by Kate Walbert
“And a husband,” Chick adds.
“Here,” Dorothy says, offering the bouquet to Chick.
“Gorgeous,” Chick says, sniffing. “Sissy,” Chick yells, though Sissy has magically appeared, drinks on a tray and the polishing rag slung over her shoulder. Chick passes her Dorothy’s bouquet, then turns back to the group, who remain fixed where they are, as if waiting for attention to animate them.
“Hi, Dorothy,” they say, released in unison.
“Hello, everyone,” Dorothy says back. “Hello, Laura,” she adds, recognizing Laura Rasmussen, a younger woman from the club, a good golfer, who smiles and waves, mouthing another hello. Chick pulls an empty chair from the circle and gestures for Dorothy to sit; the rest of the women, now distracted by Sissy’s return, accept drinks from the tray and pass a mother-of-pearl bowl of cocktail nuts. The drinks are gin gimlets. The nuts an assortment, shelled and salted.
“Hello?” Chick says, clapping again. “Knock-knock?” The women quiet and turn toward her.
“Should we review?” Chick says. “To my left is Jean, our Big Sister.”
Jean nods as she’s introduced. She looks nothing like the other women in the circle. Her thick, graying hair has been tied into two braids with a kind of rainbow yarn and parted so evenly down the middle she might have used a knife. She wears dungarees and a patterned blouse, the sleeves rolled past her elbows as if earlier she had been kneading bread.
She looks at all of them and smiles. “Hello,” she says.
“Hello,” they say.
“So,” she says. “Okeydokey,” she says. “What are we here for? Has it been explained?”
“Let’s get the names down first,” Chick says.
“Oh,” she says. “Right.”
“I have the ball,” says Chick, reaching beneath her chair to bring up a tennis ball.
“Fun and games?” Laura S. says.
* * *
There are apparently two Lauras: Laura S. and Laura R. The women’s names are now spelled out on sticky labels and stuck over their breasts. Everyone has had a drink and been apprised of the following, known in the movement, Big Sister explains, as our pledge of allegiance: There are no rules; there is no bad idea in a rap session; everything goes; Big Sister is the boss.
“So,” says Chick, looking at all of them and crossing her legs, muscular, she’d be quick to tell you, from preferring to walk her daily eighteen holes and carrying her own bag. “Since I have the ball, I’ll go first,” she says.
“Great!” a few of them say.
“I had an abortion,” Chick continues, her tone relatively unchanged. “No, I had two abortions. Both before I was twenty. Both before I met Georgie.”
Big Sister tilts over to rub Chick’s back, though it doesn’t appear to be in need of rubbing. Chick bristles a bit. If her eyes are filled with tears, she hides it well.
“Sara?” she says, tossing the ball to Sara.
“Me?” Sara says, catching it.
“Yup,” Chick says.
“I go next?” Sara says, holding the ball.
“If I throw it to you, you go next.”
Sara, who sits directly across from Chick in a skirt and top more customarily found in South America, turns to Big Sister. “I thought there were no rules in a rap session,” she says.
“Speak your mind,” Big Sister says, and her voice booms out and settles over all of them like a silky parachute.
“I hate rules,” Sara says. “That’s the first thing. And I feel like—God, this is hard—I feel like we always have to live by this bullshit protocol, these rules—”
“We?” Big Sister interrupts.
“Yeah. Us,” Sara says.
“Here? In this circle? Or do you mean women in general?” Big Sister asks.
“Is it a rule we have to state the obvious?” Sara asks.
In time it will be revealed that Sara is the one woman among them with a graduate degree, and that though she had once believed this would elevate her above the noisy din, the degree did nothing more than require her to waste a few years in Boston, prolonging the inevitable.
“The inevitable?” Big Sister asks.
Sara’s look could kill.
“The inevitable,” she repeats. Then, more brightly, “Dorothy?”
“I’m sorry?” Dorothy says. She’s heard her name but she’d been thinking, trying to picture Sara in the snows of Boston, her jeans frayed around ragged sneakers, her coarse shirt tucked into a waist cinched with a bright, handmade macramé belt. Dorothy had met women like Sara before, certain older friends of Claudia’s, teachers Claudia brought home, requiring role models, she had told Dorothy, of a more appropriate kind. Simpatico, Claudia had said. Capisce?
Dorothy had been imagining Sara in the Boston snow. “Oh yeah,” Sara says, tossing the ball to Dorothy, “and I had an abortion, too.”
* * *
That Dorothy is here and not at her weekly bridge game, that she has made several telephone calls to reschedule this and that, to find a fourth, to arrange a babysitter, is a bit of a puzzle to her. True, she had been flattered when Chick called, Chick of the faster set, a woman who turned heads when she walked into the clubhouse, her golf shoes clicking the flagstone as if she were dogged by maracas. (Chick rarely went without them: either worn or dangerously slung over one shoulder, laces cinched, spikes down.) Yet Dorothy has little to no idea what is now expected of her, what she could possibly add to the conversation. This is what Jean, the Big Sister, had called it: We’ve come here today to have a conversation, she had said, to rap our experiences, to find the words to our collective history.
It had been a stirring introduction, only dampened by the fact that Big Sister read from prepared notes and paused on occasion to bite the end of one braid, her shoulders cattywampus, as if they’d been cast in a defective mold. Still, conversation somehow bloomed when she spoke it, unfurling the possibility of other words of a richer kind: words packed into sentences as ornate and complicated as those found in closed books, words that zigged and zagged, bumped and ruptured, words she could crawl out of, or maybe into—conversation a forest thick with evergreen through which, she could now see, lay a suggestion of a path. There light, tempered and soft, sparkled, beckoning her forward.
“Where are we going?” Big Sister had said in conclusion. “Whence did we come?” And to this Maggie Sykes had spontaneously applauded, though she stopped, immediately, shifting in her hard, straight chair, patting her name tag as if comforting a baby at her breast.
* * *
It’s a good feeling, Dorothy thinks, to catch a ball, a camp feeling, though she had never been, a summer feeling, regardless, something of promise in it—she might win!—the ball new and firm. She thinks of the pleasing sound of a tennis can being opened, the release of that air, the sigh of it, though she wouldn’t call it a sigh, exactly, harder than a sigh, stronger, a gasp, maybe, or a gulp, or even—
“Dorothy?” Big Sister says.
“What?”
“Your turn,” Big Sister says.
“Oh, right,” Dorothy says. “Right,” she says.
They are all of them staring. She sits in a ring of unfamiliar women and they are all of them staring at her, waiting for her to say—what? She is unused to this, unused to being watched or, rather, seen. The ballroom dancing lessons, offered by Vivian Foxe—who once, apparently, lived in New York and studied with Martha Graham—would be an antidote to this, she had told Charles, an attempt to break out, to twirl and dip, to have fun, she had said to him, fun something they had once had in spades, or at least occasionally. Hadn’t they? Besides, the children would get a kick out of their parents’ dancing and—why not? Black tie! Club championship! She had shown Charles the mimeographed page with the specifics: limited space, couples only, come as you are (in formal attire), strap your dancing shoes on.
The night of the first lesson they had dressed in their fancy clothes: Charles in his military tuxedo, Dorothy in a sequined dress sh
e had found years earlier at the Junior League Stop & Swap and bought on a whim. It had been a dark night, predictably, with the bluish March moon, too chilly to forget a wrap. Charles had linked his arm in hers and led her down the stone walk, breaking away only to open her door of the station wagon, to bend with a flourishy bow as if earlier the station wagon were a pumpkin and he a mouse. The children, or rather Lucy (Claudia had something else to practice, though she wished them well. Have a wonderful time! she had said, speeding off. Break a leg!), clapped and clapped, watching. She stood silhouetted with the babysitter in the light of the hallway chandelier, the front door open, the two flanked by the ghoulish shadows of twin rhododendrons. Dorothy looked up to see Lucy raise a shaky hand, the babysitter’s arm linked and tight around her thin shoulder. Earlier, when Lucy had heard they were going, she had curled into a soft ball beneath the dining room table, refusing to move, refusing to budge, so that it did not surprise Dorothy to find her crumpled note crammed into the beaded clutch she carried. This before they got there, as she searched for a cigarette to calm her nerves. The note, written on a tear from a brown grocery bag, took some time to unfold.
“I am a hollow bone,” it said, the o’s shaped into sad smiley faces, so that, in the dark of the automobile, Dorothy had to read it twice to be sure.
“Dorothy?” This now Big Sister.
“Yes?”
“Remember our pledge of allegiance?” she says.
“I am a hollow bone,” Dorothy says.
Big Sister leans forward, craning around to look Dorothy eye to eye. “You are a hallowed bone?” she says, the room deadly silent, though Maggie Sykes, the unanimously elected recording secretary (there had been no challengers), scribbles notes.
“Hollow,” Dorothy says. “ ‘Hollow bone.’ ”
“Oh,” Big Sister says, pulling back. “A hollow bone.”
“Did everyone hear that?” she says, looking around the circle, looking to Maggie Sykes. “Did everyone hear Dorothy’s contribution?”
The group nods, although a few are distracted by a sudden grating mechanical sound—a backhoe? a dump truck?—out the opened bay windows.
“Sissy!” Chick yells, but Sissy is already there, cranking the levers closed, drawing the draperies across the light. She circles the furniture to click on individual lamps: a floor one with beaded glass, a large hooded bottle containing a ship, a small antique, its shade fluted into pleats. In the gradual dawning, the women turn back to Dorothy to hear what else, their eyes deep and unblinking, as if carved from wood or cast in bronze and gilded. They are panels on an ancient, intricate door, fifteen feet tall, top to bottom, with an iron knocker and brass nails. They guard a vault of impossible treasure or a Renaissance baptistery; no doubt they stand for something biblical, tell a riveting story, though perhaps one needs the headphones to understand.
* * *
The tennis ball rests in the cradle of Dorothy’s lap, furry and uncomplicated and impossibly bright. Don’t rush into silence, Big Sister had said. Our history, she had said, resides in silences.
Sara had snickered at this, but then again, Sara had snickered so often that Chick had asked if she were allergic and should Sissy put the dog out?
“Dorothy?” This now Chick, impatient.
“Yes?”
“Are you with us?”
“I’m here,” Dorothy says.
“If you’re finished, you might want to toss the ball,” Chick says.
“Oh,” says Dorothy. “I can toss it now?”
“There are no rules,” says Chick. “But you might.”
“Am I finished?”
“If you’d like to be,” Chick says.
Dorothy picks up the ball. “Should I toss it?”
“I’m here,” Chick says, holding out her hands to catch.
“You want it again?” Dorothy says.
“I could go again,” Chick says, leaning forward, hands reaching. “There’s no rule that I can’t.”
* * *
The first thing you would say about her husband, Georgie, is that he’s a natural dancer, slim-waisted, broad-shouldered, a bit of a resemblance to Gene Kelly, if you were looking for that. Suffice it to say, he has a kind of feminine style. Always had. By that I mean, Chick adds, he’s a dresser. Likes his spats, his trousers pressed. “I’ve never seen the man in jeans,” she says. “And also, he’s easy to talk to.”
The women cross their ankles, their flats kicked off and carried by Sissy back to the foyer, where they are paired and lined in rows: Pappagallos in various colors, sandals with daisies chiseled in the cowhide or bright artificial flowers attached to the straps. Now in the soft glow of the lighted room the women’s feet, bare and colored at the toes, caress the Corsican rug. They have had another round of drinks; they are trying to think of what to say next.
“We married the day after graduation. You know, everybody did that sort of thing then. Boom boom. Georgie had a certain light in his eyes. I won’t say I didn’t fall head over heels. I did, God help me. Head over heels. So he popped the question and we got married. The day after graduation, I already told you. Boom boom. The day after that, I mean the day after that, he told me he prefers boys. Just so. Boom boom. Matter-of-fact and how-do-you-do. Mary, he said—I was Mary then, a good Catholic girl, you know—he said, Mary, I must tell you. I prefer boys. Which is not to say he couldn’t, just that he preferred the other. I mean, he wanted to make his preferences known.”
Here Chick pauses as if to take a sip of water, but there is no water, only a pitcher of gin, and they’ve finished that, and so she holds out her empty glass. “Sissy,” she yells, and Sissy is there, her bright white uniform stark as she leans to refill Chick’s glass from a bottle.
“Jesus, would you give her a break?” Sara says.
“What?” Big Sister says.
“I’m talking to Miss Diarrhea of the Mouth. I’m saying, ‘Tell Sissy to sit, already.’ Let’s invite her in. Let’s see what Sissy has to say.”
The women in the circle turn from Chick to Sissy to Big Sister to Sara, who reaches over and plucks the ball from Chick’s lap, tossing it too quickly in Sissy’s direction. It spins then plonks the empty pitcher on the drinks tray.
“Game point,” says Laura S., lighting a cigarette.
“I could take a load off,” Sissy says.
“Take a load off,” Sara says, standing up and offering her chair.
“Sit here, Sissy.”
“I’m Sister,” Sissy says.
“Sister,” says Sara, pointing to Sissy, “and Big Sister,” says Sara, pointing to Jean.
“Never were there such delightful sisters,” sings Laura S. She smiles and blows some smoke out.
“We’re getting off subject,” Big Sister says.
“What’s happening?” Chick says. “I’m not finished.”
“Go on,” says Big Sister. “It’s all good.”
“I was telling you about Georgie,” Chick says.
“We’re listening. We’re still listening,” Big Sister says. Someone asks for the nuts, and the mother-of-pearl bowl is passed counterclockwise toward the requester.
Chick begins again, and then she does not; she’ll desist, she says. She’ll peter out. “Kaputt, Ich bin,” she says. “Ich bin kaputt.”
“You were talking about Georgie’s preferences,” Big Sister says, encouraging.
“As per boys,” Sara says, “as in, not you.”
“I’ve lost my place is the point,” Chick says.
“Ditto,” Beverly says, somewhere in the dark.
“You’re here?” Chick says, squinting. “Bev?”
“Present,” Bev says.
“My darling,” Chick says, scooting forward on her folding chair, inching toward the tennis ball with her big toe to push it weakly in Beverly’s direction. “Join us,” she says.
* * *
The afternoon waxes and wanes—the ball lost, eventually, hidden in one of Chick’s sneakers by Sara on her wa
y to the powder room.
Now it’s Faith’s turn, her voice issuing up from the living room, rising and falling as she describes her delivery—how she was strapped to the bed and cinched tight with buckled leather belts; how she was held down as if she were insane. No one ever said that they would do that. “I mean, no one ever said,” she said. “Did anyone ever say that?”
“They don’t tell you,” Laura R. adds. “They don’t tell you any—”
“Ruptions,” Big Sister says, “come from interrupt—”
“They gave me a shot of something,” Faith continues, “then they all left the room. Like they had a train to catch, or a curtain. They shut the little door, and no one was there at all. I couldn’t move. They left the lights on, all the lights, and the shot made me sweat and shake, and the baby—it smelled like garlic. Not the baby but the whole room. Someone must have had it for dinner. And when the doctor came in, he was talking about a television program, and he didn’t even look at me, say hello—”
“God, when Michael was born, I swore like a trucker. I mean, the language!” Chick has slipped off her chair and sprawls on the Corsican rug, an ashtray at her elbow. “And of course Georgie was off somewhere, with some orderly, no doubt.”
“Chick,” Big Sister says.
“Or maybe a male nurse.”
“Chick,” Big Sister says.
“I’ll shut it,” Chick says.
“Button it,” Big Sister says.
“I’ll button it,” Chick says.
Sissy snorts a laugh. “Like hell,” she says. She sits cross-legged on the folding chair, the mother-of-pearl bowl in her lap, the white uniform stretched above her knees. She’s untied her shoes and slipped them off her feet. She has had a drink, and she might have another. “Being off duty,” she had said in Chick’s direction. “Being invited to participate,” she had said. Sara sits on the floor in front of Sissy, leaning back against the legs of Sissy’s chair, toe to toe with Chick. Earlier, they played footsie—Ph.D. against Married-to-a-Homosexual, Sara had proposed, though, she said, it was an unfair match, really, Chick already up two abortions to one. This before the break, when Big Sister had asked for a moment of silence and then invited them all to stand—shoulder to shoulder, as it were, bone to bone.
