A Shining Affliction by Annie G. Rogers

Author:Annie G. Rogers [Rogers, Annie G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

55

When I come to see Blumenfeld the following week (we have settled into meeting three times a week), I bring a paper bag with two rabbit ears sticking out.

I lift the stuffed rabbit out of the bag by the ears and put her on my lap. Blumenfeld looks up. “Why have you hidden him in that uncomfortable bag?” he asks.

“Her,” I correct him. “There are grown-ups in the waiting room,” I explain, hoping he has read The Little Prince.

“Oh yes, the grown-ups!” he says. “That reminds me of playing ‘The Frog Prince’ with a three-year-old, Amanda, on the golf course one day. I was playing the frog, of course, and I was really into it, squatting down and croaking, when suddenly Amanda stopped. She looked sort of tense and embarrassed, as you do right now. I looked up, and there was a whole cluster of golfers watching us. So we waited until the people went away. Amanda felt rather silly about it.”

“And you?” I ask him, picturing the whole scene clearly.

“I’ve had more experience at looking silly. I’m used to it.”

We sit in the silence. I notice that my journal is on his desk. “Did you read it?” I ask him.

“I started to read it. There is much to absorb, so it’s going to take me a long time. I think you knew even from the earliest time with Melanie that she might abandon you, Annie. I sensed that earlier, and now I’m quite sure of it.”

“I don’t understand that very well,” I tell him. “It’s almost as if I went about creating the very thing that I feared the most.”

“Yes, in a way that’s right, Annie. But you did not create it alone,” Blumenfeld comments. Tears bloom in the corners of my eyes. I finger the ears of my rabbit. Despair and longing. “And you, you really get this, you get the whole .story in a way I never imagined anyone could or would, but you are not a mother-person. You don’t have any breasts!”

“I could try to grow some for you,” he says, and I have to laugh. But he is perfectly serious.

The silence grows. Blumenfeld breaks it by asking, “Does your rabbit have a name?”

“Her name is Pimmy,” I tell him, and thinking about how he might grow breasts, I add, “Do you think you could nurse her?”

He smiles. “I wouldn’t know how to. Pimmy would have to tell me how to hold and nurse her.”

Immediately I retreat, wondering if he is afraid of this.

“Do you think Pimmy would talk to me about it?” he asks.

I look at the rabbit. “She isn’t verbal.”

“That’s OK—words get in the way of talking sometimes,” Blumenfeld says, stretching out his hands to me.

I give him the rabbit. He puts Pimmy up on his chest, her head on one shoulder, loosely cradling her neck and tail. Had the rabbit wanted to squirm, she could have. Her ears flop back. He says, “She is talking to me, and she says she doesn’t want to be fed right now, she just wants to be held and surrounded and not dropped.

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