The Wednesday Sisters(13)

Kath, back in the family room, fresh drink in hand, bobbed her head agreeably, but something in the set of her strong chin said An astronaut and a novelist? You ladies are insane.

“Or a librarian,” I said, backpedaling.

“A novel,” Linda said. “That's what I wanted to write, too.”

“It's not like I ever really thought I could,” I said. “It was just . . .”

“Like wanting to be Miss America,” Ally said.

I thought of the bright red A+ circled at the top of the first poem I'd turned in to Sister Josephine, of her urging me to write for the school newspaper, and making me editor in chief. Kath was right, though: I might have been the prom queen of high school English class, but no prom queen from my little neighborhood had ever gotten to the Miss Illinois contest, much less to the Miss America walk.

“If you wanted to, Frankie,” Linda said, her voice surprisingly tentative, “we could start writing together.”

I glanced at the television (a mother being mistaken for her daughter in the pool because she ate Grape-Nuts), imagining frank, take-no-prisoners Linda wielding a red pen over a poem or story of mine.

“Just you and Frankie?” Kath said, and you could tell from the way she ran a finger over her fake-braid headband that she was feeling excluded.

“We could start a writing group,” Linda said. “All of us.”

There was a long pause, the only sound a Coke jingle on the TV, before Ally said she couldn't write and Kath said, “How about a book club?”

“But we already talk about books!” Linda said. “Wouldn't you like to try writing one?”

“Just for fun, maybe?” I said. “Nothing serious?”

Kath asked where we'd ever find time to write, and Brett, too, seemed hesitant, but Linda rolled ahead in typical Linda fashion. “You could write a Pride and Prejudice set in the American South, Kath—”

“Mr. Darcy Goes to the Derby!” I said.

“Just for fun, like Frankie said,” Linda said. “It's not as if we're thinking we're going to be the next Sylvia Plath.”

From the smile hinted on Brett's bow lips, I figured she was thinking what I was thinking—Methinks she doth protest too much (and knowing whom she was quoting, which I did not). But Linda started laying out a plan as if it had been decided: we'd all bring something we'd written to the park Wednesday; we'd move from our bench to a picnic table; we'd read our work and everyone would comment, like they'd done in Linda's college writing class. Never mind that Kath was swearing on her aunt Tooty's grave and Ally was talking about boys in high school sniggering at her poems and Brett had yet to say a single word. And the Miss America Pageant went on at its usual pace for quite some time, and not one of us could have told you what the talent was after Miss Illinois.

By the time we returned our attention to the TV, Bert Parks was announcing the finalists. Kath must have been right about the judges liking that old-fashioned hair because Miss Illinois won despite being a young, blond athlete, more cute than beautiful. “I'm so glad,” Judith Ann Ford gushed from under her crown. “I feel like it's a breakthrough.” And something made me shift uneasily in my paisley dress. Maybe it was the way she spoke or her silly flipped-up hairstyle, or maybe it was that protester's paisley dress or the bra strap cutting into my own shoulder, or maybe it was knowing Brett had wanted to be an astronaut and Linda wanted to be a writer even still—I don't know. But for some reason I couldn't shake the image of the naked woman on the poster, the stark black capital letters written on her skin: ROUND and RIB and RUMP.





I COMMANDEERED the picnic table nearest the playground the following Wednesday, the poem that had seemed so remarkably brilliant that morning before anyone else was awake already losing its luster inside my purse. I brushed away the dried leaves and pulled the worst of the splinters from the tabletop, and I was setting out a big thermos of coffee and a plate of cookies when Kath arrived, defiantly empty-handed, followed by Ally, less defiantly so. I didn't confess to them the existence of my poem—not even after Linda arrived admitting to a few paragraphs and Brett came bearing an entire first chapter. “A whole chapter!” we said more or less in unison. Linda didn't even give her a hard time about the fact that it was a mystery.

“Really, there is no possibility I could read it aloud, though,” Brett said.

Linda almost single-handedly got the kids squared away, no small task; Anna Page was back in school, a big second-grader, leaving us nine under-five-year-olds to settle in the sandbox with bowls and measuring cups and sifters. “If everyone is good,” Linda promised them, “Maggie and Davy's mommy will get Popsicles for us before we go.” “