The Barter by Siobhan Adcock

Author:Siobhan Adcock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2014-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

It is dark. Julie is in bed. Bridget has taken a shower and watched some television and eaten a little bit of dinner—she’s not hungry, which is unusual for her—and gone into Julie’s room to pull Pat the Bunny from Julie’s low white bookshelf. Her ears are ringing, and she is very, very carefully avoiding anything like real thought. If she thinks about how Mark broke his promise to come home on time, she might start looking for something of his to break, or shred, or stand over and hate like a ghost.

She places Pat the Bunny on the floor in the middle of the archway leading to the unlit living room, where she can smell but not see the ghost in the darkness. She will be standing in her corner, the ghost, gazing out the window onto the empty suburban street, perhaps listening for crickets over the faint whoosh and whir of the air-conditioning.

Without waiting to see whether her latest gift will be well received, Bridget am-scrays upstairs and climbs into bed, where she intends to wait with a stack of magazines at her elbow for her husband to come home. At which point she is unsure what she will do: tear into him, or treat him to stormy, tearful, girlish silence, or give him up to the ghost as a hostage. If she’ll even take him. She’s already got Bunny.

The best thing about Pat the Bunny, of course, and certainly its grubbiest, most well-handled feature in the copy that Bridget has just abandoned on its informal altar downstairs, is the book-within-a-book, “Judy’s Book,” which the audience is invited to read over little Judy’s shoulder, and which the preverbal infants for whom the book is written tend to recognize as a miniature version of something familiar—always a delight for the miniature-human demographic. Judy’s Book contains Bridget’s favorite line: “Bunny is eating his good supper,” which in the early, exhausted months of Julie’s life often reduced Bridget to inane, helpless giggles. She admitted to Martha once that, probably due to sleeplessness, it took her several readings of Pat the Bunny to understand that the Bunny of the title, and the hero of Judy’s Book, is actually Judy’s stuffed animal Bunny, which explains why his physical attitudes while sleeping or listening to a clock or eating his good supper look nothing like a real bunny’s—Bunny’s arms and legs are always stiffened into a forward-facing position, as if he wants to touch Judy with all four paws at once. Martha’s response was: “That’s funny. I was so goddamn tired when I read that book for my kids I kept thinking, ‘Who the fuck is Pat?’”

“Well, the other thing I couldn’t figure out is who wrote Judy’s Book, you know? She’s reading the book, but it’s about her stuffed animal Bunny? Wasn’t 1940 or whatever too early for postmodern metafiction?” Martha didn’t laugh—whereas if she had been talking to Gennie, that would’ve been a layup.

“It is meta,” Martha claimed, quite serious and yet quite not, the way she always is.

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