The Wednesday Sisters

by Meg Waite Clayton

  As the weeks passed, though, I watched my books move from the tables at the front of Bay Area stores to the O shelf in general fiction, buried between a slew of O’Connors (Frank and Flannery) and Animal Farm. By the time Nixon won reelection in a landslide that November despite Watergate (it was just too incredible to believe the president himself might have been involved), I despaired of my book ever selling more than a few copies to my mother’s friends and my own. Even my agent had gone from saying more reviews would come, just be patient, to saying he couldn’t imagine how my book had slipped through the cracks. Slipped through the cracks, it had, though. By Christmas, Michelangelo’s Ghost was gone from bookstore shelves everywhere.

  Danny tried to console me, tried to pull me up with his own joy, which was one part having a little breathing time at work and one part the soaring Intel stock. He brought me flowers, and pretty new clothes purchased on his lunch hour, and a brand-new IBM Selectric II typewriter. He took me out to dinner and started talking about taking a vacation together, just the two of us. And one morning, after he’d left for work very early, I came down to the kitchen to find the coffee made, some fancy pastries under plastic wrap on a plate, and several piles of paper that were, on closer inspection, applications to Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley.

  And all the while I listened with fascination to what was going on with Brett’s book. Kath and Arlene—who insisted Brett hire an agent—flew with Brett to New York to lunch with agents Arlene thought Brett might particularly like. Within weeks she’d sold rights for publication in England, Germany, and Japan, of all places. Then The Mrs. Americas caught the attention of one of the biggest film agents in Hollywood.

  Movie rights? It wasn’t even a book yet!

  Even her author photo was nothing like mine. She was sent to a professional photographer who used a stylist who painted more makeup on Brett’s face than she’d worn all the days of her life put together. Kath was sent along, too, with a single instruction: make sure the photographer got Brett’s gloves in the photograph.

  “Well, it’s not the coffin photo,” Linda said as we sat hunched over the picnic table one Sunday morning, admiring the result. “You know what I was thinking when we took that coffin photo, Brett? I was thinking if you really were dead, I would definitely peek under your gloves to see what was there.”

  “Linda!” I said.

  “I swear on my aunt Tooty’s grave,” Kath said.

  “But I would,” Linda said. “All of us would, wouldn’t we?”

  Brett ran a gloved hand through her cropped red hair as visions of that long-ago Wednesday Sisters blowup flashed through my mind, that Miss America gathering when we’d learned that Linda was Jewish and Jim was Indian, and that we could hurt each other even when we weren’t trying to, and that none of us was as perfect as we liked to pretend.

  Was Linda right? Would we all peek? Would we all want to?

  I thought she probably was.

  “Well then,” Brett said, “I’d better be sure to leave instructions for a closed-coffin wake.”

  I ARRIVED AT THE PICNIC TABLE one Sunday morning the following April to find Linda just sitting there, looking off into the empty space where the mansion had stood. I said good morning, but she only nodded, leaving me to sit with her in silence until everyone had arrived. When they had, Linda told us she’d found another lump in her breast.

  “Oh, Linda,” Kath started, but Linda cut her off.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said. “But I’ve got an appointment to have it looked at next month.”

  “Next month!” Brett said. “But—”

  “In three weeks,” Linda said.

  “But three weeks is—”

  “The last one was benign, and they told me then that I shouldn’t be surprised to find another one. They told me not to panic. Women who get lumps get lumps.”

  “Linda!” Kath said.

  “Heavens to Betsy,” Ally whispered.

  “I probably couldn’t get in to see anyone here for a few weeks anyway,” Linda said.

  “Here?” Ally said, and Kath started, “But Jeff could—”

  “I’m running the mini-marathon in New York again,” Linda interrupted. “I’m having it looked at back there. I can’t do it here. Jeff knows everyone here.”

  She didn’t want Jeff to know about it, didn’t want him to worry about it, not like he had the last time. That’s what she was saying without quite being able to say it. Still, we all understood. And we understood, too, that we were sworn to secrecy, which felt wrong to me, but I wasn’t Linda, it wasn’t my choice.

  Then Linda dropped another bombshell on us: Jeff was taking a position at a hospital in Boston, starting the next week. It was just for the summer, but he was pretty sure that if it went well, they’d make him a permanent offer, a better one than he could get out here.

  “What am I supposed to do?” she said. “Say he can’t accept a job in Boston because I have friends here?”

  “We’re staying in Palo Alto for the summer—the kids and I are,” she said. “We decided it would be less disruptive for them.”

  “We always knew this wouldn’t be a permanent home, right, Kath?” she said. “We’ve been lucky to get to stay as long as we have.”

  “God, I don’t know what I’ll do without you guys,” she said. “You’ll still have each other, but I won’t have anyone.”

  WHEN LINDA CAME BACK from New York a month later, she was depressed as hell. No, the lump was nothing, just a cyst, she assured us that Sunday at dawn, the morning after she returned. She’d run poorly in the race, though. Slower than last year. “A fourteen-year-old girl won in under forty minutes,” she said, but without enthusiasm, as if she’d read about it in the paper rather than tried to keep up. “Maybe I’m overtraining,” she said.

  Maybe that was it: she was running too much. Maybe that was why her shoulders looked so angular, why the skin under her eyes was translucent blue and her hair seemed in need of a good old-fashioned scrub.

  “But you had the lump whacked out?” Kath said. “By someone who knows a fur coat from a frying pan?”

  Linda sat silently for a moment, staring off at the empty playground as if watching J.J. pump high on a swing and leap forward off it, planting his palms in the sand as he landed. She gathered a smile from somewhere in the red morning light, then, as if to give her son a big thumbs-up, and she turned that newly gathered smile to us. “They did something called mammography,” she said. “They smushed my breasts flat between plates of glass they must keep stored in a freezer, they were so damned cold. And then they told me to stand stock-still up on my toes the way they had me hooked to the machine, and to hold my breath until I just about burst.”

  “It’s like an X-ray,” Brett explained. “It takes a sort of picture of the breast tissue, like an X-ray takes a picture of bone.”

  “Anyway, the lump is gone, ‘whacked out’ by a nice New York surgeon,” Linda said; though mammography technology existed, it didn’t save you from a biopsy back then. “And it was nothing,” she said, that gathered smile somehow deepening the circles under her eyes. “Really. It was just a cyst.”

  BRETT’S PUBLISHER had big plans for The Mrs. Americas, including a substantial first printing. The only pothole in her smooth, wide, newly striped road was her first review—like mine, a real stinker, and from the same trade magazine, too. Within a week, though, Woman’s Day called, and then Cosmopolitan. Could they send interviewers? Photographers? By late July, still more than a month before her book was to be released, her publisher went back for a second printing. Then the clincher came: The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

  Johnny wanted Brett to appear on his show—or his scheduler did, anyway. The exact date was a little up in the air, but it would be either the Friday night before or the Monday night after the Miss America Pageant, playing off the book title.

  “I swear, my hair is going gray with worry,” Brett said. We were sitting in the
park Sunday morning, already long after dawn.

  Linda, next to Brett, tugged at the brim of her Stanford cap and peered closely at Brett’s cropped red hair. “It really is, isn’t it?” she said. “Just a few little grays at the temple, but you’re barely thirty, right?”

  “I read somewhere that stress can cause you to go gray practically overnight,” I said.

  “You should dye it, honey,” Kath said.

  “Dye it?” Ally and I said.

  “She can’t go on Johnny Carson with gray hair,” Linda said. “Don’t be ridiculous. She’d look . . .”

  Like an elderly twelve-year-old, wearing her grandmother’s gloves.

  Like the weedy ground that reminded you, by its emptiness, of how haunting the dilapidated mansion had been. They’d seeded the dirt finally—without removing the rocks or the weeds—and for a while it had become the neighborhood’s most popular bird breakfast café. But already the seed was gone, the only trace of it a few little shoots of grass trying to survive.

  “You could just wear a hat, like Linda,” Ally said, and she pulled Linda’s Stanford cap off and put it on Brett’s head.

  In response to the astounded looks on the rest of our faces, Brett said, “What?”

  Linda’s braid had come off with her hat. Just come off completely. Gone with the hat to Brett’s head, an incongruous plait of blond against her red hair. All that was left on Linda’s head was a short bob of blond hair, flattened and chaotic from being tucked up under her hat.

  “Lordy, Lordy, Linda, you whacked your hair off?” Kath reached up and touched her own hair, trying to make some sense of Linda’s braid being removable now, like the braid headband Kath rarely wore anymore.

  “But . . .” Brett reached to Linda’s Stanford hat perched on her own head and fingered the long blond braid coming from the back. “Why is the . . . What is it”—she pulled the cap off hurriedly, as if she’d just realized she was wearing someone else’s underwear—“sewn to your hat?”

  “I . . . I felt naked without it.” Linda’s eyes started pooling—a real shock because Linda never cried, only that once when she’d found her first lump. “I’ve never had short hair, but I wanted a change, and . . .” She glanced at the playground, which was empty, all our children safe in their beds at home. “God, I hate it!”

  “But you look as pretty as a speckled pup,” Kath said.

  “She means that as a compliment, as improbable as that seems,” Brett assured Linda, and we all laughed a little nervously. Linda did look good, really. She always looked beautiful, but in some ways she looked even more so now. Short hair brought out those stunning eyes of hers, and masked the persistent thinness of her face.

  “I know how you feel, though, Linda,” I said. “What is it with hair? A bad cut—one I think is bad—can put me in a funk for days.” And we talked for a long time then about how important our hair was to how we saw ourselves, how much money we wasted on hair products, how ridiculous we were to sleep in those big curlers and to sit under the hot hoods of our hair dryers, how great the new handheld blow-dryers were supposed to be. All with our writing set on the picnic table in front of us, uncharacteristically ignored.

  “Who’d think we could make such a big fuss out of a bunch of dead protein,” Brett said.

  “Do go on,” Kath said. “How pretty I feel depends on how well my thick skull sprouts dead protein?”

  “Hey, sweetheart, you want to run your fingers through my dead protein?” I joked, a lame attempt to cheer Linda up.

  “It is easier to wash short hair,” Linda said, pulling herself together, beginning to pretend she hadn’t cried. “And I wash it so much more now. I get so sweaty running.”

  And while Kath assured Linda that ladies never sweat, they “glisten,” I sat trying to remember if I’d seen Linda running since she’d returned from New York, thinking I had not.

  “WHAT IF I SOUND like a blithering idiot?” Brett said the following Sunday, a foggy morning that made it impossible to tell when the sun had actually risen. Each great new development on her book—she was going to be in the Book-of-the-Month Club, and her publisher was planning to run ads—was no longer cause for celebration but rather cause for more anxiety. She was so stressed that it was hard to imagine she’d ever thought she might be calm enough to make it all the way to the moon, much less to sleep before sticking her little piggy toes out. Not that you couldn’t fall off a cliff when everything seemed to be going your way. Look at the Cubs that season: first place going into the All-Star break, and they ended the season in fifth, a late-season slide if ever there was one. Which I supposed could still happen to Brett, though I couldn’t really imagine it would.

  “What if I make a complete fool of myself right there on national television?” Brett said. “What if I open my mouth and nothing comes out?”

  We leaned in closer over the rough wood table, the fog moist against our faces.

  “You’re going to be a star, Brett,” Linda said. “I know you are.”

  Which was what I wanted to say, but the words were stuck deep in my gut, beside my disappointment over Michelangelo’s Ghost.

  “You are,” Kath agreed. “You’re one of the most articulate people I know. And your book is wonderful. It’s going to sell like hotcakes at the county fair. How could such a fine li’l book not sell like hotcakes?”

  Brett’s green eyes under that strawberry hair flicked to me, and just as quickly flicked away.

  “You’re going to do great,” I said, working the words over the thick clay of my tongue. That look of Brett’s was the closest any of the Wednesday Sisters had ever come to confronting the fact that my novel had bombed. And my college applications were faring no better: I’d been wait-listed at Stanford, and UC Berkeley somehow had failed to receive my second recommendation until after the deadline. (“I’m sorry, Mrs. O’Mara, but our deadlines must be firm.”)

  “Just be yourself and we’ll all be bumping along on your coattails, Brett,” Linda said.

  “If you start to get the jitters, just remember the coffin photo,” Ally said.

  “Just think of that big ol’ memorial that will be standing right here in this park someday,” Kath said. “The one that says the Wednesday Sisters first started scribbling in this very spot.”

  JUST AS THE SUN was lightening the horizon a few Sundays later, with the park still deep in shadow, Kath said, out of nowhere, “The lady’s stepson, her husband’s son? He hauled that poor lonely ol’ widow right into the courtroom.” She was staring off into space, to where it seemed you could almost see the mansion still standing there in the dim morning light, behind the majestic palm. “With her husband, his own father, barely cold in the grave,” she said. “And her daughter barely dead, too. He liked to left her without a penny.”

  Linda, sitting next to Kath, put her arm around her and rested her head on Kath’s shoulder. She’d abandoned the braid but still wore the cap, her hair perfectly cut underneath. “Lee’s not going to leave you with nothing, Kath,” she said. “And even if—”

  But Kath was already pulling away, shrugging Linda’s friendly head from her shoulder. Linda’s hat shifted. And so did her hair.

  Brett said, “Oh,” her small mouth puckering as she stared, startled, at Linda, who was grabbing at her shifted hair as if Kath had wounded her.

  Kath, not noticing, looked wounded, too, her face screwing up so that her big chin stuck out bigger, almost as though she wanted someone to take a swing so she could swing back. “You don’t have any idea, Linda!” she said. “You and your perfect relationship with your perfect husband, you don’t—”

  She stopped as suddenly as she’d started, and, like the rest of us, stared at Linda still grasping her cap.

  “Linda?” Kath said. “Oh, Linda.”

  The first hint of sun cut through the branches of the trees lining the east side of the park, subtle red across the eyesore of rocky dirt. It was Linda’s hair under that cap, but it wasn’t. It sat not quite str
aight on her head.

  I saw then how gaunt her face had become, how hard her cheekbones jutted against her skin.

  She straightened her cap and her hair together, then crossed her arms in front of her. “It’s from the chemotherapy. It makes you lose your hair sometimes.”

  She didn’t cry. She just sat there, a defiant look in her blue-green-purple-gold eyes.

  I didn’t cry, either. None of us dared cry.

  “So,” she said. “So.”

  The lump hadn’t been nothing; she’d lied to us about that.

  Yes, she knew she ought to have had it looked at immediately, she ought not to have waited the three weeks until her trip, but she’d found a doctor in New York who wouldn’t make her consent to a one-step, who wouldn’t insist on doing an immediate mastectomy while she was still under anesthesia from the biopsy.

  “I couldn’t face that again,” she said. “I did that last time, going under knowing I might come out with . . .” She looked away to the empty playground, to the jungle gym where Anna Page had hung upside down that day all those years ago now, her sandy dress falling over her face. “With no breasts at all,” she said. “With no chest muscles. With arms that might be swollen and achy the rest of my life. And I couldn’t tell Jeff until I knew what we were dealing with. I just couldn’t put him through that again.” Turning to Kath now, her eyes searching. “Every doctor in this whole town knows Jeff. Word would have gotten back to him, you know it would have, Kath.

  “I wanted to make the decision myself. I couldn’t imagine leaving it up to some man I’d never met before, who would have no idea what it would feel like to . . .” She swallowed hard. “To lose a breast.”

  She’d read the same McCall’s piece we’d all read about Shirley Temple Black, who’d refused to consent to a mastectomy before she knew what the biopsy showed: I wouldn’t have it that way—that’s what she’d written, and that’s how Linda had felt, too.