Bunny sneaks back to her room for her legal pad and a felt-tipped pen. On the top page are her notes for Albie, things she doesn’t want to forget. Thus far, she has written: 1) peanut butter; 2) what’s that disease you get from standing in dirty water; 3) books; 4) pizza (maybe); 5) did you find out . . . What? What did she want him to find out? Beneath that page are the pages she wrote last night.
In the living room, the television is on. Mrs. Cortez and an older man wearing a yarmulke sit on opposite sides of the front-row couch watching an infomercial for a vacuum cleaner. The Bertolt Brecht guy is sitting in one of the armchairs that are arranged in every which way. He waves and motions for Bunny to join him. She hesitates. She was banking on time to herself, but she doesn’t know how to refuse the gesture. With him is a woman sitting sideways, her back resting against one arm of her chair and, as if the armchair were an inner tube and she were drifting on a lake, her legs dangle over the other side.
Resting on the woman’s lap, unopened, is a tattered copy of Martha Stewart Living. The cover features Martha standing in a pumpkin patch wearing a plaid jacket and a jack-o’-lantern grin. “It’s not even from this past year,” the woman says. “It’s from, like, two Halloweens ago.” Her fingernails are painted bright red. She might be the same age as Bunny, although she looks, not older exactly, but worn thin and color-faded like the cover of the Martha Stewart magazine. Her name is Andrea, and she introduces the Bertolt Brecht guy as Josh.
A point in their favor, neither of them comment on her name, and Bunny asks her, “They let you have nail polish?”
“Fat chance,” she says. “Nail polish is like a controlled substance in here. Like we might drink it. For the formaldehyde. Yeah, right. Though,” she concedes, “if you sniff enough of it, you can get a little buzz going.” She splays her fingers, and tells Bunny, “Twice a week Beauty is an Activity. That’s where you can get your fingernails painted and your eyebrows tweezed. You can get your hair done there, too. Curled, with rollers,” she adds.
Grooming for the men is scheduled for every day except Sunday, but it’s all about shaving. “Because unsupervised we might slit our throats with the electric Norelco,” Josh says.
Andrea is, was, a nurse, in the gastrointestinal unit of this same hospital. Now, she’s a patient in the psych ward because, at home in her kitchen, she put her head in the oven. “My neighbor couldn’t mind her own business,” Andrea says. Her neighbor smelled the gas and called the fire department. “I explained to them it was because my cat had died. I keep telling them that when they let me out, I’ll get a kitten and then I’ll have something to live for.”
“Don’t they believe you?” Bunny asks.
Andrea shrugs. “Maybe. But they’re all freaked out about the codeine, too. I was addicted to codeine. They’re acting like it’s a big deal. Yeah, right. Codeine. Codeine is nothing.”
Although the mental ward is not unlike a prison, the inmates don’t much discuss what they’re in for. They don’t have to ask. Depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia—it’s right there in plain sight. What they are interested in is the cure, which is why Andrea asks Bunny what medication she’s on.
“None,” Bunny says, and Andrea concludes, “You’re an ECT-ite.”
“A what?” Bunny doesn’t understand.
“An ECT-ite. The people who are getting ECT are the ECT-ites. ECT,” she clarifies, “you know. Electroconvulsive therapy.” When Andrea says, “Josh is an ECT-ite,” she sounds like a mother bragging, as if ECT were something like a PhD.
Electroconvulsive therapy gets bad press, and really, how could it not? The vocabulary alone—electroconvulsive, electroshock, brain seizures, convulsions, electrodes, fits—is enough to scare away any sane person. We’ve all seen the movies, the black-and-white photographs of broken people with blank faces wearing soiled hospital gowns, we’ve heard the stories about how it zaps away who you were, leaving behind an empty shell, like a conch shell, and only the dim sound of a faraway ocean remains.
Bunny tries not to stare at Josh. “No, no,” she says. “It’s just that I refused Paxil and Abilify. But they’ll put me on some other drug.”
With the authority accorded to her profession, or maybe it is the authority of someone who’s been in and out of the nuthouse more than once or twice, Andrea warns her against Trazodone and Seroquel. Josh says they put him on lithium the last time he was here, and he has nothing good to say about it. Andrea is now on Lamictal, but she can’t tell if it’s working or not, and Bunny says, “I have a cat. At home. Jeffrey.”
Andrea brightens considerably and asks, “Do you have a picture of him?”
“No, but I’ll ask my husband to bring one.” On the top page of her legal pad, Bunny writes: 6) picture of Jeffery.
Andrea peeks at Bunny’s list and asks, “How about chocolate? Chocolate is like gold here.”
Bunny adds to the list 7) chocolate; and then, as if she is on to something; 8) legal pads; 9) pens.
“How about some magazines?” Andrea says. “People or Glamour. We have no idea here what’s going on in . . . I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t get a lot of visitors.”
“I don’t mind,” Bunny says. “People and Glamour.” Then she asks Josh, “What about you?”
As if he’s just woken up, or as if time stood still for a minute or two, Josh says, “Me? I had a dog when I was a kid. He got hit by a car, and the guy who hit him didn’t even stop.”
It is all too apparent: wounds never heal, but rather, in a torpid state deep inside the medial temporal lobe of the brain, grief waits for fresh release.