The Wednesday Sisters

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Brett shoved her hands under the table and met my gaze, as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words even with her incredible vocabulary.

  “You can’t make his dream come true,” Linda said quietly.

  “You don’t know what Brad’s been through, Linda,” Brett said, speaking even more quietly than Linda had, as if Mark were asleep in her arms.

  “You can’t make anyone’s dream come true but your own, Brett,” Linda said. “Only your own. That’s it.”

  Did we buy a bottle of champagne and celebrate? You bet we did. And when that essay appeared on newsstands, we opened a second bottle to celebrate that.

  It came as a huge surprise when, just a few weeks later, Linda sold her first story—to a small magazine no one had ever heard of, with no circulation whatsoever, but that didn’t matter one whit to us. It was that first story she’d given us, a simple thing about a mother putting her children to bed, and I remembered how critical we’d been of it, and how she’d listened and taken notes.

  “You never told us you were even fixin’ to send it out, Linda,” Kath said—not an accusation, but with a hint of feeling betrayed.

  I swallowed against the same swelling emotion, the little voice saying Linda must think this was some sort of a competition and she’d just won—or at least come in second after Brett. I remembered a boy I’d dated in high school, who told me I wasn’t hurt that he’d broken up with me, I was mad that I hadn’t broken up with him first. “Well, it’s wonderful anyway,” I said.

  Linda met Kath’s eyes, then mine. “It wasn’t like that,” she said quietly. “I was afraid you’d say it wasn’t ready—which it wasn’t, but I guess I needed to get it out there, to get those rejections to see that. After a few revisions, some editors wrote back with personal notes, sometimes even with comments, and I wanted to ask if you guys agreed with them, but how could I when I hadn’t even told you I’d sent it? So I just revised again and mailed it back out. Sixty-three times.”

  “Sixty-three!” In unison, all four of us.

  “I have a lot of index cards to add to our collection,” she said.

  “Sixty-three,” Kath repeated. “Lordy, Linda, how in the world could you take that much of a whippin’?”

  “Heavens to Betsy, sixty-three rejections,” Ally said soberly.

  Linda sat back in her chair, crossed her legs. “If I don’t believe in my own work,” she said, “how can I expect anyone else to? Besides, it was only sixty-two rejections. The last one was a yes.”

  LINDA WAS STANDING in front of the bathroom mirror one Tuesday night that August, still smiling over a Woodstock joke Johnny Carson had told in his opening monologue, when she raised her arms to slide on her pajama top and noticed a funny pucker in the skin on her left breast. Her fingers went to the spot, her pajama top dropping to the floor. She could feel something, not in the skin but underneath it. A small hardness, the size of a pea.

  She thought of her mother, how she’d run from her mother and her awful arm, how that must have broken her mother’s heart.

  She felt again, sure she must be mistaken. But the lump was still there. “

  Jeff?” she said, a whisper. She opened the door into the bedroom and stood there in her pajama bottoms, still naked from the waist up.

  Jeff was propped up against the pillows with a medical journal in his hands, watching Johnny Carson announce the night’s first guest: “. . . her new novel is The Love Machine. Please welcome the beautiful Jacqueline Susann!”

  He looked to Linda, his eyes drawn to her naked breasts. “Hey,” he said. “Does this mean I’m going to get lucky?” “

  Jeff,” she said in a louder voice, more like panic.

  He was out of the bed and in front of her in no time, his hands on her arms, looking directly into her eyes. “What, Linda? What is it?”

  She swallowed once, twice. “A lump,” she tried to say, but her voice didn’t come out.

  “What!” Jeff insisted. “Damn it, Linda, you’re scaring the hell out of me.”

  Something about his panic calmed her. She focused on the sameness all around her: the medical journal abandoned on the bed; Port-noy’s Complaint on her own nightstand, bookmarked to the page she’d been reading; the Tonight Show audience laughing on the TV. “

  A lump,” she said more surely. “I think I felt a lump. I’m sure it’s nothing, but—”

  “Oh, shit,” Jeff said, turning away from her, running his hand through his dark hair.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Linda assured him. “I was just startled. It’s probably nothing.”

  On the television, the Tonight Show band played a few short notes.

  “Shit,” Jeff said. “Okay. Okay. We’ll call Albert. Shit, what’s his number?”

  “It’s nearly midnight,” Linda said.

  Jeff looked at her as if she’d just insulted him. Suddenly self-conscious, she turned to the bathroom, retrieved her pajama top, pulled it over her head.

  In the moment she was turned away from Jeff, he bolted out the bedroom door, down the stairs to the phone in the kitchen. She heard pages flipping, Jeff looking for his colleague’s home number, then his voice: “Albert, listen, Linda’s got a . . .”

  In the long pause that followed, Linda crept down the stairs, peeked around the corner. Jeff sat on the kitchen floor, in the dim light that filtered down from upstairs. He had the phone receiver to his ear, but his head was tucked down to his knees.

  He looked up, focusing on the cabinets across from him. He heaved a big breath. “A lump,” he whispered. Then after another moment, “Yes.”

  “Jeff,” Linda said.

  He stiffened. He’d heard her, but he didn’t look her way. He listened into the receiver for another moment and, still without looking at her, handed it over. His hand, she thought, looked like her father’s: broad and muscular, and unsteady.

  She was chilled all of a sudden.

  She took the receiver, answered Albert’s questions. The lump was in her left breast. At about three o’clock. Yes, near her armpit. The size of a small pea. Not as hard as a marble, but harder than chewed bubble gum. She listened to Albert for a few minutes, then handed the receiver toward Jeff. “He says there’s nothing to do tonight,” she said. “

  He says to call his office in the morning and he’ll get Ellie to work me in.”

  As Linda headed back upstairs she tried to block out the sound of Jeff’s voice pleading with Albert, then growing angry. “I could drive Linda over right now, we could be there in ten minutes.” And she knew Albert was telling him what he’d just told her, that they would almost certainly have to do a biopsy, that that would take a few days to arrange.

  She turned off the television in the bedroom, turned off the lights, climbed under the covers, laid her head flat on the pillow. She stared up at the ceiling, trying not to think, trying to get warm.

  From downstairs, Jeff’s voice, still badgering Albert. “Okay, seven o’clock, if that’s the best you can do. We’ll be at your office at seven a.m.”

  She heard the receiver click onto the cradle. The house was silent for a long moment before she heard the refrigerator door sucking open, ice clinking in a glass. A bottle twisting open. Liquid splashing out. Jeff’s scotch.

  She was still lying there, awake, when Jeff came upstairs finally. She closed her eyes, able to bear the darkness with him there, and pretended to sleep.

  He eased onto the bed and under the covers, but he stayed at the very edge of the mattress, as if he was afraid to get too near her in case she was contagious. She lay awake all night, listening to the sounds of him lying awake, too. She had not felt so alone since before she’d met him, since before he’d first spoken to her at a fall mixer her freshman year at college. She’d been wearing her favorite sweater, a forest-green cashmere cardigan she claimed she liked to wear without a blouse underneath because she loved the soft wool against her skin, although the truth was that a blouse ruined the drape of the sweater,
the way the thin green wool accentuated her breasts.

  “That’s a super sweater you’re wearing,” Jeff had said, his first words not memorable on their own. But she placed her hands over his eyes without even thinking, without hesitating to touch this boy she’d never met. “Do you really like it?” she asked. “Then tell me, what color is it?” She felt the flush of his embarrassment against her palms, and she knew then it wasn’t the sweater, exactly, that he admired, knew it even before he said, “Blue?”

  “MOST LUMPS ARE just fibrocystic tumors or fibroadenomas, especially at our age,” Brett said the next morning when Linda told us about finding the lump, having already been to the doctor that morning. She’d persuaded Jeff to stay home with the children while she went to see Albert at seven. She hadn’t wanted to alarm the children by dragging them along.

  “They don’t think it’s hereditary, either,” Brett said. “Or if it is, genetics play only a minor role, so the fact that your mom—” Her gaze dropped to her gloved fingers tightly intertwined on the picnic table. “We think it’s caused by viruses or chemicals or hormones. We know mice can transmit breast cancers to their young through viruses in their breast milk, and researchers have found—”

  “I read this article in Reader’s Digest,” I interrupted. You could tell Brett meant to be helpful—if she were Linda, she’d want the scientific facts—but you could see Linda realizing she might have caught cancer from her mom’s breast milk, and thinking she’d breast-fed her own children, too. “It said even if it’s . . . not good, they do an operation, a mastectomy, and most women live for years.”

  For five years, that’s what the article had said. The five-year survival rate for breast cancer was 80 percent.

  “I’ve Lived with Cancer” was the title of that article, about a woman who was thirty-seven when she discovered a lump in her breast. It had been weirdly upbeat: most lumps were nothing, and for those that were something, an operation would likely save you, and your husband would still find you attractive, even without your breasts. But the details were sobering: a permanent form cost fifteen dollars, and they came in all sizes so you could feel “perfectly balanced.” I was left imagining taking my kids into the ocean, seawater dripping from my permanent form for hours afterward. I was left picturing myself cowering behind the bathroom door while Danny, in bed, willed himself not to be repulsed. Or worse. In five years, Davy would be only seven, and Maggie ten.

  In five years, Jamie and Julie would be ten, like my Maggie. In five years, J.J. would be six.

  “Jeff is just flipping out,” Linda said, her gaze fixed on the rough wood table in front of her. “It’s like he’s already imagining me without a breast, already imagining having to climb into bed every night with a freak.” The word spit out, but with a crack in her voice.

  “Linda,” Kath said gently.

  “Like he’s crawling into bed with a corpse,” she said more quietly, her eyes shaded by her Stanford cap, but tears making tracks down the arc of her cheek, under her jaw, disappearing into the bold stripe of her turtleneck, the one she’d worn that first day I met her. “It’s like he thinks I’m already dead, like he’s already drawing away from me so he can bear it like he . . .” She swiped a hand across her eyes. “His mom . . . Like my mom.”

  Had died, too, she meant, leaving unspoken the details. Was he two or twelve or twenty when she died? Had she been ill long, or at all? Had she been hit by a car and left in a coma? Had she been unstable, taken too many pills?

  “What does the doctor think?” Kath asked gently.

  Linda tucked her hands underneath herself on the picnic-table bench, straightened her spine. “He thinks it’s benign, but he wants to do a biopsy. It’s a small lump, so he’ll cut out the whole thing and they’ll look at it under the microscope, just to make sure.”

  There was an audible sigh of relief around the table: Small Lump, Probably Benign.

  “Jeff is trying to arrange a hospital bed for me now.” She looked to the empty mansion across the park. One of the front steps had splintered and fallen in on itself. I wondered when that had happened, if it had been hours or days or weeks.

  “Good,” Brett said. “The sooner, the better.”

  “They’ll put me under, and if the biopsy . . . if it’s bad, they won’t wait, they’ll just do the mastectomy and I’ll wake up and . . . Oh, God.”

  That’s what they did back then: they put you under for a biopsy, and if you woke with your chest and your arm all bandaged, you knew—if you could bear to know it—that your breast was gone, that it was cancer, although no one would likely tell you it was until you’d had a chance to recover from the surgery. You trusted your doctor back then. You weren’t given any other choice.

  “I don’t think I can do it,” Linda said. “I don’t think I can bear to let them put me to sleep knowing when I wake up . . . My mom, you know . . .” She waved a hand in front of her arm. Her gaze found J.J. on the swing, and you could see in her pretty face the little girl she must have been, afraid of her own mother’s hug.

  “And my kids,” she said, “my kids . . .” But she didn’t finish the thought; she left it there, left us imagining Julie and Jamie huddled in their closet, J.J. standing at salute, watching his mother’s coffin being drawn through the street.

  Jeff failed in his effort to get Linda’s biopsy done that day; the hospital bed could be arranged, but obtaining an operating room for anything short of an immediately life-threatening emergency was more problematic, even for Jeff. Left with no choice, he allowed himself to be talked into being reasonable with the same rationale we all used to console ourselves—that most lumps were nothing. The biopsy was scheduled for the following Thursday, eight days later. And by the end of that morning Linda had pulled herself together, or pulled herself in, anyway. She insisted in very frank Linda fashion that if we uttered one more word about it before she knew for sure—to her, to anyone else, even among ourselves—she would never forgive us. That if we called her to see if there was anything we could do (there was not, she insisted), if we even just called on some lousy trumped-up excuse to see if she was okay, she would never forgive us. She was not going to think about it, not for another moment, and we weren’t to either.

  “No point in losing sleep over something that is almost certainly nothing,” she said. “I’ve got to run. I have a committee meeting. We’re trying to keep the foothills behind Stanford from being developed. Don’t you think they should be kept as open space, for everyone to enjoy?” But the passion that was always in her voice when she talked about her causes wasn’t there. She didn’t even try to enlist us this time.

  “Remember, you promised,” she said as she pushed J.J.’s stroller onto the sidewalk. And despite our promise, despite that reminder, the moment she was out of sight we were talking about it amongst ourselves, unable to grant her even this one small request.

  THAT AFTERNOON, I went to Saint Thomas Aquinas, where I sat in an empty pew looking at the empty altar, wondering if there was a God up there who listened to prayers, and why He was doing this to Linda and had done it to her mom. Wondering why He didn’t let Ally carry her babies to term, and why He sat by while Lee hurt Kath, and what He could have allowed to happen to Brett that left her wearing her gloves. Wondering, too, what I could possibly do for Linda other than what she’d asked, which was nothing, which was only not to talk, a task at which I’d already failed.

  In bed that night I lay awake worrying about Linda, losing the sleep she didn’t want us to lose. Wondering if she was sleeping, or what she was doing if she wasn’t, if she, too, was lying awake. I imagined her sitting in J.J.’s room, or in Julie and Jamie’s, watching them sleep like the mother had done in her story, the one she’d gotten published, that she’d sent out sixty-three times.

  I climbed from bed carefully so as not to wake Danny, and took my glasses from my nightstand. I went to check on Maggie, her face tucked up against her Allo blanket as she mumbled in her sleep, words I never could
understand. Then into Davy’s room, where I sat on the floor by his bed with my hand on his little leg, trying to remember the details of Linda’s story, thinking, Sixty-three times.

  I thought again of the novel I’d written back in Chicago, the Italian Renaissance mystery. I’d spent so much time writing it, just that one draft, but I’d never done anything with it. I wondered what Linda had written in the years before I met her, what story she might have used to apply to graduate school. Was it in a drawer somewhere, or had she pulled it out, revised it, read it to us, and listened to what we had to say? Then revised again, sixty-three times. Or sixty-two, since the last one was a yes.

  I’d so loved the idea of that novel of mine, a whodunit that was also an exploration of religion and the perversion of its purposes—or that was what it was meant to be, anyway. It was one part fascination for me—fascination with Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel and Pope Julius II, Il Papa Terrible, whose main concern in life seemed to have been to ensure a suitable palace for his own entombment—and one part passion for a church and a religion that were so integral to who I was. But the draft when I’d read it—“Michelangelo’s Ghost,” that’s what I’d called it—was so much less than I’d meant it to be. I’d thought that was all there was to it back then. One single draft. You were a writer or you weren’t.

  I thought of all the books I’d disliked, or put down without finishing—often books that one or more of the Wednesday Sisters had loved—or books we’d all thought dreadful, that, to our considerable disbelief, made the bestseller list. “Not every book is for every reader.” Words Linda liked to say when she’d recommended a book none of the rest of us could stand.

  Linda’s Ghost, I thought, and I wanted to pick up the phone and call her, even though I knew she didn’t want that.

  I went to the kitchen. Pulled that old manuscript from the bottom kitchen desk drawer, almost as a way to be with Linda. I looked down at the first few words, the introduction of my character Risa. She was as weak a character as Dritha, the protagonist in my new novel, I could see that now. A smelly old dishrag, Linda would say, with a spine Kath would find catawampus, delivered in prose Ally would find awkward in places, with words Brett would see were not quite what I’d meant.