Necessary Things

by

Eileen M. Cunniffe

Gray Bunny

Before Grace names it, the small stuffed bunny is pale pink with purple dots and wears a lavender bow around his neck. A cherished playmate for my littlest niece, he is clutched close at bedtime and in the car seat. Eventually she learns to introduce him, dangling him by an ear and announcing “Bunny,” giggling at her own ability to speak.

With so much affection and milk lavished on him, the bunny makes regular trips through the washing machine. Soon the pink fur fades and the original ribbon frays and then falls off, only to be replaced with a rapid succession of other-colored ribbons, as Grace gets better and better at undoing the knots.

Meanwhile Grace’s vocabulary grows, as does her collection of inanimate friends. She names them all, but the one she loves best is the one she calls “Gray Bunny.” For by now he truly is gray, with only the palest of dots flecking his thinning fur.

Everyone in Grace’s world learns to take note of Gray Bunny’s whereabouts. In addition to Mommy and Daddy, her grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and neighborhood babysitters all learn to do Gray Bunny checks on a regular basis. Gray Bunny has to be in the car, beside the pillow, close to the bathtub, or near the kitchen table. On the day Grace meets her baby brother, Gray Bunny goes along for moral support. Once when she visits cousins in another state, Gray Bunny inadvertently stays home, making bedtime nearly unbearable for the entire household.

Sometimes Grace goes for an hour without mentioning Gray Bunny. Then she remembers, and her need is urgent. Whenever he re-appears, Grace greets him with “Oh, there you are,” as if they’d been playing hide-and-seek.

Life without Gray Bunny is unimaginable, or so we all think, until he goes missing for good, left behind who-knows-where on an otherwise ordinary day. Grace’s mommy phones every place they have been on that day, but Gray Bunny is nowhere to be found. Grace is heartbroken at first, although once the initial shock wears off, she handles her loss stoically. For months she speaks wistfully of Gray Bunny, sometimes consoling herself and those around her by saying, “He’ll come back later.” A doll she has named “Fairy Princess Ballerina” steps in to fill the void. A revisionist at three, Grace fondly begins to recall her old friend as “White Bunny,” a hue he never achieved.

Pink Cleats

One hot-pink soccer cleat, its scuffed toe poking out from under the rumpled bedclothes—all that remains after three satisfying but exhausting days of having my 16-year-old niece as a houseguest. I’m left wondering what inspired Erin to bring her cleats on this trip, a visit from her home in California to look at East Coast colleges. It took both of us to wrestle her overstuffed suitcase up the stairs and into my guest room. For all I know she had a soccer ball and goal in there, too. What other clues to her growing-up self were tucked into that lumpy bag?

When Erin was little we were together often, even though we sometimes lived on opposite sides of the country; I traveled a lot for work in those days, and any time I could stretch a business trip into a visit, I did. We shared family times and invented our own adventures, too—window shopping, tea at a café, stringing beads into jewelry. But then my brother and his family moved to Japan for three years. I’d seen Erin only twice since she became a teenager. Her life was so much bigger now, on the brink of expanding yet again as she made plans for college. How would we be with each other, I wondered before her visit. What would we talk about? I felt almost shy about seeing her again, having her stay in my house.

Within minutes of her arrival, I discover that soccer offers a window into her world. Erin’s sentences are peppered with references to camps, coaches, yellow cards and teammates. In my upstairs hallway, she dangles the bright pink cleats by their gray laces so I can admire them. “These are my favorites,” she announces. Are they talismans for her journey, I wonder, or the opening line to a story she wants to tell? Did she pick them up on her travels to Singapore, or perhaps Hong Kong? She doesn’t explain, she just goes back to the guest room and adds the cleats to the impressive assortment of belongings that has exploded out of her suitcase onto the bed and floor. I’m left to decipher the meaning behind the cleats, while Erin deftly swaps text messages with friends in other time zones.

At the end of our first full day together, Erin sprawls across my sofa, twisting and twirling her long, auburn hair as she describes school projects she’s led. Confidently, she tells me she’s the one her classmates rely on to write, re-write or otherwise polish team presentations. “Good for you,” I say. (“Be careful,” I want to say, “there’s a price to pay for being that girl.”) I tell her about my recent decision to leave the company where I’ve worked since before she was born. We talk about finding meaning in work, and in school. She’s eager for us to watch her favorite movie, Newsies; she just happens to have the DVD in her suitcase. We compare our different ways of being in the world: Erin feels lucky to have lived in many places, but doesn’t really belong to any of them; I have always lived in the same place, give or take a few miles, but relish the opportunities I’ve had to travel for work and for pleasure. We talk until we’re both half-asleep.

For three days, we look at college campuses, explore Philadelphia, window shop, share meals and visit with the nearby members of our clan. And then she’s gone, as suddenly as she appeared. I call California to let her know she left one of her favorite cleats behind, and to assure her that it’s already on its way to her in the mail. She hasn’t even missed it.

Diamond Earrings

For reasons I still cannot fully articulate, I decide to mark my 45^th birthday by buying myself a pair of diamond earrings. I’ve long since stopped waiting for anyone else to buy me diamonds, yet somehow I feel incomplete as a diamond-less woman of a certain age. I want to know how it feels to sparkle, to glint.

Most of my jewelry has more sentimental than monetary value. My favorite pieces remind me of somewhere or someone I’ve been: a silver necklace from Ireland, a bead bracelet from a pueblo near Santa Fe, blue topaz earrings to match the glacier I walked on in the Canadian Rockies. I’ve also kept school rings, pearls and stickpins from my suit-wearing thirties and a birthstone ring my parents gave me in grade school.

It takes several months—and a little coaching from my friend Luanne—to convince myself I should buy the diamond earrings. Luanne is well-practiced at making fine-jewelry purchases, and she gladly accompanies me to her favorite jeweler one day on our lunch break. She helps me select my earrings from a glittering case while the jeweler hovers nearby, trusting one of his best customers to make the sale. Luanne suggests something with a bit of a design—the flower petals or the small teardrops, perhaps—but in the end she supports my choice of simple diamond studs. I think she understands that I’m more interested in making a gesture than a statement.

When I reach my 50^th birthday, I find I can count on one hand the times I’ve worn my diamond earrings. It turns out my life does not include many diamond-wearing occasions, something I never knew before. I get a postcard from the jeweler every time he has a sale. He has no way of knowing I won’t be coming back.

I hold on to the credit card statement that records my diamond-earring purchase because it also records one of my favorite inside jokes: The purchase listed just below the earrings is a CD from a Joan Baez concert. The charge is to her record label, Diamonds and Rust, also the title of one my favorite songs. More than 30 years ago, Joan penned a somber ending to her ballad: “If you’re offering me diamonds and rust, I’ve already paid.” These days she deadpans her way to an older, wiser (if less poetic) conclusion: “If you’re offering me diamonds and rust, I’ll take the diamonds.”

Perhaps over time I’ll rewrite my take on the diamonds, too. For now, I like the way they sparkle in the gray velvet box where they mostly live—I open it occasionally, just to be sure they’re still there.

Taking Inventory

I’m writing this backwards, I suppose. The diamond earrings were tucked away in a drawer long before Erin came to visit. Gray Bunny didn’t disappear for some months after that. In fact, Erin and Gray Bunny crossed paths during the college-tour visit, although Grace did not have an occasion to see the soccer cleats—which is too bad, because she would have delighted in their utter pinkness.

Sometime between those events and now, I come across a small, well-worn teddy bear in the cedar chest in my guest room—a gift brought from Europe by my Uncle John’s parents in the months before I was born. There’s a photograph somewhere of the bear propped up in the crib of my nursery-to-be. I have no recollection of carrying this pale pink bear around with me or giving it a name. My earliest memory of the bear is seeing it tucked away in my mother’s cedar chest for safekeeping. Because she saved it, I came to know it as a treasure. Eventually it moved from her cedar chest into mine. The pink has faded nearly to gray. Perhaps one day I’ll offer the bear to Grace—as a reminder of, not a replacement for, her long-lost bunny.

Another day between then and now, I happen upon an ancient baseball glove in my attic, so creased with disuse that I have to pry it open to see the Willie Mays signature. I wonder why I’ve kept it for so long. I’d like to say it conjures up fond memories of my glory days as an outfielder, but unlike Erin, I never excelled at any sport, although I tried a few. The leather is worn with age, but the glove is barely broken in from use. Yet it’s moved with me from place to place, a reminder of a long-ago time when it was almost novel for girls to play in a softball league, and of later co-ed games on summer nights with work friends from half a lifetime ago.

Like the Joan Baez song, my old possessions acquire new layers of meaning over time. If they hadn’t bumped into Grace’s bunny and Erin’s cleats in my mind, I might not have given either of them a second thought when I opened the cedar chest for a blanket or climbed to the attic to stash an armful of old papers in a box. I don’t think of these objects as necessary, and like my diamond earrings, perhaps they never were. Still, I keep them.

Or maybe it’s the other way around. Perhaps Gray Bunny struck a chord because of the once-pink teddy bear stashed in my memory. Perhaps it seemed important to know why Erin’s cleats made that cross-country trip because I can’t explain my own attachment to a long-neglected baseball glove. In the end it doesn’t matter, because the bunny and the bear, the cleats and the glove, and even the diamond earrings all share one space in my thoughts now. Three ages, three girls. What we treasure, what travels with us.

=> =>Return to Reading Short Memoir