“Listen,” she said. “This is important. I want you to listen for a minute while I tell you something, and then you can ask anything you want. I want you to ask anything you want.”
“Can we go to the toy store?” J.J. asked; they’d passed FAO Schwarz on the way.
“After we’re done talking,” Linda said. “Maybe it will be open by then.”
She pulled J.J. into her lap and leaned closer to the table, the twins on either side of her. She looked at each one of them, at Julie and Jamie, who had Jeff’s sober brown eyes, at J.J., whose eye color couldn’t quite be described, like her own.
“Mommy has to go to the hospital early tomorrow morning for an operation,” she said. “I hope it will be just a little operation, but I don’t know. If it is, I’ll be home in two days. I might have to have a second operation, though, and if I do, I’ll be in the hospital longer.”
“Will you bring a baby home, like Hope?” Julie asked, her face so expectant that Linda had to look away. Her eyes met her own reflection looking back at her from the mirrored wall, her children’s smaller faces focused on hers, fear edging its way into their eyes.
She held J.J. more surely, leaning closer to the girls. She set her hand on Julie’s hair, on the little bit of ear that peeked through the sheet of blond. “Not this time, honey,” she said.
“Can we come visit you?” Jamie asked.
“Yes, you can visit me there,” Linda said. “Daddy will be here tonight, and he’ll bring you every day.” She touched a finger to her daughter’s neck, pushing away the thought that she might never see how lovely it would look on the woman her daughter would become. “I might look kind of weird after the second operation, if I end up having two,” she said. “Grandma did.”
Her mother must have known Linda loved her even as she was hiding in the closet, Linda realized. Julie and Jamie and J.J. would always love her: she knew that as surely as she knew anything.
She took a sip of her coffee, cold already. She didn’t want to scare them, but she wanted them to understand. “Honestly,” she said, “it’s okay to be afraid if you think I look weird. I’ll probably be afraid, too. Everyone is.”
And when Julie said, “But Grandma died, Mommy. Are you going to die?” Linda thought: This is why Mom and Dad never told us, because how do you answer this?
She met each of their eyes before she spoke again—all those straight-across eyebrows, like hers—so they would see that she was telling them the truth. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to die, but I can’t promise I won’t.” The earnest way they looked back at her. Could they even begin to understand this? “If anything happens to me,” she said, “I want you to always remember this: No mommy in this whole wide world has ever loved her children more than I love you guys. And always, always, you make me the happiest mommy in the world. No matter what happens, I want you to remember that. Okay? Promise me that?”
They all did. They all promised her, no matter what.
“Forever?” she said, working to make her voice lighter. “Even when you’re a hundred and two?”
They all giggled.
“Even when I’m a hundred and ninety-two,” Julie said, and Jamie, not to be outdone, said, “Even when I’m two thousand!”
Linda wrapped them in a big group hug then, not able to get out the one last thing she’d wanted to say, not able to tell Jamie and Julie they might have to remind J.J., that he might not remember his mother at all, he was so young.
They rode the carousel in Central Park that morning. At the zoo, the children laughed at the gorillas (Linda trying not to think about the poor mother gorilla who’d been so sad to be separated from baby Patty Cake and now might never get him back), and J.J., at least, eeeewwwed with real glee at the two-headed snake. They rented a little rowboat and the twins took turns at the oars, making a crazy zigzag across the water, putting them in the path of other rowboats again and again, but no harm ever came to them.
When they got back to her brother’s place, Jeff was there, and she told him, and when she leaned into him once the awful words were out, he wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. “It’s going to be okay,” he whispered, and for a moment she thought maybe it would.
They all slept in the same bed that night, the five of them together, so that if the children woke in the middle of the night she and Jeff would be there. She snuggled up with them, and when they were all breathing easily—even Jeff, who’d been up all the night before at the hospital—she eased out from under the covers and found some of her sister-in-law’s heavy stationery. She settled on the floor in the hallway outside their room, and she wrote Jamie and Julie and J.J. each a long letter, recalling the moments they were born and their first words, their first steps, describing in detail what she loved about each of them and imaging the wonderful futures she knew they would have, the things they would do and the love they would find, the love they would give along the way.
The next morning, she and Jeff got dressed quietly, not wanting to wake the children before they had to. When she was ready, she climbed back into the bed, woke them gently, hugged them and said again how much she loved them.
“Always remember that,” she said. “How much I love you. And remember: it’s okay if you’re afraid, even if you’re afraid of me, if you think I look gross.”
They giggled at the word gross.
“Mommies can’t look gross!” J.J. protested.
She wiped the sleep from his eyes. “Remember that two-headed snake we saw yesterday?” she said.
“Mommy, you won’t have two heads!” J.J. howled delightedly, and they all laughed.
“No,” Linda promised them. “I won’t have two heads, I can promise you that.”
She hugged them again, and she told them one last time that she loved them, and she said good-bye, and she went to the hospital and signed the consent to surgery, the you-may-die stuff. She held her breath as she had that first time, when they put the mask over her face. And she said a prayer not to God but to Jeff, to take special care of them if anything happened to her, to hug them every morning and kiss them every night and always always to remind them how much she had loved them, how much she still loved them even if she couldn’t be with them as they grew up.
ANYONE WHO SAW JEFF with Linda that summer could see he would never leave her. I hoped she could see it herself. He commuted to Boston until they could find someone to replace him, but he’d already gone back to the people at Stanford, already said whatever they could give him, he’d take. And still we Wednesday Sisters were saying to each other that we had to do something for Linda. But what?
We could take the children for a weekend or even a week, we told Jeff the week Linda was finishing the chemotherapy. She would be feeling better physically, at least. What she needed now, we decided, was some time without worries, to have fun, to remember who she was. “Why don’t you two go on a vacation together?” we said to Jeff.
He ran a hand through uncharacteristically unkempt hair, and for a moment I thought he would cry, and I pictured Linda, how she never cried. I imagined how hard that must be for Jeff, to feel he couldn’t cry because she wouldn’t.
“She isn’t comfortable with the physicality of being with me,” he said, his mouth heavy. “She will be. I know she will be. But she isn’t yet.” He did not sound convincing.
“What about you girls all going somewhere?” he said. “A Wednesday Sisters weekend away.” And something in his handsome, exhausted face made me remember him in that Wilbur the pig costume at our Halloween party, made me think, Some Husband.
“Not too far away,” he said, and you could see the struggle in him, the need to make Linda happy fighting against his own need to keep her within his grasp, to help her himself.
“The Miss America weekend, a Miss America retreat,” Kath said, and the rest of us rang up in an echo chorus before the utter ridiculousness of it splashed across our expressions, Ally blinking, looking d
own, Kath’s eyes startling with the realization that this dog certainly would not hunt. How could we imagine Linda would want to watch those perfect women in bathing suits when she’d just lost her breasts, her hair? When she was fighting for her life?
Brett sat rubbing one gloved index finger over her other gloved palm. “I’ve got the Carson thing that Friday,” she said, and you could see she could barely stand to mention it, that she was mortified to be talking about promoting her novel on television at such a time.
“Linda’s really excited about that,” Jeff said. “I’m so glad you’re doing it. It gives her something to look forward to. And Carson always makes her laugh, even when his jokes aren’t funny.” He smiled a little, and you could almost see him sitting in bed beside Linda, tucked under the covers with her. Ten-thirty. Watching Johnny’s opening monologue, basking in her laugh.
“The Tonight Show.”
I think we all said it at the same time.
We’d talked about getting tickets when we first found out Brett would be on, but we hadn’t known the date yet, and then with Linda being sick it had slipped our minds. Or perhaps we’d pushed it out, the fun we’d once imagined seeming far beyond our reach.
Could we still get tickets?
“Maybe I could get them, as a guest,” Brett said. “I got one for Chip.”
“I might could get them through the office,” Kath offered.
I thought, but didn’t say, that if all else failed, Danny could get them for us, through the investment bankers, I was pretty sure of that. They were always offering tickets to the opera and weekends in Napa, dinners at trendy new restaurants you couldn’t get reservations at for months. Four Tonight Show tickets couldn’t be that hard to come by, if you knew how to go about it, if you had strings to pull.
A Mrs. America weekend in L.A., with Johnny Carson, we agreed. The Tonight Show Friday night. And Saturday? Something other than Miss America, we decided. Who could spend a wild weekend in Los Angeles staying in a hotel room and watching an outdated beauty pageant, anyway?
We booked rooms in the hotel Brett was staying in—four rooms, because we couldn’t imagine Linda would want to share a room, and it seemed wrong for any of the rest of us to exclude her by doing so ourselves.
“And we’ll cut our hair,” Ally announced.
“Cut our hair?” Kath said.
“Cut it off,” Ally said. “Cut it all off, heavens to Betsy. It will give us some idea of what she’s going through, shrugging off that one crutch we rely on to feel we’re feminine.”
I thought of how Ally had felt all those years, doubting her femininity because she wasn’t able to have a baby. I tried to imagine myself without my mop of unruly dishwater blond hair—not gorgeous, but still so much a part of who I was.
“Shave it off?” I said quietly, trying to imagine walking out my front door with my skull showing, bald and free.
No one answered, though everyone had heard me.
I tried to imagine all of us standing before Linda, pulling off wigs or caps to reveal that we, like her, were smooth as our newborn babies’ little bottoms had been. I would cry if the Wednesday Sisters did that for me. I would cry at their choosing to go through what I had no choice but to endure myself.
But I wasn’t Linda.
I found a smile creeping up from the pit of my stomach. “She’ll laugh,” I said. “Somehow I know it will make her laugh. I’d do it just for that.”
“She could sure stand to laugh a spell,” Kath said. “And it’s what she’d do for us, sure enough.”
It was what she would do for us, we all agreed. Everyone except Brett, who sat silently looking down at her gloves.
Kath reached over and put a hand on Brett’s. “But Brett can’t,” she said. “She’d be nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs fixin’ to go on Johnny Carson with a shaved head.”
“I could wear a wig?” Brett said, but the rise in her voice told everything. This was her big moment, and she was dreading it already. She could no more appear on The Tonight Show with her head shaved than she could with her gloves off.
“You can’t do that, Brett,” I said.
“It will be hot enough under the lights without a wig on,” Ally agreed.
Brett nodded, but there was something unconvincing in it, as if she couldn’t stand to have hair if the rest of us were bald.
“Henry Adams said, ‘One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible,’” she said. “What is it we’ve done so right in our lives that has made us five?”
“We’ll be your big ol’ bald fan club,” Kath said, “the good Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.” And we all, again, agreed. There wasn’t a hint of conviction in our voices, though. I was sure when the time came we would talk ourselves out of this. We’d justify our cowardice or convince ourselves it would embarrass Linda. Or maybe we’d just plain lose our nerve.
WHEN THE BIG EVENING CAME, we were seated side by side, Kath and Ally and Linda and I together on the aisle in the third row, with Brett waiting backstage. I felt as if I were in a dream, as if none of this could be happening. I could not possibly be that little girl who grew up in suburban Chicago, who went to Catholic school and played the French horn and went on to be a secretary. I could not possibly have married the smartest guy at Northwestern and moved to a place I’d never heard of, two thousand miles away from my family, with my two children in tow. Most of all, I could not be the woman who’d just been accepted to Stanford—my admissions letter had come in the mail that morning, just before we left!—and made these wonderful friends with whom I was now sitting, and published a novel myself and helped my friend who was now here, waiting to sit next to Johnny Carson and talk about The Mrs. Americas as if she were Harper Lee.
I could not possibly be sitting here with a wig scratching against my shaved scalp, knowing that Kath and Ally were bald underneath their wigs, too.
We’d thought we would buy wigs that looked like our hair, but that turned out to be more difficult than you would think. So we went to the other extreme. We bought wigs that were nothing at all like our own hair. I was a sleekly cropped strawberry blonde, Ally a longer-haired honey blonde which, with her pale skin, looked more probable than you might have thought. Kath hadn’t changed her color—she was still brunette, every other shade she’d tried on had looked just ludicrous—but she’d gone for short and curly, which opened up her face, made her cheekbones more prominent. When she’d first tried it on, before we’d actually shaved our heads, we’d all said more or less in unison something like, “Wow.” We’d said maybe she should cut her hair short, and she’d smiled—a big white smile in her uncovered face—and said, “I’m planning to, don’t you know? I’m thinking mighty short.”
We didn’t need to get further than the hallway outside Linda’s hotel room to know what we’d done in Kath’s hotel bathroom was worth it. Her expression when she answered our knock was the funniest thing I’d seen in ages. Who are you? it said. I was expecting Kath and Ally and Frankie.
She laughed so delightedly when she realized it was us that she sounded almost healthy again. “Why are you guys wearing wigs?” she said.
We shrugged and said we were ready for a change.
“New city, new night, new look,” Kath said. “A girl’s got a right to turn loose every now and again.”
Linda said she had fixed on Ally when she’d opened the door, and she knew she should know her but she couldn’t for the life of her place her. She figured she was someone from back in Connecticut,someoneshe’d grown up with who’d tracked her downhere, though she couldn’t imagine who or how or why. Then she’d realized it was Ally.
“You look foxy as a blonde, Ally,” she said. “But I’m glad it’s a wig. That much bleach would destroy that wonderful hair of yours.”
The way Ally touched her wig made me remember Kath’s words when we’d first looked at ourselves in the mirror that afternoon, after we’d shaved our head
s: “You don’t miss the water till the well runs dry.” But none of us said a word to Linda about no longer having hair to destroy.
We set off for the show and took our seats and waited impatiently, talking about Brett sitting backstage. Chip was with her—we were glad for that. He’d brought her to the show and was going to stay with her until she went on, then slip into the audience to watch her. He was flying home right afterward, so they wouldn’t have to leave Sarah and Mark with anyone for the whole night. We all were reluctant to leave our children in someone else’s care for any period of time now. Linda being vulnerable made us all feel vulnerable, made our world suddenly tenuous and fragile.
The music started—Doc Severinsen and the NBC Orchestra—and Ed McMahon appeared, and it was no time before he was saying, “Heeeeeere’s Johnny!” And there he was indeed, coming through the curtains in chocolate slacks and a gray blazer, white shirt, wide red tie. The curtain swayed behind him, all blue and green and gold. This is it, we thought. This is happening for Brett tonight and it is going to happen for all of us, we have worked together to make this happen and even we sometimes didn’t believe it ever would, but here we are. And Linda was clapping as wildly as I was, as Ally and Kath were, as I imagined Brett, watching a television monitor backstage, was, too. We weren’t clapping for Johnny, though. We were clapping for each other, for those women who’d arisen from that coffin almost four years ago now.
Johnny went right into his monologue, quieting us, moving the show along. He was always current, and since this was the Friday night before the Miss America Pageant, he lobbed up some funny jokes at Bert Parks’s expense. Well, not very funny, actually. I laughed at first, but my heart wasn’t in it. I thought I was just too worried for Brett. But the laughter all around me was forced, too—not just Kath and Ally, but the two fellows behind me, and the woman with the flower in her hair in the first row. Only Linda was genuinely laughing, her laughter so lovely that part of me just wanted to sit quietly and drink it in.
The Wednesday Sisters Page 27
