The Wednesday Sisters (30 page)

A
NYONE WHO SAW JEFF
with Linda that summer could see he would never leave her. I hoped she could see it herself. He commuted to Boston until they could find someone to replace him, but he’d already gone back to the people at Stanford, already said whatever they could give him, he’d take. And still we Wednesday Sisters were saying to each other that we had to do something for Linda. But what?

We could take the children for a weekend or even a week, we told Jeff the week Linda was finishing the chemotherapy. She would be feeling better physically, at least. What she needed now, we decided, was some time without worries, to have fun, to remember who she was. “Why don’t you two go on a vacation together?” we said to Jeff.

He ran a hand through uncharacteristically unkempt hair, and for a moment I thought he would cry, and I pictured Linda, how she never cried. I imagined how hard that must be for Jeff, to feel he couldn’t cry because she wouldn’t.

“She isn’t comfortable with the physicality of being with me,” he said, his mouth heavy. “She will be. I know she will be. But she isn’t yet.” He did not sound convincing.

“What about you girls all going somewhere?” he said. “A Wednesday Sisters weekend away.” And something in his handsome, exhausted face made me remember him in that Wilbur the pig costume at our Halloween party, made me think,
Some Husband.

“Not too far away,” he said, and you could see the struggle in him, the need to make Linda happy fighting against his own need to keep her within his grasp, to help her himself.

“The Miss America weekend, a Miss America retreat,” Kath said, and the rest of us rang up in an echo chorus before the utter ridiculousness of it splashed across our expressions, Ally blinking, looking down, Kath’s eyes startling with the realization that this dog certainly would not hunt. How could we imagine Linda would want to watch those perfect women in bathing suits when she’d just lost her breasts, her hair? When she was fighting for her life?

Brett sat rubbing one gloved index finger over her other gloved palm. “I’ve got the Carson thing that Friday,” she said, and you could see she could barely stand to mention it, that she was mortified to be talking about promoting her novel on television at such a time.

“Linda’s really excited about that,” Jeff said. “I’m so glad you’re doing it. It gives her something to look forward to. And Carson always makes her laugh, even when his jokes aren’t funny.” He smiled a little, and you could almost see him sitting in bed beside Linda, tucked under the covers with her. Ten-thirty. Watching Johnny’s opening monologue, basking in her laugh.

“The Tonight Show.”

I think we all said it at the same time.

We’d talked about getting tickets when we first found out Brett would be on, but we hadn’t known the date yet, and then with Linda being sick it had slipped our minds. Or perhaps we’d pushed it out, the fun we’d once imagined seeming far beyond our reach.

Could we still get tickets?

“Maybe I could get them, as a guest,” Brett said. “I got one for Chip.”

“I might could get them through the office,” Kath offered.

I thought, but didn’t say, that if all else failed, Danny could get them for us, through the investment bankers, I was pretty sure of that. They were always offering tickets to the opera and weekends in Napa, dinners at trendy new restaurants you couldn’t get reservations at for months. Four
Tonight Show
tickets couldn’t be that hard to come by, if you knew how to go about it, if you had strings to pull.

A
Mrs. America
weekend in L.A., with Johnny Carson, we agreed.
The Tonight Show
Friday night. And Saturday? Something other than Miss America, we decided. Who could spend a wild weekend in Los Angeles staying in a hotel room and watching an outdated beauty pageant, anyway?

We booked rooms in the hotel Brett was staying in—four rooms, because we couldn’t imagine Linda would want to share a room, and it seemed wrong for any of the rest of us to exclude her by doing so ourselves.

“And we’ll cut our hair,” Ally announced.

“Cut our hair?” Kath said.

“Cut it off,” Ally said. “Cut it all off, heavens to Betsy. It will give us some idea of what she’s going through, shrugging off that one crutch we rely on to feel we’re feminine.”

I thought of how Ally had felt all those years, doubting her femininity because she wasn’t able to have a baby. I tried to imagine myself without my mop of unruly dishwater blond hair—not gorgeous, but still so much a part of who I was.

“Shave it off?” I said quietly, trying to imagine walking out my front door with my skull showing, bald and free.

No one answered, though everyone had heard me.

I tried to imagine all of us standing before Linda, pulling off wigs or caps to reveal that we, like her, were smooth as our newborn babies’ little bottoms had been. I would cry if the Wednesday Sisters did that for me. I would cry at their choosing to go through what I had no choice but to endure myself.

But I wasn’t Linda.

I found a smile creeping up from the pit of my stomach. “She’ll laugh,” I said. “Somehow I know it will make her laugh. I’d do it just for that.”

“She could sure stand to laugh a spell,” Kath said. “And it’s what she’d do for us, sure enough.”

It was what she would do for us, we all agreed. Everyone except Brett, who sat silently looking down at her gloves.

Kath reached over and put a hand on Brett’s. “But Brett can’t,” she said. “She’d be nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs fixin’ to go on Johnny Carson with a shaved head.”

“I could wear a wig?” Brett said, but the rise in her voice told everything. This was her big moment, and she was dreading it already. She could no more appear on
The Tonight Show
with her head shaved than she could with her gloves off.

“You can’t do that, Brett,” I said.

“It will be hot enough under the lights without a wig on,” Ally agreed.

Brett nodded, but there was something unconvincing in it, as if she couldn’t stand to have hair if the rest of us were bald.

“Henry Adams said, ‘One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible,’” she said. “What is it we’ve done so right in our lives that has made us five?”

“We’ll be your big ol’ bald fan club,” Kath said, “the good Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.” And we all, again, agreed. There wasn’t a hint of conviction in our voices, though. I was sure when the time came we would talk ourselves out of this. We’d justify our cowardice or convince ourselves it would embarrass Linda. Or maybe we’d just plain lose our nerve.

W
HEN THE BIG EVENING CAME,
we were seated side by side, Kath and Ally and Linda and I together on the aisle in the third row, with Brett waiting backstage. I felt as if I were in a dream, as if none of this could be happening. I could not possibly be that little girl who grew up in suburban Chicago, who went to Catholic school and played the French horn and went on to be a secretary. I could not possibly have married the smartest guy at Northwestern and moved to a place I’d never heard of, two thousand miles away from my family, with my two children in tow. Most of all, I could not be the woman who’d just been accepted to Stanford—my admissions letter had come in the mail that morning, just before we left!—and made these wonderful friends with whom I was now sitting, and published a novel myself and helped my friend who was now here, waiting to sit next to Johnny Carson and talk about
The Mrs. Americas
as if she were Harper Lee.

I could not possibly be sitting here with a wig scratching against my shaved scalp, knowing that Kath and Ally were bald underneath their wigs, too.

We’d thought we would buy wigs that looked like our hair, but that turned out to be more difficult than you would think. So we went to the other extreme. We bought wigs that were nothing at all like our own hair. I was a sleekly cropped strawberry blonde, Ally a longer-haired honey blonde which, with her pale skin, looked more probable than you might have thought. Kath hadn’t changed her color—she was still brunette, every other shade she’d tried on had looked just ludicrous—but she’d gone for short and curly, which opened up her face, made her cheekbones more prominent. When she’d first tried it on, before we’d actually shaved our heads, we’d all said more or less in unison something like, “Wow.” We’d said maybe she should cut her hair short, and she’d smiled—a big white smile in her uncovered face—and said, “I’m planning to, don’t you know? I’m thinking
mighty
short.”

We didn’t need to get further than the hallway outside Linda’s hotel room to know what we’d done in Kath’s hotel bathroom was worth it. Her expression when she answered our knock was the funniest thing I’d seen in ages.
Who are you?
it said.
I was expecting Kath and Ally and Frankie.

She laughed so delightedly when she realized it was us that she sounded almost healthy again. “Why are you guys wearing wigs?” she said.

We shrugged and said we were ready for a change.

“New city, new night, new look,” Kath said. “A girl’s got a right to turn loose every now and again.”

Linda said she had fixed on Ally when she’d opened the door, and she knew she should know her but she couldn’t for the life of her place her. She figured she was someone from back in Connecticut,someoneshe’d grown up with who’d tracked her downhere, though she couldn’t imagine who or how or why. Then she’d realized it was Ally.

“You look foxy as a blonde, Ally,” she said. “But I’m glad it’s a wig. That much bleach would destroy that wonderful hair of yours.”

The way Ally touched her wig made me remember Kath’s words when we’d first looked at ourselves in the mirror that afternoon, after we’d shaved our heads: “You don’t miss the water till the well runs dry.” But none of us said a word to Linda about no longer having hair to destroy.

We set off for the show and took our seats and waited impatiently, talking about Brett sitting backstage. Chip was with her—we were glad for that. He’d brought her to the show and was going to stay with her until she went on, then slip into the audience to watch her. He was flying home right afterward, so they wouldn’t have to leave Sarah and Mark with anyone for the whole night. We all were reluctant to leave our children in someone else’s care for any period of time now. Linda being vulnerable made us all feel vulnerable, made our world suddenly tenuous and fragile.

The music started—Doc Severinsen and the NBC Orchestra—and Ed McMahon appeared, and it was no time before he was saying, “Heeeeeere’s Johnny!” And there he was indeed, coming through the curtains in chocolate slacks and a gray blazer, white shirt, wide red tie. The curtain swayed behind him, all blue and green and gold.
This is it,
we thought.
This is happening for Brett tonight and it is going to happen for all of us, we have worked together to make this happen and even
we
sometimes didn’t believe it ever would, but here we are.
And Linda was clapping as wildly as I was, as Ally and Kath were, as I imagined Brett, watching a television monitor backstage, was, too. We weren’t clapping for Johnny, though. We were clapping for each other, for those women who’d arisen from that coffin almost four years ago now.

Johnny went right into his monologue, quieting us, moving the show along. He was always current, and since this was the Friday night before the Miss America Pageant, he lobbed up some funny jokes at Bert Parks’s expense. Well, not very funny, actually. I laughed at first, but my heart wasn’t in it. I thought I was just too worried for Brett. But the laughter all around me was forced, too—not just Kath and Ally, but the two fellows behind me, and the woman with the flower in her hair in the first row. Only Linda was genuinely laughing, her laughter so lovely that part of me just wanted to sit quietly and drink it in.

The band started playing “Tea for Two”—their your-monologue-is-flopping-Johnny tune—and Johnny said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, Doc. This lovely blonde in the third row thinks I’m funny even if no one else does.”

The camera panned to Linda sitting beside me. She waved at the lens and called out, “Hi Jeff! Hi, Jamie and Julie! Hi, J.J.!”—words you can’t hear on the film clip, although you can read her lips. My hand went involuntarily to my glasses, then touched the odd texture of something that was not my hair.

Doc Severinsen—in a turtleneck and very loud jacket—led his gang into “Tea for Two” again, and Johnny, looking chagrined, started his okay-I-admit-this-monologue-is-flopping dance. The crowd laughed—real laughter now. And then Johnny was talking about the guests who would join him: someone who was going to teach him how to break a board in half with his head, then Brett, then Ron Howard and Harrison Ford, who were starring in
American Graffiti,
a new movie we all wanted to see although we couldn’t imagine how the cute little redheaded lisper from
The Music Man
and
The Andy Griffith Show
could possibly have grown up.

No animal high jinks tonight. No oversized bug to crawl up Johnny’s arm. No furry little critter to perch on his head. Which was a good thing, I figured, because those exotic animals really stole the show sometimes. They were so funny—or Johnny reacting to them was—that they might be a hard act to follow for Brett. Humor was not her forte.

Johnny did his trademark phantom golf swing, aimed at stage left where the band was, and I was glad it was the Friday before the Miss America Pageant and not the Monday after; Monday was often guest-host night, and I couldn’t imagine Brett getting through this with anyone but Johnny, anyone who might find humor at her expense rather than at his own.

He did his Carnac the Magnificent gig, wearing his extravagantly feathered and beaded red turban and his cape. He held the sealed envelope to his forehead, saying, “Sis boom bah,” and tearing and blowing open the envelope as Ed McMahon repeated, “Sis boom bah.” Johnny gave him the look and pulled out the paper. “What is the sound of a sheep exploding?” At which the crowd around me laughed genuinely.

Usually I loved Carnac, he was my favorite Carson routine, though I liked Aunt Blabby, too. But I was impatient for Brett.

The breaking-the-board bit was funny, too, with Johnny succeeding, and then Ed McMahon pointing him in the direction of the camera and saying—while Johnny blubbered in exaggerated pain—that they’d be right back with the latest literary sensation, Mrs. Brett Tyler.
After
these commercial messages.

And then we were back on the air and there was Johnny, talking about his next guest, Mrs. Brett Tyler, and her new book,
The Mrs. Americas,
and then there Brett was, coming through the curtain. They’d done her hair wrong somehow, it looked too poufy, but I thought maybe that was the effect of her earrings: oversized globes that, together with the oversized buttons on her jacket, emphasized her smallness in a way that made her look fashionably adorable. It had been the last of a million jackets she’d tried on—all of us crowded into the dressing room. The last of a million earrings.

Johnny stood to shake her gloved hand. “
The Mrs. Americas,
those would be my ex-wives you’re writing about?” he said—he was on wife number three by that time—and the audience laughed.

Brett sat in the guest chair and Johnny began asking her about her book and her experience publishing it. She answered easily, articulately, as though she really might be Harper Lee after all. I was so very proud of her. We all were.

And then somehow she got on the topic of us—of the Wednesday Sisters. She started explaining how important the Wednesday Sisters were to her and how she couldn’t ever have gotten the novel done, much less published, without us. Right there, on Johnny Carson!

Johnny was all over that. “The Wednesday Sisters?”

He loved that.

And it just got better and better.

“So they’re your sisters?”

“No.”

“Not your sisters?”

“Friends. Writing friends. The Wednesday Sisters Writing Society, we like to call ourselves. But we’re more than that, too. So much more than that.”

“So you write together?” Johnny asked.

“Not anymore. We started out writing together. On a picnic table in the park one Wednesday morning. The Wednesday morning after the Miss America Pageant five years ago, in fact. That’s when we decided to write together, while we were watching the Miss America Pageant the year all those women protested out on the boardwalk.”

“The bra burners?” Johnny said, and Brett said right, except that they didn’t actually burn any bras, they hadn’t been able to get a permit to burn anything.

“Now we write at home, though,” Brett said, “so we can spend our time together critiquing each other’s work.”

“You don’t write together but you do watch the Miss America Pageant?”

“Right.”

“And you meet on Wednesdays?”

“No.”

One of those funny Johnny looks. “You don’t meet on Wednesdays?”

“We meet on Sunday mornings. At sunrise.”

Johnny laughed and laughed at that, which was something. If you could make Johnny laugh like that, then you knew half the households in America were laughing, too.

“But you do all wear white gloves?” he said when he’d recovered.

I swear, you could hear the intake of breath in our four seats as if it were the wind howling through downtown Chicago just before a thunderstorm. You could see our faces imagining the wavy skin under those gloves and the curled little finger, and the young girl stepping up to her brother’s awful dare all those years ago, and succeeding.

Brett touched one gloved hand to her strawberry blond hair as if she would run her fingers through it and mess it up, but then she didn’t. She simply said, smooth as anything, “No, that’s my own little oddity.”

As though it was nothing at all.

She was telling him about me getting my novel published then, and about the coffin, about Linda dragging us to the funeral home and making us lie down in that coffin and imagine what we would think of our lives if we were dying, and she was pulling something from her purse. Johnny looked at it, and you could tell by the delight in his blue eyes that all those people watching at home were about to get a peek. He held it up for the camera to move in on: the coffin photo, Brett playing dead in the coffin with the four of us lined up behind her, grinning as if we’d all seen this moment with Johnny Carson in a crystal ball.

The five of us on national television, and only Linda with her hair combed.

Johnny was looking at the photograph again himself, pointing to one of us in the photo and saying, “Haven’t I seen this woman somewhere before?” He looked to Brett. “Is this the other friend—the other Wednesday Sister—who’s already published a novel? Maybe I’ve seen her book?”

“Frankie?” Brett said. “No, Frankie is the other blonde, the one in the glasses. That one is Linda.”

“Linda,” Johnny repeated.

“She’s the lovely blonde in the third row who liked your monologue when no one else did.”

“Ouch!” Johnny said, again with a comic face, while the band played a few spontaneous notes of “Tea for Two.” “Are you Wednesday Sisters this brutal when you critique each other’s work?” Johnny asked.

Brett smiled what Kath calls “a big ol’ smile” whenever she tells the story, and you could tell she was thinking,
“When in doubt, tell the truth.”

“Let’s just say that monologue wouldn’t have made it beyond the picnic table,” she said.

Johnny laughed and laughed. “They’re all here, all of the Wednesday Sisters?” he asked, and the next thing you know, he was inviting us all to come up onstage, and Brett was pointing to us, saying, “They’re right there.”