The Wednesday Sisters (16 page)

The gift had been the small change purse that held her mother’s pin money, enough for a crib and diapers and a stroller. Nothing sentimental. Nothing by which to remember the day.

Now, Kath had shamed her parents again; she knew that even if they didn’t know it yet. Their daughter, who could not land a boy without sleeping with him before he married her, could not keep him even with her wedding ring.

She pushed harder on the accelerator, less than a car length behind Lee now. She had to jam on the brakes when he slowed for a yellow light.

He leaned over and kissed the slut.

Kath honked the horn.

Lee would have seen her then. He would have glanced up, thinking the light must have changed and, seeing it hadn’t, he would have glanced in his rearview mirror and seen her little blue car. Surely his heart would have stopped for a moment. Surely he’d have sworn under his breath or grasped for one desperate moment for some way—any way—to get out of this without being as red-handedly caught as he already was. But he didn’t get out of his car. Didn’t even acknowledge her.

Kath could see the girl slouch lower in the seat, but Lee turned and said something, and the girl sat up straight again, and actually turned around to look at Kath.

Lee just waited for the light to turn green, then drove on.

Kath wailed on that horn—a high beep that was comic, pathetic—and took off after them again.

Lee was driving faster, already entering the freeway by the time she caught up with him. She did, finally, though, and she honked and honked.

They didn’t stop, hardly even slowed.

In this goddamned flapper outfit!
Kath thought.
With my face all made up to look like the slut
she
is.

Myrtle Wilson,
Kath realized then. The woman was dressed as the Gatsby character Myrtle Wilson, the car mechanic’s wife with whom Daisy’s husband had his affair.

It was that thought that sent her over the edge. That’s the way she described it. “Over the shameful edge.”

She pressed the accelerator, pulled up behind Lee, right on his tailpipe. The chrome of her bumper reflected in his. He sped up, and she sped up. He sped faster. She did, too. She laid on the horn again. What did she want here? What did she expect? Did she think he would stop right here on the freeway and have it out with her? Did she want him to?

She stomped on the accelerator. Flat to the floor.

The crunch of her bumper against his was oddly satisfying. Her pretty blue convertible ramming into the back of Lee’s sedan, going seventy miles an hour down the freeway.

Lee just kept driving away, even faster.

She sped up. Rammed him again. Harder this time. Her bumper rode up over his and hung there for a moment, wrenching his loose as the cars again split apart.

You should have seen the front of her car.

Still he didn’t stop. Still she chased him, his bumper throwing sparks as it dragged behind him on the pavement, her hood dented upward into her view. When she told us about it, it wasn’t any leap at all to imagine: the hard set of the sturdy jaw on this almost demented, newly skinny young Southern girl in a flapper costume as she raced down the highway, bashing into the car in front of her, Tom Buchanan and the cheap woman with the goddamned stuffed dog.

Well, you can see why Lee never did stop that night. Imagine that playing out in the papers: stanford doctor in gatsby love triangle run over by jealous flapper wife. With a photograph. No paper would have been able to resist the photograph.

He was nice enough, at least, to send a station attendant back for Kath after her car died in midpursuit—not long after that second crunch of metal. It took the attendant a while to figure out that the car had simply run out of gas. And by the time he’d poured a jerry can full into her tank and sent her on her way, Lee was long gone. To the girl’s apartment, Kath was sure, though she had no idea where that was.

She waited all night for him to come home. Then washed the flapper makeup from her face and changed into day clothes and started pouring Cheerios into bowls so the children would have something that looked like a mother and a home and breakfast when they awoke.

W
E HELD OUR BREATHS
that next week, waiting for the moment Kath would tell us she was leaving Lee. A long silence fell in after she spilled the story of the great car bashing, though, and after a few weeks of not talking at all, she started acting as if the whole episode had never occurred. We discussed it constantly when Kath wasn’t there. Should
we
bring up the subject? “If she didn’t know Lee was having an affair, we’d have to say something,” Linda said. “But she knows.” “She should leave him,” Brett insisted. “But she isn’t,” I said. “She won’t. It’s her choice and she knows what she’s choosing. Who are we to tell her she’s wrong?” “I don’t like it, either,” Linda said. “But you can see the whole rock-and-hard-spot thing. If she leaves him, she’s a divorced mother of three young children, with . . . well, with nothing.” “A divorcée.” Ally said it the way we were all thinking it, as though it were a terminal disease. “If she stays,” I said, “she’s a married mother of three with a nice house and a handsome husband—” “Not so handsome,” Brett interrupted.

“—and if he’s a philanderer, well, a lot of women have lived with worse.”

Maybe this was just a thing Lee needed to get out of his system. Maybe it wouldn’t last. Lord knew, there were enough wives in the Bay Area who looked the other way while their husbands ran around with their mistresses but never did leave their wives.

“Not that many people will know,” Ally said.

“Everyone at the hospital,” Brett said.

“They’re pretty discreet,” Linda said.

“But she came to the party as
Myrtle Wilson,
” Brett said. “The
mistress.
”

“I didn’t know that was who she was,” Linda said. “Who would ever guess Myrtle Wilson?”

“Kath did.”

Linda shrugged. “Maybe Kath just saw Myrtle Wilson because that’s who she was looking for. Maybe she was wrong.”

“And what?” Brett said. “This girl is a nice girl, just like us only better, gutsier, because she went to medical school?”

“Lee doesn’t wear a wedding ring,” I said.

“She must know he’s married by now,” Brett said.

“But maybe not when she fell in love with him,” Ally said.

“Time out!” Linda interrupted. “
Which
Kath is our friend?”

We all fell quiet.

“Maybe she
was
supposed to be Myrtle,” Linda said. “Maybe it was some kind of bad-girl joke. I could see that. I could see Lee being attracted to a bad girl, someone he’s not quite sure he can control. But even if she was, no one knew.”

“People will know,” Brett said. “People will talk behind their backs.” And the rapid blinking of her eyes—very un-Brett—left me imaging her as a young woman, beginning to date her professor or her lab teacher’s assistant or whatever Chip had been, someone she knew she ought not to date because he would be grading her. She’d have been sure she was being discreet, that she would have time to figure out if she even really liked him before the whole world knew. Then she’d have realized—words overheard, maybe, or the sudden stop of hushed conversation—that everyone knew. That everyone talked.

“People will talk,” I agreed. Even when there was nothing wrong with people seeing each other, people talked. Danny and I had seen that.

Ally cleared her throat. “Like we are?”

“But we’re trying to help,” Brett said.

“Her mother won’t know,” I said. “Her father and her sisters. All her friends back in Kentucky.”

Everyone nodded, thinking about that, thinking how awful it would be to have your parents know that your husband had a girl on the side.

O
UR FIRST REACTION
to Jim being Indian was somehow well behind us after that Halloween party, maybe as a result of the profuse apologies we’d all offered after our blowup, or because Ally was right about Jim: you couldn’t know him and not love him.

“Strangers—people who don’t know him and never will—there isn’t anything you can do about them,” she told us that first Wednesday in November. “You just have to shrug them off as best you can. The problem for us is our families. Jim’s parents—don’t tell him I said this, but sometimes I think maybe it’s a blessing that phone calls to India are so expensive. They call Jim or Jim calls them once every three months, and they talk for three minutes, it’s this limit they’ve set, as if four minutes would be an unforgivable extravagance. And of course he talks to them, I don’t, I’ve only spoken to his mother once, right after we were married, just long enough to hear the disappointment in her voice. I’ve never even heard his father’s voice. But Jim reads me their letters. They want to know when Jim is going to come home. They remind him it’s his job as eldest son to care for them when they’re old.

“It’s not so much that they care that I’m not Indian. It’s more that they can’t get over the fact that Jim chose a wife without them. That’s something his whole family was supposed to be involved in. Not just his parents but his grandparents and his aunts and uncles, they were all supposed to have a say in choosing a bride for him. Did we even know if our horoscopes matched? That’s what they wanted to know. Which, no, we didn’t. They were horrified. And his mom, you can tell she worries that I won’t know how to wrap a sari and I’ll be an embarrassment with visitors when we move to India—”

“You’re moving to India?” Brett and I said in unison.

“Of course not. But try convincing them of that. Try convincing them of anything, like even that Jim was already eating meat and drinking alcohol long before I met him. His mother—it’s pretty funny, really. Every time she writes, she asks all about our trees. Have we planted a coconut tree yet? Jim had her send his favorite recipes and he translated them into English, but I didn’t even know what half the ingredients were, and when I asked for them at the grocery they looked at me like I was loony. But half the recipes call for coconut.

“And do we live near a banyan tree, she wants to know. It’s a tree that’s sacred in India, Jim says, that represents eternal life because its branches never stop expanding. I keep threatening to plant one even though they grow four times as big as your average Palo Alto yard because, listen to this: it’s a wish-fulfilling tree. I’m supposed to—I think this is the way it works—I’m supposed to gather my girlfriends and tie a thread around its bark when the moon is full, and that will keep Jim safe or make me pregnant or both, something like that!”

“Have her send us a branch, honey,” Kath said. “It’d be mighty fun to dance a midnight Indian jig!”

“Heavens, no!” Ally said, mock horror on her face. “You can’t cut so much as a
leaf
from a banyan tree. It’s sacred!” Which had us all laughing that day, though later I wondered why it was any funnier than what went on in my church, people kneeling and crossing themselves in front of manmade altars that women weren’t even supposed to stand behind. I wanted to ask Ally what she and Jim did religion-wise; I couldn’t see back then how a marriage of two different faiths—even two Christian faiths—could work. Though it turns out Jim is Hindu and Ally is Christian and that just doesn’t bother them. They feel they’re fundamentally the same even if they do pray to different gods.

“I wouldn’t laugh if Jim didn’t laugh first,” Ally said that morning. “But he’s sure the minute we have a grandson for them, his parents will be fine. Which is sort of what I hope about my parents, that a grandson will bring them around. My sister says that’s all my father talks about with her: When is she going to give him a grandson?”

We all agreed that surely a grandchild would bring everyone around, though Linda, at least, wasn’t all that sure. She told us later, after Ally left to take Carrie home, that when her brother’s old girlfriend had married a black man, her parents sat shiva for her just as if she had died.

W
E WEREN’T GOING
to
join
the peace march in San Francisco that November, mind you, we were just going to watch, to see what it was all about. As I told Danny, “How can I be a writer if I don’t experience the world?”

“You’re writing a mystery, Frankie,” he said. “One set in Renaissance Italy. And it won’t be the world you’ll experience, it’ll be thousands of irresponsible lunatics bent on causing trouble, shouting for peace as if they could possibly know more about Vietnam than the president does.” And when I started talking about the demonstrators lining up coffins outside the Capitol and all those Vietnamese civilians massacred at My Lai, he said, “You don’t think we should pull out of Vietnam any more than I do, Frankie. And what if the crowd starts rioting and people are arrested? What if it turns out like the Democratic convention, with people getting killed? What would Maggie and Davy do if anything happened to you?

“If you want to go to a peace march,” he said, “I hear there’s going to be one right here in downtown Palo Alto.” And it seemed impossible to explain the difference: that Palo Alto peace marches rarely drew more than a few hundred people, whereas this San Francisco march might draw a hundred thousand or more.

He wasn’t the only husband unhappy about our going. Only Jim and Jeff
didn’t
object. Jim thought Ally should stand up for what she believed in—but then, they were childless, they didn’t have the same concerns. And Jeff? When Danny tried to enlist his opposition, Jeff said, “I could object from my rooftop, Danny, but Linda is Linda. She’ll do what she wants.” Which left me wondering why she hadn’t gone to the University of Iowa graduate program, why she’d married Jeff and moved to Baltimore instead. It made me think of the way she’d sent her story out again and again—but without telling us. Linda did what she wanted and said what she wanted, but there was more to her than that.

The morning of the rally I slipped out of bed early, and dressed quietly, and walked down to Ally’s house in the wet darkness. I sat under my umbrella on the damp bottom step of her front porch, watching the sky over the old mansion lighten to a dull cloud gray. What did I really think about the war? I wondered as I sat there. Not Danny, but me. I read the newspapers. I watched the news. What did
I
think?

Despite the wet chill of the morning, by the time we arrived in San Francisco some two hundred thousand people had gathered at the waterfront, filling the streets and beginning to make their way toward Golden Gate Park. Three men who seemed to belong together only in their size—all big men, though the first wore a suit and tie, the second long hair and lamb-chop sideburns, the third a decorated service uniform—led the way with a large banner that read veterans for peace. There was one woman with them, a nurse in a clean white uniform who walked with a slight limp—a war wound, it dawned on me only later; she, too, was a veteran.

Those three men and the nurse seemed somehow to represent the crowd that day, the diversity. I’d expected . . . I didn’t even know, really. Disreputable-looking men with long hair and mustaches? Danny’s lunatics? But there were all kinds of men and women protesting—in suit coats and ties, in workmen’s clothes, in housedresses and bell-bottom slacks and skirts and pumps.

It was a long walk—seven miles—to the park.

We Wednesday Sisters walked at the fringes of the crowd, feeling more like the shopkeepers who observed from their doorways than like protesters. Maybe not Linda, but the rest of us. If made to declare one way or the other, Danny was probably right, I probably would have said that Nixon was doing the right thing, that peace through victory was the right path. Yes, I’d watched the footage and listened to Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid; I couldn’t purge the awful photos from my head. But it wasn’t as simple as it sometimes seems in retrospect. I believed—most Americans believed—that the spread of communism would mean loss of freedom and torture and death, and perhaps even nuclear war. We never imagined the communist world would just collapse as it did in the Soviet Union years later. We thought the only way to preserve our lifestyle was to fight theirs. And we couldn’t, truthfully, imagine that America might be wrong. We didn’t like to imagine that what we were doing as a country could be imperialist or illegal or just plain immoral any more than we liked to imagine an America that could be defeated by a small country of small people we thought of as less intelligent and less compassionate and less worthy than we were. So we just didn’t imagine it.

Even Linda, the most vocally antiwar of us, was watching more than protesting with the crowd that morning. “All the disabled veterans,” she said. “I never expected to see them here. I never thought about that.” And even as she was admitting that, a tall, blond man with his arm amputated at the elbow fell in alongside her, his stump exposed under the edge of his short-sleeved oxford shirt. “Nice to see a pretty girl like you out here with us,” he said.

Linda focused on his face—china-blue eyes, slightly crooked nose, freshly shaved chin—listening to him, trying to work up the nerve to touch him. Just a small touch at his shoulder. She veered away from him unconsciously, though, just enough to bump into Brett, who reached a hand out to steady her. Linda looked at Brett’s gloved fingers on her elbow but didn’t pull away. She turned back to the man, her face solicitous and yet not quite natural. “Did you lose your arm in the war?” she asked, making herself confront it.
See, I can face this. I can do this now.

“This?” The man thrust the stub of arm toward her, maybe angry at her for seeing his arm rather than seeing the whole of him, maybe angry at what he’d been through, maybe angry at everything.

Linda swayed back from him again, staring at the stump, unable or unwilling to look away. She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t him, really. It wasn’t him or his arm she loathed. It was herself. She wanted to tell him it was impossible for her to look at him without thinking of her mother, that it was her own guilt that was the problem, the guilt of a nine-year-old who never did embrace her mother. But he was already heading back to rejoin his buddies, who looked toward us as they frowned at something he said.

Brett set her hand back on Linda’s elbow, the lightest embrace, and Kath fell in on Linda’s other side, where the man had been.

As we walked that morning, we had to squeeze into the crowd when the road narrowed or when we came to a car parked at the curb. We were walking alongside a group of doctors when I stumbled, and I was saved from plastering myself on the pavement by one of them. He and his doctor friends made me stop so they could check my ankle, though I assured them I was okay, I was forever tripping but I’d never once in my life broken or sprained a thing.

They were from Los Angeles, a group called Physicians for Social Responsibility, and one of them—a fellow with the same dark-rimmed glasses and slight build as my Danny—turned out to know people Jeff and Lee knew; he’d interned at Stanford.

Linda told him we were writers.

“Writers?” he said. “That’s terrific. What have you written?”

He expected books, you could tell. Books he’d heard of, books on the bestseller list. When you say you’re a writer, people always do.

Linda replied, cool as a morning breeze, that Brett had published an essay and she had a story coming out soon. I felt like an idiot even though I wasn’t the one who’d proclaimed myself a writer; I hadn’t published a thing. Then quiet Ally started asking them questions as if she were a reporter for
The New York Times,
I swear, as if she did not intend to go home until she understood everything that was happening here. Before I knew it, I was asking questions, too. It was so much easier to be a writer with these strangers than it was with any-one I knew, these men who had no preconceptions about me, who wouldn’t think that I was just Frankie, the engineering school secretary who’d never been to college, who couldn’t possibly have dreams.

It seemed no time before the seven miles were behind us and we arrived at the park. We stayed with the doctors, quite a ways from Black Panther David Hilliard and the other speakers, so it was difficult to see them, but we’d come to see the crowd more than anything and we could hear well enough. As we stood talking, waiting for the speeches to begin, a nun in full white habit and a wimple came and stood near us, holding a sign that read not one more dead. Something about her—just the nunness of her, I suppose—made me think of Sister Mary Alice, the head of my high school. Sister Mary Alice was a big barrel of a woman who made things happen, though she’d been nearly eighty when I was in school. I wondered if she was still alive, and if she was still running the school, and if we’d be in this mess in Vietnam if she were in charge of the show. If you’d asked me in the car on the way up if I could imagine Sister Mary Alice—or Sister Josephine or any of the other nuns who taught me—demonstrating for peace, I’d have gotten the giggles so badly I’d have started hiccoughing. But that nun’s face held the same measure of compassion those nuns could startle you with when they’d learned your grandmother was sick or your dog had died or you had not been asked to the prom. When they mailed you a note after you’d taken your fiancé to meet them, a note that said, “Danny is clearly a very smart young man, Frances, but don’t forget that you are a very smart young woman, too.”

It made me tear up, imaging Sister Mary Alice’s stooped old body under the weight of a not one more dead sign, though I couldn’t begin to say why.

The speeches that afternoon were relatively unremarkable, the crowd moderate, enthusiastic but well behaved. When Hilliard tried to stir everyone up, suggesting in the most unpleasant language that we ought to kill President Nixon, the crowd simply drowned him out with shouts of “Peace! Peace! Peace!”

“Peace!” I found myself saying, not exactly shouting but not exactly not, joining Danny’s lunatics without feeling the least bit crazy, or even the least bit wrong. And when I looked to Kath and Brett and Linda and Ally, they too were saying, “Peace!” All while President Nixon sat in the White House watching the football game our husbands were watching at home with our children, a game the network didn’t even think to interrupt to show live coverage of hundreds of thousands of Americans taking to the streets.