The Itty Bitty Titty Committee

For two years, four women meet every Thursday night at Thessaly, a Greek restaurant on a block that is slowly changing around it.

Jo is a barista and standup comedian who has learned to make everything funny, including the things that aren’t — her mother, her fear of being known, the way she reaches for the joke before she can stop herself. Mara is an athletic trainer who has built her body into armor and is only beginning to learn what it costs to let people drive her to appointments, to send a meme when the morning is hard, to call someone from a parking lot and stay on the line. Lila is an indie designer who has spent thirty-two years being told she is scattered, dreamy, too much, and has just learned there is a name for the way her brain works, and that needing structure is engineering, not failure. Pri is a sociology PhD candidate who can explain human behavior with precision and understands almost none of her own, including why she takes things she could simply buy, and what she is trying to fill.

They play Hearts. They eat. They say the things they cannot say anywhere else. Over two years of Thursdays they tell each other about cancer diagnoses and failed job searches, about the man who doesn’t ask about the work, about what happened when she was twelve. The table holds all of it. The restaurant holds the table.

When Thessaly files for bankruptcy and closes its doors, the four women must reckon with what two years of Thursday nights have made them to each other, and who they will be without the room that held them.

The Itty Bitty Titty Committee is a novel about female friendship, the cost of being known, and the specific grief of losing a place that was yours.

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Chapter 1

The Fitting Room

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 very 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.

“Same,” she said.

They came out of their stalls within a minute of each other. 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. They stood in the natural pause of accidental encounters. Jo recognized it. The place where everyone picked back up their own life. 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.

“The Itty Bitty Titty Committee,” she said.

The pause before the laugh. Jo had built her whole life around that pause. The half-second of silence that meant something had landed.

The engineering woman laughed first. It surprised her. Jo could see the surprise move across her face before she could manage it.

“That is genuinely terrible,” the zip code woman said. Already smiling.

“The worst,” the fabric swatch said. Behind her enormous sunglasses she looked purely happy, the uncomplicated happiness of someone who had just found the right room. “What do we discuss.”

“Snacks,” Jo said. “Structural injustice. In that order.”

The zip code woman took her phone out. “Pri.”

“Jo.”

“Mara.” The engineering woman. Nothing added.

“Lila.” The fabric swatch said it while looking at the store window, where a mannequin wore the same wrap dress in a state of complete serenity. “She doesn’t know,” Lila said.

“She’s never been in there,” Jo said. “She has no idea.”

They passed phones around. Everyone typed their own name. They said goodbye the way you said goodbye when you weren’t sure if you’d talk to someone again. Warm enough to be true. Vague enough to be honest.

Jo stayed where she was. She had things to do. She was standing on a sidewalk watching three strangers walk away and it was not catching her up.

Then her phone went off. The group chat. Pri had named it before Mara had reached the end of the block.

The Itty Bitty Titty Committee.

From Mara: No.

From Lila: Yes.

Jo typed: It’s decided, Mara.

Three dots. A pause long enough to be a personality.

I know.

Jo put her phone in her pocket and went left, toward the coffee shop, toward the rest of her afternoon.

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