The Wednesday Sisters (23 page)

And laughter is a wonderful thing, it really is. It’s hard to hold tight to disappointment when your whole body is shaking with laughter, when you’re having to stand with your legs crossed so as not to wet yourself.

We were still laughing as we returned to our room late that night, as Danny sat on the chair swing and I straddled him, shrugging off the thought of my diaphragm, maybe not wanting to break the mood or maybe thinking if we made a baby that night, then it was meant to be. We made love like that, with the sliding doors wide open and the warm night breeze on our bare skin, with the moonlight reflecting so beautifully off the white-capped water it would have made you hold your breath if you weren’t making love in a swing.

Have you ever made love in a swing? It’s not quite as easy as it looks.

And the next night—our last night on the island—I overheard Danny and Bob talking about me, Danny saying yes, it was wonderful that I’d gotten an agent, wasn’t it? Saying “Michelangelo’s Ghost” hadn’t sold yet, but he was still sure it would.

T
HAT SUMMER OF 1971,
the Pentagon Papers were leaked to
The New York Times,
eighteen-year-olds gained the right to vote, Danny’s company settled into new digs in a pear orchard in Santa Clara, and Kath and Lee went together to the Outer Banks.

Yes, that was our reaction, too: You aren’t even living together in that big old house of yours anymore; how are you going to do it in the small confines of a North Carolina vacation? We didn’t put it quite so bluntly to her, but we said it. And it gets worse: they were staying at his family’s summer house, with his parents and his grandparents, his brothers and even his aunts and uncles and cousins all there, and all hers a few houses down the beach.

This was where they’d first gotten together, vacationing with other wealthy Southern families the summer she’d flirted with his friend Huntley Parker, the year Lee was captain of the football team at his private boys’ school and Kath made the varsity cheerleading squad at the sister school. And they couldn’t
not
go. They’d gone every summer of their entire lives, and the children had, too, and they still hadn’t said a word about their split to their families
or
to the children. And they weren’t either of them ready to do that yet—which Kath took as a good sign. She thought maybe a return to the place of that early romance was what was needed to get her marriage back on track.

She dieted even more stringently in the weeks before they left, and lay out in her backyard in a new bikini so she wouldn’t be marshmallow pale when Lee saw her in it. She packed the matching powder-blue suitcase and cosmetic bag Lee had given her for their anniversary one year, and she and Lee loaded the children into a taxi like they did every summer and set off for the airport. They flew to Atlanta and changed to a smaller plane that took them to the local airport where the family chauffeur—hers or his, that wasn’t quite clear—picked them up.

I’m sure Kath had thought of the room arrangements. She must have. She’d been in that house enough to know that, big as it was, when Lee’s whole family was in residence (his parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters and all the little cousins) there wasn’t a spare room for spouses who weren’t sleeping together. I wondered if she might somehow manage to stay with her family, use the excuse that she didn’t see them but this once a year so she ought to stay with them, but I don’t think that idea ever crossed her mind.

Did she sleep with him, cuddled together in the bed they’d first made love in one sultry summer night when his parents were at her house for bridge? He hadn’t wanted to, he’d as much as said on the plane that he wouldn’t do that, that he was in love with the other Kathy and he’d promised her he wouldn’t. Kath choked on that. She wanted to whack him across the face, but she only turned to the window—thankful she’d taken the window seat—and looked out at the long stretch of square fields below, fields that looked unreal from this distance, that looked like a play world populated with dolls and toy cars and nothing that could really have any emotion at all.

The vacation was awful, Kath trying so hard every moment to win Lee back. She wooed him by wooing his mother, who’d always seen her as that slut of a girl who’d trapped her sweet Lee by getting pregnant, and his father, who could be wooed by almost any attractive and attentive young woman—at least there was that. She was the perfect sister-in-law; there were servants for the cooking and cleaning, but she watched all the children while the others played tennis or golfed or swam. She tucked her children in at night while Lee sat with the other men on the porch. Mornings, she brought him coffee and the newspaper in bed and made him eggs Benedict—the cook never did make it just the way he liked it—and he ate and read the paper and pretended she wasn’t there. But those Southern manners go a long way toward covering up reality. No one had any idea that there was anything amiss.

Kath went to bed with Lee every night like a good wife, too, never once giving even a hint of the fact that, back in California, he was sleeping with someone else. The first night, the second, the third, she stayed up far too late, long after the other wives had gone to sleep, waiting for Lee to finish drinking and telling off-color jokes with his brothers. She wore sexy negligees, and she climbed in next to his turned back, and she didn’t say a word about how humiliating it was to be sleeping with a man who’d rejected her, a man who was dreaming of another woman in his sleep.

It was the fourth awful night that she let go. She’d had a sidecar before dinner—they always had cocktails before dinner—and a refill at the table, and another afterward, and when everyone was out on the porch, lost in the kind of summertime laughter that the beach brings out in even the sourest of people, she’d slipped inside and poured herself a good stiff fourth. It wasn’t the first time in her life she’d had four drinks in an evening, but she hadn’t eaten much, either. She looked great in that bikini—all Lee’s brothers had remarked on that, much to their wives’ dismay—and she was not about to let go of that attention, that reminder to Lee of what he had in her.

She dawdled in the bathroom that night till Lee was in bed, then went to his side of the bed rather than hers. She stood in front of him, carefully silhouetted in the moonlight so he could see through her negligee. She knelt down on the floor beside the bed, and she touched his cheek, his hip, his leg. He didn’t say anything, didn’t respond, so she did the only thing she could think to do. She pulled her nightgown up over her head and knelt there, naked and exposed.

“Jesus, Kath,” he said, and he turned away.

It seemed impossible even to her that she could humiliate herself further. She knelt there for the longest time, his back to her, telling herself to give up, to go to sleep. “Please, Lee,” she said quietly. Pleading. Like a little girl who can’t bear to be left out.

He rolled onto his back, said, “Jesus, Kath,” again. Then lay there, staring up at the ceiling.

She climbed on top of him.

“I can’t, Kath,” he said.

She started moving against him, moving, moving until she knew she could slip his boxers off and she would have him. She took him in her mouth, even, which she never had liked, but she knew he loved. She would have done anything he wanted that night.

She faked an orgasm, to flatter him.

He took her angrily after that. He rolled on top of her and banged into her, the bed frame squeaking under them in the quiet of the crowded house.

“Jesus,” he said when he’d spent himself, and she felt a small moment of hope. He still loved her. She could still please him.

“Jesus,” he said again. “I’ll say this, Kath. You still have the warmest pussy I’ve ever had.”

I
WAS UPSTAIRS
getting Maggie a sweater she could wear to school one Friday morning in September when the phone rang. I answered it on our new upstairs extension. My agent, Fred: “I have good news.”And the next day, as luck would have it, was the Saturday of the Miss America Pageant. When we gathered—at Kath’s that year—we popped champagne.

“Novelist Frankie O’Mara!” Kath said. “Lordy, Lordy, that beats the band, doesn’t it?”

We hadn’t turned on the pageant that evening before we were well into planning our futures as if this were the very first step for all of us, as if one of us achieving a dream meant we all could, which was how we felt. We were all writing pretty regularly by then. Brett was rewriting her novel, and Linda had felt so affirmed when she’d sold her first story that she’d written several more, having in mind a collection that could be published as a book. Even Kath was writing, despite that awful vacation with Lee. Or maybe because of it. Or because the week after they got back from North Carolina, she “just happened to drive by Lee’s apartment” and found a rent-a-van unloading the other Kathy’s medical books and albums, her bicycle, her pillow and her childhood teddy bear, her powder-blue cosmetic bag that was identical to the one Lee had given Kath as an anniversary gift. At any rate, she’d begun writing the novel Linda had urged on her, a
Pride and Prejudice
–type comedy of manners set in the modern South. She’d finished two chapters, both written in her journal—it was less intimidating that way, she said—and she was writing a little nearly every day despite the fact that she was working full-time and raising Anna Page and Lee-Lee and Lacy essentially alone. When we asked how she did it, she said it was better than staying up crying every night. At least she was getting something done when she couldn’t sleep.

Ally had reverted to her journal, too, having abandoned her porcupine story. She’d begun writing about the packages that came from her mother-in-law. The latest offering included a length of silk and several pouches of powder:
kumkum,
which was vermilion powder,
haldi,
which was yellow turmeric, and gray ashes called
bhasma.
Jim’s parents had taken them to their ancestral place, where they’d offered them as a
pooja
to their
kuldaivat,
their family god. An offering made in Ally’s name, Jim said—for a grandchild, Ally knew, although Jim didn’t say that. The length of silk, a sari, was so soft that Ally wanted to feel it on her bare skin. She’d wrapped herself in it as best she could, and it hadn’t seemed so odd then to have Jim put the red
kumkum
along the part of her hair and on her forehead—just a dot between her eyebrows—and a pinch of the turmeric and ashes on the bridge of her nose. It was like being in costume, Ally wrote in her journal, and yet not: in that sari, she was a more sensual, more exotic version of herself, but still herself. She and Jim had made love the night she donned the sari, the soft silk intertwining with their bodies. And though she hadn’t said anything to us about thinking maybe they’d made a baby that night, I imagined the evening had been blessed in the way his parents had meant it to be. I imagined that she would tell us before the pageant ended that she was pregnant again.

What Ally started talking about when the conversation turned away from our writing that night, though, was how thin Linda had become. Which she had. If anyone we knew today got as thin as Linda was back then, we’d worry it was some kind of eating disorder. That term wasn’t even in Brett’s extensive vocabulary in those days, though. And Linda didn’t seem unwell or even the least bit lacking in energy: when it came out that the state of Virginia had turned down
twenty-one thousand
women for admission to state colleges in 1970 while not turning away a single man, she ranted with her usual energy, at her usual admirable volume. But the way Ally was pushing Linda that evening seemed sort of a slap back at Linda for all that pushing Linda had done late that spring over Ally’s drugs. Still, Kath agreed with Ally. “You best starting eating better, Linda, or you’ll have to stand up twice to cast a shadow,” she said.

“I’ve been running more and more,” Linda responded. “I have in mind to run a marathon.”

“A marathon!”

“Not this fall, but maybe next. I can run ten miles already.”

I’d seen her running by enough mornings to know she was pretty fast, too.

“The New York Marathon is next fall,” she said. “I’d run Boston this spring, but they still won’t let women enter the race.”

It wasn’t something women did much then, sports of any kind. That year, fewer than 300,000 American high school girls had taken part in interscholastic sports. Even men didn’t run marathons much: only 126 ran the first New York City Marathon, competing for recycled bowling trophies. So I suppose it was a comment on how much the Wednesday Sisters had changed that we didn’t think she was loony for wanting to run that far. Or a comment on how well we knew Linda by then. You get to know someone whose writing you critique every week in a way you don’t get to know anyone else; you learn things about them they don’t know themselves.

We spent so much time celebrating that evening and talking about our own dreams and successes that we forgot entirely about Miss America. Bert Parks was practically naming Miss Congeniality when we turned on the TV. No time for us to pick the winner, Miss Ohio, who looked to me like a brunette version of Linda, with straight hair pulled back from her forehead and a perfect mouth, a perfect nose, perfect eyes. She didn’t sound at all like Linda, though. “Now a lot of anxiety is released,” she said, the stiffest first words ever uttered by a new Miss America. “Phyllis was a remarkable Miss America,” she said. “If I could do half of what she did, then I know I would not be just an image.”

Linda would have been considerably spunkier than that even if she’d just finished running a marathon, I remember thinking. Kath would have, too, even if the other Kathy was the one interviewing her. Brett would have even if she’d lost to her sister, the doctor-to-be, and quiet Ally would have, too, even if she’d just been through labor, just given birth. Not one of us would have sounded so ditzy, wearing that Miss America crown or not—that’s what I thought that night. Underestimating, I see now, the effect of the stage and lights, the audience. Underestimating the blush of unexpected success.

M
Y FIRST PHONE CALL
with my editor was a little like a first date: we talked less about “Michelangelo’s Ghost” than about where we’d grown up and what we liked to read. I hung up looking forward to working with him. And then . . . nothing. Weeks went by with no contract, no further phone call. I took to asking Danny every once in a while if I hadn’t just dreamed it.

All the while Danny was still working nonstop. The second MOS device, the 1103, had turned out to be a brilliant success—memory at less than a penny per bit—which you would think would have given him time to relax. But they were already developing the next-generation product, making something even better, and on top of that, he’d been drafted onto the public offering team, helping the investment bankers and the lawyers take the company’s stock public. Near as I could tell, those investment bankers worked all the time, and even after they went home at midnight their poor lawyers stayed on.

That spate of hard work definitely paid off, though. On October 13—a Wednesday—the company went public. The Intel offering was “oversubscribed,” a fancy way of saying they had buyers for more shares than they had to sell. Shares sold at $23.50, almost five times what Danny had paid for the stock he’d bought in the employee purchase plan. I didn’t know how much that meant for us, but maybe I could get a new oven? Or maybe we could get a second car—a used one—and keep the old oven.

At the celebration that night, Danny fell asleep sitting up in a chair.

He would end up working impossibly hard through mid-November getting the new 4004 ready for release—Intel’s first microprocessor, though they didn’t call it that; they called it a “micro-programmable computer on a chip.” It was something to be a part of, really; I think most company wives felt that way. Yes, sometimes we wondered if it was worth the empty seat at the dinner table, the picnics and baseball outings and family vacations postponed. But we saw ourselves as playing a supporting role in something important, something we were sure would change the world although we didn’t quite know how.

That weekend after the company went public, though, there were no problems, only celebration and hope and happiness. Danny went off with Mags and Davy Saturday morning, very mischievously, and came home two hours later driving a brand-new Chevy Malibu convertible, a cherry-red four-seater with “dark saddle” bucket seats, air-conditioning, and a push-button radio and eight-track tape player to boot.
I’d never have guessed him to be a red-convertible kind of guy,
I remember thinking after I’d gotten over the shock of seeing that car in my own driveway. The thing was beautiful, and he clearly deserved it. But what about the kids’ college fund? What about putting something away for a rainy day?

He climbed from the car with the biggest grin I’d seen on his face since the day Davy was born.

“Danny!” I said, tamping down my exasperation.

He held open the door, motioning for me to take the driver’s seat. “You won’t mind driving me back to the car dealer in your new chariot, will you?” he said. “So I can pick up my old jalopy?”

The car was for me. He wasn’t a red-car guy. He saw
me
as his red-car gal.

And when I climbed in beside him, he leaned over and whispered a dollar amount in my ear, not the price of the car, but the value of our Intel stock. I remember thinking it was people-might-kidnap-the-children money, your-friends-look-at-you-differently money—though it wasn’t, really; it was just more money than I’d ever imagined we’d have. Still, we agreed we wouldn’t tell anyone.

The next morning at dawn, I told the Wednesday Sisters.

They told me I’d have to buy the champagne from now on.