Bunny isn’t eligible for Group Walk. Group Walk, which is a regular walk except you’re walking with a gaggle of loons escorted by three social workers taking a spin around a relatively grim part of the city, is not, for Bunny, a dream that must be deferred. With more than half her fellow campers out for this morning stroll, the living room is deserted, and that is the best scenario here, as far as she can imagine it. She turns one of the armchairs to face the window with a view of a parking lot and a row of dumpsters and, sitting with her feet resting on the windowsill as if it were a coffee table, she opens her legal pad to the page where she last left off. Bunny reads over the sentences, and then looks up to think of what comes next.
Because this window, like all the windows here, is made of plexiglass that is scratched and dull and liberally speckled with dollops of pigeon shit in various degrees of decomposition, there’s no way to know if the sun is shining or is the sky cloud-covered or is it raining, perhaps a light drizzle? Needless to say, the windows are sealed shut. Not so much as the idea of a draft can get through. If she didn’t know that it is January, she’d have no idea what the season was. There are no people in the parking lot with their gloves tucked into the pockets of coats unbuttoned to convey to Bunny that the day might be a balmy one, whereas if it were really cold, hats would be pulled down low and there would be women wearing Ugg boots. She tries to recall the smell of fresh winter air; cold, crisp air promising snow, but she fails. Because it would only frustrate her to push herself further, to attempt to conjure a memory which she can’t bring to mind, and because to keep at it would not end well, she aims to divert her attention. She puts her pen to the paper, and she writes. She writes. More than three pages without so much as a pause. Only when she senses someone standing behind her, looking over her shoulder, does she stop, and she flips the pad so that the blank cardboard back is faceup, and Howie comes around to sit on the windowsill where he blocks her view, such as it is a view. Then, as if responding to a question, except no question has been asked, Howie says, “I was at Group Therapy. OCD.”
“OCD,” Bunny says, “is that new?”
“Not really,” Howie tells her.
Not for a skinny minute does Bunny believe that Howie is OCD, but curious to learn what he will say, she asks him how these obsessive compulsions of his manifest. He mulls over the possibilities, trying to determine which of them gleaned from his hour in Group Therapy (OCD) might seem credible: hand-washing; pattern-counting; removing seeds, one at a time, from cucumbers. “At home, I’m kind of a neat freak,” he says. “I can’t let dishes pile up in the sink. I pin my socks together before putting them in the washing machine. That sort of thing. There’s more, but the therapist is still figuring them out.” Then he asks, “What are you writing?”
“I’m not writing,” Bunny says, and Howie tells her, “I’m thinking about writing a novel. About this place. Everyone here would be a character in it.”
“Yeah, well, good luck with that.” Holding fast to her legal pad and pen, Bunny gets up from her chair, leaving Howie scanning the room for someone else to bother.
No one is using the telephone, but still, Underpants Man is there at his post. Mrs. Cortez sits on the bench across from the Activities board. Alongside her sits another catatonic. Bunny pauses to write: “Needless to say, they are not engaged in conversation.”