Bright Young Women(55)

“Do you think we can practice?” she asked me after we decided on a slim-fitted black wool sweater and tweed pencil skirt with a thick belt that made her waist look slimmer than it already was. “I’m too worked up to go to bed.”

“What do you need me to do?”

Tina went over to the desk area and dragged out the chair so that it was facing the foot of the bed. “You sit here,” she said. She perched on the edge of the bed and crossed her legs, hooking her hands around her knee. She was barefoot, wearing the tweed skirt and a lacy silk camisole. She’d packed the third floor of Frederick & Nelson but no bra. “So I’m the therapist and you’re the patient,” she explained. “And this is just pretend. I mean, you can say real stuff if you want, but you can also make it up.”

“Got it.”

“But also, just go along with what I say.”

I nodded, trying to keep a straight face. Tina was blushing, and it was very sweet.

“It’s stupid, but I have to introduce myself.”

I laughed. “Just go already!”

Tina seemed to hear herself at last, and she laughed a little too. She closed her eyes, inhaled deep, and dropped her shoulders on her long exhale. Her eyes opened, revealing a composed and capable woman. “Hi, Ruth. I’m Dr. Cannon. It’s nice to meet you.”

Dr. Cannon. How thrilling for her. I smiled widely. “It’s nice to meet you too, Dr. Cannon.”

“I understand you have been referred to me by your physician because you’ve been feeling depressed recently.”

“I have been feeling a bit down, yes.”

Tina nodded approvingly, as if to say, Good job playing along. “And how long have you been feeling like that?”

“Oh.” I worried my face with a hand, thinking. “Do you mean this time or last?”

“So you’ve had spells before?”

“I guess you could call them that.”

“Let’s talk about the first time.”

The room seemed to darken as I thought about the first time. “I was in high school.”

“Did anything happen to trigger it?”

I saw my sister-in-law’s face—her real face, features slack and helpless—and then I saw my father’s, his heartbroken horror. “I got in some trouble.”

“What sort of trouble?”

Tina had positioned the chair too close to the bed. I scooted back before our knees grazed. “It was on school grounds. My dad was a teacher there, and he tried to stick up for me, but, well… in the end it was best for everyone if I left.”

“That must have been devastating for you.”

“I guess,” I said disagreeably. I didn’t care for the word devastating. It implied a sort of wartime destruction, a razing to the ground, and I was made of stronger stuff than that. “I had a problem, and it was better for me to be someplace where I could get help, anyway.”

Tina didn’t bat an eye at that. “So you received professional care after that first spell?”

I realized I was sitting on my hands and that they were going numb. Here is where I should probably make something up, I thought, but my mind went blank with everything except the truth about the nine months I’d spent at Eastern State. I sat, tolerating the pins and needles in my fingertips and saying nothing for a long stretch of time.

“It’s okay to stop here for now,” Tina said. “Sometimes the only way to talk about a difficult event is to give ourselves permission to stop when it gets to be too much. Each time you go into it, the hope is that you push yourself a little further.”

I nodded, my eyes downcast, feeling exposed and a little resentful. Tina stretched her arms over her head with an extravagant yawn. “I’m finally tired now. Thanks, Ruth. You’ve saved me again.”



* * *




In the middle of the night, I awoke to the sound of Tina crying. She was on her side, facing away from me and trying to be quiet about it, but the sound was unmissable. I’d gone to bed regretting having shared so much with Tina, but a balance had been restored once again, both of us unmasked in our misery. Feeling something like kinship, I was lulled back to sleep.

I woke again from a disgusting dream. I was having sex with my brother, and I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t help feeling aroused. When I opened my eyes, I found that I was curled into Tina’s back, my knees in the crook of Tina’s knees, her backside nestled into my swollen pelvis. I’d been sleeping with my hands on either side of my face, squeezed into fists, my forehead pressed between Tina’s shoulder blades, like I was cold or ducking behind Tina for cover.

In the morning we were both serious and stiff. We showered and got ready in near silence. Tina wore a different outfit than the one we’d picked out the night before, a blue dress that was gorgeous but big in the bust. On the bed, she’d left the wool sweater and tweed pencil skirt, the thick black belt that had made a disappearing act of her waist.

“Black doesn’t wash you out the way it does most blondes,” Tina said with a wink, suggesting she was, of course, the exception to that rule. I was encouraged to catch a glimpse of her old cocky self, and while I wanted nothing more than to cloak myself in that heavy, heady tweed, I hesitated.

“You’re spending a lot of money on me,” I said.