The Wednesday Sisters Read online

  “You don’t know,” Ally whispered. “Maybe you just don’t want me to have a baby.”

  The tension at that picnic table was palpable, but Kath jumped right in. “We’ve just got to get us one of those banyan trees and do our midnight jig, ladies,” she said, and even Ally laughed.

  “Asparagus, mangos, and carrots,” Ally said, clearly relieved to take the conversation in a lighter direction. “That’s the latest from my mother-in-law. That’s what I’m supposed to be eating now. Jim, too. And listen to this: She sent Jim some concoction made from white lilies—Jim thinks you make a tea with it or you blend it in goat’s milk or something, even he’s not sure. It’s supposed to enhance the quality of his output, if you know what I mean!”

  Linda let the whole matter of the drugs go that day, but the next week she came armed with a fat medical textbook. Ally wouldn’t even look at it, though. And two weeks later, she started bleeding, right there in the park. She didn’t notice at first—none of us did. It wasn’t until we stood to leave that we saw the red stain on her white slacks.

  “Oh Lordy, Ally,” Kath said, and Ally looked down at herself, and what little color she had in her face drained away.

  I hurried her to her car and drove her to the hospital, leaving Maggie and Davy and Carrie with Linda, telling Ally the whole way that it was going to be okay. The moment they whisked her from the emergency waiting room, I called Jim at his office. By the time he arrived, though, it was too late—the baby was lost.

  We took our casseroles and fried chicken again, and wished there was something more we could do. Ally turned away every offer of help, though, and when Kath asked if she wanted to talk about it, Ally answered, “About what?” Which—we talked about it endlessly—seemed like a pretty loud no. None of us had any idea what she was going through, we knew that. We couldn’t imagine. And poor Linda: you could see her wondering if her warnings had somehow brought this on, if Ally’s losing her baby had been her fault.

  ON THE FIFTIETH anniversary of the suffrage movement one warm August Wednesday, while fifty thousand women marched in New York and thousands more marched in ninety cities in forty-two states in a Women’s Strike for Equality, the Wednesday Sisters sat huddled at our picnic table, with Arselia watching our children for the same inadequate pay those women were marching about.

  “Ladies,” Linda kept saying, “you know we really ought to go to town”.

  The area chapters of the National Organization for Women were staging a noon rally in Lytton Plaza.

  “I won’t ask you to shed your bras and chuck them in a garbage bin, but aren’t you curious?” Linda said. “Aren’t you dying to see what’s going on?”

  There was some discussion about the children. Could we take them to a women’s lib rally? Which might have been real worry over their safety: just ten days earlier a mass confrontation downtown had ended with riot police and Mace and more than 250 hippies under arrest. Palo Alto had seen more than its share of violence all through that summer. But I think there was more to it than that. The peace rally we’d gone to, that was pretty easy. It was in San Francisco, where we weren’t likely to bump into anyone we knew who might frown on our being there, and no doubt peace was a better thing than war in any event. But this rally Linda was talking about was in our own town, where people we knew ate and shopped. And women’s liberation was a little trickier. It was an effort to change the future for women, but we had husbands and homes and children. Too late for Brett to be an astronaut, or Linda an Olympic athlete. So if the future for women was to change in any dramatic way, where would that leave us? As the dinosaurs, the last of an unwieldy, dying breed of women who were left to depend on their husbands when that would be seen as weakness, as failure, as shame.

  “What if the crowd gets out of hand?” I asked.

  “Or the police overreact, like at Kent State,” Ally agreed.

  “For goodness sakes!” Linda said. “It’s Palo Alto!”

  “‘For goodness sakes’ is a Frankie-ism, Linda,” Brett said. “You’re stealing her line.”

  “And Palo Alto isn’t exactly some quiet little backwater,” I said, and even Linda couldn’t argue that: in addition to the chaos downtown, there had been bombings at Kepler’s Books, at the Free University, and at one of the coffee shops downtown. Still, before we knew it, we were pushing the children’s strollers up Center Drive, admonishing everyone to hold hands and be careful as the long, untidy line of us crossed the street.

  Hundreds of people had already gathered in the plaza when we got there. Speakers were demanding equal pay for equal work and child care centers and abortion rights. with four years of college, i can expect to earn $6,694 read the sign one woman carried, a woman in a cap and gown who worked, someone said, in the genetics department at Stanford. Half Danny’s salary, I thought (though his job was looking more and more tenuous—his company had laid off twenty people at the end of its second quarter, a fact he shrugged off by saying he liked working in a place where the voice listened to was the one that knew the most rather than the one with the highest rank).

  A man came out in a Playboy Bunny outfit—black bathing trunks and ears and a tail—unlike anything we’d ever imagined. He was prancing around to entertain women the way women pranced around to entertain men.

  “I’ve got to get one of those for Danny,” I said, making a joke to cover my embarrassment.

  Brett laughed. “Chip would hate the tail. It would draw attention to his ample derrière.”

  “Jim’s legs in high heels.” Ally gave a low wolf whistle, so incongruous that we all cracked up.

  “Neither a whistling woman nor a crowing hen ever come to a very good end,” Kath declared. “My mama’s advice—take it as you like.”

  A speaker appeared on the podium, saying that the usual channels for women to earn more than ten thousand dollars a year included prostitution, being a Playboy Bunny or a topless waitress, or posing nude for male magazines. I stopped laughing. We all did. We stood soberly as Ava Pauling, Mrs. Linus Pauling, stepped up to the microphone. I’m quite sure I stood straighter after she was introduced, even with Maggie tugging on my skirt, saying how hungry she was. It wasn’t so much what Mrs. Pauling said—that women had had the vote for fifty years but we hadn’t changed the world as much as we should have—as the fact that she was here. Yes, it was her husband who’d won the Nobel Prize, not her, but being married to him granted her a stature we were unsure the other speakers possessed. It made us think, If Linus Pauling’s wife is standing up for women’s rights, who are we to be skeptical?

  As we watched the rest of the rally, we found ourselves nodding in agreement, nudging Brett at the antics in a skit about a mother scolding her daughter for playing with her “dirty chemistry set,” laughing together at another skit, a “Miss 46-22-36” mock sobbing as she accepted her Miss America crown and thanking “the cosmetic industry and all those cute male photographers” for making her what she was. When the mock Miss America turned around to reveal a “U.S. Department of Agriculture Prime Grade” sign on her back, I whispered to the other Wednesday Sisters, “‘Round,’ and ‘Rib,’ and ‘Rump,’” remembering how I’d turned away from that BREAK THE DULL STEAK HABIT poster on the television the first time we’d gathered to watch the Miss America pageant, when I’d thought the protester carrying it must be so different from me even if her dress was just like mine.

  A woman from a group called the Spare Ribs (which would have made us dubious if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Pauling) delivered the next speech, which gave us all pause: “We have been told that femininity is being smart enough to be dumb around a man,” she said. “For me, femininity consists in being myself, in not putting myself down or my sisters down.”

  I began clapping then, without having decided to, and I wasn’t alone. Linda, on one side of me, and Brett, on the other, were both clapping, and Kath and Ally were as well. Even Maggie, standing in front of me, was clapping, having no real idea what she was clapping for but f
ollowing my lead. And so were Jamie and Julie, and Sarah and Lacy, and J.J. and Davy and even little Mark. Kath’s Anna Page was not just clapping but cheering without restraint, her hair wild around her face, her hat upside down on the pavement behind her, where it would be stepped upon by a passerby too busy staring at the fellow in the Bunny costume to see it there.

  WE GATHERED AT LINDA’S the Saturday night of the Miss America Pageant that year, a few weeks after the rally in Lytton Plaza, but we didn’t turn on the TV. “No Miss 46-22-36 for us tonight,” we said. We planned to enjoy a quiet evening together not watching, in part to assure Kath there would be life for her after Lee, if he divorced her, which he hadn’t yet. He was, in fact, at their house that very evening, eating the dinner she had prepared as if he still lived there, which was the charade they continued to keep up.

  Kath had run through the last of her savings buying school clothes even though she’d economized, letting Arselia go and serving more and more macaroni and cheese. To make ends meet, she’d accepted the first job she was offered, working for an obnoxious accountant who paid her the same $1.60 an hour we paid Arselia, but who let her go every day in time to be home when school got out. Every morning, Kath put on the skirt and hose and high heels required by office rules, saw Anna Page and Lee-Lee off to school, dropped Lacy with one of us, and went to work. When Lacy whined about being left, Kath took it all on her own shoulders, too. She acted as if her job were a fabulous opportunity rather than the sheer drudge it was, and she never once hinted that she was only working so that Lacy could still have her favorite Lorna Doone cookies and Anna Page could wear patent leather shoes.

  You had to admire Kath for that, for never allowing her children a glimpse of what a rat their daddy was. You had to wonder why you’d spend a whole evening admiring Miss Kentucky just because she wore gowns well when no one was admiring the kind of woman Kath was. All that carefully tended beauty, all that apparent faultlessness? You couldn’t imagine those girls could be from struggling families, that they might have to work to send their brothers to college, that their husbands might abandon them. You couldn’t imagine they would ever find themselves childless, or with lumps in their breasts, or with scars or fears they might need gloves to protect against. They were feminine, beautiful, and so you imagined their lives were all debutante balls and trust funds, that they awoke looking as beautiful as they appeared on the pageant stage, that they would never want for anything, or ever doubt themselves.

  No pageant this year, we’d decided. Kath didn’t need to stack herself up to Miss Kentucky. None of us did. We would spend the evening together admiring each other instead.

  We poured our usuals that evening—gin and tonics, vodka gimlets, sidecars—and we nibbled (long gone were the days when no one would dip the first chip). Ally had brought something that looked like poppy-seed rolls, though not quite. “Rajgira, that’s what the seeds are,” she said. “The Royal Grain. My mother-in-law sent them. The seeds, not the rolls. They’re supposed to give me strength—to carry a baby to term, she means. Although Jim’s not sure that baking them into rolls is quite what his mom had in mind.” She washed a bite of roll down with her vodka gimlet and grinned. “Much less serving them with alcohol.”

  We compared mothers-in-law, then, granting Ally’s the Most Meddling from the Farthest Distance Award (although the rajgira rolls, with the crusty, nutty-tasting grain sprinkled on top, were actually quite good). Kath’s mom-in-law took a close second, while mine came in dead last; Danny’s mother was forever saying I was the best thing that ever happened to her son. And when we’d exhausted that subject, we moved on to what kinds of mothers-in-law we would be ourselves when our children married, and what kinds of spouses we hoped they would find. It wasn’t long, though, before the conversation turned to the pageant we were determinedly not watching. It’s true, I’m afraid. We couldn’t help ourselves.

  The rules had changed that year, so that nonwhites could participate. How could we not talk about that? Miss Iowa, Cheryl Browne, was competing as the first black contestant. We wondered what it would be like to be a black woman in America—these were the days when George Wallace, who thought blacks should be denied the vote, was the seventh most admired man in America—and how one black woman in a field of fifty could possibly change things. We wondered how it would feel to be her, and whether some of the judges wouldn’t refuse to vote for her even if they thought she was the most beautiful and talented. We decided any judge who didn’t think black women should participate wouldn’t see any black woman as beautiful enough to win. We decided Cheryl Browne ought to win because for her to be named Miss Iowa she had to be super beautiful and super talented. We didn’t really believe she could win, but we hoped she would.

  As always, the talking was like the eating of potato chips, and the next thing we knew, we’d turned on the TV—just for a minute, we decided. “Just to see Cheryl Browne.” “Just till the next commercial break.” “Just till her talent, then we’ll turn it off.” Then the pageant was over and we’d watched pretty much the whole thing. It was the only year we all rooted for the same contestant.

  We did watch the pageant differently that year—at least there was that. We weren’t so wrapped up in ball gowns and bathing suits. We spent the time talking about what femininity meant and what it should mean—not “being smart enough to be dumb around a man,” we agreed.

  “Though I’ve done that,” I said. “With boys I dated in high school before I met Danny.”

  “I even put answers I knew were wrong on tests sometimes,” Ally admitted, “so the boy I was dating would do better than me.”

  “Maybe I should have done that,” Brett said. “I was great at science, sure, but I never had a date until Chip.”

  “It’s not just us,” Kath said. “Do y’all ever watch Barbara Walters on the Today show? She waits for the men to finish asking their questions before she says a word.”

  “She has to, it’s in her contract,” Brett said.

  “Seriously?” Ally said.

  “I think my problem is I confuse ‘feminine’ with ‘perfect,’” I said. “My hips are too wide, so I feel like a barking dog even though Danny swears he adores my hips. It’s tough being raised with the Virgin Mary as the girl I was supposed to be.”

  “Virgin, but still she gets the child,” Ally said. “The Son of God, no less.”

  “From a Darwinian standpoint, men are dependent on us, too, though,” Brett said. “No women, no babies.”

  “But men can have identities without babies,” Ally said. “Jim wants children even more than I do because family is so important in his culture, but he’s supposed to be the breadwinner and he is, and I’m supposed to care for the family and I can’t even produce the children I’m supposed to care for.”

  “I think Frankie is right about this perfection thing,” Linda said. “I bet even these girls on the TV see themselves in terms of their shortcomings.”

  “My knees are too big, my breasts too small,” Ally said.

  “My little piggy toes are a whopping size nine and a half.”

  “My glasses.” I tipped them for effect. “And my hair is downright goofy.”

  “Mine is the frizzliest mess—I swear sometimes I might could just shave it all off and be done with it,” Kath said.

  “Mine flattens before noon and the ends are all split,” Linda said. “But I don’t know about bald, Kath. It’d be like lacking breasts.”

  “Without either one you’re androgynous,” Brett agreed. She looked down at her own flat chest and started laughing, and we all laughed with her.

  “At least you aren’t overly intellectual,” she said when she’d recovered from laughing.

  “Or ambitious. God forbid I should be ambitious,” I said.

  “Heavens to Betsy, I’m just too good a writer to be a girl!” Ally said, and that made us all laugh again.

  Okay, our laughter might have had something to do with the cocktails, which also might have been
the source of our courage, but we did start talking that night about our own talents in a real way—not the batons we would have twirled in a beauty pageant, but our talents as writers: Linda’s graceful sentences, Ally’s imagination, Kath’s memorable dialogue, Brett’s settings, which made worlds spring to life, and my “voice,” which I thought was just the way I spoke (exactly, they said). Then, maybe because we were drinking, the fantasizing began.

  “Readers in bookstores and libraries,” Ally said.

  “In recliners, or curled up in bed,” Brett said.

  “Interviews,” Kath said.

  “Bestseller lists—why not?” Linda said.

  “The Pulitzer Prize,” I said.

  “How about a big ol’ monument,” Kath said. “One in our pretty little Pardee Park.”

  “After we’re all in our coffins for real,” Brett said.

  “Something that says the Wednesday Sisters got their start together, right there,” Linda said.

  “A fresco,” I said.

  “All of us huddled over our picnic table, children swinging in the background,” Brett said. “Like the oil painting of the Round Table regulars at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, but in a medium that will weather well.”

  “Not that it’s the publishing that matters,” Linda said. “It’s the writing that matters. Even if we never publish a word.”

  And we all agreed: it was the writing that mattered. It was through the writing that we were coming to know who we were.

  WHEN DANNY AND I opened the front door to sit on the porch after the children were sleeping that Monday evening, the girl’s room in the mansion across the street—“Estella’s room,” we’d both taken to calling it—was dimly lit. We smiled at each other and, without a moment of discussion about it, set our drinks on the porch where we would accidentally kick them over when we returned. We didn’t even stop to grab the baseball bat.