And still everything we wrote was “nice,” even when I asked specifically for more critical feedback. Which was how I ended up bringing a few pages one Wednesday that I claimed were the start of a novel—pages I knew were, without a doubt, terrible. Maybe they’d be mad at me for this deception, but the point needed to be made.
When the appalled silence after I’d read the thing grew unbearable, Kath said, “Mighty nice,” and Linda asked what the novel would be about.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “It’s absolute drivel. I wrote it to be absolute drivel. I wrote it as dreadfully as I could, and I knew you would still say it was just nifty, and here’s the thing: we won’t ever get anywhere if we aren’t honest with each other.”
Kath ran a finger over her braid headband. “Are we hankering to get any particular somewhere?”
Linda leaned over the splintered table, frowning down at the pages she’d written that week. “I am,” she admitted. “I’d like to publish something someday. Wouldn’t you, Kath?”
“Publish?” Brett said so quietly that for a moment I thought it was Ally’s voice. It made me miss Ally suddenly, made me wonder if she was still writing about her duck who was not “Some Duck,” and what she was doing on Wednesday mornings now, and if she’d ever come back to the park.
“I don’t think I could ever publish anything. I don’t think I even want to,” Brett said. She tucked her hair behind her ear—once, twice, and again; it was too short to stay. “But I would like to improve.”
“Publish,” I said, feeling the awkward newness of the word on my lips.
It doesn’t seem like much now, I know, to admit ambition to your closest friends. I guess you’ll have to take my word for it: it was. It makes me a little sad when I look back on it, to think how very many women didn’t have Wednesday Sisters, to wonder who they might have become if they had.
“Cards on the table,” Linda said. “We’re honest with each other from now on.”
“‘When in doubt, tell the truth,’” Brett said. “Mark Twain.”
ONE TUESDAY NIGHT that October, I sat on the front porch waiting for Danny and reading Middlemarch—despite Linda’s insistence that I should read it. I loved the book, maybe because, like Dorothea with Casaubon, part of what I loved about Danny was the prospect of playing a role in what he would accomplish. Fortunately, Danny was no Casaubon. He wasn’t much older than me, and he wasn’t the least bit pompous. Though he, like Casaubon, spent more and more time on his work, and I, like Dorothea, felt less included than I’d imagined.
Again and again, I looked up from the page, though, toward Ally’s house, wondering if Brett was right that Ally just needed time to herself, that she would return to us when she was ready. I was thinking about that—thinking that if I were Ally I’d come to a point where I did want my friends back and I’d worry that they weren’t my friends anymore, and I was thinking of Carrie, too, sure she must miss the park—when I saw the dark-skinned man enter Ally’s house again. The door closed behind him, and the light came on in the front hall, then went off again just as the window at the upstairs landing lit up.
It seemed so improbable that I hadn’t even raised the possibility with Linda and Kath and Brett, for fear of sounding absurd. It made me uncomfortable, honestly, to think of my friend being married to a black man, and uncomfortable to feel uncomfortable. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be prejudiced; Martin Luther King had opened our eyes to that. But I’d grown up seeing people of other races as different: They lived in different neighborhoods and they weren’t the same things we were—they weren’t our doctors or our teachers, congressmen or priests or astronauts—or we didn’t see them being what we were. Which was wrong, of course. But while it was easy to see that blacks should go to the same good schools as whites and shouldn’t have to give up their seats on the bus, it was a lot harder somehow to imagine a black man married to one of your good friends. Let’s just say if I’d come home one day and told my parents I was marrying a black man, my mom would have fainted and my dad would have fallen over dead of a heart attack.
I’d like to think in retrospect that I had some kind of reasonable concerns, like “What about the children, would they be ostracized?” I wouldn’t even have married outside the Catholic Church; it would be so hard for the kids, I’d thought, having parents of different faiths. But I suppose the truth is that I was worried about what would happen if I ever, say, invited my friends and their husbands for dinner. A concern that sounds ridiculous now, of course.
It wasn’t Danny I was worried about; he’s the least prejudiced man in the world. But people are funny. Kath’s Lee, for example—Madison Leland Montgomery IV. Would he sit down to dinner with a black man? I’d never met Lee, but I had him pegged as a Southern bigot—another prejudice on my part, yes. It was that “IV” after his name, I think, and the fact that he was from the South. I figured the original Lee Montgomery—Madison Leland Montgomery I—probably owned black men, and it’s a long way to go from owning people as property to calling them friends.
The sad truth: I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t have done more for Ally that fall if I’d been sure her husband was white. But maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe it’s just that that was our first crisis, really, and we didn’t yet know what to do to help each other in this any more than we did in our writing. We didn’t know each other well enough yet to risk mucking around in any real way in each other’s lives.
THE NEXT MORNING when I went out to get the paper, Linda blew right by me in pedal pushers and sneakers as if she was training for the Olympics herself, the sweat running down her neck as that blond braid bounced out of her Stanford cap. She showed up the next morning and the next and the next, and by the second Olympic Wednesday she’d changed her pedal pushers for little shorts like the women running in the Olympics wore, and she’d traded her Keds for men’s athletic shoes, or boys’. I wondered if she’d had the gall to try on the shoes right there in the men’s department at Macy’s, but—this is Linda we’re talking about—I suppose she didn’t think it at all outrageous, or enjoyed it all the more knowing it was. Which was why it surprised me that she didn’t say anything about her running when we met at the park that morning—never mind the evidence she wore, the pale white sweat ring around the rim of her cap.
Kath was uncharacteristically disheveled that day; she hadn’t worn her headband braid and her mascara was smudged, which would have been par for the course for me, but Kath was always so tidy. She’d been pretty quiet while Linda went on and on about the Olympics again, too, but when Brett asked if she was okay, she said she was fine, just fine.
“It’s just . . . these girl athletes, they’re just . . .” The word she was looking for was not flattering, you could tell by the tone of her voice. “I hate women athletes! Field hockey and gymnastics and basketball. Like Pookie Benton.”
“Pookie Benton?” Linda said.
Kath waved her off, saying, “Don’t mind me. I put my boots on backward this morning is all.”
Ten o’clock came and Arselia arrived and we turned to writing. “Remember: brutal honesty,” Linda said, and Brett said, “Maybe not brutal, Linda.” And we all agreed: “Honesty.”
I’d asked for it, of course, but what I read that morning was not something I’d intentionally written as drivel. These were the real first pages of a serious novel—my way of letting my friends into my life, I see in retrospect. My own life dressed up in fictional garb. But Linda didn’t know that, and she was hell-bent on starting out right this time, so she began honestly.
“I’m willing to buy that this family might exist,” she said, “though—”
“Though if your Dritha really can’t afford college,” Brett interrupted, “she ought to—”
“Do something about it,” Linda said. “Her father says an education ruins her for a proper life, and she says, ‘Oh, okay’?”
I sat there, looking past them to the new-mown grass and the red-orange-gold trees and the paint-stripped ba
lustrade over the mansion porch, wanting to say, But that was the way it was. Maybe that wasn’t the way it was in swanky East Coast families like Brett’s or Linda’s, or rich Southern ones like Kath’s, but it was the way it was in blue-collar Midwestern families.
“Maybe she could have gotten a scholarship?” Brett offered.
“But . . .” I looked away to the playground, to Mags, who would go to college if I had to scrub toilets to pay her tuition. “But if she goes to college on a scholarship, she won’t make any money, whereas if she takes a job at . . .” At the Northwestern engineering school. “If she takes a job and keeps living at home, that’s one whole paycheck that can go to paying for her brother’s college.” One of four brothers in my case, three of whom were younger but all of whom stood ahead of me in the going-to-college line.
I imagined writing the real scene: Sister Josephine calling me into her office one afternoon in the fall of my senior year, all the black-and-white fabric drape of her, the wimple tight across her forehead, the heavy cross at her chest, Christ nailed there in carved wooden detail, and the incongruous sea blue of her eyes, not the peaceful sea you expected on a nun but something more turbulent, a stormy sea that somehow retained its color, that didn’t turn white-capped or gray. She sat at her desk in front of a stack of forms, and she asked me to sit in the chair across from her. Then she did something unprecedented: she picked up the forms and came from behind the desk and sat in the empty visitor chair, pulling it close to me. She took my hand and opened it, and she stared at my palm for a moment as if my future might really be found in the lines there—and why not, since God had created my hand and my future both? “God gives us gifts and helps us see fit how to use them,” she said, and she set the forms in my hands.
I looked down at the bold black letters: The University of Illinois. It was an application, and below it, forms for financial aid. Underneath them, other college forms, all state schools. She understood my family would never be able to afford a private school for me, not with so many boys to educate.
When I went through the forms at home that evening, I found at the bottom a copy of a recommendation letter for the University of Illinois from Sister Josephine: carbon-blue letters that said I was bright, resourceful, eager to learn, that claimed I would be an asset to any college, that said I was one of the most beautiful writers she’d ever had the pleasure to teach. Allowing me to go to my father with the idea that maybe God wanted me to go to college, Sister Josephine had said she thought He meant me to go.
My mom sat quietly at the kitchen table that night, her eyes watering as she read Sister Josephine’s recommendation. When my father came home, he sat with us and she passed it to him. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette, scanning the words.
My mother stood and found an ashtray, brown, plastic, and round. “I could find a position to help with the tuition, Jack,” she said as she set the ashtray in front of him, her voice its very gentlest.
I started to explain what Sister Josephine had told me, that I could get a scholarship, that if I applied to state schools I might get a full ride somewhere. But my father wasn’t listening, my father was smashing out the short stub of his cigarette, extracting another from the pack in his shirt pocket, focusing intently on the match. Not so much angry as ashamed, I see in retrospect—though at the time it seemed only angry.
“You want your sons coming home from school to an empty house?” he said to my mother.
Mom smiled apologetically, and I knew she would say something, and I wanted to tell her No, don’t, not for my sake. But she was already speaking, saying, “Of course not, Jack. I didn’t mean that. I’d work mornings. Mornings and early afternoons. I saw a help wanted sign at the market—”
“The market! No wife of mine—” He took a deep drag on his cigarette, the tip glowing red. “You don’t need to be waiting on others for money, Margaret, not while I’m still breathing and not when I’m gone, either, for Christ’s sake.” He looked down at the linoleum tabletop, tapped his ashes into the ashtray. “I can provide for my family myself.”
From my mother’s downcast eyes, I knew the discussion was over, I knew she was bending to his will, and I hated that for her—that she was having to bend to him because of me. And I hated that in her, too—that she would just bend so easily to his will—and hated what it would mean for me. I couldn’t see my father the way she saw him: the mechanic who worked for barely decent pay and little dignity, who buried his ego at work every day so as not to offend anyone; the man who pinned his ambitions on his sons, who wasn’t quite sure what to make of the fact that it was his daughter who brought home the straight-A report cards—his daughter who was somehow his wife’s child in the same way his sons were his.
“But Sister Josephine—” I protested.
“Those nuns ought to have more sense than to meddle in people’s lives.” He stood and smashed the new cigarette into the ashtray. “If God wanted women to have a say in anything, He’d have made them priests,” he said. “Now, that’s enough.”
And when I’d gone back to Sister Josephine, the old nun had sighed and started talking about “honoring thy Father,” which I was pretty sure meant God, not my dad. “God will have a different path for you, then, child,” she said. “He doesn’t make children like you without some purpose.” Which I can see now she meant as encouragement, but at the time I was left feeling an obligation to do something noble to honor whatever these gifts were that God had given me, with no idea what in the world it might be that I could do, much less how to start.
In the park with Linda and Brett and Kath that morning, I just sat there watching Maggie for a long moment, imagining her in a cap and gown approaching my old desk at the university, résumés in hand.
“What do you think, Kath?” Linda said. “You haven’t said anything yet.”
Kath stared at Linda for a moment, as if trying to remember where she was. “Maybe Dritha’s spine is just a little catawampus, Frankie?” she said finally. “You might could pull her up a touch straighter, give her just a pinch more backbone?”
“It could be something as simple as . . . she’s dishwater blond, like you are, right?” Brett said. “But you’re not just dishwater blond, you have this wildness to your hair that can’t be tamed. Give her that, too. Make her one of those ‘round characters’ Forster likes to talk about, ‘capable of surprising in a convincing way.’”
“Exactly,” Linda agreed. “If your Dritha is really sacrificing her dreams for the sake of her brothers, we need to see her sticking a black-gloved fist in the air and—”
“That wasn’t sacrifice, that was radical trash!” I said. A little too loudly, I’m afraid. Mothers around the park turned to stare. Funny how we do that, how when we’re losing control of our emotions about one thing, we pop off over something else.
When I look at that Olympics photograph now—of Tommie Smith and John Carlos in that black-power salute—it looks so innocuous, but I sure didn’t see it that way then. Those two athletes standing stocking-footed on the Olympic awards podium, thrusting black-gloved fists in the air and bowing their heads as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played in their honor—it scared the hell out of me, as it did much of the world. That’s what I’d felt as I’d watched them, before my emotions got all tangled up with my writing: scared as hell. You’d have thought from the world’s reaction that those two boys had brought machine guns up to that podium. Those two young men, giving up their own moment of triumph to draw attention to the plight of their race. And do you know what Tommie Smith was doing while he was standing on that gold medal podium? He was praying to God.
We still talk about that moment sometimes, and I think I understand better now than I did then. I can understand being so frustrated with the lot you’re dealt that you turn in a direction you never imagined, you explode. That’s what happened to me that day in a small way, what would happen to Ally with Linda and the Tylandril three years later, and to Linda the week we didn’t call. It’s what
happened to Kath in a bigger way the next Halloween, and I sure understood it in her, I might have done exactly what she ended up doing—and I might have ended up killing Lee since my temper is, on the whole, more capricious. Sometimes you have to stand up for your own dignity. And those boys didn’t do anything violent themselves that I ever heard of. They just stood up and said what is wrong is wrong and, as Linda said even then, they sacrificed their futures in the bargain. They were banned from Olympic competition for life. So I guess one part of me likes to think now that if those boys had been my sons, I would have been awfully proud.
Well, we didn’t resolve anything about that black-power salute that Wednesday, or about the start of my novel, either. And we were no “nicer” with Linda’s piece, a complete short story. She hardly blinked her blond lashes at the criticism, though. She just listened and took a million notes without interrupting or saying a word. Then she started asking us questions. I watched her, thinking that if any of us succeeded, it would be Linda.
The Wednesday Sisters Page 6
