par for the course in this family. My ex-girlfriend said it tasted “weird,” called it “gamey.” And maybe you already know where this story is going, and maybe I don’t even have to tell you my ex-girlfriend never saw Rabbit again. 

And you might think the cliche of “He went to a farm” is a little far-fetched, but what else could a mom tell her unsocialized eight year-old? She definitely couldn’t tell her the truth. And if you can get away with it, why not pull the farm card? It’s not like my ex-girlfriend connected the dots between mystery meat and missing best friend. She was devastated Rabbit moved away but, you know, life goes on.

“The Rabbit Story” fast-forwards five years or so, and my ex-girlfriend is in foster care, and she’s telling her new siblings the bunny saga up to the present. But presently there’s this one kid, who I always imagined had pale skin and black hair, who’s mature enough to remember television dialogue but not so mature that he isn’t a sociopath, because he tells my ex-girlfriend her Rabbit is definitely-one-hundred-percent-in-her-tummy, dead. And I suspect my ex-girlfriend always suspected the truth on some level, in the way kids have a sixth sense for important things they fully realize later in life: epiphany alley-oops. She connects the dots and, well, that’s “The Rabbit Story.” And it haunts her, really haunts her.

And I should tell you my ex-girlfriend told me this story the first night I met her, at a party. My ex-girlfriend was the roommate of a classmate, and we were on her couch totally stoned and a little drunk, and I watched this goddamn gorgeous girl get lost in the telling of this story. It was hands-down the best stoned encounter of the semester, seeing her deep blue blood-red eyes scan the room as she spoke, sifting through layers of experience to uncover a tale I assumed was buried deep within, repressed beneath the surface. She touched her face a lot, which was very provocative. 

I don’t know if she said it explicitly, but I definitely got the vibe this wasn’t the kind of thing she told everyone, that I was in some way special, which felt great because midway through I already pegged her as "exceptional," as this beautiful refugee from a van down by the river who just needed a big ‘n strong government and politics grad student to caress her back to self-assuredness. I should mention she was also a grad student, British lit., so on top of this beautiful traumatic story there was a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps-college-education meta-narrative I really dug into.

Pardon the pun, but we mated like rabbits when we started out. Which I know doesn’t make us special in any way but try telling that to 23 year-old me. Because that guy fell hard, real hard.

My ex-girlfriend’s whole schtick was she was some kind of horny intellectual hippie fiend who doesn’t like to talk about the past so much. Sure, she’ll tell you Tom Sawyer stories of fishing for minnows in industrial waste or about the friendly baker who gave her siblings bread. But try to actually press her on the cold realities of living in a van or going into foster care, and you get a whole lot of, “I don’t want to talk about those nonspecific things. You’d think different of me if I did.” A therapist would call her repressed. In fact, her therapist did call her repressed, and so did mine. She had some serious no-return-address-unaddressed mental baggage which put a real strain on our relationship. But it wasn’t like she couldn’t express herself, she just did it in a very particular way.

Like I remember the first month we were dating we got dinner with some of my friends, and my ex-girlfriend was quiet most of the way through, until someone mentioned their pet dog. And then she—again, excuse the pun—hopped onto the whole animal topic, and that was the second time I heard “The Rabbit Story.”

It wasn’t the last. 

Nearly every party, every dinner, every time we went out I heard the same story. And then there were all the times she brought it up when we fought, or when we had sex, or when we were just chilling. Truth is I heard “The Rabbit Story” maybe a million times, in a hundred different tones. In high energy party settings the bit where she realizes she ate her beloved pet served as a punchline; in our more intimate time together it was a traumatic moment from her childhood; and with her friends the story is some sort of inside-joke signal that one of them made a mistake, i.e., “Looks like you ate Rabbit.”

But the thing is the story really worked for her, obviously, insofar that it made her impossible to forget. Because it was so perfect, so interesting slash bizarre slash honest slash disturbing. It was the defining moment in her life, the perfect part to make the whole, a solid tale that for her described everything since: it was her capital I Identity. And people loved her for it. I know I did, for awhile at least.

We stopped dating seven months in, but we’re still friends on Facebook. Last month she posted a TedTalk she gave on her research. Guess how she started the speech.