“It’s a great specialtay, rabbit,” she bragged, “some German beer on de top and he cook wit’ prune … I clean him myself, he was very young, very fresh, beautiful …”

Lucy and Rosa began to weep, followed by Tommy and Timmy.

Rosa, usually the quiet one, blubbered, “You mean we’re eating the Easter bunny??”

My mother did not understand, “But it is Easter, no?!”

I guess she didn’t quite pick up the difference between eating chocolate and living, breathing rabbits across the nation.

“We’re eating the Easter bunny!!” confirmed Lucy, covering her face with her forearms.

The other children repeated this phrase endlessly, followed by funereal sobs. It was as if my mother had served Santa Claus on Christmas Day. Lucky they hadn’t come over that Christmas Eve when she had made venison with cranberries, Rosa would have accused her of brewing Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer and the cranberries would have probably glowed.

Stag Head looked as though he bore the weight of the world on his plaque and his antlers already were heavy enough. Ursula kept on nibbling to make light of the matter, and as a member of the German-American club, she had probably already eaten worse in her knackwursts. Sharon contemplated her girls, afraid they would be traumatized. They had sheltered lives, they didn’t have to live with my mother.

“Go eat what’s in your baskets. You can go outside,” Joseph Minsky advised.

“It’s more than de Indians, dey have, dey should be tankful to me,” retorted my mother when they were gone. She confused Easter with Thanksgiving.

“De more for us,” she added, her feelings hurt, which basically meant leftovers for me.

The following day, I suffered upon Fool’s Stool two hours before gnawing at Easter bunny’s hind leg in Stag Head’s company. I wondered if the land of milk and honey was a land of only milk and honey. I slipped off my sandals. They hurt my feet anyway. They would have to hurt more before I was given another pair.

CHAPTER 3

Ursula popped by regularly to see how we were doing at dinner-time. In the kitchen light, her sparse eyebrows gave a small sanctuary to the burgundy streak of eyebrow pencil. Her hair had recently been dyed to a pepper red, but the chlorine and the sun were robbing it of some vital element and it was turning into a burnt-looking burgundy. I noticed she always carried with her, even in an evening gown, a faint scent of suntan lotion. No one could compete with her tan; her forearm beat anyone who dared present their own next to hers, as I often did.

My mother slid lima beans into an iron pot of salted water. Ursula unwrapped a bundle of brown paper to reveal four forked hooves.

“Pi’ feet, oh!!” my mother laughed merrily.

The skin was rubbery and thick, the colour of the Crayola crayon called “flesh”.

“My grandparents used to eat the tail,” admitted Ursula.

If mine did, I wouldn’t go around bragging about it.