The Wednesday Sisters (19 page)

The horses loaded, finally, and the race began, and there was a flurry of excitement when Silent Screen and Terlago and Robin’s Bug all came out fast. Then Brett’s pick, Silent Screen, moved into the lead about three quarters of the way through the race, and Brett actually hopped up and down with excitement. Corn Off the Cob, my horse, made a move, and I was jumping with her. Jim’s horse, Robin’s Bug, was in it, too, and for a moment we were having a ball. Then several horses that had not been in contention came up from nowhere, and Dust Commander was suddenly well in the lead.

“Dust Commander?” Chip said. “What kind of name is that for a horse?”

Then the two minutes were over and none of us had won. Or placed. Or showed. Not even Kath. The best we’d done was Silent Screen, in sixth.

Brett at first refused to accept the winnings—“I’m not taking forty-five dollars for picking the middle of the pack”—but Kath looked so devastated that Brett, thinking it was because of her refusal, said she was just kidding, of course she’d take the money, she’d won fair and square.

With Kath looking so dreadful, and Jim not much better, we started making our excuses to say good-bye as soon as it was reasonable to do so. Linda said she would stay and help Kath clean up and Jeff could let the sitter go.

As the door closed behind us, leaving Linda to comfort Kath, I said to Jeff, “Lee wasn’t on call today, was he?”

Jeff sighed, and he didn’t answer, but we all knew the truth soon enough.

B
EFORE THAT DERBY PARTY,
before Lee moved out late that summer—1970, this was—the Wednesday Sisters had been watching the women’s movement from the sidelines in the same way we’d watched the antiwar movement, notwithstanding the San Francisco march we’d attended. We weren’t so different from the rest of the country: a poll in June showed that 60 percent of men and 43 percent of women—college-educated ones—still thought a woman should be wife and mother first and foremost, a view even we would have called old-fashioned. But maybe we wouldn’t have if Lee hadn’t finally left Kath that August, if he hadn’t come home from work early one evening and put the children to bed rather than assuming Kath would, then packed a suitcase and told a stunned Kath he’d signed a lease on an apartment in Menlo Park.

He didn’t think they ought to tell the children just yet, what with school about to start, the specter of homework for Anna Page, who was going to be a fourth-grader, and Lee-Lee needing to keep a smile on his face for a full day now that he’d be in first grade. Lee would come back for breakfast or for dinner sometimes, he said, and since he was so often at the hospital anyway, they wouldn’t know he’d moved out.

Kath just sat staring at him until finally he waved a hand in front of her face and asked if she’d heard a word he’d said. She said yes—just that one word, yes—and he said, “Okay, then,” and walked out the door.

He came home for dinner the next night, and Kath, so hoping he’d changed his mind and come back that she’d convinced herself it was true before dinner was over, was devastated when he gave her his new address and telephone number, as if she were simply one more person who might need to note it in her book.

He still paid the bills and gave her a little money each week—enough for groceries, barely, but what about clothes and toys, medicines and trips to the zoo? She couldn’t bear the thought of asking him for more, though, much less taking him to court. She would have welcomed him back in a heartbeat, and she didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize his return. And she wasn’t sure Lee had more money to give her, anyway. Yes, they had a big house and plenty of silver, fancy cars, but those were bought with family money, gifts in one way or another from her family or his, doled out at their parents’ or grandparents’ whim. What they lived on day to day was the same thing Linda lived on, the meager salary of a resident, with only the promise of a doctor’s income someday, and though Kath might have gotten help from her parents, that would have raised questions, and she couldn’t bear to tell them about Lee moving out.

So that August we started seeing things a little differently, we started seeing a world where any one of us might be abandoned in one way or another by her husband, and where would that leave us? What choice would we have but to get a job, to leave our children in someone else’s care while we went off to work?

Linda once said people don’t give to causes, people give to people, and I think that’s what happened to us. It wasn’t so much that our consciousness was raised in any abstract way as that Kath, after a brief and unsuccessful stint trying to get wallpaper-hanging gigs to make a little money, was trying to get a real job. She would step up her job search in earnest after school started that September, while the Cubs were battling for first, getting as close as a half game out, and we would all be incensed on her behalf at what she encountered in her interviews. Men called her “babe” and “honey”—she called people “honey” herself, she knew that, but not in the condescending tone these men used, men who asked why she was looking for a job when she had a husband and children at home.

It wasn’t that we thought of ourselves as women’s libbers, not for a minute. The media generally dismissed every gathering of women in the name of liberation as a “flop” and stereotyped women’s rights advocates as ugly man-haters and left-wing radical lesbians, and I suppose we bought into that as much as anyone did. Our conversation still focused on the breakup of the Beatles and the new Joni Mitchell song (about paving paradise for a parking lot) more often than on the Equal Rights Amendment (though we did cheer when the ERA finally made its way out of the House Judiciary Committee that summer), and the books we read tended toward
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
rather than
Sexual Politics
—much less
The Female Eunuch.
Still, we began to see what it was like for women who had to work, and it cast events in a little different light.

Ally had as tough a time that spring and summer as Kath did. Jeff, concerned about the drug Ally was taking, went into the hospital the evening after the Derby party for the express purpose of “bumping into” a colleague in obstetrics, who referred him to a group of doctors in Boston. When Linda telephoned Ally about it that Sunday afternoon, she started slowly, explaining what Jeff had told her about why a woman sometimes miscarried repeatedly: because of an abnormality in her uterus or cervix, or because her reproductive cycle wasn’t working right somehow or there were other undiagnosed problems with her health. But Ally didn’t want to hear about it. “I’m perfectly healthy, Linda,” she said. “I’ve practically never been sick a day in my life.”

That Wednesday in the park, Linda brought it up again, saying, “These Boston doctors Jeff talked to, Ally, they think there’s a link between this drug you’re taking and some kind of rare vaginal cancer. I’m not sure I quite understand exactly what Jeff was saying, but he definitely thinks you ought to stop taking it.” Ally’s stare would have turned anyone else away—to Davy barreling headfirst down the slide or Arselia clearing J.J. from the bottom, or to the mansion’s porch light burning dimly against the dull morning—but Linda met her gaze.

“What does Jeff know about it?” Ally said. “My doctor says it’s a magic bullet, that I’ll have a baby.”

Linda rolled her lips together, her multicolored eyes kind and sad and determined, still fixed on Ally.

Ally looked away, toward the palm tree to the right of the mansion door, a single dead frond hanging down along its trunk. “How can you know? You have no idea what it’s like not to have a baby.” Her voice even softer now: “Do you think I care if I might have some higher chance of cancer when I’m eighty?” She met Linda’s gaze again, her eyes moist. “Jeff isn’t even a gynecologist. He has no idea what he’s talking about.”

“But the drug won’t help,” Linda said, so gently you might not even have believed it was Linda. “It’s just marketing. The drug companies are making a lot of money on disproved research and false hope.”

“You don’t know,” Ally whispered. “Maybe you just don’t
want
me to have a baby.”

The tension at that picnic table was palpable, but Kath jumped right in. “We’ve just got to get us one of those banyan trees and do our midnight jig, ladies,” she said, and even Ally laughed.

“Asparagus, mangos, and carrots,” Ally said, clearly relieved to take the conversation in a lighter direction. “That’s the latest from my mother-in-law. That’s what I’m supposed to be eating now. Jim, too. And listen to this: She sent Jim some concoction made from white lilies—Jim thinks you make a tea with it or you blend it in goat’s milk or something, even he’s not sure. It’s supposed to enhance the quality of his output, if you know what I mean!”

Linda let the whole matter of the drugs go that day, but the next week she came armed with a fat medical textbook. Ally wouldn’t even look at it, though. And two weeks later, she started bleeding, right there in the park. She didn’t notice at first—none of us did. It wasn’t until we stood to leave that we saw the red stain on her white slacks.

“Oh Lordy, Ally,” Kath said, and Ally looked down at herself, and what little color she had in her face drained away.

I hurried her to her car and drove her to the hospital, leaving Maggie and Davy and Carrie with Linda, telling Ally the whole way that it was going to be okay. The moment they whisked her from the emergency waiting room, I called Jim at his office. By the time he arrived, though, it was too late—the baby was lost.

We took our casseroles and fried chicken again, and wished there was something more we could do. Ally turned away every offer of help, though, and when Kath asked if she wanted to talk about it, Ally answered, “About what?” Which—we talked about it endlessly—seemed like a pretty loud
no.
None of us had any idea what she was going through, we knew that. We couldn’t imagine. And poor Linda: you could see her wondering if her warnings had somehow brought this on, if Ally’s losing her baby had been her fault.

O
N THE FIFTIETH
anniversary of the suffrage movement one warm August Wednesday, while fifty thousand women marched in New York and thousands more marched in ninety cities in forty-two states in a Women’s Strike for Equality, the Wednesday Sisters sat huddled at our picnic table, with Arselia watching our children for the same inadequate pay those women were marching about.

“Ladies,” Linda kept saying, “you know we really ought to go to town”.

The area chapters of the National Organization for Women were staging a noon rally in Lytton Plaza.

“I won’t ask you to shed your bras and chuck them in a garbage bin, but aren’t you curious?” Linda said. “Aren’t you dying to see what’s going on?”

There was some discussion about the children. Could we take them to a women’s lib rally? Which might have been real worry over their safety: just ten days earlier a mass confrontation downtown had ended with riot police and Mace and more than 250 hippies under arrest. Palo Alto had seen more than its share of violence all through that summer. But I think there was more to it than that. The peace rally we’d gone to, that was pretty easy. It was in San Francisco, where we weren’t likely to bump into anyone we knew who might frown on our being there, and no doubt peace was a better thing than war in any event. But this rally Linda was talking about was in our own town, where people we knew ate and shopped. And women’s liberation was a little trickier. It was an effort to change the future for women, but we had husbands and homes and children. Too late for Brett to be an astronaut, or Linda an Olympic athlete. So if the future for women
was
to change in any dramatic way, where would that leave us? As the dinosaurs, the last of an unwieldy, dying breed of women who were left to depend on their husbands when that would be seen as weakness, as failure, as shame.

“What if the crowd gets out of hand?” I asked.

“Or the police overreact, like at Kent State,” Ally agreed.

“For goodness sakes!” Linda said. “It’s Palo Alto!”

“‘For goodness sakes’ is a Frankie-ism, Linda,” Brett said. “You’re stealing her line.”

“And Palo Alto isn’t exactly some quiet little backwater,” I said, and even Linda couldn’t argue that: in addition to the chaos downtown, there had been bombings at Kepler’s Books, at the Free University, and at one of the coffee shops downtown. Still, before we knew it, we were pushing the children’s strollers up Center Drive, admonishing everyone to hold hands and be careful as the long, untidy line of us crossed the street.

Hundreds of people had already gathered in the plaza when we got there. Speakers were demanding equal pay for equal work and child care centers and abortion rights. with four years of college, i can expect to earn $6,694 read the sign one woman carried, a woman in a cap and gown who worked, someone said, in the genetics department at Stanford. Half Danny’s salary, I thought (though his job was looking more and more tenuous—his company had laid off twenty people at the end of its second quarter, a fact he shrugged off by saying he liked working in a place where the voice listened to was the one that knew the most rather than the one with the highest rank).

A man came out in a Playboy Bunny outfit—black bathing trunks and ears and a tail—unlike anything we’d ever imagined. He was prancing around to entertain women the way women pranced around to entertain men.

“I’ve got to get one of those for Danny,” I said, making a joke to cover my embarrassment.

Brett laughed. “Chip would hate the tail. It would draw attention to his ample derrière.”

“Jim’s legs in high heels.” Ally gave a low wolf whistle, so incongruous that we all cracked up.

“Neither a whistling woman nor a crowing hen ever come to a very good end,” Kath declared. “My mama’s advice—take it as you like.”

A speaker appeared on the podium, saying that the usual channels for women to earn more than ten thousand dollars a year included prostitution, being a Playboy Bunny or a topless waitress, or posing nude for male magazines. I stopped laughing. We all did. We stood soberly as Ava Pauling, Mrs. Linus Pauling, stepped up to the microphone. I’m quite sure I stood straighter after she was introduced, even with Maggie tugging on my skirt, saying how hungry she was. It wasn’t so much what Mrs. Pauling said—that women had had the vote for fifty years but we hadn’t changed the world as much as we should have—as the fact that she was here. Yes, it was
her husband
who’d won the Nobel Prize, not her, but being married to him granted her a stature we were unsure the other speakers possessed. It made us think,
If Linus Pauling’s wife is standing up for women’s rights, who are we to be skeptical?

As we watched the rest of the rally, we found ourselves nodding in agreement, nudging Brett at the antics in a skit about a mother scolding her daughter for playing with her “dirty chemistry set,” laughing together at another skit, a “Miss 46-22-36” mock sobbing as she accepted her Miss America crown and thanking “the cosmetic industry and all those cute male photographers” for making her what she was. When the mock Miss America turned around to reveal a “U.S. Department of Agriculture Prime Grade” sign on her back, I whispered to the other Wednesday Sisters, “‘Round,’ and ‘Rib,’ and ‘Rump,’” remembering how I’d turned away from that
BREAK THE DULL STEAK HABIT
poster on the television the first time we’d gathered to watch the Miss America pageant, when I’d thought the protester carrying it must be so different from me even if her dress was just like mine.

A woman from a group called the Spare Ribs (which would have made us dubious if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Pauling) delivered the next speech, which gave us all pause: “We have been told that femininity is being smart enough to be dumb around a man,” she said. “For me, femininity consists in being myself, in not putting myself down or my sisters down.”

I began clapping then, without having decided to, and I wasn’t alone. Linda, on one side of me, and Brett, on the other, were both clapping, and Kath and Ally were as well. Even Maggie, standing in front of me, was clapping, having no real idea what she was clapping for but following my lead. And so were Jamie and Julie, and Sarah and Lacy, and J.J. and Davy and even little Mark. Kath’s Anna Page was not just clapping but cheering without restraint, her hair wild around her face, her hat upside down on the pavement behind her, where it would be stepped upon by a passerby too busy staring at the fellow in the Bunny costume to see it there.