Bright Young Women(33)

Tina slammed on the brakes as a fox dashed across the road. I chose to save the meatballs, and my purse tipped over, its contents spilling all over the textbooks at my feet.

“Are you okay?” Tina gasped, setting her hand on my wrist. I adjusted the bowl of meatballs in such a way that I shook her off without having to actually shake her off.

“Fine.”

“Sorry,” Tina said, whether for slamming on the brakes or for touching me, I couldn’t be sure.

We parked at the curb to Frances’s house and Tina shut off the engine, staring as the others hurried from their cars to the front door, jackets drawn over their heads against that infinite mist. “Thank God for Frances and Irene. They’re really all I have.”

“Irene?” I repeated, confused. “Who is Irene?”

Instead of answering, Tina turned to survey me as she unfastened her seat belt. Whatever test was administered, I failed, because Tina’s tone suddenly turned vague. “Just another friend of mine.”



* * *




That night, the chalkboard read I wish someone would say…

Tina added an amendment before anyone could answer. “Remember too that you can also say what you wish people would stop saying.”

Frances smiled in a way that suggested she and Tina had argued about how to phrase the prompt. “The prompts are meant to get you thinking about your loved one and your grief in a dynamic way,” Frances said, “but they aren’t ever meant to be prescriptive.” She turned to a woman in an old UCLA sweatshirt who was on her third meatball. They’d been a huge hit. “Sharon, would you like to start us off tonight?”

Around the circle we went. Sharon wished people would stop reminding her that she was still young enough to have another baby. “Maybe I don’t feel like having another baby. I already did it twice. It’s not exactly a day at the spa.”

I realized how eager I was to get to Tina, the one whose idea it was to adjust the night’s prompt. She was hugging her shins to her chest, chin on her knees, observing these angry women with obvious pleasure. At her turn, she didn’t adjust her position. Her chin kept scraping the tops of her jeans as she stared dreamily at the art on the wall and spoke in a serene voice. “I’m with Sharon a little. I wish people would stop telling me it’s time to move on. It’s the way they say it that I wish would stop, really. Almost like… congratulatory. It reminds me of the time I lost a lot of weight, and even the doctor was like, Good job, Tina, but enough is enough now. You don’t want to take it too far. But he was smiling. He approved. The first year after Ed died, I didn’t date. I didn’t put on lipstick. I didn’t show any interest in anyone. People were so damn proud of me. Look at Tina, who is so devastated by Ed’s death that she’s gotten ugly.” Tina paused so some of the women could laugh at the hilarious suggestion that she could ever be considered ugly. Tina frequently made references to how beautiful she was, but always in a way that suggested it was a defect, the way some women did when they’d gained weight. They were aware there was a problem, and they wanted you to know they were working to overcome it.

“Now we’re coming up on the second anniversary, and people are starting to say this to me,” Tina continued. “It’s time to move on. It’s the same way the doctor spoke to me. Like I’ve done a really pure job at grieving. And I wish they would stop, because it hasn’t felt like a job or like work at all, really. I have no interest in replacing Ed. I never want to be married again.”

“You don’t want children, then?” someone asked, and maybe it was just me, but I detected a note of envy, or at least longing.

“The more I understand, psychoanalytically, about my own life, the clearer I am about what its true purpose is. I can’t say for sure, because I’m not a mother myself, but all of you mean as much to me as I think a child would. Helping other women view their lives in a liberated way, so that they can make choices that make them happy instead of worrying about making all the people around them happy, that fulfills me.”

There was a long, poignant silence, and I wondered if everyone else was sitting there as ablaze with awe and yearning as I was. I couldn’t imagine a greater satisfaction than knowing you were doing exactly what you were put on this earth to do. I didn’t know what that thing was for me, only that I was fairly certain it had nothing to do with the life I would have had if I’d stayed married to CJ.



* * *




That night, when my mother picked me up, I was cool to her. The invitation for my father’s garden-naming ceremony was sitting in the passenger seat, as though my parents had been driving around together, discussing my problems and how to fix them. My mother would have been telling him that they’d tried it his way—the nice way—and look where it had gotten me.

“Your friend was quite nosy,” she said to me, breaking what was starting to feel like a standoff. Usually, I was the one to do it—I couldn’t stand her being upset with me—and it felt almost too easy to turn the tables on her. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t tried it before. “Martina, right?”

“She goes by Tina.”

“What happened to her? Why does she go?”

For a moment, I was tempted not to tell her. I didn’t think I could stomach her reaction. “Her husband died.”