The Wednesday Sisters (13 page)

T
HAT SEPTEMBER
Maggie, along with Kath’s Lee-Lee and Linda’s twins, started kindergarten. Linda and I just basically blubbered, and even Kath, who’d been through this before—Anna Page was starting third grade—was as sappy about that as she was about little Lee. Our babies were growing up. But the children were not the least bit nervous. Maggie, dragging along her Allo blanket for her rest-time “friend,” let go of my hand as if she’d been doing it for ages. It made me a little sad, realizing how little she thought she needed me.

I would be thirty-eight when she went off to college, I remember thinking that morning. Forty when Davy left. They would grow up and go off on their own in a bigger way, just like in Brett’s essay, and though I would always be their mother, I would cease to be their mother in the every-moment way I was now, in the way that Danny would continue to be an every-moment engineer even without the children at home. And who would I be then?

“You should join the AAUW with me, Frankie,” Linda said. “The American Association of University Women.”

Yes, some women did belong primarily to play bridge, she said in answer to Brett, who said that’s what she thought they did. “But doesn’t everyone like to play a hand every now and then? You all learned in college, right? And anyway, the Palo Alto branch is much more than a social club.” They campaigned for women running for political office, she explained, and they were helping write an environmental handbook and working to get a San Francisco Bay wildlife refuge off the ground. They presented programs on topics such as “Foreign Policy: Dilemmas and Realities” and “Human Use of Urban Space.”

“My study topic is ‘This Beleaguered Earth: Can Man Survive?’” she said, leaving me to wonder what exactly a study topic might be. “We’re trying to show it would be cheaper to preserve the foothills behind Stanford as open space than to develop them. It’s a cool group, really. One you can all join. It doesn’t matter which college you went to.”

I nodded like I’d nodded about the whole bridge-at-college thing when I had no idea how to play bridge.

Linda had met a Northwestern alumna at the AAUW meeting that week. “You must have known her, Frankie. She’s just our age, and she was in engineering, which is where Danny was, right? There can’t have been three women in engineering. What year did you graduate?”

I didn’t know the woman, but I did know that someday Linda would bump into someone who knew me, who’d say, “Frankie? Wasn’t she an engineering school secretary?” Or Danny would say something. He had no more idea that these women thought I’d gone to Northwestern than he did that I’d been even chubbier in high school or that I’d once let Sean Casey feel me up even though I didn’t like him because I wanted a date to the prom (never mind that he hadn’t asked me to the prom anyway).

“I . . .” I adjusted my glasses, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “I didn’t graduate from Northwestern. Danny. That was Danny.”

“But you still had a class, honey,” Kath said. “That doesn’t make you not part of a class. Lordy, most gals I went to school with never did graduate either. They got married when their husbands were done, and they went and moved with them to whatever sorry town had a job. What year did you start?”

I pulled my sweater closed, too unsure of my hands to venture the buttons. I knew Kath wouldn’t care. None of them would care, really. Why hadn’t I just told them before?

“I never did start,” I said. “I never went to Northwestern. Danny did, but not me.”

“Oh,” Linda said.

“Where did you go, then?” Ally asked.

The pity in Brett’s eyes: she’d understood.

“I didn’t go to college,” I said. “I was a secretary at the engineering school. That’s how Danny and I met.”

“Well, shut my mouth,” Kath whispered under her breath.

“I just . . . when you assumed I’d been to college, I was too embarrassed to set you straight.”

Linda, frowning, adjusted her Stanford cap. Then her eyes lit up, all those colors. “You should apply to Stanford, Frankie,” she said.

“Not everyone has to go to college, Linda,” Brett said. “Not everyone even wants to.”

“Here’s one of the greatest universities in the country,” Linda said, ignoring Brett, “and you can practically walk to it.”

“Stanford?”
I said. “But I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

Linda turned her eyes heavenward, a God-give-me-patience look. “You would too, Frankie. You’re a smart girl. You just get the application, fill it out, take the SATs. Send it all in. Walk it in!”

As if it were that easy. As if there were no question of my being smart enough. As if the thousands of dollars of tuition were pocket change and she herself had gone off to graduate school when she’d wanted to, never mind the twins.

S
O, SEPTEMBER
1969. School starting. Leaves falling. Miss America—which the Wednesday Sisters talked about skipping that year. Though the pageant would have higher ratings than the year before, and the following year a record 22 million households would watch, all the controversy—those boardwalk protesters—had taken a toll. Pepsi had withdrawn its sponsorship, saying Miss America didn’t represent the changing values of society, which ought to have been true. To the Wednesday Sisters, though, the pageant was more than a beauty contest; it was the anniversary of the day we’d begun to write. Which was what we talked about at Brett’s that night, while we fixed our gin and tonics and vodka gimlets and sidecars. A year, it had been, and yes, Brett’s essay had been published and Linda’s story would be soon, but the rest of us were making no headway.

“Some things just take time,” Linda said. “Ruth Spangenberg started the Committee for Green Foothills seven years ago, and we’re still fighting development there. And sometimes I think we never are going to get this community to accept teaching minority viewpoints in our schools.”

“That fella Sid Walton, he’s a Black Panther,” Kath said, referring to the district’s director of multiculturalism who’d just resigned amidst an uproar over “exchanging” students with the Ravenswood district, where most students were black. “Anna Page’s teacher says his house is full of books and bullets.”

Bert Parks appeared onstage then, and we turned our attention to the television. Before we’d even seen Miss Alabama, Linda announced she was rooting for Miss New York, who was Jewish, and Kath, without pausing to think why Linda might care what religion a contestant was, asked if she had a nose.

“A nose, Kath?” Linda said. “It would be hard to be voted Miss America without one, don’t you think?”

Kath patted her braid headband, then dragged a lock of hair across her ample chin. “Sure, of course. I just meant—”

“Do I?” Linda asked.

“Do you what?”

“I’m Jewish, Kath. Does that make you feel differently about me?”

And I said—I know, unbelievable, but I did—I said, “But you’re
blond.
”

Miss Iowa, Miss Kansas, and Miss Kentucky walked out, Bert Parks announcing them as I tried to come up with some way to take back my words, to make a joke of them, to break the stupefied silence. But it was Ally’s quiet voice we heard first, Ally who said, “My Jim is from India.”

“That
was
Jim.” I exhaled the words, not meaning to say them aloud but it was such a surprise, somehow, to have it confirmed. And when Ally looked at me in response, I tried to explain. “I saw a dark-skinned—” I started, before thinking better of it. What would I say?
I couldn’t imagine you married to a nonwhite even with him right there in front of me?

Ally’s eyes darkened in her pale face. She hadn’t needed me to finish my sentence to know what I meant to say; she’d been facing that kind of prejudice since the day she’d started seeing Jim.

Kath, looking from me to Ally, said, “From India like Gandhi? Or from India like the British families who—”

“Jim graduated top of his class at Michigan Law School, and you were right, Linda, he should have had his pick of jobs,” Ally interrupted, shutting us all up. “But he didn’t get a single offer from the New York firms, or the San Francisco ones, either.”

“So that’s why he’s at a second-tier firm?” Kath said, not meaning anything by it, just registering the answer to the question that had bothered us all. But it came out sounding awful, as if she was suggesting Jim’s job wasn’t worth having.

“But you never told us, Ally,” Brett said.

“Told you
what
?”

“It’s
illegal,
honey!” Kath said. “A white girl can’t marry a dark man.”

“A dark man!” Ally exploded. “He’s
human,
just like we all are.”

And Linda, speaking at the same time, said, “
Illegal,
Kath? The Supreme Court overturned interracial marriage bans years ago!”

Though Kath wasn’t as wrong as all that: at the time Ally had gone to her parents and said she wanted to marry Jim, in states from Texas to her own Maryland, someone who was “white” simply could not marry someone who was not.

It’s against God’s plan—that’s what Ally’s father had said when she’d come home to tell her parents about Jim, to tell them he’d asked her to marry him. They sat in the kitchen, at an old wooden table that had been Ally’s grandmother’s, with a faded black gash at Ally’s seat, where her grandmother’s toaster had burned the wood.

Ally’s response—
But I love him, Dad
—stuck in her throat.

“He’d be touching you, sweetheart,” her mother had whispered. “
Touching
you.”

And how could she respond to that? Because she’d thought of that at the beginning, too: how dark his hand would look on her skin. It hadn’t repulsed her, not the way it did her mother, but she’d thought of it. She’d wondered how she and Jim could look so different when they were so much the same inside.

She hadn’t considered back then how their skins would blend in their children. Their features. She hadn’t wondered if her children would look like foreigners, or how she would feel if they did. She hadn’t thought at all in the beginning. She hadn’t imagined a future with Jim. She only talked to him when he came to the law school library desk where she worked part-time to help with her college expenses. They talked quietly; it was a library. They laughed quietly. He always made her laugh.

She was surprised the first time they spoke outside, on the library steps. He wasn’t naturally soft-spoken, like she was. But his voice, not hushed, was even more musical.

“Jaiman,” she called him, the name she’d watched him print on the checkout cards he pulled from the pockets of the law books, his graceful fingers dark against the lined white paper.

He laughed warmly, and said she could call him Jim, everyone here called him Jim.

“Tell me how to pronounce your name properly,” she said. “I can learn.” And he smiled, charmed by her willingness to embrace who she thought he was. But he said he preferred Jim, actually.

“Jaiman, that is another world, another life,” he said. “A whole other set of expectations.” He’d looked out across the campus, bare and dreary gray in the winter light. It made Ally wonder what the world he came from looked like. She imagined it green and sultry, and always warm.

Ally couldn’t say when, exactly, she’d fallen in love with Jim. Maybe that first moment she’d heard his lyrical voice—“Excuse me, ma’am”—before she’d even looked up to see his face.

She knew her parents might be reluctant, that they’d worry about the problems she and Jim and their children would face. But she never imagined they would refuse to have Jim in their home, even to meet him. She never imagined that her father wouldn’t walk her down the aisle in the end, that she’d be married by a justice of the peace in Ann Arbor, in a dress she’d owned for years.

“I was sure my mom and dad would embrace Jim eventually,” she would tell us later. “You can’t know Jim and not love him. I never imagined they never
would
come to know him, that when I told them we were married they’d hide their
goddamned
prejudice behind the excuse that Jim wasn’t
Christian.”

And while we were blinking at that—at Ally swearing and meaning it—she would say, “‘For I, the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.’ Those were the last words my mother said to me, the last time she ever acknowledged I was alive. A quote from the goddamned
Bible,
from Exodus, for Christ goddamned sake.”

She would start crying then. She would start crying and we’d all try to comfort her, and she’d shrug us off. “I know it’s ridiculous. I know God isn’t killing our babies to punish us,” she would say. “Jim is the kindest, most loving person in the world. No God would ever punish him even if He would punish me. And I know our children won’t be the . . . the mongrels my parents imagine, but a whole of something else, something magical.” But the words were her mother’s, the voice the one that had sung to her, and read to her, and taught her right from wrong.

Not that we learned any of that at that Miss America gathering, any more than we learned that Ally had never met Jim’s parents, either, a fact Jim explained away with the ocean gulf between them, but Ally knew better, she knew they saw her miscarriages as a sign of their own brand of offended gods, and that they, too, thought the offense was hers; their Jaiman could do no wrong.