Rabbits for Food

by Binnie Kirshenbaum

  While Bunny wipes her eyes with a napkin, the girl outlines the procedures and policies as they apply to food coming in from the outside. “And don’t put stuff that can rot in the cabinets,” the girl warns. “Last week they found a slice of moldy pizza in there stashed behind a box of Saltines.” Then she adds, “People are disgusting.”

  Arts and Crafts

  To occupy your time here with hobbies and social engagement is not exactly mandatory but it is encouraged, highly encouraged, as if to play a game of charades or to sit around a table making paper swans from squares of cut-up newspaper with a bunch of other mental patients is a pathway to sanity. Bunny is not one for hobbies or games, and she has always placed great importance, perhaps a disproportionate importance, on solitude but, during the day, unless you’re catatonic, the bedrooms are off-limits.

  The catatonics are Allowed to stay in their rooms during the day, although it is possible that the catatonics are Not Allowed to stay in their rooms during the day, but try arguing with a person who, for all intents and purposes, is oblivious to the existence of you and everybody else. Really, as far as the catatonics are concerned, it doesn’t matter where they are because wherever they are, they are alone.

  In the living room, in the hopes that no one will notice her there, Bunny curls up in chair with a legal pad and a felt-tipped pen and wonders if she could feign catatonia, and for how long, until one of the aides, Antoine, spots her. “Hey,” he says, “why are you sitting here all by your lonesome self? Don’t you want to go to an Activity?”

  “No,” she says, but Antoine insists they find something she’d like to do. “Come on, now.” The diamond stud in his ear sparkles like a smile. “Let’s have a look at the Board.”

  Beauty, Yoga, Watercoloring, Arts and Crafts, Creative Writing, Music, Dog Therapy, and Board Games. Also Group Therapy. Group Therapy (MDD); Group Therapy (BPD); Group Therapy (OCD); Group Therapy (Eating Disorders); Group Therapy (Phobias).

  “What’s Dog Therapy?” Bunny asks, and Antoine explains, “You hang out with a dog. Pet him and stuff.” The dog is a dog that’s been certified as consistently trusting and friendly but not nuts the way some friendly dogs will go wild from the happiness of a pat on the head. Social-worker dogs have been trained not to bark, growl, snap or hump.

  “Okay,” Bunny says. “I’ll go to Dog Therapy.”

  “That’s good. He’s a nice dog.” Antoine gestures to the bench against the wall across from the board. “Have a seat. They’ll be bringing him along any minute now.”

  Bunny watches the clock. One minute. Four minutes. Ten minutes. She’s been waiting there for almost twenty minutes before Antoine comes back. “Hey,” he says. “I just got word. The dog isn’t coming today. How about you give Arts and Crafts a whirl?” Then Antoine reaches into his pocket and pulls out a tissue. “Here,” he says. “Wipe your eyes. They’re running. Now, come on. I’ll walk you over there.”

  Seated around the Arts and Crafts table, nine lunatics are gluing things to other things. Bunny sits next to the girl with the private peanut butter stash. The teacher, who isn’t really a teacher but a social worker who took a class in art therapy, sets a square piece of plywood in front of Bunny along with a bowl filled with small mosaic tiles: white, speckled beige, black, a couple of reds and there is a teal-blue one in the mix, too. “Have you ever done anything like this before?” she asks.

  In the third grade, in arts and crafts class, on three consecutive Friday mornings between the hours of ten and noon, Bunny, along with her classmates, glued small mosaic tiles to their allotted squares of plywood. On the fourth Friday, when the grout between the tiles had dried, they could take their projects home.

  Bunny took the long route back to her house. When she got to where Allen Street met Nelson Road, she stopped. Scouting around in all directions, confident that there was no one who could see her, she squatted over the water sewer. As if disposing of evidence of a crime or something shameful, she slid her square of wood with the glued-on tiles through the wide iron slat. It made a satisfying kerplunk when it hit the dark sewer water where it floated among the rotting leaves of late autumn.

  After that, in third grade arts and crafts class, they made pencil cups from empty soup cans.

  Devoid of enthusiasm or inspiration, rather than pick through the tiles with a scheme in mind, Bunny takes a fistful from the bowl as if the tiles were almonds at a party. Similarly, with no thought to a pattern, not bothering so much as to line them up adjacently, she glues the tiles to the wood. There is no indication that she has any intention to see her Arts and Crafts project to completion. The inability to complete simple tasks is, of course, a common symptom of depression, but it could be a symptom of other things, too, such as the value of the task itself.

  The obese girl is staring at Bunny’s tile-on-wood. “That’s really cool,” she says. Can I have it?”

  What the girl sees, what she thinks is cool, what Bunny does not see, is that Bunny’s tiles are arranged as if the tiles were letters grouped together as if they were words, and the words were arranged as if they were a poem on a page.

  xxxx xxx

  xxxxx

  xxx xxxx

  xxx

  A poem along the lines of Fuck You, Everyone.

  Prompt: A Blessing (300 words or less)

  It’s a bad year no matter who you are. Acne, blackheads, facial hair, chest hair, pubic hair, underarm hair, breasts on parade, testicles dropping—dropping? dropping how?—and the dank smell of it all. Sniff your underarms, take a whiff of your panties, socks, jockstraps, and if you bleed through your tampon, stray dogs will follow you home. No one loves you, no one understands you. You have no friends. It’s a wonder you don’t kill yourself.

  And, as if adolescence weren’t already enough of a shit-storm of frogs, it was then, the year I turned thirteen, that inexplicably and practically overnight, I packed on the pounds. A roly-poly, jelly-belly, tub of lard, five-by-five, avoirdupois, fat, fat, fat, I was an anomaly in my ectomorphic clan.

  Back then, on Sunday nights there was a popular TV show, a family favorite, documents of real-life stories, human-interest stories with an Oliver Twist-ian sensibility—heartwarming, puke-inducing treacle. That week’s episode was about a piglet who was rejected by the sow, but adopted by a border collie with a litter of her own. Basically, this was the same storyline as the movie Babe, although Babe—the movie and the book which preceded it—didn’t come out until years later. This is not to accuse anyone of ripping off anyone else’s story. It’s a common enough occurrence that great discoveries—and lousy ones, too—happen independently of each other. Like how Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz both formulated calculus, and a few years back two novels based on the Siamese twins Chang and Eng were released in the same season, and I once had a boyfriend, a musician, who thought he’d invented a new kind of music when he distilled the complexity of European classical music with the simplicity of the four-quarter beat of the Beatles. Then, someone told him about Charles Ives. It happens.

  This pre-Babe story we were watching took place on a farm in Scotland. The camera homed in on the piglet nursing along with the collie’s four puppies, two on either side. Piggy in the middle. My sisters shared a sidelong glance and a smirk, and our mother said, “Aren’t dogs just the sweetest animals?” The film then cut to the puppies and piglet at play, all of them delirious with joy, happiness unrestrained, happiness that can come only with being new to the world. That the piglet was oblivious to his inability to keep up with the puppies—pigs can’t dart and weave or crouch, paws down and ass in the air—rendered his efforts all the more adorable. It was too cute for words.

  What I wanted most then was to be invisible, but to get up and bolt from the room would be to call attention to myself. To cry in front of them, in and of itself, was not at issue. Not when twice weekly at a minimum I went practically berser
k with crying. What’s one snivel more? What was at issue was the likelihood that sudden departure would be misinterpreted as fat-related: pigs are fat; I am fat; ergo, I am a pig. Except that wasn’t it, but I knew that any attempt to explain myself would’ve only widened the divide. If I had said, “It’s not the pig, per se. The pig as a pig is irrelevant. It could’ve been a goat or a squirrel or whatever the fuck,” and our mother, after admonishing me for using the f-word, would’ve said, “So, what then are you crying about?” and, at that, I would’ve said something like, “Go oink yourself.” Go oink yourself, a retort for self-delight; I would’ve thought it funny as all get-out, and I would’ve been alone there, too. What I did was this: I bit down on my lower lip to keep it from quivering, and like that, biting down hard on my lower lip, hard enough to draw blood, I sat out the minutes until the end of the show about the piglet, unwittingly Chaplin-esque, who thought he was a dog right up until that very moment just before slaughter. At that same moment, border collies were on a grassy hill darting and weaving, herding the sheep, to bring them home.*

  In the eighteen months that followed, the weight I’d gained fell away. Snap, poof, just like that, with no explanation despite the girls at school insisting that there had to be an explanation: Grapefruit? Juice fast? Atkins? Laxatives? Amphetamines? Did I barf it up? As if there had to be an explanation for everything. Whatever it was, the pounds were lost for good, and in that way I was again the same as everyone else in my metabolically blessed family.

  *That last bit about the pig going to slaughter while the dogs herded sheep, that wasn’t part of television show, but that’s what really happened.

  The Round-Headed Nurse

  After Arts and Crafts is lunch, and after lunch, on her way out of the dining room, Bunny is waylaid by a very tall and gangly nurse whose head is perfectly round. Perfectly round like a basketball, or the head of a cartoon character, a character from Peanuts, but Bunny can’t remember which one of the Peanuts characters had the round head.

  “Hon,” the nurse says, “Dr. Fitzgerald wants to see you.” She says “hon” but Bunny hears “bun,” and she says, “It’s Bunny.”

  “Bunny,” the nurse says, “I’m Ella.”

  Bunny follows Ella down a long corridor. At the end of the hallway, they turn left, and at the second door on the right, Ella stops and says, “Here you go, hon.”

  Standardized Testing

  Dr. Fitzgerald’s office is like an office you’d expect to find at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Without windows, fluorescent track lighting overhead, and industrial metal file cabinets line one wall. The doctor, sitting on a swivel chair at a laminated particleboard desk, leans in as if she were about to stand up. Instead, she tells Bunny to take a seat in one of two of the matching particleboard chairs on the opposite side of her desk. The chairs are without arms.

  Bunny imagines Dr. Fitzgerald is wearing navy-blue leather shoes with one-inch block heels. Expensive and boring. Her chin-length hair, tucked behind her ears, reveals the safest choice in earrings: small gold studs. Her engagement ring, a one-carat diamond solitaire, is big enough not to require explanation like how they’re saving their money for a house, but not so big as to raise eyebrows. Everything about Dr. Fitzgerald is better than Bunny, and not just because Bunny is wearing slipper-socks or because a gob of snot that looks like a jellyfish is bubbling from her nose, but simply because Dr. Fitzgerald is better. She slides a box of tissues across her desk, a desk with no clutter.

  Bunny takes a tissue but makes no move to dry her eyes or wipe her nose. Rather, with sweaty hands she fiddles with it as if the tissue were a strand of worry beads. Damp bits break off, falling onto her lap, and Dr. Fitzgerald asks, “How long have you felt this way?”

  “What way?” Bunny says.

  A string of questions follow: Has she ever been depressed before? How often do the episodes occur? When was the last one and for how long did it last? Are you sleeping? Have you gained weight? Lost weight? How much? How is your personal hygiene?

  Bunny claims to be washing her hair weekly and brushing her teeth once a day, which doesn’t exactly qualify as good hygiene, but it is better hygiene than the truth. Dr. Fitzgerald gives her the fish eye, but she lets the lie stand.

  The questions that come next seem to be some sort of standardized test, something for which Bunny, idiosyncratically, has always had a knack. Contrary to all expectations, and indeed met with incredulity, her SAT scores were in the top one percentile. But unlike the SATs, these questions don’t aim to gauge a scope of knowledge or an ability to solve problems of logic. Rather, these questions require Bunny to give a numerical distribution to darkness, defeat, panic, anxiety and grief. As if infinity could be rated on a scale of one to ten, Dr. Fitzgerald asks her, “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your depression?”

  Bunny remembers what Dr. Lowenstein had said about the far ends of the spectrum, that to be understood, to be normal, was to be in the middle, and she says, “Five.”

  “And on a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your clarity of thinking?”

  “Five.”

  “Your productivity?”

  “Five.”

  Yet, despite five being the middle ground, average, the norm, normal, somehow, five accumulates in an exponential decrease, adding up like negative numbers.

  Protocol

  While Dr. Fitzgerald is busy with her computer, entering notes or data or maybe she is catching up on her email, Bunny is brushing the bits of wet tissue from her lap to the floor. After a few minutes, or maybe closer to fifty-five minutes, the doctor asks Bunny, “What medications are you currently taking?”

  “Wellbutrin,” Bunny says, which is not a lie insofar as it is the medication she took most recently. Most recently is near enough to currently to be more or less true.

  “Would you say it’s been effective?”

  To keep herself from saying what she wants to say, which is, “What the fuck kind of stupid question is that? Would I be here if it were effective?” Bunny keeps her jaw clenched and shakes her head.

  The doctor asks about other medication. “Other than Wellbutrin?”

  Bunny neglects to mention the Lexapro; perhaps she’s forgotten about it, as it, too, obviously, hasn’t done her any good, and it’s been who knows how long since she quit bothering with it. However, she does own up to the Ambien, although not the Lunesta.

  “And prior to Wellbutrin,” Dr. Fitzgerald asks, “which antidepressants have you tried?”

  “All of them,” Bunny says.

  “All of them?” Dr. Fitzgerald is skeptical. “Which ones exactly?”

  “I don’t remember, but all of them.”

  “Do you drink?” the doctor asks.

  Bunny takes a fresh tissue from the box. “Not much. Wine with dinner. A drink at a party.” And although Dr. Fitzgerald doesn’t ask, Bunny volunteers, “I smoke.”

  “You know you can get Nicorette at the nurse’s station? But this might be a good time to quit, don’t you think?”

  No. No, Bunny doesn’t think this is a good time to quit. If anything, this is the worst time imaginable to quit, and even that is to assume Bunny wants to quit smoking, which she most definitely does not.

  Dr. Fitzgerald’s plan of action, the road map to a sound mind, begins with first weaning Bunny off Wellbutrin. “We’ll cut your dose in half for two days, then halve that for two days more. Then,” Dr. Fitzgerald says, “I want to put you on a course of paroxetine with an adjunctive treatment of aripiprazole.”

  Paroxetine? Aripiprazole? A doctor who speaks to you in a language they know you don’t understand is not unlike a snooty waiter who recites the dinner specials in French, except Bunny is fluent in French whereas she is not fluent in the vehicular language of medicine. However, she does have a working knowledge of psychopharmacologic terminology. Paroxetine is generic for Paxil. Bunny’s
time with Paxil was interminable, four months that dragged on into an eternity of lethargy, but aripiprazole she did not know. “What is that?” she asks.

  Dr. Fitzgerald fiddles with the gold earring on her left ear, and says, “It’s an atypical antipsychotic.”

  Delusional melancholia can’t be ruled out when it comes to major depressive disorder, but psychotic? “I’m psychotic?” Bunny asks.

  Bunny is not psychotic, but this classification of antipsychotics has been proven very effective in treating depression. Dr. Fitzgerald tells her that Abilify augmented with Paxil has yielded excellent results.

  Aripiprazole might’ve been new to her, but when she learns the brand name, Abilify, Bunny says, “No.” Abilify is legendary.

  “No?” Dr. Fitzgerald sounds as if that—no—was a word she’s never heard before. “No? What do you mean?”

  “I mean no. No Abilify,” Bunny says. “And no Paxil, either.”

  Dr. Fitzgerald asks, “Why not?”

  Why not? Dr. Fitzgerald has got to know why not, but nonetheless Bunny tells her, “Because of the side effects.”

  “Every drug has side effects.” For a psychiatrist, Dr. Fitzgerald is short on patience and slim on insight.

  Yes, every drug has side effects, but side effects such as dry mouth or the possibility of an erection that lasts for more than four hours is not the same as a side effect that can result in death or hair loss. The side effects that Bunny experienced with Paxil—lethargy that bordered on narcolepsy, and a loss of libido that left her with the sexual desire of a desk lamp—were identical to symptoms that ail her now, and Abilify? Abilify is a drug that brings on significant weight gain, along with uncontrollable twitching and chances are you’ll turn into a bed-wetter, too. How is that a cure for a person afflicted with depression? No one in their right mind, or even someone not in their right mind, would call that a better life.