It is another aide, not the one who took her shoes, who, on this first day in the insane asylum, shows Bunny to her room. This aide, who is wearing pink scrubs, points to her name tag and says, “I’m Shawna. If you need something, you ask me.” Then she says, “It’s going to be okay. No need for you to be crying now.”
Unaware that she is crying, Bunny touches her face, which is, indeed, wet. Shawna takes a packet of tissues from her pocket. “Here, you blow your nose and wipe away them tears. Come on, now. Let me show you your room. It’s a nice one. You got a big window facing the river.”
The bag, the one with Bunny’s things Allowed is already there, ahead of her, plopped down on her bed, in the middle of her bed; a bed that is narrow like a bed you’d expect to find in a convent or an orphanage. Bunny’s bed is the one closest to the door, which is to say that Bunny’s room is not exactly her room. On the other bed, a woman with excellent posture sits facing the window as if she were waiting, primly and patiently, on a bench in a train station. Her black hair is done up neatly in a bun. “Please,” Bunny keeps her voice low. “I can’t have a roommate.” She doesn’t want this woman to take it personally but, even growing up in her family’s three-bedroom house, it was Nicole and Dawn who shared a bedroom. Bunny had a bedroom to herself.
Unless you count Albie (and if you make an exception for the brief stint with Stella when she was between apartments), the only roommate Bunny ever had before now was a college roommate in her freshman year. Bunny’s college roommate was a very nice girl who arrived with plans for the following year to live in her sorority house, which was a revelation to Bunny, who had thought that, surely by now, sorority houses and sororities themselves had gone the way of those bras that turned normal breasts into breasts shaped like nuclear missiles.
It was not a happy arrangement for either roommate, but they tolerated one another well enough until the night when, after all of ten minutes of watching Bunny look for, but not find, her cigarette lighter—a disposable Bic, two for a dollar, hardly a big deal—the aspiring sorority girl said, “If you were organized you wouldn’t lose things. You’d know where everything is. Frankly, I don’t know how you can find anything in that mess.”
“You’re right,” Bunny said, and she pulled open the top drawer of her desk. All the way open; open and out, and she dumped the contents of the drawer, which included a half-eaten Snickers bar and the missing Bic lighter, onto the floor. For good measure, Bunny flung the now empty drawer across the room. Although the aspiring sorority girl was not in the line of trajectory, she nonetheless dashed for the door the way a cartoon character makes a beeline for the nearest exit. From there, she went to the Housing Office, while Bunny calmed herself down with a few good kicks to the wall.
Bunny was sent to Student Mental Health Services, a wish fulfilled, and, even better, she was afforded the luxury usually reserved for upperclassmen: a single, a room without a roommate.
Now, on the verge of a full-blown freak-out, she says to Shawna, “I can’t share a room. I have to have a room to myself.”
“Does this look like a hotel?” Shawna asks. “This is a hospital. No private rooms in the hospital. But don’t you worry. You and Mrs. Cortez will get along just fine. She’s no bother.” Shawna raises her voice. Perhaps Mrs. Cortez is hard of hearing. “Isn’t that right, Mrs. Cortez? You’re no bother. Mrs. Cortez don’t talk. She can talk. She just don’t want to. She’ll talk when she’s got something to say. Isn’t that right? Mrs. Cortez, this is your new roommate. You want to say hello?”
Every indication is that Mrs. Cortez is deaf as well as mute. “Oh, she can hear,” Shawna says. “She hears just fine when the dinner bell rings. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Cortez?”
Even Bunny has to admit—if she has to have a roommate, she couldn’t do better than Mrs. Cortez.
On her bed, along with her Allowed things, are a pair of blue pajamas, a dull, monochromatic cerulean blue, and a pair of slipper-socks in a similar, but lighter, shade of blue. The pajamas are made of paper. Not paper like notebook paper, but paper like those washable paper towels for wiping up kitchen spills. On the pillow is a single sheet of regular paper, placed there to be noticed as surely as a tear-soaked note from a teenage girl explaining why she has run away from home; the sort of note from the sort of teenage girl who periodically runs away from home, but never stays away for more than a few hours because where would she go? Except this sheet of paper is a printout of a grid beneath the heading: Weekly Schedule of Activities.
“Let’s get you settled in nice,” Shawna says. “This here is your closet.” She opens the door to a locker made of laminated particleboard that is a color that is not a color. Four plastic hangers hang from a rod below two shelves. “If you need more hangers, you just let me know,” Shawna says. “And this here night table’s got two drawers for your undergarments and personal effects and the like.” She demonstrates how to switch the table lamp on and off, and from there they go to the bathroom, where Shawna pulls open the shower curtain. “Cold water,” she taps the faucet on the right. “The other one is the hot water. But to tell you the truth, it don’t get much hotter than warm.” Then she directs Bunny’s attention to one of two side-by-side sinks. “This one here is yours, and that’s your cup.” The plastic cup is cloudy from far too many rounds in the dishwasher. Shawna holds up a travel-size tube of toothpaste, and a toothbrush packaged in cellophane, which she unwraps, stuffing the cellophane into her pocket. “We like to keep things sanitary around here, but some folks are forgetful. You don’t need to worry any about Mrs. Cortez though. She’s not the sort of woman to use someone else’s toothbrush.”
Above the sink is a mirror—not a real mirror, but a sheet of aluminum or maybe it’s stainless steel—and in the cabinet below are extra rolls of toilet paper.
Bunny is not up to the task of putting away her clothes, getting herself settled in or washing her face and hands, which she couldn’t do even if she’d wanted to because Shawna neglected to give her soap and towels. She could, but she doesn’t, brush her teeth. Instead she pushes her belongings to the foot of the bed, and sits on the edge as if she has been hard at work and now is merely taking a break. The bed, her bed, is covered with a waffle-weave cotton blanket of a color best described as sandy beige. The mattress can’t be more than three inches thick and through the blanket and sheets, which you could not, in all good conscience, ever refer to as white, Bunny can feel the plastic mattress cover, a precaution against urine stains or menstrual blood stains or the sweat of fear, and who knows what other fluids leak from the deranged. The pillow is the same kind of pillow that you get on airplanes when you fly coach. As a pillow, it is useless, but Bunny hugs it anyway. It is dark outside now, and Bunny sits on the edge of her bed, as still and as quiet as Mrs. Cortez sitting on the edge of her bed; the only difference between them is posture. Bunny’s shoulders sag. In this way, time passes until the dinner bell rings.
Mrs. Cortez, ramrod straight, shoulders back, head held high, walks past Bunny as if she doesn’t see her, as if, on top of everything else, Mrs. Cortez has opted to be blind.