The Wednesday Sisters (2 page)

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I
WATCHED THE PAGEANT
in my hotel room that Saturday night, rooting for Miss Illinois while Maggie slept and Davy nursed and Danny was out drinking beers with the Fairchild Semiconductor fellows he would join that spring after he finished school. I lay there on the generic flowered bedspread in the beige-walled room, watching in color—that, at least, was nice—and wondering which contestant Linda and Kath and all the other Stanford doctors’ wives were rooting for, and if the Fairchild wives got together to watch the pageant, too. I imagined my girlfriends back home in Chicago watching without me this year. I imagined a future of watching Miss America by myself, rooting for Miss Illinois while all the neighbors I didn’t know rooted for Miss California, or for Miss Whatever-State-They’d-Moved-to-California-From.

The winner that year was Miss Kansas, a near twin of the reigning Miss America who crowned her. She looked like a too-eager-to-please Mary Tyler Moore, if you can imagine such a thing, with gobs of brunette hair piled so high it stuck up above her crown. When she walked the Miss America walk, I was afraid that shiny thing would slide right off her head and plaster someone. She played a lovely piano, though. She played “Born Free.”

W
E WEREN’T
the Wednesday Sisters when I first moved to Palo Alto that next spring, of course. We’d only met that once, when it hadn’t been all that hard for me to meet people, when I wasn’t really looking for anything, I was just looking. But it’s a harder thing to do to go out and say, “Hi, I’m new to the neighborhood and I don’t know a soul.” The nights were the worst, the hours after Mags and Davy went to sleep and before Danny got home, while he was working late or getting to know his co-workers over a beer at the Wagon Wheel. I’d sit on the front porch reading or simply looking out at that old mansion, its disrepair softened by the night’s darkness, leaving it looking mysterious and rather romantic. A Miss Havisham house, that’s what Danny called it, and he was right, or nearly right: the woman who’d built it was not a Dickens character but a real woman with real sadness to bear, one who’d lost first her husband and then her only child, her daughter, Eleanor, for whom the park was named.

No one lived in the mansion any longer. It was a museum of sorts, and hardly that. It was open to the public only one Sunday a month, to comply with the provisions of the woman’s grant of the property to the city, to keep it from reverting to her heirs. But staring across the long lawn that ran beside the playground to the circle of drive in front of the abandoned old place, a circle that connected to nothing, not to the road or to any of the other homes, I imagined the old woman coming out onto the porch in the evening, sitting on the rickety Victorian rocker, looking down the drive that must once have come a long, straight, empty stretch to Center, just across from my house. I imagined her looking across at a lonely newcomer sitting on my front step, looking back at her. I imagined her standing and walking down her drive, crossing the street, saying, “Welcome to the neighborhood, Mary Frances,” and telling me about the families that had lived here before me, saying she was sure we’d be happy here. “How could you live in a house with such wonderful pink shutters and fail to be happy?” she’d say.

When I saw Linda and Kath in the park the first sunny morning after we’d moved in, I tripped on the curb hurrying to join them—familiar faces!—and arrived at their bench with grass-stained palms. I introduced myself as Mary as I let Mags head off to the swings.

“Mary Frances,” I said, suddenly uncertain—if anyone called me Mary, would I realize they were talking to me? “I met you last fall, didn’t I?”

The way they looked at me, I felt I’d interrupted. “Mary Frances?” Kath said. “Oh. Of course.” But you could tell by the look in her heavily mascaraed eyes that she didn’t remember me.

“You’re Kathy, right?” I said, saying Kathy instead of Kath as if I weren’t quite sure I remembered right, my hand going to my glasses. “And Linda?” As if I only dimly recalled that she had two daughters who were Maggie’s age, twins born in different years, Jamie just before midnight, December 31, 1963, Julie a half hour later, on January 1.

“That’s right, I’m Linda.” Linda smiled a little, her blond lashes blinking as she shifted her newborn in her lap. “That’s right.”

Brett, in her white gloves, showed up across the park then, just as I was settling onto a bench that cornered Kath and Linda’s bench, putting Davy and his favorite trucks on a blanket in front of me.

“Lordy, I haven’t seen that girl all winter,” Kath said to Linda. “I thought maybe she’d moved away.”

They stared as she settled her daughter into a baby swing—stared at her long, thin nose and her thin little face and her thin legs, stick legs, really. Skinny, you’d call her. Like Twiggy, but without the poise despite the white gloves. Only her hair was remarkable: the most gorgeous strawberry blond, cut into a pageboy that her tiny ears peeked through now and then. Without that hair, she might have disappeared entirely; you might not even have noticed the gloves.

Linda lowered her voice theatrically. “Maybe she slit her wrists,” she said to Kath. “Maybe she wears them because her wrists are jagged blue with scars and—”

“I swear on my aunt Tooty’s grave, Linda!” Kath glanced in my direction and lowered her voice. “Didn’t I tell you not to scare off one more gal before I got in a how-do-you-do?”

I settled back against the bench, the wooden slats more giving than I expected. “Maybe she lives in that falling-down mansion,” I offered.

Linda, with a see-I-didn’t-scare-her glance at Kath—a glance clearly meant to include me—turned away from the swings to consider the old wreck of a place. For a moment I thought she had in mind to march right up to the front door and demand someone give the poor house a new coat of paint.

Maggie, waiting for her swing to defy all those crazy rules about objects at rest staying at rest, shouted for me. I called, “Pump your legs, for goodness sakes, Mags!” which drew Brett’s attention. She said something to Maggie and gave her a little push, all the while smiling toward me.

“She slit her wrists in the old mansion,” Linda said, still facing the mansion, her back to Brett, as was Kath’s.

Shhh,
I thought.
She’ll hear us.

“And she lay in the bathtub bleeding all over the place until her handsome neighbor, wondering why it was so quiet—”

“Came over and whacked that ol’ door down with a wood ax to get in!” Kath said just as Brett pushed her daughter all the way through so the little girl was swinging delightfully high beside my Maggie, and Brett herself emerged on our side of the swings, just a few yards away. She ran a gloved hand through her short red hair, leaving it unkempt, then glanced back—her daughter wasn’t swinging
too
wildly—and took a tentative step toward us.

I was avoiding eye contact with her, saying, “Linda,” meaning to hush her, when Kath said, “You look at her sometimes when she thinks nobody’s looking at her. I’ll bet she slit her wrists!” and Linda said, “What?”

“Kath,”
I said, but Kath was already saying, “You know, like ‘I’ll bet he killed a man’?”

“From
The Great Gatsby,
” Brett said.

Even Linda—who is usually so cool—turned and stared open-mouthed at Brett, no doubt thinking,
Shoot, how much has she overheard?

I adjusted my glasses, trying to think of something to say.

“Are you partial to the book?” Kath asked—which sounded ridiculous, like a bad pickup line at a Rush Street bar, but Brett just replied that it was an evocative line, wasn’t it: “ ‘I’ll bet he killed a man.’”

Kath said, for my benefit in case I hadn’t read the book, that the line was from a cocktail-party scene where the host wasn’t even at his own party. She’d just read
Gatsby
—or reread it for the fourth time, actually. She’s not like Brett. She can’t spout lines from novels at will.

It was one of Kath’s favorite novels,
The Great Gatsby.
We all loved it, for different reasons. Linda wanted to be the golfer, Jordan Baker, while Brett wanted to be Gatsby—she’s never said so, but believe me, she did. I guess I must have identified with Nick Carraway, watching the world from the fringes. And Kath grew up imagining she was Daisy and all the men in the world adored her. Yes, Daisy. She even admitted it, years later. “Of course I wanted to be Daisy. She’s what I was
raised
to aspire to be, a nice girl married to a filthy rich man.” To which Linda said, “A nice,
vacuous
girl,” and Kath said, “Right,” and Linda said, “Whose husband kept a
mistress,
Kath,” and Kath, to her credit, said “Right” again. But as I said, that was years later.

That Wednesday, Brett gathered Sarah from her swing and settled her with Davy and his trucks, she and Kath already gossiping about old F. Scott like he was a neighbor. We talked about books that whole morning, hiding behind our favorite fictions, revealing ourselves slowly as the children ran on the playground or slept in their buggies or squirmed in our arms.

Kath loved anything by Jane Austen, which Linda said was fine “if you could stand all that happy-wedding-ending nonsense.” To which Kath said, without the least hesitation, that she was a happy-ending kind of gal and even Linda couldn’t shame her into being anything else.

Linda was decidedly not a happy-ending gal. Her favorite book was
The Bell Jar.
“By Victoria Lucas, which everyone knows is a pseudonym for Sylvia Plath,” she said.

“Well I guess I’m just a li’l ol’ nobody, then,” Kath said, “because I surely didn’t know.” And Brett and I both admitted we’d never even heard of the novel, though we both loved Plath’s poetry.

“‘First, are you our sort of a person?’” Brett said. “‘Do you wear—’”

“The novel hasn’t been published here yet,” Linda explained. It wasn’t, it turns out, supposed to be available in the U.S. even under a pseudonym until after Plath’s mother died. “But I found a British copy at a bookstore near my brother’s apartment in New York. It’s about this girl who’s trying to be a writer but her mother and her fiancé just assume it’s a dalliance she’ll give up when her real life—marriage and babies—begins.”

“A writer,” I said. “If I could have written anything, it would be
Rebecca.
”

“Wouldn’t you just die and be buried in a croaker sack to live in a house like Manderley?” Kath said just as Linda said, “Do you write, Mary?” with a hopefulness in her voice that made me look around, confused:
Who in the world is Mary?
In the moment it took me to realize
I
was Mary—of course I was—she said,
“Frankie!
You’re
Frankie.
I
knew
Mary wasn’t right.”

“Mary Frances, but sometimes I go by Frankie,” I said.

We all looked at each other, and there was a moment when I might have admitted I used to try to write before Maggie was born, when we all might have confessed to dreams we’d once dreamed. We were still just strangers who’d met in a park, though, and so Linda said, “I love that name, Frankie,” and she started in on what color my shutters should be painted. “Dark green, like on that house there,” she suggested, pointing to a house past the intersection at Center and Channing, one with shutters the green of the circle of pine trees in the front yard, with a bare spot in the middle where the original pine must have been before it died. Just as we turned to look, a curtain dropped to cover the front window of the house—Ally’s house, it would turn out—but if anyone else noticed, they didn’t say so. They considered color possibilities for my shutters until Linda’s girls came squawking over, deep in some four-year-olds’ dispute. Then Davy accidentally bonked Brett’s Sarah on the head with a truck (at least I hoped it was an accident), and we were all a flurry of realizing it was lunchtime and we needed to get the children home and fed and down for their naps.

Linda, coaxing J.J. into his stroller, looked to Brett and asked, as if it were pure afterthought, “Wherever did you find those gloves . . . what did you say your name was?”

Brett, unfazed, replied, “I’m Brett Tyler.”

You could practically see Linda gearing up to ask again about the gloves, but Kath cut her off, saying, “Well, nice to meet you, Brett.”

Linda shot Kath a look but said only, “And welcome to the neighborhood, Frankie,” leaving me to set off with Maggie and Davy toward the empty front porch of my pink-shuttered house, thinking,
It could be worse, I could be
Fanny,
but still.

I’
D BEEN MEETING
Linda and Kath and Brett in the park every Wednesday for six weeks by the day we met Ally, the day we learned about Linda’s mom. Any other day, it would have seemed the oddest thing, Ally arriving in the park to offer iced tea to strangers she’d never in her life seen before—or that’s what we thought, that she’d never seen us. But early that morning, Bobby Kennedy had been shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and the whole country was waiting with the same held breath, and nobody was a stranger, no one wanted to be alone.

“I’m Ally Tantry,” Ally said in a shy, almost whispering voice, and we all turned to see this unfamiliar mom: big brown eyes in a pale-as-white-flour face; full-length batik cotton skirt and sandals; dark hair that fell to her waist in smooth, shiny waves. She wanted only a fresh-daisy headband to look like one of those flower children on the news.

None of us could have said how long she’d been standing there, with her pitcher of iced tea and five matching plastic cups.

We all introduced ourselves: “Linda Mason.” “Katherine Claire Montgomery.” “Brett Tyler.” I said I was Mary Frances O’Mara, not that it did me any good. Then we all looked a little awkward for a minute until Ally offered us tea and filled a cup for each of us, nearly emptying the clear plastic pitcher, leaving only half a cup for herself, but she said she didn’t mind.

Over the weeks before that, our conversations had broadened from books to things we’d read in the paper or seen on the news. Linda had gone on and on one week about a woman who’d snuck into the Boston Marathon using her initials, who’d finished only because some men running with her had physically prevented officials from throwing her off the course. That was as personal as it had gotten, though: us saying what we thought about the Columbia student uprising or the Paris peace talks, or what we liked and didn’t like in a book—or not saying about John Updike’s
Couples
after Kath declared it a “dirty book,” which speaks volumes, too. But that morning, by way of explaining ourselves to Ally, we talked about what our husbands did, which was how we defined ourselves in those days: I’m a doctor’s wife, a painter’s wife, the wife of the president of the United States.

Brett said her husband, Chip, was a small-particle physicist working at SLAC. “The Stanford Linear Accelerator. You know: for experiments in high-energy physics and synchrotron radiation research,” she said, and Kath and Linda and I said, “Oh, sure,” to which Ally responded in her soft voice, “Heavens to Betsy, you all understood that?” Brett understood it all, though; she’d graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe, with majors in math, physics, and English literature, of all things, and she’d done graduate work in physics, to boot.

Linda said Jeff was a doctor at Stanford, and Kath said Lee was, too.

Ally told us her Jim was a lawyer at a new law firm called Wilson, Mosher & Martin. You could see in her puppy-brown eyes that she couldn’t help bragging about how he had been editor in chief of the
Michigan Law Review.
Linda, whose brother was a lawyer, asked, “Why didn’t he go to a good firm, then? One on Wall Street or in Chicago or San Francisco?” If Ally had had puppy ears to match her eyes, they would have drooped like she’d just been told there would be no walk today, but she said only, “Jim didn’t get other offers,” with an edge of anger in her voice that left even Linda silent.

They’d all met their husbands in college, except Kath, who’d met Lee in high school but had gone to Vanderbilt with him.

I told them my Danny developed large-scale integrated circuits, throwing the term out as if I had any idea what it meant. He’d started at Northwestern University when he was sixteen, and he’d just finished his Ph.D., I said. I worked in the engineering school recruiting office—that’s how Danny and I met, but I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything that morning about how invisible I’d felt at my secretary’s desk before I met Danny, with the students stopping by to check their interview schedules or drop off more twenty-four-pound linen bond résumés without so much as a “Good morning, Miss Downes,” much less a “How about that game last night, Frankie, fourteen innings of shutout lost on one lousy reliever’s pitch?” I just went on about Danny’s job at Fairchild, making it sound like the job of a lifetime.

We talked about Kennedy being shot then, and about whether the brain surgery he’d had that morning would save him, and what the loss of blood supply to part of his brain might mean. We talked, too, about grandparents and cousins and neighbors who’d died. None of them were parents of young children, though. That broke our hearts more than anything, imagining those poor Kennedy children left without a daddy, like John-John at President Kennedy’s funeral with his little hand up in salute and no idea yet that dead meant he’d never see his daddy again.

Then Linda, who’d been strangely quiet, said, “My mom died when I was nine.”

“Heavens, you poor thing,” Ally said softly, and we all looked to our children, to where Anna Page had a whole crew digging in the sand: our gang and two boys who were often here together, one still in diapers and the other in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and a little girl with dark, loose curls and skin as pale as Ally’s. Here we were, holding Bobby Kennedy’s shooting apart from our own lives—he was running for president, and our own husbands would never run for president—and Linda just brought it right home, right into our safe little lives.

“Nine, gosh. That’s hardly old enough to get a whippin’,” Kath said, and it was clear that she hadn’t known about this before, either, even though she was Linda’s best friend.

Breast cancer, it was, and Linda’s mother not even forty.

Linda would tell us later that she never saw her mother in the hospital. She didn’t know if it was hospital rules or her father’s, but she and her brothers weren’t allowed to visit their mom. They’d had no warning she was going away the morning of her surgery, either, though in retrospect Linda supposes her mother’s voice did crack as she hugged her and said, as she did each school morning, “I hope you have a wonderful day.” She supposes her mother even smelled different that morning—not of hair spray, not of lipstick—although she doesn’t remember for sure. What she does remember is ducking out of her mother’s embrace, afraid she’d be late for school. “But maybe it wasn’t like that at all,” she says. “Everything about that time is so mixed up in my mind.”

Everything except the way her mother looked when she came home from the hospital. It was midafternoon, Linda and her brothers were just arriving home from school, and in their excitement they rushed toward the car in the driveway. Her father intercepted them and ordered them to wait quietly inside until their mother was settled in bed. He ushered them into the kitchen, leaving the nurse he’d hired—a big woman, scary big, Linda remembers—to help her mom upstairs while he poured himself a glass of something from the liquor cabinet. When he caught Linda staring at him—she knew there was something wrong with him pouring that drink even if she didn’t quite know what—he said, “Go see your mother now, Linda. Just one at a time. All of you at once will be too much for her.”

He drained his glass. “Go on, go,” he said. “Don’t keep her waiting.”

Linda remembers the weight of her legs as she climbed the stairs, the hushed scrape of her leather soles on the wood, the smell as she approached her parents’ bedroom, like flowers left too long in a vase. She remembers the terror she felt as she stopped in the doorway, the look of her shoes, scuffed and dirty against the clean carpet, the lines where she’d run the vacuum before school that morning so the room would be nice for her mom.

“My favorite daughter,” her mother said, which was what she often called Linda, and it was true of course, because Linda was her mother’s
only
daughter. Linda had always heard “favorite child” though, and she’d always felt that, always felt her mother loved her best.

When she raised her eyes to the bed that afternoon, though, the mother she saw didn’t match the voice. She remembers thinking they’d taken her mother away and returned something empty, a Coke bottle with the top flipped off, with the sweet liquid drained and nothing left inside. Her hair was flat and awful, and where her bosom had been full and soft and welcoming, it was empty. But it was her arm that frightened Linda most—this grotesquely swollen thing, more the size of a leg. Years later, Jeff brought home an old stethoscope and some booties and hairnets and surgical gloves for the children to play doctor with. He blew two of the gloves up and tied them off, like balloons. One for Julie, one for Jamie. They’d come running to Linda to show her their prizes, and it had been all she could do not to scream. The balloons had been her mother’s hand: that colorless, that lifeless, that distorted.

“Climb up here and snuggle with me, sweetheart,” her mother had said that afternoon, the way she did when Linda had a nightmare. But her mother wasn’t her mother anymore, she was that hideous arm, and Linda turned and ran to her bedroom, where her father found her sometime later, curled up in the closet, sobbing, with the closet door shut.

He kicked some shoes out of the way and sat next to her on the closet floor. He pulled the door closed again, leaving them together in the mothball, dirty-sock semidarkness, the crack of daylight where the door wasn’t quite shut falling on Linda. He just sat there, his face staring at the inside of the closet door, not saying a word, not touching her. After a few minutes, he pushed the door open, stood, and without looking at her, said, “I’ll need your help with the dinner, honey.” And Linda stood and followed him down to the kitchen, where she scrounged in the pantry for a box of macaroni and cheese while her father filled a pot with water from the tap.

Linda didn’t tell us any of that in the park that morning, though.

It would come later, not all at once, but in pieces over the years. I came to know the story of Linda’s mom the way we came to know everything about each other, I suppose. The way friends who are as close as we are know the important moments in each other’s lives, even when we weren’t there.

That Wednesday morning, Linda just stared silently out at the playground. We all did, watching our children a little more closely, thinking we didn’t want them even to imagine growing up without us to kiss their skinned elbows and applaud their finger paintings and tuck them into their beds.

“When I was a kid, I used to climb up into this big oak tree in our backyard, where no one would see me,” Linda said. “I’d straddle one of its fat branches, lean against the trunk, and read until the bark left dents in my skin.
Charlotte’s Web.
I read it over and over, a dozen times at least.”

“Me, too,” Ally said quietly. “Over and over.”

“It was like Wilbur, this male pig, was more like me than anyone at school,” Linda said, “because he knew about dying.”

“‘After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die,’” Brett said, just quoting from the book, but her words left us all staring at Linda.

Linda looked away, to the sad old mansion. “Charlotte’s children didn’t need her,” she said finally, quietly.

I think we all leaned more closely together on the park bench then, trying not to think of those poor Kennedy children. Of Ethel Kennedy sitting at the hospital in Los Angeles, wondering if her husband would ever regain consciousness. Of Rose at home in Hyannis Port, facing the loss of a third son. Three sons. How could you bear that, to lose three sons?

L
INDA AND KATH
and Brett and I left Ally sitting on the park bench that morning. She was just going to stay a bit longer, she said. But even after I put Maggie and Davy down for their naps, called Danny—he was in a meeting—and made myself a cup of coffee, I could see Ally through the plate glass of my living room window, sitting in the same spot on that bench, her plastic cups stacked one inside the other and abandoned in the empty pitcher, her rounded shoulders in her muslin blouse still as death. All the mothers were packing up to take their children home for lunch, but Ally didn’t move. And when I looked again, all the mothers were gone except Ally, who sat there alone, one hand absently fingering a lock of long, wavy, dark hair. She got up and left, finally, with only the empty pitcher, the five empty cups. She hurried off with her head bowed, her legs striding the width of her long skirt, and she went into the house with the green shutters, with the cluster of pine trees in the front. You might think I’d have gone running out my door, calling, “Ally, honey, you’re forgetting your little one!” But I didn’t. There was no child left in the park.