Outside the revolving door, the heat was dry and heavy.
“Hiiiiii,” Jennifer said. She was waiting just outside, glancing from her phone to the exit. “Oh my god,” she exclaimed. “You look amazing.”
“Thank you,” Ess said. “I feel amazing.”
“Well, wow,” Jen said.
“You look great,” Ess said.
Jen gave a modest head drop to the side. It was her trademark gesture when people told her how good she looked. Jen was beautiful and she’d never gained a pound and she hadn’t had plastic surgery and yet she looked at least fifteen years younger, thanks to her careful years of clean living. She was also an incredibly nice person, as if she knew she’d been blessed with these great looks but it wasn’t important to her. She was annoying, Ess remembered. That might have been one of the reasons they didn’t end up being the bestest of friends. Jen’s very control of her physical self was a sort of rebuke to others. If she could do it, why couldn’t you?
During the ride, the driver extolled the beauty of the Arizona landscape. They passed small, crumbling ranch houses with pokey horses in pens, then orange stucco developments, acres and acres of them reaching to the bottom of the mountains and then strip mall after strip mall until they came to an area where there were trees and green grass and sprinklers and upscale chain restaurants.
But when the car pulled into the entrance, Ess’s mood plummeted. It was so barren and concrete. Not at all what she’d been expecting.
The people at the ranch were smiling, though, and nice, like the people at the hospital. Here they all wore light-blue uniforms accented with a darker hue. This should have worked, but there was something off about the shades of blue. Instead of going together, they clashed.
The fact that she’d noticed reminded Ess of how out of place she felt.
But then the guy who took their luggage began joking and perhaps even flirting with her, and Ess remembered why she was here: to have fun.
She made a point of saying it out loud to the head therapists who asked them what their goals were for their stay. “I’m here to have fun!” Ess declared. This made the therapists smile and nod at each other in approval.
“I’m here to have fun, too,” Jennifer said.
As you can imagine, the two women’s ideas of fun were vastly different.
For the first two hours, Ess tried her best. There weren’t treatments in the afternoon, so she and Jen sat out by the pool centered in an expanse of cement painted in swirly colors. Nearby was a vending machine selling healthy snacks.
Jennifer pulled out a few small bills from her designer wallet and fed them into the machine. “Here.” She handed Ess a package of rice and dried tofu creations.
They lay down on chaises on either side of an umbrella.
“So,” Jen said. She pulled at the fluted cellophane containing raw pumpkin seeds. The seam gave way and a few seeds exploded onto Jen’s oiled belly. She carefully picked them up and placed them in a napkin. “So,” she repeated. “Tell me everything.”
Ess began. But maybe because there was no alcohol, Jen didn’t seem as interested as she would have in the past. In the past, she’d have been excited about Ess’s relationship trauma. In the past, nothing was more interesting and important than relationship trauma.
“Oh, Ess. I’m sorry,” Jen said.
“I know. It’s boring,” Ess said. “I mean, what did I expect? I never loved him.”
Jen nodded. She picked up the napkin with the seeds in it and got up to deposit it in a trash container stained with spilled iced tea.
“You know,” she began when she returned. “It might be that it wasn’t all Eddie’s fault.”
“What do you mean?” Ess was immediately on high alert.
Jen considered. What did she mean? What she wanted to say was that if Ess could admit to her duplicity in the situation—she did drink a bit too much, and she shouldn’t have married Eddie in the first place, and she needed to stop living her life relying on men—then perhaps she could learn from it. And become a better person.
But Jen realized that now was not the time. Instead, she became soothing. “I didn’t mean anything. Only that when I got sectionorced, I really had to take a look at myself and how I was to blame for some of it.”
Ess’s eyes narrowed. “Yes,” she said. “But that was over twenty years ago. And you cheated on your husband. And he caught you.”
“I just meant—” Jen broke off.
“I know, I know,” Ess said. “I’m tense. Maybe I need to lie down.”
They agreed to part ways for a nap.