Rabbits for Food

by Binnie Kirshenbaum

  “I’ll bet that when he was a kid, he got the living shit kicked out of him every day,” Andrea says. “Because you know he’s the kind of guy who never learns.”

  “He thinks we’re his friends,” Josh says.

  “Shit.” Chaz tears off the corner of a blue Monopoly bill. “That’s so fucked up.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Josh agrees. “But he’s lonely. He’s a lonely guy.”

  “Maybe,” Andrea says. “Maybe that’s it, but he’s got Pam. I don’t know. Maybe,” and then she says, “In three days, it’s my birthday.”

  Help

  Bunny sits in the chair across from Dr. Fitzgerald’s desk, and tells her, “I want to go home.”

  “Good,” Dr. Fitzgerald says. “We can start you on the Paxil and Abilify tomorrow and, if all goes well, you’ll be home before you know it.”

  Bunny closes her eyes, and she shakes her head, which the psychiatrist interprets as a different decision made, that Bunny has decided on electroconvulsive therapy. “If that’s what you want to do,” she says, “I’ll set up an appointment with Dr. Grossman.”

  “No,” Bunny clarifies, “I want to go home now.”

  “Bunny, that’s not possible,” Dr. Fitzgerald tells her. “You can’t simply check out. The staff has to agree that you are ready to be discharged.” She explains that, unlike every other unit in the hospital where you can get up and walk out even if the doctor has advised against it, the rules are different in the psycho ward, although Dr. Fitzgerald does not use the word “psycho.” She says “psych ward,” because the doctors aren’t allowed to say “psycho.” Or, at least not in front of the psychos themselves.

  Bunny tries to comprehend the unfathomable. “You mean you could keep me here forever?”

  “It’s for your own good,” Dr. Fitzgerald says. “And it’s the law.”

  Bunny can’t sign herself out of the loony bin because, by virtue of her being here, she is not of sound mind. Nor is it possible for Albie to sign her out even though he is of perfectly sound mind because now that she’s here, the hospital is legally responsible for her safety.

  With more compassion than she has heretofore exhibited toward Bunny, Dr. Fitzgerald tells her, “You can petition the courts, but it can take a long time to get a hearing.”

  Bunny blows her nose into a tissue, and then blots her eyes with the same tissue, and she repeats, “I want to go home now.”

  “And we want you to go home. We want you to go home as soon as possible. But you’re not doing anything to help yourself.” Dr. Fitzgerald picks up her pen and twirls it between her fingers. She is anxious to get back to her paperwork. “You’re refusing drug treatment, you haven’t gone even once to therapy, and you’re not partaking in Activities, either.”

  “I went to Arts and Crafts, ” Bunny says, “and I go to Creative Writing.”

  “You went to Arts and Crafts one time, and Creative Writing meets for one hour three times a week. What are you doing with the rest of your days?”

  “I’ve been waiting for the dog,” Bunny tells her. “And I’ve been writing. Creatively,” she adds.

  “Alone? By yourself?” Dr. Fitzgerald makes a bird noise. “How can you expect to get better when you are off in some corner all alone? Bunny,” Dr. Fitzgerald says, “writing is not the answer.”

  Prompt: A Pair (300 words or less)

  The Delman twins were new to my school. They had extremely chubby cheeks, and short brown hair. Identical twins were deliriously remarkable in and of themselves, but these twins were all the more remarkable because of the resemblance they bore to my hamster. I was anxious to introduce them to my hamster, whose name was My Darling. When the Delman twins got to my house, I showed them to my mother and said, “Don’t they look just like My Darling?” It was the chubby cheeks. When My Darling shoveled sunflower seeds in her mouth, storing them in her pouch, her cheeks got fat. Also, their hair was the same shade of brown. My observation, in my opinion, was a huge compliment because My Darling was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. My mother, however, flatly contradicted me in a way meant to convey that I’d said something I shouldn’t have said, which was something that happened all too often for my mother’s liking, and mine, too.

  That year, at my birthday party, after I blew out the candles on the cake, which my mother cut into ten slices to put on paper plates, I opened my gifts. From past birthday party experience, I knew that most of the gifts would be things I didn’t want, but I was schooled to pretend otherwise, which was why I pretended that the Skipper doll was exactly what I wanted more than anything in the world. But when I opened the second doll, I didn’t have to pretend. Two Skipper dolls were nothing like one Skipper doll. Two Skipper dolls were twins. Twins like the Delman twins.

  Two days after my birthday, My Darling eviscerated herself on a sharp edge of her hamster wheel.

  Prior to the start of summer when the Delman twins went away to sleepaway camp, they held the top two spots on my list of best friends, which I wrote as 1a) and 1b) because how could I choose between them. Up until the latter half of my first year in college, my list of best friends was a fluid list, which could alter dramatically within minutes.

  Sometimes you don’t know something is missing until it’s there. The way someone born blind in one eye might wake up some morning to find both eyes working at 20/20, I didn’t know that I was only half of a person. I didn’t know there was any other way to be until I met Stella. When I met Stella, I became a full person. To be complete is to see the world with two good eyes. Twin eyes. I don’t know how else to explain it. There was nothing that I could not tell her because it was as if she already knew. It was like sharing myself with myself, the only difference being that Stella didn’t pass judgment on me, nor I on her. Instead, all things that had been shameful, painful, hurtful and humiliating whipped seamlessly into hilarity.

  If I wasn’t an easy person to like, Stella was near to impossible to like, although my husband loved her, which made sense because he loved me, too. Despite that she was the most brilliant person I ever knew, her sole ambition was to get rich, get rich quick. To that end, she came up with all kinds of schemes, but she had very little follow-through. Also, she made poor choices; married, and divorced, three times. All her husbands drank too much, and for reasons we could never figure out, each of them got fired from his job soon after she married him. Except for the one who didn’t have a job to begin with. That marriage lasted longer than the others, just shy of three years.

  Stella and I looked nothing alike. She was tall with strawberry blond hair and small, pretty features. She was an only child from Mississippi who never lost her accent, but still, she said to me, “In our last lives we were sisters. Twin sisters.”

  Twin sisters.

  Like the Delman twins, minus the resemblance to the hamster.

  Another Way to Get There

  Bunny and Andrea meet up on the lunch line where Andrea recounts her morning session with Dr. Fitzgerald. “I’m a changed woman.” Andrea laughs. Then, she elbows Bunny to look at Nina as she cuts across the dining room to where Antoine is leaning up against the far wall. Nina’s pink sweater, cropped short, skims the waistband of her red skirt; a waistband that has been folded over four or five times, the way, Andrea remembers, at the end of the day, she, like all the Catholic school girls, would roll up the waistbands of their plaid, pleated skirts. Nina’s hemline lands mid-to-upper thigh. Her legs are bare and on her feet are black flats with the kind of pointed toes that generally complement stiletto heels. Nina got the shoes on eBay where, she’d told Bunny, she buys all of her clothes, which are, for the most part, vintage. Circa 1960s. Early 1960s. Mod, not hippie, and she does, somewhat, resemble the iconic model of that era, except Twiggy was fatter than Nina is. Sometimes, Nina and Bunny talk about clothing and fashion.

  “Ten to one,” Andrea says, “she’s not wearing panties.”

/>   After high school, instead of getting a job or traveling cross-country to find herself or going to a normal college, Nina went to Bible college because her mother is one of those whack-a-doodle Born Agains who rely on prayer to fix everything, and if only Nina would ask Jesus for help, she’d be fixed, too. “Like that time with my car,” her mother repeated the story ad nauseam, about how one night her car broke down on a lonely stretch of road, how the battery on her cell phone had run dry, but she wasn’t afraid. She knew exactly what to do. She prayed. She prayed to Jesus to fix her car, and apparently she caught Jesus at a moment when He wasn’t particularly busy answering the prayers of people who were starving or dying or suffering in any of the multitude of ways that genuine suffering exists, because, on the next try, the post-prayer turn of the key in the ignition, her car started up, the motor purring like a cat.

  Nina makes no secret of her attraction to Antoine. It’s likely that most women here would be attracted to Antoine except for the fact that most of the women here no longer have a libido. Antoine is from Haiti. Port-au-Prince, a place that sounds as if it suits him because his bearing is regal; tall, muscular, a raised tilt to his jaw. Looking up at him, Nina twists a lock of hair around her finger, and Andrea says to Bunny, “He’d split her open like a melon.”

  For the record: because it’s impossible for a cat to have a personal relationship with Jesus, cats are barred entry to the Kingdom of Heaven. This is true of all animals except horses. There are horses in heaven because horses are needed to pull the chariots.

  You Scream, I Scream

  Cognitive Behavior Therapy (MDD) is underway when Bunny slips in and takes the chair nearest to the door. Two identical couches—fudge-brown fabric dotted with nubs of mustard brown for pizazz—and three profoundly faded orange plastic chairs are arranged in an approximation of a semicircle. The woman leading the group is positioned like a kindergarten teacher reading a story to the children. She is wearing a white lab coat. The doctors on the psych ward all wear white lab coats, and stethoscopes hang from their necks like loosely draped scarves. They never use the stethoscopes, but they wear them with their white lab coats the way the Pope wears the robe and the ring. This woman does not have a stethoscope. The clipboard on her lap looks official, except the paper is not for taking important notes or checking off appropriate boxes. Rather, it is a cheat-sheet of questions and prompts for discussion. Even for the uninitiated, she is obviously a freshly minted social worker. Her smile is huge. Her shoes are from Talbots. She is scared shitless.

  “Welcome to our group.” She lifts her arms to make an all-encompassing circle, like she is singing He’s got the whole wide world in his hands. “And you are . . . ?” she asks.

  “Bunny.”

  “Bunny?” her voice lilts. “Is that your real name?” The social worker, lacking the iota of perception necessary to read Bunny’s expression, goes on, “Or is it a pet name from childhood, you know, like you were cute as a bunny?”

  When you’re in the mental ward, to get up and kick your chair across the room as if it were a football is not a wise move. Bunny clenches her fists, her fingernails bite into the palms of her hands, and she gnaws on her tongue as if her teeth were small and sharp. The physical pain generated by the self-inflicted trauma subsumes the madness. Bunny does not run amok.

  “Okay, then. My name is Carolyn. It’s great to meet you.” Carolyn is putting out that Higher Power kind of vibe, which is worrisome. “Everyone, let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves to Bunny.”

  “She already knows us,” Chaz says.

  “Maybe she doesn’t know all of you.”

  Chaz allows for no doubt. “She knows all of us.”

  “Okay, then.” Carolyn adjusts her posture to sit taller in her chair. “Before we pick up where we left off last time, does anyone have any questions?”

  Bunny has a question; a string of questions, all related: What is the intent of the counter-intuition in this place? Why do they serve slop instead of food? And what gives with the color scheme? Why is everything—the walls, the furniture, the carpet, the curtains—in a spectrum of colors that, in the crayon box, would have names like: Listless, Hopeless, Sour Milk? Why is it that the one pop of color is the blue of the loony-socks, and even then, the bulk of the loony-socks, as they are distributed, are the same brown as sand? When our surroundings are overwhelmingly depressing, how can we be anything but depressed? But the question “Does anyone have any questions?” turns out not to be a question, but a transition in the form of a question. “Okay, then. Good. Let’s pick up where we left off last time. Edward was talking about his children, and how he is going to get reacquainted with them in a positive way.”

  Edward was one of the three men at Bunny’s table on her first night here. He seems more alert now, but that’s about it.

  “Alicia is only five. Eric is two.” Edward sounds like he is pleading for his children’s safety, as if they were being held hostage or something like that. “He’s a baby. They haven’t seen me in almost three months. Two years old, he doesn’t remember what happened yesterday.” Edward’s voice cracks. “He won’t know who I am. Alicia will be afraid of me.” Edward hunches over, head in hands. Jeanette pats his back, even though to pat his back requires touching him. Carolyn is either unaware that touching is Not Allowed, or else she is too scared to tell Jeanette to cut it out. Edward cries harder. Jeanette continues to pat his back, which, from Bunny’s vantage point, looks like she is rubbing up against him, although Edward seems not to notice. Carolyn tells him that his fears are groundless. “Of course your son is going to remember you. And your daughter is going to be so happy that you’re home. It’s going to be wonderful, I promise.”

  “Whoa, Carolyn,” Chaz intervenes. “That’s messed up. You don’t go around making promises when who the fuck knows what’s going to happen.” Perhaps he is speaking from experience as a policeman, or maybe he was always aware of the danger of heightened expectations and trust broken. “Right now,” he tells Edward, “all you can do is cross your fingers and hope for the best.”

  For himself, Chaz has no hope for the best because when he gets out of here, he’ll be doing desk duty until the day he retires.

  Carolyn consults her clipboard, flipping pages for help. “Okay, then,” she says. “Let’s talk about the first happy thing we are going to do when we get home. Something really nice. A special treat.”

  Jeanette says the first thing she wants to do is get a pedicure. At Beauty, they don’t do pedicures, although they will clip your toenails.

  Edward wipes his eyes and says, “My children. All I want is to hug my children.”

  The obese girl looks forward to time with her Xbox.

  First thing when he gets home, Howie is going to take Pam out for a lobster dinner. “Pam is my girlfriend. She saved my life,” he tells Carolyn. “If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be here.” All of them in Cognitive Behavior Therapy (MDD), including Carolyn, have heard the story of Howie and Pam, and more than once, too. It’s not even a good story, at least not the way Howie tells it. Whatever emotional depth it could have clings to the surface like pond scum, the characters are flat, and any humor it generates is unintentional. Only Bunny who, to date, has heard it at least nine times, wants to hear it again. What she likes are the variations that come with revision; how the story changes with each retelling. Yeah, yeah, everyone’s heard about how Pam raced to his house to keep him from killing himself, but in this latest iteration, Howie adds a new detail. “With nothing but flip-flops on her feet,” he says. “In the freezing cold, she ran all the way to my house with nothing but flip-flops on her feet.” Bunny likes the flip-flops; she’ll use the flip-flops.

  Another girl who, like the obese girl, also attends Group Therapy for Eating Disorders, although this girl is skeletal, says the first happy thing she wants to do when she gets home is to treat herself to a colon cleanse.

>   “Good,” Carolyn says. “That’s good.”

  How is it, Bunny wonders, that Carolyn doesn’t know that, no, an anorexic looking forward to a colon cleanse is not good, not good at all. She also wonders if Carolyn’s face aches from the isometric exercise it takes to hold that huge, insipid grin of hers in place.

  “And what about you, Bunny? What’s the first happy thing you want to do when you get home?”

  “I don’t know,” Bunny says.

  “Come on,” Carolyn cajoles. “You can think of something.”

  “No. Really, I can’t think of anything.”

  “There has to be something. At home, what’s your favorite thing to do?”

  “Read,” Bunny says.

  “No, no. I mean something really, really fun,” Carolyn urges. “Like going to the beach or on a picnic.”

  Bunny doesn’t mention her aversion to sand, but she does ask, “Isn’t it still January?”

  Carolyn explains that she didn’t mean literally go to the beach or on a picnic, but something along those lines. “Do you ski? Or like Howie, do you look forward to going out for a delicious dinner with friends?”

  “A delicious dinner with friends is how I got here,” Bunny tells her. “I want to go home where it’s quiet. Where I can be alone and read.”

  “Yes, but what do you really look forward to?”

  To put an end to this, Bunny does something like sign a confession to a crime she did not commit. She says, “I want to eat ice cream.”

  “Good, good. That’s really good,” Carolyn jiggles, jiggles for real, in her seat. “Now, what kind of ice cream do you want to eat? What flavor?”