I read the crossed-out prompts with renewed interest. I had been upset to miss the first two weeks, but I had to admit I was relieved that I didn’t need to discuss my answer to the second one with the group. My father, whom I loved more than anything in this world, had made me very angry right before he died.
Then Frances said, “Ruth, I’d like you to answer the first two prompts in a journal entry, and we can discuss them privately over the next few weeks.”
Homework. Great.
The prompt for that evening read: My support system includes… Frances asked the woman to her left to start it off. She had big white teeth and a small, pointy nose, mere slits for nostrils. I found myself feeling concerned for her. How did she breathe through nostrils that narrow? She was already clutching a tissue in her hand as she started to talk about her sister, who had lost a baby in her sixth month of pregnancy and admitted to her recently that she was relieved because it meant she could continue with nursing school unencumbered.
At seventeen weeks, a baby is the size of a turnip. My sister-in-law told me this; personally, I couldn’t care less about pregnancy. The woman with the whittled nostrils had lost a turnip and I had lost my dad, who took me to see the debut of women’s speed skating at the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley when I was nine. Helga Haase of Germany had won, and she was signing programs after the competition in the parking lot at the same time as the men’s alpine ski racing event, and even though my brother whined and begged and called me a Nazi for wanting to meet her, my father waited with me in the parking lot to get her autograph. This is important to your sister, he had said in that way of his that was authoritative but also persuasive at your most empathetic level. All right, my brother had said, sighing, and then he’d waited without complaint.
I thought I was going to meet women who had lost wonderful, terrible people, not turnips. But then the woman with the claw marks returned to the room with two Band-Aids on her chest and declared, “Your sister is a real piece of work, Margaret.” She plopped back down in the beanbag and continued with effusive familiarity, “You’ve got to stop minimizing your pain in service of her! She lost a fetus, and you lost a three-year-old with special needs who required your undivided attention at all hours. You should not have to deny the magnitude of your loss to make her feel seen.”
I realized my misunderstanding with a sharp intake of breath. The woman with the big teeth and narrow nostrils—Margaret—wasn’t there because her sister had miscarried a turnip. Margaret had lost a three-year-old and not died herself. I took her in again, this time with awe and extreme hope, remembering she had been laughing just before we started.
“Tina brings up a good point,” Frances said, giving the injured woman a name and such a smile that it was instantly clear Tina was her favorite. “Which is that members of our support team don’t need to understand every dark corner of our grief in order to provide us support.”
Tina caught me looking at her and smirked, as if to say, I was right. I looked away quickly, the tips of my ears hot.
Frances talked more about doing the work of building a support system. We talked about work so much in that room. Healing was work, a job, something to dread and grouse about but necessary in order to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. Frances said that a good support system included people who were willing to listen to you and who would not judge you for anything you were feeling, even if your feelings were provocative. I couldn’t be sure, because I was too afraid to get caught looking again, but I sensed Tina staring at me when Frances said that part.
“I had complicated feelings about my husband’s passing,” Tina piped in. “Unlike Frances’s husband, mine was not a good man. But he was beloved by the community, and so there weren’t a whole lot of people who wanted to hear me talk about what he was really like behind closed doors. I had to do the work of going out and finding the people who wouldn’t try and convince me that I was to blame.”
Tina had been in a bad marriage, and so had I. I was divorced. This seemed to matter somehow.
When it was my turn to talk about my support system, I led with my ex-husband. I didn’t want the women to get the wrong idea about me. I was having a bad breakout, but I didn’t always look like this. Someone had married me and had sex with me. “We had a lot of problems in our marriage,” I said, leaving out the part that my ex-husband was having an affair. I didn’t need them thinking, Well, of course he did, can you imagine waking up to that face without makeup in the morning? “But we still care about each other. He’s still a part of my life. He’s helping me out with something that’s important to me right now.”
From Tina, a loud huh.
My pulse quickened in a way that was not unwelcome. Tina had this way of staring at you while you spoke, like she wasn’t at all listening to what you were saying and instead was trying to figure out what you weren’t saying. It had to have been why every woman who spoke to her came away with cheeks flaming, feeling unbelievably exposed.
But when I met her eye, Tina only nodded firmly, showing her approval. “I think it’s all very modern.”
* * *
The session came to a close, and everyone pitched in, bringing empty mugs and leftover cookies into the kitchen, where there was more art. I’d never seen art in a kitchen before, or a pink-and-purple rug. The offending black cat was curled up on a stack of New Yorkers on the kitchen table, and the women fawned over him, cooing. Why’d you scratch Tina, Nixon?
Frances touched me on the shoulder. “Don’t go yet, Ruth. I have something for you.”
The other women started to disperse, but Tina stuck around, scratching Nixon under his chin, telling him she forgave him for what he’d done to her.
“He got his name because he’s a thief,” Tina explained. “He steals socks and panties from the laundry bin.” At this charge, Nixon yawned. Tina purred, “You’re a panty crook, aren’t you, Nixon?”
I felt tongue-tied and hideous in the abominable kitchen lighting. If I could see Tina so clearly as to count the freckles on her nose, then surely she could see the peach-hued scales of my foundation, the mounds of pus that throbbed like sore muscles. Something I did in those situations was raise my eyebrows and frown at the same time. I’d practiced many an expression in the mirror, turning my face from side to side, trying to land on one that hid the bumps on my forehead and the ditches in my chin. This combination was the most effective, but it made me look insane. Tina glanced back at me, saw me making that face, and nodded as though that were exactly the right way to look.
“It’s weird because you think you’re going to come here and you’re going to get advice, and then if you just follow that advice, it will get better. Instead, what you learn is how to take responsibility for it.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. “Take responsibility for what?”
“Your own feelings.”
I was annoyed with her fresh California-girl face then, her slender fingers on Nixon’s soft fur. “But what do I have to take responsibility for, exactly?”
“Talk to me in a year,” Tina said in a cloying voice that was meant for the cat. “Right, Nixon?” She kissed him on the head. She turned her face and looked up at me, her cheek resting on Nixon’s cheek. “You’ll see what I mean then. This is my second cycle. I’m infatuated with the process. I’m studying to get my license. This counts as my work experience.”
Frances reappeared holding a leather diary in her hand. “Oh, Nixon!” she cried when she saw Tina cheek to cheek with him. “You’re lucky Tina has such a generous heart.” She handed me the diary. “I wrote down the first two prompts for you so that you remember them. Try and respond to the first one between now and next week.”