“Strawberry,” Bunny says, and Carolyn claps her hands.
Party Planning
The plan is to throw Andrea a surprise party for her birthday. Bunny is taking notes, not notes for the party planning, but notes for herself that have nothing to do with the party. Teacher volunteers to make decorations and hats. “Hats?” Bunny looks up. “Do we really want hats?” Josh will ask one of his friends to pick up a pizza, and Chaz has a Pepperidge Farm angel food cake, untouched, in a brown bag in the refrigerator. No one messes with Chaz’s food. “I guess there’s no point to bothering with candles,” Jeanette says, and Josh says, “Not if you’re thinking about lighting them.” Nina offers to donate a small box of almonds coated in pastel colored sugar. “They look pretty,” she says, “but I’ll never eat them,” and Chaz points out, “You never eat anything.”
Something to Do With Cats
Watching Bunny peel an orange, one of the six he brought for her, Albie mentions, “It looks like your appetite’s come back.”
“No. It’s just that there’s nothing else to do here.” She breaks the orange apart and gives him one half. Nothing else to do, unless you count Activities, which Bunny doesn’t because a) still no dog, and b) although Bunny no longer actively thinks of herself as a writer, she cannot and will not accept the notion that Creative Writing is an Activity the way Decoupage is an Activity. Bunny writes as a way to kill time between meals. There is a lot of time between meals.
If they’d let her sleep all day, she probably wouldn’t be writing. If they’d let her sleep, that’s how she’d kill away the day. But they don’t let her sleep, and already, she has filled almost four legal pads with sentences and paragraphs.
“What else can I bring for you?” Albie asks. “More chocolate? Or some pears?”
His question prompts Bunny to remember. “A T-shirt with a picture of a cat on it,” she says. “Or a book about cats. Something to do with cats. And a card. With a cat on it. It’s Andrea’s birthday.”
“Andrea?” Albie asks. “Is she one of your friends here?”
Bunny squeezes the half of the orange still in her hand. The juice spurts. “I don’t have friends here,” she says. “I don’t have friends anywhere.”
Albie pries open her fingers to get the desiccated orange, which he sets on a napkin to take to the trash. Bunny wipes her hand on her paper pajama top. Albie takes his wife’s other hand, the one not sticky from the orange, and brings it to his lips. “You’re a good person, Bunny,” he says. “You really are.” And Bunny says, “Wrapping paper, too.”
A Breath of Fresh Air
Bunny isn’t eligible for Group Walk. Group Walk, which is a regular walk except you’re walking with a gaggle of loons escorted by three social workers taking a spin around a relatively grim part of the city, is not, for Bunny, a dream that must be deferred. With more than half her fellow campers out for this morning stroll, the living room is deserted, and that is the best scenario here, as far as she can imagine it. She turns one of the armchairs to face the window with a view of a parking lot and a row of dumpsters and, sitting with her feet resting on the windowsill as if it were a coffee table, she opens her legal pad to the page where she last left off. Bunny reads over the sentences, and then looks up to think of what comes next.
Because this window, like all the windows here, is made of plexiglass that is scratched and dull and liberally speckled with dollops of pigeon shit in various degrees of decomposition, there’s no way to know if the sun is shining or is the sky cloud-covered or is it raining, perhaps a light drizzle? Needless to say, the windows are sealed shut. Not so much as the idea of a draft can get through. If she didn’t know that it is January, she’d have no idea what the season was. There are no people in the parking lot with their gloves tucked into the pockets of coats unbuttoned to convey to Bunny that the day might be a balmy one, whereas if it were really cold, hats would be pulled down low and there would be women wearing Ugg boots. She tries to recall the smell of fresh winter air; cold, crisp air promising snow, but she fails. Because it would only frustrate her to push herself further, to attempt to conjure a memory which she can’t bring to mind, and because to keep at it would not end well, she aims to divert her attention. She puts her pen to the paper, and she writes. She writes. More than three pages without so much as a pause. Only when she senses someone standing behind her, looking over her shoulder, does she stop, and she flips the pad so that the blank cardboard back is faceup, and Howie comes around to sit on the windowsill where he blocks her view, such as it is a view. Then, as if responding to a question, except no question has been asked, Howie says, “I was at Group Therapy. OCD.”
“OCD,” Bunny says, “is that new?”
“Not really,” Howie tells her.
Not for a skinny minute does Bunny believe that Howie is OCD, but curious to learn what he will say, she asks him how these obsessive compulsions of his manifest. He mulls over the possibilities, trying to determine which of them gleaned from his hour in Group Therapy (OCD) might seem credible: hand-washing; pattern-counting; removing seeds, one at a time, from cucumbers. “At home, I’m kind of a neat freak,” he says. “I can’t let dishes pile up in the sink. I pin my socks together before putting them in the washing machine. That sort of thing. There’s more, but the therapist is still figuring them out.” Then he asks, “What are you writing?”
“I’m not writing,” Bunny says, and Howie tells her, “I’m thinking about writing a novel. About this place. Everyone here would be a character in it.”
“Yeah, well, good luck with that.” Holding fast to her legal pad and pen, Bunny gets up from her chair, leaving Howie scanning the room for someone else to bother.
No one is using the telephone, but still, Underpants Man is there at his post. Mrs. Cortez sits on the bench across from the Activities board. Alongside her sits another catatonic. Bunny pauses to write: “Needless to say, they are not engaged in conversation.”
Early Returns
At the nurse’s station, Nurse Kendall and Antoine are flirting up a whirl, which is just another way to pass the time. From his pocket, Antoine retrieves a roll of peppermint Life Savers. He peels one off the top, pops it in his mouth, and then offers one to Nurse Kendall, and one to Bunny, too. Bunny does not want a peppermint Life Saver. She’s here for a piece of Nicorette gum. “You already got one this morning.” Nurse Kendall rations the Nicorette as if nicotine were an opiate.
“Come on. Have a heart.” Antoine cajoles Nurse Kendall on Bunny’s behalf. “Give the woman a damn piece of Nicorette gum.”
Because the crazy people are Not Allowed to touch anything remotely related to medication, not so much as a vitamin, with their own hands, Nurse Kendall peels away the backing on the Nicorette wrapper, and Bunny receives the piece of gum on her tongue as if it were a Communion wafer.
“You need anything else?” Antoine asks.
“Yeah,” Bunny says. “Could you tell me the weather? Outside. Is it cold?”
“You bet it’s cold. It’s damn cold.”
“Is it overcast? Or is the sun out?”
“It was sunny when I got here,” Antoine says. “But now, who knows. They’ll be back from the walk pretty soon. One of them can tell you better.”
Pretty soon turns out to be all of two minutes, when snap! just like that, the corridor is swarming with crazies taking off their coats and then wandering off in every which direction, while the social workers, like kindergarten teachers on a class outing, try to keep order. Group Walk was cut short because of Josh, because he bummed a cigarette from a construction worker. Josh doesn’t smoke. He bummed the cigarette to give to Andrea, but no one cares why he did it. It’s Not Allowed, and there is nothing more to be said.
In the living room, Andrea spreads her coat over her legs. She is still shivering, and Josh says, “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? Forget what those fucks said. You di
d us all a favor.” She turns to Bunny and says, “You would not believe how fucking freezing it is out there.” Then, in perfect imitation of one of the social workers, the one who is very petite except for her breasts, which are the size of Volkswagens, Andrea mimics, “One rotten apple, that’s all it takes. One rotten apple,” she repeats, and Josh looks like he is about to laugh, and Bunny realizes that she is holding her breath in anticipation of what isn’t going to happen.
A Disturbance
At mealtimes, the Eating Disorders are supervised. Under the watchful eye of an aide, they are required to eat, and then for two hours after the meal, neither the Anorexics nor the Bulimics can go to the bathroom unaccompanied, although the night before Bunny saw Nina sneak into the Arts and Crafts room where she vomited into a trash can.
Now, Bunny hears Nina before she sees her. A yowling into the telephone, a lachrymosity as cacophonous as a car crash, and all the more remarkable coming from this waif with matchstick arms and legs. To add to the disturbance, Underpants Man, like a low-level buffoon with a bullhorn, orders her to get off the phone. “Time’s up,” he points to his wrist as if he were wearing a watch. “Time’s up.”
The fact that Underpants Man wears his underpants as outer pants does nothing to temper Bunny’s dislike for him, but even if he wore his underpants as they are intended to be worn—under his pants—Bunny would still loathe him. Underpants Man, the telephone Stasi.
“Time’s up.” Underpants Man jabs again and again at his imaginary wristwatch. “Time’s up.”
Time’s up for what? No one is waiting to use the phone; Underpants Man, least of all. He calls no one and no one calls him. Under different circumstances Bunny might’ve felt compassion for him, but the circumstances are what they are: Underpants Man is relentlessly badgering Nina to get off the phone while she blows snot bubbles from her nose.
Cats Are Love
The T-shirt is yellow and embossed with a kitten; a blue-eyed kitten of an indeterminate breed. “There wasn’t much of a selection,” Albie explains. “And I wasn’t sure about the size, so I got a large. Better too big, right?” From a different bag, Albie takes out the fresh three-pack of legal pads, more pens, a birthday card—a cartoon of cats in a chorus line—and purple tissue paper. “The guard confiscated the ribbon and the Scotch tape,” he says.
“Scotch tape?” Bunny ponders. “I suppose you could tape your mouth and nose shut and suffocate yourself.”
“It was the metal teeth on the dispenser,” Albie tells her, and Bunny asks, “Dispenser? Is that the right word?”
“Yeah. It’s the right word.”
“It doesn’t sound like the right word.”
“I got this, too.” Albie sets a cat calendar on the table. “I thought maybe you’d want to give her two gifts.”
Albie’s kindness overwhelms her, and she says, “You deserve better than me.”
Each month on the calendar features a different breed of cat. Bunny turns the page from January’s Maine Coon to February’s Russian Blue. June’s cat is a white Persian, and then comes July. A Siamese. All Siamese cats do not look alike, far from it, but July’s Siamese bears an uncanny and unsettling resemblance to their Angela, right down to the one crossed eye.
Bunny loves Jeffrey because he’s Jeffrey, and there is room for new love, but new love does not replace what was lost. It does not mend the tear or fill the hole or heal the wound. To replace lost love, the way you can replace your broken computer with a new one or replace the battery in your watch, is not an option.
Folding her into his arms, Albie rubs her back. “I’m sorry. I should’ve looked.”
When Bunny is done crying, Albie brushes at the sizable wet spot on his shirt. Because salt is a nonvolatile substance, tears evaporate at a slower rate than water. It was an experiment Albie did as a boy: to put a cup of salt water alongside a cup of fresh water and measure the rates of evaporation. Curiously, it was a question Bunny had once asked him; something to do with something she was writing, and it was not dissimilar to the question she asks now: “For how long can you cry before you’ve cried yourself dry?”
Albie cups her face in his hands. He kisses one eye and then the other. Her eyelashes are wet. He tastes the salt. One more kiss, this one to her forehead, and then he says, “I’m pretty sure a person can go for seven weeks, four days and three hours before dry-eye syndrome sets in.”
What Albie knows, but will not say, is that, excepting when we are asleep, the lachrymal glands never cease secreting protein-rich and antibacterial fluid, tears, which keep the eyeball lubricated. In other words, with sleep and death as the only respites, we cry forever.
Intuition
Between the hours of breakfast and lunch, Bunny wanders the halls, thinking, where do I go from here? When she is done with that, with thinking, when her thoughts are sorted out, she can get back to it, uninterrupted at least for a while. Josh is at his biweekly meeting with Dr. Grossman. Teacher is at Origami making paper hats for Andrea’s party. Howie is at Group Therapy; which disorder is up for grabs. Chaz went to Calisthenics, and, having decided to go wild in celebration of her birthday, Andrea is at Beauty where she is deliberating between green nail polish on one hand and blue on the other, or perhaps pink and orange, which Jeanette prefers. With any luck, Bunny will have the living room to herself. With any luck, she will have time alone.
Except there is no luck. Instead, there’s Nina, curled up, partially hidden, in an armchair turned to the far wall. Bunny cannot see Nina’s face, but she can see her wrap a section of her hair around her index finger, which she twirls, as if her finger were a curling iron. Hair as thin as Nina’s hair can’t hold a curl. When released, the coil will droop.
Bunny deliberates whether or not to sit with her. Nina looks lost and lonely in the chair that is too big for her, but Bunny senses that she wants to be left alone. On the grounds that it takes one to know one, the psychos intuit things like this about each other, although they don’t always respect it. Their own needs tend to take precedence. Satisfied that Nina, too, wishes to be alone, Bunny turns around and walks away, which is why she isn’t there to see Nina’s finger twirl her hair tighter and tighter until her finger is resting flush to her head. Then, the way a Band-Aid is pulled off, hard and fast, Nina yanks the hank of hair from her scalp.
Jelly Beans
Andrea is late coming to lunch, which allows the others to go over the arrangements for her party. Bunny passes around the birthday card for them all to sign. Teacher announces that he has made eight paper hats.
“I’m not wearing a paper hat,” Bunny says, and Chaz says, “Me neither.”
Teacher’s eyes fill up fast and his chin quivers, but he recovers when Chaz says, “Okay, okay. I’ll wear a hat.”
Any good that is done here is the good they do for each other, and Bunny wishes that she, too, could acquiesce about the hat. But it isn’t possible.
Howie worries that one pizza won’t be enough. “Eight people, eight slices. Suppose someone wants more than one slice?”
Teacher points out that it’s highly unlikely, really no chance at all, that Nina will eat a slice of pizza. “So someone can have two,” he says, and with that, all talk of the party stops because Andrea is there, holding out her hands, fingers splayed, for everyone to admire. Unable to settle on any one pairing of colors, each fingernail is painted a different color. “Like a bowl of jelly beans,” Teacher effuses, and then inexplicably, he begins to cry. Not that anyone here needs a reason for crying, but it could also be that he is still distraught about the hats, and his crying now is merely crying delayed.
Bunny tells Andrea that her fingernails look fabulous, which is not what she really thinks.
“I wanted to do something happy,” she says. The corners of her mouth twitch, and she quickly covers her face with her hands. It would not be unusual to have more than one person per table crying, but none o
f them, not even Josh, has ever seen Andrea cry. Then her hands fall away and, like magic, her eyes are dry, her smile is back, but it is not as if it never happened.
“They got hamburgers for lunch,” Chaz says. “With fries.”
Something Happened
Two nurses cut through the dining room as if a tornado or maybe Bigfoot were not far behind. Anxiety gathers in their wake. Heads swivel, but no one moves until one of the aides, a big guy heavily tattooed, calls for attention. “Listen up. Nice and easy now, we’re heading on over to the Therapy rooms.”
Underpants Man calls out, “We haven’t had dessert yet.” Only Underpants Man is bothered about missing a fruit cup.
To prevent chaos, to see to it that no one goes rogue, two aides are posted at each corner of the dining room.
Bunny, Josh, and Andrea are corralled into the Music Room. Andrea asks Patricia if they can switch rooms. Patricia is the aide who took Bunny’s shoes. Andrea cocks her thumb at Underpants Man and says, “I can’t be locked up in here with him. I’ll go crazy,” to which Patricia says, “You already are crazy.”
Andrea threatens to report her and Patricia says, “Go ahead. Who are they going to believe? You or me?”
It’s one of the many disadvantages to being mentally ill. You are automatically in the wrong because you are wrong. Everyone knows that crazy people have no sense of proportion and often they are delusional and paranoid. Andrea mutters “Fuck you,” and backs down.
There are not enough chairs to go around. Bunny, Andrea, and Josh sit on the floor, and Josh says, “Let’s hope no one is claustrophobic. I once got trapped in an elevator with a claustrophobic. I think it’s how I wound up here.”
Rabbits for Food Page 17