To occupy your time here with hobbies and social engagement is not exactly mandatory but it is encouraged, highly encouraged, as if to play a game of charades or to sit around a table making paper swans from squares of cut-up newspaper with a bunch of other mental patients is a pathway to sanity. Bunny is not one for hobbies or games, and she has always placed great importance, perhaps a disproportionate importance, on solitude but, during the day, unless you’re catatonic, the bedrooms are off-limits.
The catatonics are Allowed to stay in their rooms during the day, although it is possible that the catatonics are Not Allowed to stay in their rooms during the day, but try arguing with a person who, for all intents and purposes, is oblivious to the existence of you and everybody else. Really, as far as the catatonics are concerned, it doesn’t matter where they are because wherever they are, they are alone.
In the living room, in the hopes that no one will notice her there, Bunny curls up in chair with a legal pad and a felt-tipped pen and wonders if she could feign catatonia, and for how long, until one of the aides, Antoine, spots her. “Hey,” he says, “why are you sitting here all by your lonesome self? Don’t you want to go to an Activity?”
“No,” she says, but Antoine insists they find something she’d like to do. “Come on, now.” The diamond stud in his ear sparkles like a smile. “Let’s have a look at the Board.”
Beauty, Yoga, Watercoloring, Arts and Crafts, Creative Writing, Music, Dog Therapy, and Board Games. Also Group Therapy. Group Therapy (MDD); Group Therapy (BPD); Group Therapy (OCD); Group Therapy (Eating Disorders); Group Therapy (Phobias).
“What’s Dog Therapy?” Bunny asks, and Antoine explains, “You hang out with a dog. Pet him and stuff.” The dog is a dog that’s been certified as consistently trusting and friendly but not nuts the way some friendly dogs will go wild from the happiness of a pat on the head. Social-worker dogs have been trained not to bark, growl, snap or hump.
“Okay,” Bunny says. “I’ll go to Dog Therapy.”
“That’s good. He’s a nice dog.” Antoine gestures to the bench against the wall across from the board. “Have a seat. They’ll be bringing him along any minute now.”
Bunny watches the clock. One minute. Four minutes. Ten minutes. She’s been waiting there for almost twenty minutes before Antoine comes back. “Hey,” he says. “I just got word. The dog isn’t coming today. How about you give Arts and Crafts a whirl?” Then Antoine reaches into his pocket and pulls out a tissue. “Here,” he says. “Wipe your eyes. They’re running. Now, come on. I’ll walk you over there.”
Seated around the Arts and Crafts table, nine lunatics are gluing things to other things. Bunny sits next to the girl with the private peanut butter stash. The teacher, who isn’t really a teacher but a social worker who took a class in art therapy, sets a square piece of plywood in front of Bunny along with a bowl filled with small mosaic tiles: white, speckled beige, black, a couple of reds and there is a teal-blue one in the mix, too. “Have you ever done anything like this before?” she asks.
In the third grade, in arts and crafts class, on three consecutive Friday mornings between the hours of ten and noon, Bunny, along with her classmates, glued small mosaic tiles to their allotted squares of plywood. On the fourth Friday, when the grout between the tiles had dried, they could take their projects home.
Bunny took the long route back to her house. When she got to where Allen Street met Nelson Road, she stopped. Scouting around in all directions, confident that there was no one who could see her, she squatted over the water sewer. As if disposing of evidence of a crime or something shameful, she slid her square of wood with the glued-on tiles through the wide iron slat. It made a satisfying kerplunk when it hit the dark sewer water where it floated among the rotting leaves of late autumn.
After that, in third grade arts and crafts class, they made pencil cups from empty soup cans.
Devoid of enthusiasm or inspiration, rather than pick through the tiles with a scheme in mind, Bunny takes a fistful from the bowl as if the tiles were almonds at a party. Similarly, with no thought to a pattern, not bothering so much as to line them up adjacently, she glues the tiles to the wood. There is no indication that she has any intention to see her Arts and Crafts project to completion. The inability to complete simple tasks is, of course, a common symptom of depression, but it could be a symptom of other things, too, such as the value of the task itself.
The obese girl is staring at Bunny’s tile-on-wood. “That’s really cool,” she says. Can I have it?”
What the girl sees, what she thinks is cool, what Bunny does not see, is that Bunny’s tiles are arranged as if the tiles were letters grouped together as if they were words, and the words were arranged as if they were a poem on a page.
xxxx xxx
xxxxx
xxx xxxx
xxx
A poem along the lines of Fuck You, Everyone.