The Wednesday Sisters

by Meg Waite Clayton

  THE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY was an awful, drizzly day—Chicago weather, not California weather, though it wasn’t raining in Chicago, where the Cubs, having dropped to second in a loss to the Phillies, were trying to stanch their late-season slide. Maybe it was the rain, or maybe it was the Cubs’ slide or the Wednesday Sisters’ explosion and the days of silence that followed, or maybe it was the squabble I’d had with Danny that morning, I didn’t know, but the abandoned mansion across the park with its cracked windows and peeling paint, its slanting roofline and side porch, seemed to have fallen even further into disrepair. And the park, too, was empty, as deserted as the house. A few minutes after the time we usually gathered, Brett trolled by in her car—she must have taken Chip to work that day so she could have it. By the time I got to the door, though, she was around the corner. Linda came by, too, but she didn’t stop, either, and all I could think of was how awkward Danny and I had been after we’d argued that morning, how very hard it is to say you’re sorry even when you are, even to someone you love. Sitting there watching the rain fall on the empty park, I could not believe our friendship was really this fragile, that it could blow apart over a few ill-considered words. It was as ridiculous as my aunt Dotty and her brother, my uncle Jojo, who hadn’t spoken in more than ten years, not since Uncle Jojo had said something derogatory about Dotty’s affection for her cat—a nasty little animal, Jojo was right about that, but Dotty had never had children, the cat was all she had. It had been dead for years, though, and I doubted anyone else could recall what words had been slung, but I was sure Aunt Dotty remembered, and probably Uncle Jojo did, too. Memory is an unmerciful thing sometimes.

  “I’M SORRY” were Danny’s first words when he came through the door early that evening, a big bouquet of flowers in hand. I said I was the one who should be sorry, feeling selfish and self-centered and unredeemable. I’d called him arrogant and self-absorbed, so wrapped up in his work that he was forgetting his kids—his kids, I’d said, not me—when all he’d been doing was working his butt off to keep us all in new Keds.

  His company had introduced its first product that May, a sixty-four-bit random access memory, but it wasn’t making them much money, and their second technology, the multichip memories, kept popping off their ceramic bases. That left a lot of pressure on Danny’s silicon-gate MOS device. The whole company had gathered in the cafeteria for champagne in honor of the first one that actually worked. The yields were dreadful, though; very few of the things actually did work, even with Danny’s team slaving away past midnight, tinkering with the kind of water they used, changing the acid dips, and hanging a rubber chicken over an evaporator for luck—although how a rubber chicken was supposed to bring them luck I couldn’t imagine. Being completely logical and not the least superstitious myself, I prayed a lot and kept my fingers crossed and, when I found a penny lying heads up in the park one morning, I practically had it framed.

  Danny was beat to hell when he got home that night—he’d been at the office until two the night before, and left that morning without breakfast, with only my accusation that he hadn’t seen his children in a week. But we put the flowers in water and kissed and made up, and yes, we still felt a bit awkward with each other that way you do after your feelings have been hurt and you know his have been, too, but we put the children to bed and he poured us each a nightcap and we sat out on the front porch and began to let go of even that.

  It had stopped raining but it was chilly as we sat talking about the new friends Maggie was making in kindergarten and how she could already write her name. Then Danny stopped midsentence and just sat there for a moment, staring out across the street.

  “Someone’s in the mansion,” he said quietly. “Someone is wandering around with a flashlight or a candle or something, like the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

  Dickens. An engineer who reads Dickens. How could I have gotten so mad at him?

  “The night watchman, I think,” I said.

  “A watchman would turn on the lights, Frankie.”

  I shrugged. “Whoever he is, he’s a regular. I’ve seen the light several times.”

  “Let’s go look,” he said with that boyish grin I saw so little of lately. And when I hesitated he said, “Come on, Frankie. It’s not like it’s going to be a drug drop.”

  Though it might have been. Teenagers had been arrested for possession of drugs right near this park, I’d heard. But teenagers had drugs everywhere by then.

  “Wait! Maybe it’s a burglar,” he whispered dramatically, “a serial burglar carting off the silver, teaspoon by teaspoon.” We’d just be gone for a minute, he insisted. The kids would be fine.

  As we crossed the street and headed toward the mansion, Danny carrying the Cubs baseball bat I’d gotten at bat day when I was nine just to appease me, our shoes getting wet in the rain-soaked grass, it did seem almost as though a ghost was wandering the old place. The dim light in one window faded, another window lit a moment later, redder here where the room must be red, bluer there.

  “The little girl’s room,” I whispered. “The daughter’s room.”

  That’s the way I’d come to think of the room that was lit now, albeit dimly. I’d finally found the place open one Sunday on our way home from Mass, and I’d quickly changed clothes and returned to look, expecting something grand inside: a butler to greet me at the door and a woman in a silly white cap serving cucumber sandwiches and tea, though how I could have thought that from the dilapidated outside, I can’t now imagine. There had been a silver tea service and a dramatic candelabra with it, but the silver was tarnished nearly to black and was probably only silver plate anyway, because who would leave real silver in that falling-down house? The place had smelled musty, and there were cobwebs on the wooden balusters of the curving staircase, in the corners of the “little French room,” on the portrait that dominated the living room, the stern-faced old woman who’d built the house, her hair coiled in a severe bun. The fabrics on the furniture were rotting, too, and dust lay thick on the marble bust of the daughter, on the framed paintings—the daughter’s childhood art—and on the oversized family Bible, which was jammed with old photos and opened to a passage from Job.

  But the room lit now, the daughter’s room, had been . . . not exactly clean, but better cared for. The bedding was fresher, as if someone occasionally smoothed the spread and fluffed the pillows, ran a dust rag or a sleeve over the dresser, opened the window to let out the stale air. That’s why I thought of it as the little girl’s room, though there were other bedrooms with wild-rose wallpaper and four-poster beds and looking glasses, and no girl had ever lived there in any event, the old widow had built the house only after her daughter died.

  The room had a piano in it, an old upright that was nothing compared with the organ downstairs except that while the organ looked forlorn and forgotten, as if its notes hadn’t sounded in years, the piano looked somehow as if a young girl had just slipped off its wooden bench and run outside to play.

  That was why I thought of it as the girl’s room, I realized. Because of the piano.

  “Estella’s room,” Danny whispered.

  “You mean Eleanor?” That was the daughter’s name.

  “As in Estella and Pip,” he said, and I could see what he meant then: the old house wasn’t brick, and there were no iron bars over the windows, no walled courtyard, but it was dismal in the way I imagined Miss Havisham’s Satis House was. Satis House. Enough House. Whoever had this house, could want nothing else.

  As we crept up to the front of the house, the light faded from the girl’s room, our ghost moving to the back of the house, we thought. We waited and waited, my feet getting wetter and colder, my discomfort at leaving the children escalating. What if one of them woke and found us gone? Still the light didn’t appear again.

  Danny—leaving the bat with me—went around to the back to see where our ghost was. “The back of the house is dark, too,” he said when he came back.

  “The servants’ stai
rs,” I said. I’d forgotten about the worn, narrow, creaky-steep back stairs that ran down to the kitchen, behind the grand stairway in the front of the house. “They went down the servants’ stairs and out the back.”

  You’d have thought, from the look on Danny’s face, that he was Pip himself and old Estella had just told him she was to be Bentley Drummle’s wife.

  I WANTED TO CALL the Wednesday Sisters every day that week, to patch up this rift, to make it all right again. It would have been easy enough to do: telephone and apologize. Bring flowers like Danny had. Lie prostrate on their front porches and beat my ridiculous breast over the foolishness, the utter wrongness of my ideas about who was supposed to marry whom and, yes, who was better than whom. I did see that. I did see, in my thinking the same thought Kath had voiced even if I hadn’t voiced it myself—“But Ally is such a pretty girl”—that I was unforgivably prejudiced.

  That’s certainly what I would do now: I’d apologize. But I was younger then. I had entirely too much foolish pride to go with my foolish ideas. Enough that, when mixed with my insecurity, left me standing paralyzed, unable to get past the possibility that a repentant me would be rejected as surely as the unrepentant one and I’d be left without a scrap of dignity.

  Dignity. How is it that it’s most important to us when we’re least entitled to it?

  Linda drove by the park that Wednesday just as she had the week before. Brett drove by. I was sure Ally was looking out her window, as I was. But no one stopped. It was fifteen minutes after the time we usually gathered when Kath pushed her stroller into the park in the rain, Lacy protected by the stroller top but Kath herself without even a raincoat.

  She looked around at the empty park, sat down, and put her face in her hands.

  Lacy sat quietly watching her from under the hood of the stroller.

  I grabbed Davy and an umbrella and rushed out the door, met Ally hurrying from her house, Carrie only half in her raincoat. Then Linda was there and Brett was, too, and Kath was sobbing, saying, “Her name is Kathy.”

  If we were still mad at each other, we forgot it; the apologies—the self-recrimination and the I’m-such-a-jerk—would come later, along with the worries (Would our husbands mind if we invited Ally and Jim to dinner? Would we be able to treat Jim like a regular person? And what about Linda being Jewish? What did that mean?), and a newfound care for each other’s emotions that wouldn’t last forever, at least not with the same intensity, but would draw us closer.

  “My name,” Kath wailed. “My name.”

  She’d picked up the kitchen extension. Heard him call her Kathy. “Kathy, punkin,” he’d said, using the same endearment they whispered to their children.

  “If he leaves me to marry her—”

  “He’s not going to leave you, Kath,” Linda insisted, retreating from the possibility of “platonic friendship” or “business call” now, hoping only that “Lee won’t leave” would prove to be higher ground from which to fight.

  “If he leaves me and marries her,” Kath insisted, “she’ll have everything, even my name!”

  THINGS WENT FROM bad to worse for Kath that October, culminating in what even she now refers to as, like in Gatsby, “that incident with the car”—the hospital Halloween party disaster that occurred the night after the party Danny and I threw at our house. Our party had a come-as-a-literary-character theme, a mistake in retrospect, but the Wednesday Sisters all thought it was a terrific idea before it went so bad on us. It gave people both guidance and a lot of leeway. You could dress to the nines as, say, Anna Karenina or Mr. Darcy. You could don a Chinese pigtail and carry an opium pipe for a character out of Tai-Pan. You could put on a hat and tote a violin case for The Godfather, which was all over the bestseller lists that year. Or if you really hated to wear costumes, you could dress in street clothes and claim to be Updike’s Rabbit or one of his suburban-housewife flings. Danny and I did Agatha Christie: Danny, with the help of an extravagant mustache and his tuxedo, made a fairly respectable if somewhat thin and nonbalding Hercule Poirot; and I, with my glasses low on my nose and eyeliner to age my face, made a fine Jane Marple, if I do say so myself. Brett came as Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird—I swear, she nearly did look seven years old—and Chip came as Boo Radley, acting in character, too. Kath, who was the first to identify every one of us (she had an unbelievable talent for guessing who was who), came as Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby, in a wispy white flapper dress with sailor collar, a white cloche hat with a gauzy scarf, and a long, long string of pearls that were clearly real, no need to run them over your teeth. She’d joined Weight Watchers (you’d offer her a cookie and she’d say no, she’d already had her free hundred calories for the day, and she could catalogue everything she’d eaten for a day or a week as a number of breads, fruits, fats, and proteins), but I hadn’t realized how much weight she’d lost until she showed up in that flapper dress.

  Lee came not as Jay Gatsby, as you might have expected, but wearing jodhpurs and knee-high black leather riding boots, and carrying a polo stick: Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s rich, polo-playing, washed-up playboy husband. I said nothing about the odd irony of their characters. What was there to say? But it was like the costumes were a bad omen.

  The party was going swimmingly, maybe a dozen couples filling our living room and dining room and entry hall, Danny mixing drinks as everyone chatted about the costumes. Some of the fellows Danny worked with were already clinging together, slipping into shop talk, but Danny and I were working hard to introduce people to each other so that neighbors would mingle with Danny’s work cohorts and nobody would be hanging at the edges of the rooms. Music was playing on the record player—a Beatles song, “Come Together”—but not too loudly, so people could converse, and we’d launched the first game, an icebreaker called “Adam and Eve” in which each guest has the name of one character from a pair pinned to his back (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, say, or President and Mrs. Nixon), and everyone asks each other yes-or-no questions—Am I male? Dead? A movie star?—the object being to be the first to figure out who you are and to find your mate.

  The room was buzzing, lively, when the doorbell rang and I opened it to Ally and Jim—he in a long, embroidered white tunic and gathered white pants, she in a gauzy, old-fashioned dress with a sun hat and, incongruously, an umbrella opened over her head. She took one look at the crowded room and said in a bad British accent, “Not much sun this evening, is there, Doctor? Perhaps I shall fold my parasol?” and Jim answered, “I do think that is a fine idea, Miss Quested,” the lyrical Indian accent his own. Dr. Aziz from Forster’s A Passage to India, and his Englishwoman friend-turned-accuser, Adela Quested. Could the English and Indian ever be friends?

  I told Jim how happy I was to finally meet him, and I was so busy gathering the next two Adam and Eve labels and some safety pins and explaining the game to them that I didn’t realize the lull of conversation around the room, people turning and looking, staring, then remembering their manners and turning away, still stealing glances.

  Ally slipped her hand into Jim’s as Danny handed one of his co-workers a drink and headed toward us, excusing himself to get through the crowd, intent on defusing the situation although he had no idea how.

  Across the room, a neighbor Kath and Lee had been trying to make feel welcome whispered to them, “Is she with him?”

  Lee, without missing a beat, said, “That’s my li’l sis and her husband. Would y’all like to meet them?” The look on the fellow’s face, Kath said later, was so dried-apple darn funny she nearly spit out a whole mouthful of bourbon.

  The doorbell rang again, and Linda, dressed as Charlotte the Spider, complete with “Some Pig” written on her accompanying web, opened the door herself as Danny was still working his way toward us and I was pinning “Cleopatra” on Jim’s back. She stepped inside, looking pretty hot even with eight hairy black legs. Jeff, who followed her in, was the most ridiculous pillow-fat Wilbur you have ever seen.

  “Jim!” Linda said, ob
livious to the awkwardness they’d stumbled into. “I’m so glad you’re here. I’m Linda. And this is my husband, Jeff. But do call him Wilbur tonight.” Then to Ally, “Ally, you haven’t met Wilbur, either! Wilbur, this is Ally.”

  Jeff, as if he intuited the tension in the room, looked at them both and said, “Oink.”

  People all across the room laughed despite themselves.

  Jeff shook Jim’s hand and cuffed him on the shoulder, as if they’d been pals forever. “Linda tells me you were a first-year at Michigan Law the year my brother-in-law graduated,” he said, and you could practically hear the minds in the room reconsidering Jim: he was a Michigan Law grad, and someone like Jeff wanted to be his friend. Even in that pig costume, Jeff was the kind of guy people instinctively admired.

  “Oh,” Brett exclaimed. “I’m Marilyn Monroe! And Kath, I saw, you’re Joe DiMaggio! We win!”

  “We’re in love, honey!” Kath said.

  And again, everyone laughed, and after that we settled into a party that was blessedly lighthearted, blessedly fun.

  KATH AND LEE had planned to go to the hospital party the next night in the same Gatsby costumes they’d worn to our party, so Kath was already in her Daisy dress again when Lee called to say there was a problem with one of his patients and he couldn’t leave the hospital yet. He didn’t think he’d be able to leave for hours. “We’ll just skip the party. You don’t mind, do you, Kath?” he said, and she said no, of course not, they were his friends anyway. The truth, though, was that she’d been looking forward to showing off her newly Weight Watchered figure to the men with whom Lee worked, to having them admire her in front of Lee.

  Lee might have heard the disappointment in her voice, but he was distracted. He told her to hold on a minute, and he covered the phone as if he was talking to someone else. When he came on again, he said he had to run, he’d likely be late, she shouldn’t wait up for him. She told him she’d stay in costume for a while in case he freed up, but he said she shouldn’t bother, she should let the sitter go, he wouldn’t break free before midnight now.