Bright Young Women(71)

We filled a bucket with hot soapy water and spent nearly two hours scrubbing at the blood that had congealed in the crevices of the bedframe. We took the cake out of the oven and jiggled it; it needed another twenty minutes. We got one new mattress upstairs and took the cake out again. This time it was ready. We let it cool on the counter while we loaded the other mattress onto our backs and huffed and puffed up the stairs. We made up the beds with the fresh linens, frosted the cake, and hung new curtains in room ten. I looked at the clock and could not believe when I saw it was four in the afternoon. My skin felt slick, and the back of my shirt was stiff with sweat that had dried, then gotten wet and dried again.

“Do you mind,” I asked Tina haltingly, “just hanging around while I shower?” I could not imagine doing it alone.

“Not at all,” she said.

“I’ll be quick,” I promised.

“Take the time you need.”

In the bathroom, I stood before Denise’s cubbyhole. Denise was a beauty junkie who always had the latest shampoo or hand lotion in her shower caddy. I took it into one of the stalls with me. She would hate for any of that to go to waste.

I turned on the shower as hot as it would go, and then I stood under the spray far too long, working Denise’s shampoo into my hair, lathering my knees and underarms with Denise’s shaving cream. It was something called Crazylegs, and I loved it so much I became a convert. When Johnson & Johnson discontinued it in 1986, it felt like another death.



* * *




I returned from the shower, pink skin wrapped in a bath towel, to find Tina sitting at my desk, paging through one of Denise’s old Cosmopolitans and scratching at her scalp. It was the first time I had ever seen her without something covering her head. I cleared my throat noisily to announce my arrival. Surely she hadn’t meant for me to see her without her hat of the day.

But Tina hardly glanced at me before she went back to turning the pages in the magazine. “Ruth found a cure for her acne in one of these things.” She ran her finger left to right, under the small print for a shampoo advertisement. “I think her stress eased considerably once she got out from under her mother’s roof, and that helped her skin clear up faster than any pill could. Still,” she said, sighing, “can’t hurt to keep an eye out for some miracle treatment, since no doctor in the world can figure out why it won’t grow back.” She was speaking about the twin bald patches on either side of her head, like she’d recently had a pair of devil horns surgically removed.

“What happened?” I asked, going over to my bureau and pulling open the drawer where I kept my undergarments. An unkind thought popped into my head—should I ask Tina to leave while I get dressed? The woman who had stayed and helped me ready The House, who’d stood guard while I showered, who was sitting there completely unarmed and exposed to me. Like some sort of bigot exposure therapy, I dropped my towel and went about my business the way I would with any other woman in the room.

“I pulled it out, actually,” Tina said. “The day Ruth didn’t come home. I was so out of my mind I just grabbed my hair in my fists, and I pulled so hard it came out at the roots.” She licked the pad of her thumb and flipped the page of the shampoo ad defeatedly. “One doctor said I traumatized the follicle. That it will grow again when it feels safe enough.” She laughed roughly at that word. Safe.

I tugged a sweater over my head and went down the hall without pants, going toward the back of the house until I reached Denise’s room, where I ducked under a thatch of black tape. I hoped they were there, what I was looking for, but if not, I knew where to buy them.

“This is a multivitamin Denise used to take,” I said to Tina when I came back into the room. “To help her hair and nails grow. She really needed it after her last breakup with Roger. She got so thin. Thinner than she got on any of the crazy diets she was always trying—not that she needed them, but she weighed herself multiple times a day and would panic if she gained as much as an ounce. It stressed her out so much, her hair started to fall out. She found this woman here, some sort of holistic person, who gave her this. I don’t know how it works, but it does. Denise had the best hair in the whole sorority.” I tossed the bottle underhand to Tina, who caught it in the cradle of her arms.

“Have you ever heard of anorexia?” Tina asked, examining the label on the bottle.

“The thing where women starve themselves?” I said in a dubious voice, shimmying a pair of jeans up my legs. “That wasn’t Denise,” I said naively. “She was just really careful about what she ate.”

Tina pressed her lips together, saying no more. Many years and Lifetime movies about the subject later, when eating disorders were so ubiquitous that my own daughter briefly battled one, I’d realize Tina had stopped herself from explaining to me that Denise was suffering from one too. That she’d spared me from thinking about Denise in any more pain than she’d already been in at the end of her life. Tina twisted the top off the bottle and spilled some of the thick white tablets into her palm, examining them more closely. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll definitely give these a try.”

“No,” I insisted. “Thank you. I never would have gotten all of this done on my own.” I reached for a hairbrush on the vanity near where Tina sat, and we made eye contact in the mirror. “And I want to say I’m sorry, Tina. For the things I said at the hotel. What I implied about your character. You’ve got it in spades.”