The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton
The band started playing “Tea for Two”—their your-monologue-is-flopping-Johnny tune—and Johnny said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, Doc. This lovely blonde in the third row thinks I’m funny even if no one else does.”
The camera panned to Linda sitting beside me. She waved at the lens and called out, “Hi Jeff! Hi, Jamie and Julie! Hi, J.J.!”—words you can’t hear on the film clip, although you can read her lips. My hand went involuntarily to my glasses, then touched the odd texture of something that was not my hair.
Doc Severinsen—in a turtleneck and very loud jacket—led his gang into “Tea for Two” again, and Johnny, looking chagrined, started his okay-I-admit-this-monologue-is-flopping dance. The crowd laughed—real laughter now. And then Johnny was talking about the guests who would join him: someone who was going to teach him how to break a board in half with his head, then Brett, then Ron Howard and Harrison Ford, who were starring in American Graffiti, a new movie we all wanted to see although we couldn’t imagine how the cute little redheaded lisper from The Music Man and The Andy Griffith Show could possibly have grown up.
No animal high jinks tonight. No oversized bug to crawl up Johnny’s arm. No furry little critter to perch on his head. Which was a good thing, I figured, because those exotic animals really stole the show sometimes. They were so funny—or Johnny reacting to them was—that they might be a hard act to follow for Brett. Humor was not her forte.
Johnny did his trademark phantom golf swing, aimed at stage left where the band was, and I was glad it was the Friday before the Miss America Pageant and not the Monday after; Monday was often guest-host night, and I couldn’t imagine Brett getting through this with anyone but Johnny, anyone who might find humor at her expense rather than at his own.
He did his Carnac the Magnificent gig, wearing his extravagantly feathered and beaded red turban and his cape. He held the sealed envelope to his forehead, saying, “Sis boom bah,” and tearing and blowing open the envelope as Ed McMahon repeated, “Sis boom bah.” Johnny gave him the look and pulled out the paper. “What is the sound of a sheep exploding?” At which the crowd around me laughed genuinely.
Usually I loved Carnac, he was my favorite Carson routine, though I liked Aunt Blabby, too. But I was impatient for Brett.
The breaking-the-board bit was funny, too, with Johnny succeeding, and then Ed McMahon pointing him in the direction of the camera and saying—while Johnny blubbered in exaggerated pain—that they’d be right back with the latest literary sensation, Mrs. Brett Tyler. After these commercial messages.
And then we were back on the air and there was Johnny, talking about his next guest, Mrs. Brett Tyler, and her new book, The Mrs. Americas, and then there Brett was, coming through the curtain. They’d done her hair wrong somehow, it looked too poufy, but I thought maybe that was the effect of her earrings: oversized globes that, together with the oversized buttons on her jacket, emphasized her smallness in a way that made her look fashionably adorable. It had been the last of a million jackets she’d tried on—all of us crowded into the dressing room. The last of a million earrings.
Johnny stood to shake her gloved hand. “The Mrs. Americas, those would be my ex-wives you’re writing about?” he said—he was on wife number three by that time—and the audience laughed.
Brett sat in the guest chair and Johnny began asking her about her book and her experience publishing it. She answered easily, articulately, as though she really might be Harper Lee after all. I was so very proud of her. We all were.
And then somehow she got on the topic of us—of the Wednesday Sisters. She started explaining how important the Wednesday Sisters were to her and how she couldn’t ever have gotten the novel done, much less published, without us. Right there, on Johnny Carson!
Johnny was all over that. “The Wednesday Sisters?”
He loved that.
And it just got better and better.
“So they’re your sisters?”
“No.”
“Not your sisters?”
“Friends. Writing friends. The Wednesday Sisters Writing Society, we like to call ourselves. But we’re more than that, too. So much more than that.”
“So you write together?” Johnny asked.
“Not anymore. We started out writing together. On a picnic table in the park one Wednesday morning. The Wednesday morning after the Miss America Pageant five years ago, in fact. That’s when we decided to write together, while we were watching the Miss America Pageant the year all those women protested out on the boardwalk.”
“The bra burners?” Johnny said, and Brett said right, except that they didn’t actually burn any bras, they hadn’t been able to get a permit to burn anything.
“Now we write at home, though,” Brett said, “so we can spend our time together critiquing each other’s work.”
“You don’t write together but you do watch the Miss America Pageant?”
“Right.”
“And you meet on Wednesdays?”
“No.”
One of those funny Johnny looks. “You don’t meet on Wednesdays?”
“We meet on Sunday mornings. At sunrise.”
Johnny laughed and laughed at that, which was something. If you could make Johnny laugh like that, then you knew half the households in America were laughing, too.
“But you do all wear white gloves?” he said when he’d recovered.
I swear, you could hear the intake of breath in our four seats as if it were the wind howling through downtown Chicago just before a thunderstorm. You could see our faces imagining the wavy skin under those gloves and the curled little finger, and the young girl stepping up to her brother’s awful dare all those years ago, and succeeding.
Brett touched one gloved hand to her strawberry blond hair as if she would run her fingers through it and mess it up, but then she didn’t. She simply said, smooth as anything, “No, that’s my own little oddity.”
As though it was nothing at all.
She was telling him about me getting my novel published then, and about the coffin, about Linda dragging us to the funeral home and making us lie down in that coffin and imagine what we would think of our lives if we were dying, and she was pulling something from her purse. Johnny looked at it, and you could tell by the delight in his blue eyes that all those people watching at home were about to get a peek. He held it up for the camera to move in on: the coffin photo, Brett playing dead in the coffin with the four of us lined up behind her, grinning as if we’d all seen this moment with Johnny Carson in a crystal ball.
The five of us on national television, and only Linda with her hair combed.
Johnny was looking at the photograph again himself, pointing to one of us in the photo and saying, “Haven’t I seen this woman somewhere before?” He looked to Brett. “Is this the other friend—the other Wednesday Sister—who’s already published a novel? Maybe I’ve seen her book?”
“Frankie?” Brett said. “No, Frankie is the other blonde, the one in the glasses. That one is Linda.”
“Linda,” Johnny repeated.
“She’s the lovely blonde in the third row who liked your monologue when no one else did.”
“Ouch!” Johnny said, again with a comic face, while the band played a few spontaneous notes of “Tea for Two.” “Are you Wednesday Sisters this brutal when you critique each other’s work?” Johnny asked.
Brett smiled what Kath calls “a big ol’ smile” whenever she tells the story, and you could tell she was thinking, “When in doubt, tell the truth.”
“Let’s just say that monologue wouldn’t have made it beyond the picnic table,” she said.
Johnny laughed and laughed. “They’re all here, all of the Wednesday Sisters?” he asked, and the next thing you know, he was inviting us all to come up onstage, and Brett was pointing to us, saying, “They’re right there.”
The camera panned to us: no stage makeup like Brett had, and you can see if you watch the tape how flustered we look: Us? our faces
Standing there on the Carson show, the most watched talk show on television, wearing a wig that hadn’t looked great to start with and was now slightly askew.
That flustered even Johnny. You can see in his eyes on the film that he wanted to reach up and straighten it. Every time I watch the clip I want to straighten it myself, but as I stood on that stage I had no idea the thing had shifted when I’d tripped. I was too busy trying not to look out at the fuzzy blur of colors that was the audience, sure that if I did, my knees would rattle even more and I’d collapse.
Brett reached one hand toward her hair, but then stopped at one of those wonderful globe earrings and smiled easily. “This is Ally Tantry. Kath Montgomery. Linda Mason,” she said, indicating each in turn. “And this is Frankie O’Mara. M. F. O’Mara. Her novel, Michelangelo’s Ghost, is terrific.”
“Michelangelo’s Ghost,” Johnny repeated. “I like that title, don’t you, Ed?” he said, and Ed said he did, he liked that, Michelangelo’s Ghost. And me half thinking, My title mentioned not once but three times on The Tonight Show! and half trying to determine if Linda was really shooting me a funny look or if it was just that I couldn’t quite see without my glasses.
“And the book is even better than the title,” Brett said. Then to the audience, “If you haven’t read it yet, you should get up from your seat right now and rush out to your local bookstore to buy a copy.”
Johnny faked leaving, heading toward the curtain for a moment before turning back to us.
Then Linda, suddenly reaching toward me, said, “Frankie’s real hair looks better anyway,” and before I knew what she was doing, she’d pulled off my wig. There was a startled Oh! in her eyes, one that echoed the intake of breath throughout the audience as she stood with the long, smooth strawberry-blond length of my wig in her hand.
She looked down at it, then back to me, to the funny arc of my ears, to my eyes and nose and lips and high, high forehead unsoftened by the drape of all that dead protein (which even on the most humid days, I’d seen the moment I’d shaved it off, had been beautiful).
“Frankie!” Linda said, looking confusedly from the wig in her hand to my bald, bald head. “You didn’t—?”
The audience exhaled a stir of Oh my Gods and What in the worlds as Linda, too stunned to think to hand the wig back to me, and I, too mortified to move, just stood there.
Sweet Jesus, my mother, watching from her couch at home, reportedly said.
Somehow, I managed the smallest little bit of smile (a nice smile, really; you can see it on the clip). “I’m afraid I did,” I said. Or croaked, actually, to tell the truth.
“Lordy, Lordy, life sure doesn’t give us all the practice we need,” Kath murmured, the What is happening here? expression in her big brown eyes in her big-chinned face working its way into a big, self-conscious smile. I felt her hand taking mine, her palm as damp as my own. Then heard the audience again as Kath slipped off her brunette curls.
That’s when Linda started laughing. No doubt about it.
Ally, muttering “Heavens to Betsy,” eased off her long blond locks just as Brett, slipping her free hand into Ally’s, touched her white-gloved fingers to her overly poufy strawberry coif and removed her hair, too.
Linda, laughing so hard by then that tears were rolling down her cheeks, pulled off her own wig. She dropped it, and mine as well, and as they flumped onto the floor she linked hands with Ally and me, and we stood there in front of the whole world, bald-headed and together and proud.
Johnny, quick on his feet, pulled on his own hair. It didn’t come off, of course, but the crowd certainly laughed.
“Look out, world,” he said. “The Wednesday Sisters are coming. They’re not sisters and they don’t meet on Wednesdays, and for reasons I’m sure we’ll come to understand because I’m sure we’re going to hear a lot about all these ladies, they shave their heads together—though only one of them wears gloves!”
DID WE WATCH the Miss America Pageant the night after the Carson show, when we were in Los Angeles with so many other things to do? Well, we thought we wouldn’t. We were sure that would be the year we’d let go. But then it seemed it might jinx us, what with the great success of The Mrs. Americas, a title Kath never would have thought of and Brett never would have agreed to without those Saturday nights in September spent with just us girls.
Or that was the excuse we used, anyway.
We watched Colorado’s Rebecca King be crowned Miss America for the next year, 1974. She was not your typical Miss America, though, which somehow made it all right to watch her win: she’d entered for the scholarship money, which she would use to attend law school, and her vocal pro-choice stance would get nationwide publicity in a country as torn over Roe v. Wade as it is now.
The country just tore and tore that fall. It started lightly, with Billie Jean King defeating Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes with more than fifty million people watching on TV (a smaller thing than King refusing to play the U.S. Open that year unless they paid equal prize money to women, which they then did, but the match with Riggs got more attention). Within months things got more serious. Vice President Agnew resigned, OPEC started its first oil embargo, and Congress passed the War Powers Act over the president’s veto, limiting his power to make war. By the next Miss America Pageant, Nixon would have resigned, and the following spring the last Americans in Vietnam would be evacuated by helicopter from a rooftop as Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City, a retreat from a mistake we never really would admit.
And the Wednesday Sisters?
As you can imagine, there isn’t much that could get more attention than five bald women appearing together on The Tonight Show—which sure didn’t hurt our writing careers. True, Kath never has published a word—she just keeps on editing ours—and Ally, when it came down to it, said selling the novel she’d written for Hope seemed too much like sharing with others the gift she’d made for her daughter; she didn’t want to publish it. But The Mrs. Americas made it as far as number ten on the bestseller list, Michelangelo’s Ghost came back from the dead to haunt bookstores again, and Linda began selling to magazines: the pieces she’d written that summer about searching for mastectomy photos, cutting off her braid, and saying good-bye to her kids, as well as a new piece about her own mother’s death, one she developed from those exquisite few paragraphs about the key and the girl and the dead mother she didn’t want to share, that five minutes of her writing from that first time the Wednesday Sisters had gathered to write, when she’d spilled the contents of her purse on the picnic table and directed us to start moving our pens. Pieces she would, at Kath’s suggestion, eventually collect in a single volume, a book dedicated to her mom.
That Carson show seemed a sort of turning point for the Wednesday Sisters in other ways as well. Brett started talking to surgeons about her hands later that same September, the September I started classes at Stanford, where I did not graduate valedictorian as Danny and Brett had, but where I acquitted myself pretty well for a mother of two who was writing novels while she attended school. English literature, that was my major. No physics. No math. No graduate school. But my life isn’t over yet.
By year end, Ally was pregnant with a baby she again miscarried. She was as devastated as she had been before Hope was born, but she held herself together, for Hope’s sake. Three years later, she would give birth to a son she and Jim named Santosh Amar—Santosh meaning “happiness” and Amar “forever.” Sam’s birth was nearly as premature as his sister’s, but in the interim, corticosteroids had been introduced to speed lung development of babies likely to be born pre
As for Kath, no, she didn’t divorce Lee, and Lee didn’t move back in. But there was a shift in their relationship, a little of a letting go by Kath. I think she might actually have left him back then but for the children, but Linda says no, Kath will never leave Lee, hard as Linda has tried over the years to make her. “‘Life and livin’ aren’t the same,’” those conversations always end, Linda throwing one of our favorite Kathisms right back at the source. Kath has had her reasons over the years. Health insurance is the one she touts most often now, which is ridiculous, of course, because she has her own health insurance, through her publishing house. But if you point that out to her, you get back that you never know when a girl might be fired, and anyway, she’s fixin’ to leave publishing to write her own novel any day. Never mind that she now heads up the West Coast office. Never mind that she’s thrown out that “fixin’ to leave” line for years, without ever once meaning it.
“You never know,” she says. “I might could just up and quit tomorrow.”
And we’re talking about the woman who rammed her husband’s car while speeding down the freeway, the one who, when the rest of us were hesitating in that hotel room, set the electric shears to her hairline right smack-dab at the peak of her forehead and cleared a path across the top of her head before she could lose her nerve. Yes, Kath “might could” do just about anything. She “might could” even divorce Lee someday.
And Linda?
Well, Linda is a survivor, going on thirty-five years now. But then, she always was.
We all were, it turns out.
Acknowledgments