The Wednesday Sisters

by Meg Waite Clayton

  After he hung up, Kath kept telling herself that the person he was talking to was one of the nurses, or maybe another doctor. Medical staff. She repeated that rationalization for well over an hour as she sat there in her Daisy dress, having a sidecar while the sitter played crazy eights with the children. At nine, Kath tucked them into bed herself, asking the sitter not to go yet. Maybe she would just meet Lee for a drink, she said.

  When she called the hospital and asked for Lee, she had no idea what she’d say if he came to the phone. The receptionist came back on, though, to say she’d paged Dr. Montgomery twice and he hadn’t answered. “I think he went to the Halloween party,” the woman said. “The one the nurses organized. I saw him in funny clothes and boots, carrying a golf club or something a while ago.”

  How long a while? Maybe an hour, maybe two. It had been a busy night, she wasn’t sure.

  Even then, Kath made excuses for Lee. He’d finished earlier than he’d expected; he was exhausted but he thought he ought to make an appearance at the party and was stopping by for just a few minutes on the way home. Still, she told the sitter she wouldn’t be too long, and she got in her little blue convertible and headed for the University Club out on Foothill Expressway. Sure enough, Lee’s car was in the parking lot.

  She parked a good distance away, turned off her engine, and sat there, trying to figure out what to do. She watched people coming and going for ten minutes, fifteen, a half hour: a nurse in a sexy black cat costume, unaccompanied; a Superman; Albert Einstein and Minnie Mouse walking arm in arm. She was still trying to make up a plausible story to take inside with her when the door opened and Lee came out—alone. She thought she would cry with relief.

  He’d just stopped by for a few minutes. Probably he’d arrived just before she had.

  He got into the car and just sat there himself, staring through the windshield for the longest time. She was beginning to worry about him—maybe he’d lost a patient, that was always so tough on him. She had to get home and get rid of the sitter, she realized. She had to be changed and ready to comfort him when he got home.

  She started the engine and was pulling forward, through to the other parking lot entrance, when the door to the club opened again and a young woman stepped out into the porch light. She was dressed like someone from the 1920s, Kath thought. Not a flapper, but someone substantially less fashionable. She wore a housedress, and she carried some kind of stuffed animal in her arms. A dog? She was pretty, though.

  Kath stared at her, trying to figure out who she was supposed to be—Dorothy with her little dog, Toto?

  The woman walked down the steps, crossed the parking lot, slipped into Lee’s car.

  The engine fired and the car pulled out quickly, its lights still off. At the stop sign, Lee popped on the lights and leaned over to kiss the woman. Kath saw their silhouettes in the glow of the streetlight, Lee’s face turning the way he used to turn to her at the drive-in movies, when the lovers on the screen were getting romantic. Kath closed her eyes against the other woman, the other Kathy, remembering the baby-rough skin of Lee’s cheek just after he’d started to shave, the stiff feel of his varsity letter on his sweater pressing into her cashmere twinset, that first breathtaking moment of his hand sliding up to the side of her breast.

  Like any self-respecting jealous wife, Kath tailed them. Surreptitiously at first. But as she drove, as she watched the shadow of Lee caught in the streetlight, his head tipped back in laughter, as she remembered the phone call—she wouldn’t mind missing the party, would she?—and imagined him dancing with this slut at the party, with everyone knowing he was there and Kath was not, and all the time their children sleeping in their beds as if their lives could not be touched by this moment, this infidelity, she began to wonder why she cared if he saw her, to think he ought to be the one caring about being seen.

  She pressed harder on the accelerator, pulled closer behind him, the lights of her little blue car splashing onto the shiny chrome of his bumper, his black-and-yellow license plate. Tailgating, closer than was really safe, her daddy would have said. She ought to leave five car lengths between her and the car in front of her.

  She imagined her daddy finding Lee with this sleazy little white-trash gal. Would he grab his shotgun as he’d done when her mother had told him Kath was pregnant? Kath had gone not to her daddy but to her mother, in a tearful mass of streaked mascara that her mother seemed to find nearly as shameful as the pregnancy. Kath had been almost relieved when she heard about the shotgun. She thought it meant somehow that her father was not so ashamed of her as she’d feared. But he hadn’t spoken to her for days, not even at the wedding, a quiet affair in the chapel—not in the main church—on a rainy Thursday morning three days later, with only her parents and Lee’s attending. Not even her sisters, who were not to be taken out of school for something like this. No walking down the aisle. No flowers. No giving the bride away. A new dress only because her mother had secretly taken her out to buy it, making her promise not to say a word about it to her daddy. The dress not white, either, but the palest pink.

  The moment the ceremony was over, Kath’s father strode out of the chapel without a word, stopping only outside on the church steps, to light a cigarette under the roof overhang. He left Kath’s mother to hug Lee, to say how happy she was to count him as family. She hugged Kath, too, and pressed a small something into her daughter’s hand. Something special, Kath thought. A family heirloom. A single wedding gift.

  “Now you make this marriage work, Katherine Claire,” her mother whispered in her ear. “Don’t you shame us ever again.” And with downcast eyes, her mother thanked Lee’s parents, without saying a word about what her thanks were for.

  The gift had been the small change purse that held her mother’s pin money, enough for a crib and diapers and a stroller. Nothing sentimental. Nothing by which to remember the day.

  Now, Kath had shamed her parents again; she knew that even if they didn’t know it yet. Their daughter, who could not land a boy without sleeping with him before he married her, could not keep him even with her wedding ring.

  She pushed harder on the accelerator, less than a car length behind Lee now. She had to jam on the brakes when he slowed for a yellow light.

  He leaned over and kissed the slut.

  Kath honked the horn.

  Lee would have seen her then. He would have glanced up, thinking the light must have changed and, seeing it hadn’t, he would have glanced in his rearview mirror and seen her little blue car. Surely his heart would have stopped for a moment. Surely he’d have sworn under his breath or grasped for one desperate moment for some way—any way—to get out of this without being as red-handedly caught as he already was. But he didn’t get out of his car. Didn’t even acknowledge her.

  Kath could see the girl slouch lower in the seat, but Lee turned and said something, and the girl sat up straight again, and actually turned around to look at Kath.

  Lee just waited for the light to turn green, then drove on.

  Kath wailed on that horn—a high beep that was comic, pathetic—and took off after them again.

  Lee was driving faster, already entering the freeway by the time she caught up with him. She did, finally, though, and she honked and honked.

  They didn’t stop, hardly even slowed.

  In this goddamned flapper outfit! Kath thought. With my face all made up to look like the slut she is.

  Myrtle Wilson, Kath realized then. The woman was dressed as the Gatsby character Myrtle Wilson, the car mechanic’s wife with whom Daisy’s husband had his affair.

  It was that thought that sent her over the edge. That’s the way she described it. “Over the shameful edge.”

  She pressed the accelerator, pulled up behind Lee, right on his tailpipe. The chrome of her bumper reflected in his. He sped up, and she sped up. He sped faster. She did, too. She laid on the horn again. What did she want here? What did she expect? Did she think he would stop right here on the freeway and have it ou
t with her? Did she want him to?

  She stomped on the accelerator. Flat to the floor.

  The crunch of her bumper against his was oddly satisfying. Her pretty blue convertible ramming into the back of Lee’s sedan, going seventy miles an hour down the freeway.

  Lee just kept driving away, even faster.

  She sped up. Rammed him again. Harder this time. Her bumper rode up over his and hung there for a moment, wrenching his loose as the cars again split apart.

  You should have seen the front of her car.

  Still he didn’t stop. Still she chased him, his bumper throwing sparks as it dragged behind him on the pavement, her hood dented upward into her view. When she told us about it, it wasn’t any leap at all to imagine: the hard set of the sturdy jaw on this almost demented, newly skinny young Southern girl in a flapper costume as she raced down the highway, bashing into the car in front of her, Tom Buchanan and the cheap woman with the goddamned stuffed dog.

  Well, you can see why Lee never did stop that night. Imagine that playing out in the papers: stanford doctor in gatsby love triangle run over by jealous flapper wife. With a photograph. No paper would have been able to resist the photograph.

  He was nice enough, at least, to send a station attendant back for Kath after her car died in midpursuit—not long after that second crunch of metal. It took the attendant a while to figure out that the car had simply run out of gas. And by the time he’d poured a jerry can full into her tank and sent her on her way, Lee was long gone. To the girl’s apartment, Kath was sure, though she had no idea where that was.

  She waited all night for him to come home. Then washed the flapper makeup from her face and changed into day clothes and started pouring Cheerios into bowls so the children would have something that looked like a mother and a home and breakfast when they awoke.

  WE HELD OUR BREATHS that next week, waiting for the moment Kath would tell us she was leaving Lee. A long silence fell in after she spilled the story of the great car bashing, though, and after a few weeks of not talking at all, she started acting as if the whole episode had never occurred. We discussed it constantly when Kath wasn’t there. Should we bring up the subject? “If she didn’t know Lee was having an affair, we’d have to say something,” Linda said. “But she knows.” “She should leave him,” Brett insisted. “But she isn’t,” I said. “She won’t. It’s her choice and she knows what she’s choosing. Who are we to tell her she’s wrong?” “I don’t like it, either,” Linda said. “But you can see the whole rock-and-hard-spot thing. If she leaves him, she’s a divorced mother of three young children, with . . . well, with nothing.” “A divorcée.” Ally said it the way we were all thinking it, as though it were a terminal disease. “If she stays,” I said, “she’s a married mother of three with a nice house and a handsome husband—” “Not so handsome,” Brett interrupted.

  “—and if he’s a philanderer, well, a lot of women have lived with worse.”

  Maybe this was just a thing Lee needed to get out of his system. Maybe it wouldn’t last. Lord knew, there were enough wives in the Bay Area who looked the other way while their husbands ran around with their mistresses but never did leave their wives.

  “Not that many people will know,” Ally said.

  “Everyone at the hospital,” Brett said.

  “They’re pretty discreet,” Linda said.

  “But she came to the party as Myrtle Wilson,” Brett said. “The mistress.”

  “I didn’t know that was who she was,” Linda said. “Who would ever guess Myrtle Wilson?”

  “Kath did.”

  Linda shrugged. “Maybe Kath just saw Myrtle Wilson because that’s who she was looking for. Maybe she was wrong.”

  “And what?” Brett said. “This girl is a nice girl, just like us only better, gutsier, because she went to medical school?”

  “Lee doesn’t wear a wedding ring,” I said.

  “She must know he’s married by now,” Brett said.

  “But maybe not when she fell in love with him,” Ally said.

  “Time out!” Linda interrupted. “Which Kath is our friend?”

  We all fell quiet.

  “Maybe she was supposed to be Myrtle,” Linda said. “Maybe it was some kind of bad-girl joke. I could see that. I could see Lee being attracted to a bad girl, someone he’s not quite sure he can control. But even if she was, no one knew.”

  “People will know,” Brett said. “People will talk behind their backs.” And the rapid blinking of her eyes—very un-Brett—left me imaging her as a young woman, beginning to date her professor or her lab teacher’s assistant or whatever Chip had been, someone she knew she ought not to date because he would be grading her. She’d have been sure she was being discreet, that she would have time to figure out if she even really liked him before the whole world knew. Then she’d have realized—words overheard, maybe, or the sudden stop of hushed conversation—that everyone knew. That everyone talked.

  “People will talk,” I agreed. Even when there was nothing wrong with people seeing each other, people talked. Danny and I had seen that.

  Ally cleared her throat. “Like we are?”

  “But we’re trying to help,” Brett said.

  “Her mother won’t know,” I said. “Her father and her sisters. All her friends back in Kentucky.”

  Everyone nodded, thinking about that, thinking how awful it would be to have your parents know that your husband had a girl on the side.

  OUR FIRST REACTION to Jim being Indian was somehow well behind us after that Halloween party, maybe as a result of the profuse apologies we’d all offered after our blowup, or because Ally was right about Jim: you couldn’t know him and not love him.

  “Strangers—people who don’t know him and never will—there isn’t anything you can do about them,” she told us that first Wednesday in November. “You just have to shrug them off as best you can. The problem for us is our families. Jim’s parents—don’t tell him I said this, but sometimes I think maybe it’s a blessing that phone calls to India are so expensive. They call Jim or Jim calls them once every three months, and they talk for three minutes, it’s this limit they’ve set, as if four minutes would be an unforgivable extravagance. And of course he talks to them, I don’t, I’ve only spoken to his mother once, right after we were married, just long enough to hear the disappointment in her voice. I’ve never even heard his father’s voice. But Jim reads me their letters. They want to know when Jim is going to come home. They remind him it’s his job as eldest son to care for them when they’re old.

  “It’s not so much that they care that I’m not Indian. It’s more that they can’t get over the fact that Jim chose a wife without them. That’s something his whole family was supposed to be involved in. Not just his parents but his grandparents and his aunts and uncles, they were all supposed to have a say in choosing a bride for him. Did we even know if our horoscopes matched? That’s what they wanted to know. Which, no, we didn’t. They were horrified. And his mom, you can tell she worries that I won’t know how to wrap a sari and I’ll be an embarrassment with visitors when we move to India—”

  “You’re moving to India?” Brett and I said in unison.

  “Of course not. But try convincing them of that. Try convincing them of anything, like even that Jim was already eating meat and drinking alcohol long before I met him. His mother—it’s pretty funny, really. Every time she writes, she asks all about our trees. Have we planted a coconut tree yet? Jim had her send his favorite recipes and he translated them into English, but I didn’t even know what half the ingredients were, and when I asked for them at the grocery they looked at me like I was loony. But half the recipes call for coconut.

  “And do we live near a banyan tree, she wants to know. It’s a tree that’s sacred in India, Jim says, that represents eternal life because its branches never stop expanding. I keep threatening to plant one even though they grow four times as big as your average Palo Alto yard because, listen to this: it’s
a wish-fulfilling tree. I’m supposed to—I think this is the way it works—I’m supposed to gather my girlfriends and tie a thread around its bark when the moon is full, and that will keep Jim safe or make me pregnant or both, something like that!”

  “Have her send us a branch, honey,” Kath said. “It’d be mighty fun to dance a midnight Indian jig!”

  “Heavens, no!” Ally said, mock horror on her face. “You can’t cut so much as a leaf from a banyan tree. It’s sacred!” Which had us all laughing that day, though later I wondered why it was any funnier than what went on in my church, people kneeling and crossing themselves in front of manmade altars that women weren’t even supposed to stand behind. I wanted to ask Ally what she and Jim did religion-wise; I couldn’t see back then how a marriage of two different faiths—even two Christian faiths—could work. Though it turns out Jim is Hindu and Ally is Christian and that just doesn’t bother them. They feel they’re fundamentally the same even if they do pray to different gods.

  “I wouldn’t laugh if Jim didn’t laugh first,” Ally said that morning. “But he’s sure the minute we have a grandson for them, his parents will be fine. Which is sort of what I hope about my parents, that a grandson will bring them around. My sister says that’s all my father talks about with her: When is she going to give him a grandson?”

  We all agreed that surely a grandchild would bring everyone around, though Linda, at least, wasn’t all that sure. She told us later, after Ally left to take Carrie home, that when her brother’s old girlfriend had married a black man, her parents sat shiva for her just as if she had died.

  WE WEREN’T GOING to join the peace march in San Francisco that November, mind you, we were just going to watch, to see what it was all about. As I told Danny, “How can I be a writer if I don’t experience the world?”