The Cave Dwellers, Christina McDowell [ap literature book list .TXT] 📗

can scope out her neighbors. Some of the WASP-y names also tickle her, reminding her of North Carolina: Tutty Fairbanks, Tibby Meriwether, Holly Dutton. Then she flips to the index to find the last names of classmates of her daughters, the Bartholomews of course, the Montgomerys and the Davidsons and the Cowans, which light a fire under her. She flips to the protocol section for entertaining, a fascinating reminder for cocktail and dinner parties in an ever-waning disintegration of etiquette and manners in this modern world, Betsy thinks. For example: We recommend that name tags not be used… they have no place whatever at social events. Or how one must formally address an envelope to a sultan or sultana—His Highness, Her Highness—or in speaking to them, “Your Highness,” always. This also includes princes and princesses. For a king and queen: His Majesty, Her Majesty, “Your Majesty,” and so on.…

Bunny sits in the center of the sofa surrounded by presents wrapped in pastel birthday balloon print. A portrait of her great-grandmother hangs in gold above the fireplace mantel. As she waits for her mother to bring out her eighteenth-birthday cake—flourless chocolate, her favorite—she notices the cobweb in the upper corner of the mahogany-framed windowpane above the seventieth anniversary poster for the Atomic Heritage Foundation leaning against it, and remembers what bratty Lily Anderson once told her in the seventh grade: “Did you know that cobwebs are formed from human skin?” Of course this was a lie, but for some reason in this moment, she remembers. She stares at the poster, wondering about all those innocent people bombed, and she has the fleeting thought: War crimes, fucking war crimes, and yet her genealogy passed down and down and down and onto her shoulders with pride, and she wonders if it’ll ever end, and if she was too hard on Billy. He was hurt that he wasn’t invited to her family gathering before her big party; she’d said it was because her mother had something private to discuss. It’s not so easy, is it, Bunny, he’d pushed back, calling out her hypocrisy again.… We’ll be out of the house soon, Billy.… Sure, he said, sure.

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Bunny, happy birthday to you!”

Meredith sets the cake down in the middle of the coffee table, nearly setting the presents on fire. Bunny closes her eyes to make a wish, but she panics and her thoughts feel like jumbled blurs; she waits for one more moment but nothing comes to her. She fakes it and blows out the candles. “Yay!” Cate, Meredith, Phyllis, and Phyllis’s ninety-year-old husband clap their hands in lame unison.

“I wanted to give this to you before your party tonight, sweetheart.” Meredith hands her an envelope. “And I wanted it to be the first thing you opened.”

While Bunny rips open the envelope, Meredith walks behind the sofa and drapes an Hermès scarf over her shoulders, making Bunny the spitting image of her mother, Phyllis, and her mother’s mother.

“Mom, what are you dong?” Bunny asks, irritated.

“Just draping you in Mother’s vintage Hermès while you open.”

Bunny unfolds the document inside the envelope: it is her welcome initiation into the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) with printed photographs of women in white dresses adorned with white sashes and white gloves as if trapped in a 1950s beauty pageant. Bunny tries to hide her repulsion.

“Are you excited, honey? Now you can join me and Phyllis at functions.”

“They will just love you, dear,” Phyllis says.

“You’ve got lineage on both sides,” Meredith says. “Daddy is very proud.”

“So cool,” Cate says, genuinely interested.

“You know, Cate, hon, if you wanted to apply you could, you’ll just have to get the paperwork to prove the bloodline on yours and Chuck’s side of the family.”

“Maybe when I have more time…” Cate replies, her resentment almost noticeable but not quite.

“So… are you excited?” Meredith turns back to Bunny.

Bunny sits and stares at the envelope. “Thanks, Mom, can’t wait,” she says, flatlining. The significance irrelevant to all that she is learning, like spinning backward into a historical web she might not ever be able to escape from—her ancestors hanging on with their white claws.

“And before you open the rest, you know how disappointed Daddy is for not being able to come home for your birthday, so he wanted you to have this.”

Bunny opens a second “surprise” envelope.

Inside of it: a check for $100,000.

“Oh my God, Mom.” Bunny looks up.

“It’s time to learn how to spend responsibly. This was always going to be gifted to you from Daddy on your eighteenth birthday. It’s just a slice of your larger trust that will slowly start to be passed on to you. This also doesn’t leave this room, okay?”

“Money can be fickle, dear, and it’s no one else’s business,” Phyllis adds. She and Meredith shoot each other a look of both knowing and hiding what they know.

“Don’t ever forget that it’s distasteful to discuss money, okay?” Meredith says.

Cate feels a pang of jealousy in her stomach, of knowing that no matter how they may be connected by blood, she was born to the wrong brother. Though they have generously gifted her checks in the past, she did not receive an inheritance on her eighteenth birthday, nor will she on her twenty-fifth.

At the sight of the check, Bunny feels conflicted; she thinks about Anthony, she wants to know if this is normal, is this normal? She doesn’t feel gratitude, or excitement, or fulfillment. She wonders if Billy was right, hypocrite. She feels irritated with herself, her confusion, her mother and Billy, but she doesn’t want to show it, she doesn’t want to seem ungrateful on her birthday. Bunny tightens the scarf around her neck, a glorious performance for her mother, and says, “I’ll be right back—I’m going to go put it upstairs so nothing happens to it before I can take it to the bank tomorrow!” She leaps from her seat and runs up the stairs, hitting every creak