The Wednesday Sisters(2)

As I said, Linda is nothing if not frank.

That was the first Wednesday. September 6, 1967.

When I tell people that—that I first came to the Bay Area at the end of that summer, that that's when the Wednesday Sisters first met—they inevitably get this look in their eyes that says bell-bottoms and flower power, war protests and race riots, LSD. Even to me, it seems a little improbable in retrospect that I never saw a joint back then, never flashed anyone a peace sign. But I had a three-year-old daughter and a baby son already. I had a husband who'd passed the draft age, who would have a Ph.D. and a fulltime job within months. I'd already settled into the life I'd been raised to settle into: dependable daughter, good wife, attentive mother. All the Wednesday Sisters had. We spent the Summer of Love changing diapers, going to the grocery store, baking tuna casseroles and knitting sweater vests (yes, sweater vests), and watching Walter Cronkite from the safety of our family rooms. I watched the local news, too, though that was more about following the Cubs; they'd just lost to the Dodgers, ending a three-game winning streak—not much, three games, but then they are the Cubs and were even that year, despite Fergie Jenkins throwing 236 strikeouts and Ron Santo hitting 31 out of the park.

Anyway, I was sitting there watching Maggie on the slide, about to call to her to clear away from the bottom when she did it on her own, and I was just a bit intimidated by this blonde I didn't know yet was Linda, and that occurred to me, that I didn't know her name. “I'm Frankie O'Mara,” I said, forgetting that I'd decided to be Mary, or at least Mary Frances or Frances or Fran, in this new life. I tried to back up and say “Mary Frances O'Mara”—it was the way I liked to imagine my name on the cover of a novel someday, not that I would have admitted to dreams beyond marriage and motherhood back then. But Linda was already all over Frankie.

“Frankie? A man's name—and you all curvy and feminine. I wish I had curves like you do. I'm pretty much just straight up and down.”

I'd have traded my “curves” of unlost baby gain for what was under her double-knit slacks and striped turtleneck in a second, or I thought I would then. She looked like that girl in the Clairol ads—“If you can't beat 'em, join 'em”—except she was more “If you can't join 'em, beat 'em” somehow. She didn't wear a speck of makeup, either, not even lipstick.

“What are you reading, Frankie?” she asked.

(In fairness, I should explain here that Linda remembers that first morning differently. She swears her first words were “What's that you're reading?” and it was only when I didn't answer—too busy staring at Brett to hear her, she says—that she said, “She wears them all the time.” She swears what brought us together was the book in my hand. That's how she and Kath met, too; they got to talking about In Cold Blood at a party while everyone was still slogging through the usual blather about the lovely Palo Alto weather and how lucky they were that their husbands were doing their residencies here.)

I held up the cover of my book—Agatha Christie's latest Poirot novel, The Third Girl—for Linda to see. She blinked blond lashes over eyes that had a little of every color in them, like the blue and green and yellow of broken glass all mixed together in the recycling bin.

“A mystery?” she said. “Oh.”

She preferred “more serious fiction,” she said—not unkindly, but still I was left with the impression that she ranked my mysteries right down there with comic books. I was left shifting uncomfortably in my pleated skirt and sweater set, wondering how I'd ever manage in a place where even the books I read were all wrong. I couldn't imagine, then, leaving my friends back home, the girls who'd shared sleepless slumber-party nights and double dates with me, who still wore my clothes and lipstick and blush. Though it had never been quite the same after we'd all married. My Danny had seemed so . . . not awkward, exactly, but uncomfortable with my friends. And they weren't any easier with him. “He's such a brain,” Theresa had said just a few weeks before, and I'd said, “He is, isn't he?” with a spanking big grin on my face, I'm sure, and it was only the doubt in Theresa's eyes that told me she hadn't meant it as praise. The conversation had left me feeling fat and desolate and drowning in filthy diapers, and when Danny came home from class that same evening talking about a job in California, I said, “California? I've always wanted to see California,” at once imagining dinner parties with Danny's co-workers and their wives and weekend picnics at the beach and a whole new set of friends who would never imagine that Danny was one thing and I was another, even if we were.