Bunny and Andrea meet up on the lunch line where Andrea recounts her morning session with Dr. Fitzgerald. “I’m a changed woman.” Andrea laughs. Then, she elbows Bunny to look at Nina as she cuts across the dining room to where Antoine is leaning up against the far wall. Nina’s pink sweater, cropped short, skims the waistband of her red skirt; a waistband that has been folded over four or five times, the way, Andrea remembers, at the end of the day, she, like all the Catholic school girls, would roll up the waistbands of their plaid, pleated skirts. Nina’s hemline lands mid-to-upper thigh. Her legs are bare and on her feet are black flats with the kind of pointed toes that generally complement stiletto heels. Nina got the shoes on eBay where, she’d told Bunny, she buys all of her clothes, which are, for the most part, vintage. Circa 1960s. Early 1960s. Mod, not hippie, and she does, somewhat, resemble the iconic model of that era, except Twiggy was fatter than Nina is. Sometimes, Nina and Bunny talk about clothing and fashion.
“Ten to one,” Andrea says, “she’s not wearing panties.”
After high school, instead of getting a job or traveling cross-country to find herself or going to a normal college, Nina went to Bible college because her mother is one of those whack-a-doodle Born Agains who rely on prayer to fix everything, and if only Nina would ask Jesus for help, she’d be fixed, too. “Like that time with my car,” her mother repeated the story ad nauseam, about how one night her car broke down on a lonely stretch of road, how the battery on her cell phone had run dry, but she wasn’t afraid. She knew exactly what to do. She prayed. She prayed to Jesus to fix her car, and apparently she caught Jesus at a moment when He wasn’t particularly busy answering the prayers of people who were starving or dying or suffering in any of the multitude of ways that genuine suffering exists, because, on the next try, the post-prayer turn of the key in the ignition, her car started up, the motor purring like a cat.
Nina makes no secret of her attraction to Antoine. It’s likely that most women here would be attracted to Antoine except for the fact that most of the women here no longer have a libido. Antoine is from Haiti. Port-au-Prince, a place that sounds as if it suits him because his bearing is regal; tall, muscular, a raised tilt to his jaw. Looking up at him, Nina twists a lock of hair around her finger, and Andrea says to Bunny, “He’d split her open like a melon.”
For the record: because it’s impossible for a cat to have a personal relationship with Jesus, cats are barred entry to the Kingdom of Heaven. This is true of all animals except horses. There are horses in heaven because horses are needed to pull the chariots.