The animals in my garden are behaving like they think they are stars in a Beatrix Potter story or something, and if you don’t recall the finer details of Beatrix Potter’s major mischief-makers, I don’t mean they are comporting themselves adorably.
Do you remember the “Fierce Bad Rabbit”? The Fierce Bad Rabbit is one of the lesser-known players in Potter’s kitchen-garden universe, an antihero in fact, and the book has fallen into disrepute in the nursery. I think it may be banned in Florida. Still, Fierce Bad Rabbit was one of my two favorite Beatrix Potter characters when I was small and remains a favorite. The plot goes like this: Good Rabbit (anonymous, insipid) sits on bench eating a lovely carrot given to him by his mother; Fierce Bad Rabbit scratches Good Rabbit and snatches his carrot; Good Rabbit runs away and hides behind a bush; hunter appears, mistakes Fierce Bad for a game bird, and blasts off his tail and whiskers with a shotgun. Fin.
Fierce Bad Rabbit has sharp claws and “savage whiskers.” Either you get the humor or you do not. Many citizen reviewers, their knickers in a bunch on GoodReads, do not. “This story has some logical holes in it that I think even a child would not miss,” gripes a rather pedantic reviewer named Isabella. “One star.”
“I was shocked,” says Caroline.
“Not a nice story,” sniffs Kylee. “Not a good idea to read at bedtime.”
Another Beatrix Potter story of bad behavior that filled me with delight when I was little — but that was even more fascinating in its details — was “The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, or The Roly-Poly Pudding.” That’s the book, first published in 1907, in which naughty, naughty Tom Kitten doesn’t do as his mother tells him and sneaks up a chimney to the attic, where he is buttered and rolled in dough by a pair of well-dressed rats. You might remember the illustration of Tom Kitten, almost entirely encased, just his head poking out with a surprised expression as Mr. and Mrs. Whiskers, in apron and waistcoat, wield either end of a huge wooden rolling pin.
Fudge around and find out, Tom Kitten.
The deer in my back garden are naughty, naughty indeed. (Not that I can blame them. I’d be antisocial, too, if I had to bed down each night on a patch of leaves between a library parking lot and the pool house of multimillionaire neighbors who have a positive fetish for upward-facing landscape lighting.) The deer in my back garden are edging on malevolent. We seem to have four, this year, and they are lounging at their leisure just this moment beneath my clothesline, looking unrepentant for having knocked over my wire fence in two places. It’s like having four angry human teenagers living in the yard, who hold your gaze defiantly whenever you come to the window.
When I was very small, of an age when my grandmother would read Beatrix Potter to me (and, incredibly, Mother Goose! I’m sure no one reads “Deedle, Deedle Dumpling” and “A Diller, A Dollar” to their toddlers anymore), I’d come to spend an afternoon with her, and she would entertain me by making a game out of feeding the gray squirrels. This was here, in this house, where I live now. My grandmother would buy White Rock ginger ale in small glass bottles — the bottles with the pretty little winged fairy on the label — and a green box of Mystic Mint cookies, and a bag of peanuts in the shell, and when we got home from the A&P Supermarket, we would carefully place a few peanuts in the branches of the privet hedge that grows just outside the music room window. Then we’d go back inside and wait for a squirrel to come take a peanut away, watching through the glass quietly.
The other day I went out the front door to walk to the post office and spotted a squirrel eating a bagel in one of the elm trees by the driveway, where I park my car. There he was, just above my head, holding an entire bagel in his paws and chewing, his chubby cheeks in motion. Manhattan has Pizza Rat; East Hampton has Bagel Squirrel.
Bagel Squirrel is perfect. I took out my iPhone and got a picture. Bagel Squirrel is where the city and the country meet — the bagel being the ultimate symbol of the metropolis, obviously, and Squirrel Nutkin the ultimate symbol of a quaintly tamed landscape, à la Beatrix Potter. And that’s where we find ourselves: pretending it’s the country, when it’s the city now. Bagel Squirrel doesn’t want your peanuts.
Overcrowding and overbuilding bring us not just traffic jams but angry deer and bagels in trees.
Have you noticed that there is only one garbage can on Main Street between the entrance to the Reutershan parking lot and the East Hampton Library? The library's managers, bless them, keep a garbage can tucked discreetly by the brick walkway beside their northernmost wing. As you continue perambulating southward, past Town Pond, the next garbage can is literally a mile away, at Main Beach! Friends on Facebook have been complaining a lot lately about food left by the wayside. Bagels, half-eaten egg-and-cheese sandwiches, empty cans of Red Bull . . . takeout litters the shady ground between hedge and sidewalk, all over town. It’s one of the unanticipated consequences of having a huge population of commuting laborers who come and go without an infrastructure to support them.
And by infrastructure to support them I mean: Did you hear about the Porta-Potty in Sagaponack? Mayor Bill Tillotson had one installed for transient workers on Narrow Lane last fall, to afford them the dignity of a place to go when they need to go. Some of the neighbors don’t like it, but doesn’t it seem like the least we can do?
My dog is always finding deli meals when I walk her at night, under the clear light of the moon. On Friday, while Sweetpea and I were strolling and thinking in the relative darkness of Dayton Lane, she found a grilled cheese sandwich in the grassy median. There shouldn’t be a grilled cheese sandwich in the grassy median. She ate half of it before I could drag her away. And someone who works in the vicinity of the library regularly tosses fried chicken from their parked car, and it always lands in a certain spot in the undergrowth by a certain holly bush. Have you ever tried to wrench a fried chicken wing from the jaws of an indignant beagle-mix? Sweetpea would look very good in a waistcoat. She really would. If I were the sort of person who bought clothes for my dog, I’d buy her a cornflower-blue waistcoat. If I do not exercise due caution, I may awake one night to find myself buttered and roly-poly-ed up in dough, Sweetpea standing over me holding the wooden pin.