The Wednesday Sisters (15 page)

T
HINGS WENT FROM
bad to worse for Kath that October, culminating in what even she now refers to as, like in
Gatsby,
“that incident with the car”—the hospital Halloween party disaster that occurred the night after the party Danny and I threw at our house. Our party had a come-as-a-literary-character theme, a mistake in retrospect, but the Wednesday Sisters all thought it was a terrific idea before it went so bad on us. It gave people both guidance and a lot of leeway. You could dress to the nines as, say, Anna Karenina or Mr. Darcy. You could don a Chinese pigtail and carry an opium pipe for a character out of
Tai-Pan.
You could put on a hat and tote a violin case for
The Godfather,
which was all over the bestseller lists that year. Or if you really hated to wear costumes, you could dress in street clothes and claim to be Updike’s Rabbit or one of his suburban-housewife flings. Danny and I did Agatha Christie: Danny, with the help of an extravagant mustache and his tuxedo, made a fairly respectable if somewhat thin and nonbalding Hercule Poirot; and I, with my glasses low on my nose and eyeliner to age my face, made a fine Jane Marple, if I do say so myself. Brett came as Scout from
To Kill a Mockingbird
—I swear, she nearly did look seven years old—and Chip came as Boo Radley, acting in character, too. Kath, who was the first to identify every one of us (she had an unbelievable talent for guessing who was who), came as Daisy Buchanan from
The Great Gatsby,
in a wispy white flapper dress with sailor collar, a white cloche hat with a gauzy scarf, and a long, long string of pearls that were clearly real, no need to run them over your teeth. She’d joined Weight Watchers (you’d offer her a cookie and she’d say no, she’d already had her free hundred calories for the day, and she could catalogue everything she’d eaten for a day or a week as a number of breads, fruits, fats, and proteins), but I hadn’t realized how much weight she’d lost until she showed up in that flapper dress.

Lee came not as Jay Gatsby, as you might have expected, but wearing jodhpurs and knee-high black leather riding boots, and carrying a polo stick: Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s rich, polo-playing, washed-up playboy husband. I said nothing about the odd irony of their characters. What was there to say? But it was like the costumes were a bad omen.

The party was going swimmingly, maybe a dozen couples filling our living room and dining room and entry hall, Danny mixing drinks as everyone chatted about the costumes. Some of the fellows Danny worked with were already clinging together, slipping into shop talk, but Danny and I were working hard to introduce people to each other so that neighbors would mingle with Danny’s work cohorts and nobody would be hanging at the edges of the rooms. Music was playing on the record player—a Beatles song, “Come Together”—but not too loudly, so people could converse, and we’d launched the first game, an icebreaker called “Adam and Eve” in which each guest has the name of one character from a pair pinned to his back (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, say, or President and Mrs. Nixon), and everyone asks each other yes-or-no questions—Am I male? Dead? A movie star?—the object being to be the first to figure out who you are and to find your mate.

The room was buzzing, lively, when the doorbell rang and I opened it to Ally and Jim—he in a long, embroidered white tunic and gathered white pants, she in a gauzy, old-fashioned dress with a sun hat and, incongruously, an umbrella opened over her head. She took one look at the crowded room and said in a bad British accent, “Not much sun this evening, is there, Doctor? Perhaps I shall fold my parasol?” and Jim answered, “I do think that is a fine idea, Miss Quested,” the lyrical Indian accent his own. Dr. Aziz from Forster’s
A Passage to India,
and his Englishwoman friend-turned-accuser, Adela Quested. Could the English and Indian ever be friends?

I told Jim how happy I was to finally meet him, and I was so busy gathering the next two Adam and Eve labels and some safety pins and explaining the game to them that I didn’t realize the lull of conversation around the room, people turning and looking, staring, then remembering their manners and turning away, still stealing glances.

Ally slipped her hand into Jim’s as Danny handed one of his co-workers a drink and headed toward us, excusing himself to get through the crowd, intent on defusing the situation although he had no idea how.

Across the room, a neighbor Kath and Lee had been trying to make feel welcome whispered to them, “Is she with
him
?”

Lee, without missing a beat, said, “That’s my li’l sis and her husband. Would y’all like to meet them?” The look on the fellow’s face, Kath said later, was so dried-apple darn funny she nearly spit out a whole mouthful of bourbon.

The doorbell rang again, and Linda, dressed as Charlotte the Spider, complete with “Some Pig” written on her accompanying web, opened the door herself as Danny was still working his way toward us and I was pinning “Cleopatra” on Jim’s back. She stepped inside, looking pretty hot even with eight hairy black legs. Jeff, who followed her in, was the most ridiculous pillow-fat Wilbur you have ever seen.

“Jim!” Linda said, oblivious to the awkwardness they’d stumbled into. “I’m so glad you’re here. I’m Linda. And this is my husband, Jeff. But do call him Wilbur tonight.” Then to Ally, “Ally, you haven’t met Wilbur, either! Wilbur, this is Ally.”

Jeff, as if he intuited the tension in the room, looked at them both and said, “Oink.”

People all across the room laughed despite themselves.

Jeff shook Jim’s hand and cuffed him on the shoulder, as if they’d been pals forever. “Linda tells me you were a first-year at Michigan Law the year my brother-in-law graduated,” he said, and you could practically hear the minds in the room reconsidering Jim: he was a Michigan Law grad, and someone like Jeff wanted to be his friend. Even in that pig costume, Jeff was the kind of guy people instinctively admired.

“Oh,” Brett exclaimed. “I’m Marilyn Monroe! And Kath, I saw, you’re Joe DiMaggio! We win!”

“We’re in love, honey!” Kath said.

And again, everyone laughed, and after that we settled into a party that was blessedly lighthearted, blessedly fun.

K
ATH AND LEE
had planned to go to the hospital party the next night in the same Gatsby costumes they’d worn to our party, so Kath was already in her Daisy dress again when Lee called to say there was a problem with one of his patients and he couldn’t leave the hospital yet. He didn’t think he’d be able to leave for hours. “We’ll just skip the party. You don’t mind, do you, Kath?” he said, and she said no, of course not, they were his friends anyway. The truth, though, was that she’d been looking forward to showing off her newly Weight Watchered figure to the men with whom Lee worked, to having them admire her in front of Lee.

Lee might have heard the disappointment in her voice, but he was distracted. He told her to hold on a minute, and he covered the phone as if he was talking to someone else. When he came on again, he said he had to run, he’d likely be late, she shouldn’t wait up for him. She told him she’d stay in costume for a while in case he freed up, but he said she shouldn’t bother, she should let the sitter go, he wouldn’t break free before midnight now.

After he hung up, Kath kept telling herself that the person he was talking to was one of the nurses, or maybe another doctor. Medical staff. She repeated that rationalization for well over an hour as she sat there in her Daisy dress, having a sidecar while the sitter played crazy eights with the children. At nine, Kath tucked them into bed herself, asking the sitter not to go yet. Maybe she would just meet Lee for a drink, she said.

When she called the hospital and asked for Lee, she had no idea what she’d say if he came to the phone. The receptionist came back on, though, to say she’d paged Dr. Montgomery twice and he hadn’t answered. “I think he went to the Halloween party,” the woman said. “The one the nurses organized. I saw him in funny clothes and boots, carrying a golf club or something a while ago.”

How long a while? Maybe an hour, maybe two. It had been a busy night, she wasn’t sure.

Even then, Kath made excuses for Lee. He’d finished earlier than he’d expected; he was exhausted but he thought he ought to make an appearance at the party and was stopping by for just a few minutes on the way home. Still, she told the sitter she wouldn’t be too long, and she got in her little blue convertible and headed for the University Club out on Foothill Expressway. Sure enough, Lee’s car was in the parking lot.

She parked a good distance away, turned off her engine, and sat there, trying to figure out what to do. She watched people coming and going for ten minutes, fifteen, a half hour: a nurse in a sexy black cat costume, unaccompanied; a Superman; Albert Einstein and Minnie Mouse walking arm in arm. She was still trying to make up a plausible story to take inside with her when the door opened and Lee came out—alone. She thought she would cry with relief.

He’d just stopped by for a few minutes. Probably he’d arrived just before she had.

He got into the car and just sat there himself, staring through the windshield for the longest time. She was beginning to worry about him—maybe he’d lost a patient, that was always so tough on him. She had to get home and get rid of the sitter, she realized. She had to be changed and ready to comfort him when he got home.

She started the engine and was pulling forward, through to the other parking lot entrance, when the door to the club opened again and a young woman stepped out into the porch light. She was dressed like someone from the 1920s, Kath thought. Not a flapper, but someone substantially less fashionable. She wore a housedress, and she carried some kind of stuffed animal in her arms. A dog? She was pretty, though.

Kath stared at her, trying to figure out who she was supposed to be—Dorothy with her little dog, Toto?

The woman walked down the steps, crossed the parking lot, slipped into Lee’s car.

The engine fired and the car pulled out quickly, its lights still off. At the stop sign, Lee popped on the lights and leaned over to kiss the woman. Kath saw their silhouettes in the glow of the streetlight, Lee’s face turning the way he used to turn to her at the drive-in movies, when the lovers on the screen were getting romantic. Kath closed her eyes against the other woman, the other Kathy, remembering the baby-rough skin of Lee’s cheek just after he’d started to shave, the stiff feel of his varsity letter on his sweater pressing into her cashmere twinset, that first breathtaking moment of his hand sliding up to the side of her breast.

Like any self-respecting jealous wife, Kath tailed them. Surreptitiously at first. But as she drove, as she watched the shadow of Lee caught in the streetlight, his head tipped back in laughter, as she remembered the phone call—she wouldn’t mind missing the party, would she?—and imagined him dancing with this slut at the party, with everyone knowing he was there and Kath was not, and all the time their children sleeping in their beds as if their lives could not be touched by this moment, this infidelity, she began to wonder why she cared if he saw her, to think he ought to be the one caring about being seen.

She pressed harder on the accelerator, pulled closer behind him, the lights of her little blue car splashing onto the shiny chrome of his bumper, his black-and-yellow license plate. Tailgating, closer than was really safe, her daddy would have said. She ought to leave five car lengths between her and the car in front of her.

She imagined her daddy finding Lee with this sleazy little white-trash gal. Would he grab his shotgun as he’d done when her mother had told him Kath was pregnant? Kath had gone not to her daddy but to her mother, in a tearful mass of streaked mascara that her mother seemed to find nearly as shameful as the pregnancy. Kath had been almost relieved when she heard about the shotgun. She thought it meant somehow that her father was not so ashamed of her as she’d feared. But he hadn’t spoken to her for days, not even at the wedding, a quiet affair in the chapel—not in the main church—on a rainy Thursday morning three days later, with only her parents and Lee’s attending. Not even her sisters, who were not to be taken out of school for something like this. No walking down the aisle. No flowers. No giving the bride away. A new dress only because her mother had secretly taken her out to buy it, making her promise not to say a word about it to her daddy. The dress not white, either, but the palest pink.

The moment the ceremony was over, Kath’s father strode out of the chapel without a word, stopping only outside on the church steps, to light a cigarette under the roof overhang. He left Kath’s mother to hug Lee, to say how happy she was to count him as family. She hugged Kath, too, and pressed a small something into her daughter’s hand. Something special, Kath thought. A family heirloom. A single wedding gift.

“Now you make this marriage work, Katherine Claire,” her mother whispered in her ear. “Don’t you shame us ever again.” And with downcast eyes, her mother thanked Lee’s parents, without saying a word about what her thanks were for.