The Wednesday Sisters(101)

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.