The Wednesday Sisters (11 page)

L
INDA WAS STANDING
in front of the bathroom mirror one Tuesday night that August, still smiling over a Woodstock joke Johnny Carson had told in his opening monologue, when she raised her arms to slide on her pajama top and noticed a funny pucker in the skin on her left breast. Her fingers went to the spot, her pajama top dropping to the floor. She could feel something, not in the skin but underneath it. A small hardness, the size of a pea.

She thought of her mother, how she’d run from her mother and her awful arm, how that must have broken her mother’s heart.

She felt again, sure she must be mistaken. But the lump was still there. “

Jeff?” she said, a whisper. She opened the door into the bedroom and stood there in her pajama bottoms, still naked from the waist up.

Jeff was propped up against the pillows with a medical journal in his hands, watching Johnny Carson announce the night’s first guest: “. . . her new novel is
The Love Machine.
Please welcome the beautiful Jacqueline Susann!”

He looked to Linda, his eyes drawn to her naked breasts. “Hey,” he said. “Does this mean I’m going to get lucky?” “

Jeff,” she said in a louder voice, more like panic.

He was out of the bed and in front of her in no time, his hands on her arms, looking directly into her eyes. “What, Linda? What is it?”

She swallowed once, twice. “A lump,” she tried to say, but her voice didn’t come out.

“What!” Jeff insisted. “Damn it, Linda, you’re scaring the hell out of me.”

Something about his panic calmed her. She focused on the sameness all around her: the medical journal abandoned on the bed;
Port-noy’s Complaint
on her own nightstand, bookmarked to the page she’d been reading; the
Tonight Show
audience laughing on the TV. “

A lump,” she said more surely. “I think I felt a lump. I’m sure it’s nothing, but—”

“Oh, shit,” Jeff said, turning away from her, running his hand through his dark hair.

“It’s probably nothing,” Linda assured him. “I was just startled. It’s probably nothing.”

On the television, the
Tonight Show
band played a few short notes.

“Shit,” Jeff said. “Okay. Okay. We’ll call Albert. Shit, what’s his number?”

“It’s nearly midnight,” Linda said.

Jeff looked at her as if she’d just insulted him. Suddenly self-conscious, she turned to the bathroom, retrieved her pajama top, pulled it over her head.

In the moment she was turned away from Jeff, he bolted out the bedroom door, down the stairs to the phone in the kitchen. She heard pages flipping, Jeff looking for his colleague’s home number, then his voice: “Albert, listen, Linda’s got a . . .”

In the long pause that followed, Linda crept down the stairs, peeked around the corner. Jeff sat on the kitchen floor, in the dim light that filtered down from upstairs. He had the phone receiver to his ear, but his head was tucked down to his knees.

He looked up, focusing on the cabinets across from him. He heaved a big breath. “A lump,” he whispered. Then after another moment, “Yes.”

“Jeff,” Linda said.

He stiffened. He’d heard her, but he didn’t look her way. He listened into the receiver for another moment and, still without looking at her, handed it over. His hand, she thought, looked like her father’s: broad and muscular, and unsteady.

She was chilled all of a sudden.

She took the receiver, answered Albert’s questions. The lump was in her left breast. At about three o’clock. Yes, near her armpit. The size of a small pea. Not as hard as a marble, but harder than chewed bubble gum. She listened to Albert for a few minutes, then handed the receiver toward Jeff. “He says there’s nothing to do tonight,” she said. “

He says to call his office in the morning and he’ll get Ellie to work me in.”

As Linda headed back upstairs she tried to block out the sound of Jeff’s voice pleading with Albert, then growing angry. “I could drive Linda over right now, we could be there in ten minutes.” And she knew Albert was telling him what he’d just told her, that they would almost certainly have to do a biopsy, that that would take a few days to arrange.

She turned off the television in the bedroom, turned off the lights, climbed under the covers, laid her head flat on the pillow. She stared up at the ceiling, trying not to think, trying to get warm.

From downstairs, Jeff’s voice, still badgering Albert. “Okay, seven o’clock, if that’s the best you can do. We’ll be at your office at seven a.m.”

She heard the receiver click onto the cradle. The house was silent for a long moment before she heard the refrigerator door sucking open, ice clinking in a glass. A bottle twisting open. Liquid splashing out. Jeff’s scotch.

She was still lying there, awake, when Jeff came upstairs finally. She closed her eyes, able to bear the darkness with him there, and pretended to sleep.

He eased onto the bed and under the covers, but he stayed at the very edge of the mattress, as if he was afraid to get too near her in case she was contagious. She lay awake all night, listening to the sounds of him lying awake, too. She had not felt so alone since before she’d met him, since before he’d first spoken to her at a fall mixer her freshman year at college. She’d been wearing her favorite sweater, a forest-green cashmere cardigan she claimed she liked to wear without a blouse underneath because she loved the soft wool against her skin, although the truth was that a blouse ruined the drape of the sweater, the way the thin green wool accentuated her breasts.

“That’s a super sweater you’re wearing,” Jeff had said, his first words not memorable on their own. But she placed her hands over his eyes without even thinking, without hesitating to touch this boy she’d never met. “Do you really like it?” she asked. “Then tell me, what color is it?” She felt the flush of his embarrassment against her palms, and she knew then it wasn’t the sweater, exactly, that he admired, knew it even before he said, “Blue?”

“M
OST LUMPS ARE
just fibrocystic tumors or fibroadenomas, especially at our age,” Brett said the next morning when Linda told us about finding the lump, having already been to the doctor that morning. She’d persuaded Jeff to stay home with the children while she went to see Albert at seven. She hadn’t wanted to alarm the children by dragging them along.

“They don’t think it’s hereditary, either,” Brett said. “Or if it is, genetics play only a minor role, so the fact that your mom—” Her gaze dropped to her gloved fingers tightly intertwined on the picnic table. “We think it’s caused by viruses or chemicals or hormones. We know mice can transmit breast cancers to their young through viruses in their breast milk, and researchers have found—”

“I read this article in
Reader’s Digest,
” I interrupted. You could tell Brett meant to be helpful—if she were Linda, she’d want the scientific facts—but you could see Linda realizing she might have caught cancer from her mom’s breast milk, and thinking she’d breast-fed her own children, too. “It said even if it’s . . . not good, they do an operation, a mastectomy, and most women live for years.”

For five years, that’s what the article had said. The five-year survival rate for breast cancer was 80 percent.

“I’ve Lived with Cancer” was the title of that article, about a woman who was thirty-seven when she discovered a lump in her breast. It had been weirdly upbeat: most lumps were nothing, and for those that
were
something, an operation would likely save you, and your husband would still find you attractive, even without your breasts. But the details were sobering: a permanent form cost fifteen dollars, and they came in all sizes so you could feel “perfectly balanced.” I was left imagining taking my kids into the ocean, seawater dripping from my permanent form for hours afterward. I was left picturing myself cowering behind the bathroom door while Danny, in bed, willed himself not to be repulsed. Or worse. In five years, Davy would be only seven, and Maggie ten.

In five years, Jamie and Julie would be ten, like my Maggie. In five years, J.J. would be six.

“Jeff is just flipping out,” Linda said, her gaze fixed on the rough wood table in front of her. “It’s like he’s already imagining me without a breast, already imagining having to climb into bed every night with a
freak.
” The word spit out, but with a crack in her voice.

“Linda,” Kath said gently.

“Like he’s crawling into bed with a corpse,” she said more quietly, her eyes shaded by her Stanford cap, but tears making tracks down the arc of her cheek, under her jaw, disappearing into the bold stripe of her turtleneck, the one she’d worn that first day I met her. “It’s like he thinks I’m already dead, like he’s already drawing away from me so he can bear it like he . . .” She swiped a hand across her eyes. “His mom . . . Like my mom.”

Had died, too, she meant, leaving unspoken the details. Was he two or twelve or twenty when she died? Had she been ill long, or at all? Had she been hit by a car and left in a coma? Had she been unstable, taken too many pills?

“What does the doctor think?” Kath asked gently.

Linda tucked her hands underneath herself on the picnic-table bench, straightened her spine. “He thinks it’s benign, but he wants to do a biopsy. It’s a small lump, so he’ll cut out the whole thing and they’ll look at it under the microscope, just to make sure.”

There was an audible sigh of relief around the table:
Small Lump, Probably Benign.

“Jeff is trying to arrange a hospital bed for me now.” She looked to the empty mansion across the park. One of the front steps had splintered and fallen in on itself. I wondered when that had happened, if it had been hours or days or weeks.

“Good,” Brett said. “The sooner, the better.”

“They’ll put me under, and if the biopsy . . . if it’s bad, they won’t wait, they’ll just do the mastectomy and I’ll wake up and . . . Oh, God.”

That’s what they did back then: they put you under for a biopsy, and if you woke with your chest and your arm all bandaged, you knew—if you could bear to know it—that your breast was gone, that it was cancer, although no one would likely tell you it was until you’d had a chance to recover from the surgery. You trusted your doctor back then. You weren’t given any other choice.

“I don’t think I can do it,” Linda said. “I don’t think I can bear to let them put me to sleep knowing when I wake up . . . My mom, you know . . .” She waved a hand in front of her arm. Her gaze found J.J. on the swing, and you could see in her pretty face the little girl she must have been, afraid of her own mother’s hug.

“And my kids,” she said, “my kids . . .” But she didn’t finish the thought; she left it there, left us imagining Julie and Jamie huddled in their closet, J.J. standing at salute, watching his mother’s coffin being drawn through the street.

Jeff failed in his effort to get Linda’s biopsy done that day; the hospital bed could be arranged, but obtaining an operating room for anything short of an immediately life-threatening emergency was more problematic, even for Jeff. Left with no choice, he allowed himself to be talked into being reasonable with the same rationale we all used to console ourselves—that most lumps were nothing. The biopsy was scheduled for the following Thursday, eight days later. And by the end of that morning Linda had pulled herself together, or pulled herself in, anyway. She insisted in very frank Linda fashion that if we uttered one more word about it before she knew for sure—to her, to anyone else, even among ourselves—she would never forgive us. That if we called her to see if there was anything we could do (there was not, she insisted), if we even just called on some lousy trumped-up excuse to see if she was okay, she would never forgive us. She was not going to think about it, not for another moment, and we weren’t to either.

“No point in losing sleep over something that is almost certainly nothing,” she said. “I’ve got to run. I have a committee meeting. We’re trying to keep the foothills behind Stanford from being developed. Don’t you think they should be kept as open space, for everyone to enjoy?” But the passion that was always in her voice when she talked about her causes wasn’t there. She didn’t even try to enlist us this time.

“Remember, you promised,” she said as she pushed J.J.’s stroller onto the sidewalk. And despite our promise, despite that reminder, the moment she was out of sight we were talking about it amongst ourselves, unable to grant her even this one small request.

T
HAT AFTERNOON,
I went to Saint Thomas Aquinas, where I sat in an empty pew looking at the empty altar, wondering if there was a God up there who listened to prayers, and why He was doing this to Linda and had done it to her mom. Wondering why He didn’t let Ally carry her babies to term, and why He sat by while Lee hurt Kath, and what He could have allowed to happen to Brett that left her wearing her gloves. Wondering, too, what I could possibly do for Linda other than what she’d asked, which was nothing, which was only not to talk, a task at which I’d already failed.

In bed that night I lay awake worrying about Linda, losing the sleep she didn’t want us to lose. Wondering if she was sleeping, or what she was doing if she wasn’t, if she, too, was lying awake. I imagined her sitting in J.J.’s room, or in Julie and Jamie’s, watching them sleep like the mother had done in her story, the one she’d gotten published, that she’d sent out sixty-three times.

I climbed from bed carefully so as not to wake Danny, and took my glasses from my nightstand. I went to check on Maggie, her face tucked up against her Allo blanket as she mumbled in her sleep, words I never could understand. Then into Davy’s room, where I sat on the floor by his bed with my hand on his little leg, trying to remember the details of Linda’s story, thinking,
Sixty-three times.

I thought again of the novel I’d written back in Chicago, the Italian Renaissance mystery. I’d spent so much time writing it, just that one draft, but I’d never done anything with it. I wondered what Linda had written in the years before I met her, what story she might have used to apply to graduate school. Was it in a drawer somewhere, or had she pulled it out, revised it, read it to us, and listened to what we had to say? Then revised again, sixty-three times. Or sixty-two, since the last one was a yes.

I’d so loved the idea of that novel of mine, a whodunit that was also an exploration of religion and the perversion of its purposes—or that was what it was meant to be, anyway. It was one part fascination for me—fascination with Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel and Pope Julius II, Il Papa Terrible, whose main concern in life seemed to have been to ensure a suitable palace for his own entombment—and one part passion for a church and a religion that were so integral to who I was. But the draft when I’d read it—“Michelangelo’s Ghost,” that’s what I’d called it—was so much less than I’d meant it to be. I’d thought that was all there was to it back then. One single draft. You were a writer or you weren’t.

I thought of all the books I’d disliked, or put down without finishing—often books that one or more of the Wednesday Sisters had loved—or books we’d all thought dreadful, that, to our considerable disbelief, made the bestseller list. “Not every book is for every reader.” Words Linda liked to say when she’d recommended a book none of the rest of us could stand.

Linda’s Ghost,
I thought, and I wanted to pick up the phone and call her, even though I knew she didn’t want that.

I went to the kitchen. Pulled that old manuscript from the bottom kitchen desk drawer, almost as a way to be with Linda. I looked down at the first few words, the introduction of my character Risa. She was as weak a character as Dritha, the protagonist in my new novel, I could see that now. A smelly old dishrag, Linda would say, with a spine Kath would find catawampus, delivered in prose Ally would find awkward in places, with words Brett would see were not quite what I’d meant.

But if I didn’t believe in my work, how could I expect anyone else to?

I pulled the coffin photo from my refrigerator—not the one of just me, but the one of all of us—and I set it in a splash of moonlight on the coffee table. I clicked on the lamp and began making notes in my journal: What is Risa most embarrassed about or ashamed of? What little gesture does she make frequently, and does she realize it, and would she stop doing it if she did? What one thing about her seems to contradict everything else? And why in the world is she out poking into the disappearance of a nun rather than, say, living in a nice home in Palo Alto with two children and a husband, friends she meets every Wednesday in the park—or the early sixteenth-century Roman equivalent?

Because the dead nun was one of Risa’s closest friends, that was the answer, of course. A friend who would have done anything for her. One who, if she had given her promise not to talk of a thing, would not go back on it even in the name of trying to help.

In the dark of the night, I made twelve pages of character sketch: what Risa did when she awoke in the morning, her favorite food, what her ideal man looked like, what made her laugh and what her laughter sounded like, which was very like Kath’s most uninhibited laugh, and whether she, like me, sometimes laughed so hard she had to cross her legs lest she wet herself. I cut out magazine pictures to help me imagine what she looked like—dark hair like this picture, like Ally’s; eyes shaped like this woman’s, but the same green as mine; trim and petite like Brett, but with stocky hands and sturdy wrists; freckles on her nose like Brett, too, when the beauty standards of the time demanded none. Then I turned to Risa’s friend, the nun, finding no need of magazine photos to imagine her: her face was there in my mind, her eyes the sea blue of Sister Josephine’s, the brows above them as straight and expressive as Linda’s, the brows of a woman who would put herself smack-dab in the middle of the worst poverty, doing all she could to ease the pain of strangers that Risa, sequestered in her comfortable villa, couldn’t imagine how to help. And when I’d finished with the nun, I slid clean paper and carbons into the typewriter carriage, and I typed at the top of the first page “Chapter 1.”

That’s where I was—sitting with my old manuscript and my scribbles of character sketches, scraping the carbon copies of a misspelled word with a razor to avoid retyping the whole page—when I looked up and saw Danny standing in the doorway, watching me. The sun was coming up already. I’d been working all night.

I looked down at my writing, stark black letters on white. At the coffin photo beside my typewriter, me in my glasses, though usually I took them off the moment I saw a camera.

“I . . . I’m writing,” I said.

“I know,” he said, and I saw in his expression that he’d stood here before, watching me so lost in what I was writing that I didn’t even know he was there.

He smiled slightly. “In that first little apartment back in Chicago, you always sat in my seat, where the edge of the card table was peeling. I thought you’d given it up, though, before we moved here.”

He didn’t ask why I’d never told him, didn’t put me on the spot. He only looked at me like I was a gift he’d just opened, the surprise he’d known was there all along under the wrapping and the bow, but that didn’t matter because it was exactly what he wanted. “And what, pray tell, are you writing?” he asked. “If you’re willing to tell?”

I didn’t say it was my gift to Linda, my prayer for her; I’m not sure I even saw at the time that it was, that the nun had become more and more like Linda in my notes, that I was trying to capture Linda’s frankness and her generosity and her fear. But I told him the gist of the story, bungling the description badly. Still, Danny said he couldn’t wait to read it. I would let him read it, wouldn’t I? And while I was worrying that one—Would he like it? Would he see himself in any of it?—he called me “the future famous novelist, Frankie O’Mara.” It was like when I’d told Bob about my novel at the holiday party, only better, and I wondered if this was something Danny had learned from watching Bob, from admiring him, or if he’d always been like this.

I told Danny I wanted to publish under Mary Frances, my way of saying that was my dream, to be published, without having to say it directly. He responded with an easy “What about M.F.? Or M. Frances? Men won’t realize you’re a woman. You’ll get more male readers that way.”

Readers.
A word Bob had used, too, in that Christmas-party conversation: “Will you meet your readers, or will you be one of these famous recluses people want so badly to know?”

“It’s the weirdest thing,” I said, and I hadn’t planned to tell Danny this any more than I’d planned to spill my dreams to Bob at that party, but I wanted him to know suddenly, I didn’t want to have anything to hide from him. “The first time I met Bob, last December? I told him I was writing. I don’t even know why.”

“Bob?”

“Bob Noyce.”

Danny laughed uneasily, with the oddest expression behind his black-rimmed glasses, an expression that looked so like Maggie when she was about to cry. He focused on my page in the typewriter, the carbons flopped forward where I’d been correcting my mistake.

“Bob has that effect on people,” he said, light words, but something in the hesitation before he spoke left me thinking of Bob and his mask designer, the Purple-Jesus-cocktails-and-airplane-views gal. I wondered if she’d fallen in love with Bob, or if it was the image of herself she saw in his mind that had turned her head. I wondered if she was married, if her husband had seen them together. I imagined her husband feeling betrayed by the simple act of his wife having a conversation with Bob, across the room. I wondered if he’d asked what they had talked about, and if she’d answered, and if her husband, seeing how she felt with Bob even if she’d never slept with him, even if she never imagined she would, had gathered his pride and left her, without warning, maybe, without any idea at all why he’d left.