Dr. Fitzgerald’s office is like an office you’d expect to find at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Without windows, fluorescent track lighting overhead, and industrial metal file cabinets line one wall. The doctor, sitting on a swivel chair at a laminated particleboard desk, leans in as if she were about to stand up. Instead, she tells Bunny to take a seat in one of two of the matching particleboard chairs on the opposite side of her desk. The chairs are without arms.
Bunny imagines Dr. Fitzgerald is wearing navy-blue leather shoes with one-inch block heels. Expensive and boring. Her chin-length hair, tucked behind her ears, reveals the safest choice in earrings: small gold studs. Her engagement ring, a one-carat diamond solitaire, is big enough not to require explanation like how they’re saving their money for a house, but not so big as to raise eyebrows. Everything about Dr. Fitzgerald is better than Bunny, and not just because Bunny is wearing slipper-socks or because a gob of snot that looks like a jellyfish is bubbling from her nose, but simply because Dr. Fitzgerald is better. She slides a box of tissues across her desk, a desk with no clutter.
Bunny takes a tissue but makes no move to dry her eyes or wipe her nose. Rather, with sweaty hands she fiddles with it as if the tissue were a strand of worry beads. Damp bits break off, falling onto her lap, and Dr. Fitzgerald asks, “How long have you felt this way?”
“What way?” Bunny says.
A string of questions follow: Has she ever been depressed before? How often do the episodes occur? When was the last one and for how long did it last? Are you sleeping? Have you gained weight? Lost weight? How much? How is your personal hygiene?
Bunny claims to be washing her hair weekly and brushing her teeth once a day, which doesn’t exactly qualify as good hygiene, but it is better hygiene than the truth. Dr. Fitzgerald gives her the fish eye, but she lets the lie stand.
The questions that come next seem to be some sort of standardized test, something for which Bunny, idiosyncratically, has always had a knack. Contrary to all expectations, and indeed met with incredulity, her SAT scores were in the top one percentile. But unlike the SATs, these questions don’t aim to gauge a scope of knowledge or an ability to solve problems of logic. Rather, these questions require Bunny to give a numerical distribution to darkness, defeat, panic, anxiety and grief. As if infinity could be rated on a scale of one to ten, Dr. Fitzgerald asks her, “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your depression?”
Bunny remembers what Dr. Lowenstein had said about the far ends of the spectrum, that to be understood, to be normal, was to be in the middle, and she says, “Five.”
“And on a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your clarity of thinking?”
“Five.”
“Your productivity?”
“Five.”
Yet, despite five being the middle ground, average, the norm, normal, somehow, five accumulates in an exponential decrease, adding up like negative numbers.