The Wednesday Sisters

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Critiquing the manuscript was tough because a lot of what was unlikeable about Elizabeth was what might be unlikeable about Brett, too, if you didn’t know her well. But Linda launched us, asking if Elizabeth even wanted us to like her, and Ally said, “Or maybe she doesn’t want us to think she cares if we like her? Like a defense mechanism?”

  Like the way Brett hid behind her smartness, her quotes, I thought.

  “She’s smart as a whip, sure,” Kath said, “but we need to know there’s some meat on her skinny ol’ bones.”

  “Meat?” Brett said.

  “We need to see she wears gloves,” Linda said.

  Sudden silence, everyone trying not to stare at Brett.

  “I’ll bet she killed a man,” I said, that line from Gatsby, from when we first met Brett. “I’ll bet she killed a man over the way he was tearing up her manuscript.”

  “Justifiable homicide!” Ally said, with a very funny expression on her pale face, as if she’d just been released from the loony bin.

  That made us all laugh—even Brett—and our laughter brought us back together, the way only laughter can. It was like admitting we all wore our own little white gloves over some part of us. And the vulnerability of admitting that made us a little emotional, I guess, and it’s so much easier to laugh than to cry. Our laughter woke the baby, who’d been sleeping so quietly we’d practically forgotten him. And Brett leaned over to pick him up, but I said, “Let me,” because it was too much, to have to tend to a baby and listen to a critique of your manuscript at the same time. And I curled him up in my lap and jiggled him a little, ran a hand over his newly bald little cradle-capped scalp, and like most newborns he didn’t seem to care much whose warm arms he was in.

  Kath suggested Brett explain what she meant the story to be, and Brett tried, but she lost us by the third sentence of a five-minute explanation that concluded, “I guess it’s mostly about . . . beauty versus brains?”

  “That’s what I thought. That’s the big ol’ heart of the story, this idea that intelligence in a woman is about as desirable as a trapdoor on a canoe. But that doesn’t hardly get a mention until”—Kath flipped through the carbon copy she and Brett were sharing, the faintest copy—“here on page 305, Brett, in this scene with Lizzy and her mama. I was wondering, though, if her mama couldn’t be in the hunt from the get-go. You might could split this last chapter, make the first part of it prologue.” She turned to one of the last pages. “See here? Couldn’t that be the end of the prologue? Then you turn the page to chapter one. Boom: here’s Lizzy before she even knows she has a real mama, much less how brilliant she is. But the reader does know.”

  Brett nodded after a moment.

  Linda, who looked as if she’d been about to bust ever since Kath spoke, said, “I like that idea. I like that,” and I silently applauded her for waiting for Brett to like it first. She’d come a long way since that morning she’d bludgeoned us into reading after she’d sworn we wouldn’t have to read, that first meeting of what I just that minute began to think of as the Wednesday Sisters.

  “The Wednesday Sisters,” I said, not meaning to say it aloud.

  They looked at me for a moment with puzzled expressions, trying to sort out what in the world I was saying about Brett’s book.

  “We are!” Linda said. “We’re the Wednesday Sisters!”

  “The Wednesday Sisters Writing Society!” Ally said.

  And we all smiled, seeing even then, I think, that our friendship would change our lives, that it already had.

  Linda asked Brett then what she liked about Breakfast at Tiffany’s, why she’d chosen it as her model book, and Brett, after a moment, said she supposed she liked the way Holly just decides whom she wants to be and becomes that. “And the way she so easily abandons her past without ceasing to love it,” she said.

  “Think about that when you think about Elizabeth,” Linda said.

  Brett sighed. “But this will be so much work.”

  “God doesn’t believe in the easy way,” Kath said.

  “Like you told us Hemingway said, Brett: ‘First drafts are shit,’” Ally said.

  Kath kicked her under the picnic table—this was a sixth draft—but it was too late, Brett’s tears spilled over. She looked like I imagined her character Elizabeth looked in the flashback to when she was eight, when her classmates ridiculed her for using words like paucity and atmospherics and lithe.

  “Oh, shoot, I didn’t mean that, Brett,” Ally said. “I just meant even great writers . . .”

  But that wasn’t why Brett was crying, exactly, I didn’t think—or why I would have been crying if I were her, anyway. Which I would have been. Maybe it was just postpartum blues, all those hormones jumping around, but I thought it had more to do with feeling as vulnerable as that girl in her story. It had to do with knowing we were opening ourselves up, cutting ourselves open at our guts and letting the others see inside us in ways we couldn’t even see ourselves. It had to do with beginning to imagine opening ourselves up not only to each other, but also to the whole world. Because wasn’t that what we were hoping? That someday the things we’d squirreled away behind our little white gloves would be right out there on the bookshelves for anyone to see, our souls so pitifully disguised by our tortured prose.

  BRETT SHOWED UP the next Wednesday with new pages. Not a rewrite of the novel—none of us works that fast. Just something she’d banged out on the typewriter the day before. She read it aloud, shyly, a piece that, on the surface, was about watching the lunar landing, and remembering how she and her brother had dreamed of being astronauts, wondering if he watched with the same mixture of awe and pain that she felt, the pain of seeing someone else achieving that dream they’d shared. But underneath that surface, the essay was as much about watching her daughter watching it, too, and somehow it was about the wonder of the landing and the wonder of Sarah and how those two things were the future right there in her living room, and how one day Sarah would go off to school, and then to college, and then to walk on the moon or Mars or on into another galaxy altogether, and how Brett could not imagine letting her go. I watched, riveted by her words, seeing Sarah’s bare little hand slipping from Brett’s white cotton grasp. Sarah all grown up, the astronaut Brett herself had once dreamed she’d be. Brett removing her gloves to touch her daughter’s smooth cheek one last time before she boarded her spaceship, only to find that it was too late, that all her bare fingers could reach was the cold not-glass, the bubble dream of the space suit in which her daughter was now encased.

  When she finished reading, there was a long silence.

  “What?” Brett said. “I’m splitting my infinitives? Mixing my metaphors? Just tell me! If I can take that drubbing on my novel, I can take anything.”

  Kath wiped her eyes, and Ally pulled a tissue from her purse and blew her nose.

  “Have you thought about where you’ll send it?” Linda asked. And we all started talking about where we’d seen anything like this in the magazines we read.

  “But it’s just a little essay about nothing,” Brett said. And despite all our protests—of course Chip would love it, and Sarah did not come off as clingy, no one could read it and think Brett didn’t love Sarah to the ends of the universe, that’s what the whole essay was about—no amount of our saying so could convince her to send the essay out.

  EVEN AFTER WE PILED into Ally’s Nova the next morning, Linda remained mum about our destination. “Special outing, nine a.m., no excuses. I’ve got a sitter and Ally will drive” was all she’d said on the phone the night before, and this morning all we got was “Turn right here, then right again at the corner.” On University, we crossed over the freeway into East Palo Alto, then right again on the frontage road. And let’s just say you could have knocked us all over with a light breeze when we made a quick right into the parking lot.

  “A funeral parlor?” Kath said. “You’re taking us to a wake?”

  We stepped through a hushed entryway into a single large r
oom, rectangular and completely silent. The room was split by a center aisle, with slipcovered folding chairs on either side and carpet that was a deep, dark red.

  “In case there’s some spillage?” I whispered, and we laughed uneasily.

  The room was lined with pots of lilies, roses, and freesia, fragrant flowers that did not quite cover a pinch of formaldehyde, a reminder of dead frogs laid out on lab tables and awkward teenagers thrusting frog guts on tweezers into each others’ faces. At the front of the room stood an ornate coffin, carved and dark, its lid ominously closed.

  A man in a somber suit—vintage funeral-parlor director—stepped through a side door near the coffin and called a startlingly cheery hello to Linda, who introduced him as a friend of Jeff’s and hers.

  “Don’t worry, there’s no dead body in the coffin,” she said to us as we approached it. “That isn’t the point.”

  “So there is a point here?” Brett said.

  “For you, Brett,” Linda said. “Especially for you.”

  The director smiled, nothing somber or sympathetic about him.

  “This is one of our best models, a toe pincher,” he said. Its shape rather more diamond than rectangular, with the head pinched in, the toes even more so, Count Dracula–like. He pointed out its special features: the mahogany carved in crosses and grapevines (all hand-polished, which gave it that luster); the Last Supper depicted on the handle backplates and pietàs at the corners, all in antique gold. He opened the head half of the lid to reveal a diamond-shaped, pleated center panel on the lid, the entire interior done in beige velvet “with full-shirr roll and throwout, and matching pleated pillow.” He asked us to knock on the side door when we were finished. No one would bother us until then.

  Almost before he was gone, Linda was saying, “Okay, you first, Brett. Climb in.”

  “Climb in?!”

  “Into the coffin.”

  “Why?”

  “Brett,” Linda said. “I know you always know everything, but trust me this once.”

  “But I’ll get it dirty, for one thing.”

  Music began to pipe gently through the speakers, a sad trumpet solo at first, joined shortly by other instruments. An oboe. A violin.

  “Take your shoes off,” Linda said. “Take your shoes off and climb in. Frankie can be next, then Ally and Kath and me. Because that’s the order in which we’re going to be published.”

  That, of course, started a flurry of protests. Brett didn’t even want to be published, for one thing, and none of us believed Linda would be last. “You’re just putting yourself last to be polite, you know you are,” Kath said, and Linda said of course she was, but what did it matter?

  “What does that have to do with a coffin, anyway?” Brett asked.

  “Just get in, Brett,” Linda insisted.

  She opened the other half of the lid to make it easier, and Brett finally skinned her shoes off and climbed in. At Linda’s direction, she lay back on the pillow and closed her eyes. The room was completely silent for a moment, even the trumpet music ceasing, a short pause before the next piece of music began.

  “Now,” Linda said. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I do not want to be in this coffin,” Brett said.

  “Because?”

  “Because I don’t want to be dead. Because I have my children to raise, for one thing. What would Sarah and Mark do without me?”

  “Okay, so now imagine your kids are grown and you’re old and you’ve been sick and in pain and you are ready to die. You’re dead, in fact. You’re ninety years old and your children are in their sixties, they can survive without you, and let’s say Chip bit the dust with you, you’d turned your home into an old folks’ laboratory, and, drat, someone mixed something with something they shouldn’t have and blew the whole place up.”

  Brett bolted upright, startling us, looking directly at Linda.

  “You can’t be sitting up when you’re dead, just forget about that,” Linda said, setting a hand on Brett’s chest, trying to coax her to lie back on the velvet pillow again. “And even if you manage to die with your eyes open, they’ll be closed by the time you’re where you are now.”

  Brett gripped the sides of the coffin, but she did lie back, she did close her eyes. She even folded her hands at her stomach.

  I wondered if they would take her gloves off when she was really dead.

  “Double funeral here, you and Chip both,” Linda continued. “You don’t even have to worry about leaving him behind. So here’s the thing.” She closed the bottom half of the coffin so that Brett appeared only from the waist up. “Thirteen brilliant novels blew up with you. All stuck in a drawer along with one remarkable essay about the lunar landing that was never published because you never sent it out.”

  The thought of that passed across Brett’s thin little freckled face like the shadow of the landing module as it approached the moon. And as Linda closed the other half of the coffin lid, concealing Brett in its darkness, I could see the same shadow passing in her face, and in Ally’s, and in Kath’s.

  “No chance for posthumous publication, even,” I said.

  “No daughter finding the manuscripts and sending them off to New York,” Kath said. “No, ma’am.”

  “They’re gone. That’s it. Heavens to Betsy, that’s the end of you, the end of everything you might have been, everyone you might have touched with your work.”

  I wondered if Brett could hear us, or if the inside of that coffin was as quiet as death.

  Linda opened the lid again, finally, and Brett sat up.

  “You’re brilliant, Brett,” Linda said. “If you can’t do this, how are the rest of us supposed to have any hope?” She was talking about Brett’s writing, but she meant more than that. She meant How are the rest of us supposed to have any hope of becoming whoever it is we’re meant to be?

  She pulled a camera from her purse and directed Brett to lie down for another minute. “I’m not letting you forget this moment,” she said.

  We all took our turns in the coffin that morning, one by one shedding our shoes and confronting our futures, our mortality, our need. Linda took a photograph of each of us—to remind us when the inevitable forgetting began, she said—and when her turn came, I took a shot of her. We would put the photos someplace where we would see them every day, we agreed.

  For me, there was a . . . well, a joy, really, in climbing back out of that soft beige velvet, like being reborn. And I said—I don’t even know why I said it—that here we had the camera and this lovely setting. “It’s high time we had a photograph of the five of us together,” I said. “And what better occasion than upon our arising from the dead?”

  We were all laughing as we knocked on the director’s door, all giddy. He changed the music (to something more appropriate to the occasion, he said), and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic” blared from the speakers as if we were in a high school gymnasium, five young girls dancing together at a sock hop before the rest of the school arrived.

  Brett was the one who had the idea about climbing back into the coffin. We crowded around her, still with the music blaring—“believe in the magic that can set you free”—and as the director took that shot of us, we felt magical, and we felt young, with our futures ahead of us. Yes, we were young then, but we didn’t think we were, we hadn’t felt we were until that moment. Hadn’t felt we were anything other than ordinary, that we all could and would do whatever we decided to do, that if it would turn out in the end that we’d die without ever achieving our dreams, it wouldn’t be because we’d been too afraid to try.

  I don’t suppose there’s a happier funeral photo in all the world.

  WHEN THE LIBRARY DOORS opened the next morning, we went straight to the magazine section, and by noon we had a list of twenty publications to which Brett might submit her essay, the addresses and editors’ names printed clearly on three-by-five index cards that would become the first entries in a database we keep to this
day, though it’s computerized now. After peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chocolate milk for our children and ourselves at my house, we headed off to the park, a little submission army with our typewriters side by side on the picnic table. Brett drafted a cover letter, a “query,” while we banged out copies of the essay—in those days, you couldn’t just hit your print key again and again, or even photocopy things. Before the post office closed we had ten envelopes stuffed (self-addressed, stamped return envelopes included) and ready to mail.

  “Don’t tell anyone, not even your husbands,” Brett said.

  I supposed her reluctance stemmed from the same source mine would, even if she was Phi Beta Kappa from a great college and with three majors to boot. I supposed she, too, thought the only thing worse than failure was having everyone see your disgrace. I was wrong, it turns out. It wasn’t failure that Brett feared. But in the time that passed before I would come to learn that, I would take great solace in believing I was in her fine company on this.

  The first responses to Brett’s essay were discouraging—if that essay could draw return-mail dings, what hope was there for the rest of us? We all started looking at our own writing with increasing doubt. Then one day in late August, as the first coed students were registering for classes at Vassar and Princeton and Yale, Brett’s phone rang. Redbook wanted to publish her essay, and would pay her a hundred dollars to boot!

  We were sitting at our picnic table when she told us, the children tended by Arselia, who had baby Mark in her arms.

  “But I can’t let them publish it,” Brett said.

  “I swear on my aunt Tooty’s grave, Brett!” Kath said. “Just because a thing comes easily to you doesn’t mean it isn’t good enough.”

  Brett looked down at her hands resting on the picnic table. “But Brad . . . my brother . . .”

  “He’s the most charming person in the essay!” I said. “I’m sure he’ll love it.”