Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner

I give you this opportunity to hurt me. Then Katherine would go back to her own life and Theresa would . . . Theresa would stay home. Of course. That was what she always did in the long run. She stayed home.
    She’d taken a teaching job near home in preference to one not far from Martin’s, even before she knew—or knew that she knew, as she now thought of it. What had been in her mind at the time was to show Martin that she was making no demands on him. That is she had thought she could go to him directly after school, that didn’t mean he had to be thinking the same thing. She could dash down directly on the subway. Or do whatever else he wanted her to do.
    From her seat on the front porch she watched Katherine glide up the walk as though it were the aisle of an airplane, then gracefullyrun up the front steps. Her father was at work; her mother had conveniently disappeared.
    “Tessie,” Katherine said, startling her slightly because she hadn’t heard the name in so long. “My God, you look beautiful! Mom prepared me for anything but this!”
    She smiled politely. Thinking how she wished she had told Martin her old name. Thinking that if Martin could see her now she might be able to enjoy the fact that she’d lost almost fifteen pounds in the week since she’d seen him or touched food. (They were making her drink water. If her mother tried to trick her by adding something to the water, she gagged. She was supposed to enter the hospital by Monday if she didn’t start eating.)
    “It’s not just the weight,” Katherine said. Katherine had been after her for years to lose weight. “It’s your face. You look so peaceful.”
    In some strange way it was true, of course. If in one brief chat with Martin Engle she’d been robbed of a future, she’d also been robbed of the tightrope she walked toward it.
    “What’s happening, Tessie?” Katherine asked. “They’re so worried about you.”
    “That’s because they’re afraid I’m physically ill,” she said calmly. “I’ve told them I’m not ill. I just don’t feel like eating.”
    “When do you think you’ll feel like eating?”
    “On the day when if I don’t start they’ll send me to the hospital.”
    Katherine smiled. “You make it sound so simple.”
    Are things really as simple as all that?
    Theresa shrugged.
    “Are you finished with school?” she asked politely.
    “Yes,” Katherine said.
    “Everything went all right?”
    “Fine,” Katherine said. “I think I’m going to take a Soc major with a Psych minor, but I’m not sure yet.”
    Theresa nodded.
    “You missed your graduation,” Katherine said.
    “It didn’t matter.”
    “You did graduate? Nothing went wrong with school?”
    “Nothing went wrong with school.”
    “Why do you say they’re only worried that you’re physically ill?” Katherine asked. “I think they care if you’re depressed, too.”
    “Well,” Theresa said, “I guess I’m depressed. So I guess they can care.”
    “Is the doctor giving you something for it?”
    “No.”
    “How come?”

“He doesn’t favor pills, and I don’t want them, and he was concerned about the effect without food.”
    “I have twenty different pills right in my bag,” Katherine said uncertainly. “If you change your mind.”
    Theresa was silent.
    “I guess,” Katherine said, “the truth is, I’m a little hurt. I want to help but I don’t know what’s wrong and I feel you don’t trust me enough to talk to me.”
    “But I am talking to you.”
    “But you haven’t told me what’s wrong.”
    “You haven’t asked me.” Not outright. She’d just been sort of fishing around. Never guessing anything to do with a man. None of them would.
    “What is it, Theresa?”
    “A man.”
    Katherine sighed. “How could I not have known? Nobody but men can do that to us, can they?”
    There was something at once repellent and seductive about the sentence. Katherine was offering her a haven. Membership in a club. A club where