With Jeffrey trotting alongside her, Bunny walks to the bathroom, where she stops at the threshold. With one hand on either side of the open door, she grips the molding as if to bar exit or entry. Her thoughts, along with her gaze, are fixed on the bathtub. Rectangular shaped, flat to the floor but with early twentieth-century fixtures. White porcelain faucets, Hot and Cold enameled in Dutch-blue script on round caps set into brass findings. The spigot, too, is brass. Solid brass, bought when Bunny had ideas to remodel the bathroom with a freestanding sink and a claw foot bathtub. Soon after buying the faucets and spigot at a boldly overpriced salvage warehouse, Bunny’s attention drifted, redirected, away from remodeling the bathroom. To where or to what is irrelevant. What matters here is her lifelong lack of stick-to-itiveness: oil painting, sewing, piano, guitar, graduate school for applied linguistics, archery, chemistry, refurbishing furniture, or when she was fifteen and signed on for volunteer work at the Simms Home for Mentally Retarded Children, an altruism which lasted less than an hour when she discovered that these mentally retarded children were not preternaturally wise children who happened to speak in simple sentences, but in fact were overweight adolescents who grabbed at her breasts. Whatever she started, Bunny quit.
Except for writing, writing fiction. With that she persevered.
She should have stuck with archery.
All she wanted was to be taken seriously. Was that too much to ask for?
How can you expect anyone to take you seriously when, as one astute critic put it, your book jacket looks like an ad for a feminine hygiene product? The cover that her editor explained was intended to appeal to the widest common denominator.
The widest common denominator is also the lowest common denominator.
How can you expect anyone to take you seriously when you have a child’s name?
Aside from the porcelain faucets and brass spigot, the bathtub itself is nothing special, although it is deeper than the average bathtub, thereby it’s a tub conducive to long, relaxing baths, with bubbles.