Wedding

WEDDING

WHEN JENNY RABBIT heard through the grapevine that her ex- was getting married, she burst into tears. When she got the wedding announcement informing her of the precise date, place, and time, she got angry. And at the ceremony itself, when she saw the bride (for the first time) and the groom (for the last time) prancing down the aisle, she laughed out loud--so loud that other people looked at her. Afterwards, at the reception, in which she mingled with friends and acquaintances she had not seen in months and years and even weeks, she felt a great and growing calm.
That night in bed, with her dog Camel on the floor beside her, she lay staring at the ceiling, trying not to think. It took some effort, but at last she succeeded. She began giggling again, and Camel awoke and looked at her in the darkness.
Camel and Jenny are friends. They know which end is up.
When Jenny’s at work, Camel gets into her own routine. She’s got the entire house to herself: she sleeps a lot, she paces a lot; she walks past the fireplace, the guitar, the end table with the lamp and the framed photograph of herself and Jenny. She looks at the photograph regularly. For long moments sometimes. She goes outside. (There’s a special, small swinging hinge of a door on the kitchen door for Camel to go in and out of.) In the backyard she urinates and defecates. Jenny will clean up after her. Camel sleeps and wakes and paces, drinks from her bowl, eats dried food from another bowl, and yawns. She performs her constitution. This is her life; this is her routine. Sometimes she whines (or is she singing?) to the empty house, but she always acts happy--Jenny interprets it as happiness--when Jenny comes home.
During the day, when Camel’s at home by herself, with a free run of the house, Jenny’s at work, in her own routine. At her office she’s awake most of the time, and she stares out her office window a lot. She works on the eighteenth floor. She drinks a lot of water, and as a result she urinates often and defecates just once. She’s got a clean, smooth-running system. She’s got a routine. She’ll tell you that she drinks a lot of water, and she eats rather simply. Vegan. Jenny has a small, framed photograph of herself and Camel that sits on her desk, and when she is not working or looking out the window or sleeping, she stares at it for long moments. Regularly. When she’s happy, she hums a little tune to herself, softly, one that she made up and plays on the guitar, but after she’d learned of her ex-husband’s wedding plans, she deleted the words of the song (which had nothing to do with him--or with herself), so that now she just hums the melody--without the words. And she likes the song a whole lot better that way: without the words.