The Wednesday Sisters(22)

I started to explain what Sister Josephine had told me, that I could get a scholarship, that if I applied to state schools I might get a full ride somewhere. But my father wasn't listening, my father was smashing out the short stub of his cigarette, extracting another from the pack in his shirt pocket, focusing intently on the match. Not so much angry as ashamed, I see in retrospect—though at the time it seemed only angry.

“You want your sons coming home from school to an empty house?” he said to my mother.

Mom smiled apologetically, and I knew she would say something, and I wanted to tell her No, don't, not for my sake. But she was already speaking, saying, “Of course not, Jack. I didn't mean that. I'd work mornings. Mornings and early afternoons. I saw a help wanted sign at the market—”

“The market! No wife of mine—” He took a deep drag on his cigarette, the tip glowing red. “You don't need to be waiting on others for money, Margaret, not while I'm still breathing and not when I'm gone, either, for Christ's sake.” He looked down at the linoleum tabletop, tapped his ashes into the ashtray. “I can provide for my family myself.”

From my mother's downcast eyes, I knew the discussion was over, I knew she was bending to his will, and I hated that for her—that she was having to bend to him because of me. And I hated that in her, too—that she would just bend so easily to his will—and hated what it would mean for me. I couldn't see my father the way she saw him: the mechanic who worked for barely decent pay and little dignity, who buried his ego at work every day so as not to offend anyone; the man who pinned his ambitions on his sons, who wasn't quite sure what to make of the fact that it was his daughter who brought home the straight-A report cards—his daughter who was somehow his wife's child in the same way his sons were his.

“But Sister Josephine—” I protested.

“Those nuns ought to have more sense than to meddle in people's lives.” He stood and smashed the new cigarette into the ashtray. “If God wanted women to have a say in anything, He'd have made them priests,” he said. “Now, that's enough.”

And when I'd gone back to Sister Josephine, the old nun had sighed and started talking about “honoring thy Father,” which I was pretty sure meant God, not my dad. “God will have a different path for you, then, child,” she said. “He doesn't make children like you without some purpose.” Which I can see now she meant as encouragement, but at the time I was left feeling an obligation to do something noble to honor whatever these gifts were that God had given me, with no idea what in the world it might be that I could do, much less how to start.

In the park with Linda and Brett and Kath that morning, I just sat there watching Maggie for a long moment, imagining her in a cap and gown approaching my old desk at the university, résumés in hand.

“What do you think, Kath?” Linda said. “You haven't said anything yet.”

Kath stared at Linda for a moment, as if trying to remember where she was. “Maybe Dritha's spine is just a little catawampus, Frankie?” she said finally. “You might could pull her up a touch straighter, give her just a pinch more backbone?”

“It could be something as simple as . . . she's dishwater blond, like you are, right?” Brett said. “But you're not just dishwater blond, you have this wildness to your hair that can't be tamed. Give her that, too. Make her one of those ‘round characters’ Forster likes to talk about, ‘capable of surprising in a convincing way.’”

“Exactly,” Linda agreed. “If your Dritha is really sacrificing her dreams for the sake of her brothers, we need to see her sticking a black-gloved fist in the air and—”

“That wasn't sacrifice, that was radical trash!” I said. A little too loudly, I'm afraid. Mothers around the park turned to stare. Funny how we do that, how when we're losing control of our emotions about one thing, we pop off over something else.

When I look at that Olympics photograph now—of Tommie Smith and John Carlos in that black-power salute—it looks so innocuous, but I sure didn't see it that way then. Those two athletes standing stocking-footed on the Olympic awards podium, thrusting black-gloved fists in the air and bowing their heads as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played in their honor—it scared the hell out of me, as it did much of the world. That's what I'd felt as I'd watched them, before my emotions got all tangled up with my writing: scared as hell. You'd have thought from the world's reaction that those two boys had brought machine guns up to that podium. Those two young men, giving up their own moment of triumph to draw attention to the plight of their race. And do you know what Tommie Smith was doing while he was standing on that gold medal podium? He was praying to God.