“And she has dessert,” Jill said.
“Cheesecake,” Amy added. “She always brings cheesecake.”
Snow White said, “Whose turn is it to choose the next book?” Turning to Olivia, she added, “We take turns choosing the book every month.”
Olivia looked around. The book discussion was over already?
“Like I chose Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus,” Snow White said.
“Which sucked,” Jill said.
“She chose a book about sex abuse that was so depressing!”
“Bastard Out of Carolina,” Jill said to Olivia, as if somehow they were on the same wavelength. “Didn’t it win the Pulitzer Prize or something?”
“I’m not sure,” Olivia said. Why did this woman think she and Olivia were so alike? Is this what I’ve become? Olivia wondered. A comrade in abandoned womanhood? Someone who reads the book review alone at night, wears sexy clothes to the supermarket, is desperately needy?
Snow White continued, “And Amy had us read Prozac Nation, which was a real eye-opener.”
“So now we’re all on Prozac,” Jill said to Olivia in that same confidante’s voice.
“What do you like to read?” Snow White asked Olivia.
Olivia wanted to tell them about Ted Bundy and Charles Manson and some woman in Washington State who tried to kill her daughters because she loved a man who didn’t want children. But she knew that if she opened her mouth to speak, she would cry instead. She would cry because these women were all friends and she had lost her best friend to love and domesticity, because the only title that she could come up with was Drinking: A Love Story and that seemed like the only safe love story there was; because they had ex-husbands, at least, in Providence, in Finland—remarried or gay, they were out there. These women could touch them, call them, scream at them, look at them, hate them, and Olivia had lost the last piece of David, his voice, coiled tightly in plastic, safe and cozy as when they slept side by side spoon-fashion.
Crying had become so second nature to her that Olivia did not realize that she was indeed crying until Amy was by her side, stroking her hair and explaining with such hopelessness in her voice, Olivia cried even harder. “She just does this sometimes,” Amy said. “Out of the blue.”
The sliding glass door opened noisily, and a woman—Mimi, Olivia assumed—burst in. She was short and squat—like a Jeep, Olivia thought—with a head full of blond ringlets and a floral baby-doll dress. Unlike the others, who were tanned and well toned, Mimi had very white skin that was soft and unmuscled. Olivia decided she was more like a woman made of dough than a Jeep. A Pillsbury dough woman, a Michelin baby all grown up. She was also out of breath.
“You’re not going to believe this,” she said, gasping. “I was robbed.”
“I was, too!” Olivia blurted, jumping to her feet.
“You were?” Amy said. “When?”
Even though Amy had asked Olivia, Mimi answered.
“This afternoon. I went to get the cheesecake”—and here Olivia saw all of the others sneak a glance at each other, but Mimi didn’t seem to notice—“and when I got back, everything was gone.”
“Everything?” Snow White asked. “Like what?”
“You name it! Both TVs, the VCR, the stereo. And get this, selected CDs. They only took certain ones. They left all the classical and jazz and pretty much took everything else.” Her bottom lip quivered as she took a deep breath. “They took my Beatles Love Songs album. And you know that one—‘In My Life’? That was the song from our wedding and the song we played when Trey was being born. I mean, it was our defining song.”
Olivia closed her eyes to try to regain her own composure. It wouldn’t do to break down now, what with Mimi needing solace of her own. But she couldn’t stop thinking of her tape, discarded somewhere. She imagined it in the sand, seagulls uncoiling it. She imagined it tossed carelessly into a Dumpster beside garbage. Worse, she imagined Ruby in a dark basement with her loser friends, playing it and laughing. She could hear her: Hey, a dead guy’s voice. Cool.
“The weirdest thing,” Mimi was saying, “and this is what has me so upset—they took my wedding gown. I mean, it’s useless, right? It only means something to me. Not to Frank, that’s for sure. Just me. I mean, you can’t sell it or anything. It sat in the same dry cleaner’s bag since 1981, for Christ’s sake. You know?”
Mimi was crying now, and Olivia wondered if that was what always happened here, if it was a chance to cry with someone instead of by yourself, the way you usually did.
Amy let the other women console Mimi. She took Olivia by the elbow and pushed her into the galley kitchen.
“God,” Olivia said, forcing a laugh. “Thanks for the rescue. I feel like I’m on Geraldo or something. ‘Women Who Got Left Behind.’”
Amy refused even to smile. Or to let go of Olivia’s arm.