The Wednesday Sisters

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “I can run fast and I can write,” Linda said, a response, apparently, to Kath’s “It’s a beauty contest!” “Neither of which would look particularly nifty performed on TV.”

  Kath said she could play the piano, and Ally said she could, too.

  “I’d have to fall back on my baton-twirling skills,” I admitted.

  “Which would trounce the test tubes or incline planes or star charts I’d be reduced to dragging out,” Brett said.

  And somehow we were talking about Brett’s little sister. Yes, Brett had taught Jenn (and her brother, Brad, too, for that matter) how to focus a telescope, how to mix potassium perchlorate and aluminum powder, how to distinguish a blood cell from one of bone. Still, Brett never imagined Jenn would be applying to medical school. Brad, yes, but her sister?

  Ally said she’d thought about being a nurse but she couldn’t imagine cleaning bedpans, and I glanced surreptitiously at Brett’s gloved hands, wondering if she was afraid of germs.

  “Your li’l sis is fixin’ to be a doctor?” Kath asked.

  “You could still go to medical school yourself, Brett,” Linda said, and Brett looked startled, as if Linda had just put her finger on a truth Brett hadn’t seen, that she was jealous that her little sister was going to be something Brett had thought girls weren’t supposed to be.

  “Would y’all ever take your babies to see a lady doctor?” Kath asked. “Lordy, Lordy.”

  “Jenn doesn’t want to be a pediatrician, she wants to be a surgeon,” Brett said, which shocked us all; even if you could imagine a woman doctor, you pictured her working with children, like the closest doctor there was to a mom.

  And all the while those girls on the TV were walking across the stage in their one-piece bathing suits, not with bathing caps on but with their hair ratted up and sprayed into place, their mascara ready to run dark black the moment they got near water.

  Linda said she’d nearly gone to graduate school; she’d applied to the creative-writing program at the University of Iowa, but Jeff had wanted to go to medical school at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore (which had a fine creative-writing program, but Linda hadn’t been accepted there). “And then I was pregnant with the twins and they were born and I couldn’t get any sleep with them waking each other all night, much less go to school or write.”

  “I didn’t want to be a doctor, I wanted to be an astronaut,” Brett said, and we all burst out laughing, even Brett—we were getting a little tipsy. I thought for a moment that she must have been joking about her sister, too—a girl surgeon! But she wasn’t kidding about any of it, you could tell that by the sudden look in her leaf-bud eyes, all shaded and down-looking and watery even as she laughed.

  “You’d make a great astronaut, Brett,” I said. She would have, too. Brett would have made a dynamite astronaut.

  “Even before President Kennedy said we’d put a man on the moon—the ‘greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked,’ remember that?—Brad and I used to imagine it for ourselves,” Brett said. “Even before Yuri Gagarin, we used to imagine being the first two people to step on the moon.”

  We were quiet for a minute then, watching Miss Illinois flip through the air over her trampoline and drinking our drinks and remembering. It had been nighttime when the Russian cosmonaut had flown over Chicago, and my whole family had gone out to watch, to see the reflection of sunlight off his capsule. But I hadn’t even felt the awe of it—a man in space! I’d felt only the eerie fear of a Russian flying over me, looking down on my world.

  “I’m rooting for this girl even if she is too young to win,” Linda said as Miss Illinois finished her routine, and somehow Linda’s choosing her seemed almost as if she was saying she thought Brett really could fly to the moon. That we all could. That, as Esther in The Bell Jar wanted to believe, a girl didn’t have to relinquish her dreams on her wedding day.

  “She looks like she walked straight out of the fifties,” Ally said, “With her blond hair flipped up at the ends like on Carrie’s Barbie doll.”

  “I expect the judges are partial to that, though,” Kath said. “Lee surely is.” And she took a big slug of her sidecar, then another, draining the glass.

  I was about to offer her another drink—a third—when she went to the kitchen and fixed it herself. We all watched her for a moment, then tried not to watch. “Lee?” I mouthed to Linda, but she only frowned.

  “I used to think it would be neat to be a writer, too, a poet or a novelist,” I said, the confession spilling out with my own second drink. I’d written one novel already, a mystery set in Renaissance Italy, but I’d buried it in a drawer; even I could tell it was awful. That truth, though, would have to await considerably more alcohol.

  Kath, back in the family room, fresh drink in hand, bobbed her head agreeably, but something in the set of her strong chin said An astronaut and a novelist? You ladies are insane.

  “Or a librarian,” I said, backpedaling.

  “A novel,” Linda said. “That’s what I wanted to write, too.”

  “It’s not like I ever really thought I could,” I said. “It was just . . .”

  “Like wanting to be Miss America,” Ally said.

  I thought of the bright red A+ circled at the top of the first poem I’d turned in to Sister Josephine, of her urging me to write for the school newspaper, and making me editor in chief. Kath was right, though: I might have been the prom queen of high school English class, but no prom queen from my little neighborhood had ever gotten to the Miss Illinois contest, much less to the Miss America walk.

  “If you wanted to, Frankie,” Linda said, her voice surprisingly tentative, “we could start writing together.”

  I glanced at the television (a mother being mistaken for her daughter in the pool because she ate Grape-Nuts), imagining frank, take-no-prisoners Linda wielding a red pen over a poem or story of mine.

  “Just you and Frankie?” Kath said, and you could tell from the way she ran a finger over her fake-braid headband that she was feeling excluded.

  “We could start a writing group,” Linda said. “All of us.”

  There was a long pause, the only sound a Coke jingle on the TV, before Ally said she couldn’t write and Kath said, “How about a book club?”

  “But we already talk about books!” Linda said. “Wouldn’t you like to try writing one?”

  “Just for fun, maybe?” I said. “Nothing serious?”

  Kath asked where we’d ever find time to write, and Brett, too, seemed hesitant, but Linda rolled ahead in typical Linda fashion. “You could write a Pride and Prejudice set in the American South, Kath—”

  “Mr. Darcy Goes to the Derby!” I said.

  “Just for fun, like Frankie said,” Linda said. “It’s not as if we’re thinking we’re going to be the next Sylvia Plath.”

  From the smile hinted on Brett’s bow lips, I figured she was thinking what I was thinking—Methinks she doth protest too much (and knowing whom she was quoting, which I did not). But Linda started laying out a plan as if it had been decided: we’d all bring something we’d written to the park Wednesday; we’d move from our bench to a picnic table; we’d read our work and everyone would comment, like they’d done in Linda’s college writing class. Never mind that Kath was swearing on her aunt Tooty’s grave and Ally was talking about boys in high school sniggering at her poems and Brett had yet to say a single word. And the Miss America Pageant went on at its usual pace for quite some time, and not one of us could have told you what the talent was after Miss Illinois.

  By the time we returned our attention to the TV, Bert Parks was announcing the finalists. Kath must have been right about the judges liking that old-fashioned hair because Miss Illinois won despite being a young, blond athlete, more cute than beautiful. “I’m so glad,” Judith Ann Ford gushed from under her crown. “I feel like it’s a breakthrough.” And something made me shift uneasily in my paisley dress. Maybe it was the way she spoke or her silly flipped-up hairstyle, or maybe it was that proteste
r’s paisley dress or the bra strap cutting into my own shoulder, or maybe it was knowing Brett had wanted to be an astronaut and Linda wanted to be a writer even still—I don’t know. But for some reason I couldn’t shake the image of the naked woman on the poster, the stark black capital letters written on her skin: ROUND and RIB and RUMP.

  I COMMANDEERED the picnic table nearest the playground the following Wednesday, the poem that had seemed so remarkably brilliant that morning before anyone else was awake already losing its luster inside my purse. I brushed away the dried leaves and pulled the worst of the splinters from the tabletop, and I was setting out a big thermos of coffee and a plate of cookies when Kath arrived, defiantly empty-handed, followed by Ally, less defiantly so. I didn’t confess to them the existence of my poem—not even after Linda arrived admitting to a few paragraphs and Brett came bearing an entire first chapter. “A whole chapter!” we said more or less in unison. Linda didn’t even give her a hard time about the fact that it was a mystery.

  “Really, there is no possibility I could read it aloud, though,” Brett said.

  Linda almost single-handedly got the kids squared away, no small task; Anna Page was back in school, a big second-grader, leaving us nine under-five-year-olds to settle in the sandbox with bowls and measuring cups and sifters. “If everyone is good,” Linda promised them, “Maggie and Davy’s mommy will get Popsicles for us before we go.” “

  “Before lunch?” Jamie asked. Or maybe it was Julie.

  We poured coffee and set to work on Brett then, nudging and cajoling her to read. Even Kath and Ally, despite their resistance to Linda’s bludgeoning us all into writing, were dying of curiosity.

  “I couldn’t even read it to my mother,” Brett insisted.

  “You couldn’t read it to your mother?” Linda said.

  “Could you?”

  There was a stunned silence, Brett’s bow lips forming an O as she remembered: while the rest of our teenaged selves were struggling for turf with our moms, Linda was making her own after-school snack in an empty house.

  “I couldn’t imagine reading anything to my mom either,” I said. “It would be like standing naked in front of her, waiting for my flaws to be called out.” I looked to Maggie on the swings (the first to abandon the sandbox), wondering if my mom would even want to read what I wrote.

  Though she would, I thought. It was my father who would have considered my writing foolish.

  “I brought a poem,” I confessed. “But I just can’t read it.”

  Linda tipped the bill of her cap against the shifting sun. “Some writers we are.”

  She suggested we could just write instead, and while Kath and Ally were still balking I ran back to my house for paper and pens—actually three decent ballpoints, one respectable pencil, and an eraserless stub of a chewed-up pencil that was the only other writing utensil I could find besides crayons. But what exactly were we supposed to write? How could we come up with stories that hadn’t been written before?

  “Willa Cather says, ‘There are only two or three human stories,’” Brett said, “‘and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.’”

  Linda said her college writing professor had just dumped a bag of interesting things on the table and told them all to pick one and write about it for five minutes.

  “But we don’t have a bag of interesting things,” Ally said.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Linda grabbed her purse and upended it over the picnic table, spilling a brown leather wallet with dollar bills sticking out the top and her driver’s license showing through its plastic window, an old black leather eyeglass case monogrammed in initials that weren’t hers, a blue plastic checkbook, three keys on a whistle key chain, a tampon and diaper pins and change—pennies and dimes and quarters that rolled and scattered, falling through the cracks in the picnic table and landing in the grass at our feet. She stared at the glasses case for a moment, then extracted it from the pile and slipped it back into her empty purse.

  “Five minutes,” she said. “Just write. And don’t worry, we won’t read anything. Ready, set . . .” We all looked to the playground, where the kids were happily engaged. Linda’s J.J. and Kath’s Lacy were asleep in their strollers, and my Davy was pushing his trucks around on the blanket beside the table. “Write!”

  I looked at the long blue lines on the white sheet on the wooden table in front of me, all that emptiness. The edge of Linda’s wallet nearly touched the paper, the driver’s license upside down. I focused on that: height 5'10", weight 139, hair blond, eyes blue because she couldn’t check all the boxes for eye color, I guessed, and her eyes did look blue when she wore blue. I thought of my father teaching me to drive, his foot stomping on the brakeless passenger-seat floorboard, his voice booming, “Brake, for Christ’s sake, Frankie!” when I was nowhere near the stop sign yet.

  I set my eraserless stub of pencil to the blank page, trying to imbue that scene with a humor I hadn’t felt at the time. And somehow, the squeals of the children and the smell of airborne sand and the taste of the earthy fall air worked their way into my writing, too, and the urge to look up and make sure Maggie and Davy were okay, and my not wanting to look up, wanting to have this moment for myself.

  Linda called “Time!” after what seemed no time at all.

  No children maimed or dead out on the playground—that was reassuring. And even Ally and Kath had a little ink on the page, though Kath would admit—years later—that all she’d written that morning was “I swear I never met a soul half as bossy as Linda Mason.”

  “Okay, who wants to read first?” Linda said.

  After a good deal of resistance—she’d said we wouldn’t have to read! (though Kath, again years later, admitted to thinking she ought to volunteer, it would serve Linda right)—Brett said fine, she’d read first, Linda didn’t intimidate her. She read, interrupted only once by her daughter (who was dispatched back to the sandbox with a bucket and shovel). A few paragraphs about a wacky marble-rolling machine she and her brother built when they were in grade school. The rolling coins had reminded her of it.

  Kath said she liked how the passage was really about her brother even though it seemed to be about the machine, and Brett, surprisingly, looked for a moment as if she might cry.

  I volunteered to read next, saying, “But of course this isn’t really anything, I was just—”

  “Never apologize, never explain,” Linda said. “That’s what my writing teacher in college said.”

  “I don’t see you volunteering to read next,” I said.

  “Oh just shut up and read and I’ll read next, okay?”

  By the time I’d read about my driving lesson (which did get a chuckle), the natives were getting restless, so I went for the Popsicles—yes, Popsicles at 10:45 in the morning—and while the children dripped melted rocket pops on their faces, on their clothes, on the arms of those of us holding them in our laps, Linda read. Just a few paragraphs that started with the key chain, wondering what doors those keys might open, and ended with a key opening a temple, and inside the temple a thousand people filing past a casket and a little girl in the front wondering why so many people she didn’t know were claiming a loss she didn’t want to share.

  The five of us were silent for a long time afterward as the children licked their treats and giggled and stuck their tongues out to show them blue or green or orange. Finally Linda said, “Okay, Kath, your turn,” and you could tell from her voice that she was sure we all thought what she’d written was dreadful.

  Kath said what we all would have said: “I can’t follow something that good.”

  “Me either,” Ally said. “That was beautiful, Linda.”

  We spread the children’s lunch out on the picnic table, calling it dessert since the Popsicles had been lunch, though that didn’t convince them to eat more. While they ate, Linda laid out a plan for the next week: we would reread our favorite books, to see how they were written, and we would buy journals�
��the nice leather ones she’d seen at Kepler’s Books. Ally objected that she didn’t even want to write, and Kath started to agree, but Linda cut her off. “I’ll get journals for everyone,” she said. “I’ll get them this evening when Jeff gets home, and I’ll drop them by.” She looked to the playground, almost vacant now, with our nine eating their early lunch. “What we need is a babysitter,” she said. “But all mine are high school girls.”

  “I suppose I could ask my Arselia,” Kath said reluctantly.

  “Your Arselia?” Brett said.

  “My housekeeper,” Kath said.

  “You, Kath,” Linda said, “just ceded any excuse you might have had for not having time to write.”

  WE GATHERED the next Wednesday with our new journals and our copies of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, which Linda had also bought for us, and—best of all—with Arselia, who, for $1.60 an hour, minimum wage, would stay until noon. We set her loose with the children and started to chat until Linda tapped her watch face. “Ten o’clock sharp is writing time,” she said.

  “Though this is ‘just for fun,’ isn’t it?” Kath said. “‘Nothing serious’?”

  Neither Kath nor Ally had written anything in their new journals, but Brett and Linda and I had, and even Ally and Kath had started to reread their favorite books. I’d bought a paperback copy of Rebecca and cut it—literally—into chapters, which made it easier for me to think about each part.