The Wednesday Daughters

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Julie unwrapped a single fire starter and set it in the grate, then picked up the long-handled coal tongs and waited while Anna Page laid the paper and kindling.

  “I used to think it made my daddy one thing and my ma another,” Anna Page said, “but they’re just who they are.”

  “My mother wasn’t like that,” I said.

  “Like what?” Anna Page said. “Do you want him to be some—”

  “He’s not anything, Anna Page,” I said. “The fact that you want to screw him the way you want to screw every man you meet doesn’t make him anything to Mom!”

  I turned my back to the shock in Anna Page’s face—shock overlaid with a patina of hurt. I rooted in the chest for matches, stirring the guilt of her hurt into a pot of my own, letting it all stew together without apology. It wasn’t her fault that Mom had this other life here, that there was this man who knew her so well, whom I knew not at all. It wasn’t her fault that her mother never published “The Tale of Gabby Goose” or any of the other stories Mom had written for Sammy and me, or that she was so hot for this Beatrix Potter book Mom had been working on, which had nothing to do with us. Even at the funeral, Aunt Kath was talking about that miserable Potter book, asking if Mom ever talked to me about what she’d written.

  Julie said, “Shit, Ape, can’t you ever let things go?” She thrust the coal tongs out, and when Anna Page put her hand up to block them, Julia thrust the scalloped, coal-dirty ends closer to her face, backing her up against the slipper tub until Anna Page called out, “Uncle! Aunt! Grandmother! Second cousin thrice removed!”

  A smile tickled Julie’s lips, and her eyes edged toward crescents, but she didn’t relent with the tongs.

  “Don’t,” Anna Page insisted.

  Julie edged the tongs right to Anna Page’s nose, leaving her no choice but to grab the scalloped ends with her bare hands, nicely blackening her fingers.

  “Don’t!” she repeated emphatically. “Really, Jamie, don’t!”

  Julie blinked, holding the tongs tightly, her gray eyes filling with the same pain we’d seen so much of this first year without Jamie. In the silence, I remembered Anna Page, not long after Jamie died, saying to me, “Julie’s death would have left so much less devastation. Not even a husband now that she and Noah have split, not a best friend that I know of, unless it was Jamie, who was my best friend even if she was her sister’s, too.” We were all in the raw-loss stage of grief back then; she hadn’t meant what she’d said. I’d swallowed the hurt, thinking, If Julie has a best friend, it’s me; if I have a best friend, it’s Jules.

  Anna Page eased the tongs from Julie’s hands lest she drop them, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Julie. It’s just …”

  It was just that Jamie had died a year ago. First Jamie, then Dad, then Mom, all in a single brutal year.

  I joined them by the cold cast-iron fireplace, and I handed Anna Page the matches. She took one, and lit it, and set it to the paper, held it there until the paper caught. We stood together, the three of us watching as the flame crept toward the white block of fire starter, which caught and flared up into a surge of petroleum warmth.

  I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense.

  —BEATRIX POTTER,

  IN A NOVEMBER 17, 1896, JOURNAL ENTRY

  I DON’T KNOW IF I THOUGHT OF MYSELF AS DIFFERENT FROM OTHER children before I started school. I was always the youngest of the Wednesday Children until my brother, Sam, was born, there was that; but if they’d ever been uncomfortable with my mixed heritage, they’d adjusted by the time I might have realized. If they said anything at all about my appearance, it was to tell me I was beautiful: Aunt Kath and Aunt Frankie especially. Aunt Linda was always scolding them, saying they should praise my genius rather than my beauty, although how a four-year-old is supposed to be a genius unless she’s Mozart, I’m not sure. The first time I remember feeling different was at my little Palo Alto grammar school, which nowadays has lots of Asian kids, although fewer mixed-race kids than you might think. It had been Anna Page’s school, and Julie’s and Jamie’s, and Maggie’s and Lacy’s and Sarah’s and all the Wednesday Sons’ as well. I’d watched them go off every year without me, and when my turn for kindergarten came, I’d picked my favorite outfit to wear, the butter-yellow flowered gingham jumper in the photo on Mom’s night table, and armed myself with the Snow White lunch box that I didn’t need.

  I had recess at a different time than the bigger kids, and I didn’t know anyone on the swings or the monkey bars, playing tag out on the field or on the foursquare courts. I knew how to play hopscotch—Anna Page had taught me, and her sister, Lacy, told me I could just line up for a turn—so I stood behind a girl with a long blond braid that reminded me of Julie and Jamie, and made me feel less alone.

  The girl who’d been on the hopscotch court finished and hurried around to line up again. “Hey,” she said. “I go behind Meg!”

  The girl with the braid turned and peered at me with an odd expression in her gray eyes, not unlike Julie and Jamie’s eyes. “What are you?” she asked.

  At first I thought she must be talking to the other girl, and even after I understood the question was for me, I didn’t understand it. Did they play hopscotch differently at school? Did you have to pretend you were a cat or a dog, or be on one team or another, or pretend you were a fairy princess, like on Halloween?

  “I’m Hope,” I said.

  “But what are you?” she demanded.

  By then, the other girls in the hopscotch line were watching us.

  “I’m in Mrs. Kennedy’s class?” I said uncertainly.

  “I had Mrs. Kennedy last year,” another girl said. “She’s nice.”

  “But I mean, what are you?” the girl with the braid repeated. “Where are you from?”

  I knew this one. My address! I’d practiced my address and phone number; if I ever got lost, I was to tell a policeman I was Hope Tantry and give them my address and phone number, and they would help me get home.

  “I’m Hope Tantry, and I live at 1180 Channing in Palo Alto, California,” I said. I was going to do my phone number, too, but with all those girls staring at me, I couldn’t remember it.

  “Where before that?” the girl insisted.

  “She’s black, Meg,” the girl behind me said.

  I said, “I am?”

  “No, she’s not,” Meg said.

  One of the teachers came over to see what was going on. Not Mrs. Kennedy but someone else who said, “Girls, this is Hope Tantry. She’s Indian.”

  I was going to say “I am?” again, but then I remembered Ama, who lived in India. And before I could say anything, the girl with the blond braid—Meg—was popping her hand back and forth on her lips and making a warpath sound. She started prancing around me, her braid stretching up and down her back as she bobbed her warpath head, the other girls joining her even as the teacher insisted, “Girls! Girls!” This was years before Disney made any kind of Indian girl a hero, or made us anything at all.

  It’s such a small thing when you have it: a sense of belonging. You don’t realize it’s there until it’s gone.

  By the time I went off to Smith—a school I chose not only for its academics but also because a women-only college would save me the humiliation of being a wallflower even in classrooms—I’d been asked so many times “What are you?” and “Where are you from?” by people who expected to hear “Mumbai” or “Delhi” that I’d developed a push-button response: “I was born at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California, where I grew up. My dad is from India, but he came to the University of Michigan for law school in the 1960s and has lived here ever since. My mom is a Caucasian who grew up in Maryland. They’re both American. And so am I.”

  Sometimes I want to answer those questions with another question: How much time do you have? Sometimes I want to say,
My race doesn’t tell anything more about me than yours does about you. Sometimes I want to say, Oh, I just check all the boxes so I’m sure I get it right. But once you lose patience for the questions, you lose patience for the answers. I went through a period in college answering, “I’m a border rat. What the fuck are you?” It always shocked people to hear the F-word coming out of “such a sweet little mouth” even at Smith, but they never did ask anything more.

  You don’t make friends that way, though, so I learned eventually to stick to the script. It’s the details that convince people, or at least keep them from asking more. If I said my dad was Indian, for example, people might see me as growing up on some Cherokee reservation with fancy casinos and crummy schools. I say “from India” so they can at least conjure up the proper stereotype: crowded slums and saris, henna-painted skin.

  The funny thing is, I don’t exactly feel Indian even if I do look it, even if I’ve felt pulled in that direction. Not by my dad so much as by my Ama. She’s dead now, and I didn’t ever see her often, but I wrote to her in India at least once a week all my childhood, and you can say things in a letter that it’s hard to say aloud. Ama had expectations for me as well, though—ones that were as hard to get my head around: that I should wear a sari and garlands and circle a holy fire seven times at my Minnesota wedding; that Julie, my maid of honor, should carry around a tree for Kevin and me; that Sammy, like all good brothers, should have taken us to visit Ama the day after our wedding rather than driving us to the airport for our honeymoon flight. Dad said I could ignore all of it, that Ama was just being Ama, trying to manipulate me into marrying a nice Indian boy. But I don’t know. When Kevin and I had our horoscopes done—“Why not, if your Ama wants us to?” Kevin had said—they matched.

  The first time I met Kevin, eighteen months before we married, he didn’t seem fazed by my mixed race. I was at a tailgate party at Anna Page’s insistence. Never mind that I hadn’t gone to Stanford and didn’t care for football, never mind that I’d begun to think of myself as a professional woman who, like her, didn’t want to marry; I still found it hard to defy her. She said Kevin didn’t seem all that great on paper but he was the nicest, most charming guy she’d met since Isaac, and he was funny. He taught fifth grade—she’d met him when he brought a class on a field trip—and he reminded her of my dad. No, not Indian. Red hair and freckles. His kids called him “General Opie,” although they were far too young to have seen The Andy Griffith Show. “You can’t not fall for a guy who is that wonderful with kids,” she said.

  By the time the others began unpocketing game tickets, Kevin had me laughing so hard that I had the hiccups. He suggested a ride on his bicycle handlebars might scare them out of me. It was starting to rain, a few drops that maybe would continue or maybe wouldn’t, but he smiled his Opie smile and said, “I don’t mind a little rain. Do you?” He buckled his helmet under my chin, made a tiny paper airplane of his game ticket, and serenaded me with “Raindrops keep falling on my head” as we wobbled off.

  While we biked through the Stanford math and science buildings, he taught me silly lyrics about geometry to the tune of the song “867-5309/Jenny,” substituting 3.14159, the numbers that started pi. We circled Lake Lagunita, no lake at all that time of year, and cut through the New Guinea sculpture garden, the setting of the first short story he’d ever published. “On Friday nights when the artists were creating the sculptures, they played native reed pipes and did face and bark painting,” he said. “It was spooky-amazing. The story wrote itself.” He’d published only two stories in small literary magazines even he hadn’t heard of before he started looking for places to submit his work, but he called his writing “my work.” The work he did to support himself—what anyone else would call his work—was teaching, but he was so easy about it all, as if the writing was the accomplishment, as if the publishing was a different, less important thing.

  I told him my mother had written for decades and hadn’t published a word. I didn’t say anything about writing myself. I’d stopped writing altogether not long after I started practicing law.

  “Rodin took twenty years to finish Gates of Hell—not that I’m comparing my genius to his,” he said a little later as we wandered on foot through the statues in the Rodin sculpture garden, all those hard, dark bronze surfaces shaped into heartbreak, dampened in the light rain. He reached out and touched my hair then, for the first time, I would have told you, but he later confessed that as we’d biked, he’d leaned forward into the wildness of my windblown hair below his bike helmet on my head, basking in the brush of it against his cheeks, and eyes, and lips. “My favorite Rodin is The Kiss,” he said, moving his hand to my hip like the male lover in the statue, “although the figures don’t actually kiss. Their kiss is interrupted. Their lips don’t touch.” He smiled and leaned forward as if to kiss me, but he didn’t. Teasing me. I leaned forward and kissed him. He tasted faintly of the coffee we’d had at the tailgate party, with Anna Page.

  He took me to Palo Alto Bicycles that afternoon, where he proceeded to question every detail of every derailleur and brake, while my main concern was whether each bike came in red. He chose reflectors and lights, then asked the clerk how much it all came to. As I pulled out my credit card, saying under my breath from habit, “ ‘What is seven pounds of butter at 1/3, and a stick of sealing wax and four matches?’ ”—how many times had Mom and I quoted that Beatrix Potter line as we paid for groceries and clothes and books?—he pushed aside my card and handed the clerk his.

  “ ‘Now the meaning of “credit” is this,’ ” he said. “ ‘When a customer buys a bar of soap, instead of paying for it, she says she will pay another time.’ ” He bowed low, the way Pickles does in The Tale of Ginger and Pickles. “Fifth-grade economics. The kids are skeptical about reading something they think of as a baby book, but …”

  “The policeman with bead eyes and his helmet sewed on with stiches—‘Bite him, Pickles! He’s only a German doll!’ ” I said, resisting the urge to correct his inexact quote from the book.

  “God, how they laugh!”

  “But you can’t go buying bicycles for women you’ve only just met,” I protested.

  He smiled his strawberry-blond smile and said, “You have no idea of the things I can do.”

  “I’m quite sure my mother would disapprove of me accepting a bicycle from a boy I hardly know,” I insisted.

  “I’m a boy now, am I?” he replied.

  It wasn’t until we’d been dating for months that I worked up the nerve to ask if he’d slept with Anna Page. “You don’t want me to be the kind of ‘boy’ who kisses and tells, now, do you?” he teased, which made me laugh and left me wondering enough to put the question to Anna Page. “What else am I to do with my castoffs but throw them to friends?” she answered in a tone that left me thinking she was joking but not entirely sure and no longer wanting to know. It was ridiculous. I hadn’t wondered if she’d slept with Isaac before she’d introduced him to Jamie. Even if she had, it wouldn’t have meant anything; Anna Page never did seem to mean anything when it came to men. And by then, Kevin and I were deep into a whirlwind romance, already headed for that Minnesota altar even if we hadn’t admitted it to each other yet.

  That had been my choice, the Minnesota wedding, with only the Wednesday Gang and our families, and a few of his family’s friends in Kevin’s tiny hometown, where if you weren’t a blond or a redhead, you were from someplace else. That was what Kevin’s father had said the first time I met his parents, as his mom was getting over the shock of having a daughter-in-law-to-be who was half Indian.

  I know a lot more about being mixed now. I know that when I was born, the U.S. census didn’t allow for the possibility of me. Neither Dad nor I fell into any of the recognized racial groups. We were both “other,” he Indian and me a half. In earlier census years, some category of mixed race was recognized. You could be all black, or you could be mulatto, or for a brief period, you could be a quadroon (one fourth black), or
an octoroon (one eighth). I might have been considered mulatto. My children, if I ever had children with Kevin, might have been quadroons. The first time there was even an identifiable place for us on the census was in the year 2000, when I was nearly thirty. For the first thirty years of my life, whatever I was hadn’t been worth bothering to list.

  From the Journals of Ally Tantry

  8.11.2009, Ambleside. We were stomping around Wray Castle again today, walking along the lake, when it began to pour, and a man took pity on us and asked us in for tea. Now he’s invited me to dinner, and I’ve accepted. What a silly old fool I am.

  Well, if I can’t admit this in my journal, then what good is a journal? Today was the third time we took the launch to Wray Castle and walked the path along the lake, past the stone entry posts with the bold “No Motor Vehicles Beyond This Point” sign, the fine print of which allows “except for Ainsley’s End.” The house rather looms as you approach it, but I linger on the public bridleway below it, as if I half expect to see my mother’s face in the high tower window—never mind that she’s been dead for decades.

  Today we worked up the nerve to mount the stone steps and duck into the portico on the excuse of the rain. That set off a frightening dog inside, bringing the dog’s only slightly less frightening owner to the door. He insisted on making tea, and we sat in a room with inviting pink couches and green chairs, a warm fireplace, the rain safely beyond the hexagonal leaded glass. There was the most delightful cabinet there, with a hidden desk that pulls out where the center drawer ought to be—a desk, he told me, where Bea is believed to have written some of her books. Bea raised an eyebrow at this, but I ignored her and told him anyone might write anything at such a charming desk.

  He asked me if I wrote, and with the question, something soft showed in him, or the suggestion there might be something soft underneath his proper British façade. He seemed almost to hope I did write, and yet I couldn’t somehow tell him I wrote children’s books, so I told him what I tell everyone, that I mean to write something about Bea.