The Wednesday Sisters(20)

“Publish,” I said, feeling the awkward newness of the word on my lips.

It doesn't seem like much now, I know, to admit ambition to your closest friends. I guess you'll have to take my word for it: it was. It makes me a little sad when I look back on it, to think how very many women didn't have Wednesday Sisters, to wonder who they might have become if they had.

“Cards on the table,” Linda said. “We're honest with each other from now on.”

“‘When in doubt, tell the truth,’” Brett said. “Mark Twain.”





ONE TUESDAY NIGHT that October, I sat on the front porch waiting for Danny and reading Middlemarch—despite Linda's insistence that I should read it. I loved the book, maybe because, like Dorothea with Casaubon, part of what I loved about Danny was the prospect of playing a role in what he would accomplish. Fortunately, Danny was no Casaubon. He wasn't much older than me, and he wasn't the least bit pompous. Though he, like Casaubon, spent more and more time on his work, and I, like Dorothea, felt less included than I'd imagined.

Again and again, I looked up from the page, though, toward Ally's house, wondering if Brett was right that Ally just needed time to herself, that she would return to us when she was ready. I was thinking about that—thinking that if I were Ally I'd come to a point where I did want my friends back and I'd worry that they weren't my friends anymore, and I was thinking of Carrie, too, sure she must miss the park—when I saw the dark-skinned man enter Ally's house again. The door closed behind him, and the light came on in the front hall, then went off again just as the window at the upstairs landing lit up.

It seemed so improbable that I hadn't even raised the possibility with Linda and Kath and Brett, for fear of sounding absurd. It made me uncomfortable, honestly, to think of my friend being married to a black man, and uncomfortable to feel uncomfortable. I knew I wasn't supposed to be prejudiced; Martin Luther King had opened our eyes to that. But I'd grown up seeing people of other races as different: They lived in different neighborhoods and they weren't the same things we were—they weren't our doctors or our teachers, congressmen or priests or astronauts—or we didn't see them being what we were. Which was wrong, of course. But while it was easy to see that blacks should go to the same good schools as whites and shouldn't have to give up their seats on the bus, it was a lot harder somehow to imagine a black man married to one of your good friends. Let's just say if I'd come home one day and told my parents I was marrying a black man, my mom would have fainted and my dad would have fallen over dead of a heart attack.

I'd like to think in retrospect that I had some kind of reasonable concerns, like “What about the children, would they be ostracized?” I wouldn't even have married outside the Catholic Church; it would be so hard for the kids, I'd thought, having parents of different faiths. But I suppose the truth is that I was worried about what would happen if I ever, say, invited my friends and their husbands for dinner. A concern that sounds ridiculous now, of course.

It wasn't Danny I was worried about; he's the least prejudiced man in the world. But people are funny. Kath's Lee, for example—Madison Leland Montgomery IV. Would he sit down to dinner with a black man? I'd never met Lee, but I had him pegged as a Southern bigot—another prejudice on my part, yes. It was that “IV” after his name, I think, and the fact that he was from the South. I figured the original Lee Montgomery—Madison Leland Montgomery I—probably owned black men, and it's a long way to go from owning people as property to calling them friends.

The sad truth: I sometimes wonder if I wouldn't have done more for Ally that fall if I'd been sure her husband was white. But maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe it's just that that was our first crisis, really, and we didn't yet know what to do to help each other in this any more than we did in our writing. We didn't know each other well enough yet to risk mucking around in any real way in each other's lives.



THE NEXT MORNING when I went out to get the paper, Linda blew right by me in pedal pushers and sneakers as if she was training for the Olympics herself, the sweat running down her neck as that blond braid bounced out of her Stanford cap. She showed up the next morning and the next and the next, and by the second Olympic Wednesday she'd changed her pedal pushers for little shorts like the women running in the Olympics wore, and she'd traded her Keds for men's athletic shoes, or boys'. I wondered if she'd had the gall to try on the shoes right there in the men's department at Macy's, but—this is Linda we're talking about—I suppose she didn't think it at all outrageous, or enjoyed it all the more knowing it was. Which was why it surprised me that she didn't say anything about her running when we met at the park that morning—never mind the evidence she wore, the pale white sweat ring around the rim of her cap.