The Night of Four Hundred Rabbits aka Shadows in the Moonlight

354 Pages·2016·0.94 MB·English

by  Peters Elizabeth

ELIZABETH
PETERS
THE NIGHT OF
FOUR HUNDRED
RABBITS
TO CAROL
in fond recollection
of our joint Mexican adventures
Contents
ONE
I wish some university, somewhere, offered a
course in survival. 1
TWO
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded
by books, notes, and… 23
THREE
The taxi stopped again. Danny leaned forward
to expostulate with… 55
FOUR
If it hadn’t been for Ivan, I’d probably have
taken… 74
FIVE
I remembered the Kahlua as soon as I woke
up… 105
SIX
When Ivan spoke of a couple, I thought he
meant… 136
SEVEN
“Well,” I said. “Well, well.” 169
EIGHT
I was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching… 195
NINE
Uncle Jaime’s pots of pot were doing
splendidly. When I… 214
TEN
The household dined early, for a Latin family;
by nine… 250
ELEVEN
I wasn’t in the best of all possible moods
when… 271
TWELVE
Ivan was wearing his favorite black shirt and
slacks. I’m… 303
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE
BOOKS BY ELIZABETH PETERS
COVER
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Chapter 1
I
wish some university, somewhere, offered a course
in survival.
Not how to survive when your plane crashes in the
jungle, or when you get lost in the woods. Not even
how to survive in the jungle-cities of today. Maybe, if
I’d studied karate or carried a gun, I would have
managed matters more efficiently during my recent
misadventures. But I don’t think karate or firearms
would have helped. What I needed was a course in
how to understand human beings.
There are courses in everything else. All of them
lead, by some obscure chain of connection, to the ac-
quisition of the Good Life—a nice house in the sub-
urbs, with a nice husband who has a nice job, and a
parcel of nice kids. These days they
1
2 / Elizabeth Peters
even teach you how to produce the kids—complete
with anatomical charts and tests to find out whether
or not you’re frigid. If my only experience of S-E-X had
come from that classroom, I might have decided it
would be more fun to set up a workshop and build
some nice little robots. You could program the robots
to be “nice,” which is more than you can do for real
children.
But there are no courses in survival.
When you’re small, you don’t worry about surviving.
Other people protect you from danger. They hide the
bottles of bleach and the aspirin, and they won’t let
you ride your tricycle down the middle of the street.
Eventually you realize that drinking bleach can make
you dead, and so can cars, when you’re in the middle
of the street.
So what I want to know is: At what age do you learn
about people? Your parents can’t teach you that; they
can’t put the bad guys on a high shelf, like bottles of
bleach. And one of the reasons why they can’t is be-
cause they can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys
either. That’s maturity—when you realize that you’ve
finally arrived at a state of ignorance as profound as
that of your parents.
I’ve had my experience, enough to last a life-time,
and all crammed into ten days. I’d like to think that
I’ve learned something from it. But I don’t know; if
anything, decisions are harder to make now, because
so many of the nice neat guidelines I used to accept
have become blurred
The Night of Four Hundred Rabbits / 3
and confused. As I look back on it, I suspect I’d prob-
ably go right ahead and repeat the same blunders I
made the first time.
If they were blunders. That’s what I mean, about
things getting blurry. Every action seems to produce a
mixture of results, some good, some bad, some imme-
diate, and some so far removed from the original event
that you can barely see the connection.
Take, for example, that stupid comment I made the
day I arrived home from college for Christmas vacation.
It was snowing outside, and the Christmas tree
glittered with colored lights and shiny ornaments; and
I looked at the packages under the tree, which were
all, by their shapes, dress boxes and sweater boxes and
little boxes made to hold costume jewelry and stock-
ings; and I opened my big, flapping mouth, and I said,
“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any
presents.”
It was a feeble attempt at wit, I admit. It was also a
tactical error, and I should have known better. I did
know, even before I saw my mother’s face congeal like
quick-drying plaster. Helen liked to reminisce about
my childhood, but this was the wrong kind of memory.
The reading aloud—that was George’s thing. It went
on for years, long after I reached an age when I could
read to myself. And Little Women
4 / Elizabeth Peters
was one of our private jokes—George protesting feebly
that no male should ever be expected to read Little
Women, and me insisting that Little Women was the
greatest book ever written, and that no literary educa-
tion, male or female, was complete without it.
Helen never did understand those idiotic private
jokes of ours. I can remember her standing there in the
doorway, with her face wrinkled in an irritable smile,
while I lay on my bed giggling and George read sol-
emnly through Little Women, word by word, each
phrase articulated with the uncertain accent of someone
reading aloud in a language he doesn’t really under-
stand…. Oh, well, I guess it doesn’t sound funny.
Private jokes never do when you try to explain them.
And poor Helen, standing there, with that puzzled
half-smile, trying to figure it all out….
She wasn’t trying to smile, that afternoon before
Christmas. I wondered, disloyally, if Helen realized
how much older she looked with that tight plaster mask
of resentment. Helen doesn’t like being old. She isn’t,
really. As she is fond of pointing out, I was born when
she was only eighteen, and she spends a lot of time
and money trying to look ten years less than her real
age. More time and money lately, with her fortieth
birthday coming up. I don’t know why women flip
over being forty. I won’t mind, especially if I can look
like Helen—tall, slim, with a head of