The ring of the phone comes at Bunny like a bomb gone off and, as if debris were about to fall, she grips the edge of the blanket, ready to pull it over her head. When the phone rings for a second time, Albie gets up to answer it, and Bunny has recovered well enough to say, “If it’s one of my sisters, I’m not here.”
“I’ll say you’re out shopping. For confetti,” he adds and instantly regrets it. You never know what will set her off, but Bunny smiles. A sad little smile, nostalgic, almost, for the time when “for confetti” would’ve genuinely amused her. Still, it’s a smile and not a crying jag or an enraged fit, which it could’ve been because how she responds to jokes, quips, expressions of love or the last drop of patience—there’s no way to predict.
As of late, her sisters call often. Or rather, they call often compared to how rarely they called before, and despite Albie’s periodic urging, Bunny never calls her sisters. Albie puts value on family, on the idea of family, but, as Bunny has pointed out, as an only child, he has no practical experience in the field.
Albie’s childhood was a good one; happy, if you believe there is such a thing. He’d wanted for nothing except an older brother to pal around with, or even better, a baby sister to care for, to keep from harm. If he’d grown up anywhere other than New York City, Albie would’ve been the kind of kid who’d bring home a squirrel with a broken jaw or a baby sparrow fallen from its nest; a creature to rescue and protect, which is, not inconceivably, what drew him to Bunny in the first place.
As far as Bunny is concerned, at least in theory, family amounts to no more than shared DNA; as random and meaningless as the collision of two electrons before they are off again, each in its own orbit. Albie and Jeffrey are the whole of her family. Stella had been family, too, like a sister to Bunny except that the filial devotion, the love, was genuine and not foisted upon them by indiscriminate protoplasmic whimsy. Bunny misses Stella. So much, she misses Stella. Some people might say it’s too much, which is like saying that there is too much water in the ocean. The way she misses Stella is different from the way she misses Angela, but it’s the same insofar as that there is no consolation to be had. The loss of Angela and Stella both, feels to Bunny like longing that is endless. But it’s not endless. It’s longing that is limitless.
Bunny’s sisters call because, they say, they are concerned about her. Perhaps there’s something to that, but the real reason they call is for an answer to the question: How did this happen? Have they found the cause? Dawn wants it to be something like food poisoning. She wants Albie to say, “It was the mayonnaise,” although really any explanation will suffice provided it rules out the possibility of the hereditary factor. She needs to be reassured that it’s not one of those genetic mutations that can cause breast cancer or bad teeth. “So it’s definitely not genetic, right?” Dawn has asked Albie this question more than once.
Although it was never Albie’s intention to provoke hysteria in Dawn, he answered her question as best he could, which was to say, “I’m not an expert on these things.”
“Maybe, but still,” Dawn said, “you know more than I do.”
Dawn is desperate for certainty, and she seeks comfort in the fact that her children bear no physical resemblance to Bunny. If they don’t have her eyes or her mouth, then it’s not likely that they got her sick-o gene, either. Right? “Right?” she asked Albie. “They probably don’t have any of her genes. They don’t look anything like my side of the family. You’ve seen them. They look just like Michael. So even if it is genetic, they wouldn’t have that gene, right?”
“I can’t answer that,” Albie said. “I really don’t know.”
Dawn might be a wishful thinker, but Nicole has managed to believe that there’s direct causal link between Bunny’s crack-up and her use of aerosol deodorant. If Bunny’s meltdown can be attributed to her lifestyle—face it, she smokes—Nicole can rest easy. Twice-daily meditation, a raw food diet and a weekly colon cleanse is practically a guarantee that she will not die, that she will never die. However, Nicole can’t quite rid herself of the lingering concern that it might’ve been the bits of Bac-Os that did this to Bunny, the Bac-Os that their mother sprinkled liberally on salads and baked potatoes when the girls were in their formative years.
Nicole’s fixation on a squeaky-clean colon interests Bunny, in a general interest sort of way, a curiosity to occasionally ponder the way she’ll occasionally ponder who killed JonBenét Ramsey.
It’s not only her sisters who ask, “What happened?” People who barely know Bunny from Bonnie, they too want an explanation, a reason they can identify, identify and thereby avoid as if it were a matter of using a condom, or something they can control the way they can control their intake of salt. They want to know what it takes to keep a tight lid on your mind. They say, “We never saw this coming.” If no one saw this coming, it was because no one was paying attention; a lack of attention that might well have been a contributing factor. A contributing factor. One. One of many. Because it’s never just one thing. Still, they ask, “How did this happen?” Because they need to be sure that people don’t fall apart without a solid reason, they sift through her life panning for gold: she spends too much time alone; she’s got a negative attitude; she never had children; she smokes cigarettes; not having children messes with a woman’s hormones; all day working alone, that can’t be good; she eats processed food; she is a middle child; she’s never even been to a gym; she’s not very likable; she’s always been moody, difficult, dark, overly sensitive and easy to anger; even as a child, she wasn’t likable; she should’ve had children; she wears perfume; she drinks too much coffee; she smokes cigarettes.
Whatever the reason, they want to be assured that it was her own damn fault.