The Wednesday Sisters(103)

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 prematurely. Like Hope, Sam wasn't allowed stuffed animals in intensive care, but he was born breathing on his own, and he wasn't even all that small.