It scared us, to be honest. You could see it even in Linda. If it could happen to Kath, then it could happen to us, couldn't it? But we didn't want to believe that, so we chose to see it differently. Kath had slept with Lee before they were married; that made her different from me, anyway. It's awful to think of, looking back at it, but Kath's being honest caused us all to lean a little bit away from her that fall. Not that we meant to, or even realized that we were. Not that it was anything, really. We still met her at the park every Wednesday, and we took Anna Page and Lee-Lee and Lacy so she could get her hair done or buy a pretty new dress or go out to dinner with Lee. Still, in some way I can't even explain, we set her apart so that what happened to her couldn't possibly happen to us.
WE STARTED COMING to the park early that autumn, in case Ally returned or there was some new development Kath needed to talk about—nothing so obvious as lipstick on Lee's collar, but he'd gotten a phone for the bedroom, one of the new push-button ones with the star and the pound keys no one knew quite what to do with, and he'd taken to making his calls from behind the closed door, saying it was hard to concentrate with the kids screaming in the background and he was making decisions that would affect people's lives, so, really, was it too much to ask for a little quiet? Linda talked, as always, about her causes: she was starting to get involved in environmental issues, and she went on and on about the war, though she wasn't any more involved than the rest of us were in the protests, the thousands of people marching right here in Palo Alto, closing down University Avenue. As the holidays neared, we talked about what the children wanted from Santa (Hot Wheels and Sting-Ray bicycles and the new talking Barbie, who spoke six different and brilliant phrases: “I have a date tonight”; “I love being a fashion model”; “Let's have a costume party”), and about the upcoming Apollo 8 mission, the first men to leave Earth's gravity, ten orbits around the moon. We instituted a new critique rule: point out something you like about a piece before you launch into how it can be improved. And the second Wednesday of that December—despite how close we'd become, we still met only on Wednesdays—we began to talk about sex.
It was the week after Danny's company Christmas party; I remember exactly because I'd never talked about sex before, not even with my friends back home.
“Chip and I . . . we fooled around up against a fence at a beach club when we were at his cousin's wedding,” Brett confessed. “When we got back inside, his brother gave us endless grief about the fence marks all over the back of Chip's shirt. It was mortifying.”
Kath raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Fence marks on the back of his shirt?”
Brett blushed about as red as her hair, and the next thing I knew we were talking about oral sex. Linda had no more experience with it than I had. But Kath? I couldn't help thinking my friends in Chicago would have called her a slut, though I couldn't think of her that way, not Kath. I thought of her as like me, only a little more reckless, which maybe was a good thing to be, reckless.
I was surprised, then, to find myself starting to confess what had happened to me at the party. Maybe it was Danny's new company—thirty guys who'd just started this enterprise together and had so much hope for what it might become. Or maybe it was the setting, an unpretentious house tucked up against the Santa Cruz Mountains, where the grass was rich green even in December and the host himself was pouring the drinks, where everyone seemed young and enthusiastic and creative, ambitious. Maybe it was the way Danny introduced me to everyone at that party as if I were Miss Illinois of 1968. Or maybe it was the Boston Fish House punch, a stealthy blend of rum, peach brandy, and champagne in a lemon-lime base that was not the harmless little refreshment it was advertised to be. But then these guys were scientists, and every scientist I've ever met likes to explode things.
I was tipsy before long, and the only saving grace was that almost everyone else was, too. And I was surprised to enjoy it so much, and to enjoy the lovemaking afterward, not in bed when we got home but in the backseat of the car on a quiet road on the Stanford campus, with the possibility of being caught.
I eased into telling the Wednesday Sisters about it by talking about what I'd written that night, when I couldn't sleep. I'd gotten up and pulled out my journal, and even though I was still sort of sloshed, I filled a half dozen pages. I wrote about several of Danny's co-workers, including his boss, Andy, who was so logical and straightforward you could listen to him talk for hours about something you knew nothing about without getting bored. I wrote about some of the wives, too. “Like the president's wife, who talks about Maine the way I guess I talk about Chicago,” I said, and Brett said I didn't, actually, I rarely talked about Chicago anymore. Which left me wondering if Bob's wife had friends like we did, or if it didn't limit her range of friends to be the head god's wife, because how close can you get to the wives of men your husband might have to fire? I wondered if I'd be happy in that big Los Altos Hills yard I'd envied, where you were so far away from your neighbors you'd have to pack a suitcase to go borrow a cup of sugar.