Bright Young Women(7)
“I’ll be right back,” Bernadette said, and then she banged her elbow painfully on the doorframe as she turned to run down the hall.
As though she had been waiting for us to be alone, Denise’s hand shot straight up into the air, a stiff-armed salute. “Denise!” My laugh sounded deranged, even to my own ears. “You have to get dressed,” I told her. “It’s a Code Bra. There are policemen everywhere.”
I went over to her, and though I continued the ruse that she was only dreaming, I understood enough to cradle her in my arms. Her dark hair was studded with bits of bark, but unlike Jill’s and Eileen’s, it was dry and soft as I stroked it and told her again that she needed to dress. There was not a scratch on her face. It would have mattered to Denise that she left this earth unscathed.
I pushed the covers off her—she had to be hot—and found that although she still wore her favorite nightgown, her underwear was balled up on the floor, next to an overturned Clairol hair mist bottle. I did not understand how this was at all possible, but the nozzle top was gummed over with a dark substance and a clot of wiry dark hair, the kind of hair that gets stuck in your razor when you shave before going to the beach.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, nudging me out of the way, and that man was by my side again, the one who’d yelled at me. He dragged Denise out of the bed and onto the floor. I told him her name and that she had an allergy to latex. She had to be careful what paints she stored in the room because of it.
“That’s good to know,” he said, and I forgave him then, because he was so gentle with Denise as he pinched her nose and lowered his face over hers. She had fallen back asleep, but when she woke again, I would tell her that the man who’d saved her was handsome and not wearing a wedding ring. Was a medic the same thing as a doctor? Denise was the type to wind up with a doctor. Maybe this would be the story of how she met her husband, and someday soon I’d be telling it at her wedding.
January 15, 1978
3:39 a.m.
The police officer upstairs told us to go downstairs, and the police officer downstairs told us to go back upstairs. We encountered a different officer on the second floor, and this one told us in an exasperated voice that he really needed us to stay in one place and not disturb anything, and so I was the one to make the call. We’d sequester ourselves in my presidential palace.
My room had double floor-to-ceiling windows, directly above the white railing with the bronze Greek lettering. With the drapes buckled, the windows looked out over the white-bricked walkway where Denise had drawn our swirly Greek script in industrial chalk at the start of the semester.
Someone tugged on the drapery wand, and blue and red fulminated the room. “Another ambulance is here,” she really didn’t need to announce.
A few of the girls went over to the window to see for themselves. There must have been about thirty of us crammed in that room, and the smell—of night cream and beer breath—remains embedded in some primordial olfactory nerve of mine.
“Three ambulances.”
“Seven cop cars.”
“I count six.”
“Six. I feel so much better now.”
Bernadette and I fanned out, covering the room counter and clockwise, gathering as much information as we could. Who had seen something. Heard something. One of our pledges told me it was a burglary and we should check to see if the television was missing. Another insisted we’d been shot at by the Soviets, that the country was going to war. “I don’t think that’s what’s going on,” I said, giving her knee a little squeeze.
Bernadette and I huddled up to compare notes. Even in the mornings, in her bathrobe and single hair curler, she carefully margined her lips in glossy cherry lipstick. It was startling to see her pale mouth, and I could tell she was self-conscious to be without her signature color. She kept chewing on her bottom lip, flushing it momentarily with bright blood. She was still wearing the beaded blouse she’d started the night in. This turned out to be a crucial detail.
“I couldn’t get this off,” Bernadette said, indicating the button on her beaded blouse. I leaned in, pinching the fabric between my thumb and pointer finger. The crystal appliqué had gotten tangled in the buttonhole. “I knocked on Robbie’s door for help. She has those fabric scissors.” Robbie was a fashion merchandising major. “I remember her groaning that it was three in the morning. And I looked at her clock because I knew she was exaggerating. And I said it’s two thirty-five, Robbie. And she said do you want my help or not?” Bernadette exhaled, incredulous. “When did this happen? How did I not hear anything? She was fine. When I left. She was fine.”
“We’ll go see her at the hospital as soon as they let us out of here,” I promised her. Everything I promised that morning seemed possible now that I’d had the chance to conduct reconnaissance. A stranger had come into The House, likely to steal from us, and he’d encountered some of the girls and panicked. Home invasions were not an uncommon event. No one had intended us harm, and though Jill and Eileen had been bruised and bloodied, it was one of those things that looked worse than it was. Like when you nick the back of your ankle in the shower and it gushes with the force of a main artery. It had to be like that; otherwise, like Bernadette had just pointed out, we would have heard something. I dusted my hands on my thighs, my concerns allayed for the time being.