42
a doctor would collect your urine, inject it into a live female rabbit, then cut her
In the 1950s, the most common way to determine whether or not you were pregnant was the rabbit test:
I was given her name.
The rabbit was his little sister, who died a few years ago after losing the names of all eight of her children.
When he was just out of high school, my grandfather wrote a short story called “A Very Young Rabbit.�
Nostalgia comes from misremembering, he says.
I felt ambivalent when I graduated, I say, yet now feel high school was one of the happiest times of my life.
Later, back in the room I grew up in, I call C.:
to high school—to be tired, waiting?
when I say I want to return
Is that what I want
I nod though I miss that feeling and mourned it when I married, another milestone in the rearview.
N. says over the speakers in the dimly-lit hangar that used to be filled with ice in the winter.
It was so tiring to be that age, just waiting,
E m m a W i n s o r Wo o d
Rabbit Test
the columbia review