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They bought the dishwasher in March of 1972, at Sears, on a Saturday, after forty minutes of arguing in the appliance department about whether a machine could be trusted with good china. It was avocado green. It had a door that came down like a drawbridge, two racks that slid out on little wheels, and a dial on the front with settings for POTS & PANS and NORMAL and RINSE & HOLD. The rabbit bought the five-year warranty, and read the card twice at the counter, small print and all, which he had never once done with a studio contract. When the man from Sears had hooked it up and gone, the rabbit stood in front of it in the kitchen with his arms folded and looked at it for a long time, the way you'd look at a horse you'd bought and weren't sure about.
"Well," said the rabbit. "That's ours."
It was the first thing they'd ever bought together. Daffy didn't think about that at the time. He thought about it later, at about one in the morning on a Thursday in August of 1974, standing in the wreckage of the kitchen while a policeman wrote in a notebook, and it seemed to him then that he should have thought about it a good deal sooner.
It started at four minutes past eleven.
They'd had Porky and Petunia for dinner, and it had gone well, the way dinners went now. Daffy told the story about the man from the Hays office. Porky said "That's not how it h-happened" at the place he always said it. Petunia laughed in all the right places, and at half past ten they went home with a foil-covered plate of leftovers, and the rabbit rinsed and Daffy loaded, which was the system.
Daffy put the big enamel pot in the bottom rack face up.
He did it without thinking, the way you'd put down your keys. The pot went in open side up, like a bowl, because it was a pot, and pots held things; that was their entire purpose in life. Then he put in the plates, and the glasses on top, and closed the door, and turned the dial to POTS & PANS, and reached for the button.
"Doc," said the rabbit.
Daffy stopped with his wing on the button.
The rabbit was drying his hands on the dish towel at the sink. He did it very thoroughly, one finger at a time.
"The pot," said the rabbit.
"What about it?"
"It's face up."
"It's a pot," said Daffy. "It's supposed to be face up. That's how you can tell it's a pot."
"In the machine," said the rabbit, folding the dish towel in half, and then in half again, "it fills up with water. And then the water sits in it. Dirty water, from the plates. And the cycle's over and it's still sittin' there, and in the mornin' there's a pot full of cold dishwater with a little scum on the top." He laid the folded towel on the counter and squared the edges. "So it goes face down."
He said it very pleasantly. That was the part Daffy would remember: how pleasant he was. The rabbit opened the dishwasher, slid out the bottom rack, turned the pot over, slid the rack back, closed the door, and pushed the button himself. The machine began to hum. Then he smiled at Daffy, a perfectly nice smile, the one he gave people from the network, and went to wipe down the stove.
Daffy stood there.
It was nothing. He knew it was nothing. A pot. The rabbit had turned a pot over. He should have gone to bed.
He opened the dishwasher. The machine stopped humming with a sad little clunk. He slid out the bottom rack, turned the pot face up, slid the rack back, closed the door, and pushed the button.
The machine began to hum.
Behind him, at the stove, the rabbit had stopped wiping.
"Four hundred and twelve," said the rabbit.
Daffy turned around.
"What?"
"That's four hundred and twelve," said the rabbit. He was still facing the stove. "Times."
"Times what?"
"Times you put the pot in face up."
It took a second to go in. When it did, it went in all the way, down through Daffy's feathers to the bottoms of his feet.
"You've been counting?"
"Since we got the machine."
"We got the machine in March of 1972!"
"I know when we got the machine." The rabbit hung the sponge on the faucet and turned around. His face was perfectly calm. "I was there."
"You've been standing in this kitchen for two and a half years keeping count of me?" Daffy's voice went up an octave without consulting him. "In your head? Every night? What do you do, write it down? Is there a chart? Is there a little book in the drawer with hash marks in it?"
"No book."
"Then how—"
"I just know," said the rabbit. "Same as I know the rest."
Daffy stopped.
"The rest," he said.
The rabbit didn't say anything.
"What rest?"
There was a pause long enough for the dishwasher to change cycles.
"You don't wanna know, doc," said the rabbit.
"I want to know exactly."
So the rabbit told him.
He told him standing at the stove with his arms folded, in the same pleasant voice he used for the network, in no particular order, like a man reading a grocery list off the back of an envelope. The cap had been left off the toothpaste nine hundred and some times; he wasn't sure about the some. The duck had said I was going to about the garbage a hundred and sixty times, and I was literally just about to another forty. The good scissors had gone missing from the kitchen drawer eleven times and been found, all eleven times, in the duck's study, under something. The car had come back with the seat run all the way up to the wheel thirty-one times. The thermostat had been moved to seventy-eight without consultation since the first of June. The duck had told the story about the man from the Hays office at five dinner parties since January, and the man from the Hays office had gotten two inches taller every time and was now, by the rabbit's estimate, six foot nine.
"He really was very tall," said Daffy.
"He was five-six, doc. I was there."
"You've been keeping all of that?"
"I ain't keepin' it," said the rabbit. "It just stays."
Daffy had been insulted by experts. He'd been insulted by critics and producers and a man from Variety who'd once called him a nervous breakdown with a bill. He had never been insulted like this: calmly, and in detail, by someone who had plainly been paying closer attention to him than anybody alive, and had been sitting on every bit of it for two and a half years, in silence, while drying the dishes.
He drew himself up.
"Fine," he said. "Fine. You want to keep score? Let's keep score."
Daffy didn't count things. He didn't have the head for it. What he had instead was a memory like a court stenographer and thirty-three years of material. He started at the beginning.
"In 1941," he said, "you took the side of the bed by the door."
The rabbit blinked.
"Our very first night in the same bed! And you got in on the side by the door like it was assigned to you, and you've taken it every night since. Every hotel. Every motor court. Every sleeper car on every train. Thirty-three years, and not once have you asked if I wanted the side by the door."
"You don't want the side by the door."
"I might have!" Daffy was pacing now. "In 1946 you told Porky I was a handful. I heard you through the wall at the Brown Derby. A handful. Like a toddler. In 1951 you ate my half of a cheesecake from Lindy's and blamed it on that gopher, and I believed you, for eleven years. In 1958 you said my scarf was brave." He swung around. "And you have never once in your life laughed at a joke of mine at a party until somebody else laughed first. You wait. You wait to see if it's landing. I watch you do it!"
The rabbit's ears went back.
That was all. Just the ears, flat against his skull for half a second. But Daffy saw it, and something in him lit up like a pinball machine.
"And you," he said. "You, Mr. Four-Hundred-and-Twelve, Mr. Keeps-It-All-In-His-Head. You have not once in four years told me any of it." He was coming across the kitchen now. "Not the toothpaste. Not the scissors. Not the pot! Four hundred and twelve times I put that pot in face up, and four hundred and eleven of them you went and turned it over in the morning and didn't say a word! You smiled! You've been smiling at me since nineteen seventy, rabbit, like I'm the network! You haven't raised your voice in this house in four years!"
The rabbit looked at him for a long, long moment, with his arms folded and his face perfectly calm and his ears flat back. Then he said, very quietly and very pleasantly:
"Doc. Go to bed."
There was a stack of saucers on the counter by the sink, the ones that hadn't fit in the machine. They were from the good set from Bullock's, white with a gold rim, which they'd bought the same month as the dishwasher.
Daffy picked one up and threw it at the wall.
It hit the wall over the breakfast table and burst like a firework, and the pieces came down over the table and the chairs and the floor. One little gold-rimmed curve of it went spinning across the linoleum and fetched up against the rabbit's foot.
The rabbit looked down at it.
He had a phrase for moments like this. Daffy had heard him use it on hunters and gangsters and a tenor with a temper and, once, a Tasmanian devil. He'd say it to the camera, mild and almost sorry, like a man reporting the weather, and then all hell would break loose, and the other fellow would end up in the ocean. He didn't say it now. He didn't say anything. He bent down and picked up the little curve of saucer, and looked at it, and set it carefully on the counter.
Then he picked up a dinner plate and threw it.
In thirty-three years, on film and off, Daffy had seen the rabbit drop things, hand things, plant things, leave things where somebody would step on them, and arrange for things to fall from a great height. He had never once seen him pick something up and throw it in a temper, like a person. It went past Daffy's head so close it parted the feathers at the top of his head and exploded against the refrigerator, and Daffy stood there with his bill open while the pieces of a dinner plate from Bullock's slid down the avocado-green door behind him, and felt, he'd admit later to nobody, a thrill go through him like he'd been plugged into the wall.
"Finally!" he said.
The rabbit threw another one.
They went through the salad plates in under a minute.
The rabbit didn't yell at first, which was almost the worst part. He threw in silence, overhand, like a pitcher, with a terrible economy, and every one came closer than the last. Daffy went under the breakfast table, came up the other side, threw a cup that curved in the air like a boomerang and came back around the doorframe and caught him in the back of the head, and went down again seeing birds. He came up the second time holding the lid of the enamel pot in front of him like a shield and caught a bread plate on it with a noise like a church bell, and that was when the rabbit finally opened his mouth.
"You want me to raise my voice?"
It came out of him so loud the window over the sink buzzed in its frame.
"Here!" A saucer. "It's raised! You wanna know why I don't say nothin'? You wanna know?" Another. "'Cause every time I ever said anything, you packed a bag!"
Daffy lowered the pot lid an inch.
"Thirty years!" The rabbit wasn't aiming anymore. He was looking at the duck, and the plates were going everywhere: the cabinets, the ceiling, the calendar from the dry cleaner's. "Thirty years, I open my mouth one time about anything, and you're on the next train! And I'm standin' on some platform with my hands in my pockets goin', well, that's that. Every time! So I learned! I ain't a dope, I learn! You don't say it. You turn the pot over in the mornin' and you don't say nothin', and you smile, and he stays." He was breathing hard. His ears were straight up and quivering. "He stays, doc."
The kitchen was quiet except for the dishwasher, which had gone into its rinse and was swishing gently behind its door.
"And it worked," said the rabbit, more quietly. "Four years. It worked. You're still here."
Daffy stood there holding the pot lid.
He wanted to say it wasn't true. He went looking for the time it wasn't true, the time the rabbit had said something and he'd stayed, and he went back a long way, through a great many metaphorical trains, and couldn't find it.
He set the lid down on the breakfast table, on top of a great deal of saucer.
"I've been doing it on purpose," he said.
The rabbit's head came up.
"The pot." Daffy found he couldn't look at the rabbit, so he looked at the dishwasher. "Not the first time. The first time I didn't know. But you turned it over the next morning and didn't say anything, and I thought, well, he'll say something tomorrow. And you didn't. And I thought, next week. And you didn't." He swallowed. "You used to fight me about everything. The billing. The bed. Which way the toilet paper goes. You fought me about Brazil one time for an entire weekend, and you'd never even been to Brazil. And then we bought the house, and you just stopped. You say sure, doc. You let me have the good side of the closet. You smile at me." His voice did something he hadn't authorized. "I thought you'd gotten bored. I thought, he's done fighting because he's done. Because it's settled, and that's what settled looks like, and in a couple of years he'll look up from the paper one morning and wonder what he's doing here."
The rabbit didn't say anything.
"So I put the pot in face up," said Daffy. "To see if you'd still fight me about something."
There was a very long silence.
"Four hundred and twelve times," said the rabbit.
"Four hundred and twelve, apparently. I wasn't counting." Daffy lifted his chin. "Some of us have lives."
The rabbit stared at him.
Then he made a sound Daffy had never heard come out of anybody, toon or human. It started somewhere down around his feet and came up through a kind of strangled whistle and arrived at the top as a full-throated bellow:
"ON PURPOSE?"
And the dish rack went over, and they were off again.
It was different the second time. The second time they were both yelling, and some of the yelling was about the pot and some of it was about 1952 and some of it was just noise, the pure joyful noise of two people who had been very careful with each other for four years and had just found out they didn't have to be.
"Two and a half years I'm turnin' that pot over in the mornin' and feelin' like a saint!"
"Please, you were never a thaint! You were a martyr! There's a difference!"
"I'll show you a martyr—"
"Missed!"
"I didn't miss, I chose—"
"Not the cake stand! Rabbit, not the cake stand, Porky gave us that—"
The rabbit, holding the cake stand over his head with both hands, stopped.
He looked up at it. It was cut glass, heavy, with a fluted edge. Porky had brought it up the hill the week they moved in, wrapped in eleven pages of the Times, with a card in Porky's small, careful hand: For the both of you. Try not to break anything.
He brought it down very slowly and set it on the counter.
Then he picked up a soup bowl instead and threw that.
Daffy was laughing by then. He couldn't help it. He was standing in the wreck of their kitchen at a quarter to one in the morning, with a lump coming up on his head and a piece of saucer in his tail feathers and the rabbit across the room yelling at the top of his lungs about thermostats, thermostats, red in the face and wild-eyed and absolutely furious, and it was the best he'd felt in four years. He'd thought, when they bought the house, that the fighting was something you got through to get to the rest of it. It turned out the fighting had been holding something up the whole time, and you took it out at your peril.
"SEVENTY-EIGHT DEGREES!" said the rabbit. "IN AUGUST!"
"I'M COLD-BLOODED!"
"YOU'RE A BIRD! BIRDS ARE WARM-BLOODED! I LOOKED IT UP!"
"YOU LOOKED IT UP?"
"IN 1953!"
Somebody was pounding on the front door.
They both stopped with their arms back.
"Police," said a voice through the door. "LAPD. Everything all right in there?"
They looked at each other across the kitchen.
It was one in the morning, a hot night with every window in the canyon open, and there was a policeman at the door of a house on a hill with two names on the deed. Daffy saw the rabbit understand it at the same instant he did. Thirty-three years of being careful. Every hotel, every motor court, every train. And it was going to come down to a pot.
The rabbit set down the bowl he was holding, very gently, as if it might go off. He tightened the belt of his bathrobe. He went down the hall to the front door and opened it with his whole face rearranged into the one from the network.
"Officer! Evenin'. Or mornin'. What can I do ya for?"
The policeman on the step was very young, twenty-three or twenty-four, with a mustache he was still working on, a flashlight, and a notebook. Behind him a patrol car idled in the street with its light going around and around, red across the neighbors' hedges. The Kaplans from next door were standing on their lawn in their nightclothes.
The policeman looked at the rabbit. Then past him, down the hall, at the duck, who was standing in the kitchen doorway with a bread plate under one wing and a piece of saucer still stuck in his tail.
"Oh my God," said the policeman. "You're—"
"Yes," said Daffy.
"We got a call," the policeman said faintly. "Neighbor says there's a fight. Breaking glass. Somebody screaming martyr."
"Rehearsin'," said the rabbit.
The policeman looked at him.
"It's a picture," said the rabbit. "New picture. Very physical. Lotta plates."
"At one in the morning?"
"It's a very demanding picture," said Daffy.
The policeman looked at them both for a long time. He had very steady eyes for somebody that young. He looked past them, down the hall, at the kitchen: the saucer on the wall, the plate on the refrigerator, the dish rack on the floor. Daffy watched him take in the two coffee cups on the drainboard, too. And, through the open bathroom door at the end of the hall, he could have seen the two toothbrushes in the same glass on the sink, if he'd been looking, and Daffy was fairly sure he was.
"I'm going to have to come in and take a statement," said the policeman. "It's procedure."
His name was Officer Dominguez. He sat at the breakfast table, after brushing a good deal of Bullock's off a chair, and opened his notebook to a clean page, and wrote down their names, which he didn't need to ask for, and the address, which he was sitting in.
"Relationship?" he said, without looking up.
The kitchen went very still.
"Colleagues," said the rabbit.
"Colleagues," said Daffy.
Officer Dominguez wrote it down.
"And what started the—" he paused, and chose the word carefully, "—rehearsal?"
"He put the pot in face up," said the rabbit.
"It goes face up—"
"It goes face down, there's water—"
"It soaks—"
"It don't soak, it sits—"
Officer Dominguez's pen had stopped.
They tried to keep it down. They did try. They stood on opposite sides of the kitchen and hissed it at each other over the policeman's head like two people arguing in a church, and the policeman sat between them with his pen in the air and looked from one to the other like a man at a tennis match.
"—and you think I'm going to leave," Daffy hissed. "Over a pot?"
"You left over a shirt."
"That was 1947! I was practically a child!"
"You was ten years in pictures!"
"Rabbit." Daffy stopped hissing. He said it out loud, in his own voice, and Officer Dominguez's pen came down very slowly to the page. "Look around."
The rabbit looked around.
"So where's my bag?" said Daffy.
The rabbit didn't say anything.
"I didn't leave over the shirt," said Daffy. "I left over the month after the shirt, when you were so polite to me I could have screamed. I've never once left because you yelled at me, you buck-toothed doormat. I leave when you start treating me like—like other people."
Daffy spat the words out with real venom. He watched, with an unpleasant mix of joy and guilt, as the rabbit's ears drooped, one and then the other, until they were lying flat along his back.
"So I gotta yell more," he said finally, very low.
"You have to yell constantly."
"Kaplans ain't gonna like it."
"The Kaplans," said Daffy, "can move."
Officer Dominguez cleared his throat.
They both turned and looked at him. They'd forgotten he was there. He sat at the breakfast table with his notebook, looking down at it very hard, and he wrote something, and then something else, and then he read it back to them in a flat, official voice.
"Responded to report of disturbance. Found two actors rehearsing a scene for a motion picture. Some damage to dishware. No injuries." He looked up at the lump on Daffy's head. "Minor injuries." He wrote that in. "No further action."
He closed the notebook.
Neither of them said anything. There wasn't anything to say that wasn't already in the notebook.
Officer Dominguez stood up and put on his hat. At the front door, on the step, with the Kaplans still on their lawn and the light going around and around on the hedges, he turned back.
"Could I get an autograph?" he said. "For my little sister. She'd kill me."
"Sure thing," said the rabbit, already reaching for the notebook.
Officer Dominguez went red to the roots of his mustache. "Actually—sorry. Sir. Mr. Bunny. It's not—" He held the notebook where it was, halfway between them, as if it had gotten stuck there. "It's just, she's eleven, and she's got the duck on her lunchbox, and if I come home with you instead she'll think I—" He stopped. "You're great, sir. I mean that. I grew up on you. I'm sorry."
The rabbit's hand stayed in the air a moment longer. Then he lowered it and put it in the pocket of his bathrobe.
"Don't mention it," said the rabbit.
The policeman held the notebook out to the duck.
Daffy signed it so large it took two pages.
Officer Dominguez put it away in his breast pocket. He went down one step and stopped again.
"My folks fight like that," he said, not quite looking at either of them. "Thirty-one years in September." He went down another step. "And for what it's worth, my mother does it face up. Says it soaks."
Daffy turned to the rabbit with a look of such naked triumph that the Kaplans could see it from their lawn.
"Your mother's wrong," said the rabbit.
"Yes, sir," said Officer Dominguez. "I'll tell her."
They swept until three.
There was one clean plate left in the house when they were done: a saucer from the good set from Bullock's, white with a gold rim and a chip out of one side, which had been in the dishwasher the whole time. In the morning they ate breakfast off it standing at the counter, passing a piece of toast back and forth.
The rabbit unloaded the machine. Daffy watched him over the toast. The rabbit took out the glasses, and the bowls, and then slid out the bottom rack, and there was the enamel pot, face up, full to the brim with cold gray water and a little scum on top.
The rabbit looked at it for a while.
Then he lifted it out, carried it to the sink, poured it out, and set it on the drainboard. And without turning around, out loud, in a perfectly ordinary voice, the way you'd say it to anybody, he said:
"Doc. It goes face down."
Daffy put down the toast.
"No," he said, "it doesn't."
They were still arguing about it at eleven, and again at noon, and on and off for the next nineteen years, until the dishwasher finally died in the spring of 1993, sixteen years out of warranty, with the pot in it face up.