Meals are mandatory, but unable to bring herself to join the line of crazy people snaked around the dining room, Bunny keeps to the wall like a bystander. Many of the psychos, with the bovine insouciance of men who go to nice restaurants for dinner all dolled up in cargo shorts and baseball caps, are wearing their paper pajamas, which come in pale brown, as well as the blue. One man, a large man whose hair is long and gray, is wearing his underpants, white Hanes briefs, over his blue jeans. Bunny glances at his feet, curious to see if he’s put his socks on over his shoes, but he isn’t wearing shoes. He is wearing the slipper-socks, the blue ones, the same as Bunny’s slipper-socks, and Bunny dwells on this fact, that she and Underpants Man are wearing identical footwear, and what does that say about her?
What distinguishes the cafeteria in the psycho ward from cafeterias for normal people is the silverware. In the psycho cafeteria only the spoons are metal. Knives and forks are plastic. Also, plates and cups are paper. The inmates are not allowed anywhere near glass or sharp objects or anything that could be construed as a sharp object like the ballpoint pen they took away from Bunny and her nail clippers, too.
By the time she gets her food—steam table dregs of boiled broccoli and gloppy spaghetti; meatballs are on offer, but Bunny declines, although she does take two individual packets of peanut butter—there are no vacant tables. Not many chairs are free either. She isn’t frightened of the other crazy people. This isn’t the sort of a mental ward that houses the criminally insane. If anything, these people look incapable of defending themselves, but she doesn’t want to sit with them because she doesn’t want to be one of them. But she has to sit somewhere. Holding her tray, she scans the room, ultimately taking the one empty seat at a four-top table where three men sit with their heads bowed, as if they’ve nodded off midmeal. Bunny eats a pat of peanut butter with her metal spoon.