The Wednesday Sisters(16)

Linda volunteered to read what she'd written that week, and as she read I wondered how to say diplomatically that this new passage—which she'd obviously worked very hard on—was stilted and dull compared with what she'd whipped off in five minutes the week before. Kath jumped in immediately after Linda finished, though, gushing about how “nice” it was, and everyone hopped right onto that “nice” bandwagon. And that's how it would go after that: Brett would bring whole chapters of a mystery that was not particularly mysterious. Linda would bring pages of a short story about . . . well, I couldn't begin to describe it, so what does that say? Ally would occasionally bring a few journal lines about a duck who was not “Some Duck,” at least not in the way Wilbur was “Some Pig.” And the things I wrote were no better. Still, Kath—who never brought a word—would invariably start off with how nice each was, and we'd all follow suit. We meant to be encouraging each other. We did. And I wallowed in the praise as much as anyone at first. But it began to leave me strangely discouraged. I found myself listening carefully to gauge whether “nice” had any enthusiasm to it, wondering how we'd ever get better if we just sat around whacking each other on the back as if we were the next Monsieur Proust even if we weren't French, or anything close to it.





ONE WEDNESDAY morning that fall we sat sharing what we'd heard about the rock concert “gather-in” at Lytton Plaza that weekend, and trying to fend off Linda's efforts to recruit us to one of her causes (getting a mental-health services bill passed by the California legislature, I think it was that day), and waiting for Ally to show. We weren't worried at first that she hadn't arrived—she went to her sister's for breakfast every Wednesday morning, and frequently pulled back into her drive after the rest of us were already in the park. She and Kath were the only ones who had their own cars. (Ally's was just a white Chevy Nova two-door, but Kath's was a brand-new powder-blue Mustang convertible, with air-conditioning and power windows and seat belts—only the lap belts that had just been made mandatory, but Kath did use them, which was a good thing, it turns out.) By midmorning, we'd gone ahead and started critiquing our writing, and still Ally hadn't arrived.

“You don't think anything happened with the baby, do you?” I said.

“With Carrie?” Linda said at the same time Brett said, “I thought she was pregnant, but she hasn't uttered a word.”

“And how can you ask?” Kath said. “I mean, if you're wrong? ‘Oh, I see. You're not pregnant, you're just getting fat as a porker pie.’”

Which made us all laugh; I had no idea what a porker pie was, but it sounded so funny the way she said it, with the long Southern i. Everyone laughed, too, at a story I told about my cousin patting my belly at a family gathering and asking when the little guy was due when the “little guy,” my Maggie, was at that moment safely nestled in Danny's arms. It was a story I'd never told before, a humiliation I'd never wanted to recall, but it was funny, it really was. That was something I was beginning to realize: with these new friends of mine, I could laugh at myself.

We considered the possibilities. Maybe Ally had morning sickness? Car trouble? Maybe she'd gone on vacation? (Though wouldn't she have told us?) Maybe a relative was sick or had died?

Her car wasn't in the drive, but we decided Brett and I would go knock on her door anyway. There was no answer even after we knocked and rang a second time. When I tried the doorknob, though, it turned easily.

Inside, the house was dark and stale, the drapes closed against the beautiful day. No radio or TV. No little Carrie chattering to her dolly or throwing a fit over having to eat oatmeal or pulling on Ally's hem and telling her it was time to go to the park.

“Ally?” I called.

No answer.

“Ally?” Brett called a little louder.

The faucet dripped in the kitchen. In the park, the children were screaming the way kids in parks do, all overly excited and dramatic and joyous.

“Ally?” we called a third time, together.

A sound came from upstairs, not a voice or a word, but a human sound. Fear?

Brett and I looked at each other: Should we call the police? But this was Palo Alto in the middle of a sunny Wednesday morning, for goodness sakes. I imagined the police showing up and taking one look at Brett's white gloves, the event replayed in the crime column of the Palo Alto Times under the heading “No Crime at All” with some long-winded rant about how kooks like us distracted the police from important business. And Brett was already creeping up the stairs, whispering, “Ally? Ally, are you here?”