Also, there is sliced turkey and salad—lettuce, a few bits of shaved carrot and a cherry tomato—served in a small, beige plastic cup like the salad that comes with the meal served on a plane. Dessert is vanilla pudding, which no one eats. Bunny offers her tablemates chocolate, but when she retrieves the bag from the cabinet, the bag with her name on it, the bag she stashed there only a few hours before, she discovers that her chocolate bars are missing.
“I’m sorry,” Andrea says. “I should’ve warned you. You can’t keep chocolate in the cabinets. Some of these whackjobs are like junkies. They’d steal the chocolate out from under your pillow, if they could.” They can’t steal the chocolate out from under your pillow because food is Not Allowed in the bedrooms, but Chaz advises her on how to beat the system. “Chocolate bars are flat,” he says. “All you do is tuck one in your waistband under your shirt or inside a magazine.”
“And in your room, the best place to hide it is in your laundry bag,” Andrea adds. “That way, if someone finds it, they’ll have to explain why they were rummaging through your dirty panties.”
Teacher blushes, presumably at the word “panties,” and he twists to look at the table behind them. “The rabbi has chocolate cake,” he notes.
The rabbi is the voice in the dark, the voice that, night after night, calls out, “Holy fuck.” It’s not known, and frankly no one gives a fuck—holy or not—if the rabbi is really a rabbi or just some guy wearing a yarmulke. It’s his kosher meals that are the source of speculation, and envy too. Even for a person such as Bunny, a person hardly nymphomaniacal in pursuit of the palatal orgasm, the food here is, in a word, repulsive; a formula for failure as far as the Anorexics are concerned, and you can be sure that when the maraschino cherry turns out to be a pale-green grape dyed red and bleeding out over your vanilla pudding, it’s not doing the Depressives any good, either.