The Wednesday Sisters (20 page)

W
E GATHERED AT LINDA’S
the Saturday night of the Miss America Pageant that year, a few weeks after the rally in Lytton Plaza, but we didn’t turn on the TV. “No Miss 46-22-36 for us tonight,” we said. We planned to enjoy a quiet evening together
not
watching, in part to assure Kath there would be life for her after Lee, if he divorced her, which he hadn’t yet. He was, in fact, at their house that very evening, eating the dinner she had prepared as if he still lived there, which was the charade they continued to keep up.

Kath had run through the last of her savings buying school clothes even though she’d economized, letting Arselia go and serving more and more macaroni and cheese. To make ends meet, she’d accepted the first job she was offered, working for an obnoxious accountant who paid her the same $1.60 an hour we paid Arselia, but who let her go every day in time to be home when school got out. Every morning, Kath put on the skirt and hose and high heels required by office rules, saw Anna Page and Lee-Lee off to school, dropped Lacy with one of us, and went to work. When Lacy whined about being left, Kath took it all on her own shoulders, too. She acted as if her job were a fabulous opportunity rather than the sheer drudge it was, and she never once hinted that she was only working so that Lacy could still have her favorite Lorna Doone cookies and Anna Page could wear patent leather shoes.

You had to admire Kath for that, for never allowing her children a glimpse of what a rat their daddy was. You had to wonder why you’d spend a whole evening admiring Miss Kentucky just because she wore gowns well when no one was admiring the kind of woman Kath was. All that carefully tended beauty, all that apparent faultlessness? You couldn’t imagine those girls could be from struggling families, that they might have to work to send their brothers to college, that their husbands might abandon them. You couldn’t imagine they would ever find themselves childless, or with lumps in their breasts, or with scars or fears they might need gloves to protect against. They were feminine, beautiful, and so you imagined their lives were all debutante balls and trust funds, that they awoke looking as beautiful as they appeared on the pageant stage, that they would never want for anything, or ever doubt themselves.

No pageant this year, we’d decided. Kath didn’t need to stack herself up to Miss Kentucky. None of us did. We would spend the evening together admiring each other instead.

We poured our usuals that evening—gin and tonics, vodka gimlets, sidecars—and we nibbled (long gone were the days when no one would dip the first chip). Ally had brought something that looked like poppy-seed rolls, though not quite. “Rajgira, that’s what the seeds are,” she said. “The Royal Grain. My mother-in-law sent them. The seeds, not the rolls. They’re supposed to give me strength—to carry a baby to term, she means. Although Jim’s not sure that baking them into rolls is quite what his mom had in mind.” She washed a bite of roll down with her vodka gimlet and grinned. “Much less serving them with alcohol.”

We compared mothers-in-law, then, granting Ally’s the Most Meddling from the Farthest Distance Award (although the rajgira rolls, with the crusty, nutty-tasting grain sprinkled on top, were actually quite good). Kath’s mom-in-law took a close second, while mine came in dead last; Danny’s mother was forever saying I was the best thing that ever happened to her son. And when we’d exhausted that subject, we moved on to what kinds of mothers-in-law we would be ourselves when our children married, and what kinds of spouses we hoped they would find. It wasn’t long, though, before the conversation turned to the pageant we were determinedly not watching. It’s true, I’m afraid. We couldn’t help ourselves.

The rules had changed that year, so that nonwhites could participate. How could we not talk about that? Miss Iowa, Cheryl Browne, was competing as the first black contestant. We wondered what it would be like to be a black woman in America—these were the days when George Wallace, who thought blacks should be denied the vote, was the seventh most admired man in America—and how one black woman in a field of fifty could possibly change things. We wondered how it would feel to be her, and whether some of the judges wouldn’t refuse to vote for her even if they thought she was the most beautiful and talented. We decided any judge who didn’t think black women should participate wouldn’t see any black woman as beautiful enough to win. We decided Cheryl Browne ought to win because for her to be named Miss Iowa she had to be super beautiful and super talented. We didn’t really believe she could win, but we hoped she would.

As always, the talking was like the eating of potato chips, and the next thing we knew, we’d turned on the TV—just for a minute, we decided. “Just to see Cheryl Browne.” “Just till the next commercial break.” “Just till her talent, then we’ll turn it off.” Then the pageant was over and we’d watched pretty much the whole thing. It was the only year we all rooted for the same contestant.

We did watch the pageant differently that year—at least there was that. We weren’t so wrapped up in ball gowns and bathing suits. We spent the time talking about what femininity meant and what it should mean—
not
“being smart enough to be dumb around a man,” we agreed.

“Though I’ve done that,” I said. “With boys I dated in high school before I met Danny.”

“I even put answers I knew were wrong on tests sometimes,” Ally admitted, “so the boy I was dating would do better than me.”

“Maybe I should have done that,” Brett said. “I was great at science, sure, but I never had a date until Chip.”

“It’s not just us,” Kath said. “Do y’all ever watch Barbara Walters on the
Today
show? She waits for the men to finish asking their questions before she says a word.”

“She has to, it’s in her contract,” Brett said.

“Seriously?” Ally said.

“I think my problem is I confuse ‘feminine’ with ‘perfect,’” I said. “My hips are too wide, so I feel like a barking dog even though Danny swears he adores my hips. It’s tough being raised with the Virgin Mary as the girl I was supposed to be.”

“Virgin, but still she gets the child,” Ally said. “The Son of God, no less.”

“From a Darwinian standpoint, men are dependent on us, too, though,” Brett said. “No women, no babies.”

“But men can have identities without babies,” Ally said. “Jim wants children even more than I do because family is so important in his culture, but he’s supposed to be the breadwinner and he is, and I’m supposed to care for the family and I can’t even produce the children I’m supposed to care for.”

“I think Frankie is right about this perfection thing,” Linda said. “I bet even these girls on the TV see themselves in terms of their shortcomings.”

“My knees are too big, my breasts too small,” Ally said.

“My little piggy toes are a whopping size nine and a half.”

“My glasses.” I tipped them for effect. “And my hair is downright goofy.”

“Mine is the frizzliest mess—I swear sometimes I might could just shave it all off and be done with it,” Kath said.

“Mine flattens before noon and the ends are all split,” Linda said. “But I don’t know about bald, Kath. It’d be like lacking breasts.”

“Without either one you’re androgynous,” Brett agreed. She looked down at her own flat chest and started laughing, and we all laughed with her.

“At least you aren’t overly intellectual,” she said when she’d recovered from laughing.

“Or ambitious. God forbid I should be ambitious,” I said.

“Heavens to Betsy, I’m just too good a writer to be a girl!” Ally said, and that made us all laugh again.

Okay, our laughter might have had something to do with the cocktails, which also might have been the source of our courage, but we did start talking that night about our own talents in a real way—not the batons we would have twirled in a beauty pageant, but our talents as writers: Linda’s graceful sentences, Ally’s imagination, Kath’s memorable dialogue, Brett’s settings, which made worlds spring to life, and my “voice,” which I thought was just the way I spoke (exactly, they said). Then, maybe because we were drinking, the fantasizing began.

“Readers in bookstores and libraries,” Ally said.

“In recliners, or curled up in bed,” Brett said.

“Interviews,” Kath said.

“Bestseller lists—why not?” Linda said.

“The Pulitzer Prize,” I said.

“How about a big ol’ monument,” Kath said. “One in our pretty little Pardee Park.”

“After we’re all in our coffins for real,” Brett said.

“Something that says the Wednesday Sisters got their start together, right there,” Linda said.

“A fresco,” I said.

“All of us huddled over our picnic table, children swinging in the background,” Brett said. “Like the oil painting of the Round Table regulars at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, but in a medium that will weather well.”

“Not that it’s the publishing that matters,” Linda said. “It’s the writing that matters. Even if we never publish a word.”

And we all agreed: it was the writing that mattered. It was through the writing that we were coming to know who we were.

W
HEN DANNY AND I
opened the front door to sit on the porch after the children were sleeping that Monday evening, the girl’s room in the mansion across the street—“Estella’s room,” we’d both taken to calling it—was dimly lit. We smiled at each other and, without a moment of discussion about it, set our drinks on the porch where we would accidentally kick them over when we returned. We didn’t even stop to grab the baseball bat.

It was quiet, just the patter of rain starting up as we crossed the street. Then we heard the piano, haunting notes. As we drew nearer, it was unmistakable: the music came from inside the old place.

In the darkness around back, with the streetlights blocked by trees and the moon well sequestered behind rain clouds, the tinkle of piano notes wafted in the stillness, with only the occasional
shhhhew
of wheels on wet asphalt as a car passed on the street, beyond the trees. I started shivering. I was wearing only a light sweater, no protection against the rain and the chill and the tension of waiting. Danny gave me his suit coat, but still I was cold.

It seemed a long time before the piano music ceased and the wandering light appeared at the back of the house, in one of the upstairs rooms. The room grew brighter in the darkness, and then we could see her, a girl with long flowing hair standing at the window, the daughter returning to her piano.

Not a girl, though. A woman. We could see the silhouette of her, though we couldn’t see the details of her face.

Danny whispered that he’d never imagined a woman prowling around there at night, but I had. Despite my disbelief in ghosts, I’d come to imagine this person was somehow connected with the widow who’d lived in the house.

The woman disappeared after a moment, and we waited for a long time, beginning to wonder if she’d gone down the main stairs and out the front this time, eluding us again. But a faint light appeared at the top of the servants’ stairs, finally, and paused there. Danny tapped my shoulder, silently pointing to what I could see now in the little bit of light was an open window, just by a back door. We moved closer, crouched behind some bushes. It wasn’t until the woman began slowly to descend the stairs, the light fading in the upstairs window, growing stronger in the downstairs one, that I imagined my own feet on the worn wooden stairs, my own fingers on the candlestick, my own private sadness being observed.

“Danny,” I whispered, and he turned to me just as the candlestick appeared in the window, casting its weak light on a table against the wall. I put my cold hands on Danny’s cold cheeks and kissed him, turning us both away from the window.

The candlelight blinked out then, leaving the darkness total, and as our eyes adjusted, we could just make out the lonely shadow of a woman climbing through the window, quietly shutting it and setting off around the corner of the broken-down old place, to the park that had once been its lawn and, beyond it, to Ally’s house.

T
HAT WAS THE FALL
we switched from Wednesday mornings at ten to Sundays at sunrise. “Here’s the thing,” Ally said the third Wednesday after Kath had started working for the accountant. “No offense to the rest of you, but Kath, she’s just so . . .”

“She knows when a manuscript is ‘just a li’l bit catawampus,’” I said.

“Out of kilter,” Linda said.

“She’d like to tell you how you might could fix it,” Brett said.

“And she sure can make you laugh when you’re just about to tune up,” Ally said.

“Or have conniptions!”

“Tell the news!”

“Throw a hissy!”

“
Pitch
a hissy. Not throw.
Pitch.
”

We’d just have to find a new time to meet, we agreed. Weekends, because Kath would be “all tuckered out” after work.

But Arselia couldn’t sit for us on weekends, there was that problem. And with catechism and Sunday school and church—I’d just signed up to be a lector at Saint Thomas Aquinas—and everything else?

“That leaves Sundays at sunrise,” Linda said with a sigh, not really meaning it.

But Brett said, “Sundays at sunrise, then.”

“Our Lady of the Park Bench,” I said.

I
STILL REMEMBER
that first Wednesday Sister Sunday: getting up before dawn, moving quietly through the darkened house, trying so hard not to wake Danny or the children. Danny waking anyway, and coming up behind me as I stood watching the coffee bubble up into the clear top knob of the percolator. Him putting his arms around my waist and kissing my neck, whispering in my ear, “Come back to bed.”

I felt his warm hands and smelled the coffee and the toast browning in the toaster, and I half wanted to climb back into bed with him, but I said I couldn’t. “I’m meeting the girls in the park, remember?”

“Right,” he said, exhaling frustration. “Of course.

“Don’t go out before the sun rises,” he said.

I said I wouldn’t, and he went back to bed then, and I peeked in a minute later—he was sleeping again—and I took my coffee mug and my toast and I walked out the front door, into the moonlit park.

As I sat at the picnic table in the moon shadow of the dilapidated mansion, watching for the sun to rise, I thought of Kath. Kath and Lee. I imagined Lee arriving at her house—
their
house? I imagined Kath going to the grocery store after our gathering, Lee helping her unload the bags when she got home, the whole Montgomery clan going off to church as a family, which they planned to do. Lee staying for supper and going back to his apartment only after the children went to bed. I wondered what the other Kathy thought of this arrangement. I wondered if he was still seeing her. Even Jeff, who worked with him, wasn’t quite sure. He never saw Lee and the other Kathy together at the hospital.

Not long before sunrise, a slim shadow of darker darkness moved toward me from across the park, but I wasn’t scared. Even in the darkness I knew it was Linda. She sat next to me and looked at the mansion too.

“Her daughter died of typhoid,” she said, and when I turned slightly toward her, she said, “The woman who built that house. She was from a big political family; her stepson was governor, I think. Her husband died when she was in her early forties, and three months later her fifteen-year-old daughter died of typhoid. Her only child. Like the Stanfords’ son. Fifteen. Typhoid. Only child.”

We sat silently for a moment, watching the shambles of the house begin to emerge from the darkness as the sky lightened in the east.

“This park always makes me think of my mom,” she whispered. “It’s what she would have done if any of us had died, I think. She would have made a park for children to enjoy, and named it after us.”

She sat beside me, straight-backed and square-shouldered as always. “Even when she was really sick, she used to make herself get out of bed to take us to the park.”

I set my hand gently over hers, and she intertwined her fingers with mine.

Across the park, the shadows of Ally and Brett and Kath appeared, approaching us together, side by side by side.

“Someday I’m going to do something like this for my mom,” Linda said. “I’m going to make something permanent. Something forever. A park in her honor. A college. A library.”

“A book,” I whispered, as Ally and Brett and Kath reached us, as they slipped onto the picnic table benches as quietly as latecomers slipping into Mass.

“Yes,” Linda said just as the first sharp ray of the sun sparked at the horizon. “A book.”

“A book,” Ally echoed, as if it were right there in a missalette in front of her, her response.

And Kath and Brett repeated after her, “A book.” And the dawn broke, the sun cresting the horizon, bringing to life the detail around us: the two brick chimneys rising proudly from either end of the long mansion roof, the sturdy trunks and bright red and orange and gold leaves of the trees all around us, our five faces smiling at each other, not sleepy despite the hour. Kath brushed a dried leaf from the table, then, and Brett pulled the worst of the splinters and tossed them onto the ground, and we set our pages in front of us, and we began again.