The Wednesday Sisters (26 page)

D
ESPITE ALL THE DISTRACTIONS
that spring (Hurricane Agnes hit the East Coast, George Wallace was shot, Title IX steamed toward passage, and the Cubs . . . well, never mind the Cubs that year), Brett presented us with her revised novel one Sunday in late May. She seemed excited about the prospects of this new version, though what she said was, “It’s changed. I’m just warning you. It could be atrocious, I don’t even know. I have no perspective on it anymore, if I ever did.” And when the rest of us showed up in the park at dawn the next Sunday to discuss it, she did not.

We’d just decided we’d have to go drag her out of her house when she showed up, finally, her tiny face flustered under that glorious red hair, full of hope and dread. The minute we saw her, Kath stood and started clapping wildly, and we all followed suit.

In the prior versions—all those drafts that had ended up in the fireplace—the book had been a mystery, or tried to be, but the mystery element had failed to add narrative drive to the story. Brett, astonishingly, had simply abandoned it altogether. No murder in the book anymore. And where the earlier version had been set in the present, this new one was set in the future. It was funny, because this wasn’t a book I’d rush off to the bookstore for, although the original version had been. A short description of it now would read something like “as the destruction of Earth looms, fifteen women set off in a rocket ship with frozen sperm and insemination technology, to start a new world.” No men. Men couldn’t give birth, so they’d have wasted precious seats on the rocket. And yet by page 3, before you even realized you were reading science fiction, you were so charmed by Elizabeth and Ratty that you were
not
putting the book down. Charmed and intrigued, and sympathetic to Elizabeth’s plight, which was the same plight Kath had identified in the earlier draft, the mother-daughter story.

“I bawled like a babe at the end,” Kath said.

“But I was laughing out loud, too,” Ally said.

“How did you make it so funny and so touching at the same time, Brett?” I asked. “It’s a little bit of magic, that.”

“There’s just this one iddy-biddy li’l thing about this novel,” Kath said. “I do love it to death but—”

“More than one,” Linda said. “We
all
loved it, right? But that doesn’t mean we don’t have comments.”

We all agreed: yes, we had comments.

“But this is
important,
” Kath said. “
Mighty
important. This title?
Populating Paradise Galaxy
?”

Brett groaned.

“Titles are crucial, though,” Kath insisted. “Would y’all have read a book called
The High-Bouncing Lover
? That was what Fitzgerald wanted to call
The Great Gatsby.
It’s not just the reading public it matters a big ol’ mess of greens to, either. Agents with heaps of manuscripts on their desks? Editors with big piles on theirs? Poor li’l assistants like me? I’d just stick a nice letter in an envelope saying no thanks, and Arlene would never see page one of this book.”

Kath had an idea, though: How about
The Mrs. Americas
? It hit on the theme of the book, the relative importance of beauty and brains in women. And in that time of Miss America being so popular still, and yet also so controversial, the title was both appealing and intriguing. We all agreed that, yes, we would at least pull that one off the shelf and read a page or two.

                  •                  •                  •

A
FEW DAYS AFTER
we’d all given our last little comments on Brett’s new, retitled draft, Kath took
The Mrs. Americas
into her office and handed it to Arlene. When Arlene handed it back to Kath the next morning, she said, “Tell your friend we’d like to buy this. We’d like to publish it in September—not this year, but next.”

“Lordy, Arlene,” Kath said. “Just like that?”

“And when she asks her editor’s name, you can say ‘Kath Montgomery,’” Arlene said. “Or would you prefer Katherine? No rush, but I’ll need to know eventually so I can order the nameplate for your door.”

Kath was pleased as punch to be made an editor, of course, but she was reluctant to start with Brett’s book. Brett was her friend, and this was business. She didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize the Wednesday Sisters. But Arlene insisted. She was not about to take her hands completely off this one, she assured Kath. Kath shouldn’t worry about that.

“Is she young, your friend?” Arlene asked. “Is she attractive?”

Kath said she had remarkable strawberry blond hair. “She’s just this tiny little slip of nothing, near ’bout every bit of her is thin as bone, bless her heart. She’d be a wallflower without the hair, but her hair, it’s the berries.”

“Little is okay,” Arlene said. “Little is memorable.”

Kath winced at
memorable,
thinking of Brett’s gloves, trying to figure out how to put a little lipstick on that pig. Could Brett be talked out of wearing them? And how could Kath even ask?

“She’s a pistol when it comes to smart,” Kath told Arlene. “She went to Radcliffe, she graduated top of her class with degrees in English lit and math and chemistry—or maybe it was physics—and she took graduate classes at Harvard. She knows more about the space program than the astronauts do, I swear, and she wears gloves.”

That last tacked on as if it might have something to do with knowing about space, or might be entirely missed.

Arlene sat back in her chair, the same worn chair she’d had in the old office, but it looked even shabbier here against the freshly painted walls. She frowned, a hand going to her chin. “Gloves?”

Kath heaved a big sigh. “Little white cotton ones,” she admitted. “Like girls used to wear to church.”

“Like Jackie O?”

“I don’t have one guess in paradise why she wears them, I really don’t. I might could—”

“How marvelously eccentric! Gloves!” Arlene’s chair creaked as she leaned forward, grinning at Kath. “Excellent. Perfectly excellent. It will get people talking and get her name out there. Mark my words, Kath: those gloves will generate more attention than anything we could do.”

K
ATH RODE THAT HIGH
of being made editor for the rest of the week. She showed up Sunday morning more chipper than ever, and offered her suggestions on our writing with a newfound confidence. She floated through the whole day that way: through church services with Lee and the children, through her solo outing to the grocery store. She was so happy that even Lee seemed affected. He offered to help with dinner—very unlike him—and she assigned him the worst tasks: peeling the potatoes and the garlic for the garlic mashed potatoes and slicing berries for strawberry rhubarb pie.

“She’s making you an editor?” he must have said a dozen times that day, as if it shed some new light on Kath he never had seen before. And the way he looked at her made her feel like the young girl who’d placed all those wild bets again, the girl he’d fallen for.

He stayed as always after Sunday dinner, helping Anna Page with her homework and reading the children a story. Anna Page was quite sure she was too old for story time whenever Kath was doing the reading, but Sunday nights she snuggled right up next to her father. That night Lee tucked them into bed, too, and after they were down he came back into the kitchen. He fixed Kath a nightcap and stood talking with her while she finished the dishes. They spoke of the children, of things that needed to be taken care of around the house, that was all, but still it left Kath feeling hopeful.

She’d just put the last plate away when he reached up to close the cabinet door, close enough for her to smell the scotch on his breath.

“An editor,” he said, not a question this time.

Kath thought he was going to kiss her and she didn’t know if she wanted him to or not. One part of her wanted him to scoop her up and carry her to their bed and close the door and make love to her, as he had their first time, at his family’s beach house all those long years ago. But another part of her wasn’t so sure anymore.

“Well, I suppose you’d better be getting on home,” she said. Home. Which wasn’t where Kath lived anymore.

They both turned at the same time, then, to see Anna Page standing in the doorway, watching them. “Punkin,” Lee said without missing a beat. “What’s the matter, punkin? Why aren’t you asleep?”

The way Anna Page smiled up at her father, her eyes sleepy and her nightgown misbuttoned at the top, Kath knew her daughter didn’t understand what she’d just heard, but that she would someday.

While Lee took Anna Page back upstairs, and sang softly to her, staying until her breathing slowed and her thumb settled beside her lips but not in her mouth, Kath tried to imagine how she ever would explain the scene to Anna Page. What kind of example was she setting for her daughters? Or for her son, for that matter? A woman who looked the other way while her husband lived with another woman, who clung to the charade of a happy marriage—sitting together in church, Sunday dinners, even weekday breakfasts and dinners sometimes—when the truth was something entirely different. The truth was he slept in another woman’s bed every night, and still Kath wanted him back. She didn’t even have the dignity to say enough was enough.

Anna Page would see the truth someday, Kath knew, even if she didn’t that night. Lee-Lee and Lacy would, too, and what would they think? They would grow up believing this was the way men and women were: Men were philanderers and women put up with it. That was the example they would take from watching her.

And yet what was the damned alternative? To divorce Lee, or to publicly separate? Kath couldn’t imagine how that could be better for Anna Page and Lacy and little Lee. Would they go to his apartment to visit him, then? Would they sleep there, with the other Kathy there as well? Would that awful woman fix their breakfasts and brush their hair and drive them to school, or would Lee do that himself? Would their classmates find out about it and call them names? And how could they possibly understand that their daddy loved them even though he didn’t want to live with them? How could she put them through the shame of that? Shame that was her fault, or Lee’s, that had nothing to do with them but would hurt them all the same.

T
HREE MONTHS BEFORE
Michelangelo’s Ghost
was scheduled to be released, my editor was offered a better position at a competing house. I was happy for his good fortune, but his move left me orphaned—I could see that even before we’d hung up the phone. He’d bought my novel because he loved it, but what if no one else at the publisher loved it as much as he did? What if the editor who took over thought it was a dog of a book that deserved to be left home on a Saturday night?

My new editor, when he called, couldn’t even get my name right. He asked for M.F.—that was my name on the book jacket, so that was fine—but when I said he could just call me Frankie, he said, “Fine, Fanny.”

“Frankie,”
I said, and he said, “Oh yes, right, sorry”—but then proceeded to call me Fanny again and again.

When my first review came in—just dreadful—Kath said not to get riled up about anything in that rag, they were just meaner than a cottonmouth to every poor soul in this whole world, and Linda said she was sure the reviewer hadn’t even read the book. “He’s got Risa’s name wrong!” she said. “He calls her Rosa.” Still, it’s amazing how one scathing review can deflate your confidence. I began to wonder if the book really was as bland as the reviewer suggested, if it really was “familiar”—not the word he’d used, of course. He, sparing no one’s feelings, had outright called it trite.

That was the week Linda flew to New York to run her first race. She’d been shooting to run a marathon—the Amateur Athletic Union had finally permitted women to run in its sanctioned marathons, and eight had run Boston that May, with Nina Kuscsik finishing ahead of some eight hundred men. But Linda’s training had not been going well, and she’d settled instead on running the country’s first official all-women’s race, the Crazylegs Mini Marathon. Mini, after the miniskirt.

It was “just a little six-mile race.”

Six miles? The rest of us could barely
walk
six miles.

“I’m not going all the way to New York just to run,” she said. “I’m taking the children back east to visit my brother in Manhattan, and the timing worked out well. But running with a whole race full of women? Can you imagine that? If enough women show, maybe we’ll convince the Olympic Committee that women
are
physically capable of running long distances.” The longest race women ran in the Olympics that year was fifteen hundred meters, the “metric mile”—Linda was disgusted with that. Though not half as disgusted as she would become. Women who ran the New York Marathon that year would go so far as to stage a sit-down protest for ten minutes after the starting gun went off, and still the first women’s Olympic marathon wasn’t run for another twelve
years.

Seventy-eight women showed up with Linda that June of 1972, to run that first mini-marathon. Really nice women, Linda said. Never mind that there were Playboy Bunnies at the start, a publicity stunt she found insulting (especially as they hopped off into the bushes rather than run the race). Never mind that after the race two of the co-founders, Nina Kuscsik and Kathrine Switzer (the woman who’d run Boston posing as a man), were asked to hike their dresses over their knees for a photograph at a press event. They refused; Linda was really happy about that.

The winner ran the six-mile race in just over thirty-seven minutes, almost six-minute miles all that way. Linda finished less than two minutes behind her. It was the fastest she had ever run, but she was sure she could run faster.

T
WELVE WEEKS AFTER
Hope was born, her doctors finally gave Ally and Jim permission to start bringing her out into the world. They took her for a walk around the neighborhood that evening, stopping at each of our houses, leaving Maggie and Davy, who’d not yet been allowed to see her in person before, awake long past their bedtimes, still talking about little Hope. We all agreed to meet Ally and Hope at ten the next morning—a Wednesday, but Kath arranged to have the morning off so she could join us—to share Hope’s first outing to the park. Ally had been imagining this moment ever since she first stood alone inside her house, watching us through her window, wishing she belonged. None of us was going to miss this.

Ally was already there, just sitting down on our old Wednesday bench, when Mags and Davy and I came out the front door. Three mothers sitting together on the next bench were talking to her as she gathered Hope from her buggy and began to unwind her blankets, to settle in. The moment we’d crossed the street and I let go of Maggie’s hand, she took off like a shot for Ally and Hope, shouting, “Hope!” I hurried after her with Davy, and arrived to find Maggie dancing around Ally, begging, “Can I hold her, please?” In her excitement, she’d practically careened into Ally.

Ally had just finished extracting Hope from her wrappings, and there was just the briefest pause as the other mothers registered Hope’s skin color before one of them said, “Isn’t she a cutie?” and another said, “She’s so tiny. How old is she?”

“She isn’t yours, is she?” the third, a dumpy brunette, asked.

“She’s my daughter,” Ally said. “Yes.”

“Can I hold her, please can I?” Mags repeated.

“She’s your daughter?” the dumpy brunette said to Ally.

“Her name is Hope,” Maggie informed the woman in no uncertain terms. “Her birthday is March seventeenth, and we gave her her first teddy bear, Anna Page and Julie and Jamie and me did.”

“Me, too,” Davy said.

“And Lee-Lee and Lacy, too,” Maggie said.

“We named him Mr. Pajamas,” Davy said.

The woman frowned at them.

“
Please
can I hold her?” Maggie begged.

Ally looked so nervous that I said, “Not yet, Maggie. Hope is still awfully little.”

“But I can hold Davy and he’s bigger,” Maggie said.

Ally patted the bench next to her and said of course Maggie could hold Hope, and Maggie hopped right up between Ally and the women on the other bench.

“You have to hold her really carefully, especially her head,” Ally said. “See how I’m holding her? With her head on the crook of my elbow?”

“That’s the way Mommy taught me to hold Davy,” Mags said, and Ally said that’s right, of course it was.

Jamie and Julie came running over at full speed as Maggie scooted right up next to Ally and Ally slid the baby over into Maggie’s lap, quickly looping her arm around Maggie’s waist to secure Hope herself even though the baby was now, as far as my daughter could tell, completely within her control. Maggie’s round face was so full of delight that it made me wonder what she would look like when she held her own daughter someday, my granddaughter. It made me a little sorry for Ally’s mother: despite Ally’s sister Ruth’s efforts to sway their parents, her mother had only hesitated a moment when Ally had called to tell them Hope was born, before she’d hung up on her.

“I get to hold her first,” Maggie crowed, “because I know how to hold babies.”

“I want a turn! I want a turn!” the twins insisted as Linda arrived with J.J.’s hand in her grasp.

“Easy, girls,” Linda said. “Hope is a baby, not a toy.”

The women on the bench watched this all, the first two smiling indulgently, but the dumpy one frowning. “Why did you adopt a colored baby?” she asked.

Ally stared at the woman for a moment, still with both hands on her daughter, then looked off to the empty spot where the mansion had been, where all that was left was a bare scrape of rocky earth run through with tractor-tire marks.

“She’s half Caucasian and half Indian,” Ally said. “And she isn’t adopted.”

“Couldn’t you get a white baby?” the woman said.

Linda turned and gave the woman her most withering look.

“Linda, don’t,” Ally said. And as Brett and Kath and their children, too, arrived at the bench, Ally said, “I’m taking Hope down the baby slide. Anyone want to come?”

The whole lot of us, without so much as a backward glance at the obnoxious woman on the bench, swarmed together onto the playground. I held Hope as Ally climbed the three little steps up the baby slide and sat at the top. I handed her daughter to her then, and we all cheered wildly together as Ally, with Hope firmly in her lap, slid down the little slide.