Bright Young Women
Jessica Knoll
For C—I couldn’t have written the last line without you.
PAMELA
Montclair, New Jersey
Day 15,825
You may not remember me, but I have never forgotten you, begins the letter written in the kind of cursive they don’t teach in schools anymore. I read the sentence twice in stinging astonishment. It’s been forty-three years since my brush with the man even the most reputable papers called the All-American Sex Killer, and my name has long since fallen to a footnote in the story.
I’d given the return address only a cursory glance before sliding a nail beneath the envelope’s gummed seam, but now I hold it at arm’s length and say the sender’s name out loud, emphatically, as though I’ve been asked to answer the same question twice by someone who definitely heard me the first time. The letter writer is wrong. I have never forgotten her either, though she is welded to a memory that I’ve often wished I could.
“You say something, hon?” My secretary has moonwalked her rolling chair away from her desk, and now she sits framed by my open office door with a solicitous tilt of her head. Janet calls me hon and sometimes kiddo, though she is only seven years older than I am. If anyone refers to her as my administrative assistant, she will press her lips together whitely. That’s the sort of current-climate pretension Janet doesn’t care for.
Janet watches me flip the navy-bordered note card, back to front, front to back, generating a slight wind that lifts my bangs from my forehead. I must look like I’m fanning myself, about to faint, because she hurries over and I feel her hand grazing my midback. She fumbles with her readers, which hang from her neck on a rhinestone-strung chain, then juts her sharp chin over my shoulder to read the outstanding summons.
“This is dated nearly three months ago,” I say with a ripple of rage. That the women who should be the first to know were always the last was the reason my doctor made me cut out salt for the better part of the eighties. “Why am I just seeing it now?” What if I’m too late?
Janet mean-mugs the date. February 12, 2021. “Maybe security flagged it.” She goes over to my desk and locates the envelope on top of my leather-looking-but-synthetically-priced desk pad. “Uh-huh.” She underlines the return address in the upper-left corner with a square nail. “Because it’s from Tallahassee. They would have flagged that for sure.”
“Shit,” I say insubstantially. I am standing there when, just like that night, my body begins to move without any conscious consent from my mind. I find that I am packing up for the day, though it’s just after lunch and I have mediation at four. “Shit,” I say again, because this tyrannous part of me has decided that I will not only be canceling my afternoon but I will also incur a no-show fee for tomorrow’s six a.m. spin class.
“What can I do for you?” Janet is regarding me with the combination of concern and resignation that I haven’t seen in a long time—the look people give you when the very worst has happened, and really, there isn’t anything anyone can do for you, for any of us, because some of us die early and inconveniently and there is no way to predict if it will be you next, and before you know it, mourner and comforter are staring dead-eyed into the abyss. The routine comes to me viscerally though it’s been eight presidential administrations. Three impeachments. One pandemic. The towers going down. Facebook. Tickle Me Elmo. Snapple iced tea. They never got to taste Snapple iced tea. But it didn’t happen in some bygone era either. If they had lived, they’d be the same age as Michelle Pfeiffer.
“I think I’m going to Tallahassee,” I say in disbelief.
Tallahassee, Florida
January 14, 1978
Seven hours before
On Saturday nights, we kept our doors open while we got ready. Girls went in one room wearing one thing and came out wearing something shorter. The hallways were as tight and restricted as the passageways on a navy ship, snarled with chatter about who was doing what and going where and with whom. Hair spray and nail polish fumed our personal ozone layer, the blast of blow-dryers raising the mercury four, sometimes five degrees on the analog thermometer mounted to the wall. We’d crack the windows for fresh air and mock the music coming from the bar next door; Saturday night was disco night, which was for old people. It was a statistical impossibility that something bad could happen with Barry Gibb cheeping in his far-reaching falsetto that we’d all live to see another day, but we are what mathematics models refer to as outliers.
A coy voice accompanied the patterning of knuckles on my door. “I think it might snow.” I looked up from the volunteer schedules papering my hand-me-down secretary’s desk to see Denise Andora standing on the threshold, hands clasped girlishly at her pelvis.
“Nice try.” I laughed. Denise was angling to borrow my shearling coat. Though the winter of 1978 had brought a deep freeze to the Panhandle that killed the azalea trees along the Georgia border, it was never cold enough to snow.
“Please, Pamela!” Denise put her hands together in prayer, repeating her plea over red fingertips with crescendoing urgency. “Please. Please. Please. Nothing I have goes.” She turned in place to prove her point. I only know the minute details of what she was wearing that night because later there was a description of her outfit in the paper: thin turtleneck tucked into snap-front jeans, suede belt and suede boots in matching chestnut brown, opal earrings, and a beloved silver charm bracelet. My best friend was approximately one hundred feet tall and weighed less than I did as a child, but by senior year I’d learned to manage my envy like a migraine. What triggered that star-seeing pain was looking too closely at Denise when she decided she needed attention from men.
“Don’t make me beg.” She stomped her foot a little. “Roger asked some of the girls if I was coming tonight.”
I put my pencil down. “Denise,” I admonished.
I’d long ago lost count of the number of times Denise and Roger had called it quits only to encounter each other out at night, however many warm beers and deep lovelorn glances it took to forgive the spiteful things they’d each said to and about the other, but this most recent split didn’t feel so much like a split as it did a severing with a dirty kitchen knife, quite literally infecting Denise, who vomited everything she ate for nearly a week and had to be briefly admitted to the hospital for dehydration. When I picked her up at the curb, she swore Roger was out of her system for good. I flushed twice for good measure, she’d said, laughing feebly as I helped her out of the hospital-mandated wheelchair and into the passenger seat of the car.
Denise shrugged now with sudden, suspicious indifference, sauntering over to my window. “It’s only a few blocks to Turq House. On the night they’re calling for three inches of snow. I’ll be a little cold but”—she swung the lock lever and pushed her palms against the glass, leaving behind prints that would soon have no living match—“maybe Roger will volunteer to warm me up.” She faced me, shoulders thrust back in the frostbitten room. Unless her parents were coming to visit for the weekend, Denise’s bra remained collecting pills in her top drawer.
I could feel my willpower eroding. “Do you promise to get it dry-cleaned after?”