Joey Mullins is Not the Narrator
Dinah Cox
I was born the year Nixon was re-elected, and you might say I never got over the disappointment. Reagan was re-elected when I was in the seventh grade—I was the lone Mondale-supporter in my class of more than 700 students—and though these admissions might make me sound young to some people, old to some others, and long dead to posterity, the important thing is I’ve been paying attention, and back in the day I liked to fight. To say I liked being the underdog was to state the obvious, but running for city council was not my idea. For that stroke of genius I had to credit Bunny Jones, though you were not allowed to call him Bunny to his face. Probably he knew people called him Bunny behind his back, but no one wanted to be the one to officially ruin the surprise. One of these days, I imagined, Easter would come and the crucifixion would not be avenged. I was running as a democrat, which was to say, I was going to lose by a landslide.
Bunny’s real name was Edward. Not Eddie or Ed or Eduardo, but Edward, the only thing he answered to except for Professor Jones or Dr. Jones or sir. He taught Western Civilization at the state university in my home town, which was to say he was a throwback and also kind of a joke, since unsuspecting Oklahoma kids always signed up for his classes with the expectation they would watch movies about—and write short “thought papers” about—Buffalo Bill Cody or Billy the Kid. None of them had heard of Woody Guthrie, but all had been made to read—or watch--The Grapes of Wrath, not that doing so taught them the definition of empathy, because it did not. I should know, I was one of them.
My ad campaign made me look as if I felt sorry for people waiting for the bus, people standing in line at the pawnshop, the mailman on rainy days. Really I felt sorry for myself. But when I looked out the window, I saw stuff: abandoned furniture, shredded cardboard bound for the landfill, children with bloody elbows and knees. Once I saw a girl—she looked to be about nine or ten years old—simultaneously shouting into a megaphone and walking a large yellow-footed tortoise on a leash. When I looked out the window, I saw reasons to run for the city council. They were called citizens, and if you think saying so sounds like Robert Redford in The Candidate or Hillary circa 1978 or some other bullshit satire from this, the age of post-sincerity, you’re right on all three counts. Bunny Jones said if things fell into place just as he imagined they would, the voters would come to their senses, and, watch out, I was going to win.
They called him Bunny because he ate only carrots and lettuce and not your fresh from the pesticide factory farm bagged and chopped for convenience crap, either. Only organic for Bunny Jones. And he liked to brag about it, too, so even though I ordinarily might have liked to indulge in fresh and untainted produce myself, his constant chatter on the subject turned me against the slow food movement and toward microwavables that came in a box. He once boasted that his dog could eat an entire head of broccoli with no ill effects, so you see the kind of thing I’m talking about. If you’d ever met his dog—if you’d ever smelled his dog—you, too, would give up on waking too-early every Saturday morning for the pleasure of perusing the dubious jars of salsa available at the Market Town, Oklahoma Farmers’ market. And run the risk of running into Bunny Jones? No thanks.
Once, a long time ago, I was Bunny’s star student. I’d been sent away to a small, liberal arts college in Indiana, the kind of place where people of all genders companionably played lacrosse together and then shared sandwiches made with sprouts—sprouted bread, alfalfa sprouts, and nothing else save some kind of mysterious sprouted “spread” made from reconstituted brown powder—on the sidelines. All in all, this was the kind of place Bunny would have approved of, or at least the student body’s dietary habits were in line with the Bunny-way of doing things. But I’d been having trouble, charging up my mother’s credit card at places like Dan’s Liquor-Mart and Pedro’s Mexican Catina and failing Astronomy three times in a row. So my mother insisted I come home for the summer, work the drive-thru line at Wendy’s, and enroll in Bunny Jones’ Western Civilization course that met every morning at eight for all of June, July, and August, in some last-ditch effort to get me enough credits to graduate on time. Fearing I would not be allowed to finish my degree at the sprouted school in Indiana, I did not miss a single class.
“You should run for office,” Bunny said to me, somewhere toward the end of June. We were on a break—somewhere between the House of Lancaster and the House of York—when he leaned over my desk and asked me for my notes. “Another student needs to copy them,” he said. “This could be a good opportunity for you.”
He went on to explain the dilemma of one of my classmates, a boy by the name of Adam who had sprained his ankle in football practice and so could no longer attend Bunny’s lectures. I’d seen people on crutches all over campus, including in the lecture halls, so I objected, but diplomatically. That’s when he said I should run for office, but never could I have imagined he was serious, at least insofar as Bunny’s wife was some kind of officer with the Payne County Democrats and they’d been having trouble coming up with a fall guy—or, as in my case, a fall gal—a student or senior citizen who didn’t mind the public humiliation that came with the local newspaper’s reporting the predictable but embarrassing 23 votes in the special election night edition. Though I planned to return to Indiana in the fall, I agreed to put my name on the ballot.
“Wonderful,” he said, “I’ll tell my wife.”
Here are some things to know about Bunny’s wife, who did not have a cute animal nickname. She was not his first wife but his second, one of his graduate students, it was said, a woman who gave up her Ph.D. in History in favor of having his baby. Eventually, after the child was old enough to go to school, she went back to Pharmacy school herself, and, during the summer I was enrolled in Bunny’s class, worked for only a little more than minimum wage passing out Prozac at a place called Treasury Drug. She knew all of Market Town’s medicated secrets, but would give them away only in occasional bits and pieces, coded phrases like “Dr. BG has the DTs” and “RR’s cousin has BC problems, but they’re going away.” I sometimes babysat their daughter, and so, Bunny’s wife—Mary Claire was her name—liked me and always said I had a lot of potential and I really ought to think about growing out my hair sometime. Another thing I haven’t mentioned: I was six feet tall and just under 200 pounds, not exactly a threat to the sanctity of their marriage. “Ginny the Giantess,” Bunny’s wife called me, more or less affectionately. Perhaps this was some kind of payback for the whole town calling her husband Bunny, though, as I have said, never to his face.
That summer, in between Western Civ and my shifts at Wendy’s, I became a kind of fixture in the home of Bunny and Mary Claire. I babysat every Friday night—their daughter, who, by that time, was nearly old enough to stay home alone, watched television and went to bed early, all in all, an easy way to make a few extra bucks. But even when Bunny and Mary Claire were home I found myself acting as a kind of Jill-of-all-trades, washing windows, cleaning cobwebs from their basement, assembling items labeled “some assembly required.” And together, the three of us made slightly more than a half-hearted effort to get me elected to the Market Town City council.
“They have to vote for you,” Bunny said one day in the driveway. I was helping him untangle kinks from the garden hose, a task I found easy and he found difficult. “I mean, you’re the salt of the earth, Ginny. Like bread and butter.”
“With extra butter,” I said. I was in a self-deprecating phase I now regret.
“Really,” he said. “You grew up in this town. You’re wholesome. Kind to animals. On the A-Honor Roll.”
“It’s true,” Mary Claire said. She was wearing large, leather gloves and pruning a rose bush. “You’re a reliable girl.”
“Right as rain,” I said. “Do you think it’s going to rain?”
“Not until September,” Bunny said, and that year, it turned out, he was right.
The drought was long and terrible, an epic event that must have shown up in tree rings, days and days of nothing but blinding, white light from the cloudless dusty skies. The lake dried up, and an algae bloom threatened the city water supply, a potential campaign issue, we thought, though the citizens demonstrated their general indolence and indifference by swimming in the poisoned mud left behind. I don’t mean to be cruel about the people of Market Town. Mostly they worked and went to church and exchanged pleasantries at public meeting places. They thought themselves decent, which, though not the same as actual decency, went a long way toward the general slow movement of things. But when they were wrong they were criminal, and their bigotry showed like the rust on their car fenders erupting from underneath the bad paint jobs their cousins had applied for free.
One Friday night I had Bunny and Mary Claire’s air conditioner cranked down to freezing while their daughter watched a teen romance and played Solitaire on the living room floor. When I went to the fridge for some bottled water, I found the usual wheatgrass concoctions and leafy greens, but also a glass container of what looked like urine. Do Not Drink, the label said. Joey Mullins.
“Who’s Joey Mullins?” I asked Bunny the next day before Western Civ. You could say I was bold but I was also young; I didn’t know any better.
“You looked in the fridge?” he said. “I thought I could count on you, Ginny.”
“I didn’t know there was a rule against looking in the fridge.”
I’d arrived early; other students streamed into the lecture hall with backpacks in tow. Bunny looked around as if to make sure we had some degree of privacy in the midst of the crowd. “Don’t talk about my fridge,” he said. “Here, I mean. On campus.”
I watched as my classmates, the men unshaven and drowsy, the women wearing heels instead of sneakers, shuffled papers and fiddled with defective ballpoint pens. “I’ll bet they don’t care about your fridge,” I said. “Not that much, anyway.”
“Class is about to start,” he said. “Sit down.”
But something in me wanted to press him further, to test the limits of his avuncular patience. “Who’s Joey Mullins?” I said. “And why do you have his urine in your refrigerator?”
One thing I haven’t said about Bunny is that his nickname was perhaps not as flattering as it might have seemed. Sure, bunnies are cute; everyone knows that. Their velvety ears and fast-moving whiskers cover the forest floor with an innocence and energy only Walt Disney could copy. But there’s something malevolent there, also: think albino bunnies and vampire bunnies and bunnies unafraid to eat from your vegetable garden right in front of your fucking face. When you keep them in a hutch, they stink up the house. They make you feel guilty. They multiply and munch on the edges of your bedspread and shit in places they shouldn’t.
“Sit down,” Bunny said through his teeth. “We’re having a quiz.”
Were this a different kind of story I would have failed the quiz. But this was Oklahoma, where even the most mediocre student could earn an A minus and walk away unscathed. I think I ended up with an 88 on that particular quiz and, at the end of the summer, the highest overall grade in the class. It was not something I liked to brag about, though I guess something in me wants to brag about it still. Because Bunny had a reputation to uphold. Bunny was not, as he said in lectures, kidding around. He was like Hammurabi or Hannibal or Henry the Eighth. He was a hard grader. And he wanted everyone to know it.
The next Friday night, Bunny and Mary Claire’s daughter had a friend over, and their daughter and the friend spent the entire night in the daughter’s bedroom listening to loud, unintelligible music and making prank phone calls to their classmates, a harmless endeavor, I thought, though the daughter grew up to drop out of college for a couple of years and, I heard, make ends meet doing some kind of low-level telemarketing, so maybe I should have stopped her. In any case, I had the house to myself.
I looked in the liquor cabinet and found nothing save an old bottle of port and an unopened jar of maraschino cherries. Their bedside drawers, too, were a disappointment, unless I someday felt the need to tell everyone on campus Bunny read Muscle and Fitness and collected about ten billion old rubber bands. I saw a cardboard box labeled “old photos” on the top shelf of their closet, but finally decided they’d be too much trouble to retrieve and probably very boring: Bunny in a cap and gown, Bunny all young and suntanned beside some old beater car, Bunny and Mary Claire feeding one another slices of spongy white wedding cake. Not my idea of a good time. But a stack of mail in the kitchen showed promise, especially a long, white envelope still sealed and addressed to Joey Mullins, but with Bunny and Mary Claire’s address.
I would be lying to say I’ve never before, as they do in movies, used steam from a teakettle to loosen the glue on a sealed envelope. I have done it. But it was not on this occasion. It was actually much later, when a favorite professor—not Bunny—wrote me a letter of recommendation and I wanted to know what it said. On this occasion, though, I feared getting caught and so tried every other trick in the book: I shook the contents to see if they felt like a check or cash, I weighed it on Mary Claire’s kitchen scale, I held the envelope up to the light. My best guess was that it was a single-page, fairly personal bit of correspondence, written on notebook paper with black ink, with a salutation of “Hi, Joey” and signed by someone named Sabrina. The return address was somewhere in Sarasota, Florida and the stamp was one of those Christmas stamps, even though Christmas was still six months away. What any of this had to do with the urine in their refrigerator I didn’t know, but I found a way to return the letter to the stack of mail, which otherwise appeared undisturbed.
The next week in Western Civ we had what they call a “movie day,” some kind of super-boring documentary about some royal people I could not keep track of unless for the sake of an exam. Bunny said popcorn was bad for your teeth and so would not allow it in the lecture hall, but someone brought Milk Duds and about sixteen liters of generic orange soda, and, as a result, we students felt as if we were really living it up. Before class, I’d passed out some of my campaign literature and asked all my classmates to consider giving me their vote.
“The debate,” Bunny said at the break. “We have to prepare.”
“There’s a debate?”
“Yes,” he said. “The League of Women Voters. At the public library. Mary Claire wants you to wear a dress.”
“I don’t have a dress,” I said. “I mean, I don’t have a good dress. That I can wear.”
“Our nephew,” he said. “Really he’s Mary Claire’s nephew. Her sister’s kid. He’s a makeup artist for the stars.” Here he looked at me meaningfully. “Joey Mullins is his name. He can find you a dress.”
It was at this moment I realized my running for city council had absolutely nothing to do with my abilities, nor my promise as a student, nor my political savvy, Really it had nothing to do with me at all. Probably Joey Mullins felt the same way about his makeup artistry. I was but a character in Bunny’s marriage plot, and a bit player at that. Were they headed for divorce? Was I merely the cargo Bunny brought home so as to appear more original than stopping at the grocery store for some crappy, half-dead carnations? He must have been having an affair.
“I’ll find a dress,” I said. “Maybe your nephew can help with my makeup.”
“They’re going to vote for you, Ginny,” he said. “Just wait.”
Something most people don’t know is that tall people have more insight into the human condition than do their shorter contemporaries. I could, for example, watch my classmates in the lecture hall and know immediately which ones of them, usually the same ones who ate too much, longed for unattainable romance, which ones starved themselves but found their personal lives lacking, which ones came from broken homes. Because I was so tall, I could see everything. And because I was a woman and a fat one at that, I disappeared into the background of gymnasium walls, restaurants’ back corners, up against hollow trees with rough bark. I could watch and I could listen, and I considered myself lucky I was generally not jeered at but ignored.
“You’re going to look beautiful,” Bunny said. “At the debate.”
“I’m wearing basketball shorts underneath my dress,” I said, and he laughed, though I could tell he didn’t mean it.
Preparing for the debate, though, turned out to be more like sweeping and mopping Bunny and Mary Claire’s kitchen floor and nowhere was there a sign of the legendary Joey Mullins. I was beginning to think he was made-up, maybe one of Bunny’s other aliases or a character in a children’s story like Uncle Remus or Where’s Waldo. Here’s something else I’ve been wanting to say about being smart and pugnacious and not conventionally attractive: it’s rougher now than it used to be. Time was when all the academic and artistic women were lesbians, or, if not lesbians or closet-cases they at least were married to equally ugly men and most definitely feminists. Today that is not the case. The lipstick lesbian has blossomed into the lusty librarian into the hipster Ph.D. She likes her fashion from the 1950s, her furniture from the 1960s, and her paycheck securely in the upper-middle class range of the early twenty-first century. And if she has to suck a dick to get more than that, well, that’s why she wears the red lipstick, to remind us all of her dick-sucking roots. I’m aware all this sounds vicious. I can’t help it.
When I was finished sweeping and mopping, Mary Claire and I sat out on the back deck. I watched her smoke a cigarette, something I’d never before seen her do. Bunny said he needed to run to the hardware store, and their daughter asked him to drop her off at the mall or the movies, I forget which.
“He’s having an affair, isn’t he?” Mary Claire said between gulps of the oxygen-deprived air. “You can tell me, Ginny, I wouldn’t give away my source.”
“Why did they start calling him Bunny?” I said. “I mean, originally.”
“That’s a yes, right? I’m taking that as a yes.”
“It’s none of my business,” I said.
“Oh my god, you know something.”
The truth was I didn’t know and didn’t care. Maybe saying so—or even thinking as much—was cruel, but already I’d grown weary of the nuclear family’s ills. My own family was more or less ill to the point of needing life support, but I couldn’t bring myself to embrace all the platitudes just then becoming popular: that we needed counseling, that we didn’t respect ourselves enough to respect one another, that we needed to rediscover reasons why we should eat dinner together or go to museums together or find togetherness by watching insipid made-for-TV movies about other families rediscovering their reasons for maintaining some sense of mutual misery. If Bunny was having an affair—and probably he was—I didn’t want to know any more about it than I already did, which was to say, nothing at all.
“I don’t know,” I said to Mary Claire. “Whenever I see, him he’s either teaching, meeting his office hour, or here with you.”
“I’ll find out,” she said. “I’ll find him out.”
“What about the city council debate?” I said. “I need help with my makeup.”
“Oh, Ginny the Giantess,” she said. “You’re going to look beautiful.”
“That’s what Bunny said.”
“Liar,” she said. “I mean, not about you.”
The night before the debate we had a trial run in Bunny and Mary Claire’s garage. Why they didn’t invite me inside the house-proper I didn’t know, but it seemed to me they’d met in the middle or at least put their marriage woes temporarily aside for the sake of my campaign. Once again, there was no sign of Joey Mullins, and their daughter, they said, had taken up permanent residence at the public library, a bit of deception on her part, I imagined, though of course I felt glad on her behalf. We ran through a list of questions, Bunny reclining in a lawn chair, Mary Claire rearranging gardening implements and cans of pesticide on a shelf. You could not have called it a dress rehearsal since my dress, a hand-me-down from a distant relative’s too-casual wedding, was at the drycleaners for some serious stain removal and my make-up, what little I wore on an everyday basis, had become, through some machinations between Bunny and Mary Claire unknown to me, a subject off-limits for discussion. Bunny read questions from individual index cards and I answered them as if I were a regular Quiz Bowl champ, my lips moving mellifluously over phrases such as “citywide strategic planning” and “ultimate fiscal control.”
“What about the drought?” Bunny said. “Are you in favor of the cloud-seeding program?”
“Sure,” I said. “You know: whatever.”
“That’s not a good answer.”
I was angry now, sick of the whole charade. “What is a good answer then, professor?”
“You want to appear knowledgeable,” he said. “Poised.”
“Thanks,” I said, surprising myself with sudden bitterness. “But I’m not a trained seal.”
Bunny launched into his usual routine of extolling the virtues of the voting public, denouncing the general corruption of elected officials, looking for answers, finding them all distasteful or fatuous or base. It was not my fault he’d put all his faith in me to rescue Market Town, or his marriage, or both. That he chose me at all seemed to me more or less an accident, a random series of events that might have turned out differently had I looked down more often, or worn my hair differently, or taken fewer notes during his lectures in Western Civ. Things have changed a lot since that summer, and mostly not for the better, but one thing that remains the same is that a promising young woman, no matter how intelligent or driven or tough, is not at all the same as a promising young man. There’s no pre-existing mythology for the coming-of-age of people like me, unless you count deflowering, and no one wants to deflower us fatsos. If you want proof of what I’m talking about, here’s something a guy named Gary Sernovitz wrote in The New York Times:
It was F. Scott Fitzgerald—or was it Thomas Wolfe?—who established the four essential ingredients of the first novel of the smart young man from the American provinces: girl, town, youth and book. These are not independent elements. The longing for the girl is a longing to write. The elegy for the town is the elegy for youth, the girl and the book. A sentence about one is a sentence about all.
There will not be a Works Cited page at the end of this story, so you’ll have to Google it if you want to know more. Ever since I read that paragraph I’ve been filled with rage, an anti-youth, anti-male, anti-urban urge to shout from the rooftops just what it feels like to be a giantess, and not just your run-of-the-mill foot-stomping Amazon, but the kind of person, had I been a man, the other men might have called gentle, an artistic sort, pained to the very core. The elegy for Market Town is the elegy for my youth, my girlhood, and the book I’m allowed to write but not publish. A sentence about one is a sentence about all. I’ve only recently realized I’ve been angry about this my entire life, and, if I’m honest with myself, I’ll say much of it started—and ended—that summer I ran for office in Market Town. That day in the garage, I took it out on Bunny.
“You know why they call you Bunny, don’t you,” I said. “It’s because of your urges.”
“You’re not answering the question.”
“You know how bunnies are,” I said. “They’ll hump your hand if they think you’re moving it just right.”
“Ginny,” he said. “Concentrate.”
“I’m not going to win the debate,” I said. “I’m not even going to attend the debate, so you can take your precious League of Women Voters and go suck some more dicks.”
Now Mary Claire was concerned. She turned from her shelf of neatly-organized epoxies and glues and said, “The League of Women Voters does not suck dicks.”
“Sure they do,” I said. “That’s all they do.”
“Ginny,” Mary Claire said. “You must be having a bad day.”
“Bad life,” I said. “Bad girl. Bad town. Get me out of here.”
“You’re tired,” Bunny said. “You’ll feel better tomorrow.”
But he was wrong. I did not feel better the next day, nor the day after, and my anger sustained me through two more weeks of Western Civ and my mother’s ultimate decision to send me back to college in Indiana before the city council election could even take place. Before the summer was over, my hostility drove me to working doubles at the Wendy’s Drive-Thru line where, it was said, I could assemble a single with cheese faster than anybody in the entire history of the store. My name stayed on the ballot, however, and a few people voted for me. Back in college for my senior year, I called the Market Town Election Board for the exact tallies, and, it turned out, I received exactly seven votes. Bunny and Mary Claire, I was sure, still had a soft spot for my candidacy and could not resist checking the box next to my name. Since my mother told me she did not vote, I chalked up four of the five remaining votes to two particular Wendy’s co-workers and two of my high school classmates living out some suburban nightmare in Market Town. The seventh vote I couldn’t figure, though I imagined, at times, it was Joey Mullins, finally having passed his drug test, back in shape after rehab and ready to move back to Hollywood where he’d be able to forget about Market Town and move on with his life for good.
Dinah Cox
I was born the year Nixon was re-elected, and you might say I never got over the disappointment. Reagan was re-elected when I was in the seventh grade—I was the lone Mondale-supporter in my class of more than 700 students—and though these admissions might make me sound young to some people, old to some others, and long dead to posterity, the important thing is I’ve been paying attention, and back in the day I liked to fight. To say I liked being the underdog was to state the obvious, but running for city council was not my idea. For that stroke of genius I had to credit Bunny Jones, though you were not allowed to call him Bunny to his face. Probably he knew people called him Bunny behind his back, but no one wanted to be the one to officially ruin the surprise. One of these days, I imagined, Easter would come and the crucifixion would not be avenged. I was running as a democrat, which was to say, I was going to lose by a landslide.
Bunny’s real name was Edward. Not Eddie or Ed or Eduardo, but Edward, the only thing he answered to except for Professor Jones or Dr. Jones or sir. He taught Western Civilization at the state university in my home town, which was to say he was a throwback and also kind of a joke, since unsuspecting Oklahoma kids always signed up for his classes with the expectation they would watch movies about—and write short “thought papers” about—Buffalo Bill Cody or Billy the Kid. None of them had heard of Woody Guthrie, but all had been made to read—or watch--The Grapes of Wrath, not that doing so taught them the definition of empathy, because it did not. I should know, I was one of them.
My ad campaign made me look as if I felt sorry for people waiting for the bus, people standing in line at the pawnshop, the mailman on rainy days. Really I felt sorry for myself. But when I looked out the window, I saw stuff: abandoned furniture, shredded cardboard bound for the landfill, children with bloody elbows and knees. Once I saw a girl—she looked to be about nine or ten years old—simultaneously shouting into a megaphone and walking a large yellow-footed tortoise on a leash. When I looked out the window, I saw reasons to run for the city council. They were called citizens, and if you think saying so sounds like Robert Redford in The Candidate or Hillary circa 1978 or some other bullshit satire from this, the age of post-sincerity, you’re right on all three counts. Bunny Jones said if things fell into place just as he imagined they would, the voters would come to their senses, and, watch out, I was going to win.
They called him Bunny because he ate only carrots and lettuce and not your fresh from the pesticide factory farm bagged and chopped for convenience crap, either. Only organic for Bunny Jones. And he liked to brag about it, too, so even though I ordinarily might have liked to indulge in fresh and untainted produce myself, his constant chatter on the subject turned me against the slow food movement and toward microwavables that came in a box. He once boasted that his dog could eat an entire head of broccoli with no ill effects, so you see the kind of thing I’m talking about. If you’d ever met his dog—if you’d ever smelled his dog—you, too, would give up on waking too-early every Saturday morning for the pleasure of perusing the dubious jars of salsa available at the Market Town, Oklahoma Farmers’ market. And run the risk of running into Bunny Jones? No thanks.
Once, a long time ago, I was Bunny’s star student. I’d been sent away to a small, liberal arts college in Indiana, the kind of place where people of all genders companionably played lacrosse together and then shared sandwiches made with sprouts—sprouted bread, alfalfa sprouts, and nothing else save some kind of mysterious sprouted “spread” made from reconstituted brown powder—on the sidelines. All in all, this was the kind of place Bunny would have approved of, or at least the student body’s dietary habits were in line with the Bunny-way of doing things. But I’d been having trouble, charging up my mother’s credit card at places like Dan’s Liquor-Mart and Pedro’s Mexican Catina and failing Astronomy three times in a row. So my mother insisted I come home for the summer, work the drive-thru line at Wendy’s, and enroll in Bunny Jones’ Western Civilization course that met every morning at eight for all of June, July, and August, in some last-ditch effort to get me enough credits to graduate on time. Fearing I would not be allowed to finish my degree at the sprouted school in Indiana, I did not miss a single class.
“You should run for office,” Bunny said to me, somewhere toward the end of June. We were on a break—somewhere between the House of Lancaster and the House of York—when he leaned over my desk and asked me for my notes. “Another student needs to copy them,” he said. “This could be a good opportunity for you.”
He went on to explain the dilemma of one of my classmates, a boy by the name of Adam who had sprained his ankle in football practice and so could no longer attend Bunny’s lectures. I’d seen people on crutches all over campus, including in the lecture halls, so I objected, but diplomatically. That’s when he said I should run for office, but never could I have imagined he was serious, at least insofar as Bunny’s wife was some kind of officer with the Payne County Democrats and they’d been having trouble coming up with a fall guy—or, as in my case, a fall gal—a student or senior citizen who didn’t mind the public humiliation that came with the local newspaper’s reporting the predictable but embarrassing 23 votes in the special election night edition. Though I planned to return to Indiana in the fall, I agreed to put my name on the ballot.
“Wonderful,” he said, “I’ll tell my wife.”
Here are some things to know about Bunny’s wife, who did not have a cute animal nickname. She was not his first wife but his second, one of his graduate students, it was said, a woman who gave up her Ph.D. in History in favor of having his baby. Eventually, after the child was old enough to go to school, she went back to Pharmacy school herself, and, during the summer I was enrolled in Bunny’s class, worked for only a little more than minimum wage passing out Prozac at a place called Treasury Drug. She knew all of Market Town’s medicated secrets, but would give them away only in occasional bits and pieces, coded phrases like “Dr. BG has the DTs” and “RR’s cousin has BC problems, but they’re going away.” I sometimes babysat their daughter, and so, Bunny’s wife—Mary Claire was her name—liked me and always said I had a lot of potential and I really ought to think about growing out my hair sometime. Another thing I haven’t mentioned: I was six feet tall and just under 200 pounds, not exactly a threat to the sanctity of their marriage. “Ginny the Giantess,” Bunny’s wife called me, more or less affectionately. Perhaps this was some kind of payback for the whole town calling her husband Bunny, though, as I have said, never to his face.
That summer, in between Western Civ and my shifts at Wendy’s, I became a kind of fixture in the home of Bunny and Mary Claire. I babysat every Friday night—their daughter, who, by that time, was nearly old enough to stay home alone, watched television and went to bed early, all in all, an easy way to make a few extra bucks. But even when Bunny and Mary Claire were home I found myself acting as a kind of Jill-of-all-trades, washing windows, cleaning cobwebs from their basement, assembling items labeled “some assembly required.” And together, the three of us made slightly more than a half-hearted effort to get me elected to the Market Town City council.
“They have to vote for you,” Bunny said one day in the driveway. I was helping him untangle kinks from the garden hose, a task I found easy and he found difficult. “I mean, you’re the salt of the earth, Ginny. Like bread and butter.”
“With extra butter,” I said. I was in a self-deprecating phase I now regret.
“Really,” he said. “You grew up in this town. You’re wholesome. Kind to animals. On the A-Honor Roll.”
“It’s true,” Mary Claire said. She was wearing large, leather gloves and pruning a rose bush. “You’re a reliable girl.”
“Right as rain,” I said. “Do you think it’s going to rain?”
“Not until September,” Bunny said, and that year, it turned out, he was right.
The drought was long and terrible, an epic event that must have shown up in tree rings, days and days of nothing but blinding, white light from the cloudless dusty skies. The lake dried up, and an algae bloom threatened the city water supply, a potential campaign issue, we thought, though the citizens demonstrated their general indolence and indifference by swimming in the poisoned mud left behind. I don’t mean to be cruel about the people of Market Town. Mostly they worked and went to church and exchanged pleasantries at public meeting places. They thought themselves decent, which, though not the same as actual decency, went a long way toward the general slow movement of things. But when they were wrong they were criminal, and their bigotry showed like the rust on their car fenders erupting from underneath the bad paint jobs their cousins had applied for free.
One Friday night I had Bunny and Mary Claire’s air conditioner cranked down to freezing while their daughter watched a teen romance and played Solitaire on the living room floor. When I went to the fridge for some bottled water, I found the usual wheatgrass concoctions and leafy greens, but also a glass container of what looked like urine. Do Not Drink, the label said. Joey Mullins.
“Who’s Joey Mullins?” I asked Bunny the next day before Western Civ. You could say I was bold but I was also young; I didn’t know any better.
“You looked in the fridge?” he said. “I thought I could count on you, Ginny.”
“I didn’t know there was a rule against looking in the fridge.”
I’d arrived early; other students streamed into the lecture hall with backpacks in tow. Bunny looked around as if to make sure we had some degree of privacy in the midst of the crowd. “Don’t talk about my fridge,” he said. “Here, I mean. On campus.”
I watched as my classmates, the men unshaven and drowsy, the women wearing heels instead of sneakers, shuffled papers and fiddled with defective ballpoint pens. “I’ll bet they don’t care about your fridge,” I said. “Not that much, anyway.”
“Class is about to start,” he said. “Sit down.”
But something in me wanted to press him further, to test the limits of his avuncular patience. “Who’s Joey Mullins?” I said. “And why do you have his urine in your refrigerator?”
One thing I haven’t said about Bunny is that his nickname was perhaps not as flattering as it might have seemed. Sure, bunnies are cute; everyone knows that. Their velvety ears and fast-moving whiskers cover the forest floor with an innocence and energy only Walt Disney could copy. But there’s something malevolent there, also: think albino bunnies and vampire bunnies and bunnies unafraid to eat from your vegetable garden right in front of your fucking face. When you keep them in a hutch, they stink up the house. They make you feel guilty. They multiply and munch on the edges of your bedspread and shit in places they shouldn’t.
“Sit down,” Bunny said through his teeth. “We’re having a quiz.”
Were this a different kind of story I would have failed the quiz. But this was Oklahoma, where even the most mediocre student could earn an A minus and walk away unscathed. I think I ended up with an 88 on that particular quiz and, at the end of the summer, the highest overall grade in the class. It was not something I liked to brag about, though I guess something in me wants to brag about it still. Because Bunny had a reputation to uphold. Bunny was not, as he said in lectures, kidding around. He was like Hammurabi or Hannibal or Henry the Eighth. He was a hard grader. And he wanted everyone to know it.
The next Friday night, Bunny and Mary Claire’s daughter had a friend over, and their daughter and the friend spent the entire night in the daughter’s bedroom listening to loud, unintelligible music and making prank phone calls to their classmates, a harmless endeavor, I thought, though the daughter grew up to drop out of college for a couple of years and, I heard, make ends meet doing some kind of low-level telemarketing, so maybe I should have stopped her. In any case, I had the house to myself.
I looked in the liquor cabinet and found nothing save an old bottle of port and an unopened jar of maraschino cherries. Their bedside drawers, too, were a disappointment, unless I someday felt the need to tell everyone on campus Bunny read Muscle and Fitness and collected about ten billion old rubber bands. I saw a cardboard box labeled “old photos” on the top shelf of their closet, but finally decided they’d be too much trouble to retrieve and probably very boring: Bunny in a cap and gown, Bunny all young and suntanned beside some old beater car, Bunny and Mary Claire feeding one another slices of spongy white wedding cake. Not my idea of a good time. But a stack of mail in the kitchen showed promise, especially a long, white envelope still sealed and addressed to Joey Mullins, but with Bunny and Mary Claire’s address.
I would be lying to say I’ve never before, as they do in movies, used steam from a teakettle to loosen the glue on a sealed envelope. I have done it. But it was not on this occasion. It was actually much later, when a favorite professor—not Bunny—wrote me a letter of recommendation and I wanted to know what it said. On this occasion, though, I feared getting caught and so tried every other trick in the book: I shook the contents to see if they felt like a check or cash, I weighed it on Mary Claire’s kitchen scale, I held the envelope up to the light. My best guess was that it was a single-page, fairly personal bit of correspondence, written on notebook paper with black ink, with a salutation of “Hi, Joey” and signed by someone named Sabrina. The return address was somewhere in Sarasota, Florida and the stamp was one of those Christmas stamps, even though Christmas was still six months away. What any of this had to do with the urine in their refrigerator I didn’t know, but I found a way to return the letter to the stack of mail, which otherwise appeared undisturbed.
The next week in Western Civ we had what they call a “movie day,” some kind of super-boring documentary about some royal people I could not keep track of unless for the sake of an exam. Bunny said popcorn was bad for your teeth and so would not allow it in the lecture hall, but someone brought Milk Duds and about sixteen liters of generic orange soda, and, as a result, we students felt as if we were really living it up. Before class, I’d passed out some of my campaign literature and asked all my classmates to consider giving me their vote.
“The debate,” Bunny said at the break. “We have to prepare.”
“There’s a debate?”
“Yes,” he said. “The League of Women Voters. At the public library. Mary Claire wants you to wear a dress.”
“I don’t have a dress,” I said. “I mean, I don’t have a good dress. That I can wear.”
“Our nephew,” he said. “Really he’s Mary Claire’s nephew. Her sister’s kid. He’s a makeup artist for the stars.” Here he looked at me meaningfully. “Joey Mullins is his name. He can find you a dress.”
It was at this moment I realized my running for city council had absolutely nothing to do with my abilities, nor my promise as a student, nor my political savvy, Really it had nothing to do with me at all. Probably Joey Mullins felt the same way about his makeup artistry. I was but a character in Bunny’s marriage plot, and a bit player at that. Were they headed for divorce? Was I merely the cargo Bunny brought home so as to appear more original than stopping at the grocery store for some crappy, half-dead carnations? He must have been having an affair.
“I’ll find a dress,” I said. “Maybe your nephew can help with my makeup.”
“They’re going to vote for you, Ginny,” he said. “Just wait.”
Something most people don’t know is that tall people have more insight into the human condition than do their shorter contemporaries. I could, for example, watch my classmates in the lecture hall and know immediately which ones of them, usually the same ones who ate too much, longed for unattainable romance, which ones starved themselves but found their personal lives lacking, which ones came from broken homes. Because I was so tall, I could see everything. And because I was a woman and a fat one at that, I disappeared into the background of gymnasium walls, restaurants’ back corners, up against hollow trees with rough bark. I could watch and I could listen, and I considered myself lucky I was generally not jeered at but ignored.
“You’re going to look beautiful,” Bunny said. “At the debate.”
“I’m wearing basketball shorts underneath my dress,” I said, and he laughed, though I could tell he didn’t mean it.
Preparing for the debate, though, turned out to be more like sweeping and mopping Bunny and Mary Claire’s kitchen floor and nowhere was there a sign of the legendary Joey Mullins. I was beginning to think he was made-up, maybe one of Bunny’s other aliases or a character in a children’s story like Uncle Remus or Where’s Waldo. Here’s something else I’ve been wanting to say about being smart and pugnacious and not conventionally attractive: it’s rougher now than it used to be. Time was when all the academic and artistic women were lesbians, or, if not lesbians or closet-cases they at least were married to equally ugly men and most definitely feminists. Today that is not the case. The lipstick lesbian has blossomed into the lusty librarian into the hipster Ph.D. She likes her fashion from the 1950s, her furniture from the 1960s, and her paycheck securely in the upper-middle class range of the early twenty-first century. And if she has to suck a dick to get more than that, well, that’s why she wears the red lipstick, to remind us all of her dick-sucking roots. I’m aware all this sounds vicious. I can’t help it.
When I was finished sweeping and mopping, Mary Claire and I sat out on the back deck. I watched her smoke a cigarette, something I’d never before seen her do. Bunny said he needed to run to the hardware store, and their daughter asked him to drop her off at the mall or the movies, I forget which.
“He’s having an affair, isn’t he?” Mary Claire said between gulps of the oxygen-deprived air. “You can tell me, Ginny, I wouldn’t give away my source.”
“Why did they start calling him Bunny?” I said. “I mean, originally.”
“That’s a yes, right? I’m taking that as a yes.”
“It’s none of my business,” I said.
“Oh my god, you know something.”
The truth was I didn’t know and didn’t care. Maybe saying so—or even thinking as much—was cruel, but already I’d grown weary of the nuclear family’s ills. My own family was more or less ill to the point of needing life support, but I couldn’t bring myself to embrace all the platitudes just then becoming popular: that we needed counseling, that we didn’t respect ourselves enough to respect one another, that we needed to rediscover reasons why we should eat dinner together or go to museums together or find togetherness by watching insipid made-for-TV movies about other families rediscovering their reasons for maintaining some sense of mutual misery. If Bunny was having an affair—and probably he was—I didn’t want to know any more about it than I already did, which was to say, nothing at all.
“I don’t know,” I said to Mary Claire. “Whenever I see, him he’s either teaching, meeting his office hour, or here with you.”
“I’ll find out,” she said. “I’ll find him out.”
“What about the city council debate?” I said. “I need help with my makeup.”
“Oh, Ginny the Giantess,” she said. “You’re going to look beautiful.”
“That’s what Bunny said.”
“Liar,” she said. “I mean, not about you.”
The night before the debate we had a trial run in Bunny and Mary Claire’s garage. Why they didn’t invite me inside the house-proper I didn’t know, but it seemed to me they’d met in the middle or at least put their marriage woes temporarily aside for the sake of my campaign. Once again, there was no sign of Joey Mullins, and their daughter, they said, had taken up permanent residence at the public library, a bit of deception on her part, I imagined, though of course I felt glad on her behalf. We ran through a list of questions, Bunny reclining in a lawn chair, Mary Claire rearranging gardening implements and cans of pesticide on a shelf. You could not have called it a dress rehearsal since my dress, a hand-me-down from a distant relative’s too-casual wedding, was at the drycleaners for some serious stain removal and my make-up, what little I wore on an everyday basis, had become, through some machinations between Bunny and Mary Claire unknown to me, a subject off-limits for discussion. Bunny read questions from individual index cards and I answered them as if I were a regular Quiz Bowl champ, my lips moving mellifluously over phrases such as “citywide strategic planning” and “ultimate fiscal control.”
“What about the drought?” Bunny said. “Are you in favor of the cloud-seeding program?”
“Sure,” I said. “You know: whatever.”
“That’s not a good answer.”
I was angry now, sick of the whole charade. “What is a good answer then, professor?”
“You want to appear knowledgeable,” he said. “Poised.”
“Thanks,” I said, surprising myself with sudden bitterness. “But I’m not a trained seal.”
Bunny launched into his usual routine of extolling the virtues of the voting public, denouncing the general corruption of elected officials, looking for answers, finding them all distasteful or fatuous or base. It was not my fault he’d put all his faith in me to rescue Market Town, or his marriage, or both. That he chose me at all seemed to me more or less an accident, a random series of events that might have turned out differently had I looked down more often, or worn my hair differently, or taken fewer notes during his lectures in Western Civ. Things have changed a lot since that summer, and mostly not for the better, but one thing that remains the same is that a promising young woman, no matter how intelligent or driven or tough, is not at all the same as a promising young man. There’s no pre-existing mythology for the coming-of-age of people like me, unless you count deflowering, and no one wants to deflower us fatsos. If you want proof of what I’m talking about, here’s something a guy named Gary Sernovitz wrote in The New York Times:
It was F. Scott Fitzgerald—or was it Thomas Wolfe?—who established the four essential ingredients of the first novel of the smart young man from the American provinces: girl, town, youth and book. These are not independent elements. The longing for the girl is a longing to write. The elegy for the town is the elegy for youth, the girl and the book. A sentence about one is a sentence about all.
There will not be a Works Cited page at the end of this story, so you’ll have to Google it if you want to know more. Ever since I read that paragraph I’ve been filled with rage, an anti-youth, anti-male, anti-urban urge to shout from the rooftops just what it feels like to be a giantess, and not just your run-of-the-mill foot-stomping Amazon, but the kind of person, had I been a man, the other men might have called gentle, an artistic sort, pained to the very core. The elegy for Market Town is the elegy for my youth, my girlhood, and the book I’m allowed to write but not publish. A sentence about one is a sentence about all. I’ve only recently realized I’ve been angry about this my entire life, and, if I’m honest with myself, I’ll say much of it started—and ended—that summer I ran for office in Market Town. That day in the garage, I took it out on Bunny.
“You know why they call you Bunny, don’t you,” I said. “It’s because of your urges.”
“You’re not answering the question.”
“You know how bunnies are,” I said. “They’ll hump your hand if they think you’re moving it just right.”
“Ginny,” he said. “Concentrate.”
“I’m not going to win the debate,” I said. “I’m not even going to attend the debate, so you can take your precious League of Women Voters and go suck some more dicks.”
Now Mary Claire was concerned. She turned from her shelf of neatly-organized epoxies and glues and said, “The League of Women Voters does not suck dicks.”
“Sure they do,” I said. “That’s all they do.”
“Ginny,” Mary Claire said. “You must be having a bad day.”
“Bad life,” I said. “Bad girl. Bad town. Get me out of here.”
“You’re tired,” Bunny said. “You’ll feel better tomorrow.”
But he was wrong. I did not feel better the next day, nor the day after, and my anger sustained me through two more weeks of Western Civ and my mother’s ultimate decision to send me back to college in Indiana before the city council election could even take place. Before the summer was over, my hostility drove me to working doubles at the Wendy’s Drive-Thru line where, it was said, I could assemble a single with cheese faster than anybody in the entire history of the store. My name stayed on the ballot, however, and a few people voted for me. Back in college for my senior year, I called the Market Town Election Board for the exact tallies, and, it turned out, I received exactly seven votes. Bunny and Mary Claire, I was sure, still had a soft spot for my candidacy and could not resist checking the box next to my name. Since my mother told me she did not vote, I chalked up four of the five remaining votes to two particular Wendy’s co-workers and two of my high school classmates living out some suburban nightmare in Market Town. The seventh vote I couldn’t figure, though I imagined, at times, it was Joey Mullins, finally having passed his drug test, back in shape after rehab and ready to move back to Hollywood where he’d be able to forget about Market Town and move on with his life for good.