Bright Young Women(81)
But I couldn’t do it. Not then, at least. I went upstairs and I packed my bags. It was never an option to say no to someone who needed my help.
* * *
Tina rested my journal in her lap, splayed open to my last line. We were lying in her four-poster bed, our feet intertwined, wearing sheer lace nightgowns. Tina’s mimosa-yellow kimono hung on one post, designed by Norman Norell and featured in the 1965 issue of Vogue. Every night, the housekeeper set out matching white cotton slippers on either side of the bed as if this were a hotel. Tina lived urbanely, like someone was following her around and writing a profile about her and she didn’t want to give them one negative thing to put in print.
“Well, I’m proud of you,” Tina said.
I rolled my eyes.
“You did the best you could do under those circumstances. You have a very superficial mother, Ruth, who is much more concerned about appearances than your well-being.”
I pictured my mother’s bowl haircut, her everyday walking shoes with the thick slabs of foam on the soles to protect her knees. I could not square her with such an impeachment. My mother, superficial? She terrified me, sure, but right then she was likely watching television all alone, minding the electricity bill by keeping a single lamp on, so unneeded by anyone in our dark, empty house.
“You feel bad for her,” Tina observed.
“She’s all alone now.”
“But it’s not your responsibility to make sure she’s okay. Nor was it to help your father out by succumbing to your mother’s wishes.”
I shrugged. Sure.
“Do you know what an empath is?”
I laughed, it was so obvious. “Someone with a lot of empathy?”
“It’s when you care so much about others that you take on their feelings and experience this compulsory urge to help them. A lot of women are like this, and society is all too happy to exploit it.” I must not have looked properly incensed, because Tina began listing, in an outraged tone, examples of how this quality had sent my life off the rails. “You ended up marrying someone you didn’t even want to marry to make your parents feel good! You dropped out of high school to go to a mental institution to appease them!”
I lifted my hands impotently. “I guess I just don’t see what you want me to do about it now.”
“I want you to get mad! You should be mad!”
I reached for my journal and snapped it shut. “I did get mad. You read it yourself.”
“And it lasted for approximately one evening, when you were seventeen years old, and then you just went along with everything your family wanted you to do.”
“You’re actually wrong,” I said, because she did not yet know how my father died. “And now I’m getting mad.” I reached over and shut off the lamp on the bedside table.
“How am I wrong?” Tina asked in the dark. “What happened? Why did your nephew say that thing about you hurting your dad’s feelings right before he died? Why did he say everyone hates you?”
I rolled onto my side, giving Tina my back. “Didn’t you tell me in Aspen that it’s okay to stop when it starts to feel like too much?” I turned my face so that I was speaking to the ceiling, so that the word carried. “Stop.” It didn’t escape me that she was perhaps the only person in my life I’d told to stop anything, and that not only did she listen to me, she didn’t make me feel bad about it either.
* * *
In the morning, fog shrouded the panoramic views from Tina’s bedroom windows, razing the Seattle skyline to the same elevation as Lake Washington. Tina was asleep, and I lay there watching the pink scar on her tan chest rise and fall—Nixon had marked her as his—wondering if I had the courage to wake her up the way she had been waking me up for the last few weeks.
“Sorry,” Tina said, her eyes still closed. “About last night. I shouldn’t have pushed you on it.”
“I have an idea,” I said, and she opened her eyes to hear it.
Tina had been hard at work, studying for her jurisprudence exam in August. I had relished having her big, gorgeous kitchen to myself for most of the day, with expensive gadgets and her Ruffoni copper cookware, in making her French press coffee and plating beautiful meals for her on her old wedding china.
When I was CJ’s wife, I didn’t think anything about making dinner and cleaning up after him. I bought cheap cuts of meat because even though CJ earned a decent living, he was frugal, and he had no palate. I made the things my father made for us at my mother and brother’s behest: casseroles and meat loaf with gravy, thick sloppy stuff that clung to CJ’s beard and neutered my appetite in more ways than one. But at Tina’s, I served fish and vegetables that were not previously frozen. I poured red wine into crystal glasses and lit candles that burned high between us.
I suggested we throw a dinner party.
“We can invite all the girls from the grief group,” I said. “And Frances, of course.”
Tina reached out and tucked my hair behind my ear with a closed-lip, conciliatory smile. “I’m not sure all the girls in the grief group would understand.” She gestured: me in her bed.
“But Janelle was here,” I protested. “You introduced me to Janelle.” I thought about Janelle more than I cared to admit. I wondered if Tina thought that people might have an easier time understanding her and Janelle because Janelle was composed and confident, because she wore nice jewelry and didn’t have acne pits in her cheeks.