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“Why him?” she asked. “I can’t imagine what you saw in him.”
I explained that it didn’t have anything to do with Elro personally, that he was just the only one who would take me away.
“I should have taken you away,” Bunny said. “We should have left when we had the chance.”
“How’s Eddie?” I asked, to change the subject.
“Oh, he’s all right, I guess. He’s been over to visit a few times. The doctors don’t like him, though. They say he stirs me up, and I’m supposed to have complete peace and quiet.” Her voice cracked. She started to cry. “It’s true, he does stir me up.”
“Bunny—”
“No, it’s true.”
“Don’t think about it. You’re supposed to relax.”
“I’ve grown old. I look at myself in the mirror here—they took away my compact, but there’s a mirror in the bathroom. I look at myself, and it’s an old woman’s face looking back. I could be fifty, sixty, seventy years old. It’s all the same. I’m an old woman.”
“Bunny—”
She snorted, a laugh bubbling through the tears. “And you know what else? My bottom’s got fat. I sit down now, and it spreads out like a bag of sand. I’m an old fat bottom.”
“Bunny, you’re beautiful, you’re the most beautiful woman in Katydid.”
“I was, my darling, I was. But that’s all gone now, that’s the past.”
Not long afterward, Mr. Lowry arranged for Bunny’s doctor, Dr. Wheeler, to talk to me. Sitting at Mr. Noren’s secretary’s desk, I made the call at the appointed time, eleven in the morning. The doctor wasn’t in his office, and in the background, I could hear the paging system calling his name. After several minutes, he picked up, but he sounded rushed and irritated. “I recommend that you write your mother from now on and not call,” he said. “Her condition is still very delicate, and conversations tend to upset her. Keep your letters to unimportant subjects—the weather, school, that sort of thing. Don’t mention anything that might make her worry.”
“When is she going to be able to come home?”
“We can’t know that, but she won’t be home soon. She’s been living on borrowed emotional energy for years, and now she’s paying the price. I suggest you just go about your life in your own regular way and hope that some day she’ll be ready to catch up with you. Now, I’ve got to go. I’ve got lots of patients to see in addition to your mother.”
“Wait!” I yelled. I was holding the receiver in both hands, dreading the click on the other end. If he hung up now, the silence would be unbearable. “Dr. Wheeler?”
After a long pause—perhaps he had heard me but was considering hanging up anyway—his voice came slowly. “Yes, I’m still here.”
“Dr. Wheeler, I was wondering. You know, I got in trouble here this summer and then ran away, and now I’m worried that maybe I caused this to happen to Bunny, that I made her sick.”
“You know perfectly well it’s been a traumatic summer for her.”
“Yes.”
“And your brother—”
“Yes.” Please help me, I begged silently.
“But illness like this isn’t set off by one thing or even two. It’s an accumulation of things over time. Some of them are obvious, and some aren’t. It doesn’t do any good to backtrack. The best thing is to accept this and go on with your own life. You aren’t to blame.” He sounded efficient, clipped, even bored. How many sons and daughters had heard this speech before? “Now, I really must go.”
“Thank you, Dr. Wheeler.”
“Goodbye.”
I hung up and sat at the desk without moving. I tried not to think. Mr. Noren’s secretary believes in neatness, and everything has a container with its own place—pencils, pens, stamps, p
aper clips, coins, thumbtacks, tea bags, sugar packets, throat lozenges, hard candies. I scanned the candies in their small, round tin. Cherry, strawberry, lemon. Ahhh—I took a lemon, unwrapped it, and threw it in my mouth. Suddenly, Mr. Lowry burst into the room, his face crimson, his arms flapping. “Guess what? The tests are positive! My wife’s pregnant!”
On the same day that the Exponent carried an article saying that the owners of the KTD had decided to keep the factory open for at least another year, Reverend Vaughn called me up. The phone connection was distant and crackly, and he sounded a bit uneasy, talking too fast and asking too many quick questions. I got the idea that he thought I’d run away because of him, because of the story he’d told me that night in his study. Explaining would have been too hard and too tiring over that scratchy phone line, so I just tried to steer the conversation to other things. He told me he was in Chicago, staying with a friend until he found another church.
“Are you worried?” I asked.
