She sunk down beside Olivia.
“You don’t understand,” Olivia said. “I would make a family for your baby. I would. And someone looking in the window at us would pause and smile and think we were happy.”
“You don’t give a shit about me,” Ruby said. “You’re using me.”
“You robbed me,” Olivia said, “and I took you in again. You had nowhere to go.”
“You cut a deal with my mother,” Ruby said, actually pointing a nail-bitten finger at Olivia. “I heard you tell Rachel you went and talked to them, so don’t deny it.”
She had heard. Olivia tried to catch her breath, but she only made pathetic little gasping noises.
“I didn’t cut a deal—” she began.
“She probably paid you to take the baby so she and Mr. Wonderful can live in peace.”
“Ruby,” Olivia said helplessly.
“Do you know what he does for a job?” Ruby was saying. “He works at EB. He builds nuclear submarines.” Then she added, “He hates me.”
Olivia took Ruby by the shoulders, her skin slippery with sweat beneath Olivia’s hands. “Listen,” Olivia said. “I didn’t cut a deal with them. I should have told you I talked to her. Okay? But I didn’t get money from them. The only person I cut a deal with is you.” Olivia waited for Ruby to consider this. “I had to be sure,” Olivia said. “I had to.”
Ruby slid out from under Olivia’s grasp.
“Maybe I can win Ben back,” she said. “Rachel says if I go there and go to that special school and work for the Gap and take good care of Sage, Ben will see what kind of person I am. He’ll see how desperate I was to almost give away our baby. He’ll love me again. He’ll know I wasn’t what he said. Cavalier.”
“Fine,” Olivia said, standing. Now she loomed over Ruby. She felt tall and thin and wise and lovely. “Go to San Francisco. But I can tell you something that Rachel neglected to tell you. You’re not going to be thinking about cute ideas for baby clothes or quirky names for colors. You’re going to be folding thousands of pairs of jeans. You’re going to be hanging up shirts and waiting on customers and cleaning out dressing rooms. Then you’re going to go home and clean shitty diapers and make bottles of formula and stay up all night with a crying baby. This isn’t a game, Ruby. This is life. And Doctor Rachel works fourteen, fifteen hours a day. She’s not going to be there holding your feet and giving you aromatherapy.”
“Fuck you,” Ruby said. She was too ungainly to get to her feet. Olivia had the advantage. “Just fuck you,” Ruby said again.
Even though the book they had read and discussed was The Beauty Myth, all of the women—except Mimi, who was away at Club Med—were in the bathroom, positioned around Olivia, who sat facing the mirror, a towel around her shoulders, her hair damp; they were trying to agree on a good haircut for her. Amy thought she should lose a good four inches and get a simple blunt cut; Jill, whose own sexy shag gave her a good deal of credibility, thought she should lose only an inch or two and layer the front; and Pam, whose Snow White hairstyle made Olivia afraid she might end up looking like a cartoon character, too—the Little Mermaid, the Wicked Stepmother?—was talking about bobs.
Olivia looked at herself, at her cheekbones and at her eyebrows, which were in need of a good waxing, and remembered the days she’d take a taxi to her hair salon on Madison Avenue and give herself over to first her colorist, Courtney, and then her hairstylist, Robert, and then to a woman named Iliana, who waxed her facial hair and popped her blackheads and dyed her eyelashes with a vegetable dye. It was another lifetime when Olivia would go there for all those hours and emerge so self-assured, all smooth-skinned and with blow-dried hair. She would step off the curb and raise her arm to stop a taxi, certain that she looked good; that when she got the food from the Chinese delivery boy that night, he would smile at her; that if she saw Winnie, her friend would tell her how great her haircut was; that David would want to go to bed early and make love.
“I’m a mess,” Olivia said. She said it without any self-pity; it was true.
“When’s the last time you got your hair cut?” Jill asked her, lifting the heavy ends, then shaking her head before she let them fall.
“I don’t even know,” Olivia said.
“You need some good layers around your face,” Jill said.
“Layers are so eighties,” Amy said. “I mean, they look good on you. But in general, they don’t work anymore.”
Pam shook her head. “Bobs are in now.”
“I know exactly what she needs.”
Olivia recognized Ruby’s voice before she saw her face in the mirror.
“Something hip,” Ruby continued. “The thing about Olivia is, she’s a lot hipper than her grieving-widow look lets on.”
The others stepped aside to make room for her. Olivia saw them exchange surprised looks.