The Wednesday Sisters (9 page)

“These guys need to do a stint at film school,” Jeff said.

In the laughter that followed, Chip pulled Brett closer, her cropped red hair brushing against his black glasses as he whispered something in her ear.
That should be you,
I imagined him saying.
In a more perfect world, Brett, that would be you stepping out onto the moon.

Houston said something about shadow photography, and the camera view changed again, and there was Neil Armstrong—ghostlike, yes, but you could see the ladder and the whiteness of a huge-headed man in a white space suit, with a big pack strapped to his back. You could make out that he was turning toward the camera, and looking down, and he was talking about the surface, saying it was like powder and the feet of the landing module had sunk into it, but not too far. Then he said he was stepping off “the lam,” and it was just as Maggie was saying, “Daddy, he’s standing on a baby sheep?” that Armstrong finally said, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Not until then. His words were all crackling, too, and I wondered if that was the transmission or if the tears were welling in his eyes the same as they were in mine.

“Mama, why are you crying?” Anna Page said, and I saw that Kath’s eyes were tearing, too, and Linda’s were moist, and Brett was wiping whole streams from her cheeks.

And while Neil Armstrong was talking about his footprints, how he only sank into the surface a little bit and he had no difficulty moving around, Lee put his arm around Kath and pulled her toward Anna Page and him. “It’s the first time in history, Anna Page, that man has his feet down on something other than this earth or what was made on this earth,” he said. “You watch closely, punkin, this is something to remember your whole long life.”

The children, tiring of a picture that was often too wavy or too dark or too fuzzy to make out anything much, began dropping off to sleep. They missed Neil Armstrong half running, half floating across the moon’s surface, the sunlight reflecting off his space suit so he looked like the Holy Ghost himself. They missed Buzz Aldrin’s joke about being sure not to lock the door on his way out of the module, and the plaque we come in peace for all mankind, and the raising of the flag—not so much a raising as an opening and planting, the Stars and Stripes sticking straight out as if hung from a taut laundry line.

“No wind on the moon,” Brett explained, “so they ran a pole through the top of the flag, to make it look good.”

And it did. It looked beautiful, catching the sun, the stripes so clear even the children could have seen they were watching an American flag being placed on the moon. Then President Nixon was saying the heavens had now become a part of our world, and for once all the people of the world were truly one, which seems a little sappy now, and, yes, it was Nixon, but he wasn’t Watergate Nixon yet, and it was moving. It was.

As the children slept, we watched the shadow men in their space suits floating back and forth across the screen, taking soil samples and running experiments, negotiating their way back into the capsule, closing the hatch again, all while the camera left on the surface of the moon sent back footage of an unwavering flag posted in front of the silent ship. I remember thinking about Michael Collins, the command module pilot who was destined to become the trivia question, the final
Jeopardy!
even though he spent the same eight days in space that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did. Not even able to watch these first steps on the moon that could not have been made without him. I wondered how they chose who did what; if it was alphabetical he got a bad draw, even as a
C.
I imagined him still orbiting in the spaceship, alone on the dark side of the moon, and how very happy he must be to see the earth rise over the moon’s surface each time he came back around.

B
RETT ARRIVED
at the park by car that next Wednesday morning, and she got out on the passenger side, without Sarah in tow. She grinned bigger than you’d think that little-pout mouth of hers would go as she approached us, holding her very pregnant belly with one hand and four copies of her manuscript with the other. We launched into a big round of congratulations, but she interrupted us, saying she couldn’t stay. “I’ve been in labor since four this morning,” she said. “Chip will burst a vessel if I don’t hand you these and march right back to the car.”

She had the baby forty-three minutes later, a seven-pound, four-ounce boy: Mark Edward Tyler. He was the easiest baby there ever was to spot in the nursery, even through the fingerprint-smudged glass. That child had more hair than any newborn you’ve ever seen, the same remarkable strawberry blond as his mother’s. It would all fall out over the next week, leaving him bald as the moon before the
Apollo
astronauts planted their unflappable flag. But it would grow back improbably thicker, a portent of things to come.

T
HE NEXT WEDNESDAY,
Brett arrived pushing little Mark in a baby buggy while trying to hold Sarah’s hand—she’d insisted we meet to go over her manuscript even though she’d just had the baby. The novel was a mystery in which a female graduate student, Elizabeth, finds a dead body in the physics lab and, in the course of disentangling herself from suspicion, learns that she is adopted and that her birth mother is a research scientist at the university. But the improbability of that coincidence wasn’t even the biggest problem with the book, nor was the fact that only one credible suspect remained after page 42. The biggest problem was the protagonist, Elizabeth, who was, frankly, dull and unlikeable.

We all started with what we liked about the manuscript: the Stanford campus setting, the science (which was surprisingly interesting), the way Elizabeth talked things out with her favorite lab rat. “Ratty! I loved Ratty!” Linda said. “If Elizabeth were half as likeable as Ratty—”

“Y’all can laugh,” Kath said, cutting Linda off, “but I swear, Ratty reminded me of Brett’s brother in that thing she wrote about the marble machine.” And we all did laugh, but she was right, there was a certain charm the two characters shared.

“It’s awfully good for a first draft, Brett,” Kath said. “A mighty good li’l mystery.”

Brett, her watering eyes betraying her earlier insistence that this was just for fun, looked down at her gloved hands. “But it isn’t a first draft,” she said. “It’s a fourth or a fifth or a sixth draft, I don’t even know anymore. What is a draft, anyway?”

Kath, not missing a beat, said it was great for a sixth draft as the rest of us sat there, trying not to look incredulous. A
sixth
draft?

Critiquing the manuscript was tough because a lot of what was unlikeable about Elizabeth was what might be unlikeable about Brett, too, if you didn’t know her well. But Linda launched us, asking if Elizabeth even wanted us to like her, and Ally said, “Or maybe she doesn’t want us to think she
cares
if we like her? Like a defense mechanism?”

Like the way Brett hid behind her smartness, her quotes, I thought.

“She’s smart as a whip, sure,” Kath said, “but we need to know there’s some meat on her skinny ol’ bones.”

“Meat?” Brett said.

“We need to see she wears gloves,” Linda said.

Sudden silence, everyone trying not to stare at Brett.

“I’ll bet she killed a man,” I said, that line from
Gatsby,
from when we first met Brett. “I’ll bet she killed a man over the way he was tearing up her manuscript.”

“Justifiable homicide!” Ally said, with a very funny expression on her pale face, as if she’d just been released from the loony bin.

That made us all laugh—even Brett—and our laughter brought us back together, the way only laughter can. It was like admitting we all wore our own little white gloves over some part of us. And the vulnerability of admitting that made us a little emotional, I guess, and it’s so much easier to laugh than to cry. Our laughter woke the baby, who’d been sleeping so quietly we’d practically forgotten him. And Brett leaned over to pick him up, but I said, “Let me,” because it was too much, to have to tend to a baby and listen to a critique of your manuscript at the same time. And I curled him up in my lap and jiggled him a little, ran a hand over his newly bald little cradle-capped scalp, and like most newborns he didn’t seem to care much whose warm arms he was in.

Kath suggested Brett explain what she meant the story to be, and Brett tried, but she lost us by the third sentence of a five-minute explanation that concluded, “I guess it’s mostly about . . . beauty versus brains?”

“That’s what I thought. That’s the big ol’ heart of the story, this idea that intelligence in a woman is about as desirable as a trapdoor on a canoe. But that doesn’t hardly get a mention until”—Kath flipped through the carbon copy she and Brett were sharing, the faintest copy—“here on page 305, Brett, in this scene with Lizzy and her mama. I was wondering, though, if her mama couldn’t be in the hunt from the get-go. You might could split this last chapter, make the first part of it prologue.” She turned to one of the last pages. “See here? Couldn’t that be the end of the prologue? Then you turn the page to chapter one. Boom: here’s Lizzy before she even knows she
has
a real mama, much less how brilliant she is. But the reader
does
know.”

Brett nodded after a moment.

Linda, who looked as if she’d been about to bust ever since Kath spoke, said, “I like that idea. I like that,” and I silently applauded her for waiting for Brett to like it first. She’d come a long way since that morning she’d bludgeoned us into reading after she’d sworn we wouldn’t have to read, that first meeting of what I just that minute began to think of as the Wednesday Sisters.

“The Wednesday Sisters,” I said, not meaning to say it aloud.

They looked at me for a moment with puzzled expressions, trying to sort out what in the world I was saying about Brett’s book.

“We are!” Linda said. “We’re the Wednesday Sisters!”

“The Wednesday Sisters Writing Society!” Ally said.

And we all smiled, seeing even then, I think, that our friendship would change our lives, that it already had.

Linda asked Brett then what she liked about
Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
why she’d chosen it as her model book, and Brett, after a moment, said she supposed she liked the way Holly just decides whom she wants to be and becomes that. “And the way she so easily abandons her past without ceasing to love it,” she said.

“Think about that when you think about Elizabeth,” Linda said.

Brett sighed. “But this will be so much work.”

“God doesn’t believe in the easy way,” Kath said.

“Like you told us Hemingway said, Brett: ‘First drafts are shit,’” Ally said.

Kath kicked her under the picnic table—this was a
sixth
draft—but it was too late, Brett’s tears spilled over. She looked like I imagined her character Elizabeth looked in the flashback to when she was eight, when her classmates ridiculed her for using words like
paucity
and
atmospherics
and
lithe.

“Oh, shoot, I didn’t mean that, Brett,” Ally said. “I just meant even great writers . . .”

But that wasn’t why Brett was crying, exactly, I didn’t think—or why I would have been crying if I were her, anyway. Which I would have been. Maybe it was just postpartum blues, all those hormones jumping around, but I thought it had more to do with feeling as vulnerable as that girl in her story. It had to do with knowing we were opening ourselves up, cutting ourselves open at our guts and letting the others see inside us in ways we couldn’t even see ourselves. It had to do with beginning to imagine opening ourselves up not only to each other, but also to the whole world. Because wasn’t that what we were hoping? That someday the things we’d squirreled away behind our little white gloves would be right out there on the bookshelves for anyone to see, our souls so pitifully disguised by our tortured prose.

B
RETT SHOWED UP
the next Wednesday with new pages. Not a rewrite of the novel—none of us works that fast. Just something she’d banged out on the typewriter the day before. She read it aloud, shyly, a piece that, on the surface, was about watching the lunar landing, and remembering how she and her brother had dreamed of being astronauts, wondering if he watched with the same mixture of awe and pain that she felt, the pain of seeing someone else achieving that dream they’d shared. But underneath that surface, the essay was as much about watching her daughter watching it, too, and somehow it was about the wonder of the landing and the wonder of Sarah and how those two things were the future right there in her living room, and how one day Sarah would go off to school, and then to college, and then to walk on the moon or Mars or on into another galaxy altogether, and how Brett could not imagine letting her go. I watched, riveted by her words, seeing Sarah’s bare little hand slipping from Brett’s white cotton grasp. Sarah all grown up, the astronaut Brett herself had once dreamed she’d be. Brett removing her gloves to touch her daughter’s smooth cheek one last time before she boarded her spaceship, only to find that it was too late, that all her bare fingers could reach was the cold not-glass, the bubble dream of the space suit in which her daughter was now encased.

When she finished reading, there was a long silence.

“What?” Brett said. “I’m splitting my infinitives? Mixing my metaphors? Just tell me! If I can take that drubbing on my novel, I can take anything.”

Kath wiped her eyes, and Ally pulled a tissue from her purse and blew her nose.

“Have you thought about where you’ll send it?” Linda asked. And we all started talking about where we’d seen anything like this in the magazines we read.

“But it’s just a little essay about nothing,” Brett said. And despite all our protests—of course Chip would love it, and Sarah did
not
come off as clingy, no one could read it and think Brett didn’t love Sarah to the ends of the universe, that’s what the whole essay was about—no amount of our saying so could convince her to send the essay out.