The Wednesday Sisters

by Meg Waite Clayton

  This was the first Derby either of them had missed seeing live since they were toddlers. Lee’s family had a box at the track, as did Kath’s. Back home, they’d start the party by midmorning. “With mimosas garnished with strawberries,” Kath said.

  She pulled a huge jar from the refrigerator—simple syrup: equal parts sugar and water boiled together, then stuck into the refrigerator with six or eight sprigs of mint. She filled the bourbon pitcher with the syrup and tossed in some fresh mint, and Lee did the honors of pouring, smoothly wresting the job of host from Kath’s hands after she’d done all the work. She’d even put crushed ice in sterling silver drinking cups, each adorned with a row of roses at the bottom, a monogram, and an upside-down horseshoe with a year engraved inside.

  My cup—1967—was engraved with Kath’s married initials, but the cup Danny had—1950—was carved with her pre-marriage monogram, a Derby cup from long before she’d have been old enough to drink.

  “Doesn’t the horseshoe opening down let the luck run out?” I asked.

  “The horseshoe has always pointed down on the Derby trophy,” Lee said. “And no one gets a Derby trophy without a little luck.” He predicted even then, though, that Churchill Downs would eventually buckle to convention and flip the Derby horseshoe ends up, the only change ever made to the trophy.

  The doorbell rang and soon all ten of us were in the kitchen, comparing the five ladies’ hats. Ally wore a red one with extravagant blue flowers, Brett a stovepipe with a pink velvet band and black feathers, much prettier than it sounds. Linda came in a wide-brimmed to-do with a sheer flowered scarf wrapped around it and tied in a bow under her neck; and mine was a simple straw hat with a band of tiny daisies wrapped around a flat crown. It was Kath—more practiced in the art than the rest of us—who showed us what a Derby hat should be: a frothy concoction of sheer silk and linen with a soft navy brim, an ivory crown, and navy netting—“veiling,” she called it—draped high over the top, all finished with three huge red roses. Real roses that smelled wonderful.

  “It is the Run for the Roses, don’t you forget it,” she said.

  Her pearl necklace was real, too—a different strand than she’d worn at Halloween, with a beautiful clasp that matched her earrings. “My mama always says if you aren’t the prettiest girl at the party,” she said, “then you just pretend you are.”

  Lee handed her the last silver julep cup, grinning. “She also says, ‘You’ve got to go lightly with the vices.’”

  Kath took a big slug of her drink. “With Mama, you’ve got to pick and choose which advice to listen to.”

  Kath hung back as Lee shepherded everyone out to the patio, and I stayed with her.

  “This hat fell out of the ugly tree, didn’t it?” she whispered. “I should’ve stuck with the one I wear every year, I know I should have.” She grabbed a tissue and blotted her eyes before her mascara could run. “I’m sorry, it’s just that she called this morning, that awful slut called. The phone rang and Lee said he’d call back and he shut himself up in the bedroom and I couldn’t even get dressed because he’d—”

  Lee was at the kitchen door, then, reminding Kath to bring the pitcher.

  I whispered that she looked lovely in her hat, and followed her out to the patio, where brunch was set out on a long, smoothly polished wood table: ham with red-eye gravy, made with Kentucky bourbon and coffee, shrimp-and-crabmeat-stuffed tomatoes, piles of eggs and biscuits, casseroles, and coffee cake and lemon bars both garnished with powdered sugar and mint. “There’s a sort of theme that runs through a proper Derby brunch,” Kath said. “Bourbon and mint.” Even the pie, a “Horse-Racing Pie” that looked like a walnut-and-chocolate version of pecan pie, had bourbon in it. “Which maybe I shouldn’t tell y’all,” she said, “because it’s my great-grandmama’s secret recipe—every family in Louisville has its own secret recipe, and you’re banished from the clan if you spill a word of it. Except it wouldn’t be Horse-Racing Pie without bourbon, now, would it? So I’m not really giving out any secrets.”

  “And that?” I asked, indicating a creamy-looking dish in the middle.

  “That? That’s just cheese grits, honey. You can’t tell me you don’t know cheese grits.”

  “Kath’s cheese grits will make you wanna hit your mama,” Lee said.

  “Don’t go bragging on me,” Kath said. “It’s just the recipe on the box.”

  “It ain’t bragging if you can do it, Kath,” Lee said.

  While we ate—far too much—Lee and Kath talked about Churchill Downs and its twin hexagonal spires. About the new fellow, Lynn Stone, who’d taken over when Wathen Knebelkamp retired. About Diane Crump, who would ride that day, the first woman jockey ever to compete in the Derby.

  “You know your ol’ buddy Kath here is a big gambler, don’t you?” Lee said. “Plunked down the entire one thousand dollars her daddy gave her for her eighteenth birthday on a horse named Iron Liege. This li’l girl here walked away with almost ten thousand dollars! And the next year, she plunked half of those winnings down again on Tim Tam and walked away with another fifteen grand.”

  I fingered the five-dollar bill in my pocket. A thousand dollars? That was Danny’s take-home pay for an entire month.

  “You could do worse than to follow her bets. She hasn’t won every year I’ve known her, but she’s never once failed at least to show,” Lee said, this so clearly a side of Kath he adored that I wondered if maybe he did still love her after all. Maybe she wasn’t being foolish to wait around for his affair to blow over, I thought, imagining a smitten young Lee courting a teenaged Kath, this pretty girl from a proper family who’d gone wild, who drank bourbon and bet outrageously and slept with him when she’d barely finished her debutante season. And I remembered what Linda had said about that whole Myrtle Wilson thing, that maybe Lee liked girls he wasn’t sure he could control.

  Lee kept bringing the mint julep pitcher around, forever topping off our drinks, and throwing them back himself. The only one not drinking much was Jeff. “He’s on call,” Linda whispered to me, “but Lee doesn’t believe a drink or two impairs a real man’s ability to do anything. Jeff’s decided it’s easier just to play along.”

  Despite how much Lee was drinking, though, when the phone rang an hour into the party he was quick to answer it. Kath’s eyes started blinking and blinking, trying to save that mascara, but the call wasn’t even for Lee, it was the hospital, for Jeff.

  Kath sat frowning at Jeff through the glass doors as if she was annoyed that he was on call, that he hadn’t arranged to swap with someone. But he rejoined us a minute later, saying it had just been a nurse with a question about a new patient’s medication.

  Jim, sitting between Jeff and me, quietly asked Jeff if he knew anything about a medicine called Tylandril. “I read something about it recently,” he said. “Is it safe?”

  Jeff said it was a synthetic estrogen, that as far as he knew, it was safe. “The issue is whether it actually does anything to prevent miscarriages,” he said.

  Jim shot a startled glance down the long table at Ally, engrossed in conversation with Lee at the other end. She was pregnant again, and Jim hadn’t known—that was all over his face. He must have found the medicine and been reluctant to ask her directly what it was. I wondered if she kept the news of her pregnancy from him out of fear—the more she miscarried, the more she must have worried that Jim would leave her rather than remain childless himself—or if she kept it from him out of love. I wondered if she could bear to hear the heartbreak in his voice again as he sang his Indian lullabies to her empty womb.

  “All the studies show that estrogen doesn’t prevent miscarriages,” Jeff said.

  “I see,” Jim said, and the way he looked at Ally now, it was hard to imagine she could think he would ever leave her.

  Linda would learn more about it from Jeff that night: that studies had consistently shown since the 1950s that synthetic estrogen didn’t help women who chronically miscarried; that every major obstet
rics textbook but one was very clear that this “wonder drug” did nothing at all. He thought someone should tell Ally that—that she was wasting her money. But it seemed to Linda that Ally got so much comfort from believing the drug might help, and what harm could it do?

  It was getting on toward post time, after two o’clock, and Lee and Kath were tipping rapidly toward sloshed, several of the rest of us not far behind, when the phone rang again and Lee popped up to answer it. I couldn’t help overhearing him—okay, probably I could have, but I listened anyway. He didn’t say much, just “sure” a few times (a word that had two syllables in his Southern accent), and “I will.” When he hung up, he said he was very sorry but he was on call and we’d have to excuse him, that was the hospital and he had to go in.

  “Lee!” Kath protested, but Lee was already saying, “I know Kath will take good care of y’all,” already out the door and gone.

  “Is he okay to doctor anyone?” I heard Jim whisper to Jeff.

  Jeff just frowned.

  On the television, they were announcing the horses for the Derby race, and we turned our attention to picking horses and making our bets. I said I was afraid I didn’t have quite a thousand to put down, tendering my five dollars, and Ally admitted that was all she brought, too. Everyone agreed five dollars was the perfect amount to bet among friends. Winner take all.

  Linda declared that she was betting on Fathom, the horse Diane Crump was riding. Jeff and Kath lightheartedly squabbled over Dr. Behrman—Jeff maintaining the horse was his by dint of his profession, Kath by relationship. “I’m friendly with one of the Lin-Drake Farm girls,” she said. “Her family owns the horse.” And Jeff suddenly preferred Terlago and Willie Shoemaker, while the rest of us picked solely on the curb appeal of the horses’ names: Corn Off the Cob, Silent Screen, Action Getter, Holy Land, Robin’s Bug.

  The University of Louisville Marching Band struck up “My Old Kentucky Home,” and Kath teared up as she sang along with the crowd, “Weep no more, my lady, Oh! Weep no more today! We will sing one song for my old Kentucky home. For my old Kentucky home, far away.”

  The horses loaded, finally, and the race began, and there was a flurry of excitement when Silent Screen and Terlago and Robin’s Bug all came out fast. Then Brett’s pick, Silent Screen, moved into the lead about three quarters of the way through the race, and Brett actually hopped up and down with excitement. Corn Off the Cob, my horse, made a move, and I was jumping with her. Jim’s horse, Robin’s Bug, was in it, too, and for a moment we were having a ball. Then several horses that had not been in contention came up from nowhere, and Dust Commander was suddenly well in the lead.

  “Dust Commander?” Chip said. “What kind of name is that for a horse?”

  Then the two minutes were over and none of us had won. Or placed. Or showed. Not even Kath. The best we’d done was Silent Screen, in sixth.

  Brett at first refused to accept the winnings—“I’m not taking forty-five dollars for picking the middle of the pack”—but Kath looked so devastated that Brett, thinking it was because of her refusal, said she was just kidding, of course she’d take the money, she’d won fair and square.

  With Kath looking so dreadful, and Jim not much better, we started making our excuses to say good-bye as soon as it was reasonable to do so. Linda said she would stay and help Kath clean up and Jeff could let the sitter go.

  As the door closed behind us, leaving Linda to comfort Kath, I said to Jeff, “Lee wasn’t on call today, was he?”

  Jeff sighed, and he didn’t answer, but we all knew the truth soon enough.

  BEFORE THAT DERBY PARTY, before Lee moved out late that summer—1970, this was—the Wednesday Sisters had been watching the women’s movement from the sidelines in the same way we’d watched the antiwar movement, notwithstanding the San Francisco march we’d attended. We weren’t so different from the rest of the country: a poll in June showed that 60 percent of men and 43 percent of women—college-educated ones—still thought a woman should be wife and mother first and foremost, a view even we would have called old-fashioned. But maybe we wouldn’t have if Lee hadn’t finally left Kath that August, if he hadn’t come home from work early one evening and put the children to bed rather than assuming Kath would, then packed a suitcase and told a stunned Kath he’d signed a lease on an apartment in Menlo Park.

  He didn’t think they ought to tell the children just yet, what with school about to start, the specter of homework for Anna Page, who was going to be a fourth-grader, and Lee-Lee needing to keep a smile on his face for a full day now that he’d be in first grade. Lee would come back for breakfast or for dinner sometimes, he said, and since he was so often at the hospital anyway, they wouldn’t know he’d moved out.

  Kath just sat staring at him until finally he waved a hand in front of her face and asked if she’d heard a word he’d said. She said yes—just that one word, yes—and he said, “Okay, then,” and walked out the door.

  He came home for dinner the next night, and Kath, so hoping he’d changed his mind and come back that she’d convinced herself it was true before dinner was over, was devastated when he gave her his new address and telephone number, as if she were simply one more person who might need to note it in her book.

  He still paid the bills and gave her a little money each week—enough for groceries, barely, but what about clothes and toys, medicines and trips to the zoo? She couldn’t bear the thought of asking him for more, though, much less taking him to court. She would have welcomed him back in a heartbeat, and she didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize his return. And she wasn’t sure Lee had more money to give her, anyway. Yes, they had a big house and plenty of silver, fancy cars, but those were bought with family money, gifts in one way or another from her family or his, doled out at their parents’ or grandparents’ whim. What they lived on day to day was the same thing Linda lived on, the meager salary of a resident, with only the promise of a doctor’s income someday, and though Kath might have gotten help from her parents, that would have raised questions, and she couldn’t bear to tell them about Lee moving out.

  So that August we started seeing things a little differently, we started seeing a world where any one of us might be abandoned in one way or another by her husband, and where would that leave us? What choice would we have but to get a job, to leave our children in someone else’s care while we went off to work?

  Linda once said people don’t give to causes, people give to people, and I think that’s what happened to us. It wasn’t so much that our consciousness was raised in any abstract way as that Kath, after a brief and unsuccessful stint trying to get wallpaper-hanging gigs to make a little money, was trying to get a real job. She would step up her job search in earnest after school started that September, while the Cubs were battling for first, getting as close as a half game out, and we would all be incensed on her behalf at what she encountered in her interviews. Men called her “babe” and “honey”—she called people “honey” herself, she knew that, but not in the condescending tone these men used, men who asked why she was looking for a job when she had a husband and children at home.

  It wasn’t that we thought of ourselves as women’s libbers, not for a minute. The media generally dismissed every gathering of women in the name of liberation as a “flop” and stereotyped women’s rights advocates as ugly man-haters and left-wing radical lesbians, and I suppose we bought into that as much as anyone did. Our conversation still focused on the breakup of the Beatles and the new Joni Mitchell song (about paving paradise for a parking lot) more often than on the Equal Rights Amendment (though we did cheer when the ERA finally made its way out of the House Judiciary Committee that summer), and the books we read tended toward The French Lieutenant’s Woman rather than Sexual Politics—much less The Female Eunuch. Still, we began to see what it was like for women who had to work, and it cast events in a little different light.

  Ally had as tough a time that spring and summer as Kath did. Jeff, concerned about t
he drug Ally was taking, went into the hospital the evening after the Derby party for the express purpose of “bumping into” a colleague in obstetrics, who referred him to a group of doctors in Boston. When Linda telephoned Ally about it that Sunday afternoon, she started slowly, explaining what Jeff had told her about why a woman sometimes miscarried repeatedly: because of an abnormality in her uterus or cervix, or because her reproductive cycle wasn’t working right somehow or there were other undiagnosed problems with her health. But Ally didn’t want to hear about it. “I’m perfectly healthy, Linda,” she said. “I’ve practically never been sick a day in my life.”

  That Wednesday in the park, Linda brought it up again, saying, “These Boston doctors Jeff talked to, Ally, they think there’s a link between this drug you’re taking and some kind of rare vaginal cancer. I’m not sure I quite understand exactly what Jeff was saying, but he definitely thinks you ought to stop taking it.” Ally’s stare would have turned anyone else away—to Davy barreling headfirst down the slide or Arselia clearing J.J. from the bottom, or to the mansion’s porch light burning dimly against the dull morning—but Linda met her gaze.

  “What does Jeff know about it?” Ally said. “My doctor says it’s a magic bullet, that I’ll have a baby.”

  Linda rolled her lips together, her multicolored eyes kind and sad and determined, still fixed on Ally.

  Ally looked away, toward the palm tree to the right of the mansion door, a single dead frond hanging down along its trunk. “How can you know? You have no idea what it’s like not to have a baby.” Her voice even softer now: “Do you think I care if I might have some higher chance of cancer when I’m eighty?” She met Linda’s gaze again, her eyes moist. “Jeff isn’t even a gynecologist. He has no idea what he’s talking about.”

  “But the drug won’t help,” Linda said, so gently you might not even have believed it was Linda. “It’s just marketing. The drug companies are making a lot of money on disproved research and false hope.”