The Wednesday Sisters(100)

We didn't need to get further than the hallway outside Linda's hotel room to know what we'd done in Kath's hotel bathroom was worth it. Her expression when she answered our knock was the funniest thing I'd seen in ages. Who are you? it said. I was expecting Kath and Ally and Frankie.

She laughed so delightedly when she realized it was us that she sounded almost healthy again. “Why are you guys wearing wigs?” she said.

We shrugged and said we were ready for a change.

“New city, new night, new look,” Kath said. “A girl's got a right to turn loose every now and again.”

Linda said she had fixed on Ally when she'd opened the door, and she knew she should know her but she couldn't for the life of her place her. She figured she was someone from back in Connecticut,someoneshe'd grown up with who'd tracked her downhere, though she couldn't imagine who or how or why. Then she'd realized it was Ally.

“You look foxy as a blonde, Ally,” she said. “But I'm glad it's a wig. That much bleach would destroy that wonderful hair of yours.”

The way Ally touched her wig made me remember Kath's words when we'd first looked at ourselves in the mirror that afternoon, after we'd shaved our heads: “You don't miss the water till the well runs dry.” But none of us said a word to Linda about no longer having hair to destroy.

We set off for the show and took our seats and waited impatiently, talking about Brett sitting backstage. Chip was with her—we were glad for that. He'd brought her to the show and was going to stay with her until she went on, then slip into the audience to watch her. He was flying home right afterward, so they wouldn't have to leave Sarah and Mark with anyone for the whole night. We all were reluctant to leave our children in someone else's care for any period of time now. Linda being vulnerable made us all feel vulnerable, made our world suddenly tenuous and fragile.

The music started—Doc Severinsen and the NBC Orchestra—and Ed McMahon appeared, and it was no time before he was saying, “Heeeeeere's Johnny!” And there he was indeed, coming through the curtains in chocolate slacks and a gray blazer, white shirt, wide red tie. The curtain swayed behind him, all blue and green and gold. This is it, we thought. This is happening for Brett tonight and it is going to happen for all of us, we have worked together to make this happen and even we sometimes didn't believe it ever would, but here we are. And Linda was clapping as wildly as I was, as Ally and Kath were, as I imagined Brett, watching a television monitor backstage, was, too. We weren't clapping for Johnny, though. We were clapping for each other, for those women who'd arisen from that coffin almost four years ago now.

Johnny went right into his monologue, quieting us, moving the show along. He was always current, and since this was the Friday night before the Miss America Pageant, he lobbed up some funny jokes at Bert Parks's expense. Well, not very funny, actually. I laughed at first, but my heart wasn't in it. I thought I was just too worried for Brett. But the laughter all around me was forced, too—not just Kath and Ally, but the two fellows behind me, and the woman with the flower in her hair in the first row. Only Linda was genuinely laughing, her laughter so lovely that part of me just wanted to sit quietly and drink it in.

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.