Cognitive Behavior Therapy (MDD) is underway when Bunny slips in and takes the chair nearest to the door. Two identical couches—fudge-brown fabric dotted with nubs of mustard brown for pizazz—and three profoundly faded orange plastic chairs are arranged in an approximation of a semicircle. The woman leading the group is positioned like a kindergarten teacher reading a story to the children. She is wearing a white lab coat. The doctors on the psych ward all wear white lab coats, and stethoscopes hang from their necks like loosely draped scarves. They never use the stethoscopes, but they wear them with their white lab coats the way the Pope wears the robe and the ring. This woman does not have a stethoscope. The clipboard on her lap looks official, except the paper is not for taking important notes or checking off appropriate boxes. Rather, it is a cheat-sheet of questions and prompts for discussion. Even for the uninitiated, she is obviously a freshly minted social worker. Her smile is huge. Her shoes are from Talbots. She is scared shitless.
“Welcome to our group.” She lifts her arms to make an all-encompassing circle, like she is singing He’s got the whole wide world in his hands. “And you are . . . ?” she asks.
“Bunny.”
“Bunny?” her voice lilts. “Is that your real name?” The social worker, lacking the iota of perception necessary to read Bunny’s expression, goes on, “Or is it a pet name from childhood, you know, like you were cute as a bunny?”
When you’re in the mental ward, to get up and kick your chair across the room as if it were a football is not a wise move. Bunny clenches her fists, her fingernails bite into the palms of her hands, and she gnaws on her tongue as if her teeth were small and sharp. The physical pain generated by the self-inflicted trauma subsumes the madness. Bunny does not run amok.
“Okay, then. My name is Carolyn. It’s great to meet you.” Carolyn is putting out that Higher Power kind of vibe, which is worrisome. “Everyone, let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves to Bunny.”
“She already knows us,” Chaz says.
“Maybe she doesn’t know all of you.”
Chaz allows for no doubt. “She knows all of us.”
“Okay, then.” Carolyn adjusts her posture to sit taller in her chair. “Before we pick up where we left off last time, does anyone have any questions?”
Bunny has a question; a string of questions, all related: What is the intent of the counter-intuition in this place? Why do they serve slop instead of food? And what gives with the color scheme? Why is everything—the walls, the furniture, the carpet, the curtains—in a spectrum of colors that, in the crayon box, would have names like: Listless, Hopeless, Sour Milk? Why is it that the one pop of color is the blue of the loony-socks, and even then, the bulk of the loony-socks, as they are distributed, are the same brown as sand? When our surroundings are overwhelmingly depressing, how can we be anything but depressed? But the question “Does anyone have any questions?” turns out not to be a question, but a transition in the form of a question. “Okay, then. Good. Let’s pick up where we left off last time. Edward was talking about his children, and how he is going to get reacquainted with them in a positive way.”
Edward was one of the three men at Bunny’s table on her first night here. He seems more alert now, but that’s about it.
“Alicia is only five. Eric is two.” Edward sounds like he is pleading for his children’s safety, as if they were being held hostage or something like that. “He’s a baby. They haven’t seen me in almost three months. Two years old, he doesn’t remember what happened yesterday.” Edward’s voice cracks. “He won’t know who I am. Alicia will be afraid of me.” Edward hunches over, head in hands. Jeanette pats his back, even though to pat his back requires touching him. Carolyn is either unaware that touching is Not Allowed, or else she is too scared to tell Jeanette to cut it out. Edward cries harder. Jeanette continues to pat his back, which, from Bunny’s vantage point, looks like she is rubbing up against him, although Edward seems not to notice. Carolyn tells him that his fears are groundless. “Of course your son is going to remember you. And your daughter is going to be so happy that you’re home. It’s going to be wonderful, I promise.”
“Whoa, Carolyn,” Chaz intervenes. “That’s messed up. You don’t go around making promises when who the fuck knows what’s going to happen.” Perhaps he is speaking from experience as a policeman, or maybe he was always aware of the danger of heightened expectations and trust broken. “Right now,” he tells Edward, “all you can do is cross your fingers and hope for the best.”
For himself, Chaz has no hope for the best because when he gets out of here, he’ll be doing desk duty until the day he retires.
Carolyn consults her clipboard, flipping pages for help. “Okay, then,” she says. “Let’s talk about the first happy thing we are going to do when we get home. Something really nice. A special treat.”
Jeanette says the first thing she wants to do is get a pedicure. At Beauty, they don’t do pedicures, although they will clip your toenails.
Edward wipes his eyes and says, “My children. All I want is to hug my children.”
The obese girl looks forward to time with her Xbox.
First thing when he gets home, Howie is going to take Pam out for a lobster dinner. “Pam is my girlfriend. She saved my life,” he tells Carolyn. “If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be here.” All of them in Cognitive Behavior Therapy (MDD), including Carolyn, have heard the story of Howie and Pam, and more than once, too. It’s not even a good story, at least not the way Howie tells it. Whatever emotional depth it could have clings to the surface like pond scum, the characters are flat, and any humor it generates is unintentional. Only Bunny who, to date, has heard it at least nine times, wants to hear it again. What she likes are the variations that come with revision; how the story changes with each retelling. Yeah, yeah, everyone’s heard about how Pam raced to his house to keep him from killing himself, but in this latest iteration, Howie adds a new detail. “With nothing but flip-flops on her feet,” he says. “In the freezing cold, she ran all the way to my house with nothing but flip-flops on her feet.” Bunny likes the flip-flops; she’ll use the flip-flops.
Another girl who, like the obese girl, also attends Group Therapy for Eating Disorders, although this girl is skeletal, says the first happy thing she wants to do when she gets home is to treat herself to a colon cleanse.
“Good,” Carolyn says. “That’s good.”
How is it, Bunny wonders, that Carolyn doesn’t know that, no, an anorexic looking forward to a colon cleanse is not good, not good at all. She also wonders if Carolyn’s face aches from the isometric exercise it takes to hold that huge, insipid grin of hers in place.
“And what about you, Bunny? What’s the first happy thing you want to do when you get home?”
“I don’t know,” Bunny says.
“Come on,” Carolyn cajoles. “You can think of something.”
“No. Really, I can’t think of anything.”
“There has to be something. At home, what’s your favorite thing to do?”
“Read,” Bunny says.
“No, no. I mean something really, really fun,” Carolyn urges. “Like going to the beach or on a picnic.”
Bunny doesn’t mention her aversion to sand, but she does ask, “Isn’t it still January?”
Carolyn explains that she didn’t mean literally go to the beach or on a picnic, but something along those lines. “Do you ski? Or like Howie, do you look forward to going out for a delicious dinner with friends?”
“A delicious dinner with friends is how I got here,” Bunny tells her. “I want to go home where it’s quiet. Where I can be alone and read.”
“Yes, but what do you really look forward to?”
To put an end to this, Bunny does something like sign a confession to a crime she did not commit. She says, “I want to eat ice cream.”
“Good, good. That’s really good,” Carolyn jiggles, jiggles for real, in her seat. “Now, what kind of ice cream do you want to eat? What flavor?”
“Strawberry,” Bunny says, and Carolyn claps her hands.