The Wednesday Sisters (17 page)

A
LL THAT FALL,
even with so much going on, I worked on “Michelangelo’s Ghost,” revising and revising. As the Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven, as two million people participated in the first moratorium against the war, as others were going off to see
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
or reading
The Godfather
or
The Andromeda Strain,
I sat at my typewriter. The amazing thing was I didn’t
want
to do anything else. I didn’t want to go shopping or to the movies, I didn’t want to watch
That Girl
or
Laugh-In
or even Johnny Carson, which I’d always loved. And I wasn’t alone. Brett was revising her novel, Linda started a new story, and Ally traded in her “Not Some Duck” for a porcupine who was at least moving out of her journal onto full pages in a way the duck never really had. Even Kath was writing: gut-wrenching journal entries that were melodramatic and awful, that made me want to talk her into leaving Lee, just dumping him and starting over. But even now, with divorce not the taboo it was back then, it’s a hard thing to tell a friend you think her marriage is over. It’s impossible, really. What if you’re wrong and she leaves him when the next day he might have dumped the girlfriend and, having gotten that out of his system, gone back to life with her and old age and all the till-death-do-us-part happily-ever-after she’d hoped for at the altar on her wedding day? Which was the way Kath’s sad melodrama of a story would end if she ever finished it, if she ever got beyond ideas jotted in her journal, you could tell that from the little she’d written. As if by writing it she could make it true.

I’m not even sure now how we’d gotten to the point that we were all writing. I know writers who have a talisman or a ritual to make writing easier: bunny slippers they wear or a certain candle they always burn when they’re writing; putting pen to paper at sunrise, or noon, or 11:00
P.M.
; sitting in a certain chair in a favorite café or walking their dog on the beach first; playing one song on their iPod on infinite repeat for one novel, then choosing another song for the next. But that always strikes me as dicey. What if that café table is taken? What if the dog you walk on the beach eats your bunny slippers? What if your iPod dies? And the fact is, we were mothers and wives; if we waited for the stars to align just so, we’d still be waiting.

I suppose what we did was park our butts down and write any moment and any place our children were otherwise occupied. We got up early and wrote while our households slept. We carried journals and pens and even manuscripts in our purses, and if the children fell asleep in the car on the way to the grocery store, we sat with our writing propped up against the steering wheel, scribbling quietly, careful not to inadvertently honk the horn. We grabbed every minute we could, hoping it might turn out to be five minutes or ten, maybe an hour if we were lucky. And even when it was frustrating and we didn’t like what we wrote, even when we were just jotting down thoughts about a day that had not gone well, there was joy in it, one part the pleasure of feeling creative and one part the way our friendship wrapped around our hopes.

By Thanksgiving, Brett and I—pleased as anything that this new television show,
Sesame Street,
had completely enthralled our children—had completed our manuscripts. By Christmas, we’d put together agent lists and drafted letters describing our books. Brett included a lovely paragraph that said she’d graduated summa cum laude and written for the Radcliffe newspaper, and had done graduate work at Harvard. I put in a sentence reporting that I lived in Palo Alto with my husband and our two young children and tried not to worry that it didn’t look like much.

Kath took one look at our letters and said, “Ladies,” in a tone that might have been addressed to Anna Page when she was caught playing in the mud. “Do you think General Motors sells cars with ads that say ‘Would you like to see a brown car with seats and wheels and windshield wipers?’”

“You could compare yourself to some famous writer,” Linda suggested. “Frankie, you could say something like ‘in the tradition of—’”

“Daphne du Maurier,” Kath said.

“To name a brilliant example,” Linda said, rolling her eyes. “And Brett could say something like . . .” She paused, unable to come up with anyone to whom she could compare Brett’s writing. Brett’s story ought to have worked, but it didn’t, and yet none of us could say there was anything wrong with it exactly.

I wondered if the same thing was happening with my book, if it wasn’t really good enough but they were too chicken to tell me “Michelangelo’s Ghost” wouldn’t fly.

“This is preposterous,” Brett said. “We’re supposed to boil four hundred manuscript pages down to a single paragraph?”

“Like churning sweet milk,” Kath said. “How about this, y’all? How about you start with a question to draw in the reader, then give them a little peek at the story but don’t tell the ending? Show them a little ankle, maybe some calf, but don’t go sleeping with the boy before the wedding day.”

“I heard they’re getting copy machines at the library, so you could send a sample chapter, too,” Ally suggested. “It’s so easy to say no, you don’t think you’d like a book, but then you read the first line and pretty soon you’ve finished a whole chapter and you realize you
do
want to read this story about, say, a middle-aged widow manor owner in thirteenth-century East Anglia.”

So Brett and I went back to the drawing board. It’s amazing how much time you can spend on a simple one-page letter, but Kath was right: that one page would determine whether anyone would ever read our books.

                  •                  •                  •

D
ANNY STUMBLED
in the door one night not long afterward to find me working on the same paragraph I’d been working on for days. It was 1:00
A.M.
I had a moment of fearing I was in Kath’s shoes—or those boots she talked about putting on backward—especially since his initial wave of enthusiasm for my writing seemed to have waned, leaving in its wake a hint of disapproval. I wasn’t getting enough sleep, and he missed waking up next to me; couldn’t I just stay in bed in the morning?

That night, though, he just started rambling enthusiastically and incoherently—he was definitely a bit sloshed—about chips and wafers and yields. “From two to
twenty-five
good chips per wafer, Frankie,” he said. “We popped so many champagne corks that the ceiling needs to be replaced!”

I heard what he was saying then. His MOS dream, his “baby,” was becoming a reality, a product they might be able to mass-produce.

“It was the rubber-chicken good luck, was it?” I said, and he laughed, a silly-drunk laugh; he’d started praying to that rubber chicken every morning.

I could get no sense out of him after that—just a bad imitation of his co-worker Les Vadasz jumping all over the place, screaming “Sooooper dip!” in a thick Hungarian accent. I was sure he would wake the children, just as I was sure, in bed not much later that night, that we would both wake them, though we did not.

It wasn’t yet dawn when I woke the next morning—no sounds of trash collectors or early traffic yet, but I already had a new first sentence for my query letter in my mind. I slipped out from under Danny’s arm, which was draped heavily over me, and reached for my glasses on my nightstand.

“Hey,” he whispered. “Where are you going?” He lifted the sheet and blanket and pulled me to him, nuzzling, morning-breathed, into my neck. “Let’s do that again.”

What would you do if you were Risa Luccessi?
I thought. Hold on to the line. Ideas evaporate so easily if I don’t get out of bed and write them down.

“It’s morning,” I said. “Mags and Davy—”

“Shhh,” he said, reaching under my nightgown, stroking my thigh. “It’s not even light yet.”

“My diaphragm,” I said, and there was a brief but perfect stillness to him then, him shrugging off his concern about using birth control, one he never voiced in bed.

“Let’s make a baby,” he whispered. “Let’s make a Robert and we’ll call him Bobby. Let’s make a cute little Madeline who will grow up to be as beautiful as her mom.”

But I wasn’t ready for another baby, for morning sickness and the overwhelming tiredness that had been bad enough with Maggie and almost unbearable with Davy, when Maggie was already underfoot. And I wanted to steal the quiet of that morning for myself.
Your dream is in reach, Danny,
I wanted to say,
but what about mine?

He was already lifting my nightgown, though, kissing my breasts. My body was responding even as my mind was thinking
What would you do if you were Risa Luccessi?
and reaching for the next few words that I’d had, the start of the second sentence, the thought that had already dissipated in the morning exchange, leaving me with a question that had no answer, no little bit of ankle, no enticing glimpse of leg.

W
HEN I RECEIVED
the first positive response to my query letter the second Tuesday in January, my thrill was overrun with panic by the time I got to the agent’s bold, blue-ink signature. Before I knew it I’d revised two chapters entirely, screwing up the pagination. I was frantically retyping the whole thing when Danny got home late that night, and yes, he was happy for me, but I’d imagined him more excited. I’d imagined him not caring one whit about his dinner, which, by the time he got home, was three shriveled new potatoes, a pile of dried peas, and a hard lump of chicken left forgotten in the oven. I’d imagined him wrapping me up in a great big hug and calling me “the future famous novelist, M. F. O’Mara” again, saying we ought to open a bottle of champagne.

The next morning, though, the Wednesday Sisters made up for Danny’s restraint. They all wanted to touch the letter, as if it were literary spring water from the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes.

“So, what in the world is a jiffy bag?” I asked. “And what does ‘on exclusive’ mean?”

By late afternoon, I was standing at the post office window handing over my manuscript, not completely retyped but with two page 34s labeled A and B as Danny had suggested. And even as I pushed Davy’s stroller toward home I was holding my breath, sure that at any moment the phone would ring and my literary life would begin.

Minutes turned into hours, days, and weeks, though, my initial euphoria dipping to cautious optimism, souring into apprehension, then rotting almost immediately into massive, Oreo-eating dread. Perhaps the manuscript was so bad that the agent was not even going to grace it with a rejection, too concerned any further correspondence with me might taint him.

W
HEN ERICH SEGAL’S
Love Story
was serialized in the
Ladies’ Home Journal
starting that February, Kath insisted we’d be fools not to read it. “It’s the biggest publishing sensation in a thousand blue moons, y’all. Don’t you think we can learn something from this year’s May Queen?” She, like the critics, for all the fault they found with the novel, thought it charming. “It’s like the bad boy we all fell for at school,” she said. “You know you should not even be talking to this fella, he’s got a reputation and so does any girl seen with him, but he’s charming your bobby socks off and the next thing you know you’re unzipping your own skirt without him even having to ask.”

Like nearly everyone in America, we did read it, and we argued about every aspect of it, from the story (Oliver Barrett IV defies his wealthy father to marry poor Jenny Cavilleri, only to watch her die) to the prose (“‘It skips from cliché to cliché with an abandon that would chill even the blood of a
True Romance
editor,’” Linda quoted from a
Newsweek
review) to the cover, loud red and green and blue letters against a white background (half the copies at Stacey’s already looked dirty from people handling it, Ally said, a comment Kath would remember later, about the impracticality of white covers). I was the only one who swallowed the book whole, reading it in one late-night sitting and bawling at the end, having neither the English literature background to call out its flaws nor any idea whether poor Radcliffe music majors really called rich Harvard boys “Preppie,” or whether Harvard hockey stars really called their fathers “sir.”

“So, what makes it work?” Kath said.

“How can anyone possibly care about this nonsense when hundreds of women are conducting sit-ins at
Ladies’ Home Journal
?” Linda said. “When Harvard College and
Newsweek
magazine are being sued for sex discrimination—and with more to come, mark my words.” Leaving me imagining Linda holding the book physically away as she read it. Leaving me wondering if any of us could bear to read
Love Story
if Jenny had left behind not just her husband but also two sons and a daughter under the age of ten.

“Okay, what makes it so
popular
?” Kath rephrased.

“Even though it’s thin, it’s not wrong,” Brett said. “Jenny’s annoyance that Oliver poaches on the meager Radcliffe library when he can use Harvard’s—that’s real.”