Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

Author:Jessica Knoll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books
Published: 2023-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

RUTH

Aspen

Winter 1974

We went to that glass bar, the one Tina told me about at the airport, and we ordered the most expensive bottle of champagne on the menu, celebrating… what, exactly? No one had clapped for Tina as she took her seat, not even me. I’d been too intimidated by the stony reception. Even the patient seemed disgruntled, like she wished she’d gotten a different doctor, one who’d written her a prescription and recommended more rest.

We sat by the window, though I suppose everywhere was a window. The floor, the walls, the bar, constructed in heavy double-paned glass. Between my rain boots, skiers cut a course of moguls, looking like astronauts on wooden runners with their orbed helmets and cylindrical goggles. The sun shattered the snow into white-hot shards, winnowing our pupils to specks of dirt in our bright eyes, and soon I was drunk and thinking about Julia Child, whose show my father and I watched religiously, and whose first cookbook was rejected by twenty-one male publishers before going on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. I felt energized and quickly reframed the whole humiliating morning as the sort of anachronistic anecdote all pioneering women eventually tell at dinner parties thrown in their honor.

We finished our first glasses with giddy speed, and in no time the waiter was by our side, topping us off, excitedly asking what else he could bring us. At the table next to ours, two couples were politely picking through a three-tiered seafood platter heaped with lobster and crab and oysters. My mouth watered.

“We want that,” Tina said, indicating with a jut of her chin.

The waiter glanced behind him. “That’s the large. For your party size, I’d recommend the small.”

“I’m not that hungry,” I added, though I hadn’t eaten breakfast. I had no idea how much a large seafood platter cost, but it had to be a lot.

Tina ignored us both. “Large, please.”

The waiter dipped his head deferentially and returned the deep emerald bottle of champagne to the ice bucket.

“My husband was allergic to seafood,” Tina said when we were alone again. “Sometimes I thought about getting a bunch of shrimp”—she mimed mincing them up—“and making a paste. Stirring it into his morning oatmeal.”

I stared at her. She was laughing, but she wasn’t kidding.

“I know you heard me crying last night,” Tina said. “You curled into me after.” She was wearing big diamond posts in her ears, and every time she tucked her hair behind her ears, as she did now, her lobes shot laser beams that forced me to turn away from her. “It was sweet,” I heard her say. Then, a little shyly, “Don’t you want to know why I was crying?”

I did, but still my stomach roiled with fear. Whatever Tina was about to tell me, I sensed it would change something between us. In my cowardice, I hedged, “I know you were nervous about today.”

Tina let her hair fall over her ears so that I could look at her painlessly. “I don’t cry when I’m nervous.

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