The Wednesday Sisters (7 page)

When I look at that Olympics photograph now—of Tommie Smith and John Carlos in that black-power salute—it looks so innocuous, but I sure didn’t see it that way then. Those two athletes standing stocking-footed on the Olympic awards podium, thrusting black-gloved fists in the air and bowing their heads as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played in their honor—it scared the hell out of me, as it did much of the world. That’s what I’d felt as I’d watched them, before my emotions got all tangled up with my writing: scared as hell. You’d have thought from the world’s reaction that those two boys had brought machine guns up to that podium. Those two young men, giving up their own moment of triumph to draw attention to the plight of their race. And do you know what Tommie Smith was doing while he was standing on that gold medal podium? He was praying to God.

We still talk about that moment sometimes, and I think I understand better now than I did then. I can understand being so frustrated with the lot you’re dealt that you turn in a direction you never imagined, you explode. That’s what happened to me that day in a small way, what would happen to Ally with Linda and the Tylandril three years later, and to Linda the week we didn’t call. It’s what happened to Kath in a bigger way the next Halloween, and I sure understood it in her, I might have done exactly what she ended up doing—and I might have ended up
killing
Lee since my temper is, on the whole, more capricious. Sometimes you have to stand up for your own dignity. And those boys didn’t do anything violent themselves that I ever heard of. They just stood up and said what is wrong is wrong and, as Linda said even then, they sacrificed their futures in the bargain. They were banned from Olympic competition for life. So I guess one part of me likes to think now that if those boys had been my sons, I would have been awfully proud.

Well, we didn’t resolve anything about that black-power salute that Wednesday, or about the start of my novel, either. And we were no “nicer” with Linda’s piece, a complete short story. She hardly blinked her blond lashes at the criticism, though. She just listened and took a million notes without interrupting or saying a word. Then
she
started asking
us
questions. I watched her, thinking that if any of us succeeded, it would be Linda.

We turned to Kath’s work next, two journal pages, which was volumes compared with the few lines she’d brought the week before, and only the second time she’d brought anything in the six weeks we’d been writing together. There was a surprising amount of narrative drive in it—the start of a love story—but it was thin, the characters not the least bit alive.

“One of Mark Twain’s rules of literary fiction?” Brett said. “‘That the personages in a tale shall be
alive,
except in the case of
corpses,
and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.’”

I was about to ask her to repeat the line so I could copy it in my journal when Kath up and started bawling, big streaks of black mascara cutting a path through the blush on her cheeks. Brett looked alarmed—we all did—and it was Linda who recovered first, who put her arm around Kath in the nicest way.

But Kath couldn’t stop crying. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to act ugly, it’s not what any of you said, it’s just that . . . oh, Lord, I’m afraid Lee’s parking his paddy in another wagon.”

“You think Lee is”—Linda pulled Kath closer—“is having an affair?”

“He never comes home, Linda.”

“But neither does Jeff, Kath. They’re residents! And who in the world would he be having an affair with?”

Brett said, “Oh,” in a way that somehow suggested Chip and her huddled over a test tube in a science lab when maybe he’d been seeing some other girl.

“He was going to leave me for Pookie Benton,” Kath insisted.

“Pookie Benton? Kath, Lee would never leave you for a girl named
Pookie,
” Linda said, trying to bring some lightness to the situation.

“But he
was
going to leave me for Pookie. Our junior year in college. He was all over her at the Derby, helping her place her bets like he was just being a gentleman, but it was the very way he first courted
me
when he was still seeing Ada Davidson. And he
would
have left me, he would have been in Pookie’s panties as easy as sliding off a greasy log backward, except . . .” She covered her face with her hands. “Except the rabbit . . .”

Brett and Linda and I all looked at each other. “The
rabbit
?” I mouthed. Then, “Oh, I see.” A shotgun wedding.

We went from denial to strategy in two seconds flat. Not like girlfriends might now. There was no talk of walking out immediately, no “You can’t put up with that.” Pride or self-respect? What were those compared with a
husband
? This was all about how she could keep Lee, get him back from this slut of a medical student or nurse or whoever was throwing herself at him. Because the only thing worse than not yet having a husband was being divorced. What man would want used goods?

It never entered our minds that Lee was used goods, too. It never occurred to us that some woman might not want Lee because he wasn’t a virgin, just as it never occurred to us that the new girl he was seeing might be anything like us or that Kath might be able to survive just fine on her own, thank you very much. Divorce was shameful, and children needed a father, and the idea of a man being a father even though he didn’t live with his children’s mother was outside our sphere of understanding. Even Dr. Spock didn’t have anything to say about what to do with children when your husband left you; he never once mentioned the word
divorce
in his book.

It scared us, to be honest. You could see it even in Linda. If it could happen to Kath, then it could happen to us, couldn’t it? But we didn’t want to believe that, so we chose to see it differently. Kath had slept with Lee before they were married; that made her different from me, anyway. It’s awful to think of, looking back at it, but Kath’s being honest caused us all to lean a little bit away from her that fall. Not that we meant to, or even realized that we were. Not that it was anything, really. We still met her at the park every Wednesday, and we took Anna Page and Lee-Lee and Lacy so she could get her hair done or buy a pretty new dress or go out to dinner with Lee. Still, in some way I can’t even explain, we set her apart so that what happened to her couldn’t possibly happen to us.

W
E STARTED COMING
to the park early that autumn, in case Ally returned or there was some new development Kath needed to talk about—nothing so obvious as lipstick on Lee’s collar, but he’d gotten a phone for the bedroom, one of the new push-button ones with the star and the pound keys no one knew quite what to do with, and he’d taken to making his calls from behind the closed door, saying it was hard to concentrate with the kids screaming in the background and he was making decisions that would affect people’s lives, so, really, was it too much to ask for a little quiet? Linda talked, as always, about her causes: she was starting to get involved in environmental issues, and she went on and on about the war, though she wasn’t any more involved than the rest of us were in the protests, the thousands of people marching right here in Palo Alto, closing down University Avenue. As the holidays neared, we talked about what the children wanted from Santa (Hot Wheels and Sting-Ray bicycles and the new talking Barbie, who spoke six different and brilliant phrases: “I have a date tonight”; “I love being a fashion model”; “Let’s have a costume party”), and about the upcoming
Apollo 8
mission, the first men to leave Earth’s gravity, ten orbits around the moon. We instituted a new critique rule: point out something you like about a piece before you launch into how it can be improved. And the second Wednesday of that December—despite how close we’d become, we still met only on Wednesdays—we began to talk about sex.

It was the week after Danny’s company Christmas party; I remember exactly because I’d never talked about sex before, not even with my friends back home.

“Chip and I . . . we fooled around up against a fence at a beach club when we were at his cousin’s wedding,” Brett confessed. “When we got back inside, his brother gave us endless grief about the fence marks all over the back of Chip’s shirt. It was mortifying.”

Kath raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Fence marks on the back of
his
shirt?”

Brett blushed about as red as her hair, and the next thing I knew we were talking about oral sex. Linda had no more experience with it than I had. But Kath? I couldn’t help thinking my friends in Chicago would have called her a slut, though I couldn’t think of her that way, not Kath. I thought of her as like me, only a little more reckless, which maybe was a good thing to be, reckless.

I was surprised, then, to find myself starting to confess what had happened to me at the party. Maybe it was Danny’s new company—thirty guys who’d just started this enterprise together and had so much hope for what it might become. Or maybe it was the setting, an unpretentious house tucked up against the Santa Cruz Mountains, where the grass was rich green even in December and the host himself was pouring the drinks, where everyone seemed young and enthusiastic and creative, ambitious. Maybe it was the way Danny introduced me to everyone at that party as if I were Miss Illinois of 1968. Or maybe it was the Boston Fish House punch, a stealthy blend of rum, peach brandy, and champagne in a lemon-lime base that was not the harmless little refreshment it was advertised to be. But then these guys were scientists, and every scientist I’ve ever met likes to explode things.

I was tipsy before long, and the only saving grace was that almost everyone else was, too. And I was surprised to enjoy it so much, and to enjoy the lovemaking afterward, not in bed when we got home but in the backseat of the car on a quiet road on the Stanford campus, with the possibility of being caught.

I eased into telling the Wednesday Sisters about it by talking about what I’d written that night, when I couldn’t sleep. I’d gotten up and pulled out my journal, and even though I was still sort of sloshed, I filled a half dozen pages. I wrote about several of Danny’s co-workers, including his boss, Andy, who was so logical and straightforward you could listen to him talk for hours about something you knew nothing about without getting bored. I wrote about some of the wives, too. “Like the president’s wife, who talks about Maine the way I guess I talk about Chicago,” I said, and Brett said I didn’t, actually, I rarely talked about Chicago anymore. Which left me wondering if Bob’s wife had friends like we did, or if it didn’t limit her range of friends to be the head god’s wife, because how close can you get to the wives of men your husband might have to fire? I wondered if I’d be happy in that big Los Altos Hills yard I’d envied, where you were so far away from your neighbors you’d have to pack a suitcase to go borrow a cup of sugar.

“I wrote about the president, too,” I said. “I said to myself,
Frankie, you are too drunk to write about Bob, put your pen down,
but I didn’t. I wrote pages and pages: about his optimism for this new venture, which was contagious; about his insistence that computers would soon be as small as a few chips you could hold in your hand; about the look on Danny’s face when he introduced me to this man who had started the company, like a son bringing his girl home to meet his father. Then I just kept writing, spilling into my journal what happened after Bob had poured me yet
another
glass of that punch.

“He’s got these eyes that are, I don’t know,” I told Kath and Linda and Brett. “It was like he was stripping me of my clothes and my skin, too, like he could see everything about me—”

“Lord a’mercy, you didn’t sleep with this fella and then write about it for Danny to find!” Kath said.

“No! For goodness sakes! Of course not!” I leaned back from the idea so sharply I nearly fell backward off the picnic-table bench.

Linda tipped her Stanford cap lower, shading her eyes. “I nearly slept with someone else not long before Jeff and I were married,” she said. “After we’d already picked silver and china and table linens. My wedding dress. Our rings.” She looked to Kath, her pale lashes blinking apologetically. “My creative-writing professor,” she said. “He invited me to discuss a story I’d written over coffee one afternoon. Except we . . . we ordered drinks instead. It was almost like we were
both
writers that afternoon, not just him. Then drinks turned into dinner and somehow I wound up sitting in the passenger seat of his car, pulling into his garage.”

“His place,” Kath said. “So at least the fella wasn’t married.”

Linda looked to the old mansion, the panes of its tall, rectangular windows reflecting the slanted morning light. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I think maybe his wife was out of town.”

I tried not to frown, waiting for the end of the story, how she’d extricated herself. But she kept her gaze fixed on the mansion, and in the silence I wondered if she hadn’t slept with him after all, if she wasn’t just too ashamed to tell us. I imagined her basking in that professor’s confidence the same way I had in Bob’s.

I was returning from the bathroom at the party—all that scientist punch—scanning the place for Danny, facing rooms full of people I didn’t really know at all: people laughing at raucous retellings of mishaps at work or discussing other people they knew in the valley or talking technical in a way I couldn’t begin to understand. Even the other wives seemed to know everyone, to understand everything. And without Danny—where was he?—I was feeling insecure and lonely and a little drunk. Then Bob—this man Danny talked about like he sat at the right hand of the Lord Himself—was standing beside me, handing me a glass of punch I really didn’t need and asking how I liked Palo Alto, whether I was settling in and finding friends.

I started talking about Danny, saying how much he was enjoying his job and how sure he was that the company would be a big success.

Bob looked straight into me with those eyes of his. Intense. Hopeful. Encouraging.

“But what about
you,
Frankie?” he asked. “How are
you
?”

He set his hand on my shoulder, and in that one gesture I split open, my insides came tumbling out. Talking to him, I felt I could do things I might never have imagined I could. I felt like I did sometimes when I pushed back from the typewriter after I’d been writing particularly well—or after I thought I had been. And when I walked away from that conversation, I felt wrung out like a sad old rag and unbelievably energized at the same time. I felt like I’d been given a new start—or not
given,
but
found.
A start I’d thought I would have when I married Danny. A start I thought I
did
have after we were first married, but that had somehow slipped from my grasp.

“What were you and Bob talking so intently about?” Danny asked the moment I joined him, stopping the conversation in the group around him, leaving everyone else staring at us and then turning to the buffet table, pretending great interest in the cheese ball. Even as I flushed, I reached down and pulled up that feeling, that new start, and I kissed Danny on the cheek, a kiss that surprised him and made
him
blush, and made him stand up straighter.

I adjusted my glasses, smoothed my hair, looked back across the room. “Who is that woman talking to Bob now?” I asked, addressing everyone, ducking Danny’s question, enjoying my husband’s suspicion that the head of the company he worked for might be attracted to me. I wondered if he realized as surely as I did that the woman’s arrival at Bob’s side had marked the end of his conversation with me, if he’d seen how reluctantly I’d stepped away from Bob’s warm encouragement.

Danny looked at the woman, but he didn’t answer. He left it to the others to lean into the circle and lower their voices, to explain that she was a mask designer, that she and Bob were “quite close.” I would learn the details over time: that he liked to take her for flights along the coast to see fireworks on the Fourth of July; that they snow-skied and drank a grape-Tang-and-vodka drink called a Purple Jesus. But that night, Danny only stood looking at Bob and the woman while the guilt rose up in me, guilt and jealousy and something else, too, some uneasiness I couldn’t name that left me wondering if it was the entrepreneur in Bob that Danny so admired, or if it was this other thing, this thing with the woman, or if it was both, or something else entirely, something he didn’t understand any better than I understood why I couldn’t bring myself to tell Danny what I’d so easily told Bob: that I was writing a book.