The Wednesday Daughters Read online

  Now Julie glanced up from Mom’s journal, saying, “There’s a six-letter name that appears here a lot: F-q-z-g-z-l.”

  Anna Page, with a glance in my direction—was this what I wanted?—opened the third journal. She didn’t take paper or pen to hand; she expected us to be her scribes. Always the oldest of the Wednesday Children, Anna Page is in the habit of expecting us all to do her bidding without realizing she does.

  Julie said, “It’s probably a name—a person or a place—because it’s capitalized. Not everywhere but mostly. Not Hope or Sam or Samuel or Jim.”

  “Sam isn’t Samuel, he’s Santosh,” I said.

  “Maybe one of the Wednesday Sisters?” Anna Page suggested, but when we went through them, none of them had a six-letter name.

  “Jindas is six letters,” Anna Page said.

  Jindas, my father who used to sing to me even before I was born.

  Julie wrote “Jindas” above Fqzgzl.

  I’m not sure I’d realized how disturbing I’d found the idea that my mother might have lost her mind until I saw the gibberish of Mom’s tidy handwriting with something that might make sense of it written above. How could she have lost her mind without me even noticing?

  “There are two Z’s, though, and Jindas doesn’t have any repeated letters,” Anna Page said.

  Julie said, “It could be some kind of changing code. Or maybe it’s Kevin—except that doesn’t repeat a letter, either.”

  “And it’s only five letters,” Anna Page pointed out.

  It was only five letters, and none of us had known him a dozen years ago.

  Anna Page said there was no point in trying to work out a name because that could be anything; we should focus on the short words that repeated. There was a three-letter word that kept appearing, “adz,” which Julie thought might be “the” until she turned the page and found it capitalized in the middle of a sentence.

  “So that’s probably Sam,” Anna Page said.

  Julie wrote “Sam” over “adz,” then flipped forward, scanning a few pages. “Unless it’s a changing code, I don’t think it’s Sam,” she said. “If D is A, then there should be single D’s sprinkled about the journal. But the only single-letter words I see are H and Z. So one of those is probably A and the other I.”

  Anna Page wondered why Mom didn’t capitalize properly or use punctuation. It didn’t seem like her.

  “If you don’t capitalize, or if you do it randomly,” Julie said, “it makes a stronger code.”

  Anna Page draped a throw blanket over my extended legs, taking care of me the way she has ever since she babysat me: boosting me up the slide in the park or getting me balloons at the May Fete, giving me her old lunch box, taking me to see my classroom before I started kindergarten, when she was already sixteen and going on dates. Everything she’d ever done, I wanted to do, to be like her. Everything she said, I believed.

  “Why did my mother want her ashes brought here?” I asked her. “Sam is right: she belongs back home with Dad.”

  Anna Page sat beside me, the batik bedspread creasing under her weight. “The people I operate on, when I give them the you-may-die speech and get them to sign the consent, their eyes …” She took my hand. “Hearts are as individual as people—no two are the same even if there is nothing about the heart itself that will tell you its owner is Caucasian or Asian or African-American or anything else—but almost everyone I operate on asks his or her children or spouse or someone to do some last specific thing for them. Just in case, you know? As if a kind of clarity they’ve lacked in their lives comes with the immediate threat of death. The things they ask for don’t always make sense to me, but I know they make sense to them.”

  We sat there with the books around us and the darkness outside, the smells of old paper and of burning coals. Anna Page seemed a different person in that moment. If I’d ever imagined what she did every day, it was all competence and technical skill, stainless-steel surfaces and blood and machines. I never thought about what it must be like for her to wake every morning to the possible consequences of having a bad day, to having her hands on a heart that would continue to beat, or not.

  “I so took Mom for granted,” I said. “She was … My father, I adored. He would go off to the office, or on trips to take depositions or whatever, and I would miss him, and I would want him to be home. And when he was home, I would do anything he wanted—even wash the car or clean out the garage.”

  “Oh, Hope,” Anna Page said in a gentle voice, “it’s different, the way we feel about our daddies.” She rose and went to the tub, turned the faucets. The water spouted cold and rusty. “Our mamas grew up imagining someday being like their mamas, while their brothers imagined being like their daddies, but our generation … All of a sudden girls are supposed to dream of careers, and our mamas don’t have careers, so of course we idolize our daddies.”

  My dad had given me his Black’s Law Dictionary the night before I started law school. He’d given me a leather briefcase for my first legal job, a summer clerk position after my second year in law school, for which I’d never needed to take work home, or anywhere. “But your mom had a career,” I said to Anna Page, remembering the heavy weight of carrying that empty briefcase back and forth to the office every day for those long three months, the pages and pages of journals I filled with that weight.

  Anna Page rinsed the soot from her hands in the water running into the tub, finally clean and warm. “Ma didn’t become an editor till later. She was a secretary when I was a kid, and that only because Daddy didn’t want her anymore.”

  She wiped a smudge from my face, the gentle touch of her wet fingers bringing back the memory of Mom and me in the bathtub together when I was a toddler. Mom’s shallow, discolored-grout tub at home had been crowded with loofahs and soaps, lotions, always candles burning at the tub’s edge and on the back of the toilet. If the bubbles were still high when I found her in the bath, I would drop my shorts and my T-shirt and my white cotton panties on the floor, and she would slide down to the faucet end of the tub so I wouldn’t bump my head, and I would sink into the warm water, the tickling vanilla bubbles, my mother’s pale hands against my darker skin as she soaped my face, my shoulders, my hands.

  “Your ma knew you loved her, Hope,” Anna Page said. “Don’t you go talking yourself into thinking she didn’t. Don’t imagine her last thought was anything but how very much she was loved.”

  I stared down at the tidy handwriting in Mom’s journal, the cacophony of non-words.

  “I still remember the day she and your dad brought you home from the hospital, Hope,” Anna Page said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been loved as much as we all loved you that day. Remember that, Jules?”

  Julie didn’t answer her or even seem to register what Anna Page was saying. She stared down at Mom’s journal as Anna Page recalled how I’d nearly died when I was born, how even after I came home, I was kept in isolation, too vulnerable to visiting-kid germs for the other Wednesday Kids to be in the room with me. “We sat on the front porch, and your mom took a Polaroid, that’s how we first saw you,” she said. “In a photo with the bear we’d given you.”

  “Mr. Pajamas,” I said. “I still have Mr. Pajamas.”

  Julie said, “These journals must have something to do with whatever Aunt Ally was working on. Why else would she have old journals here in England, rather than at home with the rest?”

  Anna Page said, “The Beatrix Potter biography?”

  “Shit!” Julie said.

  “For a librarian, you sure have a potty mouth, Jules,” Anna Page said.

  Julie was too busy scribbling in the journal to respond. A moment later she exclaimed, “Beatrix Potter! A three-letter name with the third letter A. Beatrix Potter!”

  Anna Page, looking at her as if she were as batty as Mom’s journal gibberish, put up fingers for each letter, saying “B-E-A-T-R-I-X. That’s seven letters, Jules.”

  “Hell, it’s simple!” Julie said, still scribbling, i
gnoring Anna Page. “It’s all one letter different. A is B, and Z is A. Shift one letter in the alphabet. But look, it works. Adz. Bea.”

  When Anna Page leaned forward to look, Julie shielded the journal with her arm the way you might hide test answers you didn’t want your classmates to copy. She wrote quickly, and in a minute, she said, “Listen.” She held up the journal and read,

  7.0.1999, first night at the cottage. bea is making herself comfortable in the slipper tub, never mind that there is unpacking to be done.

  —youd be more comfortable in the big house, she says. The bed here isnt big enough for us both.

  —if you think the big house is so very comfortable—

  —some of us have reputations that would be at risk if we stayed unchaperoned in a gentlemans home, Bea says. And it isnt me hes invited, allison.

  “Julie!” Anna Page interrupted.

  “But Mom wasn’t here in 1999,” I said. “Even Graham said that. Mom didn’t start coming here until a few years ago. That can’t be right.”

  “And she wasn’t exactly here with Beatrix Potter,” Anna Page said.

  “She must have been, Hope,” Julie insisted, ignoring Anna Page. “It makes sense. Look.” She turned the journal to Anna Page and me. “The gibberish turns into words.”

  “ ‘Peter Rabbit’ is underlined the way a book title is supposed to be,” Anna Page said.

  “ ‘Peter Rabbit’ is underlined,” Julie agreed.

  “But Mom didn’t start coming here until a few years ago,” I repeated, as if my insistence might make it so. “I’d have known if she’d been coming here all those years. Wouldn’t I have?”

  When I was young, I had the itch to write, without having any material to write about.… I used to write long-winded descriptions, hymns(!) and records of conversations in a kind of cipher shorthand, which I am now unable to read even with a magnifying glass.

  —BEATRIX POTTER, JUST WEEKS BEFORE SHE DIED, IN A NOVEMBER 15, 1943, LETTER TO CAROLINE CLARK

  ANNA PAGE WAS STUFFING MOM’S UNDERWEAR INTO KITCHEN GARBAGE bags the next morning so I wouldn’t have to, while Julie and I tackled the less heartbreaking sweater drawer—only to come across a powder-blue cardigan Aunt Frankie knit for Mom when they were both younger than we are now, when I was in middle school and Anna Page, a medical student already, seemed to have everything I didn’t: striking alabaster skin and breasts and all that wild hair, guys forever flirting with her while I spent Friday nights at the gymnasium’s edge. I was grateful for the studied silence we seemed to have settled into on the subjects of Graham and Isaac; bagging Mom’s life up to dispose of it provided all the emotion one day could bear.

  Anna Page draped the sweater gently over my shoulders, the smell of not quite damp wool embracing me. When I slid my arms in, it was itchy in a good way. Anna Page touched a bit of yarn dangling near my chin, where the top pearl button was missing. “It’s lovely how the Wednesday Sisters took care of each other, isn’t it?” she said. “Maybe I should learn to knit.”

  “If friendship doesn’t go both ways, it doesn’t go anywhere,” Aunt Brett says—not quoting anyone, just being herself. But Anna Page never liked us to take care of her the way our moms took care of each other. She might knit for me, but she wouldn’t let me knit for her.

  “I don’t get any of this,” I said quietly. “Why did Mom write these crazy coded entries in her journal? Why does she write about Beatrix Potter as if she’s some traveling companion, as if they’re sitting by the lake together taking off their shoes?” I picked up one of the journals and read the last few lines I’d decoded: “ ‘No amount of trying to persuade her to trade her full-length skirts for slacks works, either’—as if they’re college roommates and Mom is trying to avoid the embarrassment of being seen with a dowdy friend.”

  Anna Page took my hand. “Oh, Hope, I don’t think that’s craziness, I think that’s—Ma is forever saying the best way to understand a character is to climb inside her and look out at the world. Maybe that’s what your ma is doing in the journals? So that when she writes about Potter, she comes alive.”

  “That’s for fictional characters, though,” I said. “That’s for novels like Aunt Frankie and Aunt Brett write. That’s for trying to make someone who isn’t real seem like they are.”

  “Is it different for a biography? The fact that Potter is a real person doesn’t mean your ma knew her well enough to write about her without … imagining her there. Aunt Frankie knew our moms so well by the time she told their stories that she could have told them in her sleep. That’s easy. But your ma didn’t know Beatrix Potter.”

  “It’s her journal,” I insisted. “It’s supposed to be about her. It’s supposed to be all personal, and instead it’s about Beatrix Potter’s damn sheep.”

  “That’s just that one entry,” Anna Page said. “It makes Mom seem like a nutcase.”

  It made me seem so self-absorbed that I hadn’t even realized she needed help.

  “Let me see the journal,” Anna Page said, and she took it from the nightstand by the bed and found a pencil in the desk. She scribbled away as Julie and I finished emptying the sweater drawer.

  “Here,” she said finally. “Listen to this—”

  Julie’s hand stilled on my shoulders. I felt myself tense, wanting the writing in Mom’s journal to return to me the Mom I’d known, the one who wrote at the dining room table where everyone could see her while it was her bathtub that was hidden away. But who was that woman? One working on a book about Beatrix Potter that wouldn’t be published, who lived her life through my dad and my brother and me.

  “No. Wait,” Anna Page said. “Give me another minute.”

  She flipped forward a few pages and started decoding again. As she worked, I wondered what it said about me that my dying mother cared more for a long-dead children’s writer than she did for me, that my husband cared more about having kids than spending a life together, that even my Ama had always wanted me to be something I had no idea how to be. Was that why I loved my father more, because he never seemed disappointed? Is that why I became who he was, spending my days tending to other people’s business, packing a briefcase to arm myself with work even at night? Dad had loved the small intricacies of the law, though. He’d done it for the doing, rather than for the veneer of success it brought, the belonging it allowed. Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he, too, would have chosen to write if there hadn’t been bills to pay.

  “Okay, listen to this.” Anna Page started reading: “ ‘The delight in her blue blue eyes’— Wait.” She skipped down the page. “Here. ‘… the stories I wrote when I was pregnant with Hope. Such silly things, heavens to Betsy, but Hope loved them nearly as much as she loved Bea’s.’ ”

  “ ‘Heavens to Betsy,’ ” Julie said. “Now, that is definitely Aunt Ally.”

  “Listen, there’s more,” Anna Page said. “ ‘How Hope loved Bea’s stories. The Tailor of Gloucester. “NO MORE TWIST.” ’ ” She turned the page and continued, “ ‘The line could make her giggle in the grocery store, or in the bath, or when she would come home from kindergarten looking like the world’s end had come.’ ” Anna Page flipped back to the prior page and handed me the journal, and I reread to the end of the page, the tears welling in my eyes.

  “ ‘NO MORE TWIST,’ ” I said, hearing the words in Mom’s voice, the expression she often used when I hadn’t quite gotten something done: a scarf I meant to knit for my dad, the yarn on the needles in a closet somewhere; a story for my high school literary magazine; the college applications I signed “Asha Tantry,” my legal name, on which I’d forgotten to check the “race” box, or that’s what we pretended, that I’d forgotten rather than become overwhelmed. No more twist.

  I hadn’t changed my name when I married, and Kevin hadn’t presumed I would or even asked me to, but right after the ceremony, every one of the Minnesotans called me “Mrs. Gallagher.” We survived that, though, and we survived the early compromises: his television and his kitchen tabl
e, his pans, my couch and china and rice cooker. My bed in the master, his in the spare. Our books and music together, alphabetized. Paint colors we agreed on, contrary to what Anna Page always says about me picking the colors and Kevin nodding along. Then I had gotten pregnant—or thought I had—and for those brief few weeks, it had seemed as if even my body were no longer mine. Kevin began questioning my working late. He purged the kitchen of junk food. He changed my riot grrrls out for Brahms, shocked that I might like anything punk or feminist, much less both. How could he have married me without realizing what music I liked? It had been a relief when the whole thing turned out to be a false alarm, a missed period. “You’re too skinny,” my doctor had said.

  “Kevin is too compulsive,” I told Anna Page and Julie as we sat out on my mother’s Lake District terrace, the powder-blue sweater Aunt Frankie had knit for Mom warming me. Julie had found a teapot and loose tea—the kind Ama used to send from India—and we’d taken our cups outside to sit in the chairs Mom would have sat in. The stones and the ground beyond the patio were the dark of after-rain, and it was chilly, but the last of the slanting sunlight through the few remaining clouds warmed our faces as we talked.

  “He’s compulsive, says the woman who alphabetizes her spices?” Anna Page said.

  I tried to sort out how to explain it, but reduced to words, it sounded silly even to me: I couldn’t load the dishwasher without him suggesting a better cup placement. I should smooth the bottom sheet before I make the bed. I couldn’t even drive with Kevin in the car because he was forever telling me to watch out for this or that, sure I would crash, even though I’d never gotten so much as a parking ticket.

  “It takes ten minutes to alphabetize spices,” I said to Julie and Anna Page, “and it saves you a minute every time you cook for the rest of your life.”

  “And her books and CDs,” Julie said.