The Itty Bitty Titty Committee

Knowing and admitting were two different things, and Jo had always been better at one of them.

She had the wrap dress on and was standing still in front of the mirror, which was the kind of mirror that showed you everything whether you had requested everything or not.

The dress was beautiful.

It had been beautiful on the hanger and it was beautiful now in the way that something could be beautiful and also completely wrong at the same time, which was a category of thing Jo understood but was not thinking about right now. Right now she was tilting her head slightly to the left, because sometimes a problem was an angle problem.

This was not an angle problem.

From the stall next to hers, through a wall thin enough to hear everything and thick enough to pretend you couldn’t, came the sound of a woman exhaling at a mirror. Short and specific. Jo knew that sound.

“This is an engineering problem,” the woman said. Not to Jo. Not to anyone. Just into the fitting room air.

“The dart placement assumes a load-bearing element that is not present.”

Jo looked at the curtain. “Load-bearing.”

A pause. “Sorry. I didn’t realize I was saying that out loud.”

“Don’t stop.”

From the other side, softer, thoughts arriving slightly ahead of words: “Mine has underwire.” A beat. “It’s a blouse. There is no reason for a blouse to have underwire.”

Jo put her hand over her mouth.

“Structural optimism,” the first voice said. Flat. Certain.

Then from the end stall, in the careful measured tone of someone who chose every word before it left: “I want to note that this entire section of the store is built on an aspirational premise that has no relationship to the actual range of human bodies present in this zip code.”

Jo laughed. Sharp, involuntary, not a performance. The kind that came out before she decided to let it.

Then the engineering voice. Then the blouse. Then the zip code woman, last and longest, a laugh that sounded like it had been waiting for the right reason and had finally found one.

Fifteen seconds. Four women in four separate stalls, laughing at the same thing, none of them able to see each other.

When it stopped the corridor was different.

“I’m putting this back,” the engineering voice said.

“Same.”

“Obviously.”

Jo looked at herself one last time. She took the dress off and hung it on the hook with the careful hands of someone making peace with something they’d already known. She did not think about why she had put it on in the first place.

“Same,” she said.

They came out of their stalls within a minute of each other.

The engineering voice was tall, visibly strong, with the kind of posture that was a decision. She had the dress folded over her arm with a precision that suggested she folded things correctly as a matter of principle, not effort.

The underwire blouse was shorter, a vintage pin on her jacket, a fabric swatch sticking out of her bag, her face in the middle of several things at once. She was looking back at her fitting room like she’d left something there, though she hadn’t. Her body was catching up with a brain that had already moved on, and this appeared to be a familiar arrangement.

The zip code woman was last. Items in a clean stack. She looked at all three of them with the particular, unhurried quality of someone taking inventory.

“The whole rack,” she said. “I checked before I came in. It’s a philosophy.”

“Their reviews say the same thing,” the fabric swatch said. “I read them last night.”

“And came in anyway,” Jo said.

“And came in anyway.”

“That’s hope. That’s the clinical definition.”

The engineering woman had counted the other returns on the rail without appearing to. “Seven,” she said. “Same section.”

They walked out together without deciding to. Past Brooke the sales associate, who was already moving toward them with the warm unstoppable energy of someone who believed in solutions.

“Did anything work out today?” Brooke asked. She meant it. That was the hard part about Brooke.

“The fitting rooms were life-changing,” Jo said.

Brooke looked at the four of them. At the items. She rallied. She was a rallier, which was different from a quitter and different again from someone who read a room.

“I can pull some other one.”

“We’re good,” the engineering woman said. A closed door. Not unkind.

Outside the light was doing something generous with the afternoon, the gold that cities got sometimes that made everything look like it was worth something.

The fabric swatch was looking for her sunglasses in a bag that held everything except them. She checked the same pocket twice.

“Left side,” the zip code woman said. Not looking.

The fabric swatch checked. Sunglasses. She put them on and looked at the zip code woman with an expression that couldn’t decide between grateful and suspicious.

“Lucky guess,” the zip code woman said.

The fabric swatch accepted this. She was, Jo would come to understand, a person who accepted a lot of things at face value because her brain was already somewhere else.

They stood in the natural pause of accidental encounters. Jo recognized it. The place where everyone picked back up their own life. She had stood at this exact junction many times and she was good at what came next: a graceful exit that left everyone feeling fine about it.

She didn’t make the exit.

“There should be a group chat,” she said instead.

“For what specifically,” the engineering woman said.

Jo gestured back at the store. At the philosophy. At seven dresses on a return rail.