The Wednesday Sisters (10 page)

E
VEN AFTER WE PILED
into Ally’s Nova the next morning, Linda remained mum about our destination. “Special outing, nine a.m., no excuses. I’ve got a sitter and Ally will drive” was all she’d said on the phone the night before, and this morning all we got was “Turn right here, then right again at the corner.” On University, we crossed over the freeway into East Palo Alto, then right again on the frontage road. And let’s just say you could have knocked us all over with a light breeze when we made a quick right into the parking lot.

“A funeral parlor?” Kath said. “You’re taking us to a wake?”

We stepped through a hushed entryway into a single large room, rectangular and completely silent. The room was split by a center aisle, with slipcovered folding chairs on either side and carpet that was a deep, dark red.

“In case there’s some spillage?” I whispered, and we laughed uneasily.

The room was lined with pots of lilies, roses, and freesia, fragrant flowers that did not quite cover a pinch of formaldehyde, a reminder of dead frogs laid out on lab tables and awkward teenagers thrusting frog guts on tweezers into each others’ faces. At the front of the room stood an ornate coffin, carved and dark, its lid ominously closed.

A man in a somber suit—vintage funeral-parlor director—stepped through a side door near the coffin and called a startlingly cheery hello to Linda, who introduced him as a friend of Jeff’s and hers.

“Don’t worry, there’s no dead body in the coffin,” she said to us as we approached it. “That isn’t the point.”

“So there is a point here?” Brett said.

“For you, Brett,” Linda said. “Especially for you.”

The director smiled, nothing somber or sympathetic about him.

“This is one of our best models, a toe pincher,” he said. Its shape rather more diamond than rectangular, with the head pinched in, the toes even more so, Count Dracula–like. He pointed out its special features: the mahogany carved in crosses and grapevines (all hand-polished, which gave it that luster); the Last Supper depicted on the handle backplates and pietàs at the corners, all in antique gold. He opened the head half of the lid to reveal a diamond-shaped, pleated center panel on the lid, the entire interior done in beige velvet “with full-shirr roll and throwout, and matching pleated pillow.” He asked us to knock on the side door when we were finished. No one would bother us until then.

Almost before he was gone, Linda was saying, “Okay, you first, Brett. Climb in.”

“Climb in?!”

“Into the coffin.”

“Why?”

“Brett,” Linda said. “I know you always know everything, but trust me this once.”

“But I’ll get it dirty, for one thing.”

Music began to pipe gently through the speakers, a sad trumpet solo at first, joined shortly by other instruments. An oboe. A violin.

“Take your shoes off,” Linda said. “Take your shoes off and climb in. Frankie can be next, then Ally and Kath and me. Because that’s the order in which we’re going to be published.”

That, of course, started a flurry of protests. Brett didn’t even want to be published, for one thing, and none of us believed Linda would be last. “You’re just putting yourself last to be polite, you know you are,” Kath said, and Linda said of course she was, but what did it matter?

“What does that have to do with a coffin, anyway?” Brett asked.

“Just get in, Brett,” Linda insisted.

She opened the other half of the lid to make it easier, and Brett finally skinned her shoes off and climbed in. At Linda’s direction, she lay back on the pillow and closed her eyes. The room was completely silent for a moment, even the trumpet music ceasing, a short pause before the next piece of music began.

“Now,” Linda said. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I do not want to be in this coffin,” Brett said.

“Because?”

“Because I don’t want to be dead. Because I have my children to raise, for one thing. What would Sarah and Mark do without me?”

“Okay, so now imagine your kids are grown and you’re old and you’ve been sick and in pain and you
are
ready to die. You’re dead, in fact. You’re ninety years old and your children are in their sixties, they can survive without you, and let’s say Chip bit the dust with you, you’d turned your home into an old folks’ laboratory, and,
drat,
someone mixed something with something they shouldn’t have and blew the whole place up.”

Brett bolted upright, startling us, looking directly at Linda.

“You can’t be sitting up when you’re dead, just forget about that,” Linda said, setting a hand on Brett’s chest, trying to coax her to lie back on the velvet pillow again. “And even if you manage to die with your eyes open, they’ll be closed by the time you’re where you are now.”

Brett gripped the sides of the coffin, but she did lie back, she did close her eyes. She even folded her hands at her stomach.

I wondered if they would take her gloves off when she was really dead.

“Double funeral here, you and Chip both,” Linda continued. “You don’t even have to worry about leaving him behind. So here’s the thing.” She closed the bottom half of the coffin so that Brett appeared only from the waist up. “Thirteen brilliant novels blew up with you. All stuck in a drawer along with one remarkable essay about the lunar landing that was never published because you never sent it out.”

The thought of that passed across Brett’s thin little freckled face like the shadow of the landing module as it approached the moon. And as Linda closed the other half of the coffin lid, concealing Brett in its darkness, I could see the same shadow passing in her face, and in Ally’s, and in Kath’s.

“No chance for posthumous publication, even,” I said.

“No daughter finding the manuscripts and sending them off to New York,” Kath said. “No, ma’am.”

“They’re gone. That’s it. Heavens to Betsy, that’s the end of you, the end of everything you might have been, everyone you might have touched with your work.”

I wondered if Brett could hear us, or if the inside of that coffin was as quiet as death.

Linda opened the lid again, finally, and Brett sat up.

“You’re brilliant, Brett,” Linda said. “If you can’t do this, how are the rest of us supposed to have any hope?” She was talking about Brett’s writing, but she meant more than that. She meant
How are the rest of us supposed to have any hope of becoming whoever it is we’re meant to be?

She pulled a camera from her purse and directed Brett to lie down for another minute. “I’m not letting you forget this moment,” she said.

We all took our turns in the coffin that morning, one by one shedding our shoes and confronting our futures, our mortality, our need. Linda took a photograph of each of us—to remind us when the inevitable forgetting began, she said—and when her turn came, I took a shot of her. We would put the photos someplace where we would see them every day, we agreed.

For me, there was a . . . well, a joy, really, in climbing back out of that soft beige velvet, like being reborn. And I said—I don’t even know why I said it—that here we had the camera and this lovely setting. “It’s high time we had a photograph of the five of us together,” I said. “And what better occasion than upon our arising from the dead?”

We were all laughing as we knocked on the director’s door, all giddy. He changed the music (to something more appropriate to the occasion, he said), and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic” blared from the speakers as if we were in a high school gymnasium, five young girls dancing together at a sock hop before the rest of the school arrived.

Brett was the one who had the idea about climbing back into the coffin. We crowded around her, still with the music blaring—“believe in the magic that can set you free”—and as the director took that shot of us, we
felt
magical, and we felt young, with our futures ahead of us. Yes, we
were
young then, but we didn’t think we were, we hadn’t felt we were until that moment. Hadn’t felt we were anything other than ordinary, that we all
could
and
would
do whatever we decided to do, that if it would turn out in the end that we’d die without ever achieving our dreams, it wouldn’t be because we’d been too afraid to try.

I don’t suppose there’s a happier funeral photo in all the world.

W
HEN THE LIBRARY DOORS
opened the next morning, we went straight to the magazine section, and by noon we had a list of twenty publications to which Brett might submit her essay, the addresses and editors’ names printed clearly on three-by-five index cards that would become the first entries in a database we keep to this day, though it’s computerized now. After peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chocolate milk for our children and ourselves at my house, we headed off to the park, a little submission army with our typewriters side by side on the picnic table. Brett drafted a cover letter, a “query,” while we banged out copies of the essay—in those days, you couldn’t just hit your print key again and again, or even photocopy things. Before the post office closed we had ten envelopes stuffed (self-addressed, stamped return envelopes included) and ready to mail.

“Don’t tell anyone, not even your husbands,” Brett said.

I supposed her reluctance stemmed from the same source mine would, even if she was Phi Beta Kappa from a great college and with three majors to boot. I supposed she, too, thought the only thing worse than failure was having everyone see your disgrace. I was wrong, it turns out. It wasn’t failure that Brett feared. But in the time that passed before I would come to learn that, I would take great solace in believing I was in her fine company on this.

The first responses to Brett’s essay were discouraging—if that essay could draw return-mail dings, what hope was there for the rest of us? We all started looking at our own writing with increasing doubt. Then one day in late August, as the first coed students were registering for classes at Vassar and Princeton and Yale, Brett’s phone rang.
Redbook
wanted to publish her essay, and would pay her a hundred dollars to boot!

We were sitting at our picnic table when she told us, the children tended by Arselia, who had baby Mark in her arms.

“But I can’t let them publish it,” Brett said.

“I swear on my aunt Tooty’s grave, Brett!” Kath said. “Just because a thing comes easily to you doesn’t mean it isn’t good enough.”

Brett looked down at her hands resting on the picnic table. “But Brad . . . my brother . . .”

“He’s the most charming person in the essay!” I said. “I’m sure he’ll love it.”

Brett shoved her hands under the table and met my gaze, as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words even with her incredible vocabulary.

“You can’t make his dream come true,” Linda said quietly.

“You don’t know what Brad’s been through, Linda,” Brett said, speaking even more quietly than Linda had, as if Mark were asleep in her arms.

“You can’t make anyone’s dream come true but your own, Brett,” Linda said. “Only your own. That’s it.”

Did we buy a bottle of champagne and celebrate? You bet we did. And when that essay appeared on newsstands, we opened a second bottle to celebrate that.

It came as a huge surprise when, just a few weeks later, Linda sold
her
first story—to a small magazine no one had ever heard of, with no circulation whatsoever, but that didn’t matter one whit to us. It was that first story she’d given us, a simple thing about a mother putting her children to bed, and I remembered how critical we’d been of it, and how she’d listened and taken notes.

“You never told us you were even fixin’ to send it out, Linda,” Kath said—not an accusation, but with a hint of feeling betrayed.

I swallowed against the same swelling emotion, the little voice saying Linda must think this was some sort of a competition and she’d just won—or at least come in second after Brett. I remembered a boy I’d dated in high school, who told me I wasn’t hurt that he’d broken up with me, I was mad that I hadn’t broken up with him first. “Well, it’s wonderful anyway,” I said.

Linda met Kath’s eyes, then mine. “It wasn’t like that,” she said quietly. “I was afraid you’d say it wasn’t ready—which it wasn’t, but I guess I needed to get it out there, to get those rejections to see that. After a few revisions, some editors wrote back with personal notes, sometimes even with comments, and I wanted to ask if you guys agreed with them, but how could I when I hadn’t even told you I’d sent it? So I just revised again and mailed it back out. Sixty-three times.”

“Sixty-three!” In unison, all four of us.

“I have a lot of index cards to add to our collection,” she said.

“Sixty-three,” Kath repeated. “Lordy, Linda, how in the world could you take that much of a whippin’?”

“Heavens to Betsy, sixty-three rejections,” Ally said soberly.

Linda sat back in her chair, crossed her legs. “If I don’t believe in my own work,” she said, “how can I expect anyone else to? Besides, it was only sixty-two rejections. The last one was a yes.”