Rabbits for Food

by Binnie Kirshenbaum

  The aide is a middle-aged woman with lank blond hair and pink lipstick. The name tag pinned to her royal blue hospital scrubs reads: Patricia. Bunny takes the seat on Albie’s left and shifts her chair to be nearer to him. Patricia unzips Bunny’s suitcase and dumps the contents onto the table. Then, as if to rid the lining of sand or lint or contraband hidden in a pocket, Patricia gives the suitcase a vigorous shake. Nothing falls out, but still Bunny feels like a criminal. Setting the open suitcase on the empty chair beside her, Patricia focuses her attention on the pile of comfortable clothes and Bunny’s other items for everyday use. One by one, item by item, as swiftly as if she were sorting fruit, she sorts Bunny’s things into two groups: Allowed and Not Allowed. What is Not Allowed goes back into the red suitcase, which Albie will take home. Her cardigan sweater is Allowed, but her bathrobe is Not Allowed. The yoga-style pants get tossed into the suitcase for the same reason her bathrobe got tossed into the suitcase: what ties around the waist can tie around the neck.

  T-shirts, jeans, wool skirt, bras, panties and socks are Allowed but her black tights are Not Allowed. She can keep the legal pad and three felt-tipped pens but the spiral-bound notebook and ballpoint pens are Not Allowed. Cigarettes are Definitely Not Allowed. Nicorette gum is dispensed at the nurse’s station.

  “I’m sorry,” Bunny says. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry about what?” Albie asks, and Bunny says, “Everything. I’m sorry about everything.”

  Jewelry is Not Allowed.

  Bunny takes off her wedding band and gives it to her husband, who turns it over between his fingertips before slipping it into his shirt pocket.

  “I’m so sorry,” Bunny says again.

  Nail polish is Not Allowed. Cosmetics are Not Allowed. Chapstick is Allowed, but dental floss? No way, no how.

  The woman whose job this is, whose job it is to take away Bunny’s gray silk scarf, her ballpoint pens, her cell phone, her house keys, her pocketbook with the shoulder strap, this woman never looks up, but she takes away Bunny’s shoes.

  Shoes with heels are Not Allowed. Sneakers are Allowed. Sneakers, but no shoelaces. With or without laces, Bunny doesn’t own sneakers. Albie says he will buy her a pair. The Allowed things go into a bag that is something like a laundry bag except there is no drawstring. The aide tells Albie that he has to go now, and she says to Bunny, “You wait here.”

  It would seem that the aide has disdain for her, but it’s not disdain. It’s resentment. She’s not getting paid enough to strip these sad people of their personal belongings, although it is better than her last job at the nursing home where she was expected to rat out old people for having sex.

  The aide walks off with Bunny’s Allowed bag. Albie hugs his wife and he tells her that he will see her tomorrow during visiting hours, that he loves her very much, that it’s all going to be okay.

  Bunny watches him leave with her red suitcase filled with her things Not Allowed, and she waits.

  She waits here.

  She waits here.

  Catatonia

  It is another aide, not the one who took her shoes, who, on this first day in the insane asylum, shows Bunny to her room. This aide, who is wearing pink scrubs, points to her name tag and says, “I’m Shawna. If you need something, you ask me.” Then she says, “It’s going to be okay. No need for you to be crying now.”

  Unaware that she is crying, Bunny touches her face, which is, indeed, wet. Shawna takes a packet of tissues from her pocket. “Here, you blow your nose and wipe away them tears. Come on, now. Let me show you your room. It’s a nice one. You got a big window facing the river.”

  The bag, the one with Bunny’s things Allowed is already there, ahead of her, plopped down on her bed, in the middle of her bed; a bed that is narrow like a bed you’d expect to find in a convent or an orphanage. Bunny’s bed is the one closest to the door, which is to say that Bunny’s room is not exactly her room. On the other bed, a woman with excellent posture sits facing the window as if she were waiting, primly and patiently, on a bench in a train station. Her black hair is done up neatly in a bun. “Please,” Bunny keeps her voice low. “I can’t have a roommate.” She doesn’t want this woman to take it personally but, even growing up in her family’s three-bedroom house, it was Nicole and Dawn who shared a bedroom. Bunny had a bedroom to herself.

  Unless you count Albie (and if you make an exception for the brief stint with Stella when she was between apartments), the only roommate Bunny ever had before now was a college roommate in her freshman year. Bunny’s college roommate was a very nice girl who arrived with plans for the following year to live in her sorority house, which was a revelation to Bunny, who had thought that, surely by now, sorority houses and sororities themselves had gone the way of those bras that turned normal breasts into breasts shaped like nuclear missiles.

  It was not a happy arrangement for either roommate, but they tolerated one another well enough until the night when, after all of ten minutes of watching Bunny look for, but not find, her cigarette lighter—a disposable Bic, two for a dollar, hardly a big deal—the aspiring sorority girl said, “If you were organized you wouldn’t lose things. You’d know where everything is. Frankly, I don’t know how you can find anything in that mess.”

  “You’re right,” Bunny said, and she pulled open the top drawer of her desk. All the way open; open and out, and she dumped the contents of the drawer, which included a half-eaten Snickers bar and the missing Bic lighter, onto the floor. For good measure, Bunny flung the now empty drawer across the room. Although the aspiring sorority girl was not in the line of trajectory, she nonetheless dashed for the door the way a cartoon character makes a beeline for the nearest exit. From there, she went to the Housing Office, while Bunny calmed herself down with a few good kicks to the wall.

  Bunny was sent to Student Mental Health Services, a wish fulfilled, and, even better, she was afforded the luxury usually reserved for upperclassmen: a single, a room without a roommate.

  Now, on the verge of a full-blown freak-out, she says to Shawna, “I can’t share a room. I have to have a room to myself.”

  “Does this look like a hotel?” Shawna asks. “This is a hospital. No private rooms in the hospital. But don’t you worry. You and Mrs. Cortez will get along just fine. She’s no bother.” Shawna raises her voice. Perhaps Mrs. Cortez is hard of hearing. “Isn’t that right, Mrs. Cortez? You’re no bother. Mrs. Cortez don’t talk. She can talk. She just don’t want to. She’ll talk when she’s got something to say. Isn’t that right? Mrs. Cortez, this is your new roommate. You want to say hello?”

  Every indication is that Mrs. Cortez is deaf as well as mute. “Oh, she can hear,” Shawna says. “She hears just fine when the dinner bell rings. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Cortez?”

  Even Bunny has to admit—if she has to have a roommate, she couldn’t do better than Mrs. Cortez.

  On her bed, along with her Allowed things, are a pair of blue pajamas, a dull, monochromatic cerulean blue, and a pair of slipper-socks in a similar, but lighter, shade of blue. The pajamas are made of paper. Not paper like notebook paper, but paper like those washable paper towels for wiping up kitchen spills. On the pillow is a single sheet of regular paper, placed there to be noticed as surely as a tear-soaked note from a teenage girl explaining why she has run away from home; the sort of note from the sort of teenage girl who periodically runs away from home, but never stays away for more than a few hours because where would she go? Except this sheet of paper is a printout of a grid beneath the heading: Weekly Schedule of Activities.

  “Let’s get you settled in nice,” Shawna says. “This here is your closet.” She opens the door to a locker made of laminated particleboard that is a color that is not a color. Four plastic hangers hang from a rod below two shelves. “If you need more hangers, you just let me know,” Shawna says. “And this here night table’s got two drawers for your undergarments and personal
effects and the like.” She demonstrates how to switch the table lamp on and off, and from there they go to the bathroom, where Shawna pulls open the shower curtain. “Cold water,” she taps the faucet on the right. “The other one is the hot water. But to tell you the truth, it don’t get much hotter than warm.” Then she directs Bunny’s attention to one of two side-by-side sinks. “This one here is yours, and that’s your cup.” The plastic cup is cloudy from far too many rounds in the dishwasher. Shawna holds up a travel-size tube of toothpaste, and a toothbrush packaged in cellophane, which she unwraps, stuffing the cellophane into her pocket. “We like to keep things sanitary around here, but some folks are forgetful. You don’t need to worry any about Mrs. Cortez though. She’s not the sort of woman to use someone else’s toothbrush.”

  Above the sink is a mirror—not a real mirror, but a sheet of aluminum or maybe it’s stainless steel—and in the cabinet below are extra rolls of toilet paper.

  Bunny is not up to the task of putting away her clothes, getting herself settled in or washing her face and hands, which she couldn’t do even if she’d wanted to because Shawna neglected to give her soap and towels. She could, but she doesn’t, brush her teeth. Instead she pushes her belongings to the foot of the bed, and sits on the edge as if she has been hard at work and now is merely taking a break. The bed, her bed, is covered with a waffle-weave cotton blanket of a color best described as sandy beige. The mattress can’t be more than three inches thick and through the blanket and sheets, which you could not, in all good conscience, ever refer to as white, Bunny can feel the plastic mattress cover, a precaution against urine stains or menstrual blood stains or the sweat of fear, and who knows what other fluids leak from the deranged. The pillow is the same kind of pillow that you get on airplanes when you fly coach. As a pillow, it is useless, but Bunny hugs it anyway. It is dark outside now, and Bunny sits on the edge of her bed, as still and as quiet as Mrs. Cortez sitting on the edge of her bed; the only difference between them is posture. Bunny’s shoulders sag. In this way, time passes until the dinner bell rings.

  Mrs. Cortez, ramrod straight, shoulders back, head held high, walks past Bunny as if she doesn’t see her, as if, on top of everything else, Mrs. Cortez has opted to be blind.

  The First Supper

  Meals are mandatory, but unable to bring herself to join the line of crazy people snaked around the dining room, Bunny keeps to the wall like a bystander. Many of the psychos, with the bovine insouciance of men who go to nice restaurants for dinner all dolled up in cargo shorts and baseball caps, are wearing their paper pajamas, which come in pale brown, as well as the blue. One man, a large man whose hair is long and gray, is wearing his underpants, white Hanes briefs, over his blue jeans. Bunny glances at his feet, curious to see if he’s put his socks on over his shoes, but he isn’t wearing shoes. He is wearing the slipper-socks, the blue ones, the same as Bunny’s slipper-socks, and Bunny dwells on this fact, that she and Underpants Man are wearing identical footwear, and what does that say about her?

  What distinguishes the cafeteria in the psycho ward from cafeterias for normal people is the silverware. In the psycho cafeteria only the spoons are metal. Knives and forks are plastic. Also, plates and cups are paper. The inmates are not allowed anywhere near glass or sharp objects or anything that could be construed as a sharp object like the ballpoint pen they took away from Bunny and her nail clippers, too.

  By the time she gets her food—steam table dregs of boiled broccoli and gloppy spaghetti; meatballs are on offer, but Bunny declines, although she does take two individual packets of peanut butter—there are no vacant tables. Not many chairs are free either. She isn’t frightened of the other crazy people. This isn’t the sort of a mental ward that houses the criminally insane. If anything, these people look incapable of defending themselves, but she doesn’t want to sit with them because she doesn’t want to be one of them. But she has to sit somewhere. Holding her tray, she scans the room, ultimately taking the one empty seat at a four-top table where three men sit with their heads bowed, as if they’ve nodded off midmeal. Bunny eats a pat of peanut butter with her metal spoon.

  Holy Fuck

  Dinner is followed by Visiting hours. The psychos who are not expecting visitors, not tonight or maybe never, exit the dining room as if they were bumper cars or ants, seemingly in all directions without a destination, but there is a destination. In the living room, a game show, Family Feud, is playing on the wide screen television that takes up most of one wall. On the other walls there is nothing to liven up the beige. No paintings or posters or prints. Three rows of couches, two couches per row, line up to face the television. Two of the couches are upholstered in grayish-brown vinyl. The other four are a listless shade of sepia with a nubby weave that is best described as larval.

  Behind the rows of couches, chairs are arranged haphazardly. The people sitting in those chairs are socializing. Bunny doesn’t want to watch Family Feud. Adrift in the sea of beige, tan, liverwurst, slate, sickly mint green, and wenge, Bunny keeps to the hallway where she is alone, except for Underpants Man who has planted himself by the pay phone on the wall, as if he were expecting an important call.

  It feels like breathing, but, in fact, Bunny is speaking out loud. “Please,” she says, “help me. Someone help me,” although she is not asking, not really, for help. It is more like a figure of speech. Nonetheless, some insane woman shows up and puts her arms around Bunny, patting her back, short and rapid pitter-patter pats the way you’d pat a wailing baby, telling her not to cry, telling her not to worry, which serves only to exacerbate Bunny’s despair, when one of the nurses happens by. The nurse stops and says, “Come on, Jeanette. You know there’s no touching.”

  Jeanette, whoever Jeanette is, lets go of Bunny and says, “But she’s crying.”

  The nurse, Lisa Kendall, R.N.—her black name tag pinned at the V of her white scrubs—is wearing pink ballet flats like Bunny’s friend Lydia wore on New Year’s Eve, except Lydia’s pink ballet flats were Clergerie and Nurse Kendall got hers from Payless.

  When Jeanette breaks away, Bunny gets a look at her face, which is a mess of a face, like maybe it was reconstructed after a hideous accident, the kind of accident where she went face-first through the windshield of a car, or it could be that she went overboard on the cosmetic surgery. Because the people here are not right in the head, you can’t rule out the possibility that this was the face she wanted, like that woman whose picture was plastered on the front page of the New York Post after undergoing extensive plastic surgery to look like a lion. Lions are beautiful creatures, but a lion’s face did not look good on a person. Also, there was the woman who turned herself into a Barbie doll. If Jeanette was after that kind of transformation, Bunny has no idea who or what she was aiming to be.

  Nurse Kendall takes a packet of tissues from her pocket. The people who work here carry around packets of tissues the same way some people always have a safety pin with them, or change for a dollar. Nurse Kendall leads Bunny away from Jeanette and says, “Maybe you want to go to sleep now? You’ve had a rough day.” The nurse walks Bunny to her room where Mrs. Cortez, sitting on her bed, facing the window, says nothing and Bunny returns the courtesy.

  Without taking the trouble to undress or brush her teeth, Bunny gets into bed. A beacon of light comes through the open six inches between the door and the jamb. A rod affixed to the top of the door prevents it from closing all the way. Not even in their sleep is privacy allowed. Bunny closes her eyes, and a voice in the void, someone, a man, calls out, “Holy fuck.” A few seconds go by, and again he calls out, “Holy fuck. Holy fuck.” Intermittently, he calls out, “Holy fuck.” Anyone who knows anything about experimental psychology or the fundamentals of torture will tell you that noises at irregular intervals are one of the surest ways to break a person.

  “Holy fuck.”

  Side Effects

  At seven in the morning, an aide rouses Bunny from her bed, th
e same as all the crazy people are roused from their drug-induced sleep. The aides, like border collies, herd the loons as if they were sheep into the living room, and the truth is, the loons are like sheep; sheep on their way to slaughter for all they care. Slumped in their seats, they wait passively for their wellness check. “Wellness” is one of those words, along with words like “parenting,” “inappropriate,” and “chakra,” that drive Bunny crazy, even before she was crazy. One of the nurses takes her temperature and blood pressure—neither of which, Bunny notes, gets written down.

  At both ends of the living room are carts stocked with bars of mini-soap—wretched, cheap soap redolent of motel rooms from the 1950s; towels devoid of color and fluff; fresh paper pajamas and slipper-socks. After they all replenish their supplies, they go back to their rooms to shower and get dressed, or not.

  Bunny does not take a shower, but now that she has soap and a towel, she does wash her hands and face, and she brushes her teeth, which is something, and she strips off the clothes she’d slept in. From the bag of her things Allowed, she chooses a black T-shirt and a pair of jeans; a fresh set of clothes, which she puts on over her dirty underwear.

  At breakfast, the vast majority of the psychos are pajama-clad.

  Bunny sets her tray down on an outlying table where only one of the four chairs is occupied. An obese young woman, a girl really, all of seventeen, is eating peanut butter, Skippy Creamy, with a plastic knife from a plastic jar. Bunny stirs her cornflakes and milk with her spoon the way you’d stir coffee and cream, and she asks the girl, “Where did you get a jar of peanut butter?”

  “My parents brought it for me,” and in a preemptive strike against what she fears might come next, she tells Bunny, in no uncertain terms, “I don’t share my food.” Then she says, “You don’t have to cry about it. Your parents can bring you food. Or your friends, if you have any.”