The Wednesday Sisters(21)

Kath was uncharacteristically disheveled that day; she hadn't worn her headband braid and her mascara was smudged, which would have been par for the course for me, but Kath was always so tidy. She'd been pretty quiet while Linda went on and on about the Olympics again, too, but when Brett asked if she was okay, she said she was fine, just fine.

“It's just . . . these girl athletes, they're just . . .” The word she was looking for was not flattering, you could tell by the tone of her voice. “I hate women athletes! Field hockey and gymnastics and basketball. Like Pookie Benton.”

“Pookie Benton?” Linda said.

Kath waved her off, saying, “Don't mind me. I put my boots on backward this morning is all.”

Ten o'clock came and Arselia arrived and we turned to writing. “Remember: brutal honesty,” Linda said, and Brett said, “Maybe not brutal, Linda.” And we all agreed: “Honesty.”

I'd asked for it, of course, but what I read that morning was not something I'd intentionally written as drivel. These were the real first pages of a serious novel—my way of letting my friends into my life, I see in retrospect. My own life dressed up in fictional garb. But Linda didn't know that, and she was hell-bent on starting out right this time, so she began honestly.

“I'm willing to buy that this family might exist,” she said, “though—”

“Though if your Dritha really can't afford college,” Brett interrupted, “she ought to—”

“Do something about it,” Linda said. “Her father says an education ruins her for a proper life, and she says, ‘Oh, okay’?”

I sat there, looking past them to the new-mown grass and the red-orange-gold trees and the paint-stripped balustrade over the mansion porch, wanting to say, But that was the way it was. Maybe that wasn't the way it was in swanky East Coast families like Brett's or Linda's, or rich Southern ones like Kath's, but it was the way it was in blue-collar Midwestern families.

“Maybe she could have gotten a scholarship?” Brett offered.

“But . . .” I looked away to the playground, to Mags, who would go to college if I had to scrub toilets to pay her tuition. “But if she goes to college on a scholarship, she won't make any money, whereas if she takes a job at . . .” At the Northwestern engineering school. “If she takes a job and keeps living at home, that's one whole paycheck that can go to paying for her brother's college.” One of four brothers in my case, three of whom were younger but all of whom stood ahead of me in the going-to-college line.

I imagined writing the real scene: Sister Josephine calling me into her office one afternoon in the fall of my senior year, all the black-and-white fabric drape of her, the wimple tight across her forehead, the heavy cross at her chest, Christ nailed there in carved wooden detail, and the incongruous sea blue of her eyes, not the peaceful sea you expected on a nun but something more turbulent, a stormy sea that somehow retained its color, that didn't turn white-capped or gray. She sat at her desk in front of a stack of forms, and she asked me to sit in the chair across from her. Then she did something unprecedented: she picked up the forms and came from behind the desk and sat in the empty visitor chair, pulling it close to me. She took my hand and opened it, and she stared at my palm for a moment as if my future might really be found in the lines there—and why not, since God had created my hand and my future both? “God gives us gifts and helps us see fit how to use them,” she said, and she set the forms in my hands.

I looked down at the bold black letters: The University of Illinois. It was an application, and below it, forms for financial aid. Underneath them, other college forms, all state schools. She understood my family would never be able to afford a private school for me, not with so many boys to educate.

When I went through the forms at home that evening, I found at the bottom a copy of a recommendation letter for the University of Illinois from Sister Josephine: carbon-blue letters that said I was bright, resourceful, eager to learn, that claimed I would be an asset to any college, that said I was one of the most beautiful writers she'd ever had the pleasure to teach. Allowing me to go to my father with the idea that maybe God wanted me to go to college, Sister Josephine had said she thought He meant me to go.

My mom sat quietly at the kitchen table that night, her eyes watering as she read Sister Josephine's recommendation. When my father came home, he sat with us and she passed it to him. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette, scanning the words.

My mother stood and found an ashtray, brown, plastic, and round. “I could find a position to help with the tuition, Jack,” she said as she set the ashtray in front of him, her voice its very gentlest.