First thing they do is take away her makeup. Apparently a girl can kill herself with a tube of lipstick or a wand of mascara, though Rita’s not sure how. She herself had swallowed a fistful of pills before slashing her wrists with a dull razor and it still wasn’t enough to kill the gray haze that had beehived her head since her kid died.
The funny farm, what her mother calls it. And it’s true that after her kid died, Rita got a little funny. Everyone said so. Not funny ha-ha but jangly as out-of-tune music. Polka dots and stripes, purple and orange. Everything tasted like ashes so she quit eating. She got smaller and smaller until the day in the produce aisle when she reached for an orange and her jeans fell clean off her. That was funny, her in her dingy underpants and hairy legs next to all those glistening bins of lemons and limes, so funny that she laughed/cried until her roommate Brenda showed up and got her committed.
At the funny farm, they give her a red pill in the morning and a blue one at night, little bullets that snuff out whatever’s funny in her. Rita’s dull as dirt now, mindless as an amoeba. She’s forgotten things, the day of the week and the names of the lipsticks she used to zip into coin pocket of her purse. It’s Saturday, Brenda says when she visits. Tells Rita all about a party she went to on Thursday where Steve you know the guy who orders Egg McMuffins with ketchup tried to get into her pants only she didn’t let him and now she’s sorry about it because Steve is hot and practically divorced. Rita doesn’t remember any Steve, only that she’d looked away just long enough to lipstick a glossy new mouth, the color of rusting blood, over her faded old one before punching in the next order.
Everyone at the funny farm tells Rita it’s not her fault her kid died: Suzie, the night nurse, who lullabies Rita into sleep after a bad dream and Loretta, Rita’s therapist. Rita and Loretta, pretty names that trail off into infinity, a figure eight lying on a couch. The only thing Rita remembers from tenth grade math class, that and the smell of tomato soup that wafted up from the cafeteria below.
Loretta tells her that time heals, that she’ll forget and move on. But what Rita wants is to remember, remember everything. That grief can be endless as infinity. That Baby Red is the name of the lipstick. That long enough is a millisecond when there’s an electric socket and a toddler with a fork scooting across the tile floor, hellbent on mischief. Giggling.
