The Wednesday Sisters (18 page)

“The quick wedding—no more people than you can crowd into a restaurant booth,” Kath said.

“And the way Oliver’s father just shuts him out when he marries her,” Ally said.

Linda, frowning, said, “You can read it in about thirty seconds; I suppose people like that. No ‘The covers of this book are too far apart,’ to quote Dorothy Parker.”

“Ambrose Bierce,” Brett said.

“Really? What’s the Dorothy Parker one, then?”

“‘This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.’”

“My sentiments exactly,” Linda said.

“Love and story, that’s what I think makes it work,” Kath said. “I don’t think people mind awfully a cliché or two—”

“Or two thousand,” Linda said.

“—if the plot is bolting down the tracks. High water covers a lot of stumps.”

“
Cinderella
meets
Romeo and Juliet,
” I said. “The girl we can all imagine we might be—Cinder-Jenny—gets the rich Harvard prince despite the family opposition.”

“But why do we want that lump-in-our-throats feeling?” Ally asked. “From the very first sentence, ‘What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?’ we know how it ends.”

“‘Between grief and nothing, I will take grief,’” Brett said. “William Faulkner.”

“Between William Faulkner and nothing, I will take nothing,” Linda said. “Do you have to be from the South to understand him?”

“God took special pains creating the South,” Kath said.

“And Faulkner wants to inflict that pain on the rest of us?”

That discussion did leave me wondering, though: Why
are
we drawn to sad stories? Why did we all read the book, knowing we were in for the dying-girl ending? Why did we go to the movie that December—Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal—having already read the whole tearjerker book? No one wants to be sad in real life.
You want the sad life behind door number one, Monty, or the happy ending behind curtain number two?
And yet sad plays well in literature. Romance and tragedy.
Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary.
Why is that?

B
RETT RECEIVED
no encouragement at all from her first batch of agent queries, so it was pretty hard for me to feel sorry for myself when my mail-battered manuscript came back from that agent with a polite “no thanks.” It was like sending a child off to school with such hope, though, then peeking into the lunchroom to see him sitting alone. I cried in the bathtub, with the door locked, despairing of ever being a writer, thinking as I sat in that warm water that I should just give it up.

The truth is, we all thought of giving up at some point that winter, more often than you could imagine. And maybe we would have, if we hadn’t had each other, but it was something, having the five of us, knowing we weren’t alone.

“He didn’t even read to the end,” I confessed to the Wednesday Sisters. “The last hundred pages are all nice and tidy, like they’ve never been touched.”

Ally put her arm around my shoulders, and Brett set a gloved hand on mine. “‘Rejections don’t really hurt after you stop bleeding,’” Brett said.

At home that afternoon, I studied my two coffin photos, remembering lying alone in the tucked-velvet darkness, listening to the muffled voices of the Wednesday Sisters beyond the polished mahogany. I imagined my tombstone: simple gray marble with perhaps an angel carved at the top; beloved wife and loving mother; cherished daughter and sister. It ought to be enough. But all those years I’d watched my brothers go off to college—I didn’t know if I could spend my whole life that way, playing the supporting role, having no part of me that wasn’t defined by my relation to someone else.

Early the next morning, I pulled out my note-card chapter summaries, scooted Maggie’s dollhouse and Davy’s train track from the middle of the family room floor, and spread the cards out beside my manuscript. I closed my eyes, inhaled the varnished-wood-and-velvet smell of that coffin. Got up, made a pot of coffee. Sharpened three pencils to a razor tip. And began again.

W
E ALL SAT GLUED
to our televisions that April after an explosion in one of the
Apollo 13
oxygen tanks crippled the rocket. “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” The crew was forced to scrap the lunar landing and swing their damaged ship around to the dark side of the moon, from which they could not even communicate with Earth. There was no live broadcast from the ship due to power limitations, but that didn’t deter the newsmen, who used models and animated footage to explain the situation. Brett hardly stepped away from her television for those four days, worrying about those three men crowded into a lunar landing module meant for only two men and only two days. Her sister, Jenn, who’d started medical school the previous fall at the University of California at San Francisco, sometimes watched with her. Jenn had little free time, but she liked to spend what she had with Brett. They spoke the same language. They could talk together about ways the lithium hydroxide canisters from the command module might be modified to fit the lunar module’s carbon dioxide scrubbers, and not an eyebrow was raised.

“I’m glad you decided not to become an astronaut, Brett—that could be you,” Jenn said as they sat anxiously in front of the television that last morning, waiting for the reentry, praying like everyone else on earth that the command module would work when they reactivated it. And while Brett was considering that—
had
she decided against being an astronaut? Or had it all been decided for her?—Jenn said, “They could sure use your help now, though.”

“
My
help?” Brett said.

“I used to want to be an astronaut, too,” Jenn said. “Like you and Brad. But I was never smart enough.”

Brett laughed. “But you’re in medical school, Jenn!”

Jenn looked at her, and something in her sister’s green eyes reminded Brett of how she had looked on Brett’s wedding day: a fourteen-year-old in a long, silver bridesmaid dress, trying to look grown-up.

Jenn shrugged. “Like that’s a big deal, a doctor.”

“Of course it is!” Brett insisted. “It would be for anyone, even if you weren’t a girl.” At the same time still thinking of her wedding day, thinking how her brother had promised not to miss it for the world, how she’d waited at the back of the church for such a long time until finally her father said, “You just have to let Brad go, Brett. We all just have to let him go and hope he finds his way.”

“I wanted to be more than a doctor, Brett,” Jenn said. “I wanted to be like you.”

“Like me? I change diapers, Jenn!” Wondering if it was the eight years that separated her from her sister that made the difference, or if there was more to it than that. Wondering if she, too, would have gone on to become someone if she hadn’t met Chip, if she hadn’t gotten pregnant before she finished graduate school.

“But you’re so
you,
Brett. You do everything easily while I’m pedaling as fast as I can. I swear, one day you’re going to be halfway through changing a diaper and the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem will just come to you.”

Brett laughed, thinking that seemed like another lifetime, the days when she’d thought she might be the one to solve anything.

“While you’re changing a darn diaper, I swear!” Jenn insisted.

On the screen, three bright red-and-white-striped parachutes burst open against the blue sky and the white puffs of cloud, and the capsule splashed safely into the sea.

“A poopy or a wet?” Brett said, and they laughed as they watched the men being lifted by helicopter and the capsule being loaded onto the USS
Iwo Jima,
the crew waving from the deck of the ship.

It wasn’t until later, as Jenn’s car was pulling out of the drive, that Brett started thinking:
What am I doing? What am I writing, exactly?
Thinking:
Couldn’t I write something more meaningful than this failure of a book that is really about nothing at all?

By the time Chip arrived home from SLAC—he’d worked late that evening—Brett was stooping at the fireplace, watching the flame creep from the match in her hand to the paper under the grate. Stacks of paper littered the coffee table, the couch, the La-Z-Boy recliner, and the new shag rug. Every single page of all twelve drafts of her novel, including all the carbon copies.

“Brett?” Chip said. “What are you
doing
? It’s already hot as blazes in here.”

She grinned up at him. “I’m burning this rubbish,” she said, and she sat on the hearth, crumpled the top page of the stack nearest the fireplace, and tossed it onto the fire. Yes, the fire. The garbage was not permanent enough.

She’d decided everything she’d written to date was utter dross, not worth the paper it was typed on, so much worse than the worst dreck she’d ever read that she would be mortified to see it in print.

“Rubbish?” Chip said.

Brett crumpled a whole fistful of pages and tossed them in with the first page, which was collapsing black into the flames. “Rot,” she said. “Tripe. Twaddle.”

And maybe Chip thought
Twaddle?
or maybe he didn’t, maybe he understood—I rather think he did because what he said was “I see. Well. Do you need some help, then?”

He stacked several of the piles from the coffee table one atop the other and set his briefcase and the evening paper in the space he’d cleared. He sat on the floor in front of the fire, on the other side of Brett’s stacks, and picked up the top sheet, pausing to read the first few words.

She wrested it from him, her bare fingers brushing against his. “
Drivel,
that’s what Frankie would say,” she said. “Linda would say
garbage
because that’s about as direct a way of saying it as there is. Ally would say . . . maybe
blather
—that seems like an Ally word. And I can hear Kath now: ‘This dog won’t hunt.’” She crumpled the page he’d tried to read and tossed it gleefully onto the fire.

Chip looked around dubiously at all those pages. “None of these dogs?”

“They don’t even bark,” Brett assured him. “They don’t even know how to wag the silly little stumps of their tails.”

B
RETT BEGAN WRITING
manically the next morning—the same story, with Elizabeth and Ratty, but completely from scratch. Was it any good? We had no idea. “It’s the same novel in a way, and yet not the same at all” was all she would tell us. She didn’t want to show us one word until she was far enough along to be certain it wasn’t as inconsequential as everything else she’d ever written—that was the way she put it, those aren’t my words. But there was this, at least: that draft came pouring out in a great gush she could barely type fast enough to catch.

“T
HE ONLY RULES
you’ve got to follow,” Kath said when she invited us to a Derby party at her house that spring, just the Wednesday Sisters and our husbands for some good ol’ Kentucky fun, “are that you wear a hat, and you tuck a little money in your pocketbook, to wager, like. Study well on that hat, too, ladies, because sure ’nough it will give you luck with your bets!”

No, Lee had not left Kath yet. And yes, Kath was still clinging to the illusion that nothing was wrong, as if the whole Gatsby car-bashing fiasco had never occurred.

Kath and Lee lived in Old Palo Alto, which was—then even more than now—the most exclusive neighborhood in town (and I mean that in a good way, although a neighbor who was one of the first engineers at Hewlett-Packard did once tell me he moved into the Community Center neighborhood in the 1940s because even Stanford-educated kind-as-anyone-you’ve-ever-met Asians weren’t welcome in the Old Palo Alto, Crescent Park, or Professorville neighborhoods back then). Still, I’d been surprised the first time I saw Kath’s house, a great big old thing that looked like a miniature version of the Museum of Science and Industry back in Chicago. It was stone, with huge, frilly columns out front—Corinthian?—and everywhere else those column façades plastered against the house (pilasters, Danny says). It was the kind of place that might have had a fountain out front. Kath said it reminded Lee of the Governor’s Mansion back in Kentucky; it was the first house they’d seen in California that looked like a real house, so they bought it even though it cost twice what they’d planned to spend.

Madison Leland Montgomery IV. But they’d been just Kath and Lee, and I’d written off Kath’s careful presentation of herself as insecurity. I was glad I’d gotten to know her before I saw her house.

“What does Lee do again?” Danny asked as we stood on Kath’s front porch that Saturday afternoon, waiting for the bell to be answered. Before I could remind him that Lee was a surgery resident at Stanford, though, Lee opened the door, cigarette in hand.

Inside, a two-story foyer with a sweeping stairway opened to huge, high-ceilinged rooms with substantial moldings and an elaborate chair rail. The furniture was dark and serious, antiques that had been in their families for generations, and on the walls were paintings of their ancestors in heavy gold frames: a forbidding lady in folds of satin, whose chin was Kath’s wide chin; a gentleman in judicial robes with the same arc of her brow; a young boy dressed in a lace christening dress, who had Lacy’s curls encircling his chubby face.

“You’re here and I haven’t even got the mint juleps made yet,” Kath said when we found her in the kitchen dumping a big slug of Kentucky bourbon into a crystal pitcher. She smiled, but her eyes were red-rimmed, her face pasty. “And they’re already running the races back home, too, aren’t they, sugar?”

“Not the Derby,” Lee assured her. Then to Danny and me, “It’s the ninth race this year. I don’t quite understand why they only televise the Derby, but who am I to say?”

This was the first Derby either of them had missed seeing live since they were toddlers. Lee’s family had a box at the track, as did Kath’s. Back home, they’d start the party by midmorning. “With mimosas garnished with strawberries,” Kath said.

She pulled a huge jar from the refrigerator—simple syrup: equal parts sugar and water boiled together, then stuck into the refrigerator with six or eight sprigs of mint. She filled the bourbon pitcher with the syrup and tossed in some fresh mint, and Lee did the honors of pouring, smoothly wresting the job of host from Kath’s hands after she’d done all the work. She’d even put crushed ice in sterling silver drinking cups, each adorned with a row of roses at the bottom, a monogram, and an upside-down horseshoe with a year engraved inside.

My cup—1967—was engraved with Kath’s married initials, but the cup Danny had—1950—was carved with her pre-marriage monogram, a Derby cup from long before she’d have been old enough to drink.

“Doesn’t the horseshoe opening down let the luck run out?” I asked.

“The horseshoe has always pointed down on the Derby trophy,” Lee said. “And no one gets a Derby trophy without a little luck.” He predicted even then, though, that Churchill Downs would eventually buckle to convention and flip the Derby horseshoe ends up, the only change ever made to the trophy.

The doorbell rang and soon all ten of us were in the kitchen, comparing the five ladies’ hats. Ally wore a red one with extravagant blue flowers, Brett a stovepipe with a pink velvet band and black feathers, much prettier than it sounds. Linda came in a wide-brimmed to-do with a sheer flowered scarf wrapped around it and tied in a bow under her neck; and mine was a simple straw hat with a band of tiny daisies wrapped around a flat crown. It was Kath—more practiced in the art than the rest of us—who showed us what a Derby hat should be: a frothy concoction of sheer silk and linen with a soft navy brim, an ivory crown, and navy netting—“veiling,” she called it—draped high over the top, all finished with three huge red roses. Real roses that smelled wonderful.

“It is the Run for the
Roses,
don’t you forget it,” she said.

Her pearl necklace was real, too—a different strand than she’d worn at Halloween, with a beautiful clasp that matched her earrings. “My mama always says if you aren’t the prettiest girl at the party,” she said, “then you just pretend you are.”

Lee handed her the last silver julep cup, grinning. “She also says, ‘You’ve got to go lightly with the vices.’”

Kath took a big slug of her drink. “With Mama, you’ve got to pick and choose which advice to listen to.”

Kath hung back as Lee shepherded everyone out to the patio, and I stayed with her.

“This hat fell out of the ugly tree, didn’t it?” she whispered. “I should’ve stuck with the one I wear every year, I know I should have.” She grabbed a tissue and blotted her eyes before her mascara could run. “I’m sorry, it’s just that she called this morning, that awful slut called. The phone rang and Lee said he’d call back and he shut himself up in the bedroom and I couldn’t even get dressed because he’d—”

Lee was at the kitchen door, then, reminding Kath to bring the pitcher.

I whispered that she looked lovely in her hat, and followed her out to the patio, where brunch was set out on a long, smoothly polished wood table: ham with red-eye gravy, made with Kentucky bourbon and coffee, shrimp-and-crabmeat-stuffed tomatoes, piles of eggs and biscuits, casseroles, and coffee cake and lemon bars both garnished with powdered sugar and mint. “There’s a sort of theme that runs through a proper Derby brunch,” Kath said. “Bourbon and mint.” Even the pie, a “Horse-Racing Pie” that looked like a walnut-and-chocolate version of pecan pie, had bourbon in it. “Which maybe I shouldn’t tell y’all,” she said, “because it’s my great-grandmama’s secret recipe—every family in Louisville has its own secret recipe, and you’re banished from the clan if you spill a word of it. Except it wouldn’t be Horse-Racing Pie without bourbon, now, would it? So I’m not really giving out any secrets.”

“And that?” I asked, indicating a creamy-looking dish in the middle.

“That? That’s just cheese grits, honey. You can’t tell me you don’t know cheese grits.”

“Kath’s cheese grits will make you wanna hit your mama,” Lee said.

“Don’t go bragging on me,” Kath said. “It’s just the recipe on the box.”

“It ain’t bragging if you can do it, Kath,” Lee said.

While we ate—far too much—Lee and Kath talked about Churchill Downs and its twin hexagonal spires. About the new fellow, Lynn Stone, who’d taken over when Wathen Knebelkamp retired. About Diane Crump, who would ride that day, the first woman jockey ever to compete in the Derby.

“You know your ol’ buddy Kath here is a big gambler, don’t you?” Lee said. “Plunked down the entire one thousand dollars her daddy gave her for her eighteenth birthday on a horse named Iron Liege. This li’l girl here walked away with almost ten thousand dollars! And the next year, she plunked half of those winnings down again on Tim Tam and walked away with another fifteen grand.”

I fingered the five-dollar bill in my pocket. A thousand dollars? That was Danny’s take-home pay for an entire month.

“You could do worse than to follow her bets. She hasn’t won every year I’ve known her, but she’s never once failed at least to show,” Lee said, this so clearly a side of Kath he adored that I wondered if maybe he did still love her after all. Maybe she
wasn’t
being foolish to wait around for his affair to blow over, I thought, imagining a smitten young Lee courting a teenaged Kath, this pretty girl from a proper family who’d gone wild, who drank bourbon and bet outrageously and slept with him when she’d barely finished her debutante season. And I remembered what Linda had said about that whole Myrtle Wilson thing, that maybe Lee liked girls he wasn’t sure he could control.

Lee kept bringing the mint julep pitcher around, forever topping off our drinks, and throwing them back himself. The only one not drinking much was Jeff. “He’s on call,” Linda whispered to me, “but Lee doesn’t believe a drink or two impairs a real man’s ability to do anything. Jeff’s decided it’s easier just to play along.”

Despite how much Lee was drinking, though, when the phone rang an hour into the party he was quick to answer it. Kath’s eyes started blinking and blinking, trying to save that mascara, but the call wasn’t even for Lee, it was the hospital, for Jeff.

Kath sat frowning at Jeff through the glass doors as if she was annoyed that he was on call, that he hadn’t arranged to swap with someone. But he rejoined us a minute later, saying it had just been a nurse with a question about a new patient’s medication.

Jim, sitting between Jeff and me, quietly asked Jeff if he knew anything about a medicine called Tylandril. “I read something about it recently,” he said. “Is it safe?”

Jeff said it was a synthetic estrogen, that as far as he knew, it was safe. “The issue is whether it actually does anything to prevent miscarriages,” he said.

Jim shot a startled glance down the long table at Ally, engrossed in conversation with Lee at the other end. She was pregnant again, and Jim hadn’t known—that was all over his face. He must have found the medicine and been reluctant to ask her directly what it was. I wondered if she kept the news of her pregnancy from him out of fear—the more she miscarried, the more she must have worried that Jim would leave her rather than remain childless himself—or if she kept it from him out of love. I wondered if she could bear to hear the heartbreak in his voice again as he sang his Indian lullabies to her empty womb.

“All the studies show that estrogen doesn’t prevent miscarriages,” Jeff said.

“I see,” Jim said, and the way he looked at Ally now, it was hard to imagine she could think he would ever leave her.

Linda would learn more about it from Jeff that night: that studies had consistently shown since the 1950s that synthetic estrogen didn’t help women who chronically miscarried; that every major obstetrics textbook but one was very clear that this “wonder drug” did nothing at all. He thought someone should tell Ally that—that she was wasting her money. But it seemed to Linda that Ally got so much comfort from believing the drug
might
help, and what harm could it do?

It was getting on toward post time, after two o’clock, and Lee and Kath were tipping rapidly toward sloshed, several of the rest of us not far behind, when the phone rang again and Lee popped up to answer it. I couldn’t help overhearing him—okay, probably I could have, but I listened anyway. He didn’t say much, just “sure” a few times (a word that had two syllables in his Southern accent), and “I will.” When he hung up, he said he was very sorry but he was on call and we’d have to excuse him, that was the hospital and he had to go in.

“Lee!” Kath protested, but Lee was already saying, “I know Kath will take good care of y’all,” already out the door and gone.

“Is he okay to doctor anyone?” I heard Jim whisper to Jeff.

Jeff just frowned.

On the television, they were announcing the horses for the Derby race, and we turned our attention to picking horses and making our bets. I said I was afraid I didn’t have quite a thousand to put down, tendering my five dollars, and Ally admitted that was all she brought, too. Everyone agreed five dollars was the perfect amount to bet among friends. Winner take all.

Linda declared that she was betting on Fathom, the horse Diane Crump was riding. Jeff and Kath lightheartedly squabbled over Dr. Behrman—Jeff maintaining the horse was his by dint of his profession, Kath by relationship. “I’m friendly with one of the Lin-Drake Farm girls,” she said. “Her family owns the horse.” And Jeff suddenly preferred Terlago and Willie Shoemaker, while the rest of us picked solely on the curb appeal of the horses’ names: Corn Off the Cob, Silent Screen, Action Getter, Holy Land, Robin’s Bug.

The University of Louisville Marching Band struck up “My Old Kentucky Home,” and Kath teared up as she sang along with the crowd, “Weep no more, my lady, Oh! Weep no more today! We will sing one song for my old Kentucky home. For my old Kentucky home, far away.”