The Wednesday Sisters (14 page)

What we did learn that evening—before the talent competition had even started—was that our quiet little Ally could storm out of a room with the best of them. Which was exactly what she did, but not before she made it perfectly clear—perfectly audibly—that we were “prejudiced morons,” “idiots,” “fools.”

“It’s one thing to have to deal with it from strangers,” she said. “The policemen who stop us to make sure I’m okay, that I’m not being kidnapped or raped. The maître d’s and ticket sellers who pretend they don’t see us. The people who
do
see us, who stare at us every time we go anywhere together—and those are the nice people, the people who don’t insult us outright. I get plenty of cruelty from strangers. I don’t need it from people I thought were my friends. If I don’t need my parents, I surely don’t need you.” And she grabbed her purse and stomped out of the house, and Linda followed her, looking as disgusted as Ally was.

Brett and Kath and I didn’t know what to do. We just sat there, watching in silence as those flawless white girls tromped across the stage and back again.

“Ally’s husband is colored?” Kath said finally, as if she still couldn’t believe it was true.

“
Indian,
Kath,” Brett said. “
From India.
”

“My mama’s Blanche isn’t any darker than I am in the summertime,” Kath said, “but that doesn’t make her white.

“Ally is such a pretty girl, too,” Kath said, giving voice to a thought I hate to admit had crossed my mind, too, even if I never would have said it aloud. She’s plenty pretty enough to marry a nice white boy, we meant. So why did she marry Jim?

I’m not saying I’m not ashamed of how I was then. Of course I’m ashamed. I’m not saying I shouldn’t have changed sooner, or that we can’t change our views about things until we have to deal with them in real life. But I’m trying to get down to the raw truth of it all here, even if it doesn’t show me at my best. I’m trying to be as honest as I possibly can.

Well, that was when Brett exploded into a lecture about skin color being just a pigment, nothing more. Which Kath said was a lot of scientific hooey because anybody could tell a person was black just by looking. At which point Brett said Kath was being simplistic and moronic and prejudiced and several other words I didn’t know, and she couldn’t believe Ally hadn’t told us—this was her beef with Ally, that she hadn’t told us, which Brett felt meant she didn’t trust us to take the news more rationally than her parents had. Which of course we hadn’t, but that wasn’t Brett’s doing, it was Kath’s and mine, which Brett pointed out in no uncertain terms. And before I knew it, Brett was shutting her door in my face as firmly as in Kath’s, and I was left standing on the porch with Kath, wondering what had happened to the friends who’d sat in the park together every Wednesday morning, helping each other through everything. Wondering how we’d ever get past this and back to that.

T
HE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY
was an awful, drizzly day—Chicago weather, not California weather, though it wasn’t raining in Chicago, where the Cubs, having dropped to second in a loss to the Phillies, were trying to stanch their late-season slide. Maybe it was the rain, or maybe it was the Cubs’ slide or the Wednesday Sisters’ explosion and the days of silence that followed, or maybe it was the squabble I’d had with Danny that morning, I didn’t know, but the abandoned mansion across the park with its cracked windows and peeling paint, its slanting roofline and side porch, seemed to have fallen even further into disrepair. And the park, too, was empty, as deserted as the house. A few minutes after the time we usually gathered, Brett trolled by in her car—she must have taken Chip to work that day so she could have it. By the time I got to the door, though, she was around the corner. Linda came by, too, but she didn’t stop, either, and all I could think of was how awkward Danny and I had been after we’d argued that morning, how very hard it is to say you’re sorry even when you are, even to someone you love. Sitting there watching the rain fall on the empty park, I could not believe our friendship was really this fragile, that it could blow apart over a few ill-considered words. It was as ridiculous as my aunt Dotty and her brother, my uncle Jojo, who hadn’t spoken in more than ten years, not since Uncle Jojo had said something derogatory about Dotty’s affection for her cat—a nasty little animal, Jojo was right about that, but Dotty had never had children, the cat was all she had. It had been dead for years, though, and I doubted anyone else could recall what words had been slung, but I was sure Aunt Dotty remembered, and probably Uncle Jojo did, too. Memory is an unmerciful thing sometimes.

“I’
M SORRY”
were Danny’s first words when he came through the door early that evening, a big bouquet of flowers in hand. I said I was the one who should be sorry, feeling selfish and self-centered and unredeemable. I’d called him arrogant and self-absorbed, so wrapped up in his work that he was forgetting his kids—his kids, I’d said, not me—when all he’d been doing was working his butt off to keep us all in new Keds.

His company had introduced its first product that May, a sixty-four-bit random access memory, but it wasn’t making them much money, and their second technology, the multichip memories, kept popping off their ceramic bases. That left a lot of pressure on Danny’s silicon-gate MOS device. The whole company had gathered in the cafeteria for champagne in honor of the first one that actually worked. The yields were dreadful, though; very few of the things actually
did
work, even with Danny’s team slaving away past midnight, tinkering with the kind of water they used, changing the acid dips, and hanging a rubber chicken over an evaporator for luck—although how a rubber chicken was supposed to bring them luck I couldn’t imagine. Being completely logical and not the least superstitious myself, I prayed a lot and kept my fingers crossed and, when I found a penny lying heads up in the park one morning, I practically had it framed.

Danny was beat to hell when he got home that night—he’d been at the office until two the night before, and left that morning without breakfast, with only my accusation that he hadn’t seen his children in a week. But we put the flowers in water and kissed and made up, and yes, we still felt a bit awkward with each other that way you do after your feelings have been hurt and you know his have been, too, but we put the children to bed and he poured us each a nightcap and we sat out on the front porch and began to let go of even that.

It had stopped raining but it was chilly as we sat talking about the new friends Maggie was making in kindergarten and how she could already write her name. Then Danny stopped midsentence and just sat there for a moment, staring out across the street.

“Someone’s in the mansion,” he said quietly. “Someone is wandering around with a flashlight or a candle or something, like the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

Dickens. An engineer who reads Dickens. How could I have gotten so mad at him?

“The night watchman, I think,” I said.

“A watchman would turn on the lights, Frankie.”

I shrugged. “Whoever he is, he’s a regular. I’ve seen the light several times.”

“Let’s go look,” he said with that boyish grin I saw so little of lately. And when I hesitated he said, “Come on, Frankie. It’s not like it’s going to be a drug drop.”

Though it might have been. Teenagers had been arrested for possession of drugs right near this park, I’d heard. But teenagers had drugs everywhere by then.

“Wait! Maybe it’s a burglar,” he whispered dramatically, “a serial burglar carting off the silver, teaspoon by teaspoon.” We’d just be gone for a minute, he insisted. The kids would be fine.

As we crossed the street and headed toward the mansion, Danny carrying the Cubs baseball bat I’d gotten at bat day when I was nine just to appease me, our shoes getting wet in the rain-soaked grass, it did seem almost as though a ghost was wandering the old place. The dim light in one window faded, another window lit a moment later, redder here where the room must be red, bluer there.

“The little girl’s room,” I whispered. “The daughter’s room.”

That’s the way I’d come to think of the room that was lit now, albeit dimly. I’d finally found the place open one Sunday on our way home from Mass, and I’d quickly changed clothes and returned to look, expecting something grand inside: a butler to greet me at the door and a woman in a silly white cap serving cucumber sandwiches and tea, though how I could have thought that from the dilapidated outside, I can’t now imagine. There
had
been a silver tea service and a dramatic candelabra with it, but the silver was tarnished nearly to black and was probably only silver plate anyway, because who would leave real silver in that falling-down house? The place had smelled musty, and there were cobwebs on the wooden balusters of the curving staircase, in the corners of the “little French room,” on the portrait that dominated the living room, the stern-faced old woman who’d built the house, her hair coiled in a severe bun. The fabrics on the furniture were rotting, too, and dust lay thick on the marble bust of the daughter, on the framed paintings—the daughter’s childhood art—and on the oversized family Bible, which was jammed with old photos and opened to a passage from Job.

But the room lit now, the daughter’s room, had been . . . not exactly clean, but better cared for. The bedding was fresher, as if someone occasionally smoothed the spread and fluffed the pillows, ran a dust rag or a sleeve over the dresser, opened the window to let out the stale air. That’s why I thought of it as the little girl’s room, though there were other bedrooms with wild-rose wallpaper and four-poster beds and looking glasses, and no girl had ever lived there in any event, the old widow had built the house only after her daughter died.

The room had a piano in it, an old upright that was nothing compared with the organ downstairs except that while the organ looked forlorn and forgotten, as if its notes hadn’t sounded in years, the piano looked somehow as if a young girl had just slipped off its wooden bench and run outside to play.

That
was why I thought of it as the girl’s room, I realized. Because of the piano.

“Estella’s room,” Danny whispered.

“You mean Eleanor?” That was the daughter’s name.

“As in Estella and Pip,” he said, and I could see what he meant then: the old house wasn’t brick, and there were no iron bars over the windows, no walled courtyard, but it was dismal in the way I imagined Miss Havisham’s Satis House was. Satis House. Enough House.
Whoever had this house, could want nothing else.

As we crept up to the front of the house, the light faded from the girl’s room, our ghost moving to the back of the house, we thought. We waited and waited, my feet getting wetter and colder, my discomfort at leaving the children escalating. What if one of them woke and found us gone? Still the light didn’t appear again.

Danny—leaving the bat with me—went around to the back to see where our ghost was. “The back of the house is dark, too,” he said when he came back.

“The servants’ stairs,” I said. I’d forgotten about the worn, narrow, creaky-steep back stairs that ran down to the kitchen, behind the grand stairway in the front of the house. “They went down the servants’ stairs and out the back.”

You’d have thought, from the look on Danny’s face, that he was Pip himself and old Estella had just told him she was to be Bentley Drummle’s wife.

I
WANTED TO CALL
the Wednesday Sisters every day that week, to patch up this rift, to make it all right again. It would have been easy enough to do: telephone and apologize. Bring flowers like Danny had. Lie prostrate on their front porches and beat my ridiculous breast over the foolishness, the utter wrongness of my ideas about who was supposed to marry whom and, yes, who was better than whom. I did see that. I did see, in my thinking the same thought Kath had voiced even if I hadn’t voiced it myself—“But Ally is such a pretty girl”—that I was unforgivably prejudiced.

That’s certainly what I would do now: I’d apologize. But I was younger then. I had entirely too much foolish pride to go with my foolish ideas. Enough that, when mixed with my insecurity, left me standing paralyzed, unable to get past the possibility that a repentant me would be rejected as surely as the unrepentant one and I’d be left without a scrap of dignity.

Dignity. How is it that it’s most important to us when we’re least entitled to it?

Linda drove by the park that Wednesday just as she had the week before. Brett drove by. I was sure Ally was looking out her window, as I was. But no one stopped. It was fifteen minutes after the time we usually gathered when Kath pushed her stroller into the park in the rain, Lacy protected by the stroller top but Kath herself without even a raincoat.

She looked around at the empty park, sat down, and put her face in her hands.

Lacy sat quietly watching her from under the hood of the stroller.

I grabbed Davy and an umbrella and rushed out the door, met Ally hurrying from her house, Carrie only half in her raincoat. Then Linda was there and Brett was, too, and Kath was sobbing, saying, “Her name is
Kathy.
”

If we were still mad at each other, we forgot it; the apologies—the self-recrimination and the I’m-such-a-jerk—would come later, along with the worries (Would our husbands mind if we invited Ally and Jim to dinner? Would we be able to treat Jim like a regular person? And what about Linda being Jewish? What did that mean?), and a newfound care for each other’s emotions that wouldn’t last forever, at least not with the same intensity, but would draw us closer.

“
My
name,” Kath wailed. “My
name.”

She’d picked up the kitchen extension. Heard him call her Kathy. “Kathy, punkin,” he’d said, using the same endearment they whispered to their children.

“If he leaves me to marry her—”

“He’s not going to leave you, Kath,” Linda insisted, retreating from the possibility of “platonic friendship” or “business call” now, hoping only that “Lee won’t leave” would prove to be higher ground from which to fight.

“If he leaves me and marries her,” Kath insisted, “she’ll have everything, even my
name
!”