The Wednesday Sisters

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “You’re writing a mystery, Frankie,” he said. “One set in Renaissance Italy. And it won’t be the world you’ll experience, it’ll be thousands of irresponsible lunatics bent on causing trouble, shouting for peace as if they could possibly know more about Vietnam than the president does.” And when I started talking about the demonstrators lining up coffins outside the Capitol and all those Vietnamese civilians massacred at My Lai, he said, “You don’t think we should pull out of Vietnam any more than I do, Frankie. And what if the crowd starts rioting and people are arrested? What if it turns out like the Democratic convention, with people getting killed? What would Maggie and Davy do if anything happened to you?

  “If you want to go to a peace march,” he said, “I hear there’s going to be one right here in downtown Palo Alto.” And it seemed impossible to explain the difference: that Palo Alto peace marches rarely drew more than a few hundred people, whereas this San Francisco march might draw a hundred thousand or more.

  He wasn’t the only husband unhappy about our going. Only Jim and Jeff didn’t object. Jim thought Ally should stand up for what she believed in—but then, they were childless, they didn’t have the same concerns. And Jeff? When Danny tried to enlist his opposition, Jeff said, “I could object from my rooftop, Danny, but Linda is Linda. She’ll do what she wants.” Which left me wondering why she hadn’t gone to the University of Iowa graduate program, why she’d married Jeff and moved to Baltimore instead. It made me think of the way she’d sent her story out again and again—but without telling us. Linda did what she wanted and said what she wanted, but there was more to her than that.

  The morning of the rally I slipped out of bed early, and dressed quietly, and walked down to Ally’s house in the wet darkness. I sat under my umbrella on the damp bottom step of her front porch, watching the sky over the old mansion lighten to a dull cloud gray. What did I really think about the war? I wondered as I sat there. Not Danny, but me. I read the newspapers. I watched the news. What did I think?

  Despite the wet chill of the morning, by the time we arrived in San Francisco some two hundred thousand people had gathered at the waterfront, filling the streets and beginning to make their way toward Golden Gate Park. Three men who seemed to belong together only in their size—all big men, though the first wore a suit and tie, the second long hair and lamb-chop sideburns, the third a decorated service uniform—led the way with a large banner that read veterans for peace. There was one woman with them, a nurse in a clean white uniform who walked with a slight limp—a war wound, it dawned on me only later; she, too, was a veteran.

  Those three men and the nurse seemed somehow to represent the crowd that day, the diversity. I’d expected . . . I didn’t even know, really. Disreputable-looking men with long hair and mustaches? Danny’s lunatics? But there were all kinds of men and women protesting—in suit coats and ties, in workmen’s clothes, in housedresses and bell-bottom slacks and skirts and pumps.

  It was a long walk—seven miles—to the park.

  We Wednesday Sisters walked at the fringes of the crowd, feeling more like the shopkeepers who observed from their doorways than like protesters. Maybe not Linda, but the rest of us. If made to declare one way or the other, Danny was probably right, I probably would have said that Nixon was doing the right thing, that peace through victory was the right path. Yes, I’d watched the footage and listened to Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid; I couldn’t purge the awful photos from my head. But it wasn’t as simple as it sometimes seems in retrospect. I believed—most Americans believed—that the spread of communism would mean loss of freedom and torture and death, and perhaps even nuclear war. We never imagined the communist world would just collapse as it did in the Soviet Union years later. We thought the only way to preserve our lifestyle was to fight theirs. And we couldn’t, truthfully, imagine that America might be wrong. We didn’t like to imagine that what we were doing as a country could be imperialist or illegal or just plain immoral any more than we liked to imagine an America that could be defeated by a small country of small people we thought of as less intelligent and less compassionate and less worthy than we were. So we just didn’t imagine it.

  Even Linda, the most vocally antiwar of us, was watching more than protesting with the crowd that morning. “All the disabled veterans,” she said. “I never expected to see them here. I never thought about that.” And even as she was admitting that, a tall, blond man with his arm amputated at the elbow fell in alongside her, his stump exposed under the edge of his short-sleeved oxford shirt. “Nice to see a pretty girl like you out here with us,” he said.

  Linda focused on his face—china-blue eyes, slightly crooked nose, freshly shaved chin—listening to him, trying to work up the nerve to touch him. Just a small touch at his shoulder. She veered away from him unconsciously, though, just enough to bump into Brett, who reached a hand out to steady her. Linda looked at Brett’s gloved fingers on her elbow but didn’t pull away. She turned back to the man, her face solicitous and yet not quite natural. “Did you lose your arm in the war?” she asked, making herself confront it. See, I can face this. I can do this now.

  “This?” The man thrust the stub of arm toward her, maybe angry at her for seeing his arm rather than seeing the whole of him, maybe angry at what he’d been through, maybe angry at everything.

  Linda swayed back from him again, staring at the stump, unable or unwilling to look away. She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t him, really. It wasn’t him or his arm she loathed. It was herself. She wanted to tell him it was impossible for her to look at him without thinking of her mother, that it was her own guilt that was the problem, the guilt of a nine-year-old who never did embrace her mother. But he was already heading back to rejoin his buddies, who looked toward us as they frowned at something he said.

  Brett set her hand back on Linda’s elbow, the lightest embrace, and Kath fell in on Linda’s other side, where the man had been.

  As we walked that morning, we had to squeeze into the crowd when the road narrowed or when we came to a car parked at the curb. We were walking alongside a group of doctors when I stumbled, and I was saved from plastering myself on the pavement by one of them. He and his doctor friends made me stop so they could check my ankle, though I assured them I was okay, I was forever tripping but I’d never once in my life broken or sprained a thing.

  They were from Los Angeles, a group called Physicians for Social Responsibility, and one of them—a fellow with the same dark-rimmed glasses and slight build as my Danny—turned out to know people Jeff and Lee knew; he’d interned at Stanford.

  Linda told him we were writers.

  “Writers?” he said. “That’s terrific. What have you written?”

  He expected books, you could tell. Books he’d heard of, books on the bestseller list. When you say you’re a writer, people always do.

  Linda replied, cool as a morning breeze, that Brett had published an essay and she had a story coming out soon. I felt like an idiot even though I wasn’t the one who’d proclaimed myself a writer; I hadn’t published a thing. Then quiet Ally started asking them questions as if she were a reporter for The New York Times, I swear, as if she did not intend to go home until she understood everything that was happening here. Before I knew it, I was asking questions, too. It was so much easier to be a writer with these strangers than it was with any-one I knew, these men who had no preconceptions about me, who wouldn’t think that I was just Frankie, the engineering school secretary who’d never been to college, who couldn’t possibly have dreams.

  It seemed no time before the seven miles were behind us and we arrived at the park. We stayed with the doctors, quite a ways from Black Panther David Hilliard and the other speakers, so it was difficult to see them, but we’d come to see the crowd more than anything and we could hear well enough. As we stood talking, waiting for the speeches to begin, a nun in full white habit and a wimple came and stood near us, holding a sign that read not one more dead. Something about her—just th
e nunness of her, I suppose—made me think of Sister Mary Alice, the head of my high school. Sister Mary Alice was a big barrel of a woman who made things happen, though she’d been nearly eighty when I was in school. I wondered if she was still alive, and if she was still running the school, and if we’d be in this mess in Vietnam if she were in charge of the show. If you’d asked me in the car on the way up if I could imagine Sister Mary Alice—or Sister Josephine or any of the other nuns who taught me—demonstrating for peace, I’d have gotten the giggles so badly I’d have started hiccoughing. But that nun’s face held the same measure of compassion those nuns could startle you with when they’d learned your grandmother was sick or your dog had died or you had not been asked to the prom. When they mailed you a note after you’d taken your fiancé to meet them, a note that said, “Danny is clearly a very smart young man, Frances, but don’t forget that you are a very smart young woman, too.”

  It made me tear up, imaging Sister Mary Alice’s stooped old body under the weight of a not one more dead sign, though I couldn’t begin to say why.

  The speeches that afternoon were relatively unremarkable, the crowd moderate, enthusiastic but well behaved. When Hilliard tried to stir everyone up, suggesting in the most unpleasant language that we ought to kill President Nixon, the crowd simply drowned him out with shouts of “Peace! Peace! Peace!”

  “Peace!” I found myself saying, not exactly shouting but not exactly not, joining Danny’s lunatics without feeling the least bit crazy, or even the least bit wrong. And when I looked to Kath and Brett and Linda and Ally, they too were saying, “Peace!” All while President Nixon sat in the White House watching the football game our husbands were watching at home with our children, a game the network didn’t even think to interrupt to show live coverage of hundreds of thousands of Americans taking to the streets.

  ALL THAT FALL, even with so much going on, I worked on “Michelangelo’s Ghost,” revising and revising. As the Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven, as two million people participated in the first moratorium against the war, as others were going off to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or reading The Godfather or The Andromeda Strain, I sat at my typewriter. The amazing thing was I didn’t want to do anything else. I didn’t want to go shopping or to the movies, I didn’t want to watch That Girl or Laugh-In or even Johnny Carson, which I’d always loved. And I wasn’t alone. Brett was revising her novel, Linda started a new story, and Ally traded in her “Not Some Duck” for a porcupine who was at least moving out of her journal onto full pages in a way the duck never really had. Even Kath was writing: gut-wrenching journal entries that were melodramatic and awful, that made me want to talk her into leaving Lee, just dumping him and starting over. But even now, with divorce not the taboo it was back then, it’s a hard thing to tell a friend you think her marriage is over. It’s impossible, really. What if you’re wrong and she leaves him when the next day he might have dumped the girlfriend and, having gotten that out of his system, gone back to life with her and old age and all the till-death-do-us-part happily-ever-after she’d hoped for at the altar on her wedding day? Which was the way Kath’s sad melodrama of a story would end if she ever finished it, if she ever got beyond ideas jotted in her journal, you could tell that from the little she’d written. As if by writing it she could make it true.

  I’m not even sure now how we’d gotten to the point that we were all writing. I know writers who have a talisman or a ritual to make writing easier: bunny slippers they wear or a certain candle they always burn when they’re writing; putting pen to paper at sunrise, or noon, or 11:00 P.M.; sitting in a certain chair in a favorite café or walking their dog on the beach first; playing one song on their iPod on infinite repeat for one novel, then choosing another song for the next. But that always strikes me as dicey. What if that café table is taken? What if the dog you walk on the beach eats your bunny slippers? What if your iPod dies? And the fact is, we were mothers and wives; if we waited for the stars to align just so, we’d still be waiting.

  I suppose what we did was park our butts down and write any moment and any place our children were otherwise occupied. We got up early and wrote while our households slept. We carried journals and pens and even manuscripts in our purses, and if the children fell asleep in the car on the way to the grocery store, we sat with our writing propped up against the steering wheel, scribbling quietly, careful not to inadvertently honk the horn. We grabbed every minute we could, hoping it might turn out to be five minutes or ten, maybe an hour if we were lucky. And even when it was frustrating and we didn’t like what we wrote, even when we were just jotting down thoughts about a day that had not gone well, there was joy in it, one part the pleasure of feeling creative and one part the way our friendship wrapped around our hopes.

  By Thanksgiving, Brett and I—pleased as anything that this new television show, Sesame Street, had completely enthralled our children—had completed our manuscripts. By Christmas, we’d put together agent lists and drafted letters describing our books. Brett included a lovely paragraph that said she’d graduated summa cum laude and written for the Radcliffe newspaper, and had done graduate work at Harvard. I put in a sentence reporting that I lived in Palo Alto with my husband and our two young children and tried not to worry that it didn’t look like much.

  Kath took one look at our letters and said, “Ladies,” in a tone that might have been addressed to Anna Page when she was caught playing in the mud. “Do you think General Motors sells cars with ads that say ‘Would you like to see a brown car with seats and wheels and windshield wipers?’”

  “You could compare yourself to some famous writer,” Linda suggested. “Frankie, you could say something like ‘in the tradition of—’”

  “Daphne du Maurier,” Kath said.

  “To name a brilliant example,” Linda said, rolling her eyes. “And Brett could say something like . . .” She paused, unable to come up with anyone to whom she could compare Brett’s writing. Brett’s story ought to have worked, but it didn’t, and yet none of us could say there was anything wrong with it exactly.

  I wondered if the same thing was happening with my book, if it wasn’t really good enough but they were too chicken to tell me “Michelangelo’s Ghost” wouldn’t fly.

  “This is preposterous,” Brett said. “We’re supposed to boil four hundred manuscript pages down to a single paragraph?”

  “Like churning sweet milk,” Kath said. “How about this, y’all? How about you start with a question to draw in the reader, then give them a little peek at the story but don’t tell the ending? Show them a little ankle, maybe some calf, but don’t go sleeping with the boy before the wedding day.”

  “I heard they’re getting copy machines at the library, so you could send a sample chapter, too,” Ally suggested. “It’s so easy to say no, you don’t think you’d like a book, but then you read the first line and pretty soon you’ve finished a whole chapter and you realize you do want to read this story about, say, a middle-aged widow manor owner in thirteenth-century East Anglia.”

  So Brett and I went back to the drawing board. It’s amazing how much time you can spend on a simple one-page letter, but Kath was right: that one page would determine whether anyone would ever read our books.

  • • •

  DANNY STUMBLED in the door one night not long afterward to find me working on the same paragraph I’d been working on for days. It was 1:00 A.M. I had a moment of fearing I was in Kath’s shoes—or those boots she talked about putting on backward—especially since his initial wave of enthusiasm for my writing seemed to have waned, leaving in its wake a hint of disapproval. I wasn’t getting enough sleep, and he missed waking up next to me; couldn’t I just stay in bed in the morning?

  That night, though, he just started rambling enthusiastically and incoherently—he was definitely a bit sloshed—about chips and wafers and yields. “From two to twenty-five good chips per wafer, Frankie,” he said. “We popped so many champagne corks that the ceiling n
eeds to be replaced!”

  I heard what he was saying then. His MOS dream, his “baby,” was becoming a reality, a product they might be able to mass-produce.

  “It was the rubber-chicken good luck, was it?” I said, and he laughed, a silly-drunk laugh; he’d started praying to that rubber chicken every morning.

  I could get no sense out of him after that—just a bad imitation of his co-worker Les Vadasz jumping all over the place, screaming “Sooooper dip!” in a thick Hungarian accent. I was sure he would wake the children, just as I was sure, in bed not much later that night, that we would both wake them, though we did not.

  It wasn’t yet dawn when I woke the next morning—no sounds of trash collectors or early traffic yet, but I already had a new first sentence for my query letter in my mind. I slipped out from under Danny’s arm, which was draped heavily over me, and reached for my glasses on my nightstand.

  “Hey,” he whispered. “Where are you going?” He lifted the sheet and blanket and pulled me to him, nuzzling, morning-breathed, into my neck. “Let’s do that again.”

  What would you do if you were Risa Luccessi? I thought. Hold on to the line. Ideas evaporate so easily if I don’t get out of bed and write them down.

  “It’s morning,” I said. “Mags and Davy—”

  “Shhh,” he said, reaching under my nightgown, stroking my thigh. “It’s not even light yet.”

  “My diaphragm,” I said, and there was a brief but perfect stillness to him then, him shrugging off his concern about using birth control, one he never voiced in bed.

  “Let’s make a baby,” he whispered. “Let’s make a Robert and we’ll call him Bobby. Let’s make a cute little Madeline who will grow up to be as beautiful as her mom.”

  But I wasn’t ready for another baby, for morning sickness and the overwhelming tiredness that had been bad enough with Maggie and almost unbearable with Davy, when Maggie was already underfoot. And I wanted to steal the quiet of that morning for myself. Your dream is in reach, Danny, I wanted to say, but what about mine?