I returned from the shower, pink skin wrapped in a bath towel, to find Tina sitting at my desk, paging through one of Denise’s old Cosmopolitans and scratching at her scalp. It was the first time I had ever seen her without something covering her head. I cleared my throat noisily to announce my arrival. Surely she hadn’t meant for me to see her without her hat of the day.
But Tina hardly glanced at me before she went back to turning the pages in the magazine. “Ruth found a cure for her acne in one of these things.” She ran her finger left to right, under the small print for a shampoo advertisement. “I think her stress eased considerably once she got out from under her mother’s roof, and that helped her skin clear up faster than any pill could. Still,” she said, sighing, “can’t hurt to keep an eye out for some miracle treatment, since no doctor in the world can figure out why it won’t grow back.” She was speaking about the twin bald patches on either side of her head, like she’d recently had a pair of devil horns surgically removed.
“What happened?” I asked, going over to my bureau and pulling open the drawer where I kept my undergarments. An unkind thought popped into my head—should I ask Tina to leave while I get dressed? The woman who had stayed and helped me ready The House, who’d stood guard while I showered, who was sitting there completely unarmed and exposed to me. Like some sort of bigot exposure therapy, I dropped my towel and went about my business the way I would with any other woman in the room.
“I pulled it out, actually,” Tina said. “The day Ruth didn’t come home. I was so out of my mind I just grabbed my hair in my fists, and I pulled so hard it came out at the roots.” She licked the pad of her thumb and flipped the page of the shampoo ad defeatedly. “One doctor said I traumatized the follicle. That it will grow again when it feels safe enough.” She laughed roughly at that word. Safe.
I tugged a sweater over my head and went down the hall without pants, going toward the back of the house until I reached Denise’s room, where I ducked under a thatch of black tape. I hoped they were there, what I was looking for, but if not, I knew where to buy them.
“This is a multivitamin Denise used to take,” I said to Tina when I came back into the room. “To help her hair and nails grow. She really needed it after her last breakup with Roger. She got so thin. Thinner than she got on any of the crazy diets she was always trying—not that she needed them, but she weighed herself multiple times a day and would panic if she gained as much as an ounce. It stressed her out so much, her hair started to fall out. She found this woman here, some sort of holistic person, who gave her this. I don’t know how it works, but it does. Denise had the best hair in the whole sorority.” I tossed the bottle underhand to Tina, who caught it in the cradle of her arms.
“Have you ever heard of anorexia?” Tina asked, examining the label on the bottle.
“The thing where women starve themselves?” I said in a dubious voice, shimmying a pair of jeans up my legs. “That wasn’t Denise,” I said naively. “She was just really careful about what she ate.”
Tina pressed her lips together, saying no more. Many years and Lifetime movies about the subject later, when eating disorders were so ubiquitous that my own daughter briefly battled one, I’d realize Tina had stopped herself from explaining to me that Denise was suffering from one too. That she’d spared me from thinking about Denise in any more pain than she’d already been in at the end of her life. Tina twisted the top off the bottle and spilled some of the thick white tablets into her palm, examining them more closely. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll definitely give these a try.”
“No,” I insisted. “Thank you. I never would have gotten all of this done on my own.” I reached for a hairbrush on the vanity near where Tina sat, and we made eye contact in the mirror. “And I want to say I’m sorry, Tina. For the things I said at the hotel. What I implied about your character. You’ve got it in spades.”
Tina smiled at me in the mirror. “I’ll have you know this is a very satisfying moment for me. I live to prove people wrong.”
I raised my eyebrows agreeably. “I know exactly what you mean.” We shared a laugh. I started for the door as I dragged my brush through my wet hair. “I don’t want to keep you any longer.”
“You’re sure?”
“The girls are supposed to arrive around five. I’ll survive the next fifteen minutes on my own.”
Tina nodded. All right then. I walked her down the stairs and to the front door.
“Call me if you need anything,” Tina said.
“I’ll let you know when I hear from Carl,” I told her.
Tina and I nodded at each other in this professional way that didn’t suit the new bounds of our relationship. Which was what, exactly? Not friendship. What we had was sturdier than that, able to sustain a sort of acrimony that friendship could not.
It was more like sisterhood, I realized, than anything I’d experienced under this roof. Because I hadn’t chosen Tina, hadn’t vetted her like I had members of this chapter, and yet we were fated to go through life together connected by spilled blood. I stepped forward and hugged her. Tina’s hands dangled lifelessly at her sides at first. Later she would tell me she often left places in a rush, trying to spare other women that awkward beat when they wondered if they could hug her without the gesture being misinterpreted. Eventually, I felt her arms hook around me, loosely, as though giving me the option to break free at any time.
* * *
After Tina left, I went into the kitchen to cut the cake and go through the mail. I didn’t even want to think about how many thank-you cards I had to write to all the people who had reached out and offered their thoughts and prayers.
There was a kind note from an alumna in Adrian, Michigan, who told me about the successful pecan sale she had hosted, netting several thousand dollars that she’d donated to her local battered women’s shelter under our chapter’s name. There was a letter from a man in New Hampshire who had read about what happened to us and, citing a statistical increase in violent crimes against women, suggested we speak to our local precinct about hosting a handgun training session for women. If they didn’t have the manpower, he was happy to provide his services. He had an army friend in Pensacola he’d been meaning to visit. Even to that derangement I would eventually reply, thanking him for the generous offer.
I came to the next piece of mail, showing a return address in Fort Lauderdale, directed to the care of Mrs. Pamela Armstrong. How odd, I thought. Armstrong was Brian’s last name. It was like a window into the impending future, and in a flash I saw the next ten years of my life with Brian, in a Florida kitchen, preparing an after-school snack for the kids who were coming through the door and calling out to me at that very moment.
“Hello?” came a tentative voice from the back of the house. My sisters had arrived.
“In the kitchen!” I hollered, slipping a butter knife under the gold-embossed seal and removing the typed letter on official government letterhead. “Dear Mrs. Armstrong,” it read. “We regret to inform you—”
“Smells good in here!”
“It’s freezing. Let’s get the heat on!”
“Look at this!” Whoever said that had discovered the snuggery of sleeping bags in the rec room.
The heat kicked on with a clang, and a Pavlovian sweat beaded my upper lip. I was still flushed from my hot shower, and the document in my hands had taken on the degree of tinder. The victims’ assistance committee had reviewed our claim and found us “ineligible for financial restitution due to a sexual relationship exclusion in the eligibility requirements, foreclosing recovery for claimants found to contribute to their own injuries.” They sent along their deepest sympathies for our terrible ordeal, but it was their elected duty to protect the program. The rules were the rules.
RUTH
Issaquah
Winter 1974