The Wednesday Sisters (8 page)

I
T WAS TWO DAYS
before Christmas when Ally finally returned to the park, and it was not a Wednesday but a Monday. It was one of those funny mornings when the moon appears as a filmy white chink in the sky when you think it really ought to be somewhere else, glowing on the dark side of the earth. I was sitting alone on the bench where we’d all first gathered, watching Maggie and Davy run around with other children on the playground, when Ally sat down next to me.

She was rail thin, her thighs sharp under the patterned cotton of her skirt as she set her hands in her lap. Her hair was carefully brushed, falling in a single dark wavy sheet until it caught between her back and the park bench. And she was as pale as that moon.

She didn’t have Carrie with her. I didn’t ask where she was. We just sat together, watching the children play for a long moment before Ally looked up at the sky and asked, “Have you been watching?”

I had been. Watching the television coverage of
Apollo 8,
yes. And watching the silent windows of Ally’s house, the man I would glimpse occasionally opening the front door in the evening, the same door that never opened to a child going out to play. Sometimes I saw the curtains move, as if Ally was watching us the way I now imagined she’d watched us months ago, before she finally appeared in the park the day Bobby Kennedy was shot. But only the man ever came out.

“Yes,” I said.

Ally’s gaze remained fixed on the translucent circle of white in the sky.

On the playground, Davy stumbled, and I watched to see if he would pick himself up without me having to go to him, and I tried to imagine what it would be like to be here every Wednesday morning as Ally had been, watching all that love she could not have. And I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t imagine there was anything in this world I would not give up to have Maggie and Davy.

“Ally,” I said, wanting to say something but not sure what. Had she thought about adopting? Maybe that. But I didn’t know what to say, how to start that conversation, whether she would see my words as an intrusion or pity, or some failure of belief that she could, if she would just keep trying, eventually have a child. So I just looked up at the moon with her, at that circle that seemed so small and uncertain a thing from where we sat but was now, from the
Apollo 8
spaceship, looming larger than the earth itself.

“It must be weird to be up there, free of the earth’s gravity,” Ally said. “Circling round and round a whole other world.”

T
HAT JANUARY,
Brett told us she was pregnant—three months already!—and even though Ally wasn’t, she and Carrie were again joining us every Wednesday, and Ally was honestly happy for Brett. Linda continued to run by my house each morning. And Kath slipped into a marriage that some days I understood completely and other days I couldn’t understand at all. That autumn of tears and anguish rolled into a winter of silence, which settled into a spring of some weird kind of acceptance, or denial, or both. Lee wasn’t leaving her, she’d decided—or tried to convince herself she’d decided, though you could tell one part of her still lived with that fear. Not leaving her
yet,
we all worried, but we never said that, not to Kath anyway, because it seemed that what kept her getting out of her antique four-poster bed every morning was the idea that since Lee hadn’t left her yet, he wouldn’t. He always had burned hot with girls at first, and then he grew tired of them—that was the way it was before he’d married Kath. Which only left me wondering: Had Lee married her because she was different from those others he’d wearied of, or would she have been consigned to the Lee Montgomery heartbreak pile, too, if Anna Page had not been in the works, or if their daddies hadn’t been friends?

Still, you could see hope blooming in her as time went on and he continued to come home at night: this was just a passing dalliance, just sex maybe, or the excitement of a new conquest, and when the newness wore off, this other woman would lose her charm for Lee and he would come back. If Kath confronted him, it would just make it worse. And it didn’t really matter as long as he didn’t love the girl, as long as he still loved Kath, which she’d decided he did. He’d just forgotten a little—which she seemed to think was her own fault.

She worked like the devil to correct that. She dug up new dinner recipes and spent hours in the kitchen; she was forever on a diet; and she was, if possible, even tidier about her clothes. But the effect of all the effort was just awful. She was a little slimmer, yes—even with her new efforts to be a gourmet chef—but it was like watching her shrink into herself, watching her revert to some Southern version of the timid souls so many of us were in junior high school, when all the girls had discovered boys while so very few of the boys had discovered us back.

Writing-wise, we finished
Aspects of the Novel
that April, so that now anyone overhearing us in the park might think we actually knew what we were talking about. We’d say things like “Even when we talk to ourselves we’re never completely honest, so our characters shouldn’t be either.” (That was from Kath’s favorite chapter, the one on characters, which she called “people” because Forster did; he was forever using Jane Austen as an example in that chapter, and Kath knew the “people” in the Jane Austen novels about as well as we knew our own children.) We started typing our work, too, and making multiple carbon copies—just stick four carbons behind the original and bang as hard as possible on the keys—and we were taking each other’s writing home and reading it, which is a different experience from listening to it being read, believe me. We could reread lines and consider them more carefully, and jot down notes in the margins, which led to much more detailed critiques. And we could take each other’s notes home with us, so when we couldn’t quite remember what exactly Ally, say, had disliked about a particular line of dialogue, we could turn to her very words.

Our writing was getting better, too. Kath’s journal pages were filling, and Ally’s “Not Some Duck” was beginning to seem like it might someday actually quack. Linda was integrating Golda Meir’s becoming prime minister of Israel and the war protests at Stanford into her stories in a way that enriched rather than overwhelmed; her setting might be the law commune on Alma, where the Shell station is now, or her character might wear a women’s lib “brassy” on a chain around her neck (as Linda herself had started doing), but the stories were more and more about the emotions of her characters, rather than their politics.

Brett was at the head of the class in this, as in all things. Late that June, she swore that before the
Apollo 11
astronauts returned from the moon a few weeks later she would finish a draft of her novel—“her
Breakfast,
” we called it even though it was a mystery, even though it wasn’t anything like
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
except that in both books a young woman walked away from her past. By then, she was big-as-a-mansion pregnant, due at the end of July, and she was working so hard to finish you’d have thought she was afraid her free hand for writing would be taken with this second hand to hold, this new baby, and she’d never find time to write again. Never mind that she was quite sure the novel was nothing. It would be “such fun” to have a draft of a novel finished, she admitted, but she wouldn’t allow the possibility that it might be published someday. “Such fun.” That was all this was, she was quite sure of that.

We all thought she was just being modest.

Then it was July 16—a Wednesday—and Danny and I woke at three-thirty in the morning to follow Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins up the elevator and across the swing arm to their places on the rocket ship, and then Buzz Aldrin, too, and to watch the lines of scientists in white shirts sitting in front of monitors like gamblers at slot machines. I thought of Brett as I watched them—not trying to imagine her with a flag patch on her shoulder and a space helmet securely on her head anymore, but rather picturing her hunched over her typewriter, finishing her novel.

We met in the park that morning, everyone showing up early because we were so excited about going to the moon and we’d been up for hours anyway. Brett was the last to arrive, and we fell upon her like Noah must have fallen on dry land.

“Eight days,” she said. “Splashdown, I said. Not launch. I still have eight days.”

“Splashdown!” Ally said.

“You better get going, honey,” Kath said, “’cause your own water’ll be splashing right down your skinny li’l legs before that capsule splashes into the ocean or I’ll choke down my best Derby hat!”

The lunar landing was scheduled for Sunday, with the first lunar walk to be Monday morning. “The astronauts have eight hours of work after they land, before they can walk,” Brett said. “They land at three eastern time, and another eight hours is midnight—too late for the East Coast to see the walk on TV.”

“You think all the Yankees in Manhattan wouldn’t be able to keep their li’l Yankee eyes open on a Sunday night for this?” Kath said.

“They want the astronauts to get some rest first, too,” Brett said.

“But they’ll be sitting on the
moon,
honey!” Kath said. “Can you imagine shutting your eyes for even one minute with your piggy toes dangling out over the moon? You put your chapter break anywhere you want to on this one, no one is turning out the light without turning the page.”

We all watched the landing from our homes that Sunday: the cockpit alarm sounding constantly, and you could tell from the astronauts’ voices that they didn’t know what it was and they sure wanted to know. As that was sorted out (too many signals overloading the computer), they realized it was too rocky to land where they’d planned. They kept talking about how many seconds were left—“They’re running out of fuel,” Danny said—and finally they landed, just in time. When you read the reports of it, you imagine the first thing they said was, “Houston, Tranquility base here. The eagle has landed.” But it wasn’t actually the first thing they said. Just the most memorable. Which is something we remind ourselves when we’re critiquing: generally, dialogue shouldn’t be what people really say, but more like an edited version.

Though that rule—like all writing rules—was made to be broken. The
un
edited version of what Blanche, Kath’s family’s cook back in Louisville, had to say about those men being on the moon? “They ain’t on no moon.” And when asked where she thought they were? “I don’t know, but they ain’t on no moon.” Sometimes real life hands you something you simply can’t improve upon.

When we learned the lunar walk would be Sunday night after all—the NASA doctors had apparently come to the same conclusion Kath had—we all had the same thought:
Let’s watch together.
Ally already had plans to have dinner at her sister’s, but the rest of us pulled our half-cooked dinners out of our ovens, gathered our families, and hightailed it over to Linda’s. Impromptu potluck. We gathered in Linda’s living room, bouncing off the walls with excitement, and introduced our husbands, which was odder than I had imagined, meeting these three men I knew so well through their wives even though we’d never met. Lee was the most surprising to me; I’d pictured a much bigger man, maybe because he was Southern or because he was a doctor or because he was an adulterous bastard (goodness, did I say that?). I had never imagined he would be so charming, either—especially to Kath. Watching him bringing her tastes of all the desserts, and Anna Page sitting on his lap with the wildness seeping out of her almost the moment he wrapped his stocky arms around her, the sweetness filling in under the pretty straw hat that she kept on all evening, I saw why Kath thought he’d never leave his family.

Danny and Chip hit it off immediately, both in their dark, unfashionable but indestructible glasses, both so smart in a way that most of us couldn’t really grasp, but there they were finishing each other’s sentences like they’d shared a room growing up and did not once lay masking tape across the floor to define their separate, inviolate territories like my brothers had. Jeff was neither as smart as Danny and Chip nor as charming as Lee (though he was plenty smart and plenty charming, don’t get me wrong), but he won hands down in the looks category—think Warren Beatty without a hint of arrogance—and he had that same restlessness that Linda had, too, that made you think the things that happened in the world would happen to him because he would make it so. I liked them all. Even Lee. I wished Ally and Jim had been able to come. I wondered if they were really at Ally’s sister’s house, and if they were having as good a time there as we were here.

We sat on the floor, huddled around Linda’s new Zenith Giant-Screen color television—a twenty-three-inch screen set in an oak-veneer cabinet—watching the footage from Cape Canaveral for the longest time, beginning to despair of ever seeing a man step out of the landing module. When you remember it and you don’t think carefully about what you remember, you think Neil Armstrong just stepped down the ladder and onto the moon and said, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” but in reality it was just like “The Eagle has landed”: we listened to audio of them opening the door forever, feeling more tension than any thriller movie could ever deliver. We sat watching, and explaining things to the children: “No, honey, the man’s name isn’t Houston, but he’s in a city called Houston, Texas.” There was a picture finally, and the fellow in Houston said there was “a great deal of contrast” and it was upside down but they could make out a fair amount of detail. Even knowing it was upside down, though, I still couldn’t make out one speck of anything, just gray at the bottom and a band of sunlight cutting diagonally across the top, and something that had to be some part of the landing module but you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t know.

“I don’t see it, Daddy,” Anna Page said, and Maggie echoed her, and then all the children were starting to whine that they couldn’t see. We couldn’t hear either, then, and all we could do was shush them and watch and listen more closely. Linda grabbed a box of cookies finally and said as long as they were quiet they could eat as many as they wanted.

There was movement in one corner of the lighted slash, something blocking the sunlight right by the module. Brett leaned toward the television and touched the screen.

“See that?” she said to the children. “That’s the . . .” Her voice faltered, and for a moment there was only the clean white of her glove touching the shadow of the screen, her eyes pooling and blinking.

Watching her, I wondered about her gloves for the first time in months; they’d just become part of her to me, and yet there was something more than that, really. There was some sadness under those gloves that none of us—not even Linda—would ask her to revisit just to satisfy our curiosity. I suppose we all felt she’d share it with us in time.

“That’s the astronaut coming out onto the moon,” she managed, and Chip pulled her to him then, and linked his fingers with hers.

“It is?” Anna Page said, disappointment thick in her voice.

Lee touched a lock of hair under her hat. “The camera has to send the signal all the way from the moon, punkin,” he said. “It isn’t as good a picture as the Saturday-morning cartoons because it has to travel all that way.”

Linda’s Julie said, “And it’s real. Cartoons aren’t real.” And we were all silent then, absorbing that. This was real.

The camera angle changed somehow, which made me wonder where this camera was until Chip explained they’d just flipped the image. We were seeing it right side up now, and closer in. And Houston said, “Okay, Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now,” and then I could see that the thing cutting off the sunlight could maybe be Neil Armstrong’s legs making their way toward the moon. You couldn’t see much, though. You couldn’t see his body or his head. Just darkness at the top of the screen.