The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton
“Climb up here and snuggle with me, sweetheart,” her mother had said that afternoon, the way she did when Linda had a nightmare. But her mother wasn’t her mother anymore, she was that hideous arm, and Linda turned and ran to her bedroom, where her father found her sometime later, curled up in the closet, sobbing, with the closet door shut.
He kicked some shoes out of the way and sat next to her on the closet floor. He pulled the door closed again, leaving them together in the mothball, dirty-sock semidarkness, the crack of daylight where the door wasn’t quite shut falling on Linda. He just sat there, his face staring at the inside of the closet door, not saying a word, not touching her. After a few minutes, he pushed the door open, stood, and without looking at her, said, “I’ll need your help with the dinner, honey.” And Linda stood and followed him down to the kitchen, where she scrounged in the pantry for a box of macaroni and cheese while her father filled a pot with water from the tap.
Linda didn’t tell us any of that in the park that morning, though.
It would come later, not all at once, but in pieces over the years. I came to know the story of Linda’s mom the way we came to know everything about each other, I suppose. The way friends who are as close as we are know the important moments in each other’s lives, even when we weren’t there.
That Wednesday morning, Linda just stared silently out at the playground. We all did, watching our children a little more closely, thinking we didn’t want them even to imagine growing up without us to kiss their skinned elbows and applaud their finger paintings and tuck them into their beds.
“When I was a kid, I used to climb up into this big oak tree in our backyard, where no one would see me,” Linda said. “I’d straddle one of its fat branches, lean against the trunk, and read until the bark left dents in my skin. Charlotte’s Web. I read it over and over, a dozen times at least.”
“Me, too,” Ally said quietly. “Over and over.”
“It was like Wilbur, this male pig, was more like me than anyone at school,” Linda said, “because he knew about dying.”
“‘After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die,’” Brett said, just quoting from the book, but her words left us all staring at Linda.
Linda looked away, to the sad old mansion. “Charlotte’s children didn’t need her,” she said finally, quietly.
I think we all leaned more closely together on the park bench then, trying not to think of those poor Kennedy children. Of Ethel Kennedy sitting at the hospital in Los Angeles, wondering if her husband would ever regain consciousness. Of Rose at home in Hyannis Port, facing the loss of a third son. Three sons. How could you bear that, to lose three sons?
LINDA AND KATH and Brett and I left Ally sitting on the park bench that morning. She was just going to stay a bit longer, she said. But even after I put Maggie and Davy down for their naps, called Danny—he was in a meeting—and made myself a cup of coffee, I could see Ally through the plate glass of my living room window, sitting in the same spot on that bench, her plastic cups stacked one inside the other and abandoned in the empty pitcher, her rounded shoulders in her muslin blouse still as death. All the mothers were packing up to take their children home for lunch, but Ally didn’t move. And when I looked again, all the mothers were gone except Ally, who sat there alone, one hand absently fingering a lock of long, wavy, dark hair. She got up and left, finally, with only the empty pitcher, the five empty cups. She hurried off with her head bowed, her legs striding the width of her long skirt, and she went into the house with the green shutters, with the cluster of pine trees in the front. You might think I’d have gone running out my door, calling, “Ally, honey, you’re forgetting your little one!” But I didn’t. There was no child left in the park.
THERE WAS A FAINT LIGHT in one of the mansion windows that night as I settled onto my front-porch steps to wait for Danny. I’d heard the place was haunted, that when the wind was blowing just right you could hear the ghost of the old woman who’d built it playing melancholy organ music, or weeping in the attic, or calling for her dead child. But there were always stories about places being haunted, especially old mansions like this one, with tragic tales behind them. And though I believed in the Holy Spirit and Jesus rising from the dead and visiting the apostles, Doubting Thomas putting his hand through Jesus’ wounded side, I dismissed people who believed in ghosts as overly dramatic and absurd. I figured the light was the street lamp behind the house coming through the window, the reflection of car lights off a pane, the night watchman or the cleaning staff. Or maybe I was imagining the light, imagining a ghost to go with the faint strains of melancholy piano music coming from somewhere in that direction.
Someone checking on the place, I decided. A policeman’s flashlight, one of Palo Alto’s finest making sure everything was okay (which was reassuring, given the way hippies and radicals had begun gathering in downtown Lytton Plaza).
Except that this looked more like . . . well, it looked warmer, more flickering.
The light went out entirely then, just like that, leaving me staring into the glass-window darkness.
A few minutes later, a car came to a stop at the corner. Danny? But it continued straight on Channing and pulled into Ally’s drive. A slender, dark-skinned man got out and slipped in through Ally’s front door without knocking or ringing the bell that I could tell. I glanced at my watch—eleven o’clock already? But I forgot all about Ally then, because Danny came home talking about quitting Fairchild, leaving his nice, stable job at his nice, stable company with its nice, stable salary to join a new company that wasn’t even a company yet, just a handful of scientists and engineers putting their heads together at someone’s house, with no certain future at all. “NM Electronics, it’s going to be called,” he said.
And not a month later, my steady, one-job-one-wife-for-life Danny up and gave notice at work.
“You quit?” I said. “Danny! But you just started!” And the job he was talking about now didn’t even seem to be the NM Enterprises job he’d been talking about—though it turned out it was the same job; the company had just settled on a different name.
“Andy is tired of watching our work languish between development and production at Fairchild,” Danny said, “and I’m jumping ship with him. These guys, Frankie, they have a plan to make larger-scale integrated circuits mass-producible!” Words hard enough for me to understand in isolation, much less strung together like that, though Brett, of course, would understand it all. “They’re trying to develop a new way for computers to store and access data, something faster and more powerful than ferrite core,” she said when I told her the next day, and I said, “Oh, sure, to replace ferrite core,” as if that cleared it right up.
Yes, the business was riskier than Fairchild, Danny admitted. They were still meeting in people’s houses, though they’d signed a lease for space starting August 1, offices that would turn out to be small and cramped and full of the old tenant’s left-behind furniture, with pipes poking out of the ceiling and holes in the floor of the manufacturing space. And the company wasn’t even expected to make a profit for a year or more, though there would be money to pay his salary, Danny assured me. A venture capitalist (the first time I’d heard that term) was helping them find investors.
“People are lining up, knocking on the door for the job Andy says I’m the perfect guy for, Frankie,” Danny said. And Danny is not above liking to be flattered; I should know.
“Silicon-gate MOS,” he said. “That’s my baby.”
I thought I was your baby, I wanted to say. I thought Fairchild was the opportunity of a lifetime. Wasn’t that why we’d moved so far from home? I thought we talked about big decisions like this before we made them, I wanted to say. We had talked about it, though, and after five years of marriage I should have been used to the way Danny made decisions when he had to make them: while I was still eyeing the airplane from the ground, he was up above the clouds with the door open, sure his parachute would work.
So many Bay Area parachutes didn’t work, though, or didn’t work fast enough. The earth shifted beneath them before they could land. Technology-business failures were so common that a Business-Week cartoon that fall would parody the risk: crowds piling in and out the doors and windows of an “Integrated Circuits” building while a salesman asks, “Want a beam-leaded MSI Flip-Flop Chip in MOS-Compatible DTL?” and another says, “That went out back in July!” But it wouldn’t be funny if Danny’s MOS chip was one of the technologies that crashed.
“They’re giving me a thousand options,” he said. “I’ll be an owner, Frankie, without even having to put any money up!” And he started talking about investing our savings in his fledgling company’s stock, too, once they’d set up an employee stock-purchase plan. But what about the kids’ college fund? What about the mortgage and the groceries and the doctor bills? How would we pay them if the company failed and we were left with no savings to live on while Danny found another position? What if the company was a smashing success but the treasurer absconded to Brazil with all the cash? But to question Danny’s decision would make him think I lacked confidence in him. And besides, he’d already quit.
WE LAUGH NOW at how nervous I was before our first Miss America party that September, the first time we moved beyond meeting up at the park on Wednesday mornings. I hurried to finish my curtains and cleaned my kitchen so you could have eaten off the cabinet floor under my sink, I swear, and I even considered painting my shutters, though in truth I was liking the pink more and more. That evening, I set up a bar on the kitchen counter and put out snacks, and I sent Danny off with Mags and Davy for hot dogs and ice cream at the Dairy Queen, with instructions not to return until the children were fast asleep in the backseat of the car.
Danny wasn’t the least bit disappointed to miss the pageant himself. Funny, isn’t it? No fellow I’d ever known would sit through a beauty contest; the gawking at beautiful women was done by us girls.
Ally was the first to ring my bell that evening. I’d seen no signs of her child the week after we met: no tricycle left in the circle of pine trees, no Ally hurrying her little one to the car, no playmates knocking at the door. There might have been toys in the backyard, but it was wrapped up in a high wooden fence you couldn’t see over or through, and that had seemed to me to mean something, too. But Ally had turned up the following Wednesday with the hand of two-year-old Carrie in her grasp. Ally’s husband must have fetched their daughter from the park while I was putting my kids down for their naps that first week, I supposed, for a doctor’s appointment or some father-daughter something, because Ally and Carrie—a quiet little thing with Ally’s dark wavy hair, her chipmunk cheeks—arrived at the park again the next Wednesday, and the next.
Within minutes, Kath and Linda and Brett had arrived at my door, too, and we were settling into my family room with potato chips and sour-cream dip and popcorn made in a pan on the stove, and with gin and tonics or vodka gimlets or, for Kath, a sidecar—not that far evolved from Anna Page’s bourbon straight out of the bottle. We felt awkward outside the familiar surroundings of the park, though, unwilling even to take the first chip from the bowl. We started talking about who we would root for, with Bert Parks not even on the TV yet.
What was on was special coverage from outside the pageant, hundreds of women picketing like autoworkers without a contract: girls in tidy dresses or skirts and blouses, wearing shoes like we wore, their hair styled like ours. Four hundred women walking up and down the Atlantic City boardwalk, from Florida and from Wisconsin and from California just like the girls inside putting on their makeup and gowns, except that these girls were carrying signs and some were swinging bras like lassos and chanting slogans as they dumped mops and steno pads and girdles into a big trash can.
“Can you imagine not wearing . . .” Ally asked, not saying brassiere, a word she spoke aloud only in the lingerie section, and even then she blushed.
I thought of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, in that black dress with the long black gloves, the five-strand pearls and the tiara in her hair, the extravagant cigarette holder. That dress would have needed a strapless bra, and why would she bother, with nothing for a bra to hold up? And in the movie she’d left her husband behind forever to start a wild life in New York, and I’d loved her for it, and I’d sort of imagined doing something that dramatic myself. Still, I couldn’t imagine doing what these real women were doing, leaving their husbands or boyfriends for one day to try to point out that women weren’t just for gawking at.
Linda pulled an issue of McCall’s from my coffee table and, keeping an eye on the protesters and awaiting the start of the pageant, flipped to an article about the balance of power in marriages. “So here’s the fifty-dollar question,” she said. “Are you the dominator or the dominatee?” And we leaned over the magazine, reading “The Sexual Wilderness” together, glad of the excuse to ignore those girls on the TV.
“The spouse who handles the money has the power?” Brett said. “That’s definitely me.”
“I’m the wily old gal who foists the money worries off on her husband,” Kath said.
“The more powerful spouse chooses the friends?” I said. “Danny wouldn’t know a friend if he announced himself on the evening news.”
As we laughed, we all glanced at the TV. The camera was focused on a sign showing a brunette in a cowboy hat, her naked back and bottom marked into sections with labels like rib and loin and chuck, like a cow about to be butchered. break the dull steak habit, the sign read. The protester carrying it looked young and innocent in her paisley shift, square-necked and falling just above her knee like the one I wore that night, but still the newscaster—his beer gut hanging over his trousers—looked down on her as if she were the disgusting one.
We all turned away, back to the magazine. “The one who takes the car to be repaired?” Ally said. “That’s an odd sign of power, if you ask me.”
“Okay, so which kind of marriage are you in?” Linda asked. “A, ‘The Minimal-Interaction Marriage’? That’s where you and your hubby basically don’t speak.” She tipped her head as if to say Go ahead, admit it, that’s you. “Or B, ‘The Peripheral-Husband Marriage’? That means, near as I can tell, that you don’t need your man, you just need his paycheck!”
“You’re skipping all the good ones, Linda,” Kath protested. Then to the rest of us, “Don’t you know she would?” She grabbed the magazine from Linda and started reading. “‘The Fun Marriage’? That’s you and Jeff, Linda. I have never heard anyone giggle together like you two. ‘The Colleague Marriage’? That’s you, Brett, ’cause you’re just as clever as Chip is, I’m sure, even if I never have met the fella. ‘The Nestling Marriage’—that sounds awfully nice, doesn’t it? That’s Ally and Jim, don’t y’all imagine?” (Ally blushed pink, an admission.) “And ‘The High-Companionship Marriage’? That’s got to be you and Danny, Frankie.”
I faked a loud snore—it really did sound like the most boring of the alternatives.
“Best friends!” Kath insisted. “You do everything together, talk over every little thing in this world.”
“So in which bailiwick does your own marriage fall, Kath?” Brett asked.
“Bailiwick?” Linda teased, because Brett was forever doing that, using bigger words than a situation called for.
But Kath simply smiled her big-chinned smile, closed the magazine, and held it away from Brett’s reach, bobbing her head so agreeably that you might have thought her answer was E, “All of the good choices above”; you might have forgotten all about the Minimal-Interaction Marriage or the Peripheral-Husband one, you might simply have laughed like Brett and Ally and even Linda did when Kath answered, “Now, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?”
The TV cut to inside finally, where Bert Parks was greeting us as if he were oblivious to the goings-on outside, though he’d refused to leave the building between the rehearsal and the show with all those protesters there. It does
Kath, Brett, and I declared for the contestants from our home states, Miss Kentucky, Miss Massachusetts, and Miss Illinois, all of whom were beautiful and thin, of course, and not wearing eyeglasses. Ally chose Miss Hawaii, a cute brunette you could imagine wearing the same long, informal skirts Ally wore, the kind of girl who, in the movies, is completely overlooked by the male lead while he’s falling for the statuesque blonde but who ends up with the wedding ring. Only Linda refused to narrow her choices. “Not until the talent competition,” she said.
“Talent? It’s a beauty contest!” Kath insisted, but Linda, her long blond hair not in a braid that night but brushed straight and pulled back with a headband so you could see her clear skin, just raised her straight eyebrows and looked at Kath with those multicolored eyes. No makeup, but you could easily picture her in one of those swimsuits, and it didn’t take much to imagine her in a pretty pink gown with a little mascara, her hair swept up in a bun—a chignon, Kath called it. Or maybe not a pink gown; for all Linda looked like a pink-gown girl, she wasn’t, not back then. And she was barely even looking at the gowns. A gown, fine, she seemed to be saying, but can she sing? Can she play the piano? Or—because this is Linda we’re talking about, right?—can she hit a tennis ball like Billie Jean King or run as fast as Wilma Rudolph? Though of course Wilma Rudolph was black and these girls were white and always had been. Laws barring nonwhites from participating were still firmly in place. There was to be a second pageant that night, though, for African-American girls—black girls, we called them—starting at midnight, after the “real” Miss America was over.