They want nothing to do with their daughter, but they felt obligated to visit because it’s her birthday. A drug addict. That’s what she is. A drug addict who twice now, twice, without repenting either time, tried to kill herself, as if she didn’t know that suicide is a mortal sin. Oh, she knew, but she didn’t give a good goddamn about anyone, not her parents, not the Church, nothing except some filthy cat. To think, she was once a nurse in this same hospital where she is now housed with drug-addicted mentally insane psychopaths and whatever else. “How the mighty have fallen,” her mother says to her.
Her father refuses to speak to her, not even to say hello. He takes off his hat and examines it, flicking away a speck of lint.
“Have you made any plans for when you get out of here?” her mother asks. “If they let you out, that is.”
“I’m going to get a cat,” the daughter tells her parents.
Her father’s face flushes a deep red, the result of a spike in his blood pressure. He stands up, puts his hat back on his head.
Her mother gets up, too. They’ve had enough. They’re leaving. Her father tells her, “You’ve brought us nothing but disgrace.” He adjusts the brim of his cap. His face is even redder than it was before.
She doesn’t know what to say, and then she does. She says, “I hope you stroke out, you fuck.”
*The truth is that this never happened. Her parents have never come to visit.
The Shape of It
Even those years when Bunny was well, or well enough, she was not above the occasional Christmas snit. And since it’d seemed as if Bunny had lost track of the days, or perhaps she was as indifferent to Christmas this year as she was to eating or bathing—whatever it was, for the sake of sanity, hers and his—Albie would forgo the pleasure of decorating a scrawny tree with candy canes and tinsel while Eartha Kitt sang “Santa Baby.” He would forgo the gifts and the pancakes and let the holiday slip by. He would treat the twenty-third to the twenty-sixth of December as one long day. But on the twenty-second, Albie came home from work to find four brown cartons topped with red stick ’um bows fixed like demented hats at the intersection of the UPS tape, as if the UPS tape were ribbon, stacked by the fireplace. Theirs is not a working fireplace, but still it’s a nice feature. Bunny had shopped for Christmas gifts online. She’d shopped for Christmas gifts for Albie, for Albie to have gifts to open on Christmas morning.
For last-minute holiday shoppers the pickings are slim. The air in the stores is frenetic; the panic contagious. Failure is pretty much guaranteed but Albie persevered. At Barney’s, he found a simple silver bangle bracelet, the sort of thing you can’t not like, and a pink and black square silk scarf. Had he remembered, or had he known in the first place, that Bunny does not wear square scarves, that she wears only oblong scarves, he would’ve kept looking because there’s no arguing that his heart wasn’t in the right place. His next stop was the Chelsea Market where, to get a box of the sugar cookies she likes, he braved the push and shove of the crowds and their decided lack of good cheer. Only the bookstore on Seventeenth Street allowed for a bit of leisurely browsing. Albie selected Allen Perry’s new novel, which got a rave review in last week’s Times. Allen Perry was not a friend of Bunny’s, but they sometimes wound up at the same parties. Then, Albie stopped in Rite Aid for wrapping paper and six catnip-filled mice for Jeffrey.
Come Christmas morning, Albie set two mugs of coffee and four scones on a plate on the coffee table. Bunny sat up on the couch. “Merry Christmas,” Albie said, and he handed her a flat, square box wrapped in paper riddled with elves, which she unwrapped with the deliberate care of someone intending to save the paper. With an edge of the scarf pinched between the tips of her thumb and forefinger, she lifted it from the box, and without a whole lot of affect—you could even say none, no affect at all—she said, “Thank you. It’s very beautiful.” She made no mention of the shape of the scarf. Perhaps she was being gracious, or perhaps it was square/oblong, who gives a fuck?
For Albie, Bunny had bought a black cashmere scarf and two crew neck sweaters—one dark gray, the other a lighter gray. A gray merino wool crew neck sweater is a gift that is second in line only to a three-pack of Hanes underwear when it comes to uneventful presents, but Albie was elated at the monotony of them. Sartorially speaking, Albie is practically Amish. His jackets, coats, gloves, shoes and socks are black and pose no conflict with the uniformity of his pale-blue or white oxford button-down shirts. Black, white, gray, pale blue, such is his rainbow. Except for his ties. His ties are his nod to color. Although he rarely wears a tie, he has many of them, all gifts from Bunny, and all as vibrant and spectacular as a collection of butterflies. He cares for them as if they were precious, delicate things. This Christmas she did not buy him a tie, but in addition to the scarf and the sweaters, she got him an authentic New York Yankees baseball cap, which he will never wear, but he is a devoted Yankees fan, and glad to have an authentic Yankees cap, and he loves Bunny all the more for buying him such a thing.
In the same methodical way that she unwrapped the scarf, she unwrapped the bracelet, and in the same flat tone, she said, “It’s very beautiful. Thank you.” The third gift she opened with equal care. Running her hand over the book jacket as if it had texture, she said to Albie, “It’s curious how in all these years we’ve been married, you’ve never once bought me a book I wanted to read,” and with some serious force behind it, Allen Perry’s new novel went winging across the room. Albie got his coat. He walked along Eighth Avenue, which was desolate. When the desire to choke his wife to death subsided, he went home.
While he was out, Bunny had unwrapped the box of sugar cookies, and she ate one before bringing her fist down hard on the box, breaking the rest of the cookies into pieces and crumbs.
“Since then,” Albie tells Muriel, “if she’s not sleeping or trying to sleep or pretending to be asleep, she’s crying. Sometimes I worry that she’ll never stop crying, like those people who get the hiccups forever. She lives on the couch. She hasn’t taken a shower or even brushed her teeth all week.”
“She must get up to go to the loo.” Muriel’s logic is thrilling.
Although he’s not sure why, Albie elects not to tell Muriel how Bunny hurts herself, how she pummels her thighs with her fists or bites her lip until it bleeds, as if to reveal what seems to be, above all the rest of it, a secret, would be to betray her.
When their food arrives, Muriel waits for her soup to cool. Albie picks up his sandwich, but puts it down before taking a bite. “She hasn’t left the apartment in six weeks,” he says. “Maybe more. It’s been close to a month since she’s spoken to anyone except me. But now, she is hell-bent on going out tonight. And not just to dinner, but to that tedious after-party, too. I can’t talk her out of it.”
Muriel, who shares Bunny’s heretofore expressed revulsion for New Year’s Eve, plans to have the leftover Chinese food in her fridge for dinner, and then curl up with a good book, which just happens to be Allen Perry’s new novel, about which she’s heard nothing but great praise. She lets her spoon rest in the soup bowl and says to Albie, “Maybe this is the beginning of the end.”
“So you think I should take it as a good sign?” Albie asks.
“I didn’t say that. I said only that it could be the beginning of the end.” Muriel reaches over the table and slides her hand along Albie’s cheek.
Identity Theft
In the hall closet, behind the infrequently used vacuum cleaner, a lamp that needs rewiring, a scrolled map of the world, and a collection of classic comic books in a carton, Bunny finds the paper shredder. A paper shredder for home use looks like a portable printer set on a mid-sized plastic bucket lined with a Hefty bag. A paper shredder for home use was a popular item back when shredding paper was thought to be a safeguard against identity theft. Now, it’s hardly worth the effort to sift through garbage looking for old bank statements dirtied with coffee grounds and wet
paper towels when you can hack into a computer instead. But fear of identity theft was not Bunny’s reason for having bought a paper shredder. Her reason was Albie’s penchant for xeroxing, in a minimum of triplicate—just in case, and despite being filed on his computer—copies of his papers, notes he’s made for papers not yet written, far-flung correspondence and a gazillion articles of interest torn from newspapers and magazines. His file cabinets bulge like extra pounds around the middle when your pants won’t zip up no matter how much you suck it in. “Just in case of what?” Bunny had asked, countless times. “Just in case of what?”
Just in case of nothing that has a sensible answer, except Albie finds peace of mind in having more than one of everything: three tubes of toothpaste, seven boxes of jumbo paper clips, four rolls of Scotch tape, a dozen six-packs of uni-ball pens (four black, two blue), five jars of his favorite fig jam, and it’s possible they’ll never again have to buy toilet paper. When he can, Albie buys in multiples, in bulk. Even crap they never use or things that have turned unusable over time, like the hundreds of rubber bands that dried out and broke.
Albie’s response to the paper shredder was, “Haha. Very funny.”
Bunny could’ve brought it back to Staples, exchanged it for more pens and Scotch tape, but she didn’t bother. Instead, she put the paper shredder in the closet and, more or less, forgot about it.
Now, as if she were walking in her sleep, walking in a way that is at once vague and yet deliberate, a ghost on a mission, Bunny carries the paper shredder to the small room that serves as her office. A television documentary that Bunny and Albie once watched on the phenomenon of sleepwalking featured a man who woke up to a policeman rapping on his car window because he was parked in front of a fire hydrant. A fire hydrant that happened to be almost a hundred miles from his home. In a sound sleep, the man drove almost one hundred miles and parked his car. Bunny couldn’t get over it. “In his sleep,” she marveled. “The man parallel parked his car. While sleeping.” Because Albie grew up in the city and never learned to drive, he was less impressed by this feat than Bunny. He said something about the enigma of the brain, how little about it is understood, how it is the last frontier of physiology. “You’re missing the point,” Bunny said. “Most people can’t parallel park when they’re awake.”
In terms of size, Bunny’s office isn’t much bigger than a refrigerator. It’s a tight fit, but it accommodates her desk, a battered old schoolteacher’s desk of heavy oak with a set of drawers on each side, the matching swivel chair, a four-drawer file cabinet, and a narrow bookcase. A corkboard hangs above the desk. Also similar to a refrigerator, the office has no windows. It suits her, or rather, it suited her quite well until five or six months ago when, as if a barbed-wire fence had been erected, a barbed-wire fence enhanced with an electrical current, she kept her distance from the room that was hers. Now, except for additional layers of dust, she finds her office exactly as she left it. Exactly as she left it is anarchy in a box. There is a desk under the tarp of paper that extends from edge to edge. Paper which includes bank statements, advertisements torn from magazines, mostly for makeup or skin cream she’d intended to buy but didn’t, handwritten instructions, directions and phone numbers scribbled on the backs of envelopes, the crumpled wrapper of a Snickers bar, notes jotted down for later, thoughts, observations, conversations overheard, and daily to-do lists. In the midst of all this debris, rising up like a white whale, is her computer. The keyboard, however, is nowhere to be seen. A pair of scissors is open on the floor handy to a patent leather shoe with a four-inch heel. Also on the floor are a dirty ashtray, empty packs of cigarettes, a few wire hangers, and the dictionary, open. Four T-shirts and a bra hang over the back of the chair.
To plug in the paper shredder, she’ll need to unplug either the computer or the printer. She doesn’t bother to note which one she pulls from the outlet because what difference does it make? Then, the way a raffle ticket is picked from a bowl of hundreds of raffle tickets, Bunny plucks a sheet of paper from the mess on her desk. The shredder is shark-like, swift and ferocious. The bank statement is in ribbons. The same goes for a Visa bill, an invitation to a baby shower, a request for a donation to fight cancer along with the free pink ribbon to pin to your blouse, a postcard from the dentist reminding her she is due for a cleaning, a plea that includes a gift of return address labels from the Humane Society and her PEN American Center membership-renewal form.
Bunny opens the top drawer of her file cabinet, and with no hesitation or break in time she shreds copies and originals of reviews of her books, and interviews she gave that appeared, for the most part, in newspapers and magazines read by people who don’t read books, and in obscure journals to which no more than eight people subscribe, albeit eight people who do read books. When the plastic bucket reaches capacity, when the shredded paper spills over the edge, Bunny goes to the kitchen for more Hefty bags. In the cabinet beneath the sink there is an open box of them, and three more boxes unopened.
Contracts she’s never read, and royalty statements, incomprehensible to her except for the fact that each of them ends in a negative number, emerge as confetti, and Bunny moves on to the file labeled author photos. In all of these photographs, Bunny is smiling widely. Photographs that span two decades and four books. Five books, if you include the last one, which Bunny does not. She feeds the eight-by-ten black-and-white headshots of herself into the shredder. It was a mistake, the smiling. She never should have smiled.
Next: two aborted novels, and stories that never took off.
Then: her college diploma, magna cum laude, together with her Phi Beta Kappa certificate, two documents that should have been proof—proof like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz needed a piece of paper to prove that he had a brain—documented proof that she was not a dumb bunny. But the proof was tainted. The two nights, non-consecutive, with the chemistry professor cast doubt on the A; there was another one, too. Philosohpy of Religion. Phi Beta Kappa conferred on her nothing but shame; the shame that comes with winning when you know you cheated.
Letters from before there was email, and emails she’d printed out while under the delusion, obviously humiliating, that her correspondence might someday be of interest to PhD students of future generations.
A birthday card from Stella. You put the fun in dysfunctional.
The way she once saved ticket stubs and programs from high school football games, she later saved the note a man in a restaurant handed to her, nearly twenty years ago, passing by her table as he was leaving: Do you believe in love at first sight?
Matchbooks from places now gone—Trader Vic’s, the Mudd Club, Nell’s.
Mother’s Day cards signed (by Albie) Love, Angela.
Three photographs of Bunny and Albie standing in front of City Hall the day they were married. Another photograph: Bunny and her two sisters, the three girls sitting on the couch. Flanked by Nicole, age sixteen, and Dawn who was ten, Bunny, in the middle, was fourteen and had recently put on weight. They are dressed up for their cousin Laura’s wedding. Bunny’s dress pinched at her waist. Her sisters are wearing big say-cheese smiles. Bunny had refused to say cheese.
Why, for all these years, did she keep this cheap print of a girl holding a bouquet of daisies? The girl in the print, facing left, has long blond hair. She is wearing a pink dress and a straw boater hat, a black grosgrain ribbon trailing down her back. When it hung on her bedroom wall, it was in a white frame, and Bunny had wondered if her mother had put it there as a rebuke, a daily reminder that nothing about Bunny was as it should’ve been, that everything about Bunny was all wrong. The girl in the pink dress probably wasn’t even a real person in real life.
Postcards from Prague, Budapest, Venice—postcards in lieu of photographs—Los Angeles, Austin, Berlin, Paris, Minneapolis—her travels—Seattle, Krakow, Florence. Now, trying to spin memory from knowledge, from a vantage point higher up, she pictures herself on the Ponte Vecchio, w
alking across the bridge, in the way that people who claim to have died on an operating table relate the experience of the soul rising from the body, rising up to the track of fluorescent lights overhead, where the soul—a transparent self—hovers, watching as the doctors try to bring the body of their dead self back to life, which happens because God has intervened. Bunny has her first articulate thought about all this shredding paper. She thinks, God isn’t going to save me.
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