The Wednesday Sisters(14)

“Before lunch?” Jamie asked. Or maybe it was Julie.

We poured coffee and set to work on Brett then, nudging and cajoling her to read. Even Kath and Ally, despite their resistance to Linda's bludgeoning us all into writing, were dying of curiosity.

“I couldn't even read it to my mother,” Brett insisted.

“You couldn't read it to your mother?” Linda said.

“Could you?”

There was a stunned silence, Brett's bow lips forming an O as she remembered: while the rest of our teenaged selves were struggling for turf with our moms, Linda was making her own after-school snack in an empty house.

“I couldn't imagine reading anything to my mom either,” I said. “It would be like standing naked in front of her, waiting for my flaws to be called out.” I looked to Maggie on the swings (the first to abandon the sandbox), wondering if my mom would even want to read what I wrote.

Though she would, I thought. It was my father who would have considered my writing foolish.

“I brought a poem,” I confessed. “But I just can't read it.”

Linda tipped the bill of her cap against the shifting sun. “Some writers we are.”

She suggested we could just write instead, and while Kath and Ally were still balking I ran back to my house for paper and pens—actually three decent ballpoints, one respectable pencil, and an eraserless stub of a chewed-up pencil that was the only other writing utensil I could find besides crayons. But what exactly were we supposed to write? How could we come up with stories that hadn't been written before?

“Willa Cather says, ‘There are only two or three human stories,’” Brett said, “‘and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.’”

Linda said her college writing professor had just dumped a bag of interesting things on the table and told them all to pick one and write about it for five minutes.

“But we don't have a bag of interesting things,” Ally said.

“Oh, for Pete's sake.” Linda grabbed her purse and upended it over the picnic table, spilling a brown leather wallet with dollar bills sticking out the top and her driver's license showing through its plastic window, an old black leather eyeglass case monogrammed in initials that weren't hers, a blue plastic checkbook, three keys on a whistle key chain, a tampon and diaper pins and change—pennies and dimes and quarters that rolled and scattered, falling through the cracks in the picnic table and landing in the grass at our feet. She stared at the glasses case for a moment, then extracted it from the pile and slipped it back into her empty purse.

“Five minutes,” she said. “Just write. And don't worry, we won't read anything. Ready, set . . .” We all looked to the playground, where the kids were happily engaged. Linda's J.J. and Kath's Lacy were asleep in their strollers, and my Davy was pushing his trucks around on the blanket beside the table. “Write!”

I looked at the long blue lines on the white sheet on the wooden table in front of me, all that emptiness. The edge of Linda's wallet nearly touched the paper, the driver's license upside down. I focused on that: height 5'10", weight 139, hair blond, eyes blue because she couldn't check all the boxes for eye color, I guessed, and her eyes did look blue when she wore blue. I thought of my father teaching me to drive, his foot stomping on the brakeless passenger-seat floorboard, his voice booming, “Brake, for Christ's sake, Frankie!” when I was nowhere near the stop sign yet.

I set my eraserless stub of pencil to the blank page, trying to imbue that scene with a humor I hadn't felt at the time. And somehow, the squeals of the children and the smell of airborne sand and the taste of the earthy fall air worked their way into my writing, too, and the urge to look up and make sure Maggie and Davy were okay, and my not wanting to look up, wanting to have this moment for myself.

Linda called “Time!” after what seemed no time at all.

No children maimed or dead out on the playground—that was reassuring. And even Ally and Kath had a little ink on the page, though Kath would admit—years later—that all she'd written that morning was “I swear I never met a soul half as bossy as Linda Mason.”

“Okay, who wants to read first?” Linda said.

After a good deal of resistance—she'd said we wouldn't have to read! (though Kath, again years later, admitted to thinking she ought to volunteer, it would serve Linda right)—Brett said fine, she'd read first, Linda didn't intimidate her. She read, interrupted only once by her daughter (who was dispatched back to the sandbox with a bucket and shovel). A few paragraphs about a wacky marble-rolling machine she and her brother built when they were in grade school. The rolling coins had reminded her of it.