I couldn’t sleep in Reva’s bed. It was a lost cause.
I decided to take a shower. I got up and undressed and turned the water on with a squelch, watched the bathroom fill with steam. Since I’d started sleeping all the time, my body had gotten very thin. My muscles had turned soft. I still looked good in clothes, but naked I looked fragile, weird. Protruding ribs, wrinkles around my hips, loose skin around my abdomen. My collarbones jutted out. My knees looked huge. I was all sharp corners at that point. Elbows, clavicles, hip points, the knobby vertebrae of my neck. My body was like a wooden sculpture in need of sanding. Reva would have been horrified to see me naked like that. “You look like a skeleton. You look like Kate Moss. No fair,” she would have said.
The one time Reva saw me completely naked had been at the Russian bathhouse on East Tenth Street. But that was a year and a half earlier, before I’d gone on my “sleep diet,” Reva would go on to call it. She had wanted to “drop weight” before going to a pool party in the Hamptons for the Fourth of July.
“I know it’s just water weight I’m sweating off,” Reva said. “But it’s a good quick fix.”
We went on the one day of the week the baths were open to women only. Most of the girls wore bikinis. Reva wore a one-piece bathing suit and wrapped a towel around her hips every time she stood up. It seemed silly to me. I went nude.
“What are you so uptight about, Reva?” I asked her while we were resting by the ice-water pool. “There aren’t any men around. Nobody’s ogling you.”
“It’s not about the men,” she said. “Women are so judgmental. They’re always comparing.”
“But why do you care? It’s not a contest.”
“Yes, it is. You just can’t see it because you’ve always been the winner.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. But I knew Reva was right. I was hot shit. People were always telling me I looked like Amber Valletta. Reva was pretty, too, of course. She looked like Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox put together. I didn’t tell her that then. She would have been prettier if she knew how to relax. “Chill,” I said. “It’s not that big a deal. You think people are going to judge you for not looking like a supermodel?”
“That’s usually the first judgment people make in this city.”
“What do you care what people think about you? New Yorkers are assholes.”
“I care, okay? I want to fit in. I want to have a nice life.”
“God, Reva. That’s pathetic.”
Then she got up and disappeared inside the eucalyptus mist in the steam room. It was a mild skirmish, one of hundreds about how arrogant I was for not counting my blessings. Oh, Reva.
The shower stall in her basement bathroom was small, the door clouded, gray glass. There was no soap, only a bottle of Prell. I washed my hair and stayed under the water until it ran cold. When I got out, I could hear the news blaring through the ceiling. The towels Reva had left for me on the sink were pink and seafoam green and smelled faintly of mildew. I rubbed the fog off the mirror and looked at myself again. My hair splatted against my neck. Maybe I should cut it even shorter, I thought. Maybe I would enjoy that. Boy cut. Gamine. I’d look like Edie Sedgwick. “You’d look like Charlize Theron,” Reva would have said. I wrapped the towel around myself and lay back down on the bed.
There were other things that might make me sad. I thought of Beaches, Steel Magnolias, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., River Phoenix dying on the sidewalk in front of the Viper Room, Sophie’s Choice, Ghost, E.T., Boyz n the Hood, AIDS, Anne Frank. Bambi was sad. An American Tail and The Land Before Time were sad. I thought of The Color Purple, when Nettie gets kicked out and has to leave Celie in that house, a slave to her abusive husband. “Nothing but death can keep me from her!” That was sad. That should have done it, but I couldn’t cry. None of that penetrated deep enough to press whatever button controlled my “outpouring of sorrow.”
But I kept trying.
I pictured the day of my father’s funeral—brushing my hair in the mirror in my black dress, picking at my cuticles until they bled, how my vision got blurry with tears walking down the stairs and I almost tripped, the streaks of autumn leaves blearing by as I drove my mother to the university chapel in her Trans Am, the space between us filling with tangled ribbons of pale blue smoke from her Virginia Slim, her saying not to open a window because the wind would mess up her hair.