The Wednesday Sisters(23)

We still talk about that moment sometimes, and I think I understand better now than I did then. I can understand being so frustrated with the lot you're dealt that you turn in a direction you never imagined, you explode. That's what happened to me that day in a small way, what would happen to Ally with Linda and the Tylandril three years later, and to Linda the week we didn't call. It's what happened to Kath in a bigger way the next Halloween, and I sure understood it in her, I might have done exactly what she ended up doing—and I might have ended up killing Lee since my temper is, on the whole, more capricious. Sometimes you have to stand up for your own dignity. And those boys didn't do anything violent themselves that I ever heard of. They just stood up and said what is wrong is wrong and, as Linda said even then, they sacrificed their futures in the bargain. They were banned from Olympic competition for life. So I guess one part of me likes to think now that if those boys had been my sons, I would have been awfully proud.

Well, we didn't resolve anything about that black-power salute that Wednesday, or about the start of my novel, either. And we were no “nicer” with Linda's piece, a complete short story. She hardly blinked her blond lashes at the criticism, though. She just listened and took a million notes without interrupting or saying a word. Then she started asking us questions. I watched her, thinking that if any of us succeeded, it would be Linda.

We turned to Kath's work next, two journal pages, which was volumes compared with the few lines she'd brought the week before, and only the second time she'd brought anything in the six weeks we'd been writing together. There was a surprising amount of narrative drive in it—the start of a love story—but it was thin, the characters not the least bit alive.

“One of Mark Twain's rules of literary fiction?” Brett said. “‘That the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.’”

I was about to ask her to repeat the line so I could copy it in my journal when Kath up and started bawling, big streaks of black mascara cutting a path through the blush on her cheeks. Brett looked alarmed—we all did—and it was Linda who recovered first, who put her arm around Kath in the nicest way.

But Kath couldn't stop crying. “I'm sorry, I don't mean to act ugly, it's not what any of you said, it's just that . . . oh, Lord, I'm afraid Lee's parking his paddy in another wagon.”

“You think Lee is”—Linda pulled Kath closer—“is having an affair?”

“He never comes home, Linda.”

“But neither does Jeff, Kath. They're residents! And who in the world would he be having an affair with?”

Brett said, “Oh,” in a way that somehow suggested Chip and her huddled over a test tube in a science lab when maybe he'd been seeing some other girl.

“He was going to leave me for Pookie Benton,” Kath insisted.

“Pookie Benton? Kath, Lee would never leave you for a girl named Pookie,” Linda said, trying to bring some lightness to the situation.

“But he was going to leave me for Pookie. Our junior year in college. He was all over her at the Derby, helping her place her bets like he was just being a gentleman, but it was the very way he first courted me when he was still seeing Ada Davidson. And he would have left me, he would have been in Pookie's panties as easy as sliding off a greasy log backward, except . . .” She covered her face with her hands. “Except the rabbit . . .”

Brett and Linda and I all looked at each other. “The rabbit?” I mouthed. Then, “Oh, I see.” A shotgun wedding.

We went from denial to strategy in two seconds flat. Not like girlfriends might now. There was no talk of walking out immediately, no “You can't put up with that.” Pride or self-respect? What were those compared with a husband? This was all about how she could keep Lee, get him back from this slut of a medical student or nurse or whoever was throwing herself at him. Because the only thing worse than not yet having a husband was being divorced. What man would want used goods?

It never entered our minds that Lee was used goods, too. It never occurred to us that some woman might not want Lee because he wasn't a virgin, just as it never occurred to us that the new girl he was seeing might be anything like us or that Kath might be able to survive just fine on her own, thank you very much. Divorce was shameful, and children needed a father, and the idea of a man being a father even though he didn't live with his children's mother was outside our sphere of understanding. Even Dr. Spock didn't have anything to say about what to do with children when your husband left you; he never once mentioned the word divorce in his book.